Guest post by Verity Jones
Man is not the primary cause of change in the Arctic says book by Russian scientists
Forget the orthodox view of Arctic climate change – this book has a very different message. (h/t to WUWT commenter Enneagram)
Published last year, this is a synthesis of work by the Russian Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI). It sets out the data and experience of scientists over 85 years, drawing together much already published in the area. For a book that is billed under a climate change heading, this is actually more an antidote to the hype usually associated with warming in the Arctic. A few pages of each chapter are available on-line and even that is well worth reading; no doubt even better in its entirety.
The Preface sets the tone of the book very clearly – “.…scientists have predicted a significant decrease in sea-ice extent in the Arctic and even its complete disappearance in the summertime by the end of the 21st century. This monograph presents results of studies of climatic system changes in the Arctic, focused on ice cover, that do not justify such extreme conclusions.” “Many studies and international projects, such as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), attribute the air temperature increase during the last quarter of the 20th century exclusively to accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However these studies typically do not account for natural hydrometeorological fluctuations whose effects on multiyear variability, as this monograph shows, can far exceed the anthropogenic impact on climate.”
The book begins by examining the major effects of the Polar Ice caps and their overall stability on Earth’s climate – affecting albedo, and regulating the heat flux from the sea to atmosphere. Climate variations are discussed and the WMO’s “30 year average” definition of climate is not considered applicable in the Arctic because fluctuations in the polar climate are so large.
Chapter 2 looks at what is known about changes in sea ice in the 20th century. The Russian data sets probably hold the most extensive information available for the first half of the century due to interest in the Northern Sea Route in the 1930s. In addition, measurements of ice thickness also go back to the middle of the 1930s when they were taken regularly for coast-bound ice at many of the Polar stations.
It is particularly interesting what they say about Arctic air temperatures (Chapter 4). “Periodic cooling and warming events are evident in air temperature fluctuations in the Arctic during the 20th century, similar to changes in ice cover.” A cool period at the beginning of the 20th century was followed by what is commonly referred to as the “Arctic Warming Period” in the 1920s-1940s. Relative cooling was widespread between the late 1950s to late 1970s, followed by the current warming period peaking in recent years. Gridded average temperature anomalies for 70°-85°N produce a curve that fits a polynomial trend to the sixth power and the cycle periodicity is 50-60 years (Figure 4.1). Other indicators in Arctic and Antarctic support this cycle and show its global nature. On the subject of polar amplification, whereby weather and climate variability increase with latitude, a number of models and explanations are discussed. None of these involve CO2.
The authors point out there is an abundance of hypotheses as to the possible causes of climate and ice variation and climate change (a ‘long-term’ phenomenon) but these lack detailed long-term data. They state “where data do exist, we should prefer data to computer models”; they believe model projections of future ice area fluctuations are unreliable. Actually, they have some deliciously scathing remarks about climate models.
“The models neglect natural fluctuations because they have no means of incorporating them, and put the entire blame for climate changes since the 19th century on human activity.”
On possible future changes they predict that “..in the 21st century, oscillatory (rather than unidirectional) ice extent changes will continue to dominate Arctic seas.” A new ice maximum in 2030-2035 is predicted (Figure 6.1) and this will have major implications for shipping in the region.
From the results of spectral analyses, they conclude that there are 50-60 year cycles and less prevalent ones at 20 years, 8-12 years and 2-3 years. These are closely related to variations in general atmospheric circulation. In the longer term the decreasing trend of ice extent may be a segment of a 200 year cyclic variation responsible for the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. Much of the discussion about solar effects is behind the paywall for the book, however there are some strong conclusions about solar effects on Arctic climate. Despite the small variation in Total Solar irradiance (TSI) through solar cycles, solar activity may have a greater effect on high latitudes because of interaction with the Earth’s magnetic field. Solar system “dissymmetry” (barycentre) influences are also mentioned as closely corresponding to the 60 year cycles.
The authors conclude that the simulation by the general circulation models does not appear to reflect the cyclic features in Arctic ice extent and climate, and, if their cyclic interpretations of climate variation are correct, ice cover will continue to fluctuate as there is little connection with the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels.
Climate Change in Eurasian Arctic Shelf Seas: Centennial Ice Cover Observations. Authors: Ivan E. Frolov, Zalmann M. Gudkovich, Valery P. Karklin, Evgeny G. Kovalev, and Vasily M. Smolyanitsky. Published by Springer/Praxis (2009) ISBN 9783540858744
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Verity is one of WUWT’s moderators and contributors. She also has her own website at Digging in The Clay. Be sure to visit it and bookmark it – Anthony
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Fred Haynie – you are a wizard, a boffin, a bloody marvel! I don’t understand all of your statistical analyses, but have no trouble with the results. Most of your cycles match well with otherwise known cycles. 9 years- lunar cycle, 19.x years – Jupiter/Saturn synodic cycle, 60 year cycle (next cool period in 2090) – unnamed 60 year cycle treated by several contributors, most notably Scafetta, one complete tour of the sun around thew SSB, 70 years cycle – possibly some confusion of the 60 year cycle and the 90 year Gleissberg cycle, also seen in some measures of the Gleissberg cycle, 90 year cycle – the gleissberg cycle, 308-364 year cycle – maybe the Deep Grand Minimum cycle of 33 sunspot cycles (364 years), 1500 year cycle – the 1470 year D-O cycle, the “next peak in 2250” – the approximately 1000 year cycle that probably bottomed during the LIA, about 1670.
Your analysis of CO2 variability related to SST and transport from equator to polar regions, and your conclusion that recent atmospheric CO2 increase is from warming arctic SST is the only scientific analysis that I have seen. Congratulations.
Anthony, please give this work more prominence. Murray
richard telford says: “…Unforced (natural) variability in the models arises from the stochastic nature of the models. For example, I have a 600 year unforced model run that contains many cycles in model climate…”
Stochastic? You mean, based on random numbers? So this is a crap shoot? Suspicions confirmed. And you want us to spend how much, based on this Wank-O-Matic Climate Model? No thanks, Dick.
I find it rather interesting that the IPCC chooses to ignore arctic data and research from the two countries (i.e., Russia and Norway) that most likely know more about the arctic than all other countries combined. Both Norway and Russia have a vested interest in developing the most accurate understanding of the arctic and could care less about following the current politically correct line on Global Warming/Climate Change/Global Climate Disruption (or what ever they seem to be calling it today).
Definitely a 60 yr wave in the HadCRUT3 global means:
http://www.robertb.darkhorizons.org/TempGr/HADcrut3gl.JPG
Though I am skeptical about the substance of the Russian’s theory on Arctic sea ice cycles and cycles of warming and cooling in the Arctic, it is this sort of potential longer term natural cycles that keeps me 25% skeptical about AGW in general. The
Russian’s theory should have about 5 years at the maximum until it is either proven right or wrong.
Even their graph shows a general uptrend on top of the cycles, with the last few years warmer than the warming era of 1920-40. Also, I don’t recall the NW passage or the NE passage being reported as open during that earlier warming, which would make the current warming more extensive. It could be that the cyclical theory of the Arctic is correct, but that the signal of CO2 warming is also still present as a bigger forcing that the 60 year cycle is riding on top of. They would not be mutually exclusive.
In memory of the Poles. Pathetic
http://www.savethepoles.com/
Murray Duffin says:
October 16, 2010 at 3:04 pm
anthony, I sent you a longish e-mail yesterday that is pertinent in this context. Murray
REPLY: Sorry, but I have not received it. Probably got spammed. Try again?
OK I tried again. If you send your e-mail address to me I can send an attachment that would be better formatted. Murray
Fred H. Haynie says: “…The earth tends to respond harmonically to the sun’s input.”
Please “amplify,” Fred.
Jimbo says:
October 16, 2010 at 2:12 am
” “……natural hydrometeorological fluctuations whose effects on multiyear variability,…….”
This is what I pointed out yesterday in Watts’ response to Tamino here.
“It sets out the data and experience of scientists over 85 years, drawing together….”
I also pointed to examples of historic variations in sea ice going back hundreds to thousands of years here.
“From the results of spectral analyses, they conclude that there are 50-60 year cycles and less prevalent ones at 20 years,…….In the longer term the decreasing trend of ice extent may be a segment of a 200 year cyclic variation”
This is why Warmists insist on the post 1979 satellite record to make their case. The further back you go the less unusual the recent receding Arctic ice looks.”
Concluding the existence of an inexorable 60 year cycle from 85 years of experience seems to me unjustified. There has barely been one cycle to look at in the data.
You seem to neglect the fact that only in recent years has CO2 been a significant enough driver to dominate the trend in global climate. This is clear evidence of logical myopia.
Nice comment, R. Gates. There is still the rebound from the Little Ice Age, which would impose an upward trend on the cycles. Is there a CO² induced trend as well? Time will tell.
jorgekafkazar says:
October 16, 2010 at 5:48 pm
Fred H. Haynie says: “…The earth tends to respond harmonically to the sun’s input.”
Please “amplify,” Fred.
“Resonance “, google it! or open any book on physics.
They say that a dog trotting across a suspension bridge could cause it to collapse if the trot frequency was in sync or harmonic with a natural vibration of the bridge. It takes only a little push at the right time to keep a childs swing going. Push a little harder and the height of the swing increases. The annual Arctic freeze/thaw cycle is the pump that drives the ocean conveyor belt. There is a natural frequency of upwelling in the equatorial eastern Pacific. Are these upwellings responding to changes in the Arctic freeze/thaw cycle which is responding to changes in absorption of energy from the sun?
R. Gates says: October 16, 2010 at 5:08 pm
…the warming era of 1920-40. Also, I don’t recall the NW passage or the NE passage being reported as open during that earlier warming, which would make the current warming more extensive.
Due to fewer satellites in 1920-40?
Fred H. Haynie says: “They say that a dog trotting across a suspension bridge could cause it to collapse if the trot frequency was in sync or harmonic with a natural vibration of the bridge. It takes only a little push at the right time to keep a childs swing going. Push a little harder and the height of the swing increases. The annual Arctic freeze/thaw cycle is the pump that drives the ocean conveyor belt. There is a natural frequency of upwelling in the equatorial eastern Pacific. Are these upwellings responding to changes in the Arctic freeze/thaw cycle which is responding to changes in absorption of energy from the sun?”
Only, as I understand it, in your analogy the dog creates an excess strain tipping point and brings the bridge down into the river. If you assume there is no such tipping point, the dog must instead be damping the vibrations caused by other forces. Cute, if true. Or is the dog damping the vibrations from its last trip across the bridge? Or from the fleas on its back?
Why has ocean heat content been dropping in the Arctic Ocean for going on 5 years?
No. The ice will not rebound. The continuation of downwelling radiation has firmly doomed all of mankind. Give up hope. Resistance is futile.
DR says:
October 16, 2010 at 9:38 pm
Why has ocean heat content been dropping in the Arctic Ocean for going on 5 years?
Not sure what the point of this question is, or if this statement is true, but assuming it is, I will say that heat is energy, and when energy is used (in the melting of ice, although the Arctic losses cannot be solely attributed as such) it is no longer contained in the ocean.
R. Gates says: October 16, 2010 at 5:08 pm
“…the warming era of 1920-40. Also, I don’t recall the NW passage or the NE passage being reported as open during that earlier warming,”
There is a detailed history on Wikipedia (that seems to be free of a certain editor’s signature in the discussion page): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sea_Route
“After a couple more trial runs, in 1933 and 1934, the Northern Sea Route was officially open and commercial exploitation began in 1935.”
“A special governing body Glavsevmorput’, the Administration of the Northern Sea Route, was set up in 1932 and Otto Schmidt became its first director. It supervised navigation and built Arctic ports.”
Evan says
[snip – If this is a legal copy, fine, repost and explain. If not, we cannot encourage piracy. And in case it is piracy, I cannot allow this link to remain in the interim; if it is not, I am sorry but I am sure you will understand. ~ Evan]
I have no personal interest in publishing the links. I gave them only as a help and my intent was not to break copyright rules.
Therefore, there is no point for me in launching an investigation to clarify whether the web-site that I indicated is legal or not. This website appears like something very well known, with a lot of people mentioning it in hundreds of thousand references. If they are crooks, this should be easily sorted out by the relevant authorities for any relevant legal action.
But – of course – I perfectly understand your concerns and I do not personnally feel like been censored in any way.
There is no simple way to know if it was a “legal copy” or not. If I want for example to use the “google sketchup” offered for free by “google”, should I write first to “sketchup”, the author who sells it at a very expensive price, to request a permission ?
By the way, speaking of “google” the complete book is already on “google docs” (I do not give the address…), then “google” may be a pirat, and now, everybody, in the whole world, has already a copy of the book.
I will not stand as a victim of censorship if you choose not to publish this note, or to publish only parts of it 😉
Many thanks for the work you are doing to keep the world informed.
Regards
R. Gates says: October 16, 2010 at 5:08 pm
“…the warming era of 1920-40. Also, I don’t recall the NW passage or the NE passage being reported as open during that earlier warming,”
And there is still available the photo of an american submarine at the North Pole in March during the ’30 sitting in open water. But If I were you Gatesie I would ignore it. It’s all lies, you know. /sarc off
jorgekafkazar says:
October 16, 2010 at 9:30 pm
If you are looking for a tipping point, it will not be run-a-way global warming. It will be if the Arctic freeze/thaw pump shuts down and we plunge into our next ice age. At present it appears that it is not slowing down.
tonyb says:
October 16, 2010 at 10:58 am
The current arctic warming period is absolutely nothing new.
This long article by myself -with many links- examines the little known period 1815-60 when the Arctic ice melted and the Royal Society mounted an expedition to investigate the causes.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/20/historic-variation-in-arctic-ice/#more-8688
This free online book by Dr Arnd Bernaerts examines the last great warming -prior to the modern one- in great detail. It covers the period 1920 onwards..
http://www.arctic-heats-up.com/chapter_1.html
We have extensive evidence of these other warm periods (without even needing to refer to ther Vikings.) Why do we insist on believing the current episiode is unprecedented?
tonyb
_____________________________________________________________
Tony,
Thanks for write-up and links.
I’ve bookmarked both under “Arctic Shipping” (everything I’ve found lately is in that IE folder).
Regards,
Junior
The preface of that paper is saying Many studies and international projects, such as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), attribute the air temperature increase during the last quarter of the 20th century exclusively to accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However these studies typically do not account for natural hydrometeorological fluctuations whose effects on multiyear variability, as this monograph shows, can far exceed the anthropogenic impact on climate.”
But… If you double check – as a good skeptic should always do. The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), does not talk about the cause(s) but strickly looked at the impacts (consequences) of the recent warming situation in the Arctic. If you want to know what the ACIA said about past Arctic climate it is in other documents, and they stated (talking about 20th century warming situation)”it is also possible that it is a result of variations in sea surface temperatures.
And : both positive and negative feedback processes in the Arctic, occurring over a range of timescales.
And : The average surface temperature in the Arctic increased by approximately 0.09ºC/decade during the past century, which is 50% greater than the 0.06 ºC/decade increase observed over the entire Northern Hemisphere (IPCC, 2001b). Probably as a result of natural variations, the Arctic may have been as warm in the 1930s as in the 1990s…
Knowing that, i find it hard to follow the preface if the very first statement is falsely representing what the ACIA said/wrote/published. There’s a lot more in the ACIA documents very similar to what that paper is saying (the cycles) 5 years earlier. Here’s the link to the ACIA paper (chap 2) about the Arctic Climate: Past and Present.
http://www.acia.uaf.edu/PDFs/ACIA_Science_Chapters_Final/ACIA_Ch02_Final.pdf
I have a chapter in ‘Chill’ called ‘Poles Apart’ which contrasts the Arctic and Antarctic environments and notes that they tend to trend in opposite directions. Both are regions of permament heat deficit and rely on transport of heat from ocean basins to melt the ice in summer. When researching the book, I was immediately struck by the wealth of papers on the Arctic cycles – especially the 60 year Surface Air Temperatures (SATs) which lag a pressure oscillation across the Arctic basin. Nobody knows what causes the cycle, but virtually all ‘real’ Arctic specialists know about it, as well as the long term cycles that are recorded in the ice-caps thoughout the ice-age and in the Holocene as well. The long cycles are not evenly spaced but follow a repeat pattern reminiscent of a Fibonacci series with the cycle length shortening before a new cycle begins.
What is astonishing is that government labs in the US and Britain can ignore all this work and pretend cycles do not exist (precisely because they cannot be modelled – too uneven intervals). And then more astonishing (for me) is that groups like WWW and FOE and Greenpeace ignore my friendly warnings that the ‘basic science’ is crocked – or in the light of ‘climategate’ more than slightly ‘cooked’.
I go on to consider the ocenaography of the Arctic – and document the known dynamics of heat transfer – and it was easy to predict that the ice would come back in 2008 and 2009, stall a bit in 2010 due to the ENSO event, and will resume in 2011. Indeed with all ocean basic oscillations now in negative (cool) territory, I expect 2011 to show distinct ‘global cooling’ and for this to persist for some years.
The Arctic cool phase is marked by high pressure systems where ‘normally’ there would be lows. As the cycle shifts, we need to remember that 60 years ago there were 3 billion people on the planet, not 6.5 and that the northern hemisphere grain belt is perilously vulnerable to the polar jetstream – which shifts with the Arctic oscillation. I warned that ‘energy’ will not be the immediate issue, it will be food – 67 countries currently depend upon world food aid, which is itself dependent on the northern grain surplus.
Green politics will see the whole of the UK exported wheat quota of 1 million tonnes go into one giant ethanol plant very soon in order to meet 1/10th of our legally binding EU target for transport biofuels.
Absolutely nobody has done any joined-up thinking. And despite 30 years of environmental advocacy (not quite your thing at WUWT, I know!) the ‘greens’ will not listen – not a single invite to speak to them, and they attack not my arguments, which are all backed by peer-reviewed science, but my personality (which I have to admit, does not readily pass peer-review!)
And a note to Leif from over at another thread:
The current data for the solar minimum 2006-2009 shows certain patterns in the North Atlantic (which will become more obvious after the ENSO event and its teleconnections have worked their way out) which if they were to persist over several decades rather than a few years of solar minimum, would progressively diminish the oceanic heat stores built up over the past 50 years. This is the real significance of the Dalton and Maunder type minimums. There is the long-term cycle of 1000 years (also quasi-Fibonacci in that the Greenland data shows progressive shortening of the cycle peaks: 8000, 5000, 3000, 2000, 1000 years ago in the Holocene by aboout 3 C per cycle) and this is acted upon by 60-70 Arctic Oscillations, 70-100 year Atlantic Multidecadal and 30-40 year Pacific Decadal, with ENSO 4-8 year cycle on top of that. All these cycles peaked in the 1980-2007 period.
The main conclusion of this book, and the source of their predictions, appears to be that the 60yr “cycle” in temperatures is due to a changing earth-sun distance, and hence changes in insolation. This is easy to test with the ephemerides from http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi which gives the positions of the planets at any time between 3000BC and 3000AD.
The challenge to would be skeptics is to find a 60 yr cycle in the earth-sun distance with the emphemerides. (I don’t find a spectral peak at 60yr)