Guest essay by Jim Steele
Director emeritus Sierra Nevada Field Campus, San Francisco State University and author of Landscapes & Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism
I just finished reading the paper Influence Of Internal Variability On Arctic Sea-Ice Trends by Swart et al (2015) in the journal Nature Climate Change and discussed by Anthony here. The paper might be better titled a Statistical Justification For The Pause In Arctic Sea Ice Melt as they concluded, “Thus, pauses in sea-ice loss, such as seen over the past eight years, are not surprising and are fully expected to occur from time to time.” In other words, we should still trust the models and ignore skeptics who cherry-pick the current pause and thickening of sea ice.
They also determined, “according to the models there is about a one in three chance of a 7-year period with a positive sea-ice trend, despite strong anthropogenic forcing.” And to their credit they also reported that the enhanced sea ice loss between 2001 and 2007 was rare, but plausibly enhanced by natural variability concluding, “Thus, both the enhanced sea-ice loss during 2001–2007, and the recent period of near-zero trend are consistent with the supposition of internal climate variability onto the background of long-term radiatively forced sea-ice decline…”
However the “elephant” mired in the thickening Arctic ice was, if this paper was truly anything more than an excuse for the lack of an Arctic sea ice death spiral, and the “background of long-term radiatively forced sea-ice decline” is a global phenomenon, then why wasn’t their analysis extended to the condition of global sea ice and Antarctica? Why cherry-pick just the Arctic?
Without access to their models, I can’t directly ascertain their statistical probability of a pause in Antractica’s hypothesized sea ice decline, but their Figure 3B (below) suggests the probability is zero. The black line represents the modeled probabilities of a increasing pause‑lengths based on observational data. A probability of a 30‑year pause (or increase in sea ice) between 1979 and 2013 is clearly zero. The graph’s other colored lines are probabilities for pauses based on different projections of CO2 concentrations throughout the 21st century referred to as Representative Concentration Pathways. The Wiki graph at the end of the article illustrates the CO2 trajectory for each RCP.
From Figure 3 c: Probability of a pause as a function of pause length in the Historical-RCP4.5 experiment over 1979–2013 (black), and in the future over 2066–2100 under the RCP2.6 (blue), RCP4.5 (cyan) and RCP8.5 (red) experiments. The horizontal dashed line represents a probability of p = 0.05. A pause is a period with a trend ≥0. Only ice extents ≥1 x 106 km2 are considered.
Thus it is more than likely, the observed 30_year “pause” in Antarctica sea ice “decline” is NOT “consistent with the supposition of internal climate variability onto the background of long-term radiatively forced sea-ice decline”. It suggests the model’s supposition of long-term radiatively forced sea-ice decline is need of serious reconsideration!
Their study was strictly a statistical analysis, independent of the various causes that might be attributed to the changing sea ice patterns at either pole. So it doesn’t matter how many hypothetical reasons may be conjured up to explain Antarctica’s growing sea ice. Based on their analyses, the models’ inability to predict a 30‑year trend in growing Antarctica sea ice “despite strong anthropogenic forcing”, can not be explained by CO2 driven models or random variability. As I have argued before Antarctica sea ice growth is a better indicator of climate change and there are very good reasons to believe the loss of Arctic sea ice is better explained by ocean and atmospheric oscillations.
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“The results of this study showed that the evolution of the stratospheric polar vortex plays an important part in
the mechanism of solar-climatic links. The vortex strength reveals a roughly 60-year periodicity influencing
the large-scale atmospheric circulation and the sign of SA/GCR effects on the development of baric systems
at middle and high latitudes. The vortex location is favorable for the mechanisms of solar activity influence
on the troposphere circulation involving variations of different agents (GCR intensity, UV fluxes). In the
periods of a strong vortex changes of the vortex intensity associated with solar activity phenomena seem to
affect temperature contrasts in tropospheric frontal zones and the development of extratropical cyclogenesis.”
http://geo.phys.spbu.ru/materials_of_a_conference_2012/STP2012/Veretenenko_%20et_all_Geocosmos2012proceedings.pdf
Thanks for the link
Conclusions
In this work we carried out the investigation of the response of atmospheric pressure at the level
1000 hPa to Forbush-decreases of galactic cosmic rays in both hemispheres. A significant pressure growth
with the maximum on the 3rd-4th days was revealed over Northern Europe and Western Siberia in the
Northern hemisphere. In the Southern hemisphere two regions of a pronounced pressure growth with the
maximum on the 4th-5th days were found. The first region is located between South Africa and Antarctica,
and the second one is between Australia and Antarctica. In both hemispheres the pressure growth was
observed at middle latitudes, ~40-70°N and ~40-70°S, correspondingly. It was shown that most prominent
pressure deviations are associated with the climatic atmospheric fronts, Arctic and Polar, which are the
regions of most intensive cyclonic activity. At the same time the significant pressure growth is observed in
the regions of low geomagnetic cutoff rigidities that allows precipitation of particles with minimum energies
from ~ 0,1 to 2-3 GeV. The obtained results suggest that the variations of low-energy component of galactic
cosmic rays strongly modulated by solar activity may influence dynamic processes at middle latitudes, so
these variations may be considered as an important link between solar activity and the lower atmosphere.
http://geo.phys.spbu.ru/materials_of_a_conference_2012/STP2012/Artamonova_%20et_all_Geocosmos2012proceedings.pdf
I thought ‘natural variation’ was out. Everything is due to AGCW, CC and/or ACD. At least that is how the Warmunista Commentariat respond when questioned about the validity of their ‘facts’.
It is a character trait of the Left and other totalitarians(tyrants and would be tyrants) to be paranoid. This is the way they are. They really ALL need to see psychiatrists plus be locked away from society. Their ravings should not be believed, let alone acted upon by anyone.
It is their paranoia that is our only weapon.
Now go forth and rattle their cages. Make the poor little dearies soil their diapers. Make them go off the deep end to be locked up in the nut house.
@Eugene WR Gallun
…It is as if we are watching people who believe that the earth is the stationary center of the solar system and give ever more convoluted explanations for the strange movements of the planets around the earth (some planets even suddenly appearing to move backwards). The earth centered model is right — therefore all the contradictions must have some explanation…The models are just wrong…
That, of course, is exactly what happened. And for exactly the same reasons – the researchers of the day had all bought into the standard model – which was that the Earth was at the centre and the planets all followed circular orbits. This was a geometrically elegant construct (rather like string theory) and it complied with the religious requirements of the day perfectly – and matched the observations so long as you cherry-picked them a bit and fiddled the data a bit…. And then, as better data was gathered, it started being difficult (just like the Pause), so the mathematicians started producing complex justifications based on Epicycles to keep their world-view intact.
The comparison is exact, even up to major scientists losing their positions as they espouse the new theory. It would be interesting to study that history in detail – because that’s what’s going to happen again…
It has now even got support of the Pope to make the parallel even more exact.
But don’t hold your breath for any change soon. It took centuries for an apology to be forthcoming for the Galileo ‘disagreement’.
So a lot turns on the validity and the importance the theorists give to the contradictions. Is it a minor thing, something that will easily fit into the theory as soon as we understand it better, or does it destroy the theory? At first, either position could be right. The warmists, though, with their denier attacks and the unacknowledged elasticity of their theories to morph to explain whatever happens to be going on outside the window, all the while assuring us that the only way to save us is getting rid of capitalism and very resentful that people are resisting, aren’t playing fair. Still, people aren’t as dumb as they’re given discredit for, they know at some level that the AGW theories are one-size-fits-all, they can smell the propaganda a mile away, and you can tell by how low most people rank AGW on their list of problems in the world.
What inhibits the polar vortex in the winter and inhibits the growth of ice?
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/n19_amsu_t70_nh_asc.gif
You can see how it is unevenly temperature distribution over the polar circle, when the polar vortex is inhibited. Warm air enters the Arctic Circle, where the vortex is weakened.
http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/Recmnh242.gif
Worth see the current ice extent and thickness of snow cover on the northern hemisphere.
http://www.wetterzentrale.de/pics/Rnhemsnow.gif
Swart et al (2015) = 20/20 hindsight.
The cargo brought by this voodoo dance is further research grants.
Keep warm Robert of Ottawa.
Coeur de lion. I have an interest in the UK Met Office – has anyone detected a language creep in their Climate section? Towards being less dogmatic? They have a chance of looking very stupid.
Schizophrenia, isn’t that the same as being Bi-Polar?
So we could say CO2 forcing is just noise in the greater scheme of natural variability,
Or we could say natural variation is just noise in the greater effect of CO2 forcing,
Or we could say we don’t know but it is interesting and we like arguing our opinion like football fans might argue who is a greater quarterback, Joe Montana or Tom Brady.
Unfortunately you cannot get government grants making a case for Joe Montana.
More unfortunately, poorly substantiated or clearly dis-proven opinions (like ice free Arctic) still carry weight in the public arena.
“The writers investigated the greenhouse effect using their adiabatic model, which relates the global temperature of troposphere to the atmospheric pressure and solar radiation. This model allows one to analyze the global-Figure 6. Near-surface temperature in the Arctic vs. solar activity (after Robinson et al., 2007) [17] .temperature changes due to variations in mass and chemical composition of the atmosphere. Even significant releases of anthropogenic carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere do not change average parameters of the Earth’s heat regime and have no essential effect on the Earth’s climate warming. Moreover, based on the adiabatic model of heat transfer, the writers showed that additional releases of CO2 and CH4 lead to cooling (and not to warming as the proponents of the conventional theory of global warming state) of the Earth’s atmosphere. The additional methane releases possess a double cooling effect: First, they intensify convection in the lower layers of troposphere; Second, the methane together with associated water vapor intercept part of the infrared solar irradiation reaching the Earth. Thus, petroleum production and other anthropogenic activities resulting in accumulation of additional amounts of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have practically no effect on the Earth’s climate.”
http://file.scirp.org/Html/4-4700320_51443.htm
Wouldn’t it be interesting to have Monckton utilize these assumptions of this paper in his simple climate model rather than the IPCC assumptions?
All the natural causes aside the UN should place a 10 year ban on shipping in the Arctic. The continued breaking up of the ice by shipping does lead to extended ice loss. The only manmade cause in the equation.
It would be interesting to know the actual extent of this.
Not that it serves the “cause” so no chance of it happening.
“…background of long-term radiatively forced sea-ice decline”
And how exactly does this radiatively-forced decline work? There is no net heat gain in the Arctic sea from either the water or the ice. The Arctic seas have a net heat loss all year, relying on heat imported from the South to remain liquid. This is easily demonstrated with lakes further south:
The Arctic summer is about 6 weeks. The season is called ‘construction’. Sachs Harbour, hardly a northern outpost, has a 6 week period above freezing. Let’s consider it.
Find a large lake further south and look at the ice cover on the lake after 6 weeks of a period with the sun at a similar elevation above the horizon as we see in Sachs Harbour. It starts much earlier of course, and then count forward 6 weeks and look at the ice on the lake. Melted yet? Nope. At the end of May in lakes around Kapuskasing – hardly a climate cold spot – are still covered in ice. Yet there is much more ‘radiative forcing’ in Kapuskasing than in Sachs Harbour during that six weeks. The core claim for CO2 forcing is not supported.
Arctic sea ice is melted from below when the rapid cooling from the top backs off. This is basic physics. This is basic science in the form of measuring temperatures above and below the ice and watching it change.
Does an ‘increase in radiative forcing’ accelerate the decline? Well apparently not because the trumpeted 400 ppm CO2 is not having any effect at all in increasing the rate of sea ice loss. That it accelerated into 2007 and again in 2012 is not much support for the hypothesis. That could just be the known sea water temperature increase that invaded through the Bering Strait – a well-documented happenstance that is clear enough. There is not yet any demonstrated “long-term radiatively forced sea-ice decline” and using the words ‘long term’ does not adequately address the criticism that sea ice extent or thickness or total mass has little or nothing to do with CO2. Certainly nothing discernable from natural variation.
Obviously the Antarctic contra-example is a death knell for the CO2 and ‘radiatively forced’ sea ice loss argument.
First, nobody knows anything about the factors controlling Antarctic sea ice. Second, cause of Arctic ice loss is well understood. The science is settled but unfortunately the people still talking about it are ignorant of it. First, they don’t even know that Arctic warming started suddenly at the turn of the twentieth century. Prior to that there was nothing there but two thousand years of slow, linear cooling. Second, they also don’t know that the warming was not steady but was interrupted by cooling for thirty years in mid-century. Kaufman et al. discovered Arctic warming and, like all true believers, immediately attributed it to the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect. But this is impossible. Laws of physics demand that in order to start greenhouse warming from scratch you must increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This did not happen. Furthermore, high resolution temperature record in NOAA’s Arctic Report Card for 2010 indicates that warming was interrupted in mid-century by cooling for thirty years and then resumed in 1970. It is highly probable that the sudden cause of the original warming was a change in North Atlantic ocean current system that started to carry warm water of the Gulf Stream into the Arctic Ocean. The fact that warm water was actually reaching as far north as Svalbard was verified in 2011 by direct temperature measurements of Spielhagen et al. The cooling in mid-century would then be caused by a temporary resumption of the former flow pattern of currents. Such reversals are quite impossible for any greenhouse warming to execute. There is one aspect of this temperature history that could be troubling. In nature, whatever has happened before can happen again. The repeat of a cooling spell such as happened in the last century would wreak havoc with transportation and resource exploration that a warming Arctic has made possible. The apparent increase of ice cover recently bears watching. For more information, read E&E 22(8):1069-1083(2011).
What happens when the polar vortex is wrecked?
Spain prepares for the first big cold wave in three years.
http://translate.google.pl/translate?hl=pl&sl=es&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fpolitica.elpais.com%2Fpolitica%2F2015%2F02%2F03%2Factualidad%2F1422950134_287619.html&anno=2
Polar intrusions go much further south when the sun is quiet. Hopefully this will keep the Arctic a little warmer because there is a net redistribution of heat as a result. We don’t want roasting tropics and a frozen north. We want Greenland to become temperate and a passable Arctic route at least part of the year – as it once was.
Greenland used to be ice free on the north coast in summer only a few thousand years ago. Now it is completely ice-bound.
Forecast the polar vortex.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat_a_f/gif_files/gfs_z100_nh_f120.gif
“ren” is it possible someday you might actually provide some useful commentary other than just being a link bomber?
Sorry. If you lived in the north-east, perhaps you would see the relationship.
The study was of ARCTIC sea-ice (perhaps they should have put it in all caps in the title), so you can’t infer anything about Antarctic sea ice from the graph shown. We all now the northern hemisphere is warming faster than southern because it has more land mass and thus less heat capacity on/near the surface.
This is so obvious that I can only guess it is yet another baiting tactic by Mr. Steele, and I will anxiously await for him to “hook” me with his reply.
Then why is it so cold here in the northern hemisphere? (While in the southern hemisphere, at least where I was a few months ago, the temperatures were the same as usual.)
Maybe you can convince people in the UK that their pensioners aren’t really dying from the cold – they can’t be, because it’s warming!
“Thus, both the enhanced sea-ice loss during 2001–2007, and the recent period of near-zero trend are consistent with the supposition of internal climate variability onto the background of long-term radiatively forced sea-ice decline…”
Statistically, such reversals should be becoming fewer and fewer. If it’s going to go on forever like this, then so what’s the problem? His woeful “statistics” are transparent to anyone who uses his head without the statistics. If it’s going to be 6C warmer in 2100, there must be some point where these reversals are “statistically” unlikely.
I don’t think that there should be a “long-term radiatively forced sea-ice decline”, because increased greenhouse gas forcing of the climate is expected to increase positive NAO/AO states, which is the wrong sign for increasing ocean transport into the Arctic:
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-3-5-6.html
I don’t think that the natural variability is internal either, rather it functions as an amplified negative feedback to solar wind variations. Yes the Antarctic is the pole that should be used as direct proxy for forcing of the climate. It shows a slow increasing trend in sea ice extent since the mid 1990’s from when the solar wind pressure/density/temp trends declined.
Under normal conditions, the magnetic field lines inside plasmas don’t break or merge with other field lines. But sometimes, as field lines get close to each other, the entire pattern changes and everything realign into a new configuration. The amount of energy released can be formidable. Magnetic reconnection taps into the stored energy of the magnetic field, converting it into heat and kinetic energy that sends particles streaming out along the field lines.
http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/science-of-magnetic-reconnection/#.VNO699KG-Sp
Or maybe also refer to fast proton of galactic? Whether GCR flux magnetic field can connect to the Earth’s magnetic field and generate heat and kinetic energy? It is known that the proton streams are directed along the Earth’s magnetic field lines.
Ren, there are continuous effects of the solar wind coupling in the polar regions. High altitude winds and circulations from Joule heating, and ozone destruction by nitric oxide propagation.
“When a neutron is put into a magnetic field produced by an external source, it is subject to a torque tending to orient its magnetic moment parallel to the field (hence its spin antiparallel to the field).[19] Like any magnet, the amount of this torque is proportional both to the magnetic moment and the external magnetic field. Since the neutron has spin angular momentum, this torque will cause the neutron to precess with a well-defined frequency, called the Larmor frequency. It is this phenomenon that enables the measurement of nuclear properties through nuclear magnetic resonance. The Larmor frequency can be determined by the product of the gyromagnetic ratio with the magnetic field strength. Since the sign of γn is negative, the neutron’s spin angular momentum precesses counterclockwise about the direction of the external magnetic field.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_magnetic_moment
Sorry if this has already been mentioned. I lack the time to read all the comments.
The “death spiral” is not allowed to “pause”, because it was explained as a simple process of cause and effect. Less ice was suppose to make water warmer which would cause less ice which would make water even warmer. And so on. A nice, simple feedback.
The “death spiral” is not described as a state of balance. It involves a “tipping point” and then an avalanche. Once the avalanche has started, it is not allowed to “pause.” The fact things “paused” and actually reversed after impressive increases in open water in 2007, and again in 2013, basically shoots the idea of a “death spiral” down in flames.
Sorry you Alarmist fellows. The “death spiral” has itself spiraled to death. Avalanches do not pause and go the other way. Perhaps someone ought introduce the idea of a “death pendulum”, after studying the works of Edgar Allen Poe.