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.
“The surprises keep coming,” said Andrew J. Monaghan, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who took part in the study. “When you see this type of warming, I think it’s alarming.”
…
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…
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
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 “Mayan Calendar” 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.