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…
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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 “It’s worse than we thought”.
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 80°S, 120°W (now located at 80°S, 119°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. “We’re talking decades into the future, I think,” 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.