[Note: part of the answer is in the photo they provide with the press release below, but they don’t see it. – Anthony]
Greenland melting due equally to global warming, natural variations
The rapid melting of Greenland glaciers is captured in the documentary “Chasing Ice.” The retreat of the ice edge from one year to the next sends more water into the sea.
Now University of Washington atmospheric scientists have estimated that up to half of the recent warming in Greenland and surrounding areas may be due to climate variations that originate in the tropical Pacific and are not connected with the overall warming of the planet. Still, at least half the warming remains attributable to global warming caused by rising carbon dioxide emissions. The paper is published May 8 in Nature.
Greenland and parts of neighboring Canada have experienced some of the most extreme warming since 1979, at a rate of about 1 degree Celsius per decade, or several times the global average.
“We need to understand why in the last 30 years global warming is not uniform,” said first author Qinghua Ding, a UW research scientist in atmospheric sciences. “Superimposed on this global average warming are some regional features that need to be explained.”
The study used observations and advanced computer models to show that a warmer western tropical Pacific Ocean has caused atmospheric changes over the North Atlantic that have warmed the surface by about a half-degree per decade since 1979.
“The pattern of the changes in the tropical Pacific that are responsible for remarkable atmospheric circulation changes and warming in Greenland and the Canadian Arctic are consistent with what we would call natural variability,” said co-author David Battisti, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences.
Researchers say it’s not surprising to find the imprint of natural variability in an area famous for its melting ice. In many of the fastest-warming areas on Earth, global warming and natural variations both contribute to create a “perfect storm” for warming, said co-author John “Mike” Wallace, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences.
The natural variations in the new study related to an unusually warm western tropical Pacific, near Papua New Guinea. Since the mid-1990s the water surface there has been about 0.3 degrees hotter than normal. Computer models show this affects the regional air pressure, setting off a stationary wave in the atmosphere that arcs in a great circle from the tropical Pacific toward Greenland before turning back over the Atlantic.
“Along this wave train there are warm spots where the air has been pushed down, and cold spots where the air has been pulled up,” Wallace said. “And Greenland is in one of the warm spots.”
In previous studies, Wallace and Battisti have documented the existence of decades-long climate variations in the Pacific Ocean that resemble the well-known shorter-range El Niño variations.
This particular location in the tropical Pacific may be a sweet spot for generating global atmospheric waves. A series of studies led by co-author Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, working with Ding and Battisti, showed that waves starting in the same place but radiating southward are warming West Antarctica and melting the Pine Island Glacier.
Researchers can’t say for how long the tropical Pacific will remain in this state.
“Our work shows that about half of the warming signal in Greenland comes from the predictable part – forcing of climate by anthropogenic greenhouse gases – but about half comes from the unpredictable part,” Steig said.
This makes shorter-term forecasts difficult, but helps scientists to make more accurate long-range projections.
“Nothing we have found challenges the idea that globally, glaciers are retreating,” Battisti said. “We looked at this place because the warming there is really remarkable. Our findings help us to understand on a regional scale how much of what you see is human-induced by the buildup of CO2, and how much of it is natural variability.”
The dramatic message of “Chasing Ice” remains true, authors say.
“There’s nothing in this paper that negates the message in the movie,” Wallace said. “Ice appears to be exquisitely sensitive to the buildup of greenhouse gases, more than we ever would have thought.” Natural variations could either accelerate or decelerate the melting rate of Greenland’s glaciers in coming decades, he said, but “in the long run, the human-induced component is likely to prevail.”
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, UW’s Quaternary Research Center, the National Basic Research Program of China and the APEC Climate Center. Other co-authors are Lei Geng at the UW; Ailie Gallant at Australia’s Monash University; and Hyung-Jin Kim at South Korea’s APEC Climate Center.
###
Note the photo provided with the press release, here it is in full resolution: http://www.washington.edu/news/files/2014/05/Greenland2010-5.jpg
And my enlargement of a section of it:
Note the black at the bottom of the melt pool, that’s carbon soot. That’s something the UW authors aren’t paying attention to.
As I explain here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/03/greenland-ground-zero-for-global-soot-warming/
…it has a big effect on albedo, and thus absorbed solar insolation, likely far more so than CO2 forcing, as explained here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/13/in-the-arctic-nearby-soot-may-be-a-larger-forcing-than-co2/
UPDATE: Here is a map showing albedo change, the text is from the link below:
http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/greenland-ice-sheet-getting-darker
Map of changes in the percent of light reflected by the Greenland Ice Sheet in summer (June-July-August) 2011 compared to the average from 2000-2006. Virtually the entire surface has grown darker due to surface melting, dust and soot on the surface, and temperature-driven changes in the size and shape of snow grains. Map by NOAA’s climate.gov team, based on NASA satellite data processed by Jason Box, Byrd Polar Research Center, the Ohio State University.
![MODISalbedo_greenland2011_610[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/modisalbedo_greenland2011_6101.jpg?resize=610%2C635)
Layman trying to ask a common sense question here:
Half the temperature increase? Really? Why not most of it? If the rest of the world is warming at a much slower rate then half that rate, maybe it’s much more than half?
What I don’t get is, with all this modelling and VERY (sarc) high climate sensitivity, how is it that there’s still life on earth?
Wouldn’t the extintion of the dinosaurs, due to a catastrophic event that obliterated the species, would have caused more damage than mere CO2 <0.04%v/v?
Now, I am not sure if the dinosaur extintion due to the meteorite is a fact or theory. But if it is a fact, shouldn't it shed some light on how resilent the climate is?
If they’re right, and 1/2 the warming is natural, then that about agrees with the recent lower estimates for sensitivity, and means that the expected 1.5C warming by 2100 is nothing to panic about.
So Steig has joined us at last!
I do not think that it matters in the short term that we do not understand ‘why’ this is happening. It can not be caused by global warming if the globe as a whole is not warming, effectively it is weather.
The problem we all share with the policies of our governments are being sidetracked by the constant need to understand how and why things happen. In reality we are not going to get some of the answers for another thousand years and we need to focus on ‘what’ happens and accept that the how and why will come later.
What is happening is that we are pumping ever increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere but the world (by our best estimates) is not warming.
Get rid of all this green crap please ^.^
Anthony, is it ALL carbon soot? Does wind blown glacial dust, or atmospheric dust, also take on a dark color when submerged? Not disagreeing about albedo effect, just wondering if carbon is the only source of dark coloration at the bottom of a melt pool on a glacier.
“Ice appears to be exquisitely sensitive to the buildup of greenhouse gases, more than we ever would have thought.”
“…more than we ever would have thought.” — Is that not an indication that previous understandings were not quite right? It’s impressive that some areas are warming, but it doesn’t necessarily add to confidence.
Only half the temperature increase due to natural variations?
Why only half?
Why is it not uniform?
Because climate is a complex phenomena, not understood by climate models.
Anthony, do we have a good measure of the carbon deposition and volcanic ash over the years. It would be a good test of your hypothesis
Can someone point to a chemical analysis of the black stuff in that Greenland pond?
I’m sceptical that it is ‘soot’. Oh, and where does the red stuff that you see over arctic glaciers occasionally come from?
Dear Anthony,
Apparently the photo of your back yard snow with the soot don’t show up. Before I send out this link to my friends and fiends is it possible to make the photos work.
Cheers Chris Hisgen (BS Honours, Mathematics & Applied Mathematics, Columbian College, George Washington University, 1977)
christopher hisgen I’ll see if I can get those fixed – Anthony
Well done WUWT for finally starting to publish research papers that, like virtually all climate-related papers in Nature, attests to the reality of significant temperature increases caused by carbon dioxide emissions.
REPLY: So like the authors of the paper, you missed what was in the photo too? – Anthony
Well I would first want to answer the Question:-
Why is (was) it, that BEFORE the last 30 years, global warming WAS uniform.
It’s not supposed to be; everybody knows that the poles warm faster, because they can’t cool as fast as the tropics do, and because of the equator to polar temperature gradient, heat constantly flows from equator to poles. It’s that second law thingy !
The hottest tropical desert surfaces, radiate at about twelve (12) times the radiation rate of the coldest polar regions.. That’s for +60 dg. C hottest daytime summer desert surfaces, to -94 deg. C Antarctic highlands Winter midnight..
But the science is settled, right? (/sarc off)
He’s claiming that the anthropogenic global warming part is the predictable part? Really?
Did those predictions suddenly come true while I slept? Cause when I went to bed last night, they were dead wrong for coming up on two decades.
And now this guy is telling us that half of the northern polar warming – the warming that is just barely holding the global average at zero warming – at least half of that is natural?
He’s simultaneously proving that “global warming” predictions are more wrong than most people realize, while asserting that very same predictability.
Idjits.
I noticed the black snow, not the black water. And when you added the blown up section the dirty canyon walls. I had assumed (perhaps in error) that the water was deep there because it is filling a canyon and thus no light there and that’s why it is black.
Either way, I’ve noticed the leave shaped holes in my skating rink after a leaf lands on it and the sun shines.
During an interglacial period, glaciers should be receding. That is what happens during an interglacial period which is what we are now in, and have been in for that last 11,500 years. If glaciers started growing, then there would be cause for concern. I do wonder though how they arrived at manmade CO2 being responsible for half the warming recently. When glaciers were receding during the Holocene Optimum at a much higher rate than they are now, natural causes were doing 100% of the job, right?
Hot under the collar says:
May 8, 2014 at 7:41 am
Only half the temperature increase due to natural variations?
Why only half?
Why is it not uniform?
Because climate is a complex phenomena, not understood by climate models.
More importantly, not understood by those who programme the models! I still gasp at the arrogance of climate modellers, who programme their models to show a given amount of warming for a given amount of CO2 & a pre-fixed climate sensitivity, & they claim that the answer coming out the other end is right!
Billy Liar asks “where does the red stuff you see on glaciers come from?”
That red stuff is a highly adapted bacteria called Chlamydomonas nivalis. The red tint is due to carotenoid pigments which protect them from UV. Where I live in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, these bacteria bloom around August when temps are above freezing.
No soot in the pool ! Just a photograph, low sun angle, shadow and diminished illumination against a very bright foreground on top ! Particulate measured in Firn and glacier ice is at the ppm level. Not enough to make a difference.
REPLY: No, sorry, you are wrong. It’s soot, dust, etc. people have sampled the bottom of those pools. Read the links provided before inserting foot in mouth. See map I’m adding from NASA showing deposition – Anthony
Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?
Dave in Canmore says:
May 8, 2014 at 8:09 am
Thanks Dave! I’ve seen it in Iceland in the summer. There’s plenty of black stuff there too but it is all rock flour, not ‘carbon’.
If the Alpine glaciers can look pink in late summer from all the Saharan dust they pick up I’m pretty sure the Greenland ice cap can pick up plenty of black dust from the glaciers grinding away at the periphery of the island.
I get so tired of the overworked “perfect [storm”] phrase. I never realized just how many perfect storms there were until I started following the AGW arguments. And was anyone else impressed by the statement that the tropical Pacific surface temperature was .3c “hotter?” Can anyone REALLY believe a rise in temperature of .3c is truly “hotter?” It’s really silly stuff like that that truly throws a lot of suspicion on whatever else they try to say. Oh yes, and the unpredictable natural variation makes it difficult to make short term prediction but easier to make long range prediction. Huh? Can the author REALLY believe this? Uncertainty only exists on the sort term, it falls out as you get further out? Wow.
“If we can muddy the waters, so that no clear distinction exists between our climate change fraud-science and real climate science, then we can then claim whatever percentage we like as our drivers of change in future – in whatever proportion of science we decide and ascribe it to.”
A nice, flexible PR strategy. A bit like the rubbery and user-friendly term for all seasons : ‘Climate Change’.
To me the dark part looks like a deeper part of the water, i notice that there are no darker parts elsewhere or if it is does the movement of water carry it to one part.
The bottom of the picture shows discoloration of the snow- soot? that has melted and yet everywhere else looks pristine.
As I wrote in my last critique of Years of Living Dangerously
?w=627&h=338
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/06/years-of-living-dangerously-pastor-rick-joyner-models-feynmans-ideal-scientist/
Climate scientists as Los Alamos National Laboratories who concluded:
“we find no direct evidence to support the claims that the Greenland ice sheet is melting due to increased temperature caused by increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. The rate of warming from 1995 to 2005 was in fact lower than the warming that occurred from 1920 to 1930.” 6 [emphasis added]
As seen in their graph, Greenland temperatures show a more cyclical nature with more warmth in the 30s and 40s and in agreement with most tree ring studies.
The retreat of Greenland’s glaciers has been largely due to intruding warm waters driven by changes in natural ocean oscillations. Those ocean oscillations increased the flow of warm Gulf Stream waters that eventually bathe the coast of Greenland and islands in the Arctic Ocean. Those warm currents melted the bottoms of any glaciers that terminated in the ocean.
Greenland’s largest outlet glacier, Jakobshavn Isbrae, drains about 7% of the Greenland ice sheet and generates 10% of the Atlantic’s icebergs. During the Holocene Optimum beginning about 9000 years ago, Jakobshavn retreated further than its present day terminus and remained that way for almost 7000 years. It was only recently during the Little Ice Age, that Jakobshavn rapidly advanced several kilometers beyond today’s terminus.7
The North Atlantic Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation’s influences on warm ocean currents explain both Greenland’s cyclical temperature behavior and current glacial retreat. The glaciers’ most rapid 20th century retreat occurred between 1920 and 1950, followed by an advance in the 1970s and then a renewed retreat in 1998.7,8,9 [emphasis added]
The rapid retreat of Jakobshavn between 1920 and 1940, as well as in the 1990s, corresponds to North Atlantic regime shifts during which warm waters from the Atlantic were pushed into the Arctic. Marine biologists wrote, “The warming in the 1920s and 1930s is considered to constitute the most significant regime shift experienced in the North Atlantic in the 20th century.”10 Fishery biologists observed that “species of fish such as cod, haddock and herring expanded farther north while colder-water species such as capelin and polar cod retreated northward. The maximum-recorded movement involved cod, which spread approximately 1200 km northward along West Greenland.” The warm water and associated species lingered for 2 more decades before retreating in the 1960s.
Reference are can be found at the end of that essay http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/06/years-of-living-dangerously-pastor-rick-joyner-models-feynmans-ideal-scientist/
Billy Liar says:
May 8, 2014 at 7:47 am
“Oh, and where does the red stuff that you see over arctic glaciers occasionally come from?”
Do you mean the red algae?
http://www.coolantarctica.com/gallery/scenic/icebergs2/Antarctica_iceberg2.htm
I’ve seen some of this in the Canadian Rockies.
———————————————————
“The study used observations and advanced computer models . .”
I have a VIC 20 someplace (haven’t found it recently) and thought it quite advanced at the time I bought it. Same with a multifunction slide rule – but I do know where it is. Now I have a fancy system that’s soooo advanced.
Maybe the writer means the underlying knowledge of the physical science expressed in multiple equations, lookup tables, pseudorandom number generators, and more is advanced. If so, why not explain?
The writer (and researchers?) don’t seem to understand the difference. To quote Shania Twain: “That Don’t Impress Me Much.”
Albedo darkening by volcanic ash on ice is the alternative explanation for the end of precambrian ice-house conditions, instead of high climate sensitivity co2.
The linear thinking strikes again. They think that Nature is a linear function of causes and so they can do this: Effects(Natural_causes + Human_causes) = Effects(Natural_causes) + Effects(Human_causes), where in this case Effects(Natural_causes)=Effects(Human_causes). Unfortunately for them, even in the stupid computer models they have non linear PDEs. The linearity assumption does not hold. This does not stop them to use it again and again. A recent paper that ‘proved’ global warming is because of the human sin started with this assumption, too. Ex falso, quodlibet.
From the press release above (Note to all: It is not really a “scientitifc article”, just a PR firm’s edited release of a scientific article):
Now, how is this circulation “model” compatible with the long-term and short term polar vortex winds we DO know exist? The polar vortex is a well-known massive circulation pattern coming from the northwest Canada heading down towards the US then turning generally east heading towards the US east coast, right? Thus its Alaska-Northwest territory-midwest-northeast US – Canada east coast- Atlanta ocean path. The polar vertex moves slightly further north and further south as winter storms change – this past winter is was much further south than normal.
But this “perfect storm” blindly crosses the polar vortex and near right-angles. And has never been measured nor observed before? Look, they are modeling the winds starting in an assumed location in the southwest pacific near Papua New Guinna. Then it flows up across the equator – across the southwest US heading northeast, across the US Midwest and eastern Canada, then up further north so that it ends up over Greenland.
So, why is the polar vortex measured and discussed as a meteorological phenomenon, and this New Guinean-Greenland wind pattern never before discussed? Is it only in a model universe, not the measured universe?
How do they know that exactly half is due to AGW and the other half is the unpredictable part? How did they come up with that figure of 50% AGW ?
Since when do they have the detailed knowledge to allocate a rate of melting? The question is posed with the back drop of the multi-decade AMO cycle and solar cycles with variability in each and uncertainty from such long-term cycles with variability. The cheap way out as seen in modeling to date is to dismiss the uncertainty of the variability from these poorly understood long term cycles or to apply constants for them and call it good. Such variability might be used some day to modify the claim to a 60-40 split or a 70-30 split or what have you.
Otzi the Iceman revealed by melting of an Alpine glacier shows that the climate in Otzi’s time was substantially warmer than today!
Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages
In a sense they are back peddling from the apocalypse. Now it is only 50% due to evil humans. Last year it was all human CO2. Is it due to highconfidence that the AGW believers have ‘won’ and will see their self-serviing policies imposed no matter the facts?
At the University of Washington it is wise to preface every paragraph with some variation of:
“Nothing we have found challenges the idea that globally, glaciers are retreating”
Then you are safe to challenge the idea that globally, glaciers are retreating.
Always keep in mind that the burden of proof is on the warm-earthers. They came up with the hypothesis of cAGW, they must defend it. Especially since their “solution” to the “problem” is Draconian, toxic, deadly, and levies the greater share of such “remedial” or “precautionary” measures upon the poor of the world. We do not have to come up with explanations of the natural cycle drivers, or the proper way to measure stuff, or why their calculations and predictions are erroneous (not to mention self-serving)—the warm-earthers must vindicate themselves, not the other way around.
“Half the temperature increase? Really? Why not most of it? If the rest of the world is warming at a much slower rate then half that rate, maybe it’s much more than half?
The rest of the world warms at a slower rate because heat is piped to pole.
If you want to argue for more than half, you have to actually have to DO WORK TO SHOW THAT.
That work, since it involves attribution, can only be done with a GCM. it’s the only tool
science has to answer “what if” questions about a system too large to fit in a lab.
“In a sense they are back peddling from the apocalypse. Now it is only 50% due to evil humans. Last year it was all human CO2. Is it due to highconfidence that the AGW believers have ‘won’ and will see their self-serviing policies imposed no matter the facts?”
Huh
1. Its never all been human c02. its co2, land use change, black carbon, methane, ozone,
etc.
2. The argument has been we are 95% certain that Over half of the warming is due to
human influence: human influence is MANY THINGS. the mean estimate for change
in forcing due to humans is 2.3 Watts since 1750. C02 forcing is less than the total.
Unless I’m reading it wrong, this quote appears to be from Mr. Wallace in an article at CTV News:
“Unless global warming starts to accelerate at a rate far beyond what we’ve seen, it’s going to be a long time before weather statistics change so much from the human signal that it would become clearly detectable in the presence of natural variability.”
Climate change not fully to blame for melting sea ice: study
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/climate-change-not-fully-to-blame-for-melting-sea-ice-study-1.1810977#ixzz318tASJ7j
While it is an improvement they recognize that CO2 is not the be all, end all, it still boggles the mind they can quantify the portions when they cannot quantify the total.
“Neil says:
May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am
Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?
1. There is no evidence that this photo shows soot.
2. Its assumed and asserted as fact.
3. Note the lack of skepticism about this “evidence”
That said, soot plays a role. thats part of the human forcing equation.
If you want to know how much of a role soot plays you have to run a GCM.
or you can just speculate and assert that it plays a major role.
Science: build a tool to try to understand the role of soot.
Politics: assert that its all down to soot. no comprehensive data, no methods, a few pictures, no testing of the hypothesis.. just assertion.
Extra-tropical climate change Its mostly about how the excess heat is stored and transported from the tropics to the extra-tropics. The polar regions lose more heat than they gain radiatively and it is ocean cycles that drive the rise and fall in temperatures as shown in Greeenland’s instrumental record.
?w=627&h=338
http://www.goes-r.gov/users/comet/tropical/textbook_2nd_edition/media/graphics/tropics_surplus_heat2.jpg
The occasional abrupt summer-time warming events are due to stalled HIgh pressure systems. But such events are transitory and tell us no more about CO2 warming or heat accumulation than the warmest historical heat wave in Death Valley in 1913.
To say that half is natural, not human-caused, is to say that you are a denier (of consensus, IPCC science). It is to say that any action to reduce human generated CO2 will have half the effect of the IPCC scenarios, and kill both the economics and the actual result of what is proposed “must” happen.
Mosher,
That work, since it involves attribution, can only be done with a GCM. it’s the only tool
science has to answer “what if” questions about a system too large to fit in a lab.
And suppose something important has been left out of the models. Or the models are of insufficient granularity to predict. Or you know – the really big elephant in the model room – suppose they got clouds wrong (and the modelers do admit that they “don’t understand clouds”). .
No what good exactly is a model that is not well matched to the object observed? TBD.
Simon
Steven Mosher:
At May 8, 2014 at 9:39 am you say
Or you could refer to the literature on physical properties of soot..
Soot (i.e. black carbon) has two climatic effects;
(a) it combines with sulphate aerosol to provide a strong warming effect
and
(b) It settles on ice to reduce the reflectance of the ice.
The warming effect was first reported by Jacobson
(ref. Jacobson M Z ‘Strong radiative heating due to the mixing state of black carbon in atmospheric aerosols’ Nature 409, 695-697 (8 February 2001) )
And has since been confirmed by several others.
The Abstract of the Jacobson paper can be read at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v409/n6821/abs/409695a0.html
and concludes its summary saying
That is strong warming and it is localised to regions near its emission (n.b. it is local and NOT global warming) because the aerosol is washed out by rain in about 2 weeks.
Black carbon which falls on ice increases radiative absorbtion by the ice and not every surface is coated with ice..
Simply, the known properties of black carbon provide spatial variation to temperature changes (i.e. warming or cooling).
Richard
Patrick (the other one) says:
May 8, 2014 at 9:32 am
Unless I’m reading it wrong, this quote appears to be from Mr. Wallace in an article at CTV News:
“Unless global warming starts to accelerate at a rate far beyond what we’ve seen, it’s going to be a long time before weather statistics change so much from the human signal that it would become clearly detectable in the presence of natural variability.”
Climate change not fully to blame for melting sea ice: study
Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/climate-change-not-fully-to-blame-for-melting-sea-ice-study-1.1810977#ixzz318tASJ7j
That quote is not in the UW press release.
Also missed from Patrick’s link is this quote from Wallace: “The ice melt is dramatic,” he said. “I would not claim to make any statement about the ice melt.”
Have to wonder why he said that…
Dung says:
May 8, 2014 at 7:37 am
I do not think that it matters in the short term that we do not understand ‘why’ this is happening. It can not be caused by global warming if the globe as a whole is not warming, effectively it is weather….
It matters a great deal. The importance is that the article is an acknowledgement – an indirect one – that we do not, in fact, know how the climate works. If we really don’t know how climate works, and we don’t, then just what is being employed to “inform” policy decisions. Ask yourself, “if we don’t know how the climate works by it self then how can we possibly know what effects we are having on it? The persistent publication of global mean temperature changes glosses over that fact that some areas may be cooling while others warm. If the sum of the total is positive, the argument is that the globe is warming. Then, since the globe is warming and there is not much change in the solar constant, the argument is that changes must due to effects here on the deck. The investigators look around here on earth and ask, “what’s the biggest change here, and with wide-eyed astonishment conclude, ‘why, it’s us, the human race!'” The approach is superficially more sophisticated [e.g. Trenberth’s energy budget], but that is the reductio ad absurdum.
Socially, there’s a great deal of comfort to be had by some in the belief that “we did it,” and the consequent, “if we did it, then we can ‘un-did’ it.” Politically it offers a safe harbor for politicians that don’t want to go out on a limb. “We have met the enemy and he is us” is a good lead in for an “if we all work and sacrifice together” argument to distract people from real issues like poisoned rivers, unbreathable air, kidnapped girls, slavery (the PC term is “human trafficking” these days), North Korea, Ukraine and a host of other issues here at home that are far more intractable in the lack of near-term solutions that don’t involve lots of bullets and explosives.
Poor old Mosh, still trying to sell us GCMs, when even the IPPC has given up on them. And as for Greenland ice’s death spiral, the only deaths are among poor deluded greenies who try to cross it. It is not heat prostration that gets them. Brett Keane
Steven Mosher says:
May 8, 2014 at 9:39 am
Steven, I don’t get how you make up your mind what to open fire on. Does it really matter that the jeopardy contestant didn’t phrase his answer in the form of a question in this case, does it really affect the point? Say AW said ‘hmm, betcha that’s soot’ instead of ‘that’s soot’. Is difference in phrasing a substantial issue?
I’m grouchy today, so no doubt I’ll realize later the problem is on my end. shrug
Mosher: You don’t get 50-50 attribution for free because 50-50 is itself an attribution. The IPCC attribution analysis makes the Monty Python Witch Trial look logically rigorous by comparison, but at least they don’t pretend to start on the 50 yard line.
Greenland warmed before
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/greenland-temperatures-from-stations-with-data-from-the-1800s/
Someone gave us a tiny clue some time back.
Is this the “unpredictable” part part?
Here are a few others.
I decided to try and track down that photo to see if there wre any others from 2010 by the same researcher as per the caption ‘Greenland ice canyon filled with melt water in summer 2010. Ian Joughin, UW APL Polar Science Center’
I found the page HERE. There are quite a few images. Do you have any idea what caused the dark areas on the following 2 photos might be? It’s certainly is not pristine ice.
http://bigice.apl.washington.edu/photos/Greenland2010-16.jpg
http://bigice.apl.washington.edu/photos/Greenland2010-1.jpg
There are other photos from other years on the link below – 2006 to 2011.
http://bigice.apl.washington.edu/photos.html
A Yahoo article states that “”We find that 20 to 50 percent of the warming is due to anthropogenic [man-made] warming, and another 50 percent is natural,” Ding said.”.
If this is true, I think the author may have her logic reversed because up to 80% is natural and up to half is man-made, contrary to what she says in the second paragraph:
“Now University of Washington atmospheric scientists have estimated that up to half of the recent warming in Greenland and surrounding areas may be due to climate variations that originate in the tropical Pacific and are not connected with the overall warming of the planet. Still, at least half the warming remains attributable to global warming caused by rising carbon dioxide emissions. The paper is published May 8 in Nature.”
Mosher, check out this photo. The left side of the photo is NOT pristine snow.
http://bigice.apl.washington.edu/photos/Greenland07-11.jpg
From
http://bigice.apl.washington.edu/photos_greenland07.html
Excellent point Anthony. I would draw your attention from the melt water pool to the snow in the extreme foreground of the photo: It displays all the characteristics of snow covered with dark contaminants. It is granular and riddled with cavities produced as the dark particles absorb light energy and burn down through the snow. This happens even at temperatures below freezing. Snow throughout the photo displays dark surface contamination and banding. Good find.
Steve Mosher says “…soot plays a role. thats part of the human forcing equation.”
Sure it is: there’s no soot from Canadian forest fires, is there?
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/12/06/business/fire/fire-blog480.jpg
I see that this debris is deposited unequally in layers. These layers can correspond with atmospheric events that brought these deposits to Greenland in varying amounts. It is very plausible that as this canyon melted, the narrow bottom would become quite black from this debris (soot pollution, dust, ash, rock flour, etc). It is my guess that these layers have already been studied via ice cores and reported on.
“Our work shows that about half of the warming signal in Greenland comes from the predictable part – forcing of climate by anthropogenic greenhouse gases…”
—
If warming due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases is so “predictable,” then why didn’t any climate models predict the current 17 year pause? If it is so predictable, please predict how much global warming is going to occur over the next 5 to 10 years. Predicting what will happen by the end of the century means little because we will all be dead by then.
I would add this Icelandic volcano eruption.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_eruption_of_Gr%C3%ADmsv%C3%B6tn
It’s basaltic, ie, the ash it produces is dark grey to black.
Sleepalot says:
May 8, 2014 at 1:13 pm
Grimsvotn and other Icelandic volcanos erupt quite regularly: where is the analysis of the black stuff on Greenland to show that it is ‘soot’. In my view ‘soot’ is being demonised like CO2.
Show me the analysis!
Looking at the close up photo with the dark layers it would indicate some ar hundreds to thousands of years old. This leaves the question of what caused them before mans recent influance.
Grimsvotn and other Icelandic volcanos erupt quite regularly
Don’t they drift the other way? I think you want the Kamchatka volcanoes, which are also very active.
I would suggest that most of soot is transported by the jet stream from the Kamchatka’s frequent volcanic eruptions
1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000
2 4 2 3 2 1 4 2 3 1 4
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010
2 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 3 2
http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/500hPa/orthographic=0,90.20,400
In the 1970’s (I think) they floated an idea of spreading soot on the ice caps to melt them. Nothing came of the idea and we cleaned up the air so people forgot about the idea. Today we have China burning massive amounts of coal in dirty power plants and they have figured out how to cover the ice caps in soot without the costly solutions that were thought up before. It will be interesting to see if we can hold off an ice age through the process of generating power.
Thanks for the enlargement of a section of the photograph; Excellent!
“We need to understand why in the last 30 years global warming is not uniform”?
We need to understand the drivers of global temperatures, then we might see if this uniformity could possibly exist.
“Still, at least half the warming remains attributable to global warming caused by rising carbon dioxide emissions.”
Read: The models need extra CO2 to simulate that warming, and given that the models are “robust” and “skillful”, we are the only “attributable” source.
They simply want to forget the cooling BS from the 1970s but it keeps coming back. If the world cools and they blame man then how can they forget the great global warming scare of the present? They have doomed themselves.
H/t
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/05/08/1978-government-experts-said-no-end-in-sight-to-global-cooling-polar-vortex-increasing/
This makes shorter-term forecasts difficult, but helps scientists to make more accurate long-range projections.
If they can’t the short-term forecasts right, how can they be confident of getting the long-range projections right? Is that like going east to get to the west, or north to go south?
As someone else pointed out, there is much evidence of soot or dust deposition on most of the snow in the picture, especially the foreground. You have to look at the full resolution image, not just Anthony’s close-up. There is grey runoff all over. I think Anthony is right. The soot was probably deposited all over, and when the melting began, it started to wash together into more concentrated spots, and the sun kept those particles warmer than the surrounding snow.
Mosher writes “If you want to know how much of a role soot plays you have to run a GCM. or you can just speculate and assert that it plays a major role.”
Let me rewrite that for you.
“If you want to know how much of a role soot plays you have to experiment by putting soot on the ice and measure the change of the rate of melting. Then you construct methods to measure the total amount of soot present in the environment. Then you calculate the effect complete with error margins.”
What you DONT do it whack it in a GCM because GCMs cant answer that question scientifically.
Mosher also wrote “Science: build a tool to try to understand the role of soot.”
So Steve, your first instinct to answer this kind of question is to “build a tool” ?
I would suggest your instinct regarding answering scientific questions has gone West.
Jimbo writes “I found the page HERE. There are quite a few images. Do you have any idea what caused the dark areas on the following 2 photos might be? It’s certainly is not pristine ice.”
It seems obvious to me that as snow and ice forms, it will contain various amounts of soot and dust. As it melts that soot and dust will be left/concentrated at the surface. Its very likely to be a positive feedback on the melting process. Some depths of ice and snow will have more or less soot depending on how much there was around at the time. Its quite probable much of that dust/soot will originally be volcanic in nature.
it is not just soot from diesel and coal that greatly affects the albedo of normally ice covered cold regions. The Colorado Rockies in recent drought times (and likely the pre-Columbian times) have gotten Spring-time coatings of Red dust from the 4 corners region spring-time wind storms. The red dust in the snow pack obviously greatly intensifies solar radiation absorption and thus snow pack melt. That leads to earlier more intense melt runoffs, with less flows in the summer.
The coming fall 2014 El Nino may provide enhanced winter- spring rains into 2015-2016 to suppress the aoelian red dust in the Southern Rockies. Along with simply more ElNino provided precip to the SW, the worsening drought-dust cycle may be broken by natural ocean cycle.
You may well be right but at least the point being made is that some of the lost albedo on Greenland ice not down to man? Where it is down to man it could originate from coal powered stations or industrial pollution. My point is that it perhaps has less to do with co2 than other factors such as wild fires (natural or arson?).
TimTheToolMan, here are the Warmists at ‘Skeptical Science’ on soot on Greenland ice lowering albedo. See their graph “Greenland Ice Accumulation Area Albedo, July 2000 – 2012”.
Here is yet another paper showing a warmer Greenland in the first half of the 20th century.
Find my earlier peer reviewed references for this observation HERE.
Funny thing, their graph (and its blatant ask-for-money trick in Skeptical Science) …
See, the ACTUAL measured day-by-day albedo of the nearby Arctic sea ice across the summer days by Curry during her SHEBA experiments shows a variation of the arctic sea ice albedo between a high of 0.93 and a low of 0.45 in mid-July.
Thus, NOT a 0.75 – 0.72 year-to-year variation – ASSUMING these people actually DID measure summer ice albedo at the same day-of-year each of the years! – but a actual variation of arctic surface ice albedo of 0.93 – 0.45. Do we call that a 50% decrease in albedo from April through July then back to 0.93 in late August and September? Or a 100% variation in albedo?
A mere 2 weeks difference in sample dates each season would account for the difference they plotted on January 1 each year.
Katherine says:
May 8, 2014 at 4:18 pm
This makes shorter-term forecasts difficult, but helps scientists to make more accurate long-range projections.
If they can’t the short-term forecasts right, how can they be confident of getting the long-range projections right? Is that like going east to get to the west, or north to go south?
Katherine, according to Steve Mosher “”they” know more about what happens after 2060 than before”
steven mosher | February 17, 2013 at 3:27 am over at J. Curry’s.
The physics of climate are such that we know more about what happens after 2060 than before. Strange but true.
Mosher apparently wrote “The physics of climate are such that we know more about what happens after 2060 than before. Strange but true.”
But the physics of climate change due to increased CO2 only says that the temperature of the ERL must increase and doesn’t say anything about what happens below that and definitely doesn’t say what must happen all the way down to ground level.
Nevertheless the AGW believers all assume warming to ground level which then feeds back positively with increased water vapour. If only they could see their assumptions for what they are…
To me it seems as if the glaciers have some sort of self-cleaning mechanism: soot comes down and blackens the surface, then the sun heats the blackened surface and the soot is washed away by the thus generated water until the surface is white again.
The sun at these latitudes doesn’t shine in winter at all. But the soot comes down incessantly. If it isn’t washed out of the air by precipitation, then it comes down by the force of gravity, some day. If the amount of soot exceeds the self-cleaning capacity of these glaciers, then all glaciers ought to be grey or even black and the sun in summer will thaw and thaw and thaw. Finally, even during summer, soot will not cease to come down. So there must be some sort of balance between soot and precipitation like snow and rain. Is the current amount of precipitation sufficient to maintain that balance? If it is, then soot can’t be a significant factor for an assumed thawing of that glacier ice, else: gotcha – at least one of the suspects.
“Ice appears to be exquisitely sensitive to the buildup of greenhouse gases…”
How would anyone who makes such a stupid, anti-scientific statement as that expect to be taken seriously?
A good picture of black volcanic dust.
http://themetapicture.com/the-demons-are-breaking-loose/