[UPDATE: and it’s not just Climategate email, see the analysis by McIntyre added below – Anthony ]
From Dartmouth College and the irascible Lonnie Thompson of OSU, who still ‘publicly’ thinks in PR that Kilmanjaro and Peru’s Quelccaya glaciers are affected by temperature, not sublimation due to lack of precipitation. See below for the Climategate email that makes nonsense of the temperature claim made in the press release below. Also of note is Thompson’s claim that “PERUVIAN GLACIER MAY VANISH IN FIVE YEARS” made on February 15, 2007, and it was still there in 2012 by this photography.
===========================================================
Temperature, not snowfall, has been driving the fluctuating size of Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap, whose dramatic shrinkage in recent decades has made it a symbol for global climate change, a Dartmouth-led study shows.
The findings support many scientists’ suspicions that tropical glaciers are rapidly shrinking because of a warming climate, and will help scientists to better understand the natural variability of past and modern climate and to refine models that predict tropical glaciers’ response to future climate change.
The study appears in the journal Geology.
Dartmouth glacial geomorphologist Meredith Kelly and her lab team used field mapping combined with the beryllium-10 surface exposure dating method and ice cores obtained by Ohio State University paleoclimatologist Lonnie Thompson to examine how the Quelccaya Ice Cap has expanded and retreated over the past millennium. It is the first time that a record of past glacial extents has been compared directly with an annually dated ice core record from the same ice mass.
During the last millennium, a significant cooling event known as the Little Ice Age occurred, but scientists don’t know what caused the cooling or its geographic extent. The Dartmouth-led team determined beryllium-10 ages of moraines – or glacier sediments — that mark the past positions of Qori Kalis, an outlet glacier that has been monitored by Thompson since he first visited Quelccaya in the early 1960s. The Quelccaya Ice Cap, the largest ice mass in the tropics, sits 18,000 feet above sea level in the Peruvian Andes.
The results show that Qori Kalis advanced to its late Holocene maximum position prior to 520 years ago and subsequently retreated with only minor re-advances since that time. The comparison of the moraine record with the ice core record suggests that temperature was the driving force of glacial expansion and retreat, says Justin Stroup, lead author and a PhD candidate in Dartmouth’s Department of Earth Sciences.
“This is an important result since there has been debate about the causes of recent tropical glacial recession – for example, whether it is due to temperature, precipitation, humidity, solar irradiance or other factors,” says Kelly, a co-author of the study. “This result agrees with Professor Thompson’s earlier suggestions that these tropical glaciers are shrinking very rapidly today because of a warming climate.”
Furthermore, the ebbs and flows of other glaciers in tropical South America are similar to the Qori Kalis extents, indicating a regionally consistent pattern of past climate conditions. On a global scale, the results suggest that glaciers were larger than present and depositing moraines in both northern and southern hemispheres at about the same time, indicating that the climate mechanisms which caused the late Holocene cooling likely influenced a globally synchronous pattern of cooling.
The research, which was funded by National Science Foundation, includes Dartmouth College, the University of Cincinnati and Penn State University.
=============================================================
OK now read this Climategate email from Phil Jones, who in polite terms, says the claim is B.S. Note the reference to Peru’s Quelccaya glacier which I have bolded – Anthony
5315.txt
date: Sat Sep 18 08:48:09 2004
from: Phil Jones <p.jones@uea.xx.xx>
subject: Re: kilimanjaro
to: “Jenkins, Geoff” <geoff.jenkins@metoffice.xx.xx>
Geoff,
The data that are used for the grid box should be within the grid box. They will be low
elevation sites though, and this may be part of the reason. It might be worth seeing if
there is anything in the U/A data – but I reckon there won’t be much in that region.
I’ve heard Lonnie Thompson talk about the Kilimanjaro core and he got some local temperatures – that we don’t have access to, and there was little warming in them. The same situation applies for Quelccaya in Peru and also some of his Tibet sites. Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.
Lonnie’s email is “Lonnie G. Thompson” <thompson.3@osu.xxx.xxx>
You could try emailing Ellen as well both might be in the field.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson <thompson.4@osu.xxx.xxx>
I’m off much of the next 6 weeks at meetings.
I hear you’re retiring soon – hope all goes well ! I’m sure you’ll still be in the field somewhere.
Cheers
Phil
At 10:32 16/09/2004, you wrote:
phil
<<kilimanjaro.doc>>
we have been concerned that people often use the melting glacier on kilimanjaro as an
example of impacts of man-made warming. you may have seen some stories countering this on the sceptics websites.
I got philip brohan to look at temps there (see attached) and there isnt any convincing consistent recent warming in the station data. but your gridded CRUtem2V does show a recent warming. presumably that is because (as philip suggests) the gridded stuff has influences from quite a large radius, and hence may reflect warming at stations a long way from kilimanjaro?
would you agree that there is no convincing evidence for kilimanjaro glacier melt being due to recent warming (let alone man-made warming)?
be grateful for your help
cheers
geoff
Dr Geoff Jenkins
Head, Climate Prediction Programme
Hadley Centre
Met Office
FitzRoy Road, EXETER, EX1 3PB, UK
tel: +44 (0) 1392 xxxxxx
mobile: 0787 966 1136
[1]www.hadleycentre.xxxx.xx
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone +44 (0) 1603 592090
School of Environmental Sciences Fax +44 (0) 1603 507784
University of East Anglia
Norwich Email p.jones@uea.ac.uk
NR4 7TJ
UK
—————————————————————————-
================================================
UPDATE: Nick Stokes responded in comments, I responded, and I’ve decided to add it to the body of this post.
“email from Phil Jones, who in polite terms, says the claim is B.S”
That’s not my reading of it. Jones seems to be saying (contrary to this paper) that Thompson says it’s due to sublimation:
“Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.”
Sounds like Jones thinks its’ temperature. Maybe he misunderstood Thompson, or LT has changed his view. But it seems Jones then and LT now both think it is temperature.
REPLY: Well I’d expect that, as your confirmation bias for temperature is legendary. The point is that “Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down.”, now look at this photo of Thompson standing next to an ice spire on Kilimanjaro and tell me with a straight face that’s not sublimation going on ( I assume you understand how sublimation presents itself with ice):
Land Use Change Impacts On Regional Climate Over Kilimanjaro” By Fairman Jr. Et Al 2011 pretty much put an end to that debate. More here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/23/34609/
On Quelccaya, McIntyre did a thorough dissection independent of me, and concluded:
“It seems to me that, among specialists, Thompson is probably standing fairly alone in claiming that d18O at tropical glaciers is a proxy for temperature rather than amount effect. (Because of Thompson’s eminence, the contradiction of his results is mostly implied, rather than directly stated.)
…
Because the 1998 El Nino was so big, it provides a good test case for temperature vs amount. It seems to me that the negative downspike for the big 1998 El Nino is decisive against Thompson.
The PNAS version of the data left off showing a sort of uptick. The extension to 2009 does not seem to me to be going off the charts.”
Of course, you lost that debate too, Nick, since your mindset can’t seem to grasp that temperature is not the cause. Land use change is, and Thompson is sampling in the wrong place to detect it. (note that all the Amazon deforestation is going on in the east)
Via a comment from Espen on the CA thread:
ScienceDaily report says: ” Most of the moisture in the area comes from the east, in snowstorms fueled by moist air rising from the Amazon Basin. But the ice core-derived climate records from the Andes are also impacted from the west — specifically by El Niño, a temporary change in climate, which is driven by sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.” (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404142417.htm).
And, as we see, no correlation in 1998 during that super El Nino to bolster Thompson’s claim, in fact, it looks refuted by the data. – Anthony
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How come the CRUtem2V shown warming at the kilimanjaro glacier but local temperatures don’t ?
Thats the billion dollar question ?
At least I don’t share his family name.
“email from Phil Jones, who in polite terms, says the claim is B.S”
That’s not my reading of it. Jones seems to be saying (contrary to this paper) that Thompson says it’s due to sublimation:
“Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down. They are going though.”
Sounds like Jones thinks its’ temperature. Maybe he misunderstood Thompson, or LT has changed his view. But it seems Jones then and LT now both think it is temperature.
REPLY: Well I’d expect that, as your confirmation bias for temperature is legendary. The point is that “Lonnie thinks they are disappearing because of sublimation, but he can’t pin anything down.”, now look at this photo of Thompson standing next to an ice spire on Kilimanjaro and tell me with a straight face that’s not sublimation going on ( I assume you understand how sublimation presents itself with ice):
Land Use Change Impacts On Regional Climate Over Kilimanjaro” By Fairman Jr. Et Al 2011 pretty much put an end to that debate. More here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/23/34609/
On Quelccaya, McIntyre did a thorough dissection independent of me, and concluded:
“It seems to me that, among specialists, Thompson is probably standing fairly alone in claiming that d18O at tropical glaciers is a proxy for temperature rather than amount effect. (Because of Thompson’s eminence, the contradiction of his results is mostly implied, rather than directly stated.)
…
Because the 1998 El Nino was so big, it provides a good test case for temperature vs amount. It seems to me that the negative downspike for the big 1998 El Nino is decisive against Thompson.
The PNAS version of the data left off showing a sort of uptick. The extension to 2009 does not seem to me to be going off the charts.”
Of course, you lost that debate too, Nick, since your mindset can’t seem to grasp that temperature is not the cause. Land use change is, and Thompson is sampling in the wrong place to detect it.
Via a comment from Espen:
ScienceDaily report says: ” Most of the moisture in the area comes from the east, in snowstorms fueled by moist air rising from the Amazon Basin. But the ice core-derived climate records from the Andes are also impacted from the west — specifically by El Niño, a temporary change in climate, which is driven by sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.” (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130404142417.htm).
And, as we see, no correlation in 1998 during that super El Nino to bolster Thompson’s claim, in fact, it looks refuted by the data. – Anthony
Research funded by the NSF. Says it all, really. Government-funded Warmist nonsense.
Also of note is Thompson’s claim that “PERUVIAN GLACIER MAY VANISH IN FIVE YEARS” made on February 15, 2007, and it was still there in 2012 by this photography.
Well, he did use the word “may” which somewhat includes the possibility “may not” as well.
I understand that they link the advance/retreat rates directly to the ice core isotope signatures (d18O, dD) and such, However there is a body of evidence that these isotope ratios in precipation in (sub) tropical areas are not related to temperature at all. There are several seasonal data series that show an inverse corrolation (GNIP database http://www-naweb.iaea.org/napc/ih/IHS_resources_gnip.html ). So it looks that there is enough reasom for a Willis E/Steve M scrutiny audit.
“During the last millennium, a significant cooling event known as the Little Ice Age occurred”
Not in Peru, surely – I though Mann had shown that the little ice age was restrictied to London and the frozen Thames?
JustAnotherPoster February 26, 2014 at 4:06 am
The answer is in the emails above. CRU estimate the mean global temperature of the Earth by dividing into a number of ‘gridboxes’. Each one is 5 degrees by 5 degrees. This translates to a very large area in mid-latitudes (about 350 miles by 350 miles). They then determine the temperature for each gridbox by averaging the readings from the stations within it.
You can see which weather stations are included in the ‘kilamanjaro’ gridbox from google earth . See how here:- http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/06/cru-produces-something-useful-for-a-change/
Notice, there are only 3 weather stations within the gridbox. Two are in Nairobi, 300 miles away to the north, and one is in Mombasa ,170 miles to the East (which shows cooling). The temperature for Kilamanjro is then determined by taking the average of these three distant, low-altitude stations. It is not going to be a very good guide is it?
“With 2015 budget request, Obama will call for an end to era of austerity” – WaPo
Austerity is when you have money to send a team to Peru to determine whether glaciers are receding due to snowfall change, or temperature change.
The above plus the e-mail revelations tell us that “the science” is not settled and that there is debate about this topic just like there is about most of things related to climate. But did we not just hear from some TV bubble head that the debate was over?
Climatology is still unable to give us any answers that are definitive on a host of subjects.
Even if the melt is caused by rising temperature, this tells nothing about what caused the rise in temperature, does it?
One single paragraph, and yet so, so telling. Here’s a dissection:
The findings SUPPORT. They don’t prove anything, don’t even state anything very convincing. Just support.
Many Scientists. Not all. Not even most. Just many.
Suspicions. Surely we don’t need to rip that one apart.
blah blah blah
refine models that predict because, of course, the models to date have been completely useless.
future climate change, since the climate change that has already occurred is not only marginal, and marginally noticeable, with no hope of attributing cause, we now have to take their word that FUTURE climate change is still on the table.
Weasel words. Learn them. Recognize them. Ignore anything that uses them.
“How come the CRUtem2V shown warming at the kilimanjaro glacier but local temperatures don’t ?”
———
I’m surprised that you’re surprised at that….
“an outlet glacier that has been monitored by Thompson since he first visited Quelccaya in the early 1960s”
Thompson’s C.V. says he got his B.S. in 1970. So unless he took time off before college, I really doubt a Senior or Junior High School student went to Peru to start his study of glaciers.
His C.V. list his first expedition in 1973 to Byrd Station with the next expedition being in 1974 to Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru. making his first visit in the early 1970s.
So apparently whoever released the press release has trouble getting simple information right and yet they want us to believe their claims related to complex climate systems. Yeah, I’ll get right on that. /sarc
Also if the glacier reached its maximum 520 years ago, then most of the time it has been retreating can’t have been human or CO2 caused. If natural climate changes have caused the first 400+ years of retreat why isn’t it reasonable to conclude that the more recent retreat is just a continuation of that natural process?
Then there is this climategate beauty.
“The most robust feature of all these runs is that the rate of glacier retreat for the second half of the 20th century is always the same, irrespective of the starting point of the climate forcing, and irrespective of whether the 20th century climate was cooling, warming, or stable.”
Athlete says:
February 26, 2014 at 6:20 am
Then there is this climategate beauty.
“The most robust feature of all these runs is that the rate of glacier retreat for the second half of the 20th century is always the same, irrespective of the starting point of the climate forcing, and irrespective of whether the 20th century climate was cooling, warming, or stable.”
Whoa!
Glaciers retreat during climate cooling, climate warming, or during a stable climate.
Does this mean that it is also a “robust” feature that Glaciers will advance at the, uh, times when the climate isn’t cooling or warming or stable?
Wazzup with that?
[snip – multiple scree names – policy violation – mod]
“Sunshine can melt ice even when the ambient air temperature is below freezing, by warming the surface of the ice. The same decrease in clouds that meant less snow for the glaciers also meant more sunshine. Even in 2000–2002, as scientists witnessed “strong melting” on Kilimanjaro, weather stations verified that the temperature never exceeded –1.6 degrees C.”
http://earthshots.usgs.gov/earthshots/Mount-Kilimanjaro#ad-image-9
The quote is from the link provided. If the temperature does not get above freezing it surly cannot be temperature causing any problems. It is the SUN.
Watts says: “now read this Climategate email from Phil Jones, who in polite terms, says the claim is B.S.”
So an email in 2004, when the study was essentially beginning, somehow negates the last 10 years of work? Please.
And anyway, why would _you_, of all people, suggest that Phil Jones, of all people, is correct? Shouldn’t you rejoice in that he proposes incorrect hypothesis like normal scientists?
REPLY: So in your world, something stated as fact 10 years ago behind closed doors is somehow negated simply because it aged? Please. based on your M.O. here it wouldn’t matter if the same statement was made last week – Anthony
CodeTech says: “One single paragraph, and yet so, so telling. Here’s a dissection:
The findings SUPPORT. They don’t prove anything, don’t even state anything very convincing. Just support.”
This is from the abstract: “Subsequent glacial retreat between ∼520 and 330 yr before CE 2009 coincides with the highest net accumulation values of the ∼1800-yr-long ice core record. Therefore, we suggest that temperature, rather than net accumulation, was the primary driver of these glacial fluctuations.”
Without reading the article, I didn’t, seems the point is that even with more stuff being put into the glacier, it is retreating. So what is left? You have evaporation (sublimation) and temperature. Pick your poison.
Pippin kool says:
February 26, 2014 at 7:20 am
And anyway, why would _you_, of all people, suggest that Phil Jones, of all people, is correct?
Even a stopped analog clock is right twice a day. Hey, even a stopped digital clock gets it right once a day.
OT: Hysterical piece by Michael Mann about a drinking game
http://www.livescience.com/43660-krauthammer-drinking-game.html
The highlights: (not clear if all of it is him or the editor)
Criticizing someone else for having mistakes in their modelling algorithms (while never publishing his).
Claims that Sandy storm surge was a foot higher because of Global Warming (think he played the drinking game himself before writing). That’s a 150 years worth of the typical 2mm/year sea level rise observed around the world. Must have read that BBC piece about the 1 foot per year rise that we could expect in the next few years.
“So in your world, something stated as fact 10 years ago behind closed doors is somehow negated simply because it aged? Please. based on your M.O. here it wouldn’t matter if the same statement was made last week” – Anthony
Okay, I’ll bite…what if he _did_ make a statement in an email last week? Should I believe that or should I believe a decade long study that is published? Believe it or not, every word that comes out of Jones’ or Mann’s mouthes are not taken as words of the gods. Interesting words, perhaps, but that is all.
REPLY: see the update. Now kindly shut up – Anthony
Athlete says:
February 26, 2014 at 6:20 am
Then there is this climategate beauty.
> We can also talk about it next week at AWI: please
> convince me your model is doing what it should do in
> the sense that glacier growth and retreat somehow is
> in accordance with a cooling or a warming,
> respectively. We might also have implemented your
> algorithm wrongly, of course, as Ives had to
> intervene in the code at quite a number of places to
> avoid all kinds of computer crashes.
===================================
As a software engineer… WOW!! I have a hard time imagining a scenario where a team member supplies some code that, having caused all kinds of crashes, says “no worries, just let me poke around here and there to keep things limping along.” …and we would be okay with that.
The code would get pulled. Then everything else they ever touched would get reviewed and possibly reverted. Then there would be some discussions about future plans… possibly in long-haul trucking.
If that little email offers any insight into the behind-the-scenes goings on of their modelling process, well that pretty well explains why they have all been such dismal failures.
I especially love the line: “…We might also have implemented your algorithm wrongly, of course,..”
Yeah, wouldn’t want to have some process in place to ensure that software is not integrated incorrectly (wrongly – if that’s a word.) I know academia is a bit of a free-for-all and they almost dislike things that suggest an enterprise approach to ensure quality but – damn – that’s wacked!
Thompson was on the Vice Presidential KindaLike Science Panel appointed by Al Gore and a cited advisor on the Inconvenient Truth book and movie back when you could still pawn off glacial retreat as a function of temperature and ignore land use and precipitation and get away with it. It is a notion so wrong that not even the ClimateGate inner circle can pretend to salvage it.
The investment in Climate Theology bias is so strong in academia that Thompson won’t be mocked over time, just politely forgotten.