New paper using Oxygen 18 isotope tracking finds the Arctic temperatures peaked before 1950, and have been stable to declining since. Natural variability is cited as the cause.
A new paper published in Climate of the Past reconstructs temperatures over the past 1100 years from Eastern Arctic ice cores. The dating was done by Oxygen 18 isotope dating and the O18 data shows the highest Eastern Arctic temperatures of the 20th century occurred in the 1920’s-1940’s. The data shows that after that peak, there was a cooling or a warming ‘pause’ over the remainder of the 20th century.
The peak in the 1920’s likely explains this classic WUWT post showing observations from 1922:
The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
The Hockey Schtick writes:
Fig. 5a below shows a double peak in O18 proxy temperatures in the 1920’s and 1940’s followed by cooling to the ice age scare of the 1970’s, and temperatures in 2000 below those of the peaks in the 1920’s-1940’s. Five compilations of meteorological data of the Eastern Arctic in Fig 5b show good agreement to the proxy data.
This is the opposite pattern to what would be expected if man-made greenhouse gases were the cause, as even alarmists claim the increase in greenhouse gases has only had a significant effect since 1950. Instead, this new paper demonstrates Eastern Arctic temperatures peaked in the early 20th century, followed by a declining trend to the end of the record in 2000.
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Of course, just like the surface temperature record, the long term trend is up, but clearly there is also a pause since the double peak, and that’s hard to explain in the face of a linear increase of (some claim exponential) GHG emissions.
The paper:
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Proxy temperature reconstruction from the paper in graph A, followed by other meteorological data and compilations of the Eastern Arctic.
doi:10.5194/cp-9-2379-2013
T. Opel, D. Fritzsche, and H. Meyer
Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Research Unit Potsdam, Telegrafenberg A43, 14473 Potsdam, Germany
Abstract:
Understanding recent Arctic climate change requires detailed information on past changes, in particular on a regional scale. The extension of the depth–age relation of the Akademii Nauk (AN) ice core from Severnaya Zemlya (SZ) to the last 1100 yr provides new perspectives on past climate fluctuations in the Barents and Kara seas region. Here, we present the easternmost high-resolution ice-core climate proxy records (δ18O and sodium) from the Arctic. Multi-annual AN δ18O data as near-surface air-temperature proxies reveal major temperature changes over the last millennium, including the absolute minimum around 1800 and the unprecedented warming to a double-peak maximum in the early 20th century. The long-term cooling trend in δ18O is related to a decline in summer insolation but also to the growth of the AN ice cap as indicated by decreasing sodium concentrations. Neither a pronounced Medieval Climate Anomaly nor a Little Ice Age are detectable in the AN δ18O record. In contrast, there is evidence of several abrupt warming and cooling events, such as in the 15th and 16th centuries, partly accompanied by corresponding changes in sodium concentrations. These abrupt changes are assumed to be related to sea-ice cover variability in the Barents and Kara seas region, which might be caused by shifts in atmospheric circulation patterns. Our results indicate a significant impact of internal [natural] climate variability on Arctic climate change in the last millennium.
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[Note: this original post was written during my workday and making a comparison to the Cowtan and Way paper, and like sometimes happens during my day, I got interrupted, and then got off on a tangent that wasn’t correct. To correct my mistake, I’ve republished this post sans that tangent. Later I’ll get back to my original idea when I have more time. – Anthony]
Undoubtedly those spikes in the 1920’s and late 1930’s to early 1940’s:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/1d09a-arcticreconstruction.jpg
had strong and/or lengthy negative NAO episodes:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/historical/north_atlantic/nao_mon.txt
That graph unfortunately ends in 1998, whereas we can safely assume that Arctic amplification and surface air temperature rate acceleration kicked in after that.
REPLY: simply because you say it does? Show/prove it “Gunther” – Anthony
This paper is devastating to the whole AGW issue. Instead of seeing a rise, we now have a 60+ year pause, at least in the Arctic which is supposed to be the canary in the AGW coal mine. The pause is easily twice as long as any increase that caused the kerfuffle in the first place. In simple terms, there is no there there. We have a planet ignoring the carbon based units that inhabit it.
Here is temperature data from the region discussed in the paper up to present: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/locations/71.53N-70.99E
Note what happens after 2000 (not shown in the graph in the paper).
REPLY: on your linked page it says for that location:
Weather Stations within 100 km
Active Stations: 0
Former Stations: 1
and
Weather Stations within 500 km
Active Stations: 10
Former Stations: 19
So my question is, how much of the recent data is from active stations, and when did the loss of stations occur? What may be happening is that the stations that are left have a warm bias. – Anthony
Anthony,
The paper you are citing uses two individual station records for its validation. If you look at the whole arctic record (the bottom panel in the figure), its not particularly controversial.
If you want more stations, look at larger regions.
Here is the whole Arkhangel region (167 active, 145 former): http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/arkhangel'sk
Or the nearby Yamal region (6 active, 3 former, 50 within 500 km): http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/yamal-nenets
Or Svalbard region: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/svalbard-and-jan-mayen
Or northern Greenland: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/locations/82.79N-32.14W
Pretty much anywhere you look in the arctic, the land warming post-2000 is pretty remarkable.
REPLY: Still, I’d like to know what individual station records are active and which ones are not – and when. One thing I’ve noted studying Arctic stations is that they all tend to be isolated pockets of humanity, which require warmth. Warmth that of course becomes local waste heat. Do you have a mechanism to show what records make up your regionalized temperature potpourri and when they were made inactive? – Anthony
And it looks like my original post on this article has disappeared, wish I could remember what I said – lol.
You mean this one Zeke?
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/22177
May be an outlier there but the data sure looks spotty in recent years. What is the “Expected Monthly Means” and “Regional Expectation”? How do you ‘expect’ a temperature or is this expecting a trend and that is the difference?
Dawson City, Yukon.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/share/clip?f=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427em6otjnrlk
Zeke Hausfather, yeah, right, so probably the current warm period in the arctic is a little warmer than the one in the early 20th century. But that pesky early 20th century Arctic warming is nevertheless a huge problem for those that desperately want the Arctic to be the canary in the AGW mine. Like, for instance, Tamino, who got so p***ed that he black listed me permanently when I used that warm period to question his toying around with Bayes theorem here.
Then here I go again. 🙂
Warmists tend to like avoiding the fact that Arctic sea ice also ‘reacts’ with water temperature, wind / currents. You’d think it’s like Bali up there. 🙂
Here are a few more examples from the 1920s to 1940s showing how the time travelling co2 villain had caused such man made havoc on our steady Arctic temps.
It’s unprecedented and worse than we thought!
“Of course, just like the surface temperature record, the long term trend is up, but clearly there is also a pause since the double peak, and that’s hard to explain in the face of a linear increase of (some claim exponential) GHG emissions.”
The authors say that a lot of this was local:
“In the AN δ18O record, the ETCW exhibits a double-peak shape with two distinct maxima 10 around 1921/1922 and 1937/1938 (Fig. 4), indicating two major warming pulses. This specific ETCW pattern and particularly the strong warming around 1920 are to our knowledge only detected in very few regional SAT time series (i.e. Svalbard, Vardø and Archangelsk; Fig. 4) and represent, thus, a peculiarity of the Barents and Kara seas region. AN ice core maximum δ18O values during the ETCW were not reached again in the 20th century and, moreover, represent the highest of the entire AN ice core record.
The core was drilled 1999-2001, so there’s not much coverage of recent warming.
Neither a pronounced Medieval Climate Anomaly nor a Little Ice Age are detectable
I really hate the phrase Medieval Climate Anomaly.
@Ric Werme
The Medieval climate anomaly was a strongly colder deviation from the 8000 year long term cooling trend so it is probably correct to call it anomalous. We are very lucky it didn’t stay down.
Seek
According to Phil jones the two warmest consecutive decades in Greenland were the 1930’s and 1940’s.
It will be 2020 before we know whether the current warming is just a flash in the pan or something more significant.
Tonyb
Using the term “Medieval Climate Anomaly” is an attempt by the warmist crowd to belittle the impact of sever hundred years when the climate was warmer than it is today. Using the term “anomaly” implies a brief, transient event — something not really worth mentioning.
From now on Nick Stokes will leave LOCAL papers and go with only global. Will you do this Nick??? PS tell your Warmists to do the same please and leave weather events like the Phillipnes typhoon alone. Can you do this? I could go on but I hope you see the problem you have created for yourself? Now look below. Now wash your hands, they are red due to cherry stains.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/19/new-paper-arctic-temperatures-peaked-before-1950-declining-since/#comment-1479428
But what about Greenland? It really is worse than we thought.. Can it get any worse than this? We must act now!!!!
And here goes the last presumed hotspot, after Antartic and tropical troposhere never showed any ambition of warming as projected.
Climate models now do not only fail quantitatively but also qualitatively – and everywhere.
” In the recent past, however, a major warming event in Icelandic and Greenland waters between 1920 and 1940 was extensively documented (e.g. Sæmundsson, 1932; Ahlmann, 1948; Lysgaard, 1948).”
From http://icesjms.oxfordjournals.org/content/62/7/1360.full
I once asked Dana from the Guardian whether we would still be in the Little Ice Age if it was not for man – he basically said YES?!!!!
Think about it: The River Thames freezing over multiple times, death and famine, failed harvest, huge storms etc. Yet we have never had it so good. Why is it that co2 is always a heathen gas? Why do most plants hate the stuff? Why does it cause toxic greening in our biosphere? Why is the climate so normal? Can someone help me please?
This warming certainly agrees with the recollections of a retired Russian Arctic ice pilot I interviewed aboard an icebreaker some time ago. They hopefully thought it would continue, but then the cold set in again. Just one of many reasons for “skepticism”.
The double peak in temperature history (far more than arctic alone) is also seen in other data including instrumental readings when such haven’t been heavily rewritten/”adjusted,” as in http://img176.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=81829_expanded_overview_122_424lo.jpg . If done right and honestly, proxy reconstructions are one way to get past rewriting of data, like a tree ring one extending up through the entire 20th century (instead of cutting off part-way) likewise matched the actual double-peak history.
What should be top priority is the investigation into what is causing such amplified warming in the Arctic. Answering that question should be able provide some help in separating recent natural warming from man made warming.
Geothermal heat? Ocean currents? I mentioned black carbon/soot in a previous post as a possibility for recent warming but that was not a factor before 1950.
Changes in the earth’s magnetic poles/fields?
It is crystal clear that strong regional warming has been happening(with pauses) dating back well before CO2 was high enough to be a factor. This effect, focused uniquely, regionally and with changes/pauses? that are timed/caused by an unknown force(s), should allow us to eventually pinpoint the source/cause.
Really why do we care what the artic does? It is mostly sea ice which will have little effect on sea levels regardless of the state it is in. With less ice, navigation will become easier and less risky.
It really is not important enough to waste any time or resources on.
I’ve been to a few rodeos now and I think the dO18 isotope proxy is the only reliable temperature proxy there is.
Forget the tree rings, the coral rings, some other chemistry-based proxies – dO18 is reasonably accurate on very short timelines, medium-term timelines and way, way back into the deep, deep history of Earth’s climate. Having said that, it is also need to be converted to temperature using the proper local-based formula. Too often, the formula for mid-latitude oceans or the global average is used by “climate scientists” to distort the history but there are definitive local situation formula.
And I say, forget Berkeley Earth. Their method is flawed and you can compare BEST’s data to some station you know is accurate and BEST is way off in terms of the overall trends over time. They might get the short-term up and downs right, but then there is a breakpoint that changes the negative trend or some oscillation into a large rising trend. Theory versus reality and I think there is upward trend bias built-in.
The Arctic does appear to be warmer in the 1920s and 1940s. There were few stations back then (and the NCDC and GISS have distorted the data in the current databases) so it is not as recognized as it should be. It cooled off from 1950 to the late 1970s as well.
Did the Inuit invent kayaks and whaling boats and travel up and down the Northwest Passage and make it to Greenland or not. Obviously they did. The conditions could not have been much colder than today if you go back 1,000 years for example or there would be no such thing as a kayak. Prima Facie.
Nick Stokes writes “The authors say that a lot of this was local”
And yet the assumption is that there are minimal “local effects” and that its valid to smear the recent warming completely over the Arctic region. At the end of the day if we have no measurements then we have no measurements. We can do stuff like hybrid kridging to have a guess…but its a guess. Its not scientific evidence. Just like models are a guess and not scientific evidence.
When did we move away from actual science? When did we move away from proper reproducible facts representing science and hypotheses being posibilities… to hypotheses being “facts” ?
It used to be that hypotheses were the starting points. Now they’re becoming the endpoints.
We shouldn’t be building science on layers of hypotheses.
There several other studies to support the conclusion Arctic temperatures have not risen since the 50s.
The greatest loss of Arctic sea ice has been due to warm water intrusions in the Barents and Kara (Figure 1 http://landscapesandcycles.net/antarctic-sea-ice–climate-change-indicator.html)
The behavior of the glaciers on islands in that region provide further support to this paper’s conclusion of no warming since the 50s. Researchers wrote, “Recession of tidewater calving glaciers on north Novaya Zemlya in the first half of the twentieth century was relatively rapid (.300 m yr-1), consistent with post-‘Little Ice Age’ warming documented by a 122-year instrumental record from Malye Karmakuly. The glaciers completed 75 to 100% of the net twentieth-century retreat by 1952. Between1964 and 1993 half of the studied glaciers were stable; the remainder retreated modest distances of ,2.5 km.” read 796. Zeeberg, J. and Forman, S. (2001) Changes in glacier extent on north Novaya Zemlya in the twentieth century. The Holocene, vol 11, p. 161–175.
Tree ring and instrumental data from northern Scandinavia are also in agreement with the warmest peaks in 40s.
http://landscapesandcycles.net/image/78022663_scaled_680x593.png
read Esper, J. et al. (2012) Variability and extremes of northern Scandinavian summer temperatures over the past two millennia. Global and Planetary Change 88–89 (2012) 1–9.
Much of any warming is due to ventilation of heat from ice free waters. HOwever over ice covered western Arctic Ocean and based 27000 dropsondes and drifting Russian ice stations researchers reported “In particular, we do not observe the large surface warming trends predicted by models; indeed, we detect significant surface cooling trends over the western Arctic Ocean during winter and autumn. actually showed a cooling trend in the 80s and 90s” Kahl, J., et al., (1993) Absence of evidence for greenhouse warming over the Arctic Ocean in the past 40 years. Nature 361, 335 – 337.
Not much observational data to support warming since the 50s!
Excuse typo. The phrase “actually showed a cooling trend in the 80s and 90s” is mistakenly inside the quotes and was not intended to be there and not part of the author’s quote.
Maybe the present Arctic conditions are not quite so “unprecedented” after all? Looks like they may need a virtual Thor’s hammer to flatten out (adjust) that pesky 1920s-1940s warm period from the proxy record.
With Christmas music already playing on the radios now, I hear “White Christmas”. When I read this, perhaps the song could be proxy for 1940’s too.
According to Dr Otto Pettersson quoted by Rachel Carson in the very last part of her book…The living sea…..’in 1919 the coal shipping season from the west spitzbergen ports increased from 3 to 7 months’….a fairly dramatic change
Since Rachel Carson’s book is full of junk science
and since 1919 coincides with the end of WWI (which may have: 1) made shipping lanes safer; 2) freed up ships for freight) here is a more reliable source for the same info. (nicely cited by Gopal Panicker at 8:02pm today):
Dr. Ole Humlum in “A Geographical-Historical Outline of Svalbard” here:
http://www.unis.no/35_STAFF/staff_webpages/geology/ole_humlum/SvalbardOutline.htm
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Not that your post wasn’t likely correct, Gopal Panicker (is that your real name, btw? — I haven’t encountered it before; just wondering — lol, whenever I see your name, I always think “Global Panic-er” and think for half a second you’re a hysterical pro-AGW person), just that Rachel Carson was SUCH a moron that I wanted to back up your good assertion with a more reliable source. My quick search using Bing did not find that Dr. Pettersson quote anywhere else or I would have cited that source (if it had been a reliable source), here.
This paper is devastating to the whole AGW issue. … We have a planet ignoring the carbon based units that inhabit it.
(Phil Jourdan at 12:52pm on 11/19/13)
Hear, hear! That bore repeating boldly! #(:))
I expect my following comment to be cut, but I am sick of the way the alarmists seem to be able to allow themselves to use whatever dodgy fraudulent adjustment, cherry picking of dates and data torturing technique that they see fit to support their repeatedly falsified hypothesis, and yet, unjustifiably still be taken somewhat seriously as scientists.
In short and to be very crude, If I measured my penis the way climate alarmists measure global temperatures, I could claim to have a 15 inch long monster between my legs.
They are flat out lying.
Memory aid: install Lazarus add-on, and set the retention periods to a nice long stretch (I use 100s of weeks for temp files). You will never lose or ‘forget’ a post again. Saves every entry in real time as you type.
“Climate Science” 101, if history conflicts with the computer model; erase history.
Trust us, we are scientists.
What price “lukewarming” now?
Ken Hall says (November 20, 2013 at 2:58 am): “In short and to be very crude, If I measured my penis the way climate alarmists measure global temperatures, I could claim to have a 15 inch long monster between my legs.”
Big deal. If “climate alarmists” measured Angelina Jolie, they’d get the same result.
The 1922 Spitsbergen event has been shown to be localized.
http://www.globalcoral.org/LONG%20TERM%20ARCTIC%20ICE%20TRENDS%20AND%20GLOBAL%20WARMING.1.pdf
Your guru looks like the Unabomber. He thinks like him, too. He’s a notorious alarmist.
What you should probably do is get out a paper or maybe open paint, and sketch the properties of the reflective insulation that deflected a fifth energy away from sensors on a planet,
and making the temp rise.
When you’re done with that sketch out for yourself how, with that 20% E in missing,
the icy frigid fluid gas bath the globe’s immersed in, made temps on e.v.e.r.y. s.i.n.g.l.e.
heat s.e.n.s.o.r.
on the p.l.a.n.e.t.
Rise yet again.
You’re in here telling me you know the difference between warmer or not, and I’m telling you, the atmosphere’s a cold, thermally conductive bath that can’t heat the earth no matter what it does.
Cold thermally conductive baths, can’t raise temps on something more than if it were in vacuum.
You say the atmosphere’s a giant heater,
I remind you, that you can’t even explain premise one: prove the atmosphere’s not actually a reflective coolant bath.
You’ll flunk that.
You’ll flunk the second one: show us all some example of a cold gas bath making temperatures rise above the temps without the cold gas bath, in vacuum.
You’ll flunk that too, and we haven’t cracked a book yet.
Add that onto the fact the gas you claim is responsible for ‘heating’
CO2- with water –
is actually the one responsible for reflecting away that 20% E in that you claim
magically
made every heat sensor on the planet show
more energy arriving,
than when 20% more energy
was arriving.
P.S. You need to remind your Unabomber looking guru he can go ahead and update his ice charts. He never saw it coming because he’s just a magic gas scammer but there’s a lot of ice up there.
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Jack Dale says:
November 21, 2013 at 3:35 pm
“It’s really magic gas, the amosphere’s a giant heater, not a reflective frigid thermally conductive bath dragging temperatures down anytime earth’s immersed in it, which is always.”
Steven,
if you have two bodies of different equilibirum heat, but each partly regulated by the other, warming the cooler body will cause the warmer body to warm, all else being equal. Different layers of the biosphere have widely different temperatures, despite being thermally connected. Change the equilibrium temperature in one layer and the whole system has to adjust – unless there is a perfect thermal insulator between layers.
@ barry, your statement is only correct if at least the warmer body has some form of external energy source attatched (or both bodies do), a mere heat bath won’t do. If the warmer body actually warms and the temperature rises that rise in the temperature came from the energy from the external source, not from the cooler body. The now warmer cooler body merely caused the warmer body to not lose as much energy to itself, conductively or radiatively, or even convectively. Without external energy flowing in to the warmer body, a cooler body can never cause the temperature of a warmer body to rise so you cannot say the cooler body warmed the warmer body, at best it made the warmer body cool more slowly.
Now on your side, I do see buried in a few words that you are saying the warmer body does have an external energy source, you said 1) both are at equilibrium 2) one is cooler than the other. By that definition there is heat flowing from the warmer to the cooler and the warmer is being replenished with the lost energy from somewhere else, an external energy source.
Too many say things of this subject without being perfectly clear. Steven R Vada seems to be speaking of an un-powered system, leaving out the solar constant input, and you are speaking of a powered system without spelling that out very clearly that it may take someone versed in thermodynamics to pick that underneath the words.
@ Steven R Vada, listen to barry and consider what he is saying, due to the solar energy input the atmosphere can alter the surface’s temperature, either way, up or down, for it affects how much can escape through it. Fortunately that amount allowed to leave, in co2’s case, is tied to the infrared optical thickness and that is not changing as co2 concentration has raised since the 50s so any warming we have is from somewhere else, albedo (clouds) or solar variances in some manner, possibly even emissivity of the surface (land use), bad temperature records, all of the above.
wayne,
It is more correct to say it your way – that the wamer body loses less heat, but I think that is less easy to grasp for average punters with no physics background. Just say that there is a (relatively) fixed stratification to temperature layers, and that changing the temperature of one means the others must adjust – unless there is a perfect thermal insulator between them.
A good intuitive analogy is car engine overheating. No matter the temperature of the day, a car’s engine always runs hotter than the ambient air. But most people who’ve been around a few decades know that cars tend to overheat on hot days more than cold – so the temperature of the relatively colder air affects the temperature of the much hotter engine.
We’re not really in disagreement about the physics, just say it differently.
But I think we disagree on this, although it’s hard to gauge from your syntax:
CO2 has risen significantly since the 1950s (and by 40% since the industrial revolution). Observational evidence of decreased brightness of IR in the CO2 spectral bands leaving the Earth’s atmosphere from stallites demonstrates that more CO2 in the atmosphere = more absorption of upwelling IR. It’s also observed from land-based sensing. Those ‘predictions’, at least, came out right.