Photo Credit: NC State
From the New York Times:
West Antarctica has warmed much more than scientists had thought over the last half century, new research suggests, an ominous finding given that the huge ice sheet there may be vulnerable to long-term collapse, with potentially drastic effects on sea levels.
A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth.
āThe surprises keep coming,ā said Andrew J. Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who took part in the study. āWhen you see this type of warming, I think itās alarming.ā
…
To try to get to the bottom of the question, David H. Bromwich of Ohio State University pulled together a team that focused on a single temperature record. At a lonely outpost called Byrd Station, in central West Antarctica, people and automated equipment have been keeping track of temperature and other weather variables since the late 1950s.
It is by far the longest weather record in that region, but it had intermittent gaps and other problems that had made many researchers wary of it. The Bromwich group decided to try to salvage the Byrd record.
They retrieved one of the sensors and recalibrated at the University of Wisconsin. They discovered a software error that had introduced mistakes into the record and then used computerized analyses of the atmosphere to fill the gaps.
…
Much of the warming discovered in the new paper happened in the 1980s, around the same time the planet was beginning to warm briskly.
They can’t find any recent warming, so they took a broken sensor with “intermittent gaps and other problems”, “recalibrated” it, “used computerized analyses of the atmosphere to fill the gaps” and “discovered” warming that “happened in the 1980s”. If you believe that this is science, then I strongly suggest you prep your telescope, lest you miss out on a spectacular sleigh sighting…
Of course they have to prep the IPCC report with junk peer review papers like this to conform to the meme.
This is just sickening and outrageous.
Unbelievable.
These people got paid for this.
Help me to understand this. One reporting station with one sensor, later discovered to have become defective, whose record is intermittent over the period of the study? Wow!
I read this article on the BBC site ( obviously they were lightning quick to put it online ) and actually laughed out loud reading it….
jeff 5778 says:
December 24, 2012 at 9:15 am
Unbelievable.
These people got paid for this.
Correction. We pay through the nose for people to do this.
I already have a partial recreation of their paper. The AWS data was significantly changed for byrd – I can’t find much detail on that but the corrections are large. The main trend is basically a combination of the manned station and the aws station data.
I will post something soon on this.
The highest temperature reported in the entire reconstruction was -9.7 Celcius.
This is an encouraging sign. The barrel is truly empty of anything but hot air.
There you again using facts to dispel fantasy. The only thing warming these days is the disperation of the grant seekers to keep the game going.
Isn’t the west Antarctic a bit volcanic? Getting warmer? Well, d’uh……
Isn’t the west Antarctic volcanic? Getting warmer? Well, d’uh….
Actually, it should read
“Scientists Pull Faster One on Warming in Anarctica”
Good grief! The average temperature of Antarctica is over -50 degrees. If there is anything melting in Antarctica it’s the ice shelf over the ocean, but it’s only a small portion of the continent. Photo showing the Antarctic continent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antarctica_ice_shelves.gif
I’ve heard that dogma in science changes one death at a time. Unfortunately, many of these people are still quite young!
Nice feedback loop there. We have gaps in the record, so we use our model to fill the gaps. This gives new input to the model to drive it warmer, which is then used to re-calibrate the sensor. Again we run our model to fill the gaps with the newly recalibrated data. Gosh, it got warmer. Recalibrate again. Anybody see a problem? Nah, completely objective. That is, I completely object to this charade being called science. When I grew up, doing this as a high school science project would have gotten you a big fat “F”.
Was there anything in the āMayan Calendarā about this? – Because that one needs re-calibrating too!
Don’t I remember a WUWT post showing that West Antarctica should actually be considered a distinct continent from Antarctica? That plus the sham science in this case (and in a plethora of other cases) leaves me wondering about the scientific acumen of those supporting CAWG…
Just wondering…
Not to mention that the sensor is in the built up area of Antarctica. How much of this is due to the “urbanization” of an otherwise uninhabitable continent?
“Much of the warming discovered in the new paper happened in the 1980s”
=====
The problem with warming the past is that it tends to make the present cooler in contrast. Even Hansen knows you have to adjust past temperatures downward to preserve any semblance of a hockey stick. If current temperatures in Western Antarctic stay flat or cool, watch them revisit the temperature record and adjust past temperatures again to remove the downward trend from the 1980s. They got grant money to adjust past temperatures upward, and they’ll get more grant money to adjust them downward again. What a sweet shell game they’ve created for job security!
Just the beginning of the rush to produce IPCC correct papers to save the AR5.
Reviewers are done , now the team gets to work.
Definition of insanity ?
Team response, If we just communicate the cause properly, this time it will work.
Or in a hat tip to WUWT commenters, Let the policy based evidence manufacturing begin.
I read the BBC article on it (link below). They in turn linked to Nature Geoscience but I couldn’t see the paper on the link page. So it’s difficult to make out just how they pulled this off. I would be interested to know because if the temperature rise has doubled and is therefore 2.2 degrees F greater than they thought then it must mean that they pushed the starting temp (1957) down by 2.2 degrees. They can’t add 2.2 degrees to current readings (can they?) if they are accurately taken. Their models might show interesting and yes, dubious patterns in between but to get that rise of 4.4 degrees they have to have pushed the 1957 temp down by 2.2 degrees and confidently stated as fact that the temps back then were indeed that much lower. Either that or they would have to give the record a sharp dip down at a later year in order to start the 4.4 degree rise from that point. I can’t see how that can be achieved with any certainty at all.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20804192
@sean71 says:
>>This is an encouraging sign. The barrel is truly empty of anything but hot air.<<
Agreed. They are grasping at straws.
I look forward to some remarks from someone who has read this paper.
So is the Antarctic peninsula still north of the Antarctic circle, where the sun always rises every day; and did all those volcanoes disappear ?
The biggest news evidently is that West Antarctica is not Antarctica, but simply a floating ice shelf !
I learn something new every day. I thought I once read that Greenland was just a group of islands, surrounding a big block of ice, so it couldn’t go anywhere; but maybe not ?
In any case, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans both go sloshing back and forth twice a day under the Antarctic Peninsular ice shelves; and apparently now; according to the NYT report, go sloshing under West Antarctica as well.
Does somebody have a geological map of Antarctica; the land piece that is sans all those floating ice shelves.
Maybe they should ban cruise ships, and ice breakers (kayaks too) from going down there and breaking up those floating ice shelves. Seems like plain vandalism to me.
In any case, I’m not going to worry, since this new robust paper says suggests , may, potentially; and the scientists can’t distinguish between that, and doesn’t suggest, may not, and potentially not. Wake me when they decide yea or nae.
Lemme guess, this Byrd Station thermometer; its hanging up on a rare misshapen Charlie Brown like Russian Christmas tree; izzat about it ??, and they don’t have wifi so Micro$oft hasn’t been fixing all the bugs in their windows, since 1958 !
Merry Christmas to all. Keep rocking world in the year.
A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958.
Are there scientists who actually use the Fahrenheit scale in their work? I thought they all used either the Celsius scale or the Kelvin one, which is just a version of the Celsius scale starting at absolute zero.
Looks like they timed the release of this one for AR5… with little time to react or have a chance to publish a refutation. Typical.
Anthony
It would be useful to post a link to real climate which carries a graph from the paper. It shows modest warming through the 90’s but then a cooling from around 1998.
Unfortunately it doesn’t show a reconstruction from the 1930’s which seemed to have some serious warming
Tonyb
Sounds like another Sighting Field Trip for Anthony š
I wonder if they built a Structure around it (near by) and heated it so that the Scientists at the station can moniter the temp in comfort
The horrors of winter in Europe 19fourties:
http://www.google.co.za/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=winter42.wpl&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fxa.yimg.com%2Fkq%2Fgroups%2F21524100%2F12735163%2Fname%2Fwinter42.wpl&ei=zpnYULnHFoGV0QWiqYDIDg&usg=AFQjCNHrFgVwHqxPBwLeTxbtc-3hGjHq_g&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.d2k
it will come back again:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
1941 -1942 + 88 = 2029-2030
An unverified computer model is “worthless”. Over half of the newly minted PhD get their degree based on “working, but unverified computer models”.
/sarc following, truth above
Let us use an unverified computer model to adjust the unverified broken sensors to prove an unverifiable theory!
Life is Good — Eat, Drink be Merry — “What me worry?!?!”
“If you believe that this is science, then I strongly suggest you prep your telescope, lest you miss out on a spectacular sleigh sightingā¦”
the level of discussion here is detoriating…
j ferguson says:
“Help me to understand this. One reporting station with one sensor, later discovered to have become defective, whose record is intermittent over the period of the study? Wow!”
Yes, but The world renowned Eric Steig says that the results are better than the results in his paper (so he finally admits that there are problems with his paper?) and he notes that the results in this paper “…matches a recent temperature reconstruction from a nearby borehole in the ice sheet, adding confidence in the findings.”
I’m not sure how he can conclude this. The borehole record shows 1.5 degrees C (2.7 F) rise, all of which occurs since 2000; the new paper says 4.4 degrees F rise with most occurring in the 1980s. These two models don’t seem to agree well at all. Guess you have to be a “climate scientist(TM)” to see that agreement.
Sounds like Rube Goldberg science to me.
I forwarded this to some mainline stats and physics colleagues at OSU. Maybe they ask some questions.
-20 degrees, +4.4 degrees = -15.6 degrees. Still to cold to have any ice melt. Then they run it through a computer model. Sheesh, this counts as science now?
This is nice to know, I guess but tell me something that has real importance or stop bothering me with fluff. It is obvious none of these people have a clue about what the difference between -40 C and -38 C is? It is simply my exposed skin freezes quicker at – 40 and I was never dumb enough to time the difference or stick my tongue on the metal porch railing either. It is glibness like this and the over misuse of perfectly valid adverbs that destroy what ever meaning they have in the language.
Eyeballing the Bromwich graph at Real Climate It looks like the warming trend rolled over sometime 2001- 3 in line with the Global SST data – see my blog Global cooling – Climate and Weather Forecasting at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
Of course the ignoring of this really significant part of this paper and the trumpeting of the 1980 warming as a sign of coming disaster by such Alarmist propagandists as the BBC, Time and the MSM in general was only to be expected.
Are you sure these scientists aren’t simply employing sarcasm? I mean, who would take this seriously? They could be the Jonathan Swifts of Climate Science. We use sarcasm a lot in these comments. This looks like they’re out there tweaking the noses of AGW climate scientists. That kind of humor can be very effective.
They know they will get away with it. Winston Smith science; the end of objective reality. Stakes are high and decisions urgent. This is about billions of dollars. The LazyTeenagers of this world are hungry; they need jobs in the crookademia.
4.4degF = 2.4degC. But I guess 4.4 is a bigger number and therefore sounds scarier. Interesting that even with all the fiddling of numbers they can still only claim that the temperatures rose in the 80s, at least 22 years ago. What’s happened since? I wonder if nothing in particular, but best not to mention that because it detracts from the scary message.
The idiocy and purposeful mendacity of the scientists is surpassed only by the wallowing naivety of the New York Times.
The disturbing combination of no authenticity and blind acceptance produces ignorance on a grand scale.
The real temperature history picture:
For 460 locations aiming to represent the high-latitude Southern Hemisphere from 60 degrees to 90 degrees latitude:
http://s8.postimage.org/70mmip0vp/Chapman_Walsh2007.gif
Chapman, W.L. and Walsh, J.E. 2007. A synthesis of Antarctic temperatures. Journal of Climate 20: 4096-4117.
Even the above, though, effectively understated the cooling over the last couple decades of the 20th century within inland Antarctica (compared to such as Comisco 2000* finding substantial cooling there over 1979 to 1998), because the inland ice sheet is not the same as the whole high-latitude Southern Hemisphere zone that includes surrounding oceans.
* http://http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442%282000%29013%3C1674%3AVATIAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2
Antarctic temperature trends were somewhat the opposite of the bulk of the rest of the world, and there is a reason for that.
During the global cooling scare period of the 1960s-1970s, when there was major cooling in most of the world with weak solar cycle 20 (as in the Northern Hemisphere average in the data of the time like http://tinyurl.com/cxo4d3l ), the Antarctic warmed. During the global warming scare period of high-activity solar cycles 21 and 22 (1976 to 1996), when the bulk of the rest of the world warmed (before having global temperatures be flat to declining since the 1998 El Nino through now), the Antarctic cooled.
Why can the ice-covered part of Antarctica have a temperature trend the opposite of even ocean waters a relatively short distance away as seen, for example, in http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/6000/6502/antarctic_temps.AVH1982-2004.jpg ? Why did the Antarctic Peninsula, where a narrow strip of land is without a wide ice expanse and is nearby dark blue ocean water, warm even while the white ice sheet inland cooled?
The answer is in http://s10.postimage.org/l9gokvp09/composite.jpg particularly the bottom right (click to enlarge), http://s13.postimage.org/ka0rmuwgn/gcrclouds.gif ,
and http://www.space.dtu.dk/upload/institutter/space/forskning/05_afdelinger/sun-climate/full_text_publications/svensmark_2007cosmoclimatology.pdf
Global temperatures rose on the whole since the Little Ice Age, corresponding to the rise in solar activity (where, since shorter solar cycles are more intense than longer ones, an illustration, using historical data harder to fudge than most metrics, is how average solar cycle length over 1901 to 1996 was 10.5 years compared to the slower weaker cycles averaging 11.5 years each over the prior century from 1798 to 1901 ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_NUMBERS/docs/maxmin.new ). However, pure Antarctic ice/snow is the prime special place on Earth where the surface is whiter than clouds, making decline in average cloud cover have the opposite temperature effect it does in most places, making Antarctic temperature trends diverge from the surrounding oceans and world for as long as decades at a time.
Propagandists spread false claims like spam, particularly against the truths of greatest threat to their cause (like what would be seen if someone read all the preceding plus looked at all the graphs linked), but reality is quite internally consistent in non-fudged, non-revisionist data once one understands the top factors involved.
This was discredited well over a year ago. This is the gift that keeps on giving. š
You guys know there are volcanoes under the West Antarctic, right?
Antarctica Volcanoes
http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Antarctica/description_antarctica_volcanoes.html
The modern Magi brings gold, frankincense, and mirth.
It’s the middle of summer down here in Australia and so ’tis time for Climate Fear… except this year the rivers are full, it’s been a cool spring and summer and all the state capitals have had rain recently…so with no bushfires raging and no dry riverbeds to point to the Warmists have got their knickers in an awful tiwst.
What can they do to illustrate how right they’ve been with their predictions?
Errrm.
Antarctica!
It’s far enough away and there’s a lot of scary ice there…(more ice in fact that there was last christmas!)
It’s only a matter of time before the Australian people turn on these idiots.
Maybe the reason that the thermometer is reading more than they thought it would is because it’s now in Colorado…:-)…..Merry Christmas.
Antarctica is roughly the size of North America. Concluding that West Antarctica is warming by using one station, Byrd Station (possibly with a broken sensor), is like using SFO to conclude that Western North America is warming. How does cr@p like this get published?
EDIT: Although the rest should all work already, the second link in my prior comment had a typo; removing the extra duplicate http : // makes it work.
This is an amazing bit of stupidity from the warmista. We’ve already been through all of this with the O’Donnell/Steig dust up. The Byrd temp data is a conflation of different thermometers, different places, horribly incomplete data, (only summer temps in the most recent part of the record) and the temps never get above freezing. THERE IS NO MELT IN THE BYRD AREA!!! None, nade, zippo, zilch.
For a refresher of the inanity about trying to derive a temp from Byrd, much less having that one spot be representative of an rather large part of a continent, go here. http://climateaudit.org/2011/02/07/eric-steigs-trick/
Brings back good memories. Good times to be had by all, again! š For those interested, I put up a bit of my perspective here. http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/early-christmas-gift-from-the-warmista-blast-from-the-past-wais-again/
Cheers and Merry Christmas to all!
Mann’s going to sue them for stealing his “trick”.
Saw the article in “Science” daily News the other day: (www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/121223152408.htm)
What a load or rubbish!
14 stations in total used in the study. 13 show very little warming (<1.3 deg. F), one (Byrd) shows a warming trend of 4.3 deg. F. Have any of these pseudo-scientists entertained the hypothesis that there might be an issue with the Byrd station records? Of course not, it is the other 13 records which clearly must be in error. The map attached to the article is very revealing!
And to think that some of my tax moneys have paid for this nonsense via the National Science Foundation makes me cringe
Thierry Copie, Physics PhD Cornell 1988
You can download the Supplementary Information from the paper here:
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/ngeo1671-s1.pdf
The above link includes 11 figures and 2 tables.
The significant (in the statistical sense) temperature increases occur in the months September – January, ie the austral summer when the station was likely manned (and the sun was up).
What did the occupants do every week in the summer:
Part of the house mouse duties ā common housekeeping tasks shared by all at the station ā included roof maintenance, he said. ā[We spent] a day per week with an electric chain saw cutting snow blocks from over the buildings (standing on the roofs), and dropping them over the side into a snow melter. Hot water from the electric snow melter would then be drained into a hole in the bottom of the tunnel.ā
http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contentHandler.cfm?id=1793
UHI anyone?
I don’t know if Kreskin is still alive, but hey, even if he isn’t maybe NASA can hire him to divine the temperature in the Antarctic. I’m sure the IPCC would accept the results.
Charles Gerard Nelson says:
“Itās the middle of summer down here in Australia and so ātis time for Climate Fearā¦ except this year the rivers are full, itās been a cool spring and summer and all the state capitals have had rain recentlyā¦so with no bushfires raging and no dry riverbeds to point to the Warmists have got their knickers in an awful tiwst.”
Just wait until they start claiming that average is the new extreme.
Also saw this on the BBC who having been found to have no scientific basis behind their alarmism (28) have decided to scream even louder.
With reports like this the reaction of warmists is clear…in the absence of facts they just make it up – at an alarming rate!
I may just print the report as I have a shortage of toilet roll
/sarc
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.anomaly.antarctic.png
Moving up on six thousands comments.
I’ve been posting on this story over at the Huffington post for the last two days.
In contrast to this site the general consensus over there seems to be that Global warming is a done deal, and only idiots don’t believe in it. The evil capitalists do believe, but claim not to so they can make lots of money before the earth dies in flood and fire.
I’ve also been informed that WUWT is a junk science site and it is a waste of anyone’s time to check out any links to it.
Have to admit to a large deal of frustration at not being able to pen cogent arguments. Could really use some help from some people who are better at expressing facts than I am.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/west-antarctica-warming-climate-change_n_2356287.html?utm_hp_ref=canada&ir=Canada#comments
Wrong link, sorry
Right. Look, is it too much to ask that these guys show me some actual sea level rise acceleration measurement before expecting me to pee all over myself in a panic? If this has been worsening since the 80’s, shouldn’t I see something OTHER than a picture perfect linear rise in sea level over the past 20 years? I mean, people have been telling me I should be alarmed about this my entire adult life. WHEN is sea level rise supposed to start noticeably accelerating? Get back to me then, thanks.
Steve Oregon says:
December 24, 2012 at 11:06 am
The idiocy and purposeful mendacity of the scientists is surpassed only by the wallowing naivety of the New York Times….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You might want to read what is behind the New York Times advocacy. link
Henry Clark says:
December 24, 2012 at 11:13 am
The real temperature history picture:
For 460 locations aiming to represent the high-latitude Southern Hemisphere from 60 degrees to 90 degrees latitude:
http://s8.postimage.org/70mmip0vp/Chapman_Walsh2007.gif
Chapman, W.L. and Walsh, J.E. 2007. A synthesis of Antarctic temperatures. Journal of Climate 20: 4096-4117.
Even the above, though, effectively understated the cooling over the last couple decades of the 20th century within inland Antarctica (compared to such as Comisco 2000* finding substantial cooling there over 1979 to 1998), because the inland ice sheet is not the same as the whole high-latitude Southern Hemisphere zone that includes surrounding oceans.
The answer is in http://s10.postimage.org/l9gokvp09/composite.jpg particularly the bottom right (click to enlarge), http://s13.postimage.org/ka0rmuwgn/gcrclouds.gif
Now, look again at the composite image you linked to above. (Upper right graphic, showing emitted solar radiation levels through several sunspot cycles.
Notice the smooth “arc” or parabolic-like (?) rise and fall of the lower (minimum) emission levels? Those do closely and immediately parallel the late 20th temperature record. Perhaps we should be plotting (or trending) minimum levels (a running plot through each low point of each solar cycle over all solar cycles, rather than the average, the high points themselves of each sunspot count each day, or the change in high points, or minor “Wiggles” that happen each year and during each 11-year solar cycle.
Jeff Condon says:
The highest temperature reported in the entire reconstruction was -9.7 Celcius
Yet there is talk of “meltwater” in related articles. The melting point of water is only that low at more than 100 MPa.
Jack Bauer interrogates Santa.
http://dailybail.com/home/jack-bauer-interrogates-santa-claus.html
Dumb question, but if they found warming which happened in the 1980’s by teasing it out of a single old broken temperature sensor, wouldn’t the continued effects of the prior warming still be visibile on the remaining and functional temperature sensors? For warming to be the least bit worrisome, doesn’t it have to stick around for a while? If it just happened in the vicinity of a single sensor which happened to be broken/unreliable then disappeared before it could be captured on other more reliable sensors, isn’t that like the tree that falls in the forrest with no one to notice it?
Strange result, compare this with previous all Antarctica results starting with 1980 instead of 1957 ā what appears to be more important in the context of AGW ā the trends are negative (even Steigs), and significantly negative.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/28/steigs-antarctic-heartburn/
1980 to 2006 trend (AWS era)
Steig 3 PC -0.06 deg C./decade
New 7 PC -0.20 deg C./decade
New 7 PC weighted-0.20 deg C./decade
New 7 PC wgtd imputed cells -0.21 deg C./decade
and satellite data shows all Antarctica cooling as well since Dec 1979
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0162ffab1459970d-pi
āWhen you see this type of warming, I think itās alarming.ā
Now that’s funny! Of course it’s alarming – you are an alarmist – what else would it be???
On a less “alarming” note , we are looking at White Christmas here in the Colorado Front Range & Mountains with a nice little storm moving in this evening. Yeah !!
So the headline is:
West Antarctica has warmed much more than scientists had thought over the last half century, new research suggests, an ominous finding given that the huge ice sheet there may be vulnerable to long-term collapse, with potentially drastic effects on sea levels.
But what this research (let’s disregard the models all the way down) shows is that the warming was in the late 1980;s and does not affect current temperature measurements?
Can someone say how that justifies the headline above? What it should say is Antarctica warmed more in the late 1980’s than scientists have thought but since 1997 it has cooled.
I can see why the NYT and BBC would run with the first headline – but someone should call them on it. The fact is that this research has zero effect on the reported current temperatures and therefore cannot be claimed to be causing further melt as the temperatures are considerably below freezing.
“the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958.”
Ummmmmm……..
From what to what?
I was really pondering the significance of the “warming” until I got to the end and realized the “warming” was yet more computerized finagling of sensor data.
Every day for the past 10 years one team member or another comes up with a new “It’s worse than we thought”.
But over same 10 year period, the temperatures recorded by thermometers have remained stubbornly constant.
Something’s wearing a bit thin, and it’s not the ice.
I finally understand AGW! Broken instruments, cherry picked data, biassed (not a mispelling!!) computer modelling. It says it all. These people should be arrested for the fraud that they have perpetrated on mankind and the taxpayerand as a punishment be banished to the coldest regions of the planet, because if they are getting warmer as this drivel claims, then the “scientists” will be fine!
It’s time to give the children their AGW Yuletide scare….
THE PENQUINS ARE DOOMED IF WE DO NOT SAVE THE POLAR BEAR ! ! !
With sunspot count down and consequently the variable solar magnetic output on the wane, an increase in the Antarctic ice coverage is more likely than not.
I saw this article on Antarctica warming worse than we expected using adjusted data and thought here we go again. So did a little analysis of my own on the hot days for Mawson using the raw data from the Australian BOM site that had a good continuous record from 1954 to present. I used a hot day definition of Tmax >=5C. There is a persistent decrease in the number of hot days over this period and in fact since 1994 the average number of hot days per year has been 2.6, compared to the long term average for the entire period of 5.9. There are also some interesting ups and downs along the way that appear to be consistent with Henry Clark’s comments on this post about warmer in the 70’s and cooler in the 80’s.
“To try to get to the bottom of the question, David H. Bromwich of Ohio State University pulled together a team that focused on a single temperature record”.
Say no more squire, say no more.
We know for a fact if this one station had shown:-
“West Antarctica has cooled much more than scientists had thought over the last half century, new research suggests, an ominous finding given that the huge ice sheet there may be invulnerable to long-term collapse, with potentially no effects on sea levels.
A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience reports that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has cooled by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global cooling, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-cooling regions on earth.”
The alarmists firstly would have refused publication and second, ridiculed how awful the use of one station that has lots of data missing and moved to different sites can’t possibly represent the entire Western Antarctic.
Even if it was a perfect instrumental station with no data missing, it is extremely ridiculous to suggest that this can even represent a land mass the size of half a continent.
Wishing all a happy Christmas and a happy, safe, healthy and blessed New Year 2013…
(NB: These are real genuine wishes to you all. They are not generated by computer models or derived from tinkering with and adjusting remote sensor data)
Gail Combs – good comment, i.e. just follow the money.
Does anyone know what the temperatures have been like in the study area since 1990?
Do you think that with the grant money they would bankroll the cost of an Antarctic expedition to a broken sensor, return it to Colorado, do all this work on it and “do computer analysis of the atmosphere” (whatever that could possibly mean!) and come out with a report that says,”Sorry, we couldn’t resuscitate it and have no idea what the record is.” No, they saw this broken sensor as an opportunity to create a warming station. IPCC’s techniques have spread across academia: write the conclusion first, do the research, write appropriate code and then report on the conclusions of the study. How long can this shameless corruption of scholarship go on without an enormous backlash from the proportion of scientists that still are honest, outraged and motivated to save science from the philistines. Maybe I don’t want to know the answer to this question or even what the proportion of such scientists is. A full makeover – even creation of new Universities and scholarly journals seems the only way forward.
Mike Smith says:
December 24, 2012 at 12:29 pm
Every day for the past 10 years one team member or another comes up with a new āItās worse than we thoughtā.
I think there should be a catelogue of all the “worse than we thoughts” and “unprecedenteds” with attribution for future scholarly study of the present Dark Ages.
Once again, the only way “scientists” with billions and billions of dollars can show any significant warming is by adjusting data to show it.
Even if 99.9% of Antarctica showed record cold and sea ice extent these fraudsters would find a small couple of acres that ‘showed’ warming – after necessary modeling and adjustments.
Since they like the 1980s then what about the 1950s?
Sound familiar? Head for the hills!
Here’s some more.
Is there a pattern? Surely not. Head for the hills anyway.
I quickly looked up Byrd Station on Wikipedia before the climate police could get it changed:
“Byrd Station refers to a research station established by the United States during the International Geophysical Year by the U.S. Navy during Operation Deep Freeze II in West Antarctica at 80Ā°S, 120Ā°W (now located at 80Ā°S, 119Ā°W, 1553 m elevation).[1] A joint Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines operation supported an overland tractor train traverse that left out of Little America V in late 1956 to establish the station. The train was led by Army Major Merle Dawson and completed a traverse of 646 miles over unexplored country in Marie Byrd Land to blaze a trail to a spot selected beforehand. The station consisted of a set of four prefabricated buildings and was erected in less than one month by U.S. Navy Seabees.[2] It was commissioned on January 1, 1957. The original station (“Old Byrd”) lasted about four years before it began to collapse under the snow. Construction of a second underground station in a nearby location began in 1960, and it was used until 1972. The station was then converted into a summer-only field camp until it was abandoned in 2004-05.[1]”
This is what they are relying on for their scare story!?! I think even Mann might be embarrassed to use a dataset produced/manipulated/tortured from the Byrd Station.
This might be something for Jeff Condon to address but something from this paper that bothers me is their figure 1 which presumably shows the “footprint” of Byrd. Note that they take what appears to be warming similar to what they measure all the way out to Scott station and Amundsen-Scott station. The temperature data which is presumably good from these stations does not show any such warming….it is much, much less. They say they used kriging in their analysis but it doesn’t make sense in light of this figure and surrounding station data.
“The highest temperature reported in the entire reconstruction was -9.7 Celcius.”
At -9.7 degrees Celsius there will clearly be a lot of ice melting going on , won’t there!
I think that they should hand back their grant money right now!
The NYTimes article quotes Eric Steig and refers to Steig et al 2009. Needless to say there is no mention of O’Donnell et al 2010 which falsified Steig 2009.
Steve Oregon says:
December 24, 2012 at 11:06 am
The idiocy and purposeful mendacity of the scientists is surpassed only by the wallowing naivety of the New York Times.
———————————————————————————————————-
Steve , I know Vietnam War veterans who still refer to NYT as the New Hanoi Times , it seems nothing has changed .
Feedback loop; they hypothesize, we criticize, they repair ad hoc, we criticize, they shore-up, we criticize, they retrench ad nauseam adhockery. Haack ptui!
Neat work, HenryP. Sorry I couldn’t re-link directly. Powerful viewing.
I just used the same method on my checking account and according to the science I am now a millionaire. I’ll call the bank after the holidays so they can fix their mistake.
“Much of the warming discovered in the new paper happened in the 1980s, around the same time the planet was beginning to warm briskly.”
====================================================================
They have a few typos. I’ll fix them.
“Much of the warming discovered is only in the new paper that the models say happened in the 1980s, around the same time the models say the planet was beginning to warm briskly. Now we need to adjust all those faulty sensors for the last 16 years. More research funds are needed.”
Not fit to print.
This is really deafening cry for UHI:
http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/features/contentHandler.cfm?id=1793,
as posted already earlier. Read this report, and take your conclusions. This was published in Nature Geoscience? Oh, I see, Nature, move on nothing to see here. This is so fabricated as fabricated can be.
“Dr. Bromwich is worried that this could eventually become routine, perhaps accelerating the decay of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but the warming is not fast enough for that to happen right away. āWeāre talking decades into the future, I think,ā Dr. Bromwich said.”
We now accept Amex, Visa, Mastercard and Paypal as well as regular BPay deductions – this will take at least a decade or two to sort out !!!
Let’s notice that the entire MSM is publishing this story… worldwide.
After reading a lot more, I have come to the following conclusion:
The team found a software error in the sensor.
My question: did they compare this software error with the software as submitted by the manufacturer of the probe? If it would be a programming error, it is likely (99%) that this error will be present in more sensors. If it is what I suspect, radiation damage to an individual, not well attended sensor, then the software error will show up at no other locations (likely, 99%).
So please: details!!!!.
I say – lets have MORE of these studies! Higher claimed temperature trends (alarms). Pictures of Polar Bears drowning in the ANTarctica (who would know the malapropos?) Really! The more these bogus stories come out – especially ones with tiny teams of activist-scientists researching isolated data points – especially these, yes, lets have more.
Because eventually, even the “MSM” gets it. It ain’t a story when the weatherman says there’s going to be a hurricane, and peeking outside shows clear blues skies and a nice brisk northern breeze. Keep it coming, researchers! You’re taking “one for the team” so that the whole team may someday just be set aside as so much eco-extremism.
Does Ohio State have any credibility? If so why?
“Ohio State researcher manipulated two dozen figures in NIH grants, papers”
Terry S. Elton, a researcher at Ohio State University in Columbus who studies genetic expression in various heart conditions and Down syndrome, has been sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity for fabricating and/or falsifying data in a number of NIH grants and resulting papers.
According to an OSU statement sent to Retraction Watch last night, it was an anonymous whistleblower who alerted the university to the potential misconduct in July 2010. The ORI report notes that the two OSU investigations, along with the ORI investigation, found that Elton:
falsified and/or fabricated Western blots in an NIH grant application in three submissions of the same grant application and in six (6) published papers.
They also fired the last football coach, who was a lot higher paid than any scientist, for misreporting his players rule infractions.
I know its guilt by association, but, he who lies down with dogs, wakes up with fleas.
More bogus studies written to generate headlines and Wiki articles so as to maintain the momentum of the narrative that has been so carefully crafted to facilitate the willful destruction of civilization.
Heh, what they failed to mention to press is that according to their (bogus) reconstruction, temperature trend at Byrd Station during the last 2 decades is -1.74Ā°C/cy, while average annual temperature is -26Ā°C. It’s damn cold there and cooling, folks, at an alarming rate.
see Central West Antarctica among most rapidly warming regions on Earth – Supplementary Information, Supplementary Figure S10
Yes, Desert,I got you
How to predict temperatures (admittedly in the past, but this is climatology after all):
1. Assume that the world is warming dramatically
2. Observe the current temperature for a given station is not warming dramatically
3. Conclude that the past must have been incorrectly measured or recorded
4. Correct previous measurements to insure that temperature trends agree with the assumption that the world is warming
A question for the climatologists – if this one station is in error (assuming it is) – and the errors for other stations are evenly distributed (presumably there is no bias in the previous record upon which the whole AGW meme is built, right?) – then wouldn’t the sum of all historical corrections leave the mean trend unaffected but simply increase the uncertainty?
Please forgive my naive question – I’m new to climatological thought and logic.
No they don’t. I remain shocked by the extent of poor science in climatology, but I am no longer surprised.
Alarmist, yes. Alarming, no. I already said I’m no longer surprised by poor science in climatology.
Jpatrick said (December 24, 2012 at 9:58 am )
“…I look forward to some remarks from someone who has read this paper…”
Well, apparently the BBC (Matt McGrath) must have read the press release related to the paper in question, and have decided that it’s worse than the scientists thought.
Although I predict some wailing about this too:
“…Ee’re seeing a more dynamic impact that’s due to climate change that’s occurring elsewhere on the globe translating down and increasing the heat transportation to the WAIS.” said Dr Monaghan.
But he was unable to say with certainty that the greater warming his team found was due to human activities.
“The jury is still out on that. That piece of research has not been done. My opinion is that it probably is, but I can’t say that definitively.”
This view was echoed by Prof Bromwich, who suggested that further study would be needed…”
Wonder if they were part of the 97%.
I found my Grandfather’s old pocket watch. It wasn’t running so I ran a computer model of the position of the hands and determined that it provided the exact time at least twice a day. Based on that analysis I concluded that the watch was running and correct, +/- 12 hours.
Is it summertime in the southern hemisphere?
Holy crap we only have six months left until the Arctic melts.
āā¦Eeāre seeing a more dynamic impact thatās due to climate change thatās occurring elsewhere on the globe translating down and increasing the heat transportation to the WAIS.ā said Dr Monaghan
Monaghan here is disingenous at best. It is well understood that colder catabatic winds have for consequence a renewed warm, moist air advection along the relief of the peninsula contributes to the fast warming and record snow on the area. to claim that this is a consequence of global warming elsewhere truly shows either incompetence or bad faith. Yet another one who should have read Leroux…
“It is by far the longest weather record in that region, but it had intermittent gaps and other problems that had made many researchers wary of it.”
Many researchers? Not all of them?
What kind of researcher wouldn’t be wary of weather record that had intermittent gaps and other problems? Possibly a AGW Climatologist.
“… a team that focused on a single temperature record.”
A single temperature record is the basis for their claim of twice the previous warming. A highly questionable record at that.
Boggles the mind.
When you see an obviously BS article like this, it usually is hidden behind a paywall. I almost decided to pay for it, but I just could not imagine myself financing ‘climate science’ disinformation.
Anyhow, if you look at the blurry charts, you can see the following:
1. There has been no statistically significant warming since around 1990.
2. About 60% of the peak temperatures consist of ‘reconstructed figures’.
3. The charts only go to 2004/05, while the article claims 2010.
4. The summer and autumn charts are effectively flat.
5. The annual upward trend is greater than three of the seasons, but similar to that of Spring.
As Justhefact points out, the methodology used here is so suspect that no reasonable competent scientist would take it seriously. And that’s the problem: an analogy for reasonable competent scientist and typical ‘climate scientist’ is oil and water, they just do not mix.
But there is more:
“Construction of a second underground station in a nearby location began in 1960, and it was used until 1972. The station was then converted into a summer-only field camp until it was abandoned in 2004-05.[1]ā
The stats from this place, when the warming was supposed to have occurred during the 1980s, was a summer-only field camp. The Byrd station is in an area of Antarctica where the temperature averages around -25 degrees C and it snows a lot. The important point here is: “summer only field camp”.
Stephana says:
-20 degrees, +4.4 degrees = -15.6 degrees. Still to cold to have any ice melt.
Except under a very high pressure. e.g. take said ice to the deepest part of the ocean.
Or there might be some surface melting due to solar radiation. In which case the air temperature probably dosn’t matter that much.
It is interesting to compare the new reconstruction of temperatures at Byrd by Bromwich, Monaghan et al. (2012) with that contained in Monaghan, Bromwich et al’s 2008 paper, available at http://polarmet.osu.edu/PolarMet/PMGFulldocs/monaghan_bromwich_jgr_2008.pdf. Figure 3 thereof shows no obvious trend in temperatures at Byrd from 1960-2005, quite unlike the high trend reconstruction in Figure 2 of their new paper. And reconstructions of West Antarctic temperatures per Figure 9 of the 2008 paper shows cooling over both 1970-2002 and 1980-2002. Incidentally, Steig’s representation of Monaghan, Bromwich et al’s (2008) Byrd temperature reconstruction in the graph in his 1 February 2011 piece at RealClimate does not appear to reflect Figure 3 in the paper itself.
The new Bromwich, Monaghan et al. reconstruction incorporates very large adjustments to the Byrd automated weather station (AWS) record, post 1989, reflecting a discovered calibration error of over 1.5 C. At the same time they state that no corrections were required between 1980 and 1988; I was not convinced by the explanation given for this. Both their 2008 and 2012 reconstructions appear to treat Byrd AWS as measuring exactly the same temperature as the manned Byrd station despite their different locations, with quite possibly different microclimates. I am dubious that it is possible to have much confidence in the large adjustments made to the Byrd AWS record post 1989, in the lack of any adjustments from 1980 to 1988, or in treating Byrd AWS temperature measurements as corresponding exactly to those at the manned Byrd station. I’m not saying that the new reconstruction is wrong, I just think there is too little solid data and too much uncertainty as to what measurement errors occurred for any long period reconstruction of temperatures at Byrd to be relied upon.
As for comparing the Steig et al. (2009) (Steig 2009) and the O’Donnell, Lewis, McIntyre and Condon (2010) (OLMC 2010) reconstructions, they were based on the same dataset (although OLMC 2010 used a wider range of the weather station records than did Steig 2009). The differences between these two reconstructions was primarily due to Steig 2009 having used a mathematically defective method. The main contribution of OLMC 2010 was to derive a better reconstruction method (starting, like Steig 2009, by infilling missing data using the RegEM program) that overcame the defects in the Steig 2009 method. FWIW, the 1957-2006 annual mean trend of the reconstructed/infilled manned Byrd station record per Steig 2009 was only about 0.13 C/decade – not much more than a quarter of the 1958-2005 trend per Bromwich, Monaghan et al. (2012). The much higher trends shown in their Figure 4 for Steig 2009 were for that study’s spatial reconstruction at the grid cell containing Byrd’s location, which (due to defective mathematical methods) was greatly in excess of the reconstructed/infilled trend for Byrd station itself.
Even in Germany this junk Science has been published in Journals.
“Hello” everyone. Read the “fine print” in Justin Gillis article: “warming….is a relative concept”…”.average annual temperatures are nearly 50 deg Fahrenheit below freezing”… only “several days of surface melting”. That indicates to me the scientists quoted are disseminating mis-information – as usual.
Back in the old days, whiteout was used to “adjust” the data form to “correct” readings that just couldn’t be right. Just because a computer does it doesn’t make it better than whiteout. Bad practice then. Bad practice now.
The steroids scandals of baseball (cheating), gave birth to the idea of new records in the record book possibly being marked with an asterisk so that earlier (and presumably) later “greats” are not lost in the steroids “noise”. I think something similar is going to have to be done with scientific journals. The alternative is perhaps too drastic – wipe out about 20 years of their volumes. This whack-a-moley science where a new satellite era ice extent in Antarctica spawns studies by the catastrophists of “worse than thought” temp rises on the continent. This is one in a series of moles having been whacked over recent years (GISS lowering world temp average from 15C to 14C pre 1997 to “augment” the warming trend and also lowering the temp of the mid 1930s to make 1998 a new record; Santer’s 15 years without warming being a death knell for models being extended to 16 years, 17 years, 20 years, longer; grudgingly, in the face of overwhelming evidence, reinstating the RWP, MWP and LIA but restricting it to the northern hemisphere; adding crustal rebound to annual sea level rise making the metric not a sea level data set; dispensing with the need for a tropical tropospheric hotspot as a thumbprint of CAGW, etc. etc.).
@ Nic Lewis: Similarities between the two Monaghan papers…
2008: The disagreement among data sets inWest Antarctica emphasizes the pressing need to establish reliable long-term climate records there, especially considering increasing scientific interest in West Antarctic mass balance.
2012: These results argue for a robust long-term meteorological observation network in the region.
So can we infer from the same plea made in 2012 that after four years nothing really new as far as data acquisition has occurred?
Martin van Etten says:
December 24, 2012 at 10:28 am
āIf you believe that this is science, then I strongly suggest you prep your telescope, lest you miss out on a spectacular sleigh sightingā¦ā
the level of discussion here is detoriatingā¦
Oh I don’t know. I think we’re doing quite well, given what we have to work with, Martin.
Is it just me or do the software corrections and adjustments only ever go in one direction so the obsessive-compulsive alarmists can then claim that its worse than they thought?
Well I don’t make New Year resolutions;but I plan to make at least two in 2013.
First one is to stop paying California Sales tax; except on gasoline purchases. So I’ll buy food, which isn’t taxable (no eating out, so I’ll eliminate tipping too); and I’m not buying anything. So all gifts will be cash only.
My second nyr is to henceforth pay NO attention, or any credibility, to ANY so-called “scientific” information/research/discovery/whatever, that is released/leaked/hacked/whatever, to the public in any sort of msm/tv/radio/pressrelease/whatever, unless accompanied by a statement from the authors that they personally support such release as published, and everything in it.
I am sick and tired of pronouncements of so called scientific “discoveries” that contain ifs/ands or buts, and maybees/perhaps/consistent withs; and other non-determinate platitudes. State your findings using SI units with error bounds, in peer reviewed literature, and quit with the “press releases” that do not include in toto, an unabridged, unexpurgated copy of that peer reviewed paper, so that the reader/viewer/listener/whatever can discern what YOU discovered or observed, as distinct from what the public relations minions claim that you discovered or observed.
The NYT, Washpost, etc do not constitute peer reviewed journals, and if you allow your results to be “reported” as science in such media, without an equally public demand for retraction or correction; then expect your work to be ridiculed, pilloried, and excoriated, for what such releases turn your actual findings into.
I’m happy to learn from msm that you have a new scientific paper. Give them the title, authors, and abstract; any more, other than the complete paper; and you can expect the fat to hit the shin.
The subject “paper” of this thread, is all the reason I need.
So, one weather station in West Antarctica has had problems with the equipment and suddenly, according to Watts and his little club, human made climate change is a myth. The problem of the equipment is reported and discussed in the media. Surely this strengthens the case in that, unlike your claims, the process of research and verifying research is all transparent. I wonder how you would have responded to research in the 1960s that indicated that smoking tobacco causes lung cancer, or Columbus’s suggestion in the 1400s that perhaps the world is not flat after all. You should be embarrassed. The monumental effort to keep the planet habitable for our kids will happen whether you are on board or not. Seizing on tiny anomalies in the itty-bitty details in what is a global outpouring of good science, proving unequivocally that the earth’s temperature is rising, is what you do when you are starved for attention but don’t know how to get it.
[the devil is in the details, always. This on the other hand is a content free post. Why don’t you say what it is you feel is wrong in what “Watts and his little club” are saying? Linking skepticism about man made climate change with tobacco and Columbus is very old hat here and it adds nothing to the argument at all. Perhaps you could provide references for your claims about “global outpourings”. Finally I don’t think there are any attention seekers here other than those who post such empty stuff as you have. You have all the appearances of a troll and may well come to be considered as one in time. Why not try and provide some content? . . Thank you . . mod]
Recalibrate with computer analysis = “educated” guess.
I saw this article a couple of days ago. Immediately classified it as BS and moved on. Meant to check WUWT earlier but got distracted and now find my intial reaction was correct.
āThe surprises keep coming,ā said Andrew J. Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who took part in the study. āWhen you see this type of warming, I think itās alarming.ā
++++++++
Wait a minute… hold on just a second here. So Andrew J Monaghan “saw this result from a recalibration and was alarmed at what? A number derived from a model of sorts?
It is time this climate change research industry was brought to an abrupt end… not the scientific research… the politics. All government agencies, legislation and climate change policies that have been created as a consequence of IPCC AR4 to ‘halt’ climate change must be eliminated. Only then perhaps all this nonsense will end.
This AGW rubbish not only denigrates true science but costs humanity the future. We even have one deluded who claims that by ignoring AGW we commit millions of future peoples to death. The fact his delusions will cause millions to die today – no energy – does not concern him. As a left wing idealist – I assume – who no doubt supports Agenda 21 he is apparently unaware that the UN, in that document, says the population should be no more than half a billion.
Say what you will MvW but it is the warmists who waste our resources on politically motivated scaremongering so as to garner trillions of dollars for their friends and supporters. More CO2 and an increase in temperature from natural warming, would be a blessing; more food for the masses.
Scaremongering is a tactic to avoid proper examination of the facts. A proper examination that would likely show the errors in many, if not all, claims, made by misguided ‘warmists’ posing as scientists; who in their right mind would have given these people degrees? We are aware that records have been regularly falsified, adjusted, and ‘corrected’ to suit the findings of government funded spoofs. Claims of pending doom continue because the money still flows to those charged with keeping the ‘story’ going.
Now, how do we make a killing out of telling the truth abouth these misguided politically driven individuals? How do we make it so obvious that the public has been led up the garden path and fleeced that even the dumbest ‘warmist’ sees the light? On second thoughts forget the warmists, too far gone. Let us reveal the truth about where the taxpaters’ funds have been going in their trillions to support academia, alternate energy scams, and carbon heists to no environmental benefit. Only than the recipients of the largesse have gained while our children will suffer, no doubt.
“You have all the appearances of a troll and may well come to be considered as one in time.”
Clearly, I have hit a nerve. I am the only blogger here to get such an angry reaction, in bold, stuck onto mine. That’s because I am the only one who maintains the view that AGW is a likely threat. I am glad you did that because you have revealed your true colours. You are not interested in sound debate at all but rather to create a vehicle for like-minded climaphobes to vent their prejudices.
“This on the other hand is a content free post.”
The content of my post was totally on topic. The topic – the one you have established – is whether we should trust climate science in the light of dodgy readings in West Antarctica. The topic is not what scientific evidence is there to support AGW. My view is “yes” we should support the findings of the AR4. Issues such as you have reported above are rare and small in the context of the sound work done by many in the field.
“Perhaps you could provide references for your claims about “global outpourings”.”
The IPCC AR4 is a globally authored document and its vast research base is what I would regard as outpourings.
“Linking skepticism about man made climate change with tobacco and Columbus is very old hat here and it adds nothing to the argument at all.”
But it is very relevant, and you need to be reminded of it. With the spherical Earth idea, scepticism was based on the natural human tendency to measure new ideas against ones’ personal experience. New ideas are dismissed because to give them weight would be to challenge how they look at the familiar world around them. That’s what you and your other bloggers here are doing. With the unhealthy tobacco idea, there was active resistance to the idea because of the vested interests in maintaining the status quo. Perhaps this is how you think: you want your current lifestyle to continue and all your reasoning is tainted by that interest.
“Why not try and provide some content?”
I will be happy to provide my approach to the article in the NY Times. In essence, the article is saying that it is the adjustments to data following the discovery of faulty sensors that revealed temperature rises “three times the overall rate of global warming”. Your cynicism, in essence, is based on the fact that the data was adjusted. You then take the unreasonable leap to conclude that the adjustments render the data unreliable and misleading. You and other bloggers have not provided any evidence to prove this. So, my trust in science and the processes of scientists remains intact.
Many members of your club – yes, I like that term – have tried to suggest that the climate change industry is deliberately deceptive in order to obtain increased research funding. Climate change research receives funding because it is good science and because it is a serious issue. End of story. The funding mechanisms and funding priorities do not affect the research findings, otherwise we could not trust any research. The current economic structures are better served by not responding to AGW. Those structures are capable of funding their own scientific research to disprove AGW.
Happy blogging.
Martin Wright says:
December 27, 2012 at 2:46 am
——————————————————-
I notice that this post of yours adds nothing to your last post and doesn’t add anything further to the thread. Why do you think that referring to AR4 is impressive when so much of it has collapsed under scrutiny? Is AR4 a global outpouring of scientific knowledge such that you have nothing to add since 2007? That seems a bit poor by any standard as we are now 5 years further down the line.
I don’t think anybody here thinks that the earth is flat and I certainly do know that nobody in their right mind thinks that climatology is as proven as the spherical earth concept. In fact most of us here think that the man made catastrophic global warming nonsense is on a par with lysenkoism at best. Telling us that we don’t understand, or deny, that smoking is directly linked to increased lung cancer and heart disease is to underestimate us skeptics in the worst way.
Regarding the adjustments to the temperature record you would find, if you cared to, that this issue has been carefully dissected here and we are unconvinced as to the reasoning behind the adjustments as they almost always seem to advance the warming cause. Your faith in the science of these adjustments is quite endearing but faith is just that.
As for the funding, well, it is always provided to find the link to human activity and its effect on climate so yes we are a bit suspicious particularly when we see no funding for research that would look for proof that our burning stuff isn’t causing climate change.
“Clearly, I have hit a nerve. I am the only blogger here to get such an angry reaction, in bold, stuck onto mine. Thatās because I am the only one who maintains the view that AGW is a likely threat.” Now this bit is the strangest part of your entire post. You have obviously not read other threads where there are many folk who have similar views as you. They all get to say their piece and then get to enjoy the rough and tumble with many, many, well informed and cogent thinkers here. You, Mr Wright , are not unique as your wooly arm waving shows. We know you and until you tighten up your act you will never be taken seriously. Folk here love a good argument based on facts, theories and character. You seem like a , and I mean this in the nicest possible way, young boy who has read a few bits and pieces without actually understanding them and then assumed we are a bunch of ignorant knuckle draggers who need to be told whats what. Wrong.
People here are highly informed and very well equipped to understand and critique the offerings of serious climatologists let alone a know nothing like you.
Hello Keith
I stand by everything in my previous post. Of the 130 posts so far in this thread, only Henry Clark and myself has ventured into the WUWT den to argue for AGW. Thatās five postings (from two bloggers) arguing for AGW out of 130. And you still have not explained why I got the angry moderatorās comment. Your insulting comments, Keith, should be directed at, say, GrahamHK who makes the ridiculous assertion that the motivation behind AGW scientists is āto garner trillions of dollars for their friends and supportersā. Really? Trillions? The ārough and tumbleā as you put it seems to be reserved for me. This thread does not represent a balanced debate at all.
The AR4 has not ācollapsed under scrutinyā. You want to believe it has. Everyone would prefer the research to be wrong. It would be great if burning fossil fuels made no difference to atmospheric temperatures. Governments, even the conservative ones, accept the science. The USA has, despite the recession, been the shining light in sustainable energy investment in 2012. Is that government, with all of its advisors and access to all climate research, and with a population deeply devoted to the internal combustion engine and the pioneering spirit of drilling for oilā¦ is that government really misguided? Developed economies around the world pursue sustainable energy options because the science is right.
All AGW research is anti-AGW research. All AGW research has the potential to prove that AGW is a myth. The research is conducted to get data we donāt have. The data speaks for itself. AGW is 90% likely.
My posts have been on-topic. The issue is about trusting science, not the science itself. It is not my job to know about science. But it is my moral duty to provide for my children, to behave and vote in a morally responsible way. I trust the collective findings of climate scientists.
I never stated that you believed that Earth was flat or that you deny that smoking is harmful. What I stated was that your response to AGW research findings is similar to sceptics in past eras. History will judge your scepticism in the same way.
By the way, the issue of data adjustment has not been ācarefully dissectedā in this thread. No post here has actually analysed how the adjustment was made.
I donāt think you are a ābunch of ignorant knuckle draggers who need to be told whats whatā. I think you are very clever (except for punctuation). You are like Iago who seeks out Othelloās jealousy. Othello is no more jealous than any other man but if that is all you are looking for, then that is all that you will find. Scientific research in its totality is certain to have the odd anomaly, error or personal bias.
Your last line is a fine example of how sceptics who feel threatened react. You resort to insults. I donāt know much about climate science. I donāt need to. But I know much about how to select trustworthy sources on which to base my judgement.
Regards
Martin
I sincerely regret my last sentence Martin and I apologise for it. That is certainly not the me I have come to be. It was not, however, motivated by fear. I am strongly confident of my stance regarding CAGW and there is nothing in your response that has caused any doubt to arise in my understanding of the debate.
The issue here is linking man made CO2 to anything unnatural in the world’s climate. There is nothing, not a single thing, that I have read or been told that links the two. Just because we can measure atmospheric CO2 doesn’t mean that what is happening is a threat to mankind, or the planet at large.
When someone can show that firstly there are unnatural things happening to our climate and/or weather and that these things are as a result of our adding CO2 to the atmosphere then I will have to change my point of view. All we seem to have right now are , at best, weak inferred connections to things that are not unprecedented.
That is my position. Yours is different based on a belief in the abilities of a very small group of men to tease out this connection and its consequences. I do not have your faith hence I am a skeptic.
Martin Wright says:
“Is that government, with all of its advisors and access to all climate research, and with a population deeply devoted to the internal combustion engine and the pioneering spirit of drilling for oilā¦ is that government really misguided?”
Yes. Completely.
The argument for AGW rests on radiative physics. But the effect of AGW, which undoubtedly exists, is vastly overstated. AGW is a minuscule, third order forcing that is swamped by order of magnitude higher second order forcings, which in turn are swamped by first order forcings. AGW is only a minor, bit player. It truly does not matter.
If AGW was an important forcing, it would be measurable. We would be able to quantify it in relation to other forcings. But it is not measurable. AGW is too small to measure; there are no empirical, testable measurements of AGW. None at all. It’s effect is only a conjecture, unsupported by any physical measurements.
There certainly is no catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. In fact, global warming has currently ceased. The only reasons for the endless discussion about AGW are money, and status. Take those away, and the AGW scare would promptly fizzle out, because there is really no scientific evidence supporting it. While a faint AGW effect may exist, it can, and should be, completely disregarded for all practical purposes. It is truly a non-event, kept alive only by the use of massive public funding.