Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Today I saw some scary headlines. I post them up along with snippets of the stories. First, from the BBC:
Greenland and Antarctica ice loss accelerating
Earth’s great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, are now losing mass six times faster than they were in the 1990s thanks to warming conditions.
“That’s not a good news story,” said Prof Andrew Shepherd from the University of Leeds in the UK.
Next, from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
Greenland, Antarctica Melting Six Times Faster Than in the 1990s
The two regions have lost 6.4 trillion tons of ice in three decades; unabated, this rate of melting could cause flooding that affects hundreds of millions of people by 2100.
Finally, from LiveScience:
Ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland increased sixfold in the last 30 years
The rapid ice loss puts the world right on track for the ‘worst case’ climate scenario.
Hmmm, sez I, the dreaded “worst-case” climate scenario … so I went to find the data. The articles are in Nature magazine, links are here (paywalled, I got the DOI and used it over at SciHub to get the papers). The study is done by a group of scientists who are part of a project called the “ice sheet mass balance inter-comparison exercise” (IMBIE).
Here is their money graph regarding Antarctica:
Figure 1. From Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017. The purple at the bottom is the overall total loss for Antarctica
And here’s the corresponding graph for Greenland:
Figure 2. From Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018. Click to expand. Dark blue is the overall total loss for Greenland
OK, both of those look scary enough.
So I downloaded the data. Kudos to the Imbie folks who did the study. The data’s all available on two Excel spreadsheets, freely available here. Figure 3 shows my graph of their data corresponding to the “Antarctica” part of Figure 1:
Figure 3. Cumulative ice mass loss, Antarctica. The photo is penguins on surreal ice.
And Figure 4 shows the corresponding data from Greenland:
Figure 4. Cumulative ice mass loss, Greenland. Note the different vertical scales. Greenland loses more ice than Antarctica.
YIKES! The ice loss looks like it’s falling off of an ice cliff …
So those agree with the IMBIE study, and they are both adequately terrifying.
Having seen that, I thought “how does this compare to the total ice mass in the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets? Their ice volumes are not exactly known but are on the order of thirty million cubic kilometres in Antarctica and a tenth of that, three million cubic kilometres, in Greenland.
Now, one cubic kilometre is about 0.95 gigatonnes of ice. Using those figures, I added the monthly Greenland ice mass loss shown in Figure 4 to the total mass of the ice in Greenland. That gives me the monthly total amount of Greenland ice. Figure 5 shows that result.
Figure 5. Monthly change in Greenland ice mass as calculated but not graphed by the IMBIE team.
See the blue/black line across the top? Yep, that’s the change in Greenland ice. The net change is so small that you can’t really see it even in a quarter century plus of data. It’s about five-thousandths of one percent (0.005%) of the total Greenland ice mass per year … be still, my beating heart.
And here’s the corresponding plot for Antarctica:
Figure 6. Change in Antarctic ice mass as calculated but not graphed by the IMBIE team.
As before, the blue/black line across the top is indeed the change in the total ice mass of Antarctica. The thing is, all of that terrifying ice loss shown in Figure 3 represents a total loss of three ten-thousandths of one percent (0.0003%) of the Antarctic ice mass per year … lost in the noise.
Next, the media, and to a lesser extent the scientists, waste a bunch of ink hyperventilating about the effect on sea-level rise. They imply, but don’t state, that this is increasing the overall rate of sea-level rise. However, what they fail to note is that in fits and starts, the polar ice caps have been melting since we came out of the last glacial period … so the effect of polar meltwater is not new. Meltwater has been included in the sea level rise data for centuries. And as I’ve shown here, we’re not seeing any acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise in the longest and best tide gauge records we have.
Finally, here’s probably the biggest thing that the studies revealed. Figure 7 shows the monthly ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica combined.
Figure 7. Total combined monthly ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland
Notice anything curious about that chart? I mean, other than the fact it has a map of Greenland, Antarctica, and the US in the background?
Yep, you’re right. In 2011, it started going the other way. The great ice caps were losing more and more ice each year from 1992 to 2011. By 2011 they were losing about fifty gigatonnes of ice each month.
In that year, something changed. Since 2011, Antarctica and Greenland have recovered to where the loss is less than half of the maximum loss of fifty gigatonnes per month. Seems to me that things are getting colder, not warmer as all the headlines are shouting. Most recently the loss is only on the order of twenty gigatonnes per month.
And why is that? Why is the rate changing? Why is even the sign of the rate changing, from more ice lost each month to less ice lost each month? And why did that change occur nine years ago, and not seven years or eleven years ago?
Simple answer. We don’t know.
Oh, they tell you in the studies that it’s from “ocean-driven melting” or the “North Atlantic Oscillation” or ” atmospheric circulation favoured cooler conditions” or that the “spatial pattern of accelerating mass changes reflects the geography of NAO-driven shifts in atmospheric forcing” … but those are just mechanistic correlations and relations. When they say “ocean-driven melting”, they’re just saying that when the water is warmer the ice melts more. Which is trivially true, and doesn’t answer the simple question—why did the trend reverse nine years ago, and not eleven years ago, or seven years ago, or not at all?
We don’t know.
My best to all,
w.
As Is My Wont: I ask people that when you are commenting please quote the exact words that you are discussing. This way, we can all understand just who and what you are referring to.
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It’s interesting that a decrease in the rate of ice loss can be attributed to any number of natural factors, but as we’ve heard time and time again, an increase is proof of manmade global warming.
It will be interesting to compare the rate of change in atmospheric CO2 concentrations to the presumed decrease in manmade emissions due to the corona virus pandemic. I’m just curious if any inferences might be drawn about what percentage of atmospheric CO2 concentration can be attributed to manmade emissions.
If you make a graph of Global temp increase of say 1C over 150 years using the Kelvin scale, which is the correct one, then 1C is less than 0.5% which also doe not look very dramatic!
What have you people got against penguins??? There are bound to be some penguins in Greenland within a Zoo. Surely?
I love this analysis. It almost “flat lined” me.
I was suspicious the second I looked at the axis labels that the authors were being less-than-revealing with their graphs. Years of visiting this site (WUWT) has trained me to check axis, starting and ending points, and scan for the keyword “model”. LOL
Does Greenland have a zoo?
The penguins in the Arctic went extinct in about 1845, largely as a result of human predation.
I can put figure 7’s most recent year’s melt (~240 Gt) into perspective using a number, ~2.8 microns, derived in essay Pseudoprecision in my ebook Blowing Smoke. As you point out, a GT of ice is ~0.95 cubic kilometer of water (ice floats). Based on the estimated ocean surface, a Gt of ice will raise sea level ~ 2.8 microns (2.8E-6), so 240 GT contributes about 0.7 millimeters to recent annual sea level rise. (NASA’s own published conversion is 365Gt = 1mm, so 1 GT=3.65 microns. Dunno how they got that value, but it isn’t right. Lots of NASA’s other SLR stuff is also just ‘off’ because it does not close, as explained in guest post Sea Level Rise, Acceleration, and Closure.)
But coasts gonna drown anyway from global warming—IPCC and NASA’s Jim Hansen are certain.
Rud,
I think you and NASA are in close agreement. 362.5GT/mm when inverted turns into 2.8 microns/GT. BTW, the 362.5 figure is from IPCC5, Glossary page 1462 which assume a seawater density of 1T/m^3. In the Cryosphere Chapter, 317ff, they use a density of 1.028 instead, but for Rud’s calculation to 2 significant digits, it doesn’t matter.
Note to both of you, they use a density of 0.917 for land based ice, not that it matters to this calculation.
Actually ice melting in West Antarctica has even less effect since much of it was below sea-level to begin with. So this part is used up to fill out the space where the ice was. And glacier ice only has a density of 0.91, so it takes about 1.13 cubic kilometers of glacier ice to make 1 cubic kilometer of (cold, salty) Southern Ocean water.
NIMBIE. Just flashed across my mind as I read.
Now I Make Blah Into Existential
Since their charts are cumulative losses, I think if you dropped in two charts showing the annual first differences, it would improve the transition to the image background chart
D. F., I put in cumulative losses in Figs. 3 & 4 to parallel their cumulative losses in Figs. 1 & 2.
w.
Yep, that’s what confused me on first glance. I thought surely we can’t be seeing that level of additional loss each year. Then I saw it was cumulative- anything to create a panic. Next given the scales involved, I call BS on their margins of error.
And let us not forget this:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/10/22/western-antarctic-ice-sheet-growing-as-oceans-warm/
I would have linked to the original paper, but the summary at the above website makes very clear what the paper says.
Thank you Willis for another carefully researched post. Looking behind the curtain!
The use of “cumulative total” graphs is part of the standard toolkit for climate alarmists, and IMHO it borders on fraudulent. In the case of melting ice caps, as long as there’s any net ice loss at all, the cumulative total will always increase, and this is clearly the point of using cumulatives. Your figure 7, which shows the actual rate of ice loss changing over time, is the real story. Omitting this kind of plot from the paper clearly shows that the object of the publication is to frighten the children. Honest authors would have included a similar plot in the paper, and any honest referee would have insisted on it, because it conveys a much greater amount of relevant information at a single glance.
During last summer’s California fire season, Hayhoe used a plot of cumulative acres of the US burned by forest/brush fires. Look, it keeps going up! OMG we’re all going to die!
Misleading? Without a doubt. Deceptive? Definitely. In other words, normal for climate science – where the conclusions are arrived at before the research grant is approved, and before the data is collected.
Can they really measure the total mass of ice in those ice caps with that degree of accuracy? I am somewhat skeptical. A little discreet cherry-picking here, a thumb on the scales there, even at a subconscious level, would not surprise me one little bit. Science in the service of politics!
Doesn’t it make you proud to be living in the 21st century?
Willis Do you have any explanation of why the Cumulative uncertainty was passed by the cumulative loss ~ 1995? Up until then the uncertainty was larger. It probably has something to do with measurement of cumulative error but I cant think this late at night.
I’d love to hear what George Moonbat at the Grauniad has to say about this as it completely punctures the alarmist narrative.
Indeed – it seems most of the climate change panicmongers are more PR than science.
Bernays driven science…
Hi Willis….thanks for this. I was in a FB debate with a lecturer at Leeds Uni who was patronising us with his ‘my colleagues on the ice at the moment are shocked how bad it is’ warnings….he was ref to Shephards study of course. So its no surprise to find out his ‘colleagues on the ice’ are guilty of the same slieght of hand he tried to play us with. Arrogant & knew very little when pressed, just reverted to the usual talking points. Was quite shocking to find someone at Leeds Uni so full of it….!
So thanks for confirming my suspicions!
Willis “We don’t know”–yes we do:
Geological forces as described by J.E. Kamis in his seminal work plateclimatology.com.
Massive geological forces causes all atmospheric conditions and dwarf Atmospheric Bias theories.
Additionally GEOTHERMAL forces not acknowledged by those with limited knowledge of earth systems, i.e., submarine vents and sub-surface and terrestrial volcanoes reacting to plate movements.
And there is nothing we can do about it.
Willis—don’t respond unless you have read Kamis’s 66 page paper. And then only the specific sections of his paper that don’t agree with—touché!!
Bigfoot, I got this far and started laughing:
“Completely control earth’s climate”? Hyperbole much? Clouds have nothing to do with the climate?
So then I thought “Well, how much energy is he claiming comes up from below?”
I did a search on “W/m2” … nothing.
I did a search on “watt” … nothing.
I did a search on “joule” … nothing.
I did a search on “energy” … eight hits, three of which have nothing to do with it. The others are about El Nino/La Nina, which says in part:
I’m sorry, but that is total nonsense and indicates he doesn’t have a clue about the El Nino/La Nina pump. When a bunch of warm water piles up in the Central and Eastern Pacific, strong winds blow up that move the warm surface waters westward. So much water is moved that it actually lowers the sea surface level.
3D section of the Pacific Ocean looking westward alone the equator. Each 3D section covers the area eight degrees north and south of the equator, from 137° East (far end) to 95° West (near end), and down to 500 metres depth. SOURCE The Tao Of El Nino
Removing the warm upper waters exposes the cooler water underneath. So totally contrary to his bizarre assertions, nothing is warmed, and nothing is cooled, and there is no need for his imaginary heat source. The warm top layer is removed, exposing the cool layer underneath.
Sorry, Bigfoot, but your man is clueless. He hasn’t given one single estimate of the size of his imaginary heat source, nor even tried to estimate the geothermal energy flux he’s talking about.
w.
Willis Eschenbach
March 22, 2020 at 2:17 pm
“So much water is moved that it actually lowers the sea surface level.”
The October 2010 illustration makes it look like the sea surface is changed by about 70-100m…can this be right? I could believe 30-50m perhaps but they’re the ones making the measurements I guess. Or maybe I’m reading the scale wrong.
Beautiful picture, thank you. Much clearer than the one I had in my mind.
Willis,
FWIW, this geoscientist supports your questioning of this “maginaary heat source.”
Having said this, remember that accurate, relevant observations of the deep ocean floor are difficult, expensive and incomplete. Keep some room in the mind for future advances from more measurements – as I suspect you do.
This polar contribution to sea level change is restricted by errors that are plausibly much larger than stated officially, in particular, the weight of water, snow and ice deposited each year on land. Geoff S
As I expected you and others can’t see the forest for the trees. Suggest you take your sailboat to the Western Antarctic Rift. You can bath in the sauna water. Ice melts by 2200 deg. F. magna trumps over your teeny tiny watts. As always you cherry pick what justifies your misunderstanding of the Thermodynamics you never studied.
Bigfoot, you asked me for specific objections to Kamis’s work. I did so, detailing a number of specific flaws.
In response you accuse me of:
• Not seeing the forest for the trees.
• Talking about “teeny tiny watts”??
• Cherry picking data
• Misunderstanding thermodynamics
• Never studying thermodynamics
You sure you understand how this “scientific discussion” deal is supported work? It should go like this.
You say “find specific errors in Kamis’s work”. I find specific errors errors in his work and lay them out in full detail. So far, so good.
But then you’re supposed to come back and either agree that what I found were errors, or show us all where I’m wrong.
What you’re not supposed to do is what you’re doing, going into an incoherent spittle-flecked rant full of ugly personal accusations …
Come back when you’ve figure out how to play nice on a scientific blog.
Or don’t come back. Either one, I’m easy.
w.
You’re not a scientist. You’re not a computer programmer/modeler. You’re not an engineer. You’re not a climatologist. You don’t even have a BA in English. You do, however, have a ”certificate” from Aames School of Massage. That’s the point. I will say, your certitude is amusing, though. Is that overcompensation. Rhetorical question.
Willis <=== The wife and I hiked in Yellowstone National Park last July, and I was blown away by the thermal and chemical phenomena. I've read a lot since, and here's and example: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2012JB009463. It contains numerous references and their estimates of heat flux from the park. One in particular was 2.3 W/m^2, which is surprisingly close to the supposed radiation imbalance caused by CO2. I've not tried to find any world-wide data on the geothermal contribution to global temperature, but there must be some (data, that is). I did find (and subsequently lost) some college class notes on estimating the heat flux from magma emerging from the mid-Atlantic Ridge. It was huge, IIRC, and believably so given the evident magnitude of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzwuTBx93uA
It would just be interesting to see what the relative contribution might be.
Michael, it is true that there is a large heat flux from those places where the lava comes out, or where there is a huge lava chamber just underground.
But think about it … how big is Yellowstone, and how many places like it are there in the US. Lassen Park has fumaroles and hot springs … where else? And of course, it’s only certain spots within the park that are hot.
Outside of those areas, the geothermal heat flux is on the order of a tenth of a watt per square metre.
Some diggingg finds a link saying that 13.1 km^3 of new lava came out of a 140 km spreading zone over 8,000 years. That’s about 12,410 m^3 per km of spreading zone per year.
Let’s say the lava comes out at 1,000°C. Lava is 3100 kg per m^3. So that’s about 38.5 million kg of lava.
Specific heat of lava is about 840 J/kg -°C. To cool a kg of lava from 1000°C to maybe 4°C releases 836 kilojoules.
So to cool the 38.5 million kg of lava releases 32.2 gigajoules of energy/year. That’s a constant energy release of about a thousand watts per kilometer of spreading zone. And that, of course, is about one watt per metre of spreading zone … and if the zone was only one metre wide, that’s about one watt per square metre.
But of course, it’s not one metre wide. Think about how far it is to the nearest spreading zone …
w.
Thanks for the link! I’ll delve into it a little more. In the meantime, here are two for you: http://magma.geol.ucsb.edu/papers/EoV%20chapter%205%20Lesher&Spera.pdf
http://www.science.smith.edu/geosciences/petrology/Assignments/Enthalpy.pdf
The first gives thermodynamic and transport properties of silica melts and magma. The second is a problem statement for a course in geosciences at Smith. It contains a simpler set of physical properties for lava, but they are close to the values one gets (with more effort) from the first link. I get a total value for lava cooling from 1350 C to 20 C of 2 MJ/kg. One thing I think is missing from your calculation is the latent heat of fusion. Another is dividing cooling the liquid to the solidification point, then subsequently to the final temperature – the specific heat capacities of the liquid and solid are different.
The lava flow video I linked was taken off the Kamokuna Lava Delta. I haven’t been able to get any hard data on the flow rate, but scaling from the height (70 feet), and the flow speeds over land quoted in some sources (17 mph), I estimate the mass flow rate to be 37,000 kg/s. At 2 MJ/kg heat released to the ocean, that’s about 74 GW. You’d think that would have some effect somewhere…
The work done by J.E. Kamis is valuable even though his conclusions that geological forces control climate are overstated. My understanding is that the IPCC models assume that geological energy inputs are either zero or negligible. Mr. Kamis’s work makes the very good point that those inputs may be real and have not been measured.
There is something wrong with their Antarctic ‘money graph’, this posts figure 1 (their figure 2). I have written about Antarctica here and at Climate Etc several times, so am very familiar with the continent and its ice sheets. East Antarctica is about 2/3 of the continent and more than 2/3 of the total ice mass because thicker. The dividing line is the Transantarctic mountain range. The Peninsula is, relatively speaking, rounding error.
The graph shows all of Antartica ice loss (magenta) about the same as West Antarctica (WAIS green). That is mathematically and physically impossible given the stability of EAIS (yellow).
Thanks, Rud, always good to hear from you.
You expect scientific accuracy in a climate science study published in the journals?
Stay well,
w.
Rud, I’m probably going to smack myself in the morning for writing something stupid but I cannot see what is impossible. W’s fig 1 is in amounts, the East Antarctic sheet is, as you say, stable, not losing ice. The West is where the ice is being lost and it follows that the total loss should be about the same as the loss from the west. The relative areas are irrelevant.
Yeah, it is a nit picking point but but if people who usually make sense say something I don’t understand it is sometimes a learning opportunity.
Compelling and convincing.
Just concerning data analysis in general. I have a Ph.D. in atmospheric science and do a lot of data analysis. The biggest changes over the years for researchers like myself is two fold. First, data is now readily and generally freely available to the general public. This was never the case many years back. So the data you used was generally your own and you did not really share it around. Secondly, the means to plot and analyze data is extremely easy now. It used to be very cumbersome to do this, and other researchers would generally accept your results as they were not going to spend the time to plot and analyze it. In other words, researchers could smoke through a lot of results because few others were going to do in depth checking.
So, many kudos to you for having such a keen interest in data and its analysis, and posing straight forward questions. You keep the marginal scientists from being able to push their questionable results upon the masses. Many of these “scientists” still do not realize that they are not the only ones who can analyze data any longer.
I’m not really sure why the melting flipped in 2011, but my guess it has to do with Sunspots. Like elementary physics, if you know F=MA and E=IR, you can figure most physical laws out and you can use Sunspots to determine the overall climate… always has, always will.
Also the fact that Jupiter, Saturn and Mars are currently in conjunction also probably has something to do with it, though I’m still trying to figure that one out.
Nope. It’s not sunspots. I’ve written about this at length. See here for my twenty-four posts on the subject.
w.
I should have put the /s tag on this, but Willis you have posted so many times on this I thought of all people, you would have picked up on it. Sorry you went back and counted all 24 articles, but I guess with all the time we have on our hands ……
‘Greenland’s melting ice raised global sea-level by 2.2mm in two months’ – Guardian headline March 19.
The article only claimed the ice loss was enough to raise sea levels by 2.2mm.
Mind you, either way I can’t get excited about a sea rise equivalent to a few bubbles.
Saw this story in several outlets, including Fox News web site. Fox will report every daft global warming alarm ever since the kids took over, they probably feel the heat at all the best soirees. Normally don’t look at comments, but on GW stories I look and am gratified to see 80-90% comments run skeptical.
I fail to see how these stories are considered “global” warming. Greenland and Antarctica? Michael Mann says it’s just regional. /sarc please.
all you Deniers, now is your opportunity to (a) Put your money where your mouth is, and (b) make a killing (opps!) in the real estate market.
If all the projections are so wrong, invest NOW in Florida Gulf Coast real estate! Sales are way down, and the properties are – I must say – very nice. Of course Florida is a hell hole 6 months of the year, nevertheless.
I have two sisters who own property on Sanibel Island. Mike Pence recently bought a multi-million dollar place near bye. Sales are slow because Sanibel’s height above mean sea level is dropping an inch a year below 4 ft (as of 5 years ago). But its all Fake News! buy now, avoid the rush!
Seriously, talk is cheap. Climate change is an Economic proposition. Put your money where you mouth is.
Great job of debunking as usual Willis. I looked at the Antarctica data and I’m even more skeptical. They report cumulative values to 0.01 gt – but their uncertainty says +/- 560 gt and that’s at 1 SD, so really +/- 1120 gt cumulative at 95% confidence. Clearly false precision. It’s hard to imagine how one could possibly determine an ice mass balance over 5 million Square miles to a precision of 0.003% in an environment like the antarctic. Oh, and the last 11 monthly (2016-17) are all identical 14.26 gt – odd that.
Willis, you asked: “why did the trend reverse nine years ago, and not eleven years ago, or seven years ago, or not at all?”
I would note that some folks looking into cycles have been postulating that a quasi-70 year cycle, perhaps related to ocean phases (e.g. NAO, PDO), could be at work here, and be the (partial) answer to your question. I’ve been looking at this cycle and trying to relate northeastern U.S. cold-season storminess to it. Most non-CAGW researchers agree that global temperatures warmed in the 1920s and 1930s, and cooled in the 1940s to the mid 1970s, and then warmed again. From the mid 70s (and I think 1976 was the turning point year) to 2011 is about 35 years, the warming half of the ~70 year cycle.
One can “kind of” see this cycle going backwards in time with “significant” northeastern U.S. winter storms. At least, I think I can see it, even back to the depths of the Little Ice Age; perhaps I’m seeing too much, especially with a dearth of data! I used a compilation of northeast U.S. winter storms from various sources, thinking that the NAO would be the operative influence on temperatures, with colder (warmer) temperatures leading to more (less) snowy and stormy winters. There may be a name for this putative 70-year cycle, but I like to call it the Ludlum cycle, after the late NJ State Climatologist, David Ludlum, who wrote books on northeast U.S. storms. Non-quantitatively (yet), and only subjectively, there does seem to me to be a weak correlation between “significant” winter storminess and this quasi-70 year cycle. So, when I started looking at this in the late 1990s, I began to think that the year 2010 should be an inflection point, where we might start to see some signs of global cooling.
Assuming this cycle is actually a phenomenon, I’ve been attempting to relate ~11 year sunspot cycles to these climate cycles. My thought is that groups of 3 sunspot cycles would operate this cycle. Noting that sunspot cycles reverse polarity each time, perhaps one 3-group, which is dominated by a negative polarity, 2-to-1, would have a warming effect (affecting upper atmospheric ozone, or chemistry, perhaps?), and that the next sunspot 3-cycle (another 30-35 year period) would be dominated by a positive polarity, 2-to-1, and this would have a cooling effect. Then, combining 3 groups of 3-sunspot cycles, this would comprise about 100 years. Each 100-year group would be (admittedly only slightly) dominated by one polarity, and the succeeding 100-year period would switch to the opposite polarity dominance. Well, of course, that’s just wild speculation, but something might be influencing this (these) cycle(s). Speculating even more wildly, it appeared to me that temperatures as inferred from winter storminess also varied by about 100 years, so on a quasi-200 year cycle. This would correlate to that ~200 year sunspot polarity cycle. And, perhaps not so wildly, as many researchers have previously noted, there is a much more dominant ~600-800 year cycle at work, which gives rise to our “Warm Periods” and “Little Ice Ages.” So, to conclude, I think there is a ~70 year cycle nesting within a ~200 year cycle nesting within a ~600 or ~800 year cycle, and the first two modulate the dominant longer-scale cycle.
It’s been about 300 years since the depths of the LIA, so we should be at about the peak of our Modern Warm Period now…or for maybe another 50-100 years as the dominant ~600 or ~800 year cycle peaks. The supposed ~200 year cycle would act in a negative way this century, though, and contribute to slight cooling for 2000-2100, so this might result in a century about the same or only slightly warmer than 1900-2000, before we start a more noticeable cooling after 2100. The ~70 year cycle seems like it may have changed about 2010 or so (your ice loss graph might be the canary in the coal mine), meaning this cycle will contribute to slight cooling in the period 2010-2045 (although it doesn’t seem to have done a whole lot yet from 2010-2020). The next 35 year period, 2045-2080, might then be the warmest peak of our Modern Warm Period. How’s that for some wild speculation?!
If you conclude, probably correctly, that most of the foregoing is just nonsense, then please just consider that a switch in the ~70 year cycle, as noted by many researchers, may be the operative mechanism with respect to the reduction of Antarctic and Greenland ice loss beginning about 2011. Thanks!
4caster, see above …
w.
Antarctica is a land of ice. But dive below the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and you’ll find fire as well, in the form of subglacial volcanoes (livescience.com)
Willis,
Again and again you skillfully bring meaning to data and reveal the fakers and the foolish. Thanks for your hard work.
Willis
You gave them a good hiding. Thx. The divergence of heat more to the NH waters is strange.
It must be the CO2 that did it…
I think it was UK PM Disrelli who sais “”Statistics, damm statistics and plain lies “”
So today we are still been told that by year 2100 etc. is important to us.
The silver lining if any , about the vieus outbreak is that as the world goes into a big recession, our politicians will no longer have any spare money to throw at Green causes, to shut them up.
But the subsuidies for renewables is a harder problem, with South Australia with almost 50 % of windmills and solar panels being one of the worst examples.
The worlds economy wants cheap power to be able to recover.
VK5ELL MJE
‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics’
This quotation is often attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th century British Prime Minister. The source for this view is the autobiography of Mark Twain, where he makes that attribution. Nevertheless, no version of this quotation has been found in any of Disraeli’s published works or letters. An early reference to the expression, which may explain Twain’s assertion is found in a speech made by Leonard H. Courtney, (1832-1918), later Lord Courtney, in New York in 1895:
‘After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, “Lies – damn lies – and statistics,” still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of.’
There’s no indication that by ‘Wise Statesman’ Courtney was referring to any specific person, although it may be that Twain thought that he meant Disraeli.
The earliest citation that known of of the current usage of the phrase, that is, “there are three kinds of falsehoods, lies, damned lies and statistics” is from Arthur James Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, as quoted in the Manchester Guardian, 29th June 1892.
https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/lies-damned-lies-and-statistics.html