I enjoy surprises in data, especially when they might make alarmists unhappy.
Willis Eschenbach’s post Greenland Is Way Cool at WattsUpWithThat prompted me to take a look at the Berkeley Earth edition of the Greenland TAVG temperature data. See Figure 1, which presents the graph of the annual Berkeley Earth TAVG temperature (not anomaly) data for Greenland from 1900 to 2012, which is the last full year of the regional Berkeley Earth data.
Note: I used the monthly conversion factors listed on the Berkeley Earth data page for Greenland to return the monthly anomaly data to their original (not anomaly) form and then determined the annual averages. [End note.]
Figure 1
With the relative large multidecadal variations in the data, it seemed as though I was taking the trend of one and a half cycles of a sine wave. That prompted me to start the graph in January 1925 and check the linear trend again. See Figure 2. Imagine that: a flat linear trend of Greenland land surface TAVG temperatures from 1925 to 2012.
Figure 2
MODEL-DATA COMPARISON
Are you wondering if the climate models stored in the CMIP5 archived (which was used by the IPCC for their 5th Assessment Report) showed a similar not-warming trend for the same time period? Wonder no longer. See Figure 3.
The climate model outputs, the CMIP5 multi-model mean, are available from the KNMI Climate Explorer. For Greenland, I used the coordinates of 59.78N-83.63N, 73.26W-11.31W, which are listed on the Berkeley Earth data page for Greenland, under the heading of “The current region is characterized by…”. The simulations presented use historic forcings through 2005 and RCP8.5 forcings thereafter. I use the model mean, because it represents the consensus (better said, group-think) of the climate modeling groups who provided climate model outputs to the CMIP5 archive, for use by the IPCC for their 5th Assessment Report.
Figure 3
For those who would prefer to see the full spread of the model outputs in a model-data comparison, you may want to think again. See Figure 4. It’s a graph created by the KNMI Climate Explorer of the 81 ensemble members of the climate models submitted to the CMIP5 archive, with historic and RCP8.5 forcings, for Greenland land surface temperatures, based on the coordinates listed above. There appears to be roughly a 7- to 8-deg C spread from coolest to warmest model. Well, that narrows it down. It’s just another example of how the climate models used by the IPCC for their long-term prognostications of global warming are not simulating Earth’s Climate. Each time I plot a model-data comparison, I find it remarkable (and not in a good way) that anyone would find climate model simulations of Earth’s climate, and their simulations of future climate based on bogus crystal-ball-like prognostications of future forcings, to be credible.
Figure 4
Back to the multi-model mean: Figure 5 presents the observed and climate-model-simulated multidecadal (30-year) trends in Greenland near-surface land air temperatures, from 1900 to 2012. Once again, the models are clearly not simulating Earth’s climate.
Figure 5
I’ll let you comment about that. We’ve already discussed and illustrated back in 2012 how climate models do not (cannot) properly simulate polar amplification. See the post Polar Amplification: Observations Versus IPCC Climate Models. The WattsUpWithThat cross post is here.
That’s it for this post. Enjoy the rest of your day and have fun in the comments.
STANDARD CLOSING REQUEST
Please purchase my recently published ebooks. As many of you know, this year I published 2 ebooks that are available through Amazon in Kindle format:
- Dad, Why Are You A Global Warming Denier? (For an overview, the blog post that introduced it is here.)
- Dad, Is Climate Getting Worse in the United States? (See the blog post here for an overview.)
And please purchase Anthony Watts’s et al. Climate Change: The Facts – 2017.
To those of you who have purchased them, thank you. To those of you who will purchase them, thank you, too.
Regards,
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❶①❶① . . . The “Temperature Range Comb” . . .
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Bob,
you might be interested to see how Greenland’s temperature ranges, compare to other places in the world.
The “Temperature Range Comb” (a type of graph which looks like a “comb”), displays temperature ranges, for more than 24,000 real locations on the Earth.
And I am talking about REAL, ACTUAL, ABSOLUTE temperatures. Not those weak, pale, temperature anomaly things.
The temperature range for each location, goes from the temperature of the month with the highest average high temperature, to the temperature of the month with the lowest average low temperature.
To make it easier to refer to the temperature ranges, I will call the month with the highest average high temperature, the hottest month. And I will call the month with the lowest average low temperature, the coldest month.
The temperature ranges are sorted by the hottest temperature, followed by the coldest temperature.
Each hottest temperature, has a range of coldest temperatures. Because of this, the sorting causes the graph to have the appearance of a “comb”.
I have given each location a sequence number, based on its position in the sorted list of hottest temperatures. So it goes from 1, for the location with the highest “hottest” temperature, to just over 24,500 for the location with the lowest “hottest” temperature.
There are 23 Greenland locations, with sequence numbers between 24,524 and 24,604.
A word of warning. The X-axis is “reversed”, so zero is on the right side of the graph, and high numbers like 24,500 are on the left side of the graph.
So all of Greenland’s locations are near the left edge of the graph.
I hope that makes sense. Having to explain hottest, highest, high, average, low, lowest, and coldest, in various combinations, is difficult.
I am happy to answer any questions, if you have any.
https://agree-to-disagree.com/the-comb-of-death
Sheldon, you have an odd sense of humour.
You also have some interesting info.
I went to Greenland in August 2019 on an expedition with 7 young professors of climate, glaciers, weather, rocks, science, birds, and oceans. I am not a scientist so it was great to be with young scientists with the latest data.
We were on a 2 week science expedition through the artic, north of the artic circle, plus 6 landings on Greenland. I learned that for the first time in 900 years, Greenland can grow gardens(potatoes, leeks, turnips), access oil and gas underground, and once again process minerals that were too far under snow in the past. Northern Canada had their best wheat crop ever and Siberia is experiencing much the same as Greenland and No Canada.
Some countries like global warming!
Not us, we have a home on the ocean front near Miami Florida so we fear global warming. But at least someone else is doing well with it.
I think we need to use the word pollution to discuss our sense of urgency. Pollution and overpopulation are the concerns. Then we do not have to fight over scientific measures of how much the globe has warmed.
All the sarcastic and hate filled comments above and on so many of these blogs are a waste of time. What shall we each do about pollution and over population? That is the item I wish to discuss
wow you have a time machine that’s big news “I went to Greenland in August 2019” please go 100 years in the future and see if your house is still there or not and report back.
Did you also find out that a lot of “things” that used to be under Snow & Ice are no longer under Snow & Ice just as they used to be before the Snow & Ice came?
So Population & Polution are the concerns?
Not a Billion Starving People, Not 2 Billion without Cheap Energy or proper Medical Care?
Those people are already here, what do you suggest we do about them?
Which forms of “Polution” would you like to discuss?
What are your personal priorities.
Mary
People here are very anti malthus and many are not ovely concerned about population growth.
Pollution subjects receive very mixed comments here as with a recent article about plastic in general and plastic in the seas.
Incidentally I do a lot of research at places like the met office and as a generalisation if material has not been digitised it does not exist to many modern researchers. A lot of very interesting material has not yet been digitised and evades published papers.
Greenland authorities noted a rapidly warming climate back in the 1930’s and it was discussed at an international conference just after the war. Spinks noted that vegetables were being grown again in Greenland during that decade for the first time since the 1200’s or so
Tonyb
Mary, you’ve come to the right place to understand why there are sceptics and what they have to say. Oh yes, there is a lot of unpleasant noise on a blog where our precious eroding freedom still flourishes. Skip the ugly stuff and try to understand some of the excellent science told in an understandable way that a fair number of posters here offer.
The actual article itself is a legitimate critique of the “consensus” science (an oxymoron in true science). Scepticism has been a hallmark of true science since The Enlightenment. Here is a quote from an essay on TE:
“The Enlightenment has been defined in many different ways, but at its broadest was a philosophical, intellectual and cultural movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It stressed reason, logic, criticism, and freedom of thought over dogma, blind faith, and superstition.”
Believe it or not, traditionally, scepticism was part and parcel of the scientific method itself. In the excesses of climate science, inextrictably and unhealthily bound up with politics, scepticism became a pejorative term. The “consensus” (like a Synod of Bishops) does not tolerate strating from the official line. See climategate email examples of having editors fired for publishing articles sceptical of the science, gatekeeping of publishers, punishment of their own who question. Don’t read whitewash damage control articles on climategate. Read actual examples. They have been catelogued for easier reference.
WUWT was a natural reaction to the consensus and is #1 one of many sceptical blogs that sprang up to supply scepticism which was absent. I myself am a geologist and engineer and I even studied paleoclimate in geology. I’m not particularly special here. There are giants of science includung some real Nobel scientists who have come to this site.
A challenge! Suspend belief for a month and be a devil’s advocate. Research the case against unequivocal catastrophic global warming and the evidence that the case is in no way settled. Check out warmer periods in our Holocene (the 15,000yrs since the end of the last glacial
period) when open seas washed the north shore (now ice-locked) beaches of Greenland strewing it with driftwood! Read the most egregious emails. Read about professors fired for criticizing the science abd more. You will get a wonderful education and, if you still think we are unequivically headed for a disaster for the human race, habitat, agriculture mass extinctions, you will at least be speaking from some authority instead of from instilled fearfulness. Respectfully Gary P
Note how the actual Temperature increases and then drops sharply, and then increases again. That is impossible to be caused by a linear increase in CO2 is CO2 is the cause of all warming as claimed by the alarmists. Here is a possible explanation of the non-linear behavior of temperatures.
An Einstein Thought Experiment on Climate Change
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2019/01/12/an-einstein-thought-experiment-on-climate-change/
Willis often talks about going back to the raw data. I agree we should examine data at least as a spot check to make sure conclusions are reasonable. With that in mind, I urge you to investigate the B.E.S.T. page for one of the few Greenland stations that provide data prior to 1940. It is
http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/stations/155343
SW. Greenland coastal fjord station, MITTARFIK ILULISSAT (JAKOBSHAVN LUFTHAVN)
The record runs from Jan 1866 to Oct 2013. Long records are precious to climate science. But look what BEST did to it!
There are no fewer than 30 empirical breakpoints in the 35 year period from 1903 to 1938 !!!
Either the method of determining empirical breakpoints is hideously flawed or this station’s record keeping is so fundamentally flawed the station not be used at all. I prefer the former. This is a station on an arctic fjord and there is little reason to believe it will behave in synchronicity with a sparse regional kriging network. Regardless, you cannot tease out any “climate signal” from temperature record snippets only a year or two long.
Ironically, this station has an unusual number of quality control failures after 1980 and a gap from 1990-2005, all in the period of “recent warning’.
You have data from 1900 through 2012. Why not show a running 30-yr average of 11yr smoothed data instead of a linear trend for the entire period? Wouldn’t that be more climatically relevant?
Once again, we see that, on a regional scale, climate models fail miserably to synchronise with observations, and natural variability – in this case multidecadal natural variability – dwarfs the secular warming trend to such an extent that it becomes difficult indeed to positively identify a secular warming trend. Climate alarmists merely sniff dismissively, pointing out that it’s GLOBAL warming we’re talking about and OF COURSE there will be large regional variability. They forget to also mention that the rapid warming of Greenland, accompanied by rapid surface ice melt and the shrinkage of Arctic sea-ice is attributed almost entirely to the accumulation of GHGs. In reality, a significant portion, if not a majority of Arctic warming in recent years has very likely been due to multidecadal variability. The ‘catastrophic’ Greenland surface ice melt which is predicted to continue uninterrupted by alarmists has been largely due to changes in atmospheric circulation (NAO), occasioning clearer skies above Greenland and enhanced summer surface melting due to direct solar insolation. Likewise, warmer North Atlantic waters have in part been driven by changes in ocean circulation and overturning.