From York University
Citizen scientists collected rare ice data, confirm warming since industrial revolution
TORONTO, April 26, 2016 – In 1442, Shinto priests in Japan began keeping records of the freeze dates of a nearby lake, while in 1693 Finnish merchants started recording breakup dates on a local river. Together they create the oldest inland water ice records in human history and mark the first inklings of climate change, says a new report published today out of York University and the University of Wisconsin.
The researchers say the meticulous recordkeeping of these historical “citizen scientists” reveals increasing trends towards later ice-cover formation and earlier spring thaw since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
Sapna Sharma, a York University biologist, and John J. Magnuson, a University of Wisconsin limnologist, co-led an international team of scientists from Canada, United States, Finland, and Japan looking at this early data. Their findings are published in Nature Scientific Reports.
“These data are unique,” says Sharma. “They were collected by humans viewing and recording the ice event year after year for centuries, well before climate change was even a topic of discussion.”
The records from Lake Suwa in the Japanese Alps, says Sharma, were collected by Shinto priests observing a legend about a male god who crossed the frozen lake to visit a female god at her shrine. A local Finnish merchant initiated data collection on Finland’s Torne River because the river, and its frozen-or-thawed status, was important to trade, transportation, and food acquisition.
Ice seasonality, or when a lake or river freezes over in winter or thaws again in spring, are a variable strongly related to climate, says Magnuson. And while such a long-term, human-collected dataset is remarkable in and of itself, the climate trends they reveal are equally notable. “Even though the two waters are half a world apart and differ greatly from one another,” he says, “the general patterns of ice seasonality are similar for both systems.”
For example, the study found that, from 1443 to 1683, Lake Suwa’s annual freeze date was moving almost imperceptibly to later in the year – at a rate of 0.19 days per decade. From the start of the Industrial Revolution, however, that trend in a later freeze date grew 24 times faster, pushing the lake’s “ice on” date back 4.6 days per decade. On the Torne River, there was a corresponding trend for earlier ice break-up in the spring, as the speed with which the river moved toward earlier thaw dates doubled. These findings strongly indicate more rapid climate change during the last two centuries, the researchers report.
In recent years, says Magnuson, both waters have also exhibited more extreme ice dates corresponding with increased warming. For Lake Suwa, that means more years without full ice cover even occurring. Before the Industrial Revolution, Lake Suwa froze over 99 per cent of the time. More recently, it does so only half the time. A similar trend is seen with extremely early ice breakup on Torne River. Extreme cases once occurred in early May or later 95 per cent of the time, but they are now primarily in late April and early May.
“Our findings not only bolster what scientists have been saying for decades, but they also bring to the forefront the implications of reduced ice cover,” says Sharma. The consequences of less ice span ecology, culture and economy. “Decreasing ice cover erodes the ‘sense of place’ that winter provides to many cultures, with potential loss of winter activities such as ice fishing, skiing, and transportation.” Less ice and warmer waters also lead to more algal blooms and impaired water quality, she says.
The team of researchers say they are planning follow-up studies to better understand the ecological consequences of the big changes in these two water bodies.
###
Direct observations of ice seasonality reveal changes in climate over the past 320–570 years
Sapna Sharma , John J. Magnuson , Ryan D. Batt , Luke A. Winslow , Johanna Korhonen & Yasuyuki Aono
Scientific Reports 6, Article number: 25061 (2016) doi:10.1038/srep25061
The paper http://www.nature.com/articles/srep25061 (open access)
Lake and river ice seasonality (dates of ice freeze and breakup) responds sensitively to climatic change and variability. We analyzed climate-related changes using direct human observations of ice freeze dates (1443–2014) for Lake Suwa, Japan, and of ice breakup dates (1693–2013) for Torne River, Finland. We found a rich array of changes in ice seasonality of two inland waters from geographically distant regions: namely a shift towards later ice formation for Suwa and earlier spring melt for Torne, increasing frequencies of years with warm extremes, changing inter-annual variability, waning of dominant inter-decadal quasi-periodic dynamics, and stronger correlations of ice seasonality with atmospheric CO2 concentration and air temperature after the start of the Industrial Revolution. Although local factors, including human population growth, land use change, and water management influence Suwa and Torne, the general patterns of ice seasonality are similar for both systems, suggesting that global processes including climate change and variability are driving the long-term changes in ice seasonality.
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But wait, they haven’t done their adjustments yet. I can for see the ‘Benjiwa adjustment’: where during his honorable tenure as shinto head priest he required all materials that were written to be thoughtfully contemplated and hence they assumed the recording took place the day after observing but recorded the next days date.
Or the Julian adjustments and Gregorian adjustments all of which could be 10-14 days off. And Japan used the lunar-solar calendar (nengo), so we could have adjustments there. This won’t be over until they’ve properly adjusted all the dates!
By the end of the adjustments the lake will be shown to have evaporated completely.
When you torture the data, at least try to hide your fingerprints. Figure 1, 95% confidence intervals (those blue hourglass shaped lines) should enclose . . . . wait for it . . . . 95% of the points. Those lines enclose maybe a tenth of the points.
Talking of record keeping l myself have kept a record of the date of the first snow of the winter for nearly the past 40 years for where l live in North Lincolnshire England. lt is as follows.
77/78 21st Nov
78/79 27th Nov
79/80 19th Dec
80/81 28th Nov
81/82 8th Dec
82/83 16th Dec
83/84 11th Dec
84/85 2nd Jan
85/86 12th Nov
86/87 21st Nov
87/88 22nd Jan
88/89 20th Nov
89/90 12th Dec
90/91 8th Dec
91/92 19th Dec
92/93 4th Jan
93/94 20th Nov
94/95 31st Dec
95/96 17th Nov
96/97 19th Nov
97/98 2nd Dec
98/99 5th Dec
99/00 18th Nov
00/01 30th Oct
01/02 8th Nov
02/03 4th Jan
03/04 22nd Dec
04/05 18th Jan
05/06 28th Nov
06/07 23rd Jan
07/08 23rd Nov
08/09 23rd Nov
09/10 17th Dec
10/11 25th Nov
11/12 5th Dec
12/13 27th Oct
13/14 27th Jan
14/15 26th Dec
15/16 21st Nov
From this no noticeable trend stands out.
Yes since 2000 the two latest snowfalls have happened but also during this time has been the only the time its snowed in October since the record began. What this seems to suggest is that there has been less cold weather turning up during the winter. Rather then the cold setting into the season at a later date.
“From this no noticeable trend stands out.”
And nor should it, as a first snow is not an indicator of climate. In these climes it is more likely a transitory effect as a warm air arrives after a brief cold spell.
FYI: I also live in N Lincs and coming back from the local pub 20 mins ago it was snowing.
It’s called weather. And by no means unusual in April… in fact it’s more usual than snow in December.
Yet Tone, a hot day gets front line news in every liberal rag and has the Met going wow
Like their hottest evah recorded by a sensor right next to a runway at heathrow.
so why dont you use your time better dealing with the utter hyperbole on the Guardian, your time is wasted here, as we know weather is just weather, we just point this out for when Schmidt comes back telling us this was the hottest month in human history baaaaaahahahahaha
“Yet Tone, a hot day gets front line news in every liberal rag and has the Met going wow”
Now let me think …..
Oh yes that’s it.
That’ll be journalists wot do that……. because it sells.
Typical conflation of the science with the media with politics.
Typical lack of critical thinking.
Another citizen science story making the news..
SFU study taps indigenous stories to paint picture of climate change
Researchers at Simon Fraser University have analyzed observations of temperature and rainfall from 92,000 indigenous and non-indigenous people in an effort to fill in knowledge gaps in our understanding of the Earth’s changing climate.
Interviews gathered in 137 countries for about 1,000 studies paint a picture of changing sea levels, species ranges and rainfall, according to lead author Valentina Savo of the university’s Hakai Institute.
Changes in the timing and nature of the seasons — affecting fishing, hunting, food gathering and crop production — were observed in about 70 per cent of participating communities, according to the study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The observations of indigenous people match well with conventional climate data and computer models, but much of the information gathered comes from parts of the world not well monitored by scientists.
http://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/sfu-study-taps-indigenous-stories-to-paint-picture-of-climate-change.
Yet the Hudon’s Bay record is marginalized because it doesn’t conform to the narrative and is said to be from a single location. Such bullcrap because the ships entering Hudson’s Bay kept record’s as well. wtf?
“…… increasing frequencies of years with warm extremes, changing inter-annual variability, waning of dominant inter-decadal quasi-periodic dynamics, and stronger correlations of ice seasonality with atmospheric CO2 concentration and air temperature after the start of the Industrial Revolution. ”
Whoa Nelly!
I’m a simpleton. Help me out here.
“changing inter-annual variability, waning of dominant inter-decadal quasi-periodic dynamics, ”
Really? That’s how they want to say that? Whatever it is?
I get the first part. Changing variability.
However, and sorry for the crudeness, but the second part is the stuff written by a quasi-ass trying to display their education and self impression of superiority.
It (the paper) reads like something from Sks if I am to be totally honest.
Go wash your mouth out, Mark?
I did, with paint stripper
Lake Suwa is a resort town with 100’s of hotels, ryokans (small Japanese inns) and private homes with onsen (hot-spring baths) dumping their onsen runoff water into Suwa Lake, which obviously didn’t occur 500 years ago….
Almost the entire lake is surrounded by homes, ashfault roads, hotels, restaurants, office buildings, large parking lots, and one of the busiest highways in Japan (Chuo Expressway) runs close to lake as do various train lines…. Obviously none this stuff existed 500 years ago, either…
What a BS paper. The huge UHI effect can account for most of the change, plus natural LIA warming recovery for the rest…
What a BS paper…
You have provided the most important comment of all by introducing a new variable. Even if this new information did not influence their findings, they should have made an analysis and explained why. I thought this was an interesting study except I too was thinking recovery from LIA was a possibility. Now, it is just another example of a study reeking of motivated reasoning.
Amazing how they focus on all the negative and often nebulous negatives instead of the positives
Where is the extreme weather-
“Wrap Up of U.S. Agriculture for 2015
Normal weather conditions prevailed in most major growing regions around the world in 2015.
As a result 2015 saw continued building of global grain and oilseed stocks that began with the
large harvests of 2013”
“Decreasing ice cover erodes the ‘sense of place’ that winter provides to many cultures, with potential loss of winter activities such as ice fishing, skiing, and transportation.”
Which is why Inuit from all southern latitudes flood Fairbanks in February, so they can get that ‘sense of place’.
That statement is possibly the most gobsmackingly stupid utterance from a so-called ‘scientist’ in human history.
I was going to use exactly the same quote to make the same point. Looks like we need another 9/11 as it creates a wonderful sense of place… Or another Siberian Gulag, because who would know where Siberia was unless it had Gulags.
this extreme weather is crippling-
“A major catalyst behind the strong farm income of recent years has been the strength of U.S.
agricultural exports, which have shown remarkable growth since 2000—nearly tripling in
absolute value and accounting for over 30% of gross cash farm income”
Well there does not seem to be a great deal of melting taking place in the Hudson Bay soar this year. 🙂
Sorry “so far this year”
For what it is worth, one of the senior advisors to Canadian farmer training (extension) workers told me, in answer to the question, “Is the growing season in Canada getting longer?” with the reply, “About 3 days per decade since 1960.”
That matches vaguely the record shown above. I am not concerned by it. 1960 was cold, colder than it had been 20 years before. so it took time to get back the temperatures in the late thirties. If we are there by now, it is not much more, but hard to see because of the fiddling of the records to make it appear cooler in the late 30’s. Obviously the growing season is not 6 days longer since 1996 because the temperature has not, on average, changed.
It should be possible to find ice melt records for lakes in the US and Canada going back 400 years. Cape Town has 400 years of rainfall data. Let’s keep our eyes open.
“It should be possible to find ice melt records for lakes in the US and Canada going back 400 years.”
That I strongly doubt. From 1616? Four years before the Mayflower? I understand that even the Torneå record is quite unusual, and probably owes its existance to the fact that ice breakups on Torne älv tend to be violent, and sometimes quite destructive.
I followed the article link to supplemental information believing that contrary to previous alarmist articles, this one might even have data so that replication might be easily attempted. What I found was a Word doc with more graphs.
Did anyone find any data or is this one more of the alarmist articles where we are supposed to trust their mathematical manipulations which turn no trend into a warming trend with a correlation to CO2?
The problem with mathematics is that every input into the calculation has to be absolutely correct in order to have an absolutely correct outcome. Someone had an article on here recently that tried to point this out, yet the heaps of scorn were directed at the author. People really need to think critically here. Now, more than ever.
Well it is certainly true that the output is uniquely determined by the input.
The output is always correct for the set of input numbers entered.
G
The Lake Suwa data are here:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/jgeography1889/63/4/63_4_193/_pdf
They were actually originally published in 1954. The Tornio data are linked in my post below. This is just plagiarizing old research with a CAGW slant, a very common form of “science” today. It being much less trouble than doing actual research.
More me-too science. So somebody in Climate Science™ has apparently stumbled upon Kajander’s 1993 paper:
Kajander J. 1993. Methodological aspects on river cryophenology exemplified by a tricentennial
break-up time series from Tornio. Geophysica nr 29 (1-2), 73-95.
Anyone interested in actual data, can find them on page 7 of this report:
http://www.smhi.se/polopoly_fs/1.24419!Hydrologi_118.pdf
It’s pretty interesting really. It shows the brief quite warm period around 1750 known from a number of Scandinavian records, a quite cold interval in the early 1800’s, a slow steady warming from c. 1880, a marked cooling c. 1950-75 and then warming again.
Sounds familiar?
Anything goes to get a grant, including sacrificing science.
Do you think any of ’em feel it? Remorse, I mean. Is there any one of them who feels a twinge of conscience when they lay this sort of stuff out on the table for the world to see? Is there any honor left at all? Any sense of shame? Isn’t there even the tiniest voice whispering in their ear that something is not right?
I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror, much less step outside. It surprised me these people can act as though they have no inkling at all. There is no care for honesty. They are not even trying for it.
Typo – “surprised” should be “surprises”.
“Our findings not only bolster what scientists have been saying for decades, but they also bring to the forefront the implications of reduced ice cover,” says Sharma.
Which scientists, and what, exactly have they been saying? They’ve been all over the map, and wrong about everything so, the only thing they’ve shown is that there has been a warmup since the LIA. No shirt Shirlock.
Oh, and hilarious how they desperately try to find something “bad” about the reduced ice cover.
Yes, the earth (high latitude regions both poles) has warmed after the little ice age. The earth warms and cools cyclically correlating to solar cycle changes.
The recent warming cyclic is high latitude warming which same pattern of warming that occurred in the past cyclically correlating to solar cycle changes.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
If CO2 was the cause of the warming the entire earth would have warmed as CO2 is more or less evenly distributed in the atmosphere. As the amount of warming is proportion to the increase in atmospheric CO2 and the amount of long wave radiation that is reflected off into space the most amount of warming should have, if CO2 was the cause of the warming occurred in the equatorial regions, as that the region where the most amount of long wave radiation is emitted to space.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/TMI-SST-MEI-adj-vs-CMIP5-20N-20S-thru-2015.png
http://www.eoearth.org/files/115701_115800/115741/620px-Radiation_balance.jpg
The latitudinal temperature anomaly paradox is the fact that latitudinal pattern of warming in the last 150 years does match the pattern of warming that would occur if the increase in temperature was caused by the CO2 mechanism.
As noted above in this paper, there is a latitude warming paradox which supports that assertion that the majority of the warming in the last 150 years not caused by the increase in atmospheric CO2.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DOUGLASPAPER.pdf
” if CO2 was the cause of the warming occurred in the equatorial regions, as that the region where the most amount of long wave radiation is emitted to space.”
No.
Equatorial regions are dominated by water.
Which as we know is both a much more powerful GHG but also performs cooling on the surface.
Both of which easily dominate/mask the anthro CO2 warming.
Should say after the great famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1695%E2%80%931697
It killed third of the population of Finalnd
This business of talking about warming since the beginning of the industrial revolution, i.e. 1750 seems to be getting more common from the warmers. Presumably they see warming starting as the LIA ends and they want to make that warming all anthropogenic. But they can’t possibly tie warming to human CO2 emissions until at least the middle of the 20th century. It’s a low-key message being intentionally, insidiously insinuated into public consciousness to eliminate any ideas that post-LIA warming has any natural component to it.
I tried looking for a table or chart of historical world coal production. Couldn’t find one, but settled for this little chart of UK coal production from 1800 on:
http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/learning_modules/history/04.TU.04/illustrations/04.IL.39_02.gif
Carefully scaling off, I get annual production of 10 million tons in 1800, after which it ramps up progressively faster and peaks at about 270 million tons during World War I (these would be long tons: 1 long ton = 1.015 tonnes). The 20th century decline is presumably matched by increasing oil imports and decreasing coal exports which accounted for up to 25 percent of UK coal production in the “heyday” of the empire. It seems fair to estimate that world coal production had a similar pattern, but lagging somewhat behind the UK. US coal production was minimal before 1850, but did ramp up very fast after that.
OK here’s a world coal (and oil) production chart starting in 1850.
http://capita.wustl.edu/capita/capitareports/GlobSEmissions/GlobS1850_1990_files/image002.jpg
Scaling off again, it looks like world coal production was about 100 million tonnes in 1850, and going back to the UK chart – good grief the UK accounted for almost half that total!
The point of all this being that coal was the only fossil fuel of significance before the late 1800s. Using the world chart, annual coal production in 1890 was about 500 million tonnes, and in 1990, annual hard coal + soft coal + oil production was 7,700 million tonnes. Ignoring the difference in carbon/hydrogen ratio for now, that’s an increase of over 15 times.
So if they want CO2 from fossil fuels to be the sole driver of the modest warming in the late 20th century, there’s no possibility that it could account for any detectable warming before about 1900. And to be realistic, nothing of significance before about 1960, when world annual fossil fuel production was about half of the 1990 number.
So all this “warming since the start of the industrial revolution” stuff is nonsense. No matter what you believe about the 1979 to 1998 warming period, there’s no way that any warming before mid-20th century can be anything but natural. Any suggestion to the contrary would be propaganda.
This interesting info when checking ice. From Wikipedia.
‘Lake Suwa is the site of an interesting natural phenomenon, The God’s Crossing (御神渡り o-miwatari?). The lake has a natural hot spring under its surface. When the lake’s surface freezes in the winter, its lower waters are still circulating. This results in ice pressure ridges forming in the surface ice, reaching heights of 30 centimetres (0.98 ft) or more.’
So can it be that the hot spring Is changing?
Nenana Ice classic continues to show an earlier break-up of ice on the Tanana river.- A noisy signal that is to be expected.
http://s25.postimg.org/vsme6rmi7/neenan_equinox.jpg
I thought it had gone rather quiet on this river since the excitement of 3 years ago, and now I see that the last 3 break-ups have been close to the earliest on record.
By the way, the slope of the trend-line since 1965 is about -7 days in 50 years, so it should be about minus 0.14, surely?
The slope is in an unfortunate scale days per day!
The label is badly formatted also!
The equation is:
y = -3.6773E-04x + 5.4920E+01
Which works out as -6.7days/50 years as you suggest
Didn’t we already know that the trend has been toward warming since the LIA? So what? Does that prove AGW?
Am I wrong or did they just publish in the time period where we know that it went from cold to a little warmer the new rare data showed it really went from damn cold to still kinda cold since it was all icey indeed?????