Guest post by David Middleton
The recent return of the Warming Island AGW myth inspired me to build a climate reconstruction for the Greenland Sea region.
Temperature Reconstruction
I performed a GISS station search centered on 71.4 N latitude, 23.5 W longitude and downloaded the 12 GISS/GHCN instrumental records with at least 60 years of continuous data up to 2011.
Next I calculated a temperature anomaly relative to 1961-1990 for each of the 12 stations and then averaged them together to create a temperature reconstruction. The climate in the Warming Island area is statistically indistinguishable from that of the 1930’s.
Then I took that reconstruction back to 1000 AD with the GISP2 ice core Ar-N2 data (Kobashi et al., 2010)…
The Modern Warming is also statistically indistinguishable from the Medieval Warm Period in the Warming Island / Greenland Sea region.
Arctic Sea Ice Reconstruction
It occurred to me that there might just be a relationship between the temperature anomaly and the Arctic sea ice extent. So I went to Wood for Trees and downloaded the historical NSIDC Arctic Sea Ice Index. Then I cross plotted an annual 13-month running average of the sea ice index against the average of the station anomalies and the GISP2 reconstruction (Kobashi et al., 2010) and found a pretty good correlation (R-squared = 0.67)…
Using the equation “Sea Ice Index = (-0.5976 * Temp. Anom.)+12.374” I calculated a Model Sea Ice Index.
The “Model Sea Ice Index” (white curve) is very similar to the measured sea ice index (cyan curve)…
Using the same equation, I extrapolated the Model Sea Ice Index back to 1000 AD using the GISP2 temperature data from Kobashi et al., 2010…
The model suggests that Arctic sea ice had been steadily expanding from ca. 1150 AD up until ca. 1800 AD and has been declining since ca. 1800 AD.
Next, I carried the model back to the Early Holocene using the Alley, 2000 GISP2 reconstruction…
This suggests that the sea ice contraction during the instrumental era (1979-2011) is not particularly remarkable.
Calibrating the Model
Realizing that my model has been extrapolated about 8,000 years away from real data, I decided to compare it to some real data. McKay et al., 2008 demonstrated that the modern Arctic sea ice cover is anomalously high and the Arctic summer sea surface temperature is anomalously low relative to the rest of the Holocene…
Modern sea-ice cover in the study area, expressed here as the number of months/year with >50% coverage, averages 10.6 ±1.2 months/year… Present day SST and SSS in August are 1.1 ± 2.4 8C and 28.5 ±1.3, respectively… In the Holocene record of core HLY0501-05, sea-ice cover has ranged between 5.5 and 9 months/year, summer SSS has varied between 22 and 30, and summer SST has ranged from 3 to 7.5 8C (Fig. 7).
My GISP2 (Alley, 2000) sea ice model is generally consistent with McKay et al., 2008…
Conclusion
“Move along, there’s nothing to see here.” The Arctic sea ice has “been there and done that” many times over the last 10,000 years without any anthropogenic assistance.
References
Alley, R.B. 2000. The Younger Dryas cold interval as viewed from central Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 19:213-226.
Kobashi, T., J.P. Severinghaus, J.-M. Barnola, K. Kawamura, T. Carter, and T. Nakaegawa. 2010. Persistent multi-decadal Greenland temperature fluctuation through the last millennium. Climatic Change, Vol. 100, pp. 733-756.
McKay, J.L., A. de Vernal, C. Hillaire-Marcel, C. Not, L. Polyak, and D. Darby. 2008. Holocene fluctuations in Arctic sea-ice cover: dinocyst-based reconstructions for the eastern Chukchi Sea. Can. J. Earth Sci. 45: 1377–1397
Michaels, P. 2008. “Warming Island”—Another Global Warming Myth Exposed.World Climate Report.
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Pascvaks says: @ur momisugly September 29, 2011 at 5:21 am
“…….Who said these guys were flakes? I really can’t get it out of my head that Soros is behind all this somewhere, and I just can’t imagine how he himself expects to profit from it all. When ‘Fat Albert’ starts talking about everyone chipping in to build a pyrimid for ‘Big George’ you’ll know the cat’s out of the bag.
I just don’t get it! WHY?…”
_________________________________________________________________________
First David, Great article, I hope you can expand and publish. Given all the Viking artifacts the melting is uncovering you would think the CAGW types would get a clue.
About WHY
MONEY and POWER of course with the added benefit of wiping out the excess “Useless Eaters” (you and me) cluttering up the landscape they want to “Rewild”
Big Al , Monsanto, and the World Bank will clean-up big bucks with planting eucalyptus forests for carbon credits as I just explained in this comment It is an invasive allelopathic monoculture tree, uneatable to most animals so it also wipes out the food supply of the wildlive while sucking up water and nutrients and leaving the land unfit for crops. Eucalyptus globulus Is also classified as the worst fire hazard tree to top it off.
I explain the push for power and control of the world food supply with comments starting http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/26/ipcc-resistance-is-futile/#comment-752960“>here.
All you have to do is a search on Soros, Rothschild and farmland to see what is considered the next big money maker. The plan has been in the works for decades and scares the {selfsnip} out of me because they are now beginning to “cash in ” on their plans as the big corporations buy up more and more farmland worldwide.
Making BIG money from starvation:
http://www.bread.org/hunger/global/
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-goldman-gambled-on-starvation-2016088.html
http://www.globalissues.org/article/758/global-food-crisis-2008
OT Anthony check this Bull coming from Canada:
http://nrtee-trnee.ca/
The report is fearmongering BS, economic alarmism… check page 143-145 for the advisors of this garbage!
Thanks for the good work. The role of time in all geoscience endeavors must never be underestimated. The geosciences are simply one huge set of models that are continually being recalibrated to new empirical data. Many it seems are so focused on their own navels they completely forget about geo-time.
We geo’s also tend to appreciate the fact that the Earth is one heckuva low-pass filter.
Dr Mo says:
September 29, 2011 at 6:07 am
Michael D Smith says:
September 29, 2011 at 4:42 am
“A textbook example of loss of high frequency information in ice data. Nice work Willis.”
err… I know Willis E. does great work around here, but give credit to David Middleton where credit is due… 🙂
Duly noted… Sorry about that David! I read it and it was so well done and easy to follow I guess I just assumed it was Willis. I too would take that as a huge compliment! Nicely done, I look forward to your next article… Mike S.
Thanks for the Kobashi et al. David. So the whole catastrophic warming occurred up there before 1950, then cooled a bit, then warmed a bit to previous level. Here are all Greenland stations via the KNMI Climate Explorer:
Monthly: http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/icrutem3_300-340E_55-85N_n_sua.png
Annual means: http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/icrutem3_300-340E_55-85N_n_su_mean1a.png
Here is the CMIP3+ model average for the same area:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/itas_cmip3_ave_mean_sresa1b_300-340E_55-85N_n_su_mean1a.png
Those cutting-edge-coupled-state-of-the-art models can not replicate recent history, because they are purely based on hypothetical “greenhouse forcings” and dismiss any natural changes. Unbelievable, that someone is still ready to argument with them.
I don’t see the obvious and predictable 60-70 year ice cycles discussed by Joe D’Aleo on here a couple of weeks ago. What’s up with that?
Did you look up Walsh & Chapman 2001, Annals of Glaciology, 33, 444-448 and compare their reconstruction of arctic ice to yours?
Well done David! I am in agreement. The most important/dominant time scale for humans is the last ~8000 years (since the interglacial maximum peak to the LIA minimum and present). The linear trend is COOLING. I don’t see the trend reversing in the future.
Kobashi et al. found them…
Davis & Bohling, 2001 also found a prominent 60-70-yr cycle.
Edim says: @ur momisugly September 29, 2011 at 11:59 am
“Well done David! I am in agreement. The most important/dominant time scale for humans is the last ~8000 years (since the interglacial maximum peak to the LIA minimum and present). The linear trend is COOLING. I don’t see the trend reversing in the future.”
__________________________________________________________________________
All you have to do is LOOK at the long term Geo scale record of temp. and you can see the earth is in the best shape it has been for an extended period of time. I am talking about the nice FLAT Holocene instead of a spike and crash back to an Ice age of the previous couple of interglacials. The believers of CAGW are so busy looking at the temp vs CO2 data they never notice that we don’t even have a problem.
http://climatechangedownunder.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/ice-core-data.jpg
Gail Combs,
Yes, it’s much flatter cooling than the previous couple of interglacial, but I take these ice core records with a grain of salt. There may be unknown artifacts, or maybe not. What I find interesting is that on those timescales warming seems to be steeper than cooling.
Walsh & Chapman’s reconstruction starts in 1880. It wouldn’t be of much use in trying to reconstruct the Little Ice Age & Medieval Warm Period.
Walsh & Chapman’s reconstruction disagrees with the NSIDC real data much more than my model and shows an expansion of Arcitc sea ice during the 1930’s & 1940’s… A period of Arctic warmth during which Soviet ships routinely plied the Northeast Passage.
Otherwise it indicates ~4% more ice than my reconstruction from 1880-1930, up to 17% more ice from 1930-1960, ~4% more from 1960-1970. The two reconstructions are in agreement with the satellite record from 1980-1990 and then Walsh & Chapman deviate above the the satellite record from 1990-2000 and then drop ~10% below the satellite record from 2000-2010. My reconstruction is within 3% of the satellite record in 28 out of the 32 years….
1980 -6%
1995 +6%
2003 -4%
2007 +5%
Looks like you are tossing away loads of information by not using shorter records. As JeffId and Romanm and Tamino and Nick Stoke and Richard Muller’s team shows there is no need to
throw away this information as they can be combined effectively.
Also, it looks like you are averaging over 90 degrees of longitude and if you are simply averaging them that will tend to give you a spatial bias.
Finally, you’ve got a geographically inhomogenous group WRT ( many island stations for example. )
In any case, there is more data that might tighten up you analysis and of course.. code and data posted or it doesnt count as science. Same rules for everybody
@steven mosher says:
September 29, 2011 at 2:19 pm
It’s a hobby… Not a Ph D thesis… /Sarc
If I had an unlimited amount of time for this hobby, I would have used the shorter records… Or at least all of the records with data from 1961-1990.
On the spatial biasing… The data are where the data are. Ideally, I would have plotted the anomalies on annual map horizons, gridded & contoured the anomalies and then put together an animated time slice volume… But that would have been too much like work.
RR Kampen
What happened to the monster el Nino that you were predicting back in May?
TomRude,
The funding for these fellows has been drying up now since the Conservatives took a majority and naturally gravity has reasserted its tugging on the sky.
Günther Kirschbaum says:
September 29, 2011 at 12:39 am
Take a look at your link. Then go to the Ward Hunt ice shelf pictures at:
http://http-server.carleton.ca/~dmueller/iceshelves/WHIS2011.html
Now tell me whether you can see any difference between the 2011-8-26 an 2011-09-22 state of the ice shelf. They have failed to indicate (by red outline) that the ice joining the two parts of the shelf is still there in the September picture. They are showing a decrease when there is none!
Sloppy work.
Somewhat OT, but I notice the temperature trend graph of Reno, Nevada, as posted at surfacestations.org in January 2008:
(1) http://gallery.surfacestations.org/main.php?g2_itemId=33587
has apparently been morphed into this one (at the GISS site):
(2) http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425724880000&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1
On the current GISS site I’m unable to find any trend graph that is similar to (1), and the direction of “manipulation”, if any, appears to be “past years drastically upward”, as opposed to their “traditional manner”.
Anyone in the know please tell me about the background of this enigmatic change of the graph.
When the story becomes clear, I’m incorporationg it into a book (titled “The Global Warming Myth”, in Japanese) to be published in February or March 2012.
Thank you in advance for your help.
Billy Liar says:
September 29, 2011 at 4:43 pm
“Now tell me whether you can see any difference between the 2011-8-26 an 2011-09-22 state of the ice shelf”
Look at the high resolution picture. What was joined in August is broken up in September.
Just look at the orientation of the “texture” of the shelf.
==> NO sloppy work. Sloppy comment only.
Oh god the scaremongering continues. The AP continues with its groupthink establishmentarian approach. What’s new?
http://news.yahoo.com/canadian-arctic-nearly-loses-entire-ice-shelf-214311365.html
911. What’s your emergency?
Another prank call, it seems.
[I know this is a little OT, but still Arctic, and I figured Dave Middleton could shoot some holes through it].
Go for it, Dave.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Another AP Globe and Mail alarmist article on non peer reviewed result to boot!
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/canadian-arctic-nearly-loses-entire-ice-shelf-from-global-warming/article2185500/
Sounds like the ice shelf loss is slowing down.
“Between 1906 and 1982, there has been a 90 percent reduction in the areal extent of ice shelves along the entire coastline”… 1.2% per year. The ice shelves should have vanished in 1990, two years before the Canadian Arctic started to warm.
You do realize that running correlations between running means is literally asking for a spurious one right?
If “running correlations between running means is literally asking for a spurious one,” then I’ve found one helluva lot of spurious oil & gas over the last 30 years.