The narrative surrounding climate change often rides the crest of sensationalism. The latest twist in this saga emerges from the high-Arctic in Greenland. A recent report published in Current Biology reveals that prior assumptions about the region’s advancing spring season have now been effectively erased. It seems that the zealousness to attribute everything to climate change has reached an icy impasse.
About a decade and a half ago, scientists claimed that the Arctic spring was coming sooner than ever before – supposedly at some of the fastest rates of change globally. It is instructive to note that despite the passionate rhetoric around these claims, later research seems to have frozen them in their tracks. The alleged ‘earlier and earlier’ arrival of spring has now been supplanted by what the researchers term “extreme year-to-year variation”. Despite these stark differences from the original claims, the climate change narrative somehow still clings on.
Niels Martin Schmidt of Aarhus University in Denmark sums up this curious paradox,
“We looked at previously reported extreme rates of phenological advancements in the Arctic and found that directional advancement is no longer the prevailing pattern. Actually, the previously observed trend has disappeared completely and has been replaced by extreme year-to-year variation in the onset of spring.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/996247
The climatic change phenomenon, that was originally painted in bold, irrefutable strokes, seems to have taken a surprising U-turn.
Supposedly, climate changes are expected to occur faster in the Arctic than lower latitudes. An ecosystem-wide monitoring program launched in 1996 at Zackenberg in Northeast Greenland aimed to track these changes. Early findings, based on the first 10 years of data, indicated a clear pattern of advancement across plants and animals. However, the analysis of the entire data set, now spanning 25 years, reveals an entirely different story.
Analyzing the data from 1996–2020, the researchers report,
“little evidence of directional change in the timing of events even as climate change continues.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/996247
A seemingly embarrassing retraction. However, they were quick to blame this shift on
“a high degree of climate variability from year to year.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/996247
The classic fallback argument, that despite the lack of conclusive evidence, climate change still must be at play. Apparently, the consistent shift from directional change to extreme variability across organisms and the ecosystem’s apparent subjection to varying climatic conditions was indeed surprising. It’s clear that earlier predictions were not as solid as they were initially presented to be.
“Some years have almost no snow in spring, whereas others have snow on the ground way into the summer season,” he says. “This leaves us with a generally warmer but much more unpredictable spring climate—and this is where the second contributor to the observed phenological shift kicks in. Some species appear unable to take advantage of the warmer conditions in spring and appear to have reached the limits of their phenological plasticity.”
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/996247
The story gets even more fascinating when Schmidt describes the current pattern as being “a lot messier.” Rising temperatures have seemingly stalled, while snow cover varies wildly from year to year. It appears that our understanding of these ecosystems, and how they respond to changing environmental factors, is much less comprehensive than we thought.
In conclusion, this tale of retracting findings and shapeshifting patterns highlights the precariousness of drawing definitive conclusions from limited data sets. The authors here blame climate change for phenomena that their own work indicates have no clear pattern. Perhaps we should focus less on hurriedly attributing every environmental change to climate change and more on understanding these ecosystems’ inherent complexities. After all, nature has a way of surprising us, and the Arctic spring seems to be no exception.
All you need to do is substitute Witches for Climate Change and you are back in the 1700’s. Use the term Bogyman and you are back even further. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
We’d have gotten away with it if it hadn’t been for those pesky….
. . . facts.
“a high degree of climate variability from year to year” – AKA Weather!
As we all know, it’s weather that changes from year to year, not climate.
Boy, I sure do hate it when the weather doesn’t follow the normally scheduled program. This is surely something new that can be attributed to climate boiling.
“”I sure do hate it when the weather doesn’t follow the normally scheduled program.””
Tell me about it
“”Unsettled, breezy and cool””
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2643743
Oh hell yes! With a wet and windy weekend looming, colder as well, no doubt. The whinging, whining comments in the media from people escaping the dreary weather in Northern Europe for the Med and how it’s ‘unbearably’ hot there this year are getting rather sickening, I’m afraid.
Looking forward to Autumn and warmer and drier weather….
“Well now we really need that extra grant money to find out how climate change is happening due to our new findings.”
“Certainly sir, as soon as you refund the wasted grant money investigating the earlier onset of the Arctic Spring.”
Many of these ‘studies’ confound weather with climate. You can’t ‘SEE’ climate. And climate is ALWAYS changing. But it changes back at some point. Climate is defined as an average over 30 years. And that was a bad choice, because of the ~70 year climate cycle. If climate were redefined as an average over 70 years, we would have a totally different view of climate.
And then maybe even 70 years isn’t enough? We could go to 230 years, 1200 years or 130,000 years.
30 years isn’t really adequate
Climate is not an average, and the 30 years thing was never intended to apply.
A 30-year average of weather metrics was meant to be a simple comparison.
Climate boiling was not an issue when the number of years was selected in the 1930s.
As with 97% and 1.5 degrees, defining “climate” as an average temperature is bs.
But you don’t need to study Arctic or Antarctic climate for 30 or 70 years to see that the variations in monthly and annual temperatures are far greater than in warmer climates and this variability has always existed.
There’s no such thing as a global climate, global average climate, or global average temperature. They are all just constructs misused by scientivists, the Misleadia, and extreme lefties hell-bent on imposing “socialism”
“Never let a crisis go to waste – and if there is no crisis, make one” – basic jist of socialism/communism since day 1.
Emily Litella sums it up.
Who?
From Saturday Night Live in the ’70’s. The late Gilda Radner as Emily Litella in numerous skits, which always ended with “Never mind.”
She was a great talent who passed on way too soon. Her routines are meme-ready for skewering people too full of themselves, like warmunists.
What’s about earlier starting winter ?
Leave it out, Krishna
I’m still getting through early autumn – summer was cancelled
Not in Spain. Plenty of heat here if somebody wants some more. It is usually nice until mid-October. Today we are enjoying a very nice 25ºC (77ºF) in Madrid courtesy of Storm Patricia currently over France. We are supposed to get a new heatwave next week.
Send some, do!
It’s been amazing lake weather here on the canadian prairies this summer, hot days and warm nights, don’t even need a thermal blanket as the sun sets.
Loving me some climate change, happy to take more.
And I see some Scouts at a Jamboree in South Korea have been driven out of their tents and into air conditioned hotel rooms because of the “extreme” heat. British lads I understand. Seems a bit weedy.
Didn’t last for long:
http://polarportal.dk/fileadmin/polarportal/surface/SMB_curves_LA_EN_20230804.png
Onset of spring in northeast Greenland….
It’s a narrow strip of land between a permanently frozen icecap and the ocean. Is it possible that spring weather arrives when the sea ice breaks up and “warm” (i.e. not frozen) ocean water is exposed? (that’s a rhetorical question BTW)
It’s been well documented (NSIDC, JAXA) that sea ice breakup went through a period of getting progressively earlier from about 2000 to 2012, after which it fluctuated for a while, and looks as though it might have started be getting later again in the last few years. The same trend that they are seeing in the onset of spring — surprise!
I submit, as a working hypothesis, that they are seeing the AMO cycle at work, not “climate change”, which – by definition in the alarmist world – only works in one direction, i.e. getting warmer all the time, and is caused by you and me emitting ever increasing amounts of CO2.
Sounds about right. The AMO moved into its warm phase around 1995-97 when they started their data. The effects were strong until right around 2006 when the sea ice reached a new equilibrium level and has remained there ever since.
We will soon find out if the ~60 year cycle continues.
“the previously observed trend has disappeared completely and has been replaced by extreme year-to-year variation.”
Random numbers usually behave that way 🙂 Long live Climate Science!
The same thought I had. The fact that you may get 10 heads in a row does not make a pattern!
O/T – Possible story tip
“””The Government has cut all ties with eco-extremist group Greenpeace after it sent protesters to invade the privacy of the Prime Minister’s home in Yorkshire.
The environmental group regularly meets with the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and is regularly consulted on issues.”””
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1798722/Rishi-Sunak-Greenpeace-protest-cut-ties
An own goal if ever there was one.
Ah, the outbreak of common sense continues…
Time to start up the investigations into overspending their lobbying caps. I’m sure they kept their direct spending within bounds but they then paid the salaries of ‘volunteers’ working in parliamentary offices, supposedly for free. When you add it all up, I’ve a feeling that there has been serious overspending going back decades.
The UK shouldn’t even have ties with an advocacy group, never mind cutting them
Nobody voted for Greenpiss
Exactly – politicians have to listen to the voters – all of them – not a select group of radicals that can be useful in generating press coverage.
15 years ago? These dimwit pseudo scientists with an agenda, have no idea of the cycles and variance in the natural world. 15 years to a geologist or paleontologist is about a popcorn fart in duration (a properly-executed popcorn fart is about 10 nanoseconds).
That’s fast
Therein lies the problem. They know nothing about nature because they ASSUME any changes that occur can all be blamed on the imaginary influence of human activities.
Eisenhower was a prophet, he saw science descending into politicized BS due to the amount of it being funded by the federal government before I was born.
It is why variance is one of the most important statistical parameters when dealing with a mean of a distribution. Why do you think nothing to do with climate science ever mentions the variance of the data being used? Likewise, why never mention the skewness and kurtosis? Are all climate data distributions normal so that skewness and kurtosis don’t matter?
Climate science operates like a child in school that says, look I can measure the height of babies all the way to NBA players and the average will tell you what the average height of humans is.
Planetary climate as well as local is variable over both short and long time frames. Little argument about this, but few seem to realize that change is a necessary component of variability.
“The climatic change phenomenon, that was originally painted in bold, irrefutable strokes,
seems to have taken a surprising U-turn.”
______________________________________________________________________
That’s right the “Global Cooling” “Global Warming” U-Turn took about two years. 1979-1981
When the facts don’t conform to the ideology, change the facts!
I don’t know why scientists don’t understand the nature of the Arctic Shift that took place between 1997 and 2007. All the evidence is there in plain sight, and it is not very difficult to interpret it.
Climate shifts and climate regimes are known since the 1990s and in 1997 we underwent a climate shift, changing to a new regime. It was particularly evident in the Arctic, but very easy to spot in the global climate and even in the stratosphere.
Where’s the anthropogenic in that?
Even worse, were the money in that.
Dropkicked into the rubbish bin, hopefully!
High variability precedes a shift from inter glacial to glacial in the high resolution paleo temperature proxies.
Oh yay, something to look forward to.
Inevitable.
Resistance is futile.
Ferd – high variability often occurs in the shift from one state to another – the shift from summer to winter and back to summer again exhibits variability in the autumn and spring seasons. The same thing happens when we see a shift from a warm phase to a cold phase and again from the cold phase to a warm phase. And, as you mentioned, it’s also found during the shift from a glacial to an interglacial period.
Reading EurekaAlert reminds me of a internet meme/saying:
“Ever Read Something So Stupid It Gives You Forest Whitaker Eye?”
They are a reminder of just how poorly science can be performed and reported.
It’s getting ever tougher to be a climate alarmist:
So much for supposedly settled climate science.
6. There hasn’t been any “exodus of climate refugees”.
7. The frequency and intensity of storms (hurricanes, typhoons and tornadoes) have not increased over the last 100 years
8. Ocean coral reefs have not disappeared due to “ocean acidification”
9. The Earth has greened by 10–15% due to CO2 increasing from 280 to 420 ppm.
10. There haven’t been an unusual number of mass species extinctions over the last 250 years.
11. Humans are NOT now experiencing an “existential threat” from climate change.
12. The Earth has NOT reached a “tipping point”.
Probably another dozen or more facts could be added to this list, but need I?
6. There are however growing numbers of climate change policy refugees.
Climate activists: “I don’t care about your facts, I KNOW CO2 is causing everything on your list because I can feel it! – so it must be true! Your obvious and easily verified facts don’t matter because oil companies must have paid for that research somehow and so it has the cooties and doesn’t count”
“And I don’t have to listen to you because you deny the climate emergency!!”
Sticks fingers firmly in ears..
“La la la la la la la la la la la la la…”
Sure looks like “the science of climate change is settled” . . . NOT!
Was it not but two days ago, we all shared Kip’s distaste for “weasel words”. This report exemplifies MY personal (dis)favourite; hyperverbosity to hide lack of intellectual substance.
I mean, ye gads: “…directional advancement is no longer the prevailing pattern”.
This particular twit Schmit sure has the heart of a poet.
…wrapped in aluminium, hidden at the back of the freezer…
There is no reason to believe these alarmists, even if I know they are telling the truth I look for their angle. These people are terrible.
The Word of the Year for warmunists is now “extreme”, after abandoning “global warming” which sounds sorta ominous but the data didn’t prove it out … but also discovering that the phrase “climate change” doesn’t really resonate much with the ignorant masses, so it’s now being supplanted with the word “extreme”.
So they’re publishing papers that grudgingly admit that global warming isn’t really a thing now, so it’s all about “extreme extreme extreme extreme”. And even if nothing actually bad (“We’re all gonna die tomorrow!”) is going one, then they pout and say, “Well, we still don’t like this, because it’s just so EXTREME”.
They can’t let go! Pronouncements “which once had a high degree of certainty” but have been falsified by nature, are simply rationalized as a switch to some new, more alarming pattern. Like the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, climate pronouncements don’t evolve they remain cast in stone.
It can be seen that the specter of the phony Anthropo Crisis Climate, no matter if it were to slip into a lifetime of precipitous cooling, will live on. No one will admit they were wrong, let alone apologize for the pain, the suffering, the millions of lives lost and the trillions of dollars wasted. It has to be taken away from the perps eventually.
The Gospels remain true because human nature doesn’t change, but science goes through many periods of rapid advancement and spirals of wasted effort going down rabbit holes. Excellent examples of human nature, good and bad.
Last words in Conclusion
“To tackle this challenge, and to avoid biases in our view on Arctic ecological dynamics under global change, we urgently need further observatories running structured, long-term monitoring programs at high latitudes.”
please send more money
I’m glad I worked in oil and gas all my life and only had to break my ass to stay employed. It’s got to be tough being a grant dependent scientist and needing to come up with the most ridiculous bull feathers to stay employed. Ouch.
Stacking that BS stuff up is hard work and just like Sisyphus just when you think you got it all piled up it topples over on you
The older ones who started this nonsense will just retire on big fat pensions and their ill-gotten gains, whilst the younger ones will just focus on the next human-induced “crises” (soil depletion anyone?) until they receive their big fat pensions.
Oh no not climate messiness too? We’re all doomed to go at messy times instead of all holding hands together and singing-
Vera Lynn – We’ll Meet Again (Lyrics) – YouTube
“little evidence of directional change in the timing of events even as climate change continues.”
The point is the paper is about phenological response to the change in the climate not to the change in climate itself. What they found is that some species have reached their limit of response to the change in conditions.
Let’s look at some of the conclusions.
This is what I have been recommending for some time. The vagaries of calculating a “global” change in temperature totally ignores different regions. The Koppen scale was developed for a reason.
This would seem to say that species pools are relatively stable. I don’t read this as a conclusion that species are not going to survive.