I’ve been getting a lot of pressure to cover the story by warmspinner Richard Black over at the BBC about a supposed feedback between Arctic sea ice and colder, snowier, winters in the UK and the EU. For example, WUWT “elftone” says:
Richard Black of the BBC – despite getting his head handed to him on a platter twice recently – is spinning like crazy about snowy winters. The cause is shrinking arctic ice. No, really :). I’m amazed he’s able to stand:
I’ve been resisting covering this for a little bit, because I knew sooner or later some MSM media fool would mangle this story into something unrecognizable (they always do). I was right, and the result is the most hilarious global warming headline ever:
They really have lost the plot, haven’t they?
After a few hours, probably responding to people calling up the newsroom and laughing uncontrollably, some editor changed the headline to read “Melting Arctic causes snowier winters in Europe, the US “.
The Internet though, has a memory for such things. The original link was: http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/world/global-warming-is-making-the-world-colder/story-e6frea8l-1226283672088?from=public_rss
But if you click on that you get the revised headline with revised URL.
It is still cached in some places, like this law blog: http://legalnews.findlaw.com/article/0dc48OwedZ44D?q=NASA
UPDATE: I’ve posted the Georgia Tech press release on the science here. While the idea posited isn’t totally implausible, I need to see more examples to be convinced. – Anthony
For its writer, the headline makes me think of a quote credited to Yogi Berra that Anthony posted a few days ago, “If you don’t think too good – don’t think too much”
This type of stuff has been around…
“Global warming blamed for unusual cold spell”
http://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?pp_cat=11&art_id=61512&sid=17581089&con_type=1
Greenpeace said so.
Re: You Guys are unreal and IQs…
What was that old joke? Maybe if You Guys left here and went over to DeSmogBlog, the average IQ of both blogs would go up.
“They really have lost the plot, haven’t they? After a few hours, probably responding to people calling up the newsroom and laughing uncontrollably, some editor changed the headline”
When I see something like that headline, I can’t help wondering if it wasn’t a skeptic who wrote it, with an eye to what it said, and that it was changed to conform to the party line.
The idea that an ice free arctic will change the weather is probably correct for all time scales.
Consider the north shore of Lake Superior. The weather/climate changes a lot if the lake develops a substantial ice cover. Open water releases heat to the atmosphere and has a moderating effect on the local weather. Once an ice cover prevents this, it gets a lot colder along the shore. The arctic will be the same.
The freezing, or lack thereof, in the arctic will be controlled by ocean currents. The solar contribution in the high arctic winter ranges from small to zero. If the ocean doesn’t freeze, it is because heat is coming in via currents. So, for some reason, the ocean currents have changed in part of the arctic and we have something like a large polynya.
Given the time scale on which ocean currents operate, it seems reasonable that the currents might have changed due to the heating in the late 20th century. To me it looks like a system with a large negative feedback whose transfer function has a time constant measured in years or decades.
From much experience I can sadly confirm that the Adelaide Advertiser is one of the junkiest newspapers in Australia. I cringe at what I am likely to be confronted by every time I see a story with the prefix “by science journalist…”: who, it appears, is randomly picked by spinning the bottle.
The loopinees of this headline seems to have entered even their conscousness and embarrassed them to the point that the whole story was deleted from their print edition. Damn, I would have framed it and hung it on the wall.
Orwellian, indeed!
With respect to the CAGW hypothesis, “Ending Is Better Than Mending!”
Unhinged hysteria is making global warmists’ pontifications more credible
“Smoking extends life expectancy by 10 years
FDA reccomends vegetables be replaced by beer in food pyramid”
Definitely would not like these two. Beer and smoking are both nasty.
(spoken) It says here…
(sung) The average unhinged warmist,
Basically insecure,
Due to some long frustration may react
With psychosomatic symptoms,
Difficult to endure,
Producing their deranged conception of facts.
In other words,
Just from waiting around for the planet to grow uncold,
The warmists become bitter scolds.
You can out them wherever you figure the doctored data lurk,
You can give them a shot for ethics they’ve not got, but it just won’t work.
When they’re tired of getting the fisheye from you denier jerks,
The warmists become bitter scolds.
(spoken) It says here…
(sung) The warmists remaining unheard,
Offends their regal sense,
Spawns psychotic tendencies, see note. (spoken) Tendencies see no– Oh! See note.
(sung) Chronic, spasmodic syndromes,
Toxic with nonsense,
Affecting their grants, proposals, stipends, and votes.
In other words,
Just from worrying whether their payoff is on or off,
The warmists become quite wroth.
You can pump them all day with some FOIAs and the bloggers’ biz,
But their payday never gets anywhere near as large as they’d wish.
If they’re getting a kind of a name for themselves, and it ain’t “scientists”,
The warmists become quite wroth.
And furthermore,
Just from bawling and mewling and calling out that consensus exists,
The warmists are in a sinking ship.
When they get on the News at Six each night, they can hear warning bells chime.
Their departments are under subpeona and they’re out of time.
When they’re let go at term’s end for behaving like slime,
The warmists will go down in their ship, their ship, their leaking old ship,
Their “peer review”, and their proxies, and their models that failed to predict the dip!
From their lack of thoughtful reflection and a feeling their schtick’s grown old,
The warmists dug themselves a deep deep hole!
@You Guys are unreal, there’s a headline pictured above which specifically says global warming is making the [b]world[/b] cooler.
Incomplete satellite monitoring and badly sampled data from very sparse populations of weather-stations then used to make predictions for somewhere else? Umm….I thought even the modellers were leery of making detailed regional forcasts.
The 2011 AGU* Charney Lecture by Graeme Stevens contains an excellent example of the perils of commiting to any kind of a useful regional forcast.
http://www.agu.org/sections/atmos/sectionawards/charneylecture.shtml
I found it quite listenable as a background audio. I think the ‘Swedish problem’ was described after the half-way point.
*No, I have no connection to the AGU. Never met them. Never likely to.
You’ve got to be more understanding and forgiving. They just meant “Carbon dioxide is Making the World Colder.” and the text was meant to read …
“The IPCC has just discovered that they forgot that the Sun’s radiation has a lot of infra-red in it and of course water vapour and carbon dioxide absorb some of this and send wonderful backradiation back to space containing some of the potent solar energy that would otherwise have warmed the Earth a bit more.
“So they have now decided that carbon dioxide helps to cool the Earth and doesn’t do any warming because all that backradiation they talked about is really just standing waves that don’t transfer any energy. So now we need only $50 billion a year to build and maintain coal burning generators in all those third world countries we need to control.”
Only one headline I can think of that might possibly top that……
“Global warming helping Cubs win World Series”
Yeh, I saw that headline on BBC too… rolled my eyes knowing it was Dickie Black’s work again.
I’m wondering, do “correspondants” have different code of ethics to journalists? There’s no way Black’s reporting on AGW is balanced. The Fakegate just showed that to those who didn’t want to believe before.
This had been on German news a week ago as well. They said that a number of recent studies would all support the conclusion.
Check out Pope’s feedback equilibrium theory, according to which Arctic Ice Rulz!
herman@popesclimatetheory.com
His bottom line is surprisingly optimistic; the current regime is responsible for the abnormally prolonged interglacial we are enjoying, and it is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Or even longer than foreseeable!
🙂
Down Under we heard about the lack of snow plows closing Heathrow a year ago because airport management listened to the usual doomsayers that Northern Hemisphere kiddies would grow up without making snowmen. We had a similar experience with the long drought that has turned to floods the last couple of years and the same alarmist prognostications that the world’s second largest river basin, the Murray Darling would never fill again just like our dry dams. Chief among them was our Climate Change Commissioner Tim Flannery who has gone to ground recently (or mud as the case may be) and is nowhere to be heard. He’s the scientific chap who was spruiking seven feet or so rising sea levels and then purchasing a waterfront property on the estuarine Hawkesbury River. Well it is true Tim may face the prospect of a deluge but it won’t come from the sea –
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/playground-weekender-music-festival-cancelled-due-to-wet-weather/story-e6frfku0-1226285205772
As one dry commenter opined recently- ‘I’m having a lot of trouble clearing away all this water to find the drought underneath’
Well if you don’t bother with snow ploughs listening to the alarmists, naturally if you’re gullible government you have to do something about their prediction of never ending drought-
http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/desal-plant-cant-shut-despite-heavy-rain/story-e6frfku0-1226285073771
Same sad story, different hemisphere.
It would be remiss of me not to point out that southern Australia has just finished the last day of its typically hot dry summer season and is now looking forward to its usual autumn and winter rainfall in order to replenish its water catchments.
When I first read the title “Global warming is making the world colder” I thought it was some parody written by someone in the skeptical camp. But when I saw that it was really, really another bit of (post-normal) science coming from the warmist camp I just could not believe my eyes.
Is this the end of the end of the scam?
Update on my complaint about old Richard Black’s bias over Fakegate.
Still no reply. Almost as though the BBC isn’t really serious about it’s commitment to serving the public. Very curious.
Here’s what I wrote on their complaints website:
“The article was biased by way of selective reporting.
Richard Black refused to report on Climategate until the story was cold as he was unsure of the providence of the leaked emails. This was quite justifiable.
However, in this story the documents were stolen and at least one was fabricated. Again his established procedure would be proven to be justified. Yet he abandoned that practise.
To avoid bias (and fulfil his duty as a journalist) he should have checked his sources and consulted with DeSmog Blog, Heartland Institute and Watts Up With That. He did not do those things.
Instead he misled his readership in order to disparage a competitor’s website (Watts Up With That). This is a clear bias against the winner of the Science Blog of the Year. As a less lauded science and environment blogger himself the motivation is suspect.”
Carmen D’oxide says:
February 28, 2012 at 7:12 am
If you can’t understand things, be a journalist.
If you can’t be a journalist, be a headline writer
———————————————————
If you cant do either become a climate scientist for Pacific Institute.
I for one greatly enjoyed our Global Warming induced mild winter of 2012 than our Global Warming induced mini-ice age of 2011. Who knows what Global Warming has in store of 2013!? I don’t know but I bet it is no better or worse than than the last 43 winters I’ve experienced.
Oh, almost forgot! Global Warming causes too many Daffodils, Dandilions appeal to UN to prevent Climate Herbocaust! Al Gore appeals to World Court to grant flowering plants the same basic rights as humans.
—
Kip Hansen says:
February 28, 2012 at 4:07 pm
The Northeast US is suffering from lack of snow and cold this winter…lots of stories about daffodils coming up too soon, etc.
I’ve actually replicated this hypothesis/theory/BS at home. If I stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open, I get colder while the refrigerator heats up the rest of the room. Maybe if I reverse my window AC and have the cold air blow outside, I could combat global warming. Guess I’d have to do this during the winter to really have an affect. Yeah, that’s the ticket!
Sounds like a rehash of a hypotheis of Ewing and Donn
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/pdf_extract/123/3207/1061
Back in the 1950s, they hypothesized that an ice-free Arctic Ocean leads to increased snowfall at high latitudes. With higher precipitation, portions of this snow may not melt during the summer and so glaciers form and grow. Finally the glaciers calve into the Arcitc ocean, ultimately causing the ocean to freeze over.
.When low-temperature ice covers the Arctic Ocean there is little evaporation and the polar regions become deserts. This low precipitation allows high-latitude snowfalls to melt during the summer.
So what we get, according to their theory, is an oscillation between an ice free arctic and growing glaciers, and an ice covered arctic and receding glaciers.