Reader Phil Hutchings writes via email:
This article in Nature Communications caught my eye!
This is a beauty. This week, Nature Communications published an explanation as to why (at least) 58 New Zealand glaciers grew in the twenty-five years to 2008.
The aberrant behaviour by these naughty glaciers was perfectly explicable though – it was caused by “regional cooling”.
Researchers from NZ’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research and Victoria University prepared, yes, a model of the Southern Alps. And yes, they found that in their model, lower air and adjacent ocean temperatures (during those 25 years) were correlated with the growing glaciers.
Fair enough.
But where is the support for this claim ?
“While this sequence of climate variability and its effect on New Zealand glaciers is unusual on a global scale, it remains consistent with a climate system that is being modified by humans”
The paper:
Mackintosh, A.N, Anderson, B.M, Lorrey, A.M, Renwick, J.A., Prisco Frei, & Dean, S.M., Regional cooling caused recent New Zealand glacier advances in a period of global warming. Nature Communications, February 2017
nature-communications-feb-2017 (PDF)
Isn’t the advance/retreat of glaciers dependent on snowfall as well as temperature?
Maybe even more so.
Yes, but when they retreat, it is due to warming.
Isn’t the advance/retreat of glaciers dependent on snowfall as well as temperature?
That is discussed in the study. There’s a link to it in the article at the top of this thread if you want to read it. It’s not long.
Smart Rock,
Glaciers are such complex dynamic systems that it is difficult to determine what is causing an advance or retreat. Alpine glacier terrain is usually quite cloudy. A decrease in cloudiness could result in local warming and retreat. A change in precipitation in the zone of accumulation, for whatever reason, will cause a change in mass balance. Assuming that sunlight can reach the surface of the glacier, dust or soot can accelerate melting and cause retreat. And, a change in ambient temperature in the zone of wastage can cause an advance or retreat of the terminus. One needs simultaneous measurements along the entire length of a glacier before anything intelligent can be said about cause and effect. the zone of accumulation is usually above the average freezing line. If global temperatures are actually affecting the system, then one should expect that the terminus should impacted by the lapse rate. That is, the change in elevation should be predicted by the average local lapse rate for a given temperature change.
The immediate check would be: do New Zealand weather stations agree with regional cooling? As I remember, they had the same issue as US, global and Australian weather stations where the homogenisation process turned cooling into warming.
I am pretty sure there is a bust here. Local weather station data versus glaciers extending.
This is not surprising at all. During the past 10,000 years you will find very few periods when all glaciers in the planet are moving with the same trend. Glaciers respond to a lot of conditions, including temperatures, precipitations, solar irradiation, orientation, changes in elevation. Even for glaciers that are very close such a simple factor like the steepness of the glacier can determine that a glacier grows or contracts. And glaciers that end in the ocean behave very differently from glaciers that end on land.
You really need an expert glaciologist to make something out of these glaciers growing.
Precipitation is easily the most important factor in glacier growth, all things being equal. Change in the weather pattern bringing more precipitation could easily overwhelm melting from slightly higher tempreratures. The fact that no other possibilities have been considered and discussed casts doubt on the nature of the article.
Looks like “reasonable skeptic” just answered my speculation
And yet the WWF state the glaciers have lost 11% of volume in the past 30 years.
http://www.wwf.org.nz/what_we_do/climate_change_new/new_zealand_impacts_of_climate_change/
Settled science eh?
@Simon “even in a country (NZ) that has shown significant warming over the last 100 years”
Temperatures across New Zealand have been declining, at least over the last 80 years, according to the raw data.
Same in the USA.
It’s only warming in areas in which there are no thermometers, so that NOAA, NASA and HadCRU are free to make up “data”. And where there are thermometers, they “adjust” the readings to comport with the crooked consensus rather than reality, or even worse, now put their thumbs on the “raw” data.
There are eleven airfields around New Zealand, both inland and on the coast, that have been providing long term temperature data. The measuring equipment has not been interfered with over the years with structures built nearby or altered surfaces adjacent to the equipment. The raw data, as supplied by the Met service, shows a slow decline over that time averaging about one degree per century equivalent.
The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Studies (NIWA) NZ maintains a record which has achieved de facto status as a national temperature record (not claimed as such by NIWA). The adjusted (homogenised) record shows an increase of around 0.9ºC/century. Fortunately the raw data is available.
http://kerkin.co.nz/climate/unadj7station.png
http://kerkin.co.nz/climate/unadj7stationanomaly.png
All I see is temperature barely deviating.
As the warming is 1C and the x-axis on the top graph is 20C, it would look pretty minor.
“Temperatures across New Zealand have been declining, at least over the last 80 years, according to the raw data.”
Really, let’s proof? Why would NZ be any different to other parts of the warming planet?
How many thermometers were there 100 years ago?
Many parts of the planet have cooled since the 1930s, to include the continental USA. So too probably has the global average, were its books not so thoroughly cooked to a crisp.
Simon,
A single number such as the global average temperature doesn’t carry a lot of information. What climatologists should be looking at is the behavior of all the different climate zones throughout the world. If any sort of pattern emerges, that may provide insight on what is actually happening. A single number presupposes that CO2 is the driving force and that the entire world responds similarly. However, there is evidence that at least the Arctic is responding in a unique manner. Where else might the Earth be responding anomalously? And why?
Of late I have been getting friendly cooperation from the lead climate scientist at NIWA, New Zealand. I now have full access to the historical temperature data. This dates back to the 19th century involving scores of stations. For the moment I am fully satisfied the NIWA’s calc that NZ has warmed by 0.9 C over the last century is pretty close to the mark. However, this upward trend is flattening as time goes by as there has been no warming over the last 19 years. The record shows a very slight decline.
As for Fanz Josef here are average temperatures throughout the working life of 3 stations at Franz Josef. Many stations have been closed over the last 20 years as automation took over. The record is remarkably stable throughout the years. Twenty year averages throughout the record all hover around the 11 C mark.
Station A (1953-1990) Average annual T 11 C
Station B (1982-2015) Average annual T 11.15 C
Station C (2013 – 2017) Average annual T 11 C
This record suggests that any change in the glacier is not due to temperature. There is no correlation between the the glacier receding and elevated temperature. Going on the geomorphology (photo) I would say the glacier is near its modern maximum. We don’t see much scouring on the valley walls down slope of the toe.
What is interesting are the records from a number of stations that have backups at the same location. Very seldom do these twin stations record the same within 0.1 C on a daily basis. There is always a 0.1 – 0.2 difference. On some days there are as much as a 0.3 C difference. Only heaps of data will cancel this discrepancy out.
Temperature data for New Zealand is freely available from NIWA’s cliflo database.
Michael, are you intending to publish your results? I do hope so.
I have done a cross check on the temperature tend that has been proposed by NIWA for New Zealand. I find the NIWA trend to be substantially exagerated. The primary reason relates to the way they splice together station records for each locality in the seven-site compilation. My conclusion is that the warming trend has been around 0.4 deg C per 100 years. Others have come to basically the same conclusion.
That would not surprise me
Thanks Michael. Would it be fair to say that the warming and flattening off is consistent with the Solar magnetic activity-water vapor-ocean link postulated by Svensmark and Shaviv and covered a few weeks ago by Anthony Watts here?
That is, does this look like natural (mostly solar induced) warming expected after the end of the Little Ice Age? because it does to me?
Humans will contribute via CO2, but it doesn’t look to me like we are the dominant effect.
Moa – I don’t know. I will do a study of precipitation at Franz Josef. That could be interesting. Note that F Z is in a coastal zone
I have access to the same data as you, but I see no evidence of a decline. Definitely not one that passes any statistical tests of significance. Same for any sign of flattening by the way.
“What is interesting are … There is always a 0.1 – 0.2 difference. On some days there are as much as a 0.3 C difference.”
That is interesting. How does climate ‘science’ handle that? A major statistical problem for interpolating point-to-area data no?
Doesn’t that mean that lower air and ocean temperatures correlate with warming? And we’re supposed to nod in agreement and call this science?
This is from the same people who think ‘men’ have vag!nas and ‘women’ have pen!ses. Born that way, dontcha know? /sarc
So why should it surprise anyone that these people think that colder air and colder seas are caused by ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ ?
Now open your wallets and tug your forelocks to the unelected mandarins at the United Nations. Or else !
@Simon February 15, 2017 at 11:46 am: Simon, you are lying by half-truth again, like all Marxists. The researching organisation, known as NIWA for short, and its ex-member Renwick, were forced to admit they had ruined the New Zealand 7-station Official T record. In Court, they admitted this in order to run and hide from further investigation, a legal trick. Certain idiots departed, only to be replaced by another (Brandolino?). So, we now do not have an official record because of their tampering. The original, however, shows NO significant longterm T increase over a century.
NZ West Coast glaciers, and some on the eastern Southern Alps, have a short steep run, which can take ice well below the 0C isotherm. They rely on heavy snowfall and fast transit to survive across the lowland where tourists can see them easily. Snow volumes change as cloud rain volumes change, that is, weather patterns.
As elsewhere, our courageous and honest scientists continue to combat the crooks, and creeps like Simon. We will win, and the weather patterns are changing in our favour. Much summer snow this season, nastily cold down south..
“As elsewhere, our courageous and honest scientists continue to combat the crooks, and creeps like Simon. We will win, and the weather patterns are changing in our favour. Much summer snow this season, nastily cold down south..”
Yes well last year the warmest in NZ history… so you are gonna have to find a few more crooks to help you.
1) Fake record.
2) Allegedly warmest since 1909. Big whoop, even if true, which it isn’t.
NZ and the rest of the world were hotter in the Medieval (~1 Ka), Roman (2 Ka), Minoan (3 Ka) and Egyptian (4 Ka) Warm Periods and during the Holocene Optimum (5-9 Ka), plus of course prior Pleistocene interglacials, the Pliocene, Miocene, Oligocene, Eocene and Paleocene Epochs of the Cenozoic Era, the entire Mesozoic Era (~66-252 Ma), despite being near the South Pole, and most of the Paleocene Era (~252-541 Ma) .
Brett, when F.J. & Fox were advancing from the mid 80’s (I made my first visit there in ’84) through to 2008 the official (NIWA) line was that those two glaciers in particular were responding to heavy rain/snowfalls on their neves as a result of increased El Nino patterns in the period. Someone had shown a direct correlation between the rainfall at Hokitika (a small town north of the glaciers) and the advance/retreat of the glaciers. The West Coast (of the South Island) is renowned for it’s rainfall where other parts of the country refer to their annual rainfall in millimetres, on the Coast they talk about rainfall in metres!
In 1984 the viewing platform that I climbed up would be well buried in the 2008 photo. The glacier has undergone a very rapid retreat in the past four years since I last visited them. They are now more like how they were back in the early 80’s or 1970’s. The photo above was taken from a large rocky bluff that was at the terminal moraine back in the late 19th century by the way.
When I visited the glaciers in 2010 I overheard a DoC (Dept of Conservation) guide telling overseas tourists about the effects of global warming on these two glaciers. On my next visit 3 years later I brought along some of my photos from 1984 and showed a few Aussies who became a bit confused because it didn’t gel with the line they were being fed by DoC.
I did contract work for DoC and NIWA many years ago, I did not trust their data and practices then and my opinion has not changed since. 7 thermometers to calculate an average for the whole of NZ…no joke! 112 to do the same in Australia…no joke!
Brett, you are lying not even by half truths, but completely, Not even to mention the ad hominems. All the unhomogenised data is available freely. Each “courageous and honest scientist” can look for themselves and if they they are indeed honest and do the calculations properly they will find that it has warmed.
Brett Keane @ur momisugly 1:09
“…were forced to admit they had ruined the New Zealand 7-station Official T record.”
Is the data lost or can it be recovered? Do you have some links to this tampering?
Cheers,
Alastair
The raw data has been archived in the cliflo database. The database is managed by NIWA. It is publically searchable. You just need a username and password, which can be obtained for free when you register. Basically the temperature and rainfall records, along with humidity, wind, sunshine etc are available in reasonably user-friendly form, including as excel spreadsheets.
Rob R @ur momisugly 2:47
Many thanks.
Alastair
Or, to draw again on Captain Cook, no change since at least 1777!
Localized cooling is double-plus good. I’ve also heard that chocolate ration is being increased.
In Oceania we have always been at war with Eurasia!
Regional, my ahse……..http://notrickszone.com/2017/01/05/north-atlantic-cooling-has-plunged-below-1950s-and-1800s-levels-and-scientists-project-more-cooling/#sthash.oe770w9S.pGVj8Fw5.dpbs
They squirm, but to no avail. Should stick to their colouring books.
Regional my ahse
That article is about a regional phenomenon. North Atlantic. One of the few places (the only place?) on the globe that has cooled since 1900.
For every complex problem there is a simple answer — and it is wrong.
Global Warming is eventually overwhelmed by extensive Regional Cooling.
I am not a statistician. But, I have a gut feeling involving probability. Using just 7 stations to establish mean temperature in NZ over the short-term (say 10 years) is precarious. Large areas in NZ recorded well below the 1981 – 2010 average (- 1C to – 1.5 C) for Jan 2017. Nevertheless there were hot spots showing above average. Should any of the stations be in an area that is not representative (highly likely) then results get skewed.
Over 20 years plus, trend results may start to be accurate. However, it would not have been difficult to throw more stations in the mix.
Whatever adjustments that may have been applied to early stations are unlikely to be applied to the current fully automated versions. This shows in the 1998 – 2016 record (very slight cooling).
There is a big difference between adjusting individual stations and a number across-the-board e.g. many early NZ stations were run by the NZ Forest Service i.e. They were located near forest field centres. These pine forests mature inside 30 years. What would you suspect should a notable anomaly occur in these locations? Should it show rapid anomalous cooling through one 30 year period it should be excluded from national analysis (IMO).
Antagonising these institutions leads to nowhere. We need facts. These can only be found through being a seeker (of truth). The scientific method remains the best tool
It’s time we stop these games of filling in geographical areas based on far away neighbour stations. I use the term neighbour loosely. I’d really like to see a lot more climate budget going into covering the World in weather stations and stopping this guess work on land temperatures.
As for the original article, they can’t support their assertion. It is moronic. It’s unusual, but expected? It’s just the mantra of anything and everything, even if they contradict each other, can all be put back at the feet of humans and CO2.
Really, you can just stop at “model”. They are just devices to confirm the “researcher’s” faith.
They will all be melted by 2035 though, because we want to draw attention to the region.
Accepting that global average temp has increased by around +0.9 C over the last century does not undermine the view that AGM is insignificant. It enhances it. The last 19 years is showing a zero to very slight upward trend depending on the data source. Meantime, CO2 levels continue to rise. This is no longer about the past. It is about the future. Lay your bets folks :-).
That +0.9C could well be due to changes in Solar magnetic activity from the end of the Little Ice Age, with an integration effect due to oceanic heat capacity. Now the Sun is starting to slow down again we’d expect to see that rise followed by a decrease in warming rate. Looks perfectly natural and explainable to me. Humans possibly do have a small effect on top, but we are not the dominant effect.
My bet is the 0.9C is a bit overinflated (from manipulation, raw rural station data shows more like 0.4C over last 100 years). I reckon the rise is largely due to desulpherisation as we move to cleaner burn technology. Less smog and smoke haze leads to increased solar radiation at ground level and higher ground temps. Taking avg of min and max exacerbates that – we should be integrating temp because it’s not gaussian.
Information on global and regional glaciers here.
http://www.grid.unep.ch/glaciers/
Shows some glaciers in advance (including NZ), most in retreat. Database of 100,000 glaciers.
1. No, these glaciers are not advancing. On the whole they are retreating as anyone that read the paper, or even only looked at figure 2 (shown by Nick Stokes above) would have understood. The paper deals with advances during a relatively brief period on top of their overall decline.
2. The title of this post is a misinterpretation of the study. The advances are not “a sign of regional cooling”. The regional cooling can simply be measured. Rather the advances are the consequence of the cooling.
The ice in the south pole is growing, not just in New Zealand. chur
The ice in the south pole is growing, not just in New Zealand. chur”
Really?” Sea ice isn’t, in fact at an all time low.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
would that taken to mean “an all time low” since 1979 ?! I’m not aware of any data preceding that.
All time is a very, very long time. It’s longer than recorded human history, it’s longer than human civilisation, it’s longer than the history of the planet Earth !!
What it seems you are trying to say is that it is lower than average for the satellite era.
Greg
“would that taken to mean “an all time low” since 1979 ?! I’m not aware of any data preceding that.”
Only accurate record we have. Got a better one, let me know.
What do you think of the massive gain in Greenland smb? It is now close to 150 Gt above the average trend line?
That’s only one year, overall during the satellite era the Antarctic sea ice extent is trending up.
These graphs give a much more balanced idea of the global sea ice trends:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NSIDC%20GlobalArcticAntarctic%20SeaIceArea.gif
Quite true Chris, until 2016, the Antarctic was running at record highs and was steadily increasing. That’s when the mainstream media didn’t like to talk about it. They are in love with the Antarctic now, though, as all the media reports this morning show. All time low! Unfortunately for them, you can trace this back to the start of the melt season. The anomaly didn’t increase or maintain the same, but actually narrowed. Showing that what happened early on in the melt season doesn’t dictate the rest of it.
I’m personally expecting the Antarctic to continue as in the previous decade and post good numbers this southern winter.
It’s interesting how a one season event is now climate change and in the same breath they ignore that magic 30 year number for climate and also ignore the recent record highs. The bias reporting over the Antarctic really does show there is something very wrong with how climate science is discussed.
Quite true Chris, until 2016, the Antarctic was running at record highs and was steadily increasing. That’s when the mainstream media didn’t like to talk about it.
No, increase and record highs have indeed been covered by the MSM. Even the lefty rags.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29822830
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-12/antarctic-sea-ice-record-coverage-causes-problems-for-supply/6464178
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11669794
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/04/130401-global-warming-antarctica-sea-ice-science-environment/
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-14/record-coverage-of-antarctic-sea-ice/5742668
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/09/19/antarctic-sea-ice-sets-another-record/#3c36d05b4c78
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/antarctic-sea-ice-level-breaks-record/
NASA has mentioned it many times, too. Eg,
https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20121112.html
Chris, the x-axis is so large on that graph that it’s hard to spot anything.
Annual Arctic sea ice decrease since 1979 has been about 3 times as great as Antarctic increase. Global sea ice has trended downward over that time.
I’m not sure if it’s been reported here, but for the same period (the full satellite record), global sea ice has been at record lows every day (for that day of the year) for the last 5 months. The departure late last year was 6-sigma(!) for a month or so. Recently global sea ice hit the all-time low for the period.
Too soon to tell if this remarkable deviation is a harbinger, but definitely worth a mention here, where much smaller blips in climate indices rate attention.
If nothing else, this discussion emphasises the near meaningless of an “average temperature”. It is like measuring the coastline: there are a limitless number of ways you could do it and all would be equally wrong.
This summer in New Zealand has been the wettest / driest / coldest / hottest in recorded history – depending on where you live:
While the parched Port Hills around Christchurch in the South Island are ablaze, much of the “winterless north” is enjoying a prolonged downpour and cool temperatures. Like many kiwis, we rely on tank water at home (rain water stored in a cistern) and (anecdotally) my tanks are still three-quarters full and filling up fast – very unusual for this time of year, in my experience. Meanwhile, the Southern Alps (briefly) had more snow cover over the summer holidays than they had over most of the previous winter.
New Zealand is a small country which nevertheless sees dramatically varied climatic and weather conditions north/south and east/west. It seems impossible to discern any meaning in an “average” temperature for the whole country.
Under that rubric you might have trouble telling Winter from Summer depending on location. But if you average the national weather records over the 3-month periods for each season, the answer will be correct every time. Even if you live calendarless underground.
You can pick Winter/Summer in a given year every time just based on averaged temp data. That’s ‘meaningful’. Averages work.
“Correct” but not helpful. It reminds me of Ford Prefect’s review of Earth for the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy which, after Ford’s 15 years’ of field research, was updated from “harmless” to “mostly harmless”.
Not sure what a value judgement has to do with mathematics. You’ll always get a more accurate temperature of an object by averaging a fair sample of it than by focussing on one spot.
Glaciers measured in years is politics.
Glaciers measured in decades is weather.
Glaciers measured in centuries is data.
Glaciers measured in millennia is climate.
The tour guide at Columbia Icefields said that glaciers grow and shrink based on whether so much snow falls that it cannot all melt during the summer. Thus humidity is a big factor.
“A climate system being modified by humans” — and from that we go to “catastrophic”? That’s quite a leap! Why couldn’t “a climate system being modified by humans” be benign or beneficial? The underlying assumption seems to be that whatever humans do is bad.
Where does it mention ‘catastrophic’ in the paper?
If you’re speaking more generally, deleterious effects in the future are not an ‘assumption’. Yes, they’re estimates based on modeling (and some physics), but not assumptions.
(In case you think i’m an ‘alarmist’, my take is to review the range of projections, from mild to greater, rather than pick one end or the other of the spectrum and announce this is the ‘truth’)