Friday Funny – Svalbard Revisited

I guess they best release some of that pent-up Svalbard CO2.

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.

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.

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 :” 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.

The OHC graph is interesting. It is becoming clearer that 2005/2006 was the turning point.

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?

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

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.

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

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

lgl says:
Greg. Wow, you even beat me in finding correlations which is not there 🙂
So you are saying there is no correlation between 1972 and 2000 between SST and dCO2 ?
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=233
Or from 1994 onwards in AO ? Even the detail from 2002-2007 matches. Hardly coincidence it would seem.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=259

http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.fr/2012/03/co2-outgassing-model.html

Weather stations at airports are designed to give you information for flight movements and out of the airports . They were never intended to provide proof for a wider area , that as come about because you might as well us them because they exist . As such the ‘problems ‘ with their sitting never used to matter before the need for ‘settled science’ in this most unsettled of areas , weather prediction.

Fig 6 If the summer temp change is 0.8°/100 yrs and the winter temp change is -0.1°/100 yrs and the annual temp change is +1.4°/100 yrs, what do spring and fall look like? Certainly >>1.4°/100 yrs or is something else going on here?

Caleb says:November 2, 2013 at 2:32 am
I remember it as St. Augustine’s Fire, a book, describing rye ergot and its effects on Medieval villages. It has lysergic acid, and was used by Hoffman for the first LSD synthesis.

Greg Goodman says:
November 2, 2013 at 3:14 am
Ferdi, the corollary of recognising the effect of temp on sink rate is that without human emissions there would also be out gassing. The equilibrium atm CO2 level would be higher and oceans would out-gas to meet this level.
Agreed, but as the Vostok (and recently Dome C) data show over the past 420 (800) kyears, the new equilibrium will shift with not more than 8 ppmv/K temperature difference.
The increase in pCO2 in the oceans according to Henry’s law is near-linear (an error of 2% over 1 K) for about 16 microatm/K. That gives an increase of outgassing and a decrease in uptake. A similar increase of pCO2 in the atmosphere will bring that again in equilibrium. That the real equilibrium is lower, probably is a matter of vegetation which sink rate in general increases with temperature.
Thus of the 100 ppmv increase in the atmosphere since about 1850 (70 ppmv since Mauna Loa started), maximum 16 ppmv (Henry’s law) or 8 ppmv (Vostok) is from the 1 K temperature increase since the LIA…

AMO is not mentioned-Why?

The Stevenson screen seems to be ideally suited to give the micro-climate for the runway, which is good and necessary for the pilots to do their calculations, but to give the climate apart from the runway there must be another screen somewhere. No? We may have a problem here.

Interesting trivia—according to wiki, the ‘Stevenson screen” is named after Thomas Stevenson, who was the father of Robert Louis Stevenson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson_screen

Coming out of heated structure not a problem, going in, problem. A case keeps moist warmer inside air off a cold gun, for a while at least. Outside, if the fog is not an ice fog and temp is below freezing, then you have the possibility of fog freezing on the cold metal parts of the gun. Case keeps the fog moisture away from the cold gun.

Paul Coppin says:
“All bears are stalkers if the terrain dictates it”
Not polar bears. Actually they hardly hunt at all during the summer season, though they will opportunistically take any food that presents itself and is easy to catch (e. g. garbage cans). If they did hunt on land Svalbard wouldn’t have those peculiar, slow “dachshund reindeer”. Also they are utterly unafraid of humans and will usually approach quite openly. Stalking isn’t really that easy in the very open landscape in Svalbard in any case (no vegetation taller than a centimetre or two, and very little cover of any kind).
Actually You carry a rifle on Svalbard mostly in order to be able to scare off Polar Bears by the bang, As a matter of fact if You use it to kill a bear you had better be able to prove that you had taken all reasonable precautions, and was directly threatened by an attacking bear, or You will be in big trouble with the authorities. If You are a Tourist Guide you might have Your license revoked, since you are not supposed to get yourself into a situation where you have to use the gun.
All the above is based on field experience in Svalbard.

th Hey Paul. That’s great commentary about guns and bears.
“… shot placement at distance…” No lie. Shot placement is always key, but if that bear’s close enough to get to you before his system shuts down… I’d personally prefer a rifle with a little thicker bullet- like a .338 Winchester- or bigger. The Inuit are likely tuned in enough that they won’t let a bear get too close before they act.
There’s a lovely description in Jim Corbett’s books about hunting man-eating tigers in colonial India of an instance where he was armed with a comparatively light hunting rifle (but still, a real hunting rifle) and by chance found himself directly in the path of the tiger he was hunting as it came, unawares, up a hillside. He positioned himself in prone position and shot the tiger just under an eye as its head emerged over the rim of the ridge in front of him at point blank range. He then sat, frozen, while the tiger proceeded to roar and tear up every bit of the shrubbery around him for some twenty minutes without quite finding him (in plain sight). Corbett found bloody tiger brains and a piece of skull — his bullet passed directly through the tiger’s brain.
Some months later, he finally managed to shoot this particular animal (with a heavier rifle) and discovered that the tiger’s skull was actually healing. A more perfect placement than a point-blank head shot is difficult to imagine, but large animals often have a startling vitality and can sometimes live and move for minutes and run for hundreds of meters after being shot in the heart even with a large caliber bullet. I’ve shot deer perfectly through the heart with a 12 gauge deer slug (some 2-3 times the mass of a typical 30-06 bullet, diameter approximately 3/4 inch) — at comparatively close range, only to watch the deer I just shot run for a quarter mile over a minute before dropping. Large bears — and a polar bear or grizzly bear are very large bears — could close the distance to you and tear you apart three times over before dropping, even if shot through the heart. There are numerous stories out there of people who were treed by grizzly bears and armed with a .45 caliber handgun who shot the bear repeatedly at point blank range as the bear climbed the tree after them to try to tear them apart.
So sure, you can go polar bear hunting with a .22 rifle, and if you are a near-perfect shot, cool under fire, and manage to put enough bullets through the bear’s brain (or just get lucky shooting it elsewhere) you might even survive. Personally, I’d rather go skydiving, bungy-jumping, free-swimming with great white sharks, or work as a crash test dummy — your chances of survival would likely be higher (although you might well SCARE OFF a bear by firing the rifle NEAR the bear and not actually hurting it). If I were to hunt a polar bear, a 30-06 with a 220 grain soft-nosed bullet would be the SMALLEST gun I would consider and I’d take great comfort in using e.g. a 375 H&H magnum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.375_Holland_%26_Holland_Magnum
with a nice, big 300 grain silvertip bullet. This is a rifle that one could actually use for elephant or rhino hunting (NOT as a first choice, still too light) but as the article says:
“African game guides, professional hunters, and dangerous game cullers have repeatedly voted the .375 H&H as their clear preference for an all-round caliber if they could only have one rifle. A similar preference has been expressed by Alaskan game guides for brown bear and polar bear country.”
With a 375, there is a pretty good chance of putting down a charging bear with one shot. You probably won’t have time for a second one. And it won’t do you the slightest bit of good to carry your rifle with you into the field in its case, BTW — it would need to be loaded, shell in the chamber (on safety) and handy enough to be able to bring it to bear (so to speak) within the 10 or 20 seconds you are likely to have if the bear decides you are prey or a threat when you walk up on it unawares. What you do about mittens vs gloves, freezing fingers sticking to subzero triggers, brittleness, I have no idea. My idea of a good time isn’t to shoot bears (or do anything else) under seriously cold, snowy conditions.
rgb

@rgb “My idea of a good time isn’t to shoot bears (or do anything else) under seriously cold, snowy conditions”
__________________________
The upside is that it’s very much easier to skid the carcass off the terrain on ice and snow then to drag it through the weeds… 🙂 That and the rum toddies post-hunt are particularly nice after a cold day…
.

Steinar Midtskogen says:
November 2, 2013 at 12:24 am

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.
APU exhaust
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcjeff/59634235/
I’ve worked at YYZ for over three decades and have learned how far APU exhaust can be felt downwind.

Yup. No one, ever, has managed to use a pistol against a charging bear.
http://www.fieldandstream.com/photos/gallery/survival/animal-attacks/2009/08/charging-grizzly-killed-alaska
Any attempt to do so is utmost foolishness and pure “Mall Ninja’ness”.
Do I want to attempt it with a handgun? No. Would I rather have a handgun then a rifle? That depends on the rifle, the caliber and how it (the rifle) is carried.
File the front sight off so the “Bear can stick it…” Well it takes all kinds I guess and as my Daddy used to say “Different strokes for different folks” I guess. But if you are into that sort of thing…. Well just go ahead and confess. “You’re not really here for the hunting, are you?”

Stephen Skinner says:
“It appears quite obvious from this article that the runway tarmac has caused the underlying permafrost to melt and yet seems to completely miss that point and return to the main AGW meme about climate change causing perma frost to melt.”
The underlying permafrost melts every year, tarmac or not, but only the very top layer. If you accept that AGW will increase the temperature by 7C and having it stay there, the annual temperature will rise above 0C and the permafrost will melt all the way down eventually, so that’s at least consistent reasoning.
clipe says:
“I’ve worked at YYZ for over three decades and have learned how far APU exhaust can be felt downwind.”
We’re speaking og 100m here or more. And this is a cold place. The hot air will quickly rise. Any effects will be several order of magnitudes less than instrument error.
I’ve lost count how many times I’ve been to Svalbard airport, in different seasons, and I’m very sure that this exhaust is a non-existing problem. Could the tarmac influence the readings? Much more likely, but even that is not really a problem. Consider that temperatures vary a lot here. Monthly means departing from the normal by more than 10C are not unheard of, and natural 30y climate variations make up several degrees as well, so tiny errors do not change the big picture. But different microclimates change temperatures by several degrees as well, so homogenisation in order to get pre 1975 data is the real challenge.

To add to the drop in Norway’s grain harvest and its partial attribution to climate cooling, there are now reports in the MSM including the BBC about a significant global wine shortage. Even the AGW-leaning BBC attributes part of this shortage to poor weather, in particular frosts at inappropriate times. Serious and economically significant frost damage to grapes and many other fruits are reported in Europe, South America and Australia.

If you run Google Earth on Svalbard Airport, and look at the aircraft traffic management capability of the airport, proximity of taxiways and apron parking, there is no way the site can’t be affected. One apron taxiway is within 100m +/- of the screen( the one in the picture above), and worse, the screen is at an end where aircraft would enter the runway then do a 180 for take off. The hangar apron is directly upwind of one end of the runway, and directly upwind of the screen.

@Alfred Ledner I don’t think anybody here is saying bear haven’t been taken down with a handgun (and I’ve tried to keep the defense perspective, not a handgun hunting perspective, which is a different thing). What we have been saying is that a handgun as a defensive weapon against bear is not an optimal choice. Your point about the type of rifle is certainly valid. The example you provided from Field and Stream is questionable evidence at best however. That bear. while big, was acknowledged as sickly, “400 lb underweight”, and starving. Motive, but diminished opportunity… While the bear very likely had the intention of dinner, he was not in the best fighting trim. The guy who shot it knows he was lucky. For a whole bunch of reasons, that day could have turned out very differently. Had the bear been in better trim with more fat on, had the shooter not hit the bear as well on his second shot, it very likely would have had a different outcome.

That was “a woman”, not several women…

Alan Robertson says:
November 2, 2013 at 3:08 pm
I agree entirely with your ammo discussion, although maybe I did not know that 50 years ago. I do remember my dad thought I should have a 270.
Caleb at 3:57
“Gosh, I never knew the fellows that comment here are such scaredy cats.
I’m now carrying a camera with a VR (vibration reduction) lens. I use a photo of a black bear (the Cinnamon type) when posting on some sites. (Jo Nova’s is one such.) I didn’t think a “dirty look” would help so I just took pictures.

FWTW, I just did a frequency analysis on the daily data from Svalbard lufthavn since 1975 and there is a very small peak at 7days.
It is well buried in the noise and far from being “statistically significant” amid the weather ‘noise’ but there is a tiny bump.
I figured that if there was a traffic based signal it would likely have a weekly component. (Probably a drop in activity at w/e).

RE: Barry Cullen says:
November 2, 2013 at 3:45 am
“Fig 6 If the summer temp change is 0.8°/100 yrs and the winter temp change is -0.1°/100 yrs and the annual temp change is +1.4°/100 yrs, what do spring and fall look like? Certainly >>1.4°/100 yrs or is something else going on here?”
————-
Spring shows +3.7C/ 100 yrs and fall +1.2 C/ 100 yr. Link to the paper below.
We used the normal definition of spring as MAM, but Mach and April are really winter months at Svalbard. The fjord at Longyearbyen may freeze as lata as April. Some year it does not freeze at all, and then the “spring” temperature becomes higher.
——————
RE: Phil. says:
November 2, 2013 at 7:00 am
“As Figure 4 shows, the average winter temperature over Solar Cycle 24 will be 6.0ºC colder than that over Solar Cycle 23.
Please, Fig 4 shows nothing of the sort, if anything it shows a rising trend, the authors have added their guess onto the graph which is 6ºC colder than the present average, that’s all.
In fact when I went to that paper the graph looks different and the extra points aren’t there! How about an actual link to the paper/figure because something’s not right!”
—–
The paper can be downloaded here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/nso7w8tz3nkrya2/111129Svalbard%20solflekk%20temperatur.pdf
The figure shown by David (above) is correct. If you read the paper you will see that we found autocorrelations in the residuals for the spring, summer and fall temperatures. We could therefore make a forecast on the 95% level ONLY for the winter and year temperatures. The extra points (diamonds with bars) are forecasts with a 95% confidence interval.
Grain production in Norway:
A message from the Norwegian Agricultural Authority (www.slf.dep.no) can be translated to the following:
“The Norwegian grain production (in 2013) will be only 913 000 ton, the lowest since 1976…..in addition to reduced areas, the wet and cold spring in 2013 damaged large areas, which could not be seeded.”

D. Patterson says:
November 3, 2013 at 8:03 am
The Mauna Loa measurements are garbage for a variety of reasons, including the improper smoothing of the data just to mention one reason.
One can only hope that one day the temperature measurements are as rigorously calibrated and controlled as the CO2 measurements are. See:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/about/co2_measurements.html
And the raw data (calculated hourly averages from the instrument voltage measurements) still are available at:
ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/
if you want to perform your own “proper” smoothing, which BTW doesn’t give a difference in average or trend over a year of more than 0.1 ppmv:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/co2_mlo_spo_raw_select_2008.jpg
Before 1960, we have the Law Dome ice cores over the past 150 years with a resolution of a decade and an overlap of 20 years with the South Pole data:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_sp_co2.jpg
and
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/klim_img/law_dome_co2.jpg

D. Patterson says:
November 3, 2013 at 12:38 pm
If you believe that CO2 did migrate through cracks in the ice from inside the ice at 180-280 ppmv towards the outside where one can find 380 and more ppmv CO2, then you may believe the late Jaworowski’s findings. I don’t, therefore I do take all what he said with a grain of salt:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/jaworowski.html
And historical data are as accurate as the local variability shows: a high variability means a lot of local sources/sinks at work, thus completely unsuitable to show what the “background” data in the rest of the atmosphere were. Historical data taken over the oceans and coastal with wind from the sea show also today less variability and were around the ice core data. See the reflection of years of discussion with the late Ernst Beck:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html
One must be skeptical about any scientific claim, until proven and reproduced. The Mauna Loa data are reproduced by 10 (NOAA) baseline stations from near the North Pole (Alert, Canada) to the South Pole. And 70 other stations maintained by other organisations and countries. This is rock solid science.
Rejecting the data only because you don’t like them makes your other claims equally unbelievable.

D. Patterson says:
November 3, 2013 at 6:26 pm
Maybe we have been there in the past, but my memory isn’t that good anymore.
About ice cores: if the ice cores show measurements between 180-280 ppmv and the atmosphere is at 380-400 ppmv between the moment of drilling and the moment of measurement, then there was and is no migration from low levels to high levels. Jaworowski said it does. Jaworowski said that there is no difference between the age of the ice and the average age of the exclosed air. That simply is impossible (except for remelt layers). For me Jaworowski is exit. Let him rest in peace, together with his ideas.
Contamination of ice with dust and bacteria happens. In general IF there is contamination and IF there is sufficient foodstuf, more CO2 will be released. But the CO2 levels are too low, according to some skeptics. Some extremophylic bacteria may survive hundredthousands of years at -40°C, but not more than that, by repairing damage on their DNA by using CO2 as carbon source and nitrogen compounds as energy source. If we take all of the N2O levels as all been used to remove CO2 as building block, that gives a CO2 “depletion” of less than 1 ppmv over 140 kyr… See item K at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/101/13/4631.full.pdf
Biological life is a matter of temperature and availability of nutritritients. Both lack in Antarctic ice cores. Coastal cores with less cold temperatures and more dust deposits show the same CO2 values as the inland cores for the same average gas age. It would be extremely difficult for bacteria to give the same result in ice cores with largely different conditions.
As Dr. Tim Ball and his sources have observed and demonstrated in their own scientific publications and U.S. Senate testimony, the carbon dioxide data has been deliberately corrupted.
I don’t know where Dr Tim Ball has found the 600 ppmv measured at Mauna Loa. Most of the variability is at +4 ppmv when the wind blows downslope from the volcanic vents and -4 ppmv when the wind is upslope in the afternoon. It doesn’t make one damn difference if you include or exclude these outliers for the average or the trend. As said before, all raw data, hourly averages + their standard deviation are available on line at ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/in-situ/mlo/ and that since since 1974. Before 1974 the CO2 levels were calculated by hand, from long analog paper data logs. Thus I would like to see the source of the “600 ppmv” and the high variability of CO2 in the upper air (a reference to the right page would be nice). You are insulting hundreds of people working at a lot of institutes and countries by saying that they corrupt their data without a shred of evidence.
Nothing like finding volcanoes underneath the ice
The nearest volcano from the South Pole is over 1000 km away. The winds in general blow away from the South Pole. If there were ice cores taken near the volcano, that might have influenced the local measurements for the duration of the eruption and a few decades later, but that would be noticed as peaks, not seen in other ice cores.
when we can see full well these other stations are not located in the Central Pacific Ocean atop an outgassing volcano at several thousand feet of altitude?
Some kind of illogical thinking here: If one finds the same CO2 levels (within a few ppmv averaged over a year), despite volcanoes, altitude, latitude, temperature, rain, pressure,… then all these other variables are of not the slightest influence on the measurements. Thus the CO2 levels worldwide are within very thight limits. The only exception is on land near huge sources and sinks. That is where most of the historical data were taken and therefore these have not the slightest value for estimates of the past CO2 levels (as good as stomata data give similar problems over centuries of land management).
Reproduction of results is much easier when the data is managed or cherry picked to produce a desired result using questionable data selection and adjustments
Again, you are insulting people who’s only aim is to produce the best “background” CO2 data available. If you have any proof that their method gives different results than simply using all available data including the outliers, only then you may be right.
On the contrary, it is up to you to demonstrate how it is possible for your “belief” in such data can meet or exceed the requirements for completeness, accuracy, and applicability for the hypothesis you are arguing, and you have failed to do so.
I have read the arguments of both sides and found the arguments of the late Ernst Beck too light and of the late Jaworowski outright wrong, even the opposite of what he claimed. If Dr Tim Ball still want to use their arguments, then he makes the rest of his argumentation as unbelievable as these from his sources.
And as I am a real skeptic (that is: to both sides), I have asked for a few days of the MLO instrument voltage readings to see if their calculation of the hourly average CO2 level is performing as they claim. If you want, you may repeat that, simply ask for the data to Dr. Pieter Tans of NOAA. Or have a look at one hour of measurements:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/mlo_raw_v_2006_11_17_18.xls

During WW2, the Svalbard islands and the surrounding seas were the theatre of some really fierce fighting between the Allies and the Nazis, with commando raids to destroy the coal mines (occupied by the Nazis following the fall of the Norwegian government in the summer of 1940), and the struggle of Allied convoys en route toward Murmansk to bring supplies to the Soviet Union.
So, digging in military and historical records, one should be able to found some detailed data on weather during almost 5 years of war, during a period (1940 – 45) affected by some “transition” between the ’30s warm period ant the post-WW2 cooling….
Not to mention the following 45 years of the Cold War, with a lot of weather stations installed near NATO and PoW military bases in the Arctic….
Just my 2 cents…

I had an opportunity to visit Spitsbergen (Svalbard), Norway this summer. Our ship stopped at both Longyearbyen and Ny Alesund. I could not get to the weather station at the airport outside Longyearbyen (note main article), but I was able to see the weather station in Ny Alesund. The Longyearbyen airport is located 3.5 km NW of the city on an open ridge. The Stevenson screen in Ny Alesund was bordered on three sides by a gravel road. The Post Office was on the north side. The screen was in an open field with only a few other instruments near by. I was unable to find anyone who knew anything about the weather station during the short stay in Ny Alesund. I have pictures of the station from several different directions if anyone would like copies in jpeg format [bshemingway at gmail.com]. Ny Alesund is located on the south coast of Kongsfjorden, west of the Krone Glacier. It is mainly a research station located at 78d 55m N 11d 56m E (d=degrees, m=minutes). There are only a few people who live in Ny Alesund year-round. The main source of man-made heat that could impact the station is from steam that is transported from the local power plant by one foot in diameter pipes to the buildings in the town. None of these pipes is close to the weather station.