Antarctic Sea Ice Increase and Global Warming

It’s hard to make a case these days that even Arctic ice is down. See this comparison from Cryosphere Today:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=05&fd=26&fy=1995&sm=05&sd=26&sy=2014
[h/t Steve Goddard. Note that snow extent for the two dates is not directly comparable.]

OK, don’t want to trigger a firestorm here – is the implication from Mr Buske that maybe UHI heat propagation/leaching out into the environment is the cause of the NTH warming? That’s what I infer. Is this even feasible? I wouldn’t have thought that a UHI footprint could be big enough to cause any measurable hemispherical effect.

I think you’re dead on the money. The fact that e.g. HADCRUT4 does not correct its temperature record for UHI in the land surface record (while there is little evidence of equal heating or evidence of much less heating of both the neighboring oceans or the troposphere above) is absolutely an anthropogenic effect on the (predominantly northern) hemisphere temperature computation. The fact that the GISS correction somehow often manages to increase or leave neutral the UHI correction it does compute in the present relative to the past, so that correcting for UHI actually increases global temperatures as the world’s urbanization has proceeded is also absolutely an anthropogenic effect on temperature. The fact that thermometers have, over the greater part of the thermometric record, been used regularly only on the land, in or near urban centers that have monotonically grown, surrounded by an ever-increasing margin of forest turned to farmland, to shopping malls, roads, and parking lots, and even in the present are sited in official weather stations located (say) ten meters or so from a vast complex of treeless concrete runways at airports, in an office building downtown in a major urban center, in between buildings in a government complex surrounded by parking and with buildings acting as a reflector oven during the day — that’s an anthropogenic cause of increase in the computed thermometric record.
It is a simple matter of fact that the southern hemisphere has comparatively few major urban centers and a much smaller population. It has fewer thermometers, and the thermometers it has are much, much less likely to have been read in the same site, regularly, for 164 years back to 1850. In 1850 Antarctica, much of Africa, much of South America, and the bulk of Australia were Terra Incognita, untouched and unvisited by westerners with their fancy scientific instrumentation, unsettled, uncivilized, unknown). Its oceans were visited by whalers and pirates and slavers, not scientific expeditions. Even now, almost 1/3 of the population of the Earth lives in just two countries — India and China, both in the northern hemisphere. Even now, the southern hemisphere has only 800,000,000 people! — that is between 11% and 12% of the total world’s population! It is also important to remember that 80% of the southern hemisphere is ocean and 20% sparsely populated land, where in the northern hemisphere over 40% of the surface area is (comparatively heavily urbanized) land.
Finally, it is a simple matter of fact that computed temperatures — oops, I meant temperature anomalies as we have no idea what the actual global average temperature(s) are even today within one whole degree centigrade either way — are almost never presented to the public with credible error bars. There is a simple reason for that. If they were, the uncertainty of the estimates in the 19th century would be far greater than the total anomaly, and would only gradually shrink to where a warming “signal” could emerge from statistical and measurement “noise” by around the second half of the twentieth century, and would remain commensurate with most of the warming observed in the single burst of conceivably anthropogenic CO_2 driven warming in the entire thermal record, that covers roughly the period between the 1982-1983 El Nino and the 1997-1998 “super” El-Nino that was the last burst of statistically significant (and instrumentally resolvable!) warming we’ve seen in the last 16 years. And yes, southern temperature uncertainties are even today much greater than northern temperature uncertainties because there are far fewer thermometers more erratically measured in a much smaller land surface area, and systematic or not ARGO is damn sparse compared to the incredible number of NH thermometers throughout much of the record.
However, the SH record is, by its nature, much less susceptible to the UHI effect, which is an entirely anthropogenic artifact in the computation of global temperatures, while being even more susceptible to the anthropogenic neglect of a proper treatment or presentation of error.
The very, very interesting thing is that one would expect to first order — in what is admittedly a horrendously nonlinear coupled chaotic system with strong non-Markovian dynamics that I’ve asserted in other posts cannot currently be modelled or predicted in any believable way out to the long (climate, vs weather) term at the granularity of current model computation or any granularity they are likely to achieve in less than decades — is for well-mixed atmospheric CO_2 to have a larger water vapor feedback driven warming of the southern hemisphere than in the northern hemisphere, as the ratio of humid warmed ocean to drier land is 4:1 in the south, 3:2 in the north. Yet we observe the opposite.
A truly cynical skeptic might consider this to be first order evidence supporting two possibilities that either or both could independently be correct. One is that we have the wrong sign for total feedback due to water including all oceanic and atmospheric and albedo-related effects, given the actual dynamic process that govern the ocean and its contributions to local and global temperatures. This is basically consistent with Bob Tisdale’s ENSO-dominant hypothesis (and with Trenberth’s “missing heat” hypothesis that seems to be converging with Tisdale’s). The second is that UHI is important, and computing the land surface record without compensating for it leads to anomalous warming that is not reflected in the oceans or troposphere because it is anthropogenic local warming, not global, but happens to warm the places we are most likely to position our thermometers with a clear time dependent gradient due to monotonically increasing population and land use change.
rgb

That shark video might be more appropriate to the stuff this site fights against than you would think at first glance. I have a sneaking suspicion that it is a clip from that Faux Megladon documentary Discovery made last year. The one that claimed they had discovered evidence that Megladon had survived into the modern age, only revealing afterwards that it was purely an speculative entertainment production. Which makes it about as scientific as most of the Global warming documentaries.

While CO2 is an unlikely contributor to northern hemisphere warming, carbon soot from the burning of coal since the dawn of the industrial revolution is very likely a causative factor. Look at the photos of the air quality in major cities in China today and you can see that while coal is burned cleanly in the USA (thus no longer producing the soot) the soot from Chinese coal burning is probably continuing to contribute to soot over the arctic.

Mr. Buske, It is my hope you are seeking a dialog on your interesting speculation and assertions.
If that is what you are after, then I offer a repost of my comments and questions to your post, hoping for a meaningful response from you:
“hunter says:
June 6, 2014 at 3:17 am
You offer a lot to ponder. I would ask you to expand this interesting assertion a bit more:
“…that evidence of severe, largely anthropogenic warming of the Northern Thermal Hemisphere (NTH) is compelling.”
1- please define severe. There is good historical evidence that the temperatures we are experiencing are not unique. And certainly it is fair to say that nothing severe is happening, since storm, drought, flood, heat and cold are failing to show any dangerous trends.
2- You introduce a new term”NTH” Northern Thermal Hemisphere. Please offer evidence that this is even a meaningful term.
You further assert that this NTH warming explains arctic ice loss. How does this reconcile with excellent historical records indicating that the current state of Arctic sea ice is not unprecedented,and that in fact Arctic sea ice is highly dynamic and has been like this in the past ≈150 years.
Looking forward to your reply,
Respectfully,
hunter

Norm Buske said:
“… I agree that evidence of severe, largely anthropogenic warming of the Northern Thermal Hemisphere (NTH) is compelling. ”
What evidence? We would all be interested in hearing a compelling argument that the 20th century warming shown in your Climate4you chart above is
1) anomalous warming, not explained by natural variation over the past centuries. I.e. not unprecedented, (cf. previous Medieval, Roman warm periods etc). Yes, there is an active debate on this topic. So let’s see your “compelling” evidence that “settles” the debate.
2) and caused “largely” (as you say) by man-made activities.
I guessing that your argument goes something like this: A) Temperatures rose in the 20th century. B) CO2 levels rose in the 20th century due to human activities. Therefore (applying the Holmes-Doyle lemma) man-made event B certainly caused event A. What else could it be!
I’m willing to concede that the increase in CO2 levels in Proposition B is likely due to human activity. But you can’t apply that causation transitively to Proposition A, without further compelling proof. And that proof can be ‘compelling’ if and only if you can prove that you’ve eliminated all other possibilities.
As they say in the Army, “It’s time to sh*t, or get off the pot!” Show us your compelling evidence! (And we’ll know it is compelling if it causes Anth*ny to change his belief)