Paul Homewood notes: According to John Cook, Antarctic sea ice has been expanding because the Southern Ocean is getting warmer. He also claims that anyone thinking more ice is due to colder conditions is “ignorant”.
He forgets that some of us know how to check the data.
Bob Tisdale produces analyses of sea surface temperatures each month, and these have shown that the Southern Ocean has been getting considerable colder since 1981, and particularly in the last 8 years.
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2014/10/12/september-2014-sea-surface-temperature-sst-anomaly-update/All of Bob’s data is sourced from the KNMI website here.
Now who looks “ignorant” Mr. Cook?
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Apparently, that’s the unadjusted data.
It didn;t say that. It said SoHem SST temperature
“RELIGION has nothing to do with science anymore, it is a faith proposition, the secular apocalypse, that they in their beneficent wisdom are the only one that can save us from it, even if they have to imprison us, torture us, and kill us, for our own good of course.”
Fixed it for ya.
Denniswingo’s version made sense. Yours doesn’t.
Arthur, it all depends on the choice of baseline. Usually the anti-religion crowd pick an Inquisition as a ‘norm’ and never pick 1100-1350 AD Alexandria surrounded by the most advanced civilisation the Western world had ever seen, so advanced it even provoked the Renaissance in Europe.
Modern secular humanism is akin to a teenager depart home declaring (and convinced) he raised himself since he was a child.
Magic ice that forms as things get warmer. It is almost as if the rent seekers are testing to see how far they can play their faithful believers for fools.
sort of like that team of tailors who found themselves a gullible Emperor in need of some clothes.
Maybe the ice around Antarctica is Ice 9. Let’s see if anyone picks up the literary reference.
Ha ha, my favorite Vonnegut book.
…KNMI website here
That link to the KNMI website doesn’t work. Perhaps this ass the link intended:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/selectindex.cgi
For those not familiar with KNMI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Netherlands_Meteorological_Institute
Established in 1854, its first director was Prof. Buys Ballot, known to all meteorologists for his famous rule: If the wind is on your back, in the Northern Hemisphere a low pressure area will be to your left.
“was the link… ”
Sorry for the lurid typo.
John Cook’s claim is proven wrong, in more none-news bears find woods a [good] place to get rid of personal waste .
Cook and his SS gang are the typical little men made big by spouting nonsense, they care nothing for facts nor reality all that matters is how something works for them. The good news is they will go back to being little men once the cause falls , and if we are lucky bitter ones who spend their lives knocking out anger messages on blogs the total readership for which could hold a meeting in match box.
Perhaps we could club together and get him some new crayons.
I might have to convert now. I had no idea that the next ice-age would (could) be caused by AGW.
No, more ice and more extreme cold is due to warming. It should be obvious. Anyone who disagrees with that needs tutoring from the enlightened John Kerry, Al Gore, and a little Bill Nye the ideology guy thrown in for good measure.
The words “ignorant” and “stupid” have become official replacements for words like science and model prediction errors according to observed behavior of AGW trolls.
It’s obvious Cook doesn’t live in the Southern Hemisphere.
There is significantly less land area in the SH, much more ocean. The ocean drives the climate, and consequently the weather. Behind all that, as the ultimate force is Antarctica.
There is no continental amelioration.
Ah, Sophocles. The larger irony in your post is that he most definitely does.
Yes, but he lives in Queensland and uses Barrier Reef temps as proxies.
I’m amazed that anybody pays attention to John Cook at all.
Fortunately, John Cook looks so much like a clown a) he doesn’t need the usual face paint, hat and big shoes, b) I instinctively just laugh when I see his name let alone his picture and c) I never have to take anything he says with even a single grain of salt cos 97% it will be utter crap. (The other 3% covers him knowing the date, time of day, his own birthday, Lewandowsky’s email address and how to button his shirt.)
You all don’t understand. You are looking at the chart from the northern hemisphere perspective. Antarctica is at the bottom of the world so you must turn the chart upside down.
Anthony,
the article by John Cook in your link was posted in 2010 so he has had 4 years of being wrong. Alternatively he has had four years to think up a new excuse.
The article title and reader comments make interesting reading in the light of subsequent events
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Watts-Up-With-That-ignorance-regarding-Antarctic-sea-ice.html
Watts Up With That’s ignorance regarding Antarctic sea ice
Posted on 9 March 2010 by John Cook
Gents; I hate to pick nits but just wondering…….did any notice that the Cook article is from 2010? Also his charts show surface air temp.
Also his charts end @ur momisugly 2004.
Maybe its time to stop proving them wrong and start doing something about shutting up their lies before we are all standing in line to get some bread.
Let’s fight over the weather!
LOLOLOL!!! Spit beer on my puter. You owe me a beer.
vote.
On cooks page he has two charts that show temperatures increasing.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/Antarctica_Sea_Ice.gif
They conveniently stop at 2004. Where is he getting those from?
Hmm. It looks like cook is looking at air temperature. So that is one difference. I don’t know what data set he pulled that from, because I think I remember other posts on WUUT that showed southern polar air temperature being pretty flat. Maybe someone could find that chart.
Am I also right in thinking that the ocean would be being warmed by creating all that ice, so the fact that it isn’t is somehow significant too?
Makes more sense to use air temperatures, since ice is just frozen air.
More questions..
Why would air temperature matter other than it’s trend is convenient for cook to say the south is warming. The water has a much higher specific heat, so the air temperature literally doesn’t matter..right? Could some of the extra heat in the southern air cook sees be explained by the heat released when water freezes?
What is the absolute water temperature? I assume its colder than the air in summer and warmer in winter but I have no idea really. What is the relationship between air and water temps at the poles anyway?
Why would trends explain melting when temps are below freezing throughout the trend? Is this information lost in the annual temperature #? Are summer and winter temperatures both cooling?
I am asking all this since I want to know what games are being played by cherry picking air temperature.
From the WUWT Sea Ice reference page:
ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/graphics/tlt/plots/rss_ts_channel_tlt_southern%20polar_land_and_sea_v03_3.png
Southern air temperatures over the largest southern land mass are NOT getting hotter ….
@RACookPE1978 “not getting hotter”. That’s what I thought. So where does cook get his graphs?
Below that image you got from John Cooks page there is this text:
Figure 3: Surface air temperature over the ice-covered areas of the Southern Ocean (top). Sea ice extent, observed by satellite (bottom). (Zhang 2007)
So it is clear that the charts came from (Zhang 2007)
Increasing Antarctic Sea Ice under Warming Atmospheric and Oceanic Conditions
JINLUN ZHANG
Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington,
ABSTRACT
Estimates of sea ice extent based on satellite observations show an increasing Antarctic sea ice cover from
1979 to 2004 even though in situ observations show a prevailing warming trend in both the atmosphere and
the ocean.
http://psc.apl.washington.edu/zhang/Pubs/Zhang_Antarctic_20-11-2515.pdf
I think it’s also say SIMULATED under the graph ….. Maybe from an invalidated computer model ?
The main purpose of the Zhang 2007 paper was to explain the “riddle”, or “paradox” (author’s words) of waxing ice extent, which would imply waning temperatures, contradicting the so-called global warming models.
This apparently vexed the Big Government patron NASA and also NSF who funded the paper.
Satellite imagery prove that ice extent is increasing, so the science is “settled” on that fact.
But where is the ‘paradoxical’ warming in the region? To show that, the author relied on Eugenia Kalnay’s 1996 “reanalysis” project, using Data Assimilation (which Kalnay pioneered) to “blend” all available historical climate records into one “seamless” stream.
http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds090.0/docs/publications/bams1996mar/bams1996mar-bm.pdf
Data Assimilation (DA) can be thought of as (in effect) a huge Bayes net, which processes historical time series a step at a time, starting with some initial a priori estimates and treating each point as new evidence for inferring forecasts as posterior probababilities. DA is used in many modern weather modeling systems (e.g. WRF) and tends to produce useful short range forecasts. But, as in any model, may “adjust” local conditions to produce the most accurate global forecast.
So author used a later incarnation of Reanalyis to establish the needed “warming trend”.
So why didn’t the author use the actual temperature record (which showed no warming trend) instead of this modeled output? Well, I think it is clear that he needed a warming trend for his experimental model, for trying to predict increasing ice extend under this constraining context.
In fact he states that this modeled trend is ‘ideal’ for his experimental study:
So there’s a lot of handwaving going on here, which the author properly caveated:
Was he successful? Well, yes and no.
Yes, by twiddling some parameters he did produce a model using a ‘hypothetical’ warming trend which generated some increased ice extent.
But, no, it didn’t predict as much ice as needed to match observed extents.
So why didn’t he twiddle the parameters some more and and generate a model that fully matched the observed ice extents?
I’m guessing that he tried that, but it probably needed a ‘cooling trend’ to do that. So obviously his Big Gov patron wouldn’t be interested in paying for that kind of ‘real science’. They only want results that match their politically motivated goals.
Thanks for that discussion Johanus on the “Reanalysis project”. So there are no actual *measured* temperatures that show a warming southern ocean, only models? Actual measurements show a cooling trend? That is a quite jarring result. Frankly it does not speak well of “climate science”.
Bob Clark
Bob Clark:
re: “… actual *measured* temperatures…”
Technically speaking, there are no devices that “measure” temperature directly. So ‘thermometers’ must always rely on some kind of model to impute temperatures from other proxies. [It’s the ‘engineering fallacy’ which makes us believe that the readings from the instruments we build allow us to view Nature directly.]
So, to paraphrase George Box, “all measurements are wrong”. Except perhaps in some small regions of time, space and scale, where they might reliably provide useful estimates of ‘temperature’, ‘distance’, ‘time’ etc. For example, a micrometer might provide useful measurements of hair thickness, but would be useless for measuring the distance from New York to London.
I’ll partially defend the Reanalysis data by saying that it can be ‘useful’ for climate studies of the past 60 years or so, in the sense that it provides a continuous stream of hindcasted “forecasts” using the same technology as “real” forecasts are using. So Zhang’s use of this data makes sense as the basis for his modeling experiments. (Especially since he apparently could find no ‘real-world’ data to support his hypotheses)
But, like most government-developed data projects, Reanalysis data is riddled with errors which tend not to be corrected. Here’s a list (as of 2012) of some of the known problems:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/reanalysis/problems.shtml
In particular, some of the polar temps Zhang used are known to be uncertain (and won’t be fixed):
He has a drawing board in his office.
Freedom…..
the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.
At what point does consistent, persistent, relentless pushing of untruths infringe upon freedom?,
Clearly the data is out of adjustment.
But don’t you see? The Southern Ocean is getting colder because of global warming — the warming glaciers are melting and falling into it, like ice cubes in a drink.
Now get out of my way, I have a billion-dollar grant to collect!
John knows the difference between sea surface temperatures and temperatures at a depth- which apparently you do not. Why don’t you post a graph of these in the interest of fairness rather than cherry picking your data?
Meanwhile back in the real world, warmest month on record *again* and without an El Nino. Sheez you’d think that with all those volanic eruptions, that soot from China, and those natural cycles you’re all so fond of, that the planet would be cooling. Except it’s not.
Don’t you just love adjusted data? UAH and RSS say different.
UAH and RSS are adjusted too!
If you look at a relatively recent report (pdf) that goes back to the early satellite data you can see that while the Arctic ice cap has lost roughly 3 million square miles of ice, the Antarctic cap has gained about the same amount. The slopes look different, but if you set the Y axis increments of the two graphs to be the same then the slopes are pretty much equal.
Why is one pole gaining ice and the other loosing at seemingly similar rates? It could be just part of the chaos theory of the universe, stuff happens. Sure seems to be a balance though. Interesting!
The re-discovery of the old Nimbus and other satellite’s historical (1960s through 1979) images of both poles will aid a lot in learning about what exactly is going on. This new (well, old actually) information could explain the warmists seeming panic these days – they know the jig is up, that their models don’t work, and that the Arctic and Antarctic are doing their own thing for unknown reasons, but they need to keep the grant money flowing so their jobs will be secure.
The Australian Antarctic Division’s resupply ship Aurora Australis left Hobart today (one week later than last year) to resupply the Davis base facing according to the Hobart Mercury “the toughest sea ice conditions in memory”:
http://www.themercury.com.au/news/tasmania/sea-ice-at-record-levels-as-aurora-australis-leaves-hobart-for-201415-research-season/story-fnj4f7k1-1227098503133
We will follow her progress with much interest.
A well established oceanography lliterature provides fully adequate explanation for climate change on all time scales. Tim cook is not am oceanographer but a cartoonist and media drama queen. For the media to get its oceanography from the cook, not established oceanography, is nothing short of criminal fraud and propaganda of the worst kind.