Guest Post by Jeff Condon
Tamino has his crowd all whipped up about sea ice. He has done two posts now declaring how stupid I, Anthony Watts, and by association, all of you, are. Sorry folks, it was a drive-by incident! For him, I’m not enough of a believer and for others, I’m too much. Is it is a good sign when you get it from all angles? Either way, he has made deliberately erroneous claims in an attempt to discredit this blog, and WUWT, which I suppose means we have struck a nerve.
The first thing I would like to clarify is my opinion on sea ice in general. Like many readers here, I have read a large number of papers on the topic, unlike most, I have also taken the time to download and plot satellite Sea Ice data, replicated the trends and examined sea ice on a regional basis. With help, I have identified evidence of minor trend inducing error and will soon be looking at how the online satellite data is knitted together during transitions. From all of these many hours of time, I’m completely unconvinced that man made global warming is causing very much of the observed sea ice decline. I’m also willing to be wrong but the literature appears to support that a substantial portion of the Northern hemisphere decline is caused by a weather pattern change in the Arctic.
This opinion is reasonably standard in the mainstream although it is often mixed with the claim that warming weakened the ice and allowed it to flow out of the polar region. The possibility that warming or weather are primary causes of the declining sea ice creates a need for disaggregation. Of course the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive so there is a lot of room for some combination of a variety of factors to be the cause. We also know that something the believers often conveniently forget is that not all warming is CO2 based.
So with all of that said, I don’t think that the effect man is having on the globe is detectable in the ice trend. Detectable being statistically differentiable. That is very different from whether a trend can be detected or whether a trend is caused by natural warming. In his recent two posts, Tamino (aka Dr. Grant Foster) mixes everything together in what has been a successful attempt to whip up his followers. Unlike the Air Vent and WUWT, his crowd is comprised primarily of non-technical readers who often jump at any statement they can find with literally zero understanding of why or what they are attacking.
So, if you have a region like the Arctic, where sea ice is often, but not always, multi-year and that ice is being affected by being either pushed out of the region and melting, simply warming and melting or some combination, and you want to understand the trend in ice levels for the globe caused by surface temperature warming, then disambiguation of the effects is necessary. Therefore measuring ice which melts completely and re-forms annually should provide a cleaner temperature signal than a region reacting to something else.
To that end I made the plot below from gigabytes of satellite data which identified 72 degrees North Latitude as the line where multi-year ice is nearly non-existent. Layman Lurker confirmed this latitude independently (and with less effort) before I finished. Now “nearly non-existent” is different from “completely non-existent” but not by much (see how that works!). Engineers and scientists often approximate things but some in Tamino’s crowd show their inexperience and called this as an error despite having no evidence.
So I then added up all of the single year sea ice south of 72 North latitude in the Northern and Southern hemisphere, plotted all of it including the pole-hole part left out, and referred to it as global single year ice. Unfortunately, the global ice didn’t have enough trend for Tamino (wasn’t quite 95% significant) and he completely wigged. (“Wigged”, is a psychiatric term used to describe the reaction of believers when they discover something is unhelpful to the “cause”. ) What he did to “fight back” was misrepresent the work and show a ridiculous annual refreeze plot in the North region implying that somehow that is equivalent. That was Grant Fosters trick on his readers, who were unwilling or unable to point out the deception. Several of them fell for it completely and their acerbic comments went uncorrected by Grant.
The north pole is a trapped region which freezes “nearly” completely every year. As multi-year ice vanishes, there is an increase in available open sea area and single year ice area naturally increases. Therefore if you want to isolate the effect of temperature on sea ice from weather effects on North polar ice, it is counterproductive to include anything from that region.
I have spent about an hour and a half now processing the data to see how well each region correlates to UAH NH temperatures. I took the entire NH temperature and correlated it to Northern hemisphere sea ice South of 72 degrees North latitude and sea ice North of 72 degrees. Of course, since we are using ICE, it is preferable to use only ice and temperatures from months where northern ice is present. I chose Jan – September from the video but it was pretty arbitrary. An estimate again! OMG.
Correlation of ice area to NH temperature:
South of 72 – 0.692
North of 72 – 0.593
So sea ice south of 72 correlated better to the NH temperature than that North of 72. It appears that the ice I’ve chosen is a better indicator of NH temp than ice north of that point. Of course it covers a lot more land mass than the other ice but it again confirms that the satellite sensors are measuring a real warming and the high correlation (for climate science) indicates that warming is having an impact on ice melt. It also confirms that the disaggregation of the data may not be worthless after all.
Lets see what Tamino’s crowd had to say about our collective stupidity-for daring to plot data:
“What Condon’s essay really illustrates is how fake skeptics fool themselves into thinking they have real evidence.”
“It’s my opinion that people like Jeff Condon are actually enemies of liberty.”
“It’s simple bootstrapping – it’s deliberate misinformation.”
“I cannot read much of Watts and other deniers – because too quickly I realize I am arguing with idiots. “
“Thanks very much for exposing this breathtaking piece of idiocy.”
“Every time I think I’ve finally become cynical enough to no longer be surprised by denier lies, something like this comes along and proves me wrong.”
“Watts’ comment was obvious. After all, he’s paid to say he’s not concerned. “
“This is typical of deniers. You start with the answer you want and then torture the data until you get enough evidence to believe it.”
“There is absolutely nothing justifiable from a scientific perspective in the ways Condon slices and dices the data”
“Cherry picking data to come to a conclusion the you already believed to be true, is the prime example of being a denier and not an honest skeptic.”
“Jeff Condon is anti-innovation, pure and simple.”
“Jeff is a moron.”
“Jeff got as close to the poles as he could without people noticing he was egregiously cheating.”
And that all is from the FIRST post. Tamino, who I believe realized his trick made him look bad, put up another post quickly attacking an older piece where I dared point out that sea ice level reached ‘average’.
oh my……
And around the believers went again.
Related articles
- How Fake Skeptics Fool Themselves (tamino.wordpress.com)
- Tamino Misses The Point And Attempts To Distract His Readers (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Sea Ice News Volume 3 #1 – The “Arctic Institute” pwns itself (wattsupwiththat.com)
- WUWT Sea Ice Page
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For the record, here’s what the sea ice looks like today – Anthony
1. DMI summertime temperatures, as measured at 80 north latitude since 1958, have decreased from 1958 through 2012. Further, that decline in temperatures – during the only time of the year when the sun is shining across the Arctic – is recently accelerating, just as the sea ice extents is decreasing.
2. Arctic sea ice extents minimums are now 4.5 million km2. Now, in today’s real-life world of actual sea ice coverage, there is virtually no sea ice in the north other than a roughly circular area above Greenland, slightly off center towards the Bering Strait. To a very good approximation, the entire current Arctic sea ice extent can be seen as a “cap” centered on the pole extending from the pole down to 79.5 latitude.
3. In today’s real world, Arctic sea ice minimum – the ONLY additional ice that can “melt” if current trends continue (since the rest of the Arctic ice has already melted every summer) will melt back from that limit of 80 north latitude towards the pole. That is, if there is a “arctic feedback” from exposing more low-albedo open ocean water to the sun rather than highly reflective snow and ice, this change can only occur between 80 north and the pole because all other sea ice has already melted each year, and will continue to melt each summer.
However, at the actual times of minimum sea ice at mid-September each year, the sun is less than 10 degrees above the horizon at its highest extent. At that low a solar angle, the water is HIGHLY reflective, and will absorb less than 5% of the sun’s energy at even at this highest point of the day at local solar noon. The rest of the day? Even less solar energy is present.
The “outdoors myth” of “dark” albedo open ocean water is ONLY true at the equator, where there is an unusually low amount of floating sea ice that can be melted at any time of the year.
Thus, when you combine actual solar exposure times to low solar incidence angles with a corresponding high reflectivity, plus a arctic air mass of 3.5 to 11 times the atmospheric mass than at the equator that absorbs a greater fraction of the energy before it gets a chance to strike the ice surface. plus a large evaporative loss of energy from open water of (approximately) 78 watts/m2, you find that open water – at the point of today’s melting at minimum sea ice extents, looses more energy than ice.
Therefore, the more open water that is exposed at minimum sea ice extents, the colder the Arctic air will get. And that is what the DMI is showing with its actual decrease in summer temperatures at 80 north.
Jeff B. says:
March 5, 2012 at 3:39 pm
“What are the Alarmists fear-mongering about now? What a waste of resources. Those Alarmists Scientists should be retrained as cancer researchers or something else that would be useful to humanity.”
I`m right there with You on alarmist fear-mongering being a shocking waste of resources but there`s already surfeit of alarmists and not enough researchers in that field with the inevitable shonky numbers . John Brignell highlights that very well at His site :
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/number%20watch.htm
Makes You wonder to what degree does all the , neo-puritan , agenda driven , phobia-peddling and it`s accompanying dodgy funding allocations , drain resources from genuine research ?
First, Arctic is really warming but not because of any greenhouse effect. The cause of this warming is a rearrangement of North Atlantic currents at the turn of the twentieth century that started to bring warm Gulf Stream water into the Arctic. The Arctic had been cooling for two thousand years before this when the warming suddenly started. This was discovered by Kaufman et al. who naturally called it – you guessed it – greenhouse warming. Problem is that he and his high-powered co-authors like Ammann, Briffa and Overpeck either did not understand physics or chose to ignore it. It is not too difficult to see that in order to create sudden greenhouse warming you have to put that greenhouse gas in the air first. This did not happen at the turn of the century but they were so used to getting away with outrageous claims that they thought nothing of it. It was not too difficult because you would have to know the carbon dioxide timeline to find out what they did. Anyway, it is all in my paper here:
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/arno-arrak.pdf
[~dbs, not Anthony.]
I’ve looked a lot at F&R2011, as a result of Willis’ article on it, and if that’s as good as Foster can do, I’m not impressed. He seems to studiously avoid running a regression with normalized inputs, to see the relative impacts of his variables. (Which would show that his case is not as strong as he makes it out to be.) He extrapolates a linear trend in a time series — a beginner’s mistake if ever there were one. He assumes that his variables enter his model with basically no impact, lurk for some lag time, then pop up to affect things for a single month and disappear. He uses a linear trend to stand for all influences other than select exogenous variables, and then equates this linear trend solely with (continuing) warming effects.
He’s sophisticated enough to account for autocorrelation of errors, but so blinded by the result he wants to achieve that he can’t tell self-serving assumptions from reasonable ones.
In the post that generated the Tamino response, you referenced Comiso 2012. That paper, and many others that look at sea ice decline, crunches the numbers and finds a strong contribution to long-term decline from warming.
Comiso 2012 is the paper that found older multiyear sea ice was melting faster than younger multi-year.
I’m sceptical any amount of warming would produce this effect.
Whereas its fairly simple to explain by increased solar insolation. Older multi-year ice will have more particulates embedded in it. As solar insolation melts the ice surface these particulates concentrate on the surface reducing the albedo and accelerating the melt.
Comiso found a correlation with warmer temps, which doesn’t mean he found a contribution. Such a statement is an assumption about what is cause and what is effect.
RealOldOne2 says:
quote
It showed me that Foster’s mind was closed to anything he didn’t agree with. It’s just an echo chamber there, like at RC. Also, since this Grant Foster publishes peer-reviewed papers, it makes me wonder what quality of science you could expect from someone who behaves that.
unquote
I can sympathise with this — I had a post snipped for no better reason than to allow Dr Foster to score a small point. If he is prepared to do something like that just to make his blog followers admire his wit, what might he be prepared to do to get his point of view over in a scientific paper? Would he lie, cheat, hide declines?
Well, probably yes, all those things.. A man whose integrity is suspect in small things is likely to be unreliable in large matters. I am continually puzzled that the warmers don’t realise this. Why are they not patient, polite, tolerant and forgiving in their posts? Surely it can’t just be that deep down they know they are on thin ice?
However, let me speak a little in Dr Foster’s defence: he once calculated for me the warming saved per tonne of CO2. I always use his calculation when the naive claim that the UK’s efforts on CO2 reduction will be worthwhile — Dr Foster’s figures show that the best result would be about thirty thousandths of a degree.
JF
The picture is not very clear on my monitor. Please tell me that’s not a balding ponytail.
Multi year sea ice is completely dependent on ocean currents and wind drift…. As the icecap drifts into warmer waters it melts more quickly…. Otherwise we would have a kilometers high ice glacier grounded on the seabed instead of a floating ice cap. So arctic sea ice is always moving and melting…. and depending on the prevailing currents and winds, some decades weather patterns are more conducive to moving the arctic icecap around than other decades.
The catastrophists need to stop hyperventilating.
Peter Miller says: March 5, 2012 at 4:24 pm
“For the scientifically challenged, such as a typical CAGW believer, fresh water freezes at lower temperatures than more saline water.”
I now know what a “climate scientist” feels like making stupid obvious mistakes – arrgh!
Peter, congratulations. In two sentences you’ve achieved more than Tamino in two whole pieces and a lot more, and WMC in his whole career that I’ve seen.
Arrgh! Sorry! the magic words that distinguish us from “the Team”! and yet, also give us the chance to actually know what they feel like.
Um, for the grammatically challenged: you got it inversificated. ;p
Both are from The Magic Flute. Tamino is the noble prince, elevated to divinely selected Global Ubermeister after the defeat of the Queen. Pamino is the bird-catchin’, jabberin’, side-kick who’s too “flighty” to qualify for the Inner Circle, but good-hearted enough to win a consolation prize (Pamina).
I thought that Tamino derived from the Spanish name for the feral donkey of Mexico, a subspecies of Equus asinus. Thanks for the heads-up!
As for the gist of the main article, I thought all we had to know to falsify the AGW-Polar Ice hypothesis was the fact that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Northwest Passage was navigable by primitive sailboats without icebreaker escorts. Remember, the burden of proof is on the hypothesis formulator. Why do we have to show any more?
OK, one more stake in the heart—the Greenland Viking historical record. There…satisfied now?
Only takes one.
Not even sea ice is going their way now! And even if it did, what would that prove? Would it prove there is polar warming? There is certainly no global warming now!
RSS for February just came out at woodfortrees. It came in at -0.121 C. So the combined January-February average is -0.09 placing it the 26th warmest so far. (UAH was also 26th warmest on its set after February.) For RSS, it is now 15 years and 3 months, since December, 1996, that the slope has no trend. (slope = -0.000234717 per year) See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1994/plot/rss/from:1996.9/trend
Irony:
William M. Connolley using wiki as a climate science reference. Considering he’s the one that did the heaviest editing to a point that nobody believes wiki as a climate reference.
This is an amusing example of “Tamino” getting his arse handed to him when he goes up against a scientific sceptic:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/03/19/tamino-and-the-adjusted-gaspe-data/
@henrythethird says:
William M. Connolley using wiki as a climate science reference. Considering he’s the one that did the heaviest editing to a point that nobody believes wiki as a climate reference.
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A little like Trenberth citing the authority of the IPCC for why we should reverse the null hypothesis and accept the teachings of catastrophic global warming. (While forgetting to mention he was the lead author of a section of the IPCC report. In other words, his authority came from citing himself.)
Will Nitschke says:
March 5, 2012 at 10:09 pm
This is an amusing example of “Tamino” getting his arse handed to him when he goes up against a scientific sceptic:
http://climateaudit.org/2008/03/19/tamino-and-the-adjusted-gaspe-data/
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One can only hope that, as with an ass, the cross between a compulsive liar and a statistician is also sterile.
I predict a complete recovery of the Arctic sea ice by 2020.
I also predict nobody will remember this prediction in 2020.
Will Nitschke says:
March 5, 2012 at 4:09 pm
RealOldOne2 says:
“Also, since this Grant Foster publishes peer-reviewed papers, it makes me wonder what quality of science you could expect from someone who behaves that.”
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He published a paper recently that argued that if you adjusted out all the parts of the climate system that contributed to cooling, such that you were left only with the elements of the climate system that caused warming, this proved that warming occurred unabated.
That’s load of crap Will! Bob Tisdale wrote
Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) attempted to remove from 5 global temperature datasets the linear effects of 3 factors that are known to cause variations in global temperature.The paper covered the period of 1979 to 2010…..The independent variables listed in the abstract of Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) are El Niño-Southern Oscillation, volcanic aerosols, and solar variations.
There was some big El Niño events, and if i’m not mistaken, we also reached a solar maximum, within that time period. Do you not regard them as contributing to warming?
You don’t have to agree with his work ( Bob obviously didn’t ), but you shouldn’t need to misrepresent what he did.
Regardless of whether we are all evil, the data shows that sea ice has not continued to decline since 2007. That’s despite the econuts claiming temps continue to rise in that region. Inconvenient.
Only of recent times have I dared venture to a few alarmist sites, without exception all proved to be devoid of any meaningful discussion. The debates did not question how large angels were or indeed whether they even existed, the debate was entirely about how many would fit on the head of a pin.
I have thought about this for a while and tried to find a reason that these people could all be so narrow minded, angry and bigotted in their so called science.
Nature, nurture and education can not do this to a person, It is only religion that gives these effects, they are religious nuts following the new Gaia religion. They are the useful idiots of those further up the food chain.
As in the past when confronted by a fool carrying a sandwich board and yelling the end is nigh, it is best to ignore them and carry on doing real world stuff that may be of benefit.
Julian Flood says: March 5, 2012 at 5:34 pm
… let me speak a little in Dr Foster’s defence: he once calculated for me the warming saved per tonne of CO2. I always use his calculation when the naive claim that the UK’s efforts on CO2 reduction will be worthwhile — Dr Foster’s figures show that the best result would be about thirty thousandths of a degree.
Nice. Got a reference?
Ha, I remember answering Tamino myself. He gave me some useful info too but I cannot locate it right now.
@Daveo says:
“That’s load of crap Will! Bob Tisdale wrote…”
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Bob is a much more patient guy than I am, and entertains silly ideas put forward by Climatists before attempting to deconstruct them. Most of the rest of us just roll our eyes and shake our heads. Although as a sceptic it’s convenient to cite f&r2011 as a paper that demonstrates that natural variability has to date drowned out the effects of CO2, in contradiction to the IPCC AR4 claim that CO2 is now ‘the’ driver of climate. If it’s a driver, it’s something of a back seat one so far.
Why cant we all just get along?
/sarc off
Oooooowwwww, Tamino, I’m so scared!! The ICE is melting, the ICE is melting!!!!
Anthony,
sometime ago I read a NASA paper, on the accuracy, not confidence levels, of ice data. At that time ~ 2000, there seemed to be a error of about 10-15%, especially in measuring the ice perimeter.
I would imagine, with more recent satellite data & image processing methods, the accuracy would improve. Hence more recent data would be more trustworthy then older, especially pre satellite.
Any comments?
.