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…
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 -1.74°C/cy, while average annual temperature is -26°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.
“…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
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]”
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.).
@ur momisugly 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
“If you believe that this is science, then I strongly suggest you prep your telescope, lest you miss out on a spectacular sleigh sighting…”
the level of discussion here is detoriating…
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.