Guest essay by David Archibald
A visit to the weather station at the airport is the highlight of any trip to Svalbard. Of course that weather station has been the subject of attention on WUWT here.
Above: The Svalbard weather station at the airport
Figure 1 below shows the closest point the public can now get to the Svalbard weather station, the gate at the airport:
Figure 1: David Archibald, Professor Ole Humlum and Professor Jan-Erik Solheim at the closest point the public can get to the Svalbard Airport weather station which is 140 metres southeast of this point.
Professor Humlum was able to provide details of the siting problems particular to Arctic airport weather stations. For example, at one stage one of the airlines had a flight that got into Svalbard from Tromso on the Norwegian mainland in the late afternoon and then returned to Tromso at 5.00 am the following morning. To keep the aircraft warm overnight, the crew would leave the auxiliary power unit (APU) running. If the wind was blowing from the northwest, this would affect the temperature recorded by the weather station. This was an armed meteorological expedition as shown in Figure 2 following:
Figure 2: Professor Humlum carrying the expedition’s Remington rifle
Why an armed expedition? The island of Svalbard is infested with “warmers” (/sarc – the rifle actually for polar bears) . Note that the rifle wasn’t left in the vehicle. Poor visibility from falling snow meant that one may not be aware of a threat until you are directly upon it.
Figure 3 following shows a warmer nesting site encountered by the expedition:
Figure 3: Permafrost carbon dioxide injection project on Svalbard
This facility was founded on the peculiar notion that carbon dioxide could be stored under the permafrost layer. All the signage is in English no doubt because the Norwegian authorities are too embarrassed to have this inane project signposted in Norwegian. There is no source of carbon dioxide on Svalbard and any injected at the site would have to be transported from one thousand kilometres south on the Norwegian mainland.
As well as being an armed expedition, this was a sustainable expedition with provisioning including local produce of seal meat, whale meat and reindeer. Why go to Svalbard in the first place? It is quite apparent now that ground zero in climate change is not the coral reefs of the Maldives, the delta mouth islands of Bangladesh or anywhere else tropical and third world. It is here, hard up against the Arctic Circle. In fact Svalbard is going to get polar amplification really bad, as shown by Figure 4:
Figure 4: Projected average summer, annual and winter temperatures for Svalbard over Solar Cycle 24 (from Solheim, Stordahl and Humlum, 2011, Solar activity and Svalbard temperatures)
As Figure 4 shows, the average winter temperature over Solar Cycle 24 will be 6.0ºC colder than that over Solar Cycle 23. The economic effects of climate change have already been felt on the Norwegian mainland. Figure 5 shows Norwegian wheat imports and Norway’s domestic attempts are growing wheat:
Figure 5: Norwegian wheat imports and domestic production 1960 – 2012
What is apparent from Figure 5 is that domestic wheat production started replacing imports of the grain from the mid-1970s. From 2007, imports doubled as humid weather at harvest causing fungal infections of the crop and precluded most of it from being used for human consumption. Thus the end of the Modern Warm Period is sharply defined by Norwegian wheat statistics. Norway’s weather is driven by the sea temperature to its west, which also peaked in 2006 as shown by Figure 6:
Figure 6: Ocean heat in the Atlantic Ocean (0-60 West, 30-65 North) from Climate4you.com
Figure 6 shows that the fall in temperature of the Atlantic Ocean to the west of Norway from the peak in 2006 has been just as fast as the rise from 1990. When will the cooling stop and at what level?
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I guess they best release some of that pent-up Svalbard CO2.
Pretty dramatic drop from 1967 to 1973. What caused that and what caused the subsequent plateau and increase?
Bear note to self:
Note gun still in sheath, will take at least 10 seconds for Goretex covered meat snack to shed mittens, unshoulder rifle, unzip cover on rifle and remove same, and finally chamber,,,chomp chomp, growl, disembowel, , my goodness, I can’t eat all three of these in one sitting.
Maybe the “missing heat” isn’t in the oceans? it’s in the stupid that hasn’t burned yet?
Or maybe they’re transporting the CO2 (the magic molecule) there so the ice they said would melt but hasn’t might start to?
yeah…according to Dr Otto Pettersson (successor to Arrhenius as professor)…quoted by Rachel Carson…in ‘The Living Sea’…the coal shipping season from the west Spitzbergen (Svalbard) ports went up from three months to seven months in 1919…quite dramatic decline in sea ice in the area…this was well before any significant anthropogenic rise in CO2 levels…there are also anecdotal accounts of low sea ice area in the twenties. (i have a picture of the cover of a publication from those days…but dont know how to show it here)…anyway this agrees well with your temperature graph…which has a sharp rise in 1919.
“From 2007, imports doubled as humid weather at harvest causing fungal infections of the crop and precluded most of it from being used for human consumption. ”
I think I saw a documentry once that suggested just such a fungus was responsible for the Witches of Salem episode. Some kind of hallucinigen in the fungus made the entire community become irrational and paranoid.
Seriously David, some self-awareness is called for. The idiocy of your use of total wheat production in Norway as a proxy for climate was recently called out multiple times by multiple commenters in this thread.
I would consider meditation. 20 minutes a day should do it.
Jeez is right about the wisdom of including the wheat production graph. Willis Eschenbach, Keith DeHavelle, charles the moderator, and others pointed this out in the post on 10/5/2013. Wheat production can rise or fall for a variety of reasons; climate being only one of many possibilities. If you look at wheat yield (production per unit area), there is no correlation to any warming or cooling trends.
http://www.factfish.com/statistic-country/norway/wheat,%20yield
Also, it is not obvious from Figure 4 that average winter temperatures will be -6.0C for Solar Cycle 24 compared to Solar Cycle 23. A legend and/or annotations on the graph would go a long way to clarifying this. But the graph of North Atlantic ocean temperatures is nice. It actually does illustrate the points you’re attempting to make.
David
“There is no source of carbon dioxide on Svalbard”
Didn’t you visit the coal power plant on Svalbard?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_fzJfuFshSWU/TDiA3yk3qAI/AAAAAAAAAGI/4UWsmNGFSEo/s1600/kullkraftverk400.jpg
It will be interesting to see how the Arctic region cools in response to the most rapid decline in solar activity in 8000 years. 6C colder in Svalbard in the winter, burr.
Early indications of cooling will be more blue in the ocean regions. (Check)
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2013/anomnight.10.31.2013.gif
In advance of the cooling there will be a change in cosmic ray flux striking the earth. (Check)
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/webform/query.cgi?startday=02&startmonth=09&startyear=1975&starttime=00%3A00&endday=16&endmonth=10&endyear=2013&endtime=00%3A00&resolution=1440&picture=on
http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3256
Solar activity and Svalbard temperatures
jeez :” The idiocy of your use of total wheat production in Norway as a proxy for climate was recently called out multiple times by multiple commenters in this thread.”
Yes, this initial mistake was arguably innocent, repeating it makes it deliberate.
The fact that both domestic and imports spiked in 2007 shows other factors that weather dominate this record.
I’m no more interested in propagandist BS from the denial side than from the AGW side. Everyone shouting BS at each other from opppsing sides is why climate “debate” is just about finished. No one is interested the science at all at this stage.
I’m noting an increase is this kind of content here at WUWT , which is a shame.
I like David Archibald’s articles. They lack that muddy, obfuscated, narcissistic verbiage characteristic of the articles by modern “scientists” defending their turf and proving to their bosses that they deserve their salary.
Not to mention amateurs of Al Gore’s BB-gun caliber. The Wall Street Journal recently published Gore’s article (no doubt, with editor’s tongue in cheek). There is not a single reference to any factual data in the whole article, promising riches to those who would invest in CO2 cap-and-trade scam. But the main feature of this article is that it is virtually unintelligible. It is so poorly written using such an ambiguous, viscous, indefinite language, that it feels as if it was written by some UN committee whose excretions are destined for the nearest garbage bin as soon as they are produced.
The OHC graph is interesting. It is becoming clearer that 2005/2006 was the turning point.
From the Humlum paper:
“Arctic temperature increase since 1980, until now is also expressed by the Svalbard record, although with an apparent delay of 5-‐10 years.”
“The correlation is always negative and has a maximum absolute value between 10 and 13 years lag.”
Also Arctic Oscillation leads global CO2 by several years. Peak correlation was different lag during late 20th c. warming than it is during “plateau”.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=259
Rather than seeing the increase variability in the Arctic as some mysterious “polar amplification” perhaps we should conclude that it is the polar regions that are where “climate change” begins and atmospheric circulation then affects temperate latitudes.
David,
Friday funny, indeed.
1. You’re exaggerating the siting problem. Warm air from an airplane or the local buildings surely has a totally insignificant impact on a thermometer many metres away in a windy place like this. The problem with the Svalbard airport record is the homogenisation. The record only goes back to 1975, and the rest has been reconstructed from other sites in Svalbard. About half of it from Longyearbyen, but even Longyearbyen has a different microclimate (the airport is exposed to Isfjorden which is often open even in winter, whereas Longyearbyen is exposed to the frequent eastern winds in the winter bringing cold air coming through the valley from the interior). Humlum has a private record from Longyearbyen very close to the old observing site providing some insight to the homogenisation problem. The overlap in official observations is only two years, but Humlum has 10+ years.
2. The CO2 well is a technology experiment. And their dream is to inject the CO2 produced by the local power plant CO2 neutral. The energy is made from local coal. Incredibly expensive, of course.
3. The temperature on Svalbard and the Arctic in general is mostly governed by a ~70y cycle which totally dwarfes the longer term 20th century warming. We’re likely heading for a slow 40y cooling period in the Arctic again, but not quite for the reasons that you suggest. I’m not saying that there is no link to the solar activity, but it’s weak compared to the cycle, just as the global warming signal. We don’t know a great deal about this cycle, though. It seems to be real, but it doesn’t seem clear to me whether the amplitude is constant.
4. Wheat import/production in Norway as a temperature proxy is ridiculous. If you were looking at wheat yield, then you could get a kind of connection to the weather, but still it would not be a good temperature proxy. And why a proxy anyway, when we have excellent temperature records for that period?
To clarify CO2 comment, that is rate of change of CO2 correlating with AO. There is an underlying increase in d/dt(CO2) which, like temperature, has also ‘plateaued’.
The variation is about +/-1 on an average base of 1.5 ie a very significant proportion.
Then we need to look at how CO2 varies with SST.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=233
SST correlates with zero lag, the correlation being better pre-2000 than during “plateau”.
Thus SST seems to dominate earlier part and AO is dominant during temp hiatus.
The three are clearly intimately related , as one would expect from fundamental physical laws, Henry, Fick etc.
Current assumptions about human emissions are deliberately naive. With that degree of correlation on the inter-annual scale it is unreasonable to suggest that there is not a longer term causation between AO , SST and CO2.
The Humlum paper is more evidence of the polar origin of much of the change.
Steinar
“And why a proxy anyway, when we have excellent temperature records for that period?”
Right
http://eklima.met.no/metno/trend/TAMA_G0_0_1000_NO.jpg
And how could a 0.5 C drop after 2005 not affect wheat production in Norway, with its marginal conditions for wheat?
Perhaps this is why so many opaque foreign companies are spending billions buying up Australian farmland.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/bitter-harvest-aussie-families-warn-of-foreign-giants-buying-up-the-farm-20130924-2uca4.html
Funny thing to do, given the scientific consensus that climate change will shortly render Australian farmland into worthless desert. Almost like someone, somewhere is worried that the world is cooling, and is prepared to bet billions of dollars on their opinion.
Greg says: November 1, 2013 at 11:52 pm No one is interested the science at all at this stage.
———————————————————
I am certain lots of folks here ARE interested in the science – just as soon as we get some. OK, only slightly sarcastic. How about they add just 4 NEW equivalent temperature stations N, S, E, W of the airport away from asphalt, & other human constructs and test exactly how accurate the existing station is by running simultaneous measurements ? THAT would be real science, yielding variance data useful in generating comparative observations and some measure of error. But NO…..blinders on, pls
Greg
Wow, you even beat me in finding correlations which is not there 🙂
lgl,
“And how could a 0.5 C drop after 2005 not affect wheat production in Norway, with its marginal conditions for wheat?”
If you decide to import rather than to import, production will of course be affected, so how do you know that a reduction was not a decision? Even if David used yield, production depends not only on temperature, but also a lot on precipitation, not too little and not too much and also preferrably at the right time.
The choice to allocate acreage, (hetareage?) to specific crops is governed by economics, food fashions, energy and fertilizer costs, transportation costs, futures speculation, stuff I don’t know, and the weather/climate. Grain production in Norway is a combination of Wheat, Oats, Rye, and I think Millet. To try and use total production of just one of these grains, and not even production per hectare, as a proxy for just one variable out of all of the above, is beyond stupid.
This was all discussed on the other thread. A drop in wheat in a given year is often just a choice to grow something else.
Here are some links for you.
Production per acre
Background about grain production in Norway.
Archibald consistently brings down the quality of WUWT and it is a bad thing.
It is bad for the credibility of this site.
It is bad for the credibility of the skeptic community.
It is bad for the loss of trust it creates with those on the fence.
It is bad for the loss of influence that the lack of credibility creates.
A couple of years ago Climate4you pointed out pretty well what the effect of topography on local meteorological values on Svalbard was: http://www.climate4you.com/SvalbardMetPhenomena%2020080902.htm
RE: Steve R says:
November 1, 2013 at 10:11 pm
The program you remember likely was about ergot fungi in grain, and the bad reaction, called “ergotism,” that eating such grain causes. Because it messes up both circulation and nerves, it can cause poor people who eat bad flour to hallucinate, twitch, convulse, and get gangrene in their hands and feet. Some suggest it explains the odd phenomenon of “St Vitus Dance” in medieval societies, though there is a lot of debate about such a connection.
Greg Goodman says:
November 2, 2013 at 12:38 am
Current assumptions about human emissions are deliberately naive.
Human emissions are about twice the observed increase in the atmosphere and twice the year-by-year variability in CO2 rate of change. Thus it is far from naive to expect that humans are responsible for the observed increase and that nature (especially ocean temperatures) is responsible for the variability in increase rate (or more accurate: the variability in sink rate):
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/dco2_em2.jpg