# Arctic temperature amplification takes a hit in GRL

From Wikipedia:

Polar amplification is the greater temperature increases in the Arctic compared to the earth as a whole as a result of the effect of feedbacks and other processes. It is not observed in the Antarctic, largely because the Southern Ocean acts as a heat sink and the lack of seasonal snow cover. It is common to see it stated that “Climate models generally predict amplified warming in polar regions”, e.g. Doran et al.

Now with this paper, blowing the surface data out for AGW effects, what are they going to do?

New paper finds only 1 weather station in the Arctic with warming that can’t be explained by natural variation

A paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters examines surface air temperature trends in the Eurasian Arctic region and finds “only 17 out of the 109 considered stations have trends which cannot be explained as arising from intrinsic [natural] climate fluctuations” and that “Out of those 17, only one station exhibits a warming trend which is significant against all three null models [models of natural climate change without human forcing].” Climate alarmists claim that the Arctic is “the canary in the coal mine” and should show the strongest evidence of a human fingerprint on climate change, yet these observations in the Arctic show that only 1 out of 109 weather stations showed a warming trend that was not explained by the natural variations in the 3 null climate models.

Note a “null model” assumes the “null hypothesis” that climate change is natural and not forced by man-made CO2 or other alleged human influences.

GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L23705, 5 PP., 2012
doi:10.1029/2012GL054244

On the statistical significance of surface air temperature trends in the Eurasian Arctic region

Key Points

• I am using a novel method to test the significance of temperature trends
• In the Eurasian Arctic region only 17 stations show a significant trend
• I find that in Siberia the trend signal has not yet emerged

C. Franzke

British Antarctic Survey, Natural Environment Research Council, Cambridge, UK

This study investigates the statistical significance of the trends of station temperature time series from the European Climate Assessment & Data archive poleward of 60°N. The trends are identified by different methods and their significance is assessed by three different null models of climate noise. All stations show a warming trend but only 17 out of the 109 considered stations have trends which cannot be explained as arising from intrinsic [natural] climate fluctuations when tested against any of the three null models. Out of those 17, only one station exhibits a warming trend which is significant against all three null models. The stations with significant warming trends are located mainly in Scandinavia and Iceland.

Introduction

[2]   The Arctic has experienced some of the most dramatic environmental changes over the last few decades which includes the decline of land and sea ice, and the thawing of permafrost soil. These effects are thought to be caused by global warming and have potentially global implications. For instance, the thawing of permafrost soil represents a potential tipping point in the Earth system and could lead to the sudden release of methane which would accelerate the release of greenhouse gas emissions and thus global warming.

[3]   Whilst the changes in the Arctic must be a concern, it is important to place them in context because the Arctic exhibits large natural climate variability on many time scales [Polyakov et al., 2003] which can potentially be misinterpreted as apparent climate trends. For instance, natural fluctuations on a daily time scale associated with weather systems can cause fluctuations on much longer time scales [Feldstein, 2000; Czaja et al., 2003; Franzke, 2009]. This effect is called climate noise. Even very simple stationary stochastic processes can create apparent trends over rather long periods of time; so-called stochastic trends [Cryer and Chan, 2008; Cowpertwait and Metcalfe, 2009; Barbosa, 2011; Fatichi et al., 2009; Franzke, 2010, 2012]. On the other hand, a so-called deterministic trend arises from external factors like greenhouse gas emissions.

[4]   Specifically, here I will ask whether the observed temperature trends in the Eurasian Arctic region are outside of the expected range of stochastic trends generated with three different null models of the natural climate background variability. Choosing the appropriate null model is crucial for the statistical testing of trends in order not to wrongly accept a trend as deterministic when it is actually a stochastic trend [Franzke, 2010, 2012].

[5]   There are two paradigmatic null models for representing climate variability: short-range dependent (SRD) and long-range dependent (LRD) models [Robinson, 2003; Franzke, 2010, 2012; Franzke et al., 2012]. In short, SRD models are the most used models in climate research and represent the initial decay of the autocorrelation function very well. For instance, a first order autoregressive process (AR(1)) has an exponential decay of the autocorrelation function. LRD models represent the low-frequency spectrum very well, have a pole at zero frequency and a hyperbolic decay of the autocorrelation function. One definition of a LRD process is that the integral over its autocorrelation function is infinite while a SRD process has always an integrable autocorrelation function [Robinson, 2003; Franzke et al., 2012]. In general, both stochastic processes can generate stochastic trends but stochastic trends of LRD models can last for much longer than stochastic trends of SRD models. This shows that the rate of decay of the autocorrelation function has a strong impact on the length of stochastic trends. In addition to these two paradigmatic models we will also use a non-parametric method to generate surrogates which exactly conserve the autocorrelation function of the observed time series. Figure 1 displays the autocorrelation function for one of the used stations and the corresponding autocorrelation functions of the above three models. It has to be noted that there are a myriad of nonlinear stochastic models which can potentially be used to represent the background climate variability and the significance estimates will depend on the used null model. However, I have chosen the three above models because two of them represent paradigmatic models for representing the correlation structure and one conserves exactly the empirical correlation structure.

Figure 2. Map of stations: Magnitude of the observed trend in °C per decade.

Results

[17]   Figure 2 displays the location of all stations and the colour coding indicates the magnitude and sign of the temperature trends. The first thing to note is that all stations experience a warming trend over their respective observational periods. The largest trends (more than 0.4°C per decade) are in central Scandinavia and Svalbard. Most of Siberia experienced warming trends of about 0.2–0.3°C per decade.

[18]   After finding evidence for warming trends we have now to assess their statistical significance; do the magnitudes of the observed trends lie already outside of the expected range of natural climate variability? The above three significance tests reveal that 17 of the 109 stations are significant against an AR(1) null model (Figure 3a), 3 stations are significant against a ARFIMA null model (Figure 3b), and 8 stations are significant against a climate noise null hypothesis using phase scrambling surrogates (Figure 3c). All these trends are significant at the 97.5% confidence level. This shows that while the Eurasian Arctic region shows a widespread warming trend, only about 15% of the stations are significant against any of the three significance tests.

Figure 3.  Stations with a statistically significant trend against (a) AR(1), (b) ARFIMA, (c) phase scrambling null model and (d) stations with a significant trend: blue: weak evidence, green: moderate evidence and red: strong evidence.

## 102 thoughts on “Arctic temperature amplification takes a hit in GRL”

1. Daniel says:

“Now with this paper, blowing the surface data out for AGW effects, what are they going to do?”
Nothing they just ignore it ;)

2. Chris B says:

I think the indicated warming is like the MWP, very localized. /sarc

Could there be one location on the planet with statistically significant cooling?

3. TImothy Sorenson says:

Cue up Queen: “Another one bites the dust.”

4. JA says:

And the data recently measured was compared to a time period of duration
25 years? 50? 200? 1000? 10000? years?

“Now with this paper, blowing the surface data out for AGW effects, what are they going to do?”
They will ignore it, just like all the other evidence that refutes the AGW hypothesis.

As I have said before, the AGW movement is a POLITICAL movement in which “science” is used advance a political ideology .
It is no coincidence that the AGW movement began in earnest upon the fall of the USSR and that probably 98% of the AGW zealots are liberal progressives, socialists or communists.

The science does not matter at all. No more than misery and poverty in Czarist Russia was caused by the Kulaks; an invention of the Bolsheviks to advance their tyrannical, murderous cause.

5. phlogiston says:

“Out of those 17, only one station exhibits a warming trend which is significant against all three null models [models of natural climate change without human forcing].”

“NULL MODELS … of natural climate change without human forcing” ??!

But we are constantly lectured that the null hypothesis is stasis, that nothing other than stasis “can be imagined by Ben Santer”, or that CAGW IS in fact the new null hypothesis.

Now this outbreak of sanity … the null hypothesis is normality, i.e. natural climate change (oscillation).

Noteworthy indeed – a move in the right direction.

6. Fred Allen says:

108 canaries are singing at the top of their lungs, but not to worry: one quiet canary is all the alarmists need…even if they parade it in an oversized coffin, march it through the streets at the head of a huge procession and bury it with full media attention.

7. Figure 1 that Willis provided the other day showed clearly that the Arctic temperatures were not correlated with global warming. This current paper now confirms Willis’ findings. The Arctic is not a canary for climate change.

8. rgbatduke says:

“Significance against the null hypothesis” is a grey area. All of the stations exhibit warming. The warming does not come with a label identifying its proximate cause, probably because it doesn’t have a “proximate” cause — as the paper notes, a lot of what one sees is basically amplified noise with varying autocorrelation lifetimes. The “climate”, then, is determined by a highly non-Markovian integrodifferential process which stretches “proximate cause” out over anywhere from years to decades into the past (if not longer, since it is a global integrodifferential process where an ENSO strength fluctuation in a different hemisphere altogether two or more decades in the past can still be influencing the polar climate today in the sense that it would be very different had that fluctuation not occurred).

One is left right where one started. This in no way disproves the hypothesis that CO_2 caused the anomalous strength of the ENSO fluctuation in 1998 that is almost single-handedly responsible for the step-function bump in global mean temperatures in both SSTs and LTTs, which in turn is still affecting/producing Arctic warming in some regions due to peculiarities in the phases of the other decadal oscillations. Nor is it possible to prove that CO_2 caused the 1998 ENSO bump, because we don’t know the baseline.

This is the one thing that drives me nuts. We do not know the baseline. We do not know how to compute the null hypothesis warming without unprovable assumptions, any more than we know how to assign observed warming to CO_2 vs natural without CO_2 — they are one and the same. We have no idea why the Earth warmed into the MWP, cooled into the LIA, or why it has warmed since. We do now know how to predict what it would have done if CO_2 had never exceeded (say) 300 ppm. We do not know what is driving its long term trends or the strength of those forces, only that those forces historically have been capable of producing 1-2C century scale variations in temperature independent of CO_2 level over hundreds of thousands if not millions of years, in ice age or out of ice age. Are they amplified noise in a marginally stable externally forced nonlinear chaotic coupled oscillator system? Are they strictly following macroscopic orbital forcings?

We may, quite literally, never know, or at least not know in my lifetime and beyond. We might still not know 100 years from now. We aren’t ever going to have particularly high resolution or accurate estimates of global temperatures from the pre-thermometric past, because the second law of thermodynamics and the great eraser, entropy, has had centuries to millions of years to blur the record and we don’t seem to be able to do a very good job at estimating global temperatures in the contemporary present with actual thermometers stuck into the planet all over the place and satellite thermometers taking global atmospheric or SS temperatures pretty much all of the time. I just don’t think people appreciate how profound our ignorance here really is, how overstated our knowledge of the remote past (or even the relatively recent past) is.

If one believes the “best” proxy reconstructions of temperatures over the last 20,000 or so years, one doesn’t have to resort to fancy statistical methods to prove that we don’t know whether the current warming is due to natural variations or CO_2 (or rather, how to apportion the observed warming between the two). It is perfectly obvious that the climate system can make it much warmer or much cooler than it is today without any really significant change in either atmospheric composition or orbital stance, and that it can accomplish this on the timescale of centuries at rates of + or – 0.1-0.3 C/decade without any visible or definite proximate cause!

Which is the end of the story, at least until we can assign a proximate case to each and every major climate variation of the last 20,000 years, in detail. When we can explain, in full non-equilibrium thermodynamic regalia, why the MWP and LIA happened and why they were as large or small as they were, then perhaps we can think about understanding the present. But we can’t, and we don’t and we won’t be able to until we can, which may well be never, given that we cannot go back in time and measure many of the things that might have contributed to the “proximate cause” in this non-Markovian multivariate nonlinear chaotic system with a highly variable driver.

rgb

9. James at 48 says:

How many Arctic stations are impacted by anthropogenic albedo mods, and, anthropogenic surface and near-surface energy dissipation?

10. pat says:

hmmm. There have been an increase in papers that are extremely cautious about CAGW lately. To pun, there is a bit of ice breaking going on.

rgb–just type “CO2”, as in one atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen. The underscore in your compound representation isn’t necessary. :)

12. Sean Houlihane says:

Key Points
* I am using a novel method to prove this point that I think is true.

Not again. Stats is simple, no need to re-invent it…

13. Two points:
– The paper recognizes that “All stations show a warming trend”. Just pointing this out because I still see a lot of folks who deny the official line that warming, for whatever reason, is occurring.
– the paper’s results depend on models. A lot of criticism I’ve heard from the climate change denial side (e.g. Monckton) is over scientists’ use of models. I’m glad to see so many people here favorable of results emanating from models. Long may it continue.

Chris B says:
December 11, 2012 at 7:28 am

I think the indicated warming is like the MWP, very localized. /sarc

Could there be one location on the planet with statistically significant cooling?

I hope not, Chris–the longer this planet keeps warming, the longer the next Ice Age will be delayed. And just think of the beneficial levels of CO2 we’re seeing–simply amazing!

Plants are growing like they’ve not been in 200+ years and they even need less water! The Sahel is expanding on the south of the Saraha and someday I hope this conversion to a more abundant biosphere turns that entire Sahara wasteland into one big pasture for cows, horses, and goats.

What’s not to like, eh?

(Kinda takes the air out of those windbag Warmistas that can’t see anything but gloom and doom every mourning they wake up–“mourning” misspelled on purpose, of course.)

15. Jimmy Haigh says:

Canaries in coalmines, eh? Bad analogy. It’s CO (Carbon Monoxide) that kills the poor canaries they take down into coal mines.

Garrett says:
December 11, 2012 at 8:21 am

Two points:
– The paper recognizes that “All stations show a warming trend”. Just pointing this out because I still see a lot of folks who deny the official line that warming, for whatever reason, is occurring.

Could you please supply a list of “folks who deny the officieal line” for us, Garrett?

17. Fred Allen’s right. This paper contains statistical proof that there is significant warming in the Arctic that cannot be explained from natural causes. The fact that only 1 station exhibits this will be quietly forgotten.

Garrett says:
December 11, 2012 at 8:21 am

– the paper’s results depend on models. A lot of criticism I’ve heard from the climate change denial side (e.g. Monckton) is over scientists’ use of models. I’m glad to see so many people here favorable of results emanating from models. Long may it continue.

If you could please offer a link showing where Monckton is on the “climate change denial side”, I’d love to see it, Garrett.

Otherwise, I believe you owe Lord Monckton a public apology.

And then back to the books for you.

Garrett says:
December 11, 2012 at 8:21 am

– the paper’s results depend on models. A lot of criticism I’ve heard from the climate change denial side (e.g. Monckton) is over scientists’ use of models. I’m glad to see so many people here favorable of results emanating from models. Long may it continue.

If you could please offer a link showing where Monckton is on the “climate change denial side”, I’d love to see it, Garrett.

Otherwise, I believe you owe Lord Monckton a public apology.

And then back to the books for you.

20. Jim G says:

rgbatduke says:

“This is the one thing that drives me nuts. We do not know the baseline. We do not know how to compute the null hypothesis warming without unprovable assumptions, any more than we know how to assign observed warming to CO_2 vs natural without CO_2 — they are one and the same.”

Only one thing about this drives you nuts? How can one have a baseline in a continuously changing system with a large number of intercorrelated variables for which cause and effect are unknown and possibly unknowable? Modeling the climate is a fools’ errand, being carried out by fools, who do not know, nor care one iota about science. It’s all about power and money, as are most political endeavors.

21. David Schofield says:

He has probably got the figures upside down – he’s from the British ANtarctic Survey! :-)

22. RACookPE1978 says:

In general, over all the world, about 1/3 of all thermometers – surface stations – show a cooling trend over the past 60+ years.

About 1/6 show no trend at all.

Only the remainder, just slightly over 1/2 of all stations, actually show a positive trend in temperatures.

So, despite all the hype and exaggerations from the CAGW propagandists intended to cost the planet millions from increased deaths from cold, starvation and illness and bad food and bad water – the 1/3 of one degree increase in temperatures advertised as “Catastrophic Global Warming” is only true for half of the thermometers in use.

23. AndyW says:

Garrett says:
December 11, 2012 at 8:21 am
…The paper recognizes that “All stations show a warming trend”. Just pointing this out because I still see a lot of folks who deny the official line that warming, for whatever reason, is occurring….
————————————————————————————-
Sorry Garrett, but I think you’ll find that most people here at WUWT agree there has been a warming trend since the 1800s, What most people here also agree is there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 17 years – a period that Phil Jones once admitted would prove the alarmists’ models were junk

You’re right in one respect though – this paper seems to be relying on models, so I’m rather doubtful of what it has to say, unless someone else can convince me of the robustness of the models used.
(Did you just see what happened there Garrett? Being a true sceptic, I refused to accept everything that is put in front of me, but I’m also prepared to change my mind if somebody can prove me wrong. Scepticism’s great – you should try it some time)

24. mpainter says:

“profound… ignorance” Our understanding concerning the factors that shape our climate would be much further advanced if the present generation of climate scientists had been willing to allow that AGW is the not the only factor that shapes global climate- but such an admission is seen as treason in the ranks and could be professional suicide. Their efforts mostly have been directed at supporting the untenable AGW “axiom” and so they have made no contribution toward advancing the understanding of climate processes. Their science is mostly a house of cards that collapses when poked; nonetheless, it serves as ideological grist to feed the AGW propaganda mill. Such is the result when ideologues hijack a branch of science.

25. RobertInAz says:

Looks like that one station is near (or perhaps in) Reykjavik – Iceland.

26. mpainter says:

Jim G says: December 11, 2012 at 8:50 am

Yup, it is hard to see how the idea of a baseline applies to climate. One could arbitrarily put one, but what good is that? Thus climate models.

27. DR says:

Good news for canaries. Alaska was the “canary in the coal mine” just a few years back, but that one got away too.

They are running out of garages to hide the dragons in.

28. JJ says:

Garrett says:

Two points:
– The paper recognizes that “All stations show a warming trend”. Just pointing this out because I still see a lot of folks who deny the official line that warming, for whatever reason, is occurring.

Uh … the ‘all stations’ referred to is the 109 Eurasian arctic stations that are the subject of this paper. I challenge you to name anyone (let alone ‘lots of folks’) who has ever denied that warming is occuring at those 109 stations. For that matter, I challenge you to find a statement of ‘the official line’ that references the status of those 109 stations specifically, thus providing anyone the opportunity to have ever ‘denied’ it.

Typical warmist equivocation. The whole house of cards is based upon dishonest and fallacious bullshit arguments like that.

– the paper’s results depend on models. A lot of criticism I’ve heard from the climate change denial side (e.g. Monckton) is over scientists’ use of models. I’m glad to see so many people here favorable of results emanating from models.

Nah. The models are crap. And even the crappy models don’t show CAGW. CAGW is a religious/political belief system, not science.

29. rgbatduke said;

“When we can explain, in full non-equilibrium thermodynamic regalia, why the MWP and LIA happened and why they were as large or small as they were, then perhaps we can think about understanding the present. ”

I am currently trying to extend CET from 1660 back to 1000 AD and am currently at 1538. I tend to use contemporary observations, together with such practical info as crops, wine dates, glacier movements etc and combine them with scientific papers.

Things are muddied even further than you suggest, as the MWP was split by a substantial decades long cooling period, whilst the LIA was split by a substantial decades long warming period.

My guess would be that extreme climatic events such as the notably warm period we call the MWP, or a notably cold period we call the LIA, can be likened to sea flooding in as much a number of factors need to come together.

As regards sea flooding for example, any river involved needs to be swollen after heavy rain, the sea needs to be at the peak few hours of a especially high (spring) tide and there needs to be an area of low pressure positioned in a particular manner combined with winds that will pile up the water and push them in the direction of the weakest point.

So there are five or six factors involved all-or most-of which need to happen at the same time.

Relate that to a warm or cold climatic period. The jet stream has to be in a certain position with winds blowing consistently from a certain direction, whilst the oceans have to be in a particular warm or cold phase. No doubt other factors (arctic ice levels) are also involved, but they are probably the main ones.

During the MWP we can see clear evidence of the jet stream positioning and setlled weather over a long period with winds mostly from a warm direction. The LIA is complicated (sunspots?) but basically the important factors need to be in position in a negative manner. We have sufficient evidence to see that the settled warm (MWP) or cold (LIA) weather often breaks down, but then reasserts itself, so the period as a whole can be characterised as ‘warm’ or cold.’
tonyb

30. JJ says:

RobertInAz says:

Looks like that one station is near (or perhaps in) Reykjavik – Iceland.

Probably sitting in the lava field of a recently active volcano with a difficult to pronounce name :).

31. BC Bill says:

On my screen Figure 2 shows purple and pink dots, colours which are not on the scale given. Most of the dots appear light blue, which indicates slight cooling. Can we get a better Figure 2? I went to the source, but of course it is pay walled.

32. RobertInAz says:

Notice how strongly this result is impacted by the warm water entering the Eurasian Arctic from the North Atlantic (link is courtesy of the WUWT Sea Ice Reference Page).

This sure looks to me like warm(ish) water from the North Atlantic moving into the Arctic where it provides a small atmospheric warming signal as it radiates into space. If more heat currently radiates away than is replenished in the North Atlantic, then we are probably on the down leg of a negative (heat energy) feedback cycle. As the alarmists tell us, these ocean dependent cycles take decades to even centuries to work through.

Combining this observation with Bob Tisdale’s most excellent discussion of ENSO (http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/) and one might come to the conclusion that it is a very natural cycle with the heat energy accumulated in the Pacific slowly making its way to the North Atlantic where it can easily escape back into space. The current 16 years of surface temperature stability indicates that one of those decades long cycles is probably rolling over.

33. Ivan says:

I think the models are bad: don;t have enough aerosol cooling that masks the CO2 warming. :)

34. Laurence Crossen says:

According to meteorology, all of the greater change in temperature at the poles, or polar amplification, is due to heat transport. None is due to any other factor. The temperature gradient depends on the mean annual temperature of the earth. Any temperature change localized at the poles such as albedo changes are distributed around the earth at that gradient.

35. JimG –

How can one have a baseline in a continuously changing system with a large number of intercorrelated variables for which cause and effect are unknown and possibly unknowable?

Good points, Jim.

The climate guys have jumped the gun by several decades, studying that “continuously changing system” for only a few years before coming up with conclusions that were initially made even while the climate was only just a handful of years out of the ‘new ice age meme. Much of the work done since has been Confirmation Bias. It is not this work that should have the attention of these drop-in warmists in these comments. They need to go back to 1985 and ask what was the basis for conclusions jumped to then, given the climate history at at time (the end of the 1945-1975 cooling trend).

I disagree – in the long term – about the cause and effects being unknown and possibly unknowable. NOW we can’t know them, but have some faith in present and future scientists. We are only 30-35 years or so into the age of computers (counting not from the glacial-speed Eniac but the explosion of Apples and PCs) and about the same for modeling. Even though we do disdain models – in their current state – it is only by models that we will ever be able to know/understand the baselines and the system as a whole. Just because there is garbage now going in, crap understanding of the pieces of the puzzle, and inadequate code/math doesn’t mean someone won’t straighten out the mess some day.

Steve Garcia

36. rgbatduke says:

rgb–just type “CO2″, as in one atom of carbon and two atoms of oxygen. The underscore in your compound representation isn’t necessary. :)

Thanks, Rocky, but I write in latex without even thinking about it, and in latex a subscript is underscore. Technically I should be writing $CO_2$ — (latex CO_2) replace () with signs — but I’m too lazy and without a previewer and edit capability it is too easy to screw up and lose a whole paragraph. rgb 37. Kev-in-Uk says: I think Garrett missed the point that the warming is not outside natural variation – and as a typical alarmist might do, solely zoomed in on the ‘it’s warming’ meme! Duh! 38. rgbatduke says: During the MWP we can see clear evidence of the jet stream positioning and setlled weather over a long period with winds mostly from a warm direction. The LIA is complicated (sunspots?) but basically the important factors need to be in position in a negative manner. We have sufficient evidence to see that the settled warm (MWP) or cold (LIA) weather often breaks down, but then reasserts itself, so the period as a whole can be characterised as ‘warm’ or cold.’ Sure, in other words there are fluctuations around some mean baseline behavior. But what causes that baseline behavior, and makes the LIA most cooling, or the MWP or Roman warm period mostly warming? Again, we have the problem of being able to reliably identify the baseline behavior as a function of non-CO_2 variables before we can even think about the CO_2 dependence/anomaly, and even after that we have to have a truly reliable carbon model over precisely the same kind of time frame, because there are fluctuations of CO_2 in the past thermal record that appear — to me, to the extent that they are accurately known from proxies — utterly confound the Bern model for the carbon cycle. I know that Richard has done work comparing carbon cycle models, as has Bart (in a less detailed manner) but both of them, I think, have only worked with contemporary data. At a glance, the Bern model fails to describe any of the CO_2 concentration data shown in a recent top post on the subject. In fact I think — without doing all of the actual arithmetic — that the data positively refutes the model, or establishes far more stringent limits on the model parameters than given by their current values. But I rather think the model cannot be salvaged and is refuted. If/when I finish teaching in a few days for a few weeks, I may try to revisit this issue quantitatively, as it is pretty easy to run the numbers with octave/matlab. Note also that the issue is no longer the relatively simple but arguable issue of whether or not CO_2 rises precede or follow temperature rises, it is that the integrated solution to the coupled ODEs look like they cannot possibly describe the gross variations, given the joint distribution of temperature and CO_2 as best we known them by proxy. Beyond that, I agree that decadal or better warming and cooling are likely multifactorial and not single variable independent events in the climate record. Century scale warming and cooling, however, is correspondingly more difficult to explain in terms of confluence of multiple factors as the probabilities go down substantially. Those seem rather to involve serious, long term basic causes that we have not yet identified, certainly not in a quantitatively useful way. To put it another way, if warming required the coincidence of three factors each with only two distinct values, we would only expect to be in warming phase 1/9th of the time Increasing the number of categories or factors makes this worse. Yet we have millennial trends in temperature clearly visible across the Holocene, with century scale dips (and, no doubt, decadal scale antidips) and ditto peaks. Just looking at the data I’d suggest no fewer than five or six major drivers (more if you count different aspects of Milankovitch as being distinct), with highly nonlinear coupling and not at all equal influence, at least two or three of which are unknown or underestimated. One could probably do an analysis of the fractal dimensionality of the data and get a better idea of the dimensionality of the underlying space and its probable principle components, but the principle components in the current models are utterly irrelevant on the millennial or century scale — they are at best decadal. And we don’t yet have good data on one single cycle of all the major known decadal oscillations. Bob Tisdale loves ENSO (for good reason) because if its strong correspondence with discrete jumps in a baseline e.g. SST temperature. But ENSO itself probably is related to the PDO. The PDO is surely coupled to the AO and NAO. All three are no doubt influenced by the details of the THC. Perhaps (as you note) the solar cycle matters — it is certainly coincident, sometimes and in some ways that might depend on precisely the kind of multifactorial confluence you suggest with the temperature, but fitting a multivariate predictive model is an enormously difficult problem and requires lots of accurate data that spans the entire range of the permutation space of the variables to accomplish. A factor that somehow eludes climate scientists. Only by assuming separability can one fit with lesser data. But what justifies an assumption of separability? With a separable model used to approximate a non-separable phenomenon, you simply get the best fit possible with a basis that spans the wrong linear vector space, one in which the solution does not lie. This happens all of the time in quantum physics — it is an excellent description of the virtues and problems with perturbation theory, for example — but somehow in the real world separability is always assumed because it is so damned difficult (and requires so damned much high quality data) to fit a truly nontrivially multivariate function by any means whatsoever. I only know of one good, general way to do it, in fact, and that is with a neural network. One can sometimes do better if you have some reason to think that you know something about the solution (and are right) but a NN is a generalized nonlinear function approximator and hence enormously powerful. rgb 39. rgbatduke says: Only one thing about this drives you nuts? How can one have a baseline in a continuously changing system with a large number of intercorrelated variables for which cause and effect are unknown and possibly unknowable? Modeling the climate is a fools’ errand, being carried out by fools, who do not know, nor care one iota about science. It’s all about power and money, as are most political endeavors. It’s not a fool’s errand, it’s only a fool’s result if one takes the result more seriously than the probable correctness of the solution warrants. It actually looks like a lot of fun, and is certainly profitable even if one can only make comparatively short run predictions. In the long run the efforts from this “fool’s” activity are science. Science should be enormously tolerant of fools and iconoclasts in the short run even as it refuses to take anything too seriously until there is a good, long term, predictive agreement between theory and data. Which even if the GCMs were right we wouldn’t know for at least 20 to 50 more years. I don’t actually think it is unknowable — I only think that the unmeasured past is unknowable. In the future, with modern instrumentation, we can take increasingly fine grained and exhaustive measurements, and at some point things are actually rather likely to end up knowable. This isn’t a religious “things man was not meant to know” argument, it is just a “things we don’t know — yet — given the data and our best theories” argument. Egregious claims are made for the theories on the basis of one tiny sliver of accurate data plus another equally tiny sliver of increasingly inaccurate data preceded by data so coarse that even things like mean global temperature estimates are often within 2 sigma of present temperatures, so that one truly has to be open minded to say that the mean temperature estimates mean anything at all. I think we can make some decent inferences, but proxy derived results automatically come with huge cumulative error bars inherited from all of the processes that set their scale plus all of the unknown factors that might contribute. 40. rgbatduke says: December 11, 2012 at 7:59 am “This in no way disproves the hypothesis that CO_2 caused the anomalous strength of the ENSO fluctuation in 1998 that is almost single-handedly responsible for the step-function bump in global mean temperatures in both SSTs and LTTs” I have been studying what I’m going to start calling Daily Temperature abnormality in the NCDC Summary of Days data. http://www.science20.com/virtual_worlds/blog/updated_temperature_charts-86742 Daily abnormality is the difference of how much the temperature goes up today, and how much the temp falls tonight. So while there may be a temperature fluctuation in 1998, there has in general been no trend in Daily Temp Abnormality over the entire period of good data( after WWII), and this graph: http://www.science20.com/files/images/1950-2010%20D100_0.jpg show the Abnormality for North of 23 Lat on a daily basis for 1950 to 2010, weather variability far exceeds any trend in the data. 41. George M says: Garret, at least read what the article says:”here I will ask whether the observed temperature trends in the Eurasian Arctic region are outside the expected range of stochastic trends generated with three different null (statistical)models of the natural climate background variability.” He is not using a global climate style model, but using statistics to estimate the natural, random(stochastic) background natural climate variability. A totally different, and valid “model”. The results look pretty robust. None of the trends where outside the normal range of variability, except for 1 station in 109. What most non-scientists, including many of the climate modelers don’t understand that a complicated system can have random behavior, and that random behavior can produce a long-lasting trend in a variable, until some other random change takes over and does something else. 42. mpainter says: Garrett: Hate to tell you this, but while you were at your last global-warming confab, they pulled the rug out from under your feet. The official line has been changed, because the latest fifteen-year temperature trend shows no warming since 1998. So here is an IQ test for you: Is the globe warming? 43. @Kev-in-Uk “I think Garrett missed the point that the warming is not outside natural variation – and as a typical alarmist might do, solely zoomed in on the ‘it’s warming’ meme! Duh!” Warming isn’t the issue. Catastrophic AND man-made warming is the extraordinary claim. The CLAIM is both. If it ain’t us causing it, all the hoopla is b.s. And if it ain’t catastrophic, then no alarm is necessary. It becomes the Chicken Little Who Cried Wolf. Which it was from the start. Steve Garcia 44. My first comment was going to be this: If 1 out of 109 canaries dies in a mine – who the hell empties out the men from the mine based on that? Steve Garcia 45. Graeme W says: Garrett says: December 11, 2012 at 8:21 am Two points: – The paper recognizes that “All stations show a warming trend”. Just pointing this out because I still see a lot of folks who deny the official line that warming, for whatever reason, is occurring. I think enough people have commented on this, but I’ll just add that I’m happy to say that warming has occurred. Attribution of cause and determination of magnitude are the main areas of disagreement between people. – the paper’s results depend on models. A lot of criticism I’ve heard from the climate change denial side (e.g. Monckton) is over scientists’ use of models. I’m glad to see so many people here favorable of results emanating from models. Long may it continue. From what I can see, the author has used the word “model” in the statistical sense, and does not mean the much maligned computer models used to “project” climate behavior. Two of the three “models” are AR (a statistical function) and ARFIMA (another statistical function). I don’t recognize the third model specified, but given the first two are statistical “models” I presume the third one is, too. As such, the approach taken is not controversial. 46. mpainter says: Jim G says: “it is a fool’s errand, carried out by fools…” Overlooks the possibility that some do it solely for their bread, having a PhD in physics in a world where there is a glut of those. They are fortunate to find employment in their field, while others are in wheat fields, such as the physics PhD who works on an itinerant combine crew. 47. Scarface says: Is it me, or did I just hear the fat lady singing? 48. Sun Spot says: Hello Garret , @ Garrett says: December 11, 2012 at 8:21 am, Many people have contested you brief tome, but all I’m hearing back from you is crickets ? 49. Steve Keohane says: rgbatduke says:December 11, 2012 at 10:47 am To put it another way, if warming required the coincidence of three factors each with only two distinct values, we would only expect to be in warming phase 1/9th of the time Increasing the number of categories or factors makes this worse. Interesting coincidence that is roughly the non-glaciated to glaciated ratio. 50. rgbatduke Thanks for your detailed response. After examining tens of thousands of comtemporary references from the 7th Century onwards (I was at the Met Office library today looking at weather observations in Southern England from 1205 to 1350) I really dont see much different from today to various periods in the past. Certainly no sign of catastrophic warming in the modern era but an interesting saw toothed warming can be observed that has been going on for hundreds of years from around 1700. Judging by glacier information this seems to have happened also from around 750AD to around 1215Ad and to a lesser extent from 1350 to 1550. I think the only thing that surprisres me about climate science is how much we THINK we know about it but how little we really do, as demonstrated by a constant stream of new papers which makes us all adjust our perspective. tonyb . 51. Tilo Reber says: I did find a trend in the Arctic that was greater that the variation of other stations. But the reason was due to a shore ice effect. In other words, the earlier retreat of shore ice had a profound effect on the arctic stations that were right next to that shore. And most of them were. One can actually see the profoundness of the effect by looking at the ice coverage maps at cryosphere today, deducing when a shore station would have it’s nearby sea area become ice free, and then observing the drastic tempreature anomoly that was recorded for that station and that resulted from that change. Of course the change in temperature at the station is real. However, the warming that is local to the station and is caused by warm water circulating across the surface is not real warming when it is extrapolated from the shore stations to a thousand kilometers across the still existing ice and inland to areas still covered by snow and ice. Also note, that the stations in the maps above that do show significant trend are almost all shore stations. 52. rgbatduke says: So while there may be a temperature fluctuation in 1998, there has in general been no trend in Daily Temp Abnormality over the entire period of good data( after WWII), and this graph: http://www.science20.com/files/images/1950-2010%20D100_0.jpg show the Abnormality for North of 23 Lat on a daily basis for 1950 to 2010, weather variability far exceeds any trend in the data. That is actually a damn interesting thing to look at, and one I’ve suggested be examined in other threads a number of times. In principle, the mean thermal variation from sundown to sunup, when averaged over enough samples and controlled for variations in e.g. humidity or baseline weather — should be a direct measure of GHG surface warming. The problem is this — there are few places on the Earth’s surface where one can get sufficiently precise data, controlled for the natural fluctuations, that would otherwise confound (IMO) any attempt to resolve the CO_2 based gain, in order to do the job. My primary suggestion would be literally mid-desert — places where the annual variation of temperature and humidity year to year is very small, so December 11th this year is likely to have almost exactly the same max/min/mean temperature and same (near zero) humidity in any given year. In Durham, NC, where I live, this is pointless — in the years I’ve lived here 12/11 can be anything from dry and very, very cold, to snowing, to cool and raining, to warm and raining to just plain warm and dry. Today, for example, it is pretty warm but fairly humid (cloudy). In two days it will be clear and rather cold. This is NOT a good place to make a series intended to reveal this. In the middle of Death Valley, or the Sahara, or the Negev, or the Australian Outback, if you eliminate the rare weather event that is clearly distinct from the norm you might get enough “good” data from enough “acceptably normal, dry” days over enough years to be able to resolve the second order variation in the delta T that represents a GHG-based signal. Bear in mind that this will be extraordinarily difficult, because it will take years worth of data to establish a mean Delta T baseline, and more years worth of data (some years later) to establish a second mean Delta T, and the two means have to be separated by at least 2 sigma to talk about statistically resolvable changes in the cooling rate. If you could do enough places and years to obtain this, however, it would be enormously valuable! And it isn’t completely infeasible. In the Sahara, for example, it isn’t uncommon to have 50C variations in peak daytime to pre-dawn temperature, and it is likely that some 40C or more of that happens from sundown to sunup. If one assumes that one is trying to measure changes in\Delta T = 40$K on a scale of roughly 300 K absolute mean temperature, and that eliminating humidity altogether reduces the natural variance of the 40K year to year to (say) 1 degree, then one might be able to resolve the mean variance of $\Delta T$ to within 0.1 degree over a decade or two of daily measurements. One then MIGHT be able to wait a decade, take another decade’s worth of measurements, and obtain $\Delta T$ a second time, this time with much higher CO_2 levels (on average), also to within 0.1 K. This would give you a prayer of being able to resolve them, e.g. get $40.1\pm0.1$ for the first decade and $40.3\pm0.1$ for the second. Whereupon one would actually have direct evidence of a warming process with sufficient controls that one could at least hope that it is independent of e.g. humidity, decadal oscillation phase, thermohaline circulation, solar state. Indeed, one almost wouldn’t care about any of these things because they might shift T itself a bit year to year, but variation in nighttime radiative cooling in still, dry air would vary only with the fourth root of the absolute temperature and for that matter one could measure the actual absolute temperature and accurately subtract out this effect, leaving you with a non-confounded$\Delta T$anyway. So good job, good idea, but don’t bother applying it everywhere as it is pointless where there is humidity and substantial natural variation. Apply the idea only where Nature provides you with a minimally confounded environment, where “only” the non-water vapor driven GHE limits the rate at which desert sands cool at night (or as close as you can manage), controlled for humidity as best you can manage. rgb 53. I think this approach makes a lot of sense. It is more then obvious most natural processes that have veneration are stochastic in nature. Will it change anyone’s mind? I have my doubts. The extremes on both sides of this and most other politics-economic-social questions are only interested in out shouting each other. Rational thought and any science are unfortunately lost in the shuffle. 54. john robertson says: Remember the response of environment Canada 2010, to the question put via access to information request 2008, what is the state of EC weather station data acquisition ? Errors & More Errors, calibration not done, yes we know, but we can’t afford the man hours to fix. But we spent 4 billion on running computer simulations. No surprise to see Eureka as the hot spot in the canadian arctic. Lets see an electronic sensor installed in summer and calibrated in 1990 to a 0-20mA range = 0-40 C? ( midrange 20C) Last winter these same style of sensors in Alaska at -40, we are told please ignore, cause they are not accurate, at and below this range. Possibly the reason we are not measuring/recording any record low temperatures is the equipment. Interesting concept of Null Hypothesis Models, I’ll wait and see. Who is running tests on these models and what proximity to past reality do they accomplish? 55. Gary Pearse says: The distribution of the “significant” trends seems to be sampling the influx of Gulf Stream waters into the arctic. Is there not a comparative data set from the 1930s where anecdotal info, actual temps, newspapers, arctic ship traverses (probably largely from Norway) … gave cause for alarm about the plight of the seals and the melting ice? This would be a reasonable “baseline” for natural variability within a century. Also, I recall the existence of a report (read on WUWT a couple of years ago) by (I believe) a British admiral to the Royal Society in 1817 reporting on the widespread melting of ice and the thought that navigation through the arctic seemed feasible. That it was essentially still within the LIA gives an extreme example of rgbatduke’s idea of the chaotic nature of climatic components coming together at times to give us warmth or cold. In any case, with the known comparatively recent histories of arctic warming, the statistical null models used here seem superfluous. Let’s take it as a given (at least within the context of what is even grossly knowable) that the natural variation can deliver notable freeze-ups and thaw-downs of the arctic in multi century scales and there is no dispute whatsoever that we have had multimillenial massive freeze-ups taking 50million cubic km out of the sea and depositing it as ice on half the NH land masses. How does 100% certainty stack up! 56. K Denison says: rgbatduke said (among MANY great thoughts): “I just don’t think people appreciate how profound our ignorance here really is, how overstated our knowledge of the remote past (or even the relatively recent past) is.” +1 57. rgbatduke says: Interesting coincidence that is roughly the non-glaciated to glaciated ratio. Or, not a coincidence at all, given that current Milankovitch theory involves the coincidence of three distinct harmonic functions, one for eccentricity, one for precession, and one for (if I recall correctly) where perihelion lies relative to the above, facing e.g. northern or southern hemisphere or in between. There are other factors: one bobbing up and down in the solar system ecliptic, maybe more. The problem with that is it has only been the ratio for the last five or six cycles. Over the previous two million years, the period varied from 26K to 40K to the current 100K years, while the length of interglacials remained roughly constant at around 10Ky. That is, there are problems with the Milankovitch theory that make it a plausible set of factors but unlikely to be a complete or sufficient explanation, and that make it absolutely not a predictive explanation. We have correlation, we have plausible causality, we cannot incorporate the two into a convincing predictive model that explains or predicts the end of the Wisconsin glaciation, the beginning of the Holocene, the Younger Dryas return to glaciation, the roaring back into the Holocene warm phase, the Holocene optimum (and why, during that optimum, the proposed positive feedback from humidity didn’t permanently lock the planet back into warm phase if climate sensitivity is as high as has been suggested) and all of the greater and lesser bumps along the way. So as I said, five or six (at least) important factors plus the various orbital factors might do it. Call it a ten dimensional non-separable model. Tough stuff… rgb 58. richardscourtney says: rgbatduke: I agree – indeed, applaud – all you have said in this thread. I now write to comment on part of one of your posts because it mentions me and I wish to clarify my view for others. In your post at December 11, 2012 at 10:47 am you write Sure, in other words there are fluctuations around some mean baseline behavior. But what causes that baseline behavior, and makes the LIA most cooling, or the MWP or Roman warm period mostly warming? Again, we have the problem of being able to reliably identify the baseline behavior as a function of non-CO_2 variables before we can even think about the CO_2 dependence/anomaly, and even after that we have to have a truly reliable carbon model over precisely the same kind of time frame, because there are fluctuations of CO_2 in the past thermal record that appear — to me, to the extent that they are accurately known from proxies — utterly confound the Bern model for the carbon cycle. I know that Richard has done work comparing carbon cycle models, as has Bart (in a less detailed manner) but both of them, I think, have only worked with contemporary data. At a glance, the Bern model fails to describe any of the CO_2 concentration data shown in a recent top post on the subject. In fact I think — without doing all of the actual arithmetic — that the data positively refutes the model, or establishes far more stringent limits on the model parameters than given by their current values. But I rather think the model cannot be salvaged and is refuted. If/when I finish teaching in a few days for a few weeks, I may try to revisit this issue quantitatively, as it is pretty easy to run the numbers with octave/matlab. Note also that the issue is no longer the relatively simple but arguable issue of whether or not CO_2 rises precede or follow temperature rises, it is that the integrated solution to the coupled ODEs look like they cannot possibly describe the gross variations, given the joint distribution of temperature and CO_2 as best we known them by proxy. Your views in the paragraphs which I cite mirror my views so closely that I could have written them myself. I strongly agree that the Bern Model is bunkum. Yes, you are right that our (i.e. Rorsch, Courtney & Thones) work only considered contemporary data. And I would appreciate your informing of the results of the work which you promise to soon conduct: perhaps you could publish for comment on WUWT if that does not harm your citation index? In the unlikely event that you want any assistance from me then please let me know. For the benefit of others, I again copy a summary of my views to here so they know to what you have referred. I do not know the cause of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration, but I want to know. I tend to think it is probably a result of temperature rise from the LIA but it may be entirely a result of the anthropogenic emission. I explain this as follows. The annual anthropogenic emission of CO2 should relate to the annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere if one is causal of the other according to a simple mass balance, but these two parameters do not correlate unless 5-year smoothing is applied to the data. (There are reasons why smoothing of the data of up to 3 years can be justified, but e.g. the Bern model uses 5-year smoothing to obtain agreement between the emissions and the rise because less smoothing fails to obtain it.) Importantly, the dynamics of the system indicate that ALL the anthropogenic emission and the natural can easily be sequestered by the system. At present the yearly increase of the anthropogenic emissions is approximately 0.1 GtC/year. The natural fluctuation of the excess consumption is at least 6 ppmv (which corresponds to 12 GtC) in 4 months. This is more than 100 times the yearly increase of human production, which strongly suggests that the dynamics of the natural sequestration processes can cope easily with the human production of CO2. A serious disruption of the system may be expected when the rate of increase of the anthropogenic emissions becomes larger than the natural variations of CO2, but the data in this paragraph indicates this is not possible. The failure of correlation denies the ‘mass balance’ argument. And, on face value, it seems to deny an anthropogenic cause of the rise, but it does not. An explanation of this is provided by the failure of the sequestration process to sequester all the annual emission both (natural and anthropogenic) when the system dynamics indicate the system could be expected to sequester them all. Clearly, the system of the carbon cycle is constantly seeking an equilibrium which it never achieves . Some processes of the system are very slow with rate constants of years and decades. Hence, the system takes decades to fully adjust to the new equilibrium. And the observed rise is probably that adjustment. Thus, the system not sequestering all the emissions (when its dynamics indicate it can) is an indication of adjustment towards an altered equilibrium. Therefore (a) The temperature rise since the LIA must induce some of the rise and could be the cause of all of it by creation of a new equilibrium state. (b) But the anthropogenic emission could be the cause of such a new equilibrium state and so be responsible for almost all the rise. In either case, the correlations observed by Bart are indicative of the changed rate constants with fluctuating temperatures during adjustment to the new equilibrium state. And the ‘mass balance argument’ is irrelevant because it assumes the system is not changing its state. One of our 2005 papers assessed these possibilities. (ref. Rorsch A, Courtney RS & Thoenes D, ‘The Interaction of Climate Change and the Carbon Dioxide Cycle’ E&E v16no2 (2005)) The paper reports attribution studies we conducted which used three different basic models to emulate the causes of the rise of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in the twentieth century. These numerical exercises are a caution to estimates of future changes to the atmospheric CO2 concentration. The three basic models used in these exercises each emulate different physical processes and each agrees with the observed recent rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration. The models each demonstrate that the observed recent rise of atmospheric CO2 concentration may be solely a consequence of the anthropogenic emission or may be solely a result of, for example, desorption from the oceans induced by the temperature rise that preceded it (applying these two assumptions provided a total of six models from the three basic models). Furthermore, extrapolation using these models gives very different predictions of future atmospheric CO2 concentration whatever the cause of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Each of the models in the paper matches the available empirical data without use of any ‘fiddle-factor’ such as the ‘5-year smoothing’ the IPCC uses to get the Bern model to agree with the empirical data. So, if one of the six models of our paper is adopted then there is a 5:1 probability that the choice is wrong. And other models are probably also possible. And the six models each give a different indication of future atmospheric CO2 concentration for the same future anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide. Data that fits all the possible causes is not evidence for the true cause. Data that only fits the true cause would be evidence of the true cause. But the above findings demonstrate that there is no data that only fits either an anthropogenic or a natural cause of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Hence, the only factual statements that can be made on the true cause of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration are (i) the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration may have an anthropogenic cause, or a natural cause, or some combination of anthropogenic and natural causes, but (ii) there is no evidence that the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration has a mostly anthropogenic cause or a mostly natural cause. Richard 59. Gary Pearse I suspect you are referring to my article carried here called ‘ historic variations in arctic ice part one’ I am currently writing part two covering the arctic melting from 1918 to 1949 It has meant reading several hundred arctic papers, a visit to the Scott polar institute in Cambridge and correspondence with a number of scientists with a special interest in arctic ice. I hope to have it ready some time in January Tonyb 60. knr says: This is easy stuff, [as] AGW is a self evident truth its impossible for any valid research to challenge it . Therefore any that does is not actual valid in the first place so can safely be ignored with its authors smeared has being in the pay of ‘evil fossil fuel companies’ Facts , data , reality, means nothing all that matters is does it support or not ‘the cause’ when your on a mission to save the planet there is no time to waste with such ‘details’ 61. Scarface says: December 11, 2012 at 11:39 am Is it me, or did I just hear the fat lady singing? * She’s been warming up for a while now – if you’ll pardon the expression. :) 62. Here is the likely cause of the warming at the Reykjavic station. Iceland Although peat has traditionally been used as a fuel in Iceland, present-day consumption is reported as zero. http://www.worldenergy.org/documents/peat_country_notes.pdf I’ve experience of peat fires for heat and it is a very smokey fuel. Much more than coal. Although climate science is interpreting this as a volcanic signal. Iceland is a strong localized source of non-eruptive volcanic warming and cooling. Temperature trend maps show that this phenomenon is localized to an area of about twice that of Iceland. With altitude the area remains constant but the phenomenon weakens and changes sign upon passing through the tropopause. The effect’s magnitude implies a large positive feedback, according to a conventional climate forcing estimate. This phenomenon is unique in that it is not observed for the other major volcanic islands. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2004GL021816.shtml Note in the graphic the warming plume downwind from Iceland AND from the UK, which has no volcanism, but does have a similar reduction in aerosol production from domestic coal burning. 63. rgbatduke says: December 11, 2012 at 12:12 pm “That is actually a damn interesting thing to look at” Thanks, I’ve found little interest though. So, while I agree on the site selection you outlined, in fact when I started that was my idea. I felt any conclusions reached would be discounted for cherry picking. And I found even without that kind of filtering, it’s really consistent, and if you looked at the jpg, seasonal variation is very prominent. If you haven’t taken a couple minutes, you should follow the link in my name to my results, and see what it shows around the world. I also have created a google map if the stations in each chart. 64. Deco79 says: Gail Combs says: December 11, 2012 at 1:32 pm People keep saying the Arctic is ‘warming’ so how come the Length of the Arctic Melting Season is getting SHORTER? Hi Gail. A quick experiment…Take a 1kg piece of ice out of the freezer and put it in a room that is say 18C. Then take a smaller piece of ice out and put it in a room slightly warmer than 18C. Time how long it takes for both pieces of ice to melt. That will give you your answer. 65. rgbatduke says: December 11, 2012 at 7:59 am About 20,000 years ago the Earth climate system received a large whack as the glaciation ended. We aren’t sure why although the Milankovich cycles seem to play a part. In any case it does not seem surprising that introducing a large disturbance into a complex inter-related non linear system should result in oscillatory behaviour of at least some observed variables. Attribution of such observations may however be futile. Later you said “So good job, good idea, but don’t bother applying it everywhere as it is pointless where there is humidity and substantial natural variation. Apply the idea only where Nature provides you with a minimally confounded environment, where “only” the non-water vapor driven GHE limits the rate at which desert sands cool at night (or as close as you can manage), controlled for humidity as best you can manage.” You are looking for extremely small changes introduced by changes in concentration of non water vapor GHGs and agree that to measure this is difficult even under the best of a very limited set of conditions, so my question is (apart from scientific curiousity) “why do we care?”. 66. RobertInAz says: Deco79 says: December 11, 2012 at 2:30 pm Hi Gail. A quick experiment…Take a 1kg piece of ice out of the freezer and put it in a room that is say 18C. Then take a smaller piece of ice out and put it in a room slightly warmer than 18C. Time how long it takes for both pieces of ice to melt. That will give you your answer. Where does one start? Oh my. And if the melting stops before the ice is fully melted and more ice starts forming from the water (melted ice) puddled around the as yet unmelted bit of ice, what might one infer about the temperature of the room. 67. Gary Pearse says: climatereason says: December 11, 2012 at 1:05 pm Gary Pearse I suspect you are referring to my article carried here called ‘ historic variations in arctic ice part one’ Hi Tonyb, I am looking forward to seeing your next installment. With all the real information that is available (some of it qualitative but substantive) it seems to me that the reliance on models has become excessive – almost as if one needs a model to do battle with other models. I would say that the models used could be employed wrongly as “evidence” that an Ice Age is impossible and never happened. Probably at the 95% confidence level!! 68. nemo says: “Thanks, Rocky, but I write in latex without even thinking about it, and in latex a subscript is underscore. Technically I should be writing CO_2 — (latex CO_2) replace () with$ signs — but I’m too lazy and without a previewer and edit capability it is too easy to screw up and lose a whole paragraph.”

Heh. FWIW, if you are on Linux, and have bound the compose key to something handy (like the otherwise useless capslock) then COMPOSE, _, 2 will work fine. Like this => CO₂
Ok, admittedly doesn’t work so well for more complex stuff that requires latex/mathml :)
You can also add your own convenience sequences to ~/.XCompose – just make sure the first line is:
include “%L”
to retain the globals.

69. rgbatduke says:

So, while I agree on the site selection you outlined, in fact when I started that was my idea. I felt any conclusions reached would be discounted for cherry picking.
And I found even without that kind of filtering, it’s really consistent, and if you looked at the jpg, seasonal variation is very prominent.
If you haven’t taken a couple minutes, you should follow the link in my name to my results, and see what it shows around the world. I also have created a google map if the stations in each chart.

I have dutifully followed the link and read your article. It does not change my suggestion or conclusions. Additional comments: Plotting the daily rise to max vs daily fall to min as a reflection of daily energy balance is not going to work, because it is not. You might as well just look at daily min to daily min, as long term energy imbalance is revealed by how much the minimum temperature increases (assuming global average temperature relates to global average enthalpy in some control volume, which is not strictly true).

However, the primary problem is that seriously, if you want to directly detect the change in the warming produced by the non-H2O portion of the GHE, you have to control for humidity which pretty much means using data from deserts. You also have to control for absolute temperature, which means that you have to correct for the fourth power dependence on temperature of the radiation rate — it actually cools faster on hotter days. You want to remove heat input altogether, hence do only nighttime radiative loss, not the daytime balance between radiation in and radiation out, which is too complicated. The desert is the closest thing we’ve got to a lunar surface, with atmosphere (but little or no water) overhead, and to the extent that one can further correct for wind driven temperature change (only use evening-to-morning variation on nearly windless nights) one can get quite close.

This isn’t “cherrypicking” — this is sensibly selecting a portion of the Earth’s geography that controls for confounding variable so you can more or less directly observe the Big Kahuna itself, CO_2 + Ozone driven greenhouse heat trapping with absolutely minimal (uncontrollable and highly variable) contributions from water vapor or clouds. Even the albedo is ideal — no vegetation to speak of, so no seasonal variation of albedo or emissivity per location.

If you wanted to do even better (and had actual money to work with) you’d use a black painted tarmac insulated from below with embedded thermometers facing straight up in a windless or nearly windless valley. Measure as perfectly as possible the pure blackbody cooling of a purely radiant emissive surface. A few decades of measurements and you’re golden.

rgb

70. JJ says:

Deco79 says:

Hi Gail. A quick experiment…Take a 1kg piece of ice out of the freezer and put it in a room that is say 18C. Then take a smaller piece of ice out and put it in a room slightly warmer than 18C. Time how long it takes for both pieces of ice to melt. That will give you your answer.

Uh … no.

The experiment you describe does not replicate the arctic ice melt season, nor does it measure an analagous timeframe.

Another failure of warmist cognition. Pardon the contradiction in terms.

71. Gail Combs says:

Deco79 says:
December 11, 2012 at 2:30 pm

Gail Combs says:

December 11, 2012 at 1:32 pm

People keep saying the Arctic is ‘warming’ so how come the Length of the Arctic Melting Season is getting SHORTER?

Hi Gail. A quick experiment…Take a 1kg piece of ice out of the freezer and put it in a room that is say 18C. Then take a smaller piece of ice out and put it in a room slightly warmer than 18C. Time how long it takes for both pieces of ice to melt. That will give you your answer.
________________________________
OH, so you are saying the ENTIRE Arctic is now Ice FREE in the summers so that is why the melt season is shorter?

72. Billy Liar says:

That lone red dot on South West Iceland is bang on the mid-Atlantic ridge where there is plenty of very hot water on or not far below the surface.

http://www.randburg.com/is/or/

It is also home to the ISAL aluminum smelter which uses close to 3,000 gigawatt hours of electricity per year, or 17% of the electricity used in Iceland. The Company’s output of aluminium is approximately 190,000 tonnes annually.

http://www.riotintoalcan.com/documents/ISAL_Sustainable_Development_Report_2011.pdf

73. RACookPE1978 says:

Deco79 says:
December 11, 2012 at 2:30 pm (responding to)

Gail Combs says:

December 11, 2012 at 1:32 pm

People keep saying the Arctic is ‘warming’ so how come the Length of the Arctic Melting Season is getting SHORTER?

Hi Gail. A quick experiment…Take a 1kg piece of ice out of the freezer and put it in a room that is say 18C. Then take a smaller piece of ice out and put it in a room slightly warmer than 18C. Time how long it takes for both pieces of ice to melt. That will give you your answer.

Hmmmn.

But Gail, the DMI daily measured temperatures at latitude 80 north – where the ice actually is at the time of minimum sea extents in mid September each year – shows that “the Arctic” is not getting hotter.

Since 1958, the DMI reports measured arctic air temperature through the summer ice melt season – up where the ice actually is, not down in the mid-tundra 1200 km further south near mid-Canada’s “red spot” – is not only steady (within 1/10 of one degree, but recent arctic summer temperatures have been getting colder!

And, just to confuse Deco79’s day even further, each square kilometer of sea ice that melts below the long-term sea ice minimum of 7 million km^2 seems to increase the cooling of Arctic waters even more!

(Now, recent all-time record high Antarctic sea ice DO reflect more energy from the sun, and DO add to the global cooling in the southern hemisphere. So he can’t claim he’s all wrong.)

74. Keith G says:

It is good to see that someone is considering the consequences of a broader class of statistical models to test whether or not (relative to each class of model) there has been a statistically significant secular trend in temperature. To re-iterate a statement made in the paper, models that exhibit long-range dependence (LRD) can spontaneously give rise to apparent trends lasting on decadal timescales – even when the underlying statistical process has (by construction) no secular trend. And since historical surface temperature data (whether this be a global average or more local measure) does exhibit LRD, we are forced to conclude that, based on a detailed examination of the statistics of those time series alone and given their relative brevity, it is not practicable currently to distinguish a secular trend in the temperature record from endogenous noise for those statistical models that do exhibit LRD. [N.B. Yes, of course, the temperature record shows an increase over the last 50 years or so. That isn’t in dispute. But also that isn’t the issue.]

75. RACookPE1978 says:

feet2thefire says:
December 11, 2012 at 11:27 am

My first comment was going to be this:

If 1 out of 109 canaries dies in a mine – who the hell empties out the men from the mine based on that?

Not all what the CAGW theists want to do in that coal mine.

They want to shut down the coal mine, throw all of the workers and their families out in the dark to starve to death from the cold and wet because that first canary MIGHT die in the coal mine … sometime in the next four years!

76. MattS says:

@RACookPE1978

“They want to shut down the coal mine, throw all of the workers and their families out in the dark to starve to death from the cold and wet because that first canary MIGHT die in the coal mine … sometime in the next four years!”

Of old age.

77. David A. Evans says:

December 11, 2012 at 8:26 am

Explaining jokes is bad form and wasted on both those who got it and those who didn’t.

DaveE.

78. David A. Evans says:

rgbatduke says:
December 11, 2012 at 12:12 pm

Strange you should mention the middle of Death Valley.

The station of record used to be pretty much there at Furnace Creek until they moved it to the edge of the valley at Badwater

DaveE.

79. taxed says:

l think one of the big drivers of climate change is the jet stream and the effects it can have on the gulf stream. lf there is a link between the two, then that would help to put in place the rapid climate change that’s been seen in the past. Because any change in the jet stream that lasts for a number of years will also effect the wind patterns on the earth’s surface, which in turn will have its effect on the gulf stream.
Now if these two did change together within a fairly short space of time, then that would have a big impact on the climate.

80. Michael Schaefer says:

All I can see when watching Antonys glorious Sea Ice Page is that in exactly the same area as the 17 stations reporting “some warming” are situated, there’s a MASSIVE upwell of warm water to be seen in the surface temp pics, the surface water-anomaly there being up to plus 8 degrees centigrade warmer-than-normal.

But where’s a warm sea, there’s warm air, I would suppose, according to Willis Eschenbach’s most-entertaining lectures on oceanic heat content and sea-atmosphere-interaction.

So perhaps, scientists should stop asking themselves why the air is warmer-than-normal in the Arctic Ocean in these areas, but rather, why the sea is…?

81. Espen says:

That single warming station wouldn’t be the busy Keflavik International Airport, would it?

82. Paul Vaughan says:

@rgbatduke

This is quite important:

Are you familiar with the writings of Tomas Milanovic at Climate Etc.?

If not, you’ll find essential guidance in comments here:
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/delve-into-halcrut-at-the-poles/

Koutsoyiannis (2011) wrote: “However, while those laws give elegant solutions (e.g., analytical descriptions of trajectories) for simple systems comprising two bodies and their interaction, they can hardly describe the irregular trajectories of complex systems. Complex natural systems consisting of very many elements are impossible to describe in full detail and their future evolution cannot be predicted in detail and with precision. Here, the great scientiﬁc achievement is the materialization of macroscopic descriptions rather than modeling the details. This is essentially done using probability theory (laws of large numbers, central limit theorem, principle of maximum entropy). Here lies the essence and usefulness of the stationarity concept, which seeks invariant properties in complex systems.” (bold emphasis added) http://www.landandwaterusa.com/issues_water/2011_water/6-3JAWRA_HKDynamics.pdf

Be SURE to understand Milanovic. The aggregate constraints are on spatiotemporal chaos (not solely-temporal chaos). The equations are PDEs (not ODEs). Coupling varies in time.

Dealbreaker:
Koutsoyiannis’ approach unnecessarily severely limits achievable insight by being aspatial & temporally-global.

“The decadal ‘‘noise’’ involves coupled variations in the distributions of temperature, mass, and velocity (21, 22) and so is manifested in the steric sea level, moments of inertia, and the Earth’s variable rotation.” (bold emphasis added) http://www.pnas.org/content/99/10/6550.full.pdf (Munk 2002 20th century sea level enigma)

Note: “(21, 22)” refers to the work of Jean Dickey of NASA JPL. (In North America the highest concentration of people with enhanced awareness of aggregate constraints seems to be at NASA JPL.)

Wyatt, Kravtsov, & Tsonis (2011) summarize decadal-timescale northern hemisphere winter coupling in Figure 4:

Compare with: http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/gl1218/2012GL052885/2012gl052885-op01.jpg

Caution: The steep gradients of the southern ocean are relatively free of longitudinal deflectors. Bill Illis provides this highly informative illustration:

(circulatory morphology reconfiguration)

For related insight, study Figure 10 here:
Carvalho, L.M.V.; Tsonis, A.A.; Jones, C.; Rocha, H.R.; & Polito, P.S. (2007). Anti-persistence in the global temperature anomaly field. Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics 14, 723-733.
http://www.icess.ucsb.edu/gem/papers/npg-14-723-2007.pdf

“Apart from all other reasons, the parameters of the geoid depend on the distribution of water over the planetary surface.” — Nikolay Sidorenkov

83. Kelvin Vaughan says:

Gail Combs says:

December 11, 2012 at 1:32 pm

People keep saying the Arctic is ‘warming’ so how come the Length of the Arctic Melting Season is getting SHORTER?

It’s warming up but only in the warm period Gail. The warm period is getting shorter and hotter.

Excuse me a moment I have a steering wheel down my trousers that is driving me nuts!

84. Ryan says:

Just to confirm what rgb has been saying, I have the monthly figures for Ross-on-Wye, UK in front of me. The hottest month ever recorded in Ross-on-Wye was July 2006 at an average of 26.8Celsius. This compares to July 2005 at 22.2Celsius and July 2007 at 19.6Celsius. So was that exceptionally warm July 2006 caused by CO2? Well the sunshine hours for July 2007 were 309.6hours (compared with 224hrs and 206hrs for the years either side). It was, in fact, the sunniest month on record for Ross-on-Wye.

Well perhaps this is a trend and Britain is going to get warmer and sunnier! I wish! Sadly 2010 gave Ross-on-Wye one of the cloudiest Julys on record with a meagre 149hrs and an average temperature of 22Celsius.

Basically any attempt to look for the CO2 signal when cloud is present will just confound your measurements. The noise signal caused by cloud even when averaged out over a month is massive. We are talking about 100% variation in monthly cloud averages over a two year time span. If you wanted to really find the CO2 signal you need to remove the sources of noise from your data. Create a computer algorithm that can look for days in the record that are cloud free and have low winds – for the UK this would usually mean looking for days in the middle of a nice long summer high pressure system. Once you have found those days, take a look at the minimum temperatures because that tells you how cold it got at night when CO2 was allegedly providing all that extra insulation to prevent the heat escaping. Now look for days in the record which meet the same criteria at the same time of year and join the dots. If you’ve got a trend and not too much noise remaining it might be CO2 (or then again it could be UHI).

What Team-AGW are doing now is averaging everything so it looks like they have a trend. That’s just low-pass filtering. It’s like me low-pass filtering a signal on an antenna and expecting that just by this simple process I will be able to pick up BBC Radio 4. They’ve got something that looks like it might be a trend but a trend of what? It could be a trend in cloudiness or wind direction or airport business or volcano activity on Iceland or anything – they have no idea because the measurements they have used are in no way related to the theory they are trying to test.

85. richardscourtney says:

Ryan:

I agree all you say at December 12, 2012 at 7:54 am.

However, if all of that is needed to discern an effect of increased atmospheric CO2 effect then the effect is so trivial that it can be ignored as a ‘driver’ of climate.

Richard

86. Gail Combs says:

Kelvin Vaughan says:
December 12, 2012 at 7:18 am

Gail Combs says:

December 11, 2012 at 1:32 pm

People keep saying the Arctic is ‘warming’ so how come the Length of the Arctic Melting Season is getting SHORTER?

It’s warming up but only in the warm period Gail. The warm period is getting shorter and hotter.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
So that means we are in deep Kimshee when the NAO goes from warm back to cold now doesn’t it? Ice melts because of the warm sea not the warm air. (Seas control the atmospheric temp not the other way round)

OOPS! looks like it has already flipped.

…The negative phase reflects an opposite pattern of height and pressure anomalies over these regions. Both phases of the NAO are associated with basin-wide changes in the intensity and location of the North Atlantic jet stream and storm track, and in large-scale modulations of the normal patterns of zonal and meridional heat and moisture transport (Hurrell 1995), which in turn results in changes in temperature and precipitation patterns often extending from eastern North America to western and central Europe (Walker and Bliss 1932, van Loon and Rogers 1978, Rogers and van Loon 1979)….

…Strong positive phases of the NAO tend to be associated with above-averagel temperatures in the eastern United States and across northern Europe and below-average temperatures in Greenland and oftentimes across southern Europe and the Middle East. They are also associated with above-average precipitation over northern Europe and Scandinavia in winter, and below-average precipitation over southern and central Europe. Opposite patterns of temperature and precipitation anomalies are typically observed during strong negative phases of the NAO. During particularly prolonged periods dominated by one particular phase of the NAO, anomalous height and temperature patterns are also often seen extending well into central Russia and north-central Siberia.

The NAO exhibits considerable interseasonal and interannual variability, and prolonged periods (several months) of both positive and negative phases of the pattern are common. The wintertime NAO also exhibits significant multi-decadal variability (Hurrell 1995, Chelliah and Bell 2005). For example, the negative phase of the NAO dominated the circulation from the mid-1950’s through the 1978/79 winter. During this approximately 24-year interval, there were four prominent periods of at least three years each in which the negative phase was dominant and the positive phase was notably absent. In fact, during the entire period the positive phase was observed in the seasonal mean only three times, and it never appeared in two consecutive years.

An abrupt transition to recurring positive phases of the NAO then occurred during the 1979/80 winter, with the atmosphere remaining locked into this mode through the 1994/95 winter season. During this 15-year interval, a substantial negative phase of the pattern appeared only twice, in the winters of 1984/85 and 1985/ 86. However, November 1995 – February 1996 (NDJF 95/96) was characterized by a return to the strong negative phase of the NAO. Halpert and Bell (1997; their section 3.3) recently documented the conditions accompanying this transition to the negative phase of the NAO.

NAO graph

87. richardscourtney says:
December 12, 2012 at 8:47 am

Ryan:

I agree all you say at December 12, 2012 at 7:54 am.

However, if all of that is needed to discern an effect of increased atmospheric CO2 effect then the effect is so trivial that it can be ignored as a ‘driver’ of climate.

Richard

Richard,
And that’s basically what I’ve found. Consider the global average daily falling temp is ~18F, and we know there are place on the planet that are 2-3 times that? That says the temps are controlled by water, and water vapor, because when we exclude it the swing is many times larger.
If with little water vapor you can see a +60F drop in temps, with all of that co2, does it even matter if co2 is a fraction of a degree, and water limits it to under 20 degrees drop?

88. David Cage says:

They are caused by complicated and inexplicable feedbacks and the pop up hot spots that show up on NASA plots have nothing to do with creating higher temperatures. Some times I wonder if climate scientists have even IQs of remotely near 50 let alone over 100.
Don’t they even look at files like AMSRE_SSTAn_M and wonder how a tiny average rise can cause such significant temperature rises with all the claptrap about complex feedbacks etc.
Funny also why the end without the hot spots doesn’t get hot. Unless of course they do not learn basic thermodynamics.
Why also did they need to get the BBC to brainwash the public is the science was so sound and worse still to get it to claim to be a private company to avoid FOI requests when that strategy has the risk that it could end their licence funding. There has to be very big levers to get them to go down that route.

89. Kelvin Vaughan says:

Gail Combs says:

December 12, 2012 at 8:56 am

Flipping heck not more cold. I’m freezing, it’s been frosty all day!

90. Laurence Crossen says:

From Wikipedia:
Polar amplification is the greater temperature increases in the Arctic compared to the earth as a whole as a result of the effect of feedbacks and other processes…
This definition is incorrect. The only cause of polar amplification is heat transport. Ask the meteorologists. Polar amplification is the greater change in temperature at both poles than the change in the tropics of the mean annual temperature. For every one degree change in the tropics the temperature at the poles changes about three to five degrees.

91. Ryan says:
December 12, 2012 at 7:54 am

Basically any attempt to look for the CO2 signal when cloud is present will just confound your measurements. The noise signal caused by cloud even when averaged out over a month is massive. We are talking about 100% variation in monthly cloud averages over a two year time span. If you wanted to really find the CO2 signal you need to remove the sources of noise from your data. …. Once you have found those days, take a look at the minimum temperatures because that tells you how cold it got at night when CO2 was allegedly providing all that extra insulation to prevent the heat escaping.

Under the conditions you describe, the minimum temperature will occur after dawn, at the point downward solar radiation exceeds upward LWR. This makes the minimum temperature particularly sensitive to clouds, especially low level clouds, because of the long path through the atmosphere of solar radiation at this time.

Even a small amount of early morning cloud will produce a larger effect than the one you are looking for.

92. I see north “polar amplification” due to rgional high surface albedo feedback.

But what is being amplified? Have a look at:

There is a visible periodic component with a period around 62 years. (It
can easily be unsteady in amplitude and period.) It accounts for about
.21 degree C of the warming from 1973 to 2004.
Much of this appears to me to be Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation – a
north/south shifting of heat in the Atlantic Ocean. When AMO is in its
north-warming phase, the high positive feedback in and near the Arctic
causes much of the Arctic to warm disproportionally more. When AMO is
in its north-cooling phase, much of the Arctic cools disproportionately.

Because the positive feedback is greater in the northern hemisphere
than in the southern hemisphere, shifting heat northward warms the world,
and shifting heat southward cools the world.

93. Kelvin Vaughan says:

I have noticed that there is a correlation between the temperature above 80°N and the Arctic ice area. Whenever the ice are slows down or shrinks back a bit the temperature has risen and when it is growing fast the temperature has fallen.

It probably is pulses of warm ocean flowing into the Arctic Ocean. That’s my theory anyway!

94. Ryan says:

Under the conditions you describe, the minimum temperature will occur after dawn, at the point downward solar radiation exceeds upward LWR.

I think you will find that minimum temps always occur significantly before dawn. This is because lightening of the night sky occurs long before the sun breaks the horizon, due to scattering. If you look at a thermometer just before dawn you will see the temperature rise long before the sun appears over the horizon and more or less at the same rate as the sky lightens.

If you have three hot cloudless daytimes in a row in the summer then i think normally you will find the middle day of those three will have a nightime that is cloudless too – so the minimum temp measured at that time will usually give you the temperature that the air managed to drop to before any scattered weak sunlight manages to light the sky. It is not perfect, but taking only these measurements would significantly reduce the impact of cloud and wind as noise sources in detecting a CO2 related signal. Otherwise as my Ross-on-Wye data shows a cloudy summer month or a cloudless summer month can shift the annual average by as much as 0.5Celsius quite easily, and then you have the wind to consider.

95. The logging I’ve done has the temp still really close to min even a little past sunrise, but it was on the west side of the house.
But the key is that the ground was still warmer than the air temp, today for instance was in the low 20’s F, the grass and everything off the ground was covered with frost, but the ground wasn’t. The air trapped between the blades of grass insulate the ground from the cooling of space. I would bet that when measured over a large grass field vs an open field of dirt, the air will be a few tens colder over the grass.

96. Jim G says:

feet2thefire says:
December 11, 2012 at 10:18 am
“I disagree – in the long term – about the cause and effects being unknown and possibly unknowable. NOW we can’t know them, but have some faith in present and future scientists. We are only 30-35 years or so into the age of computers (counting not from the glacial-speed Eniac but the explosion of Apples and PCs) and about the same for modeling. Even though we do disdain models – in their current state – it is only by models that we will ever be able to know/understand the baselines and the system as a whole. Just because there is garbage now going in, crap understanding of the pieces of the puzzle, and inadequate code/math doesn’t mean someone won’t straighten out the mess some day.

Steve Garcia”

Due to the degradation of our educational system, present scientists include some very poorly educated souls who have the time and money to go to college but not the mental capacity and are able to obtain virtually any type of degree in any event. Don’t see that changing for the better in the future, only getting worse. See the movie, “idiocracy”.

97. Laurence Crossen says:

@Anthony Watts:
“Polar amplification is the greater temperature increases in the Arctic compared to the earth as a whole as a result of the effect of feedbacks and other processes…”

~Any warming of the earth, regardless of its cause or the location of its source, would reduce polar amplification. The warmer the earth, the less the gradient of temperatures between poles and equator. Then for each increment of warming there would be less polar amplification. Recognition of this fact would be detrimental to the AGW cause. Any warming at the poles is distributed very efficiently around the earth at the prevailing gradient so it would only add negligibly to AGW.
~As Steve Goddard points out, Venus is very warm and has very little wind or weather as it has virtually no temperature gradient between the poles and the equator. Jupiter is very cold and has a very large gradient resulting in 400 mile per hour winds. For every degree of warming on Jupiter at the equator there is much more than five degrees warming at the poles. Properly speaking, that is what “polar amplification” is. (Please see my two other comments above).

98. I was out in the car ~2:30, we’ve had clear sky’s since yesterday morning, Car’s thermometer read 42-44, and yet the south side of ditches and embankments still had frost on it from last night. So much for co2 LWR warming, even during the day there isn’t enough warming to melt frost.

Lastly I had google maps of station locations (North of 66.5Lat (4 pages worth) http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=218403362436074259636.0004b8b6c923547d1e5ed&msa=0&ll=67.4585,169.9005&spn=97.813044,36.5625), notice all of the stations are near water, waters from the gulf stream is going to be a lot warmer than if the air temp was measured out in the middle of the ice sheet.