In a climate discourse saturated with the axiom that global warming is the harbinger of unidirectional catastrophic changes, a recent study from Nature Geoscience stands out—not for its groundbreaking insights but for the peculiar manner in which it contorts observations to fit the prevailing climate change narrative. The study, focusing on the Himalayan glaciers, notably those around Mount Everest, reveals a cooling phenomenon, where localized areas experience temperature drops despite the global trend of rising temperatures.
The Paradox as Presented
Abstract
Understanding the response of Himalayan glaciers to global warming is vital because of their role as a water source for the Asian subcontinent. However, great uncertainties still exist on the climate drivers of past and present glacier changes across scales. Here, we analyse continuous hourly climate station data from a glacierized elevation (Pyramid station, Mount Everest) since 1994 together with other ground observations and climate reanalysis. We show that a decrease in maximum air temperature and precipitation occurred during the last three decades at Pyramid in response to global warming. Reanalysis data suggest a broader occurrence of this effect in the glacierized areas of the Himalaya. We hypothesize that the counterintuitive cooling is caused by enhanced sensible heat exchange and the associated increase in glacier katabatic wind, which draws cool air downward from higher elevations. The stronger katabatic winds have also lowered the elevation of local wind convergence, thereby diminishing precipitation in glacial areas and negatively affecting glacier mass balance. This local cooling may have partially preserved glaciers from melting and could help protect the periglacial environment.
The authors of the study document a decrease in maximum air temperatures and a reduction in precipitation in the glacierized areas of the Himalayas, a pattern observed over the past three decades. The narrative quickly turns to global warming as the prime mover of this paradox, attributing the local cooling to enhanced katabatic winds driven by increased glacier melt—a consequence of global warming.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01331-y
The study states:
“We show that a decrease in maximum air temperature and precipitation occurred during the last three decades at Pyramid in response to global warming.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01331-y
This explanation, however, smacks of a rationalization crafted to align with the larger narrative of climate alarmism. The irony of glaciers cooling their surroundings, even as they melt, should prompt a reevaluation of our assumptions about climatic responses to global warming, not reinforce them under the guise of novel mechanisms.
A Critique of Convenient Conclusions
The assertion that glaciers, through their melting, induce local cooling effects that then counteract the very warming causing their melt, serves as a perfect emblem of the circular reasoning often pervasive in climate science discussions. The study details complex interactions between atmospheric conditions and melting glaciers leading to this cooling:
“Katabatic winds arise from adiabatic warming due to air subsidence and cooling of the near-surface air by sensible heat exchange with the glacier surface… This process generates a divergence of air masses along the northern and southern Himalayan valleys and causes further drying of the katabatic winds.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-023-01331-y
While the mechanics described are scientifically plausible, their portrayal as a direct outcome of global warming stretches credulity. It exemplifies the trend in climate research to frame every observed change in the environment, however contradictory or counterintuitive, as a consequence of global warming. This not only stifles genuine scientific inquiry but also muddles the public understanding of climate dynamics.
The Broader Implications of Misframed Research
The implications of such studies extend beyond academic circles into policy making, where they can lead to misguided efforts based on oversimplified models of climate interaction. The localized cooling and drying around these glaciers, while scientifically fascinating, are presented with an undue emphasis on their supposed linkage to global warming, potentially skewing policy responses to these phenomena.
This framing might distract from more pressing environmental issues or lead to policies that fail to address the actual complexities of regional climate dynamics. It is crucial to not shoehorn every observation into the global warming narrative.
Conclusion
This study, while contributing to our understanding of high-altitude climatic processes, also highlights the problematic tendency in climate science to conform observations to established narratives. True scientific progress requires the dispassionate assessment of data and phenomena, free from the compulsions of ideological conformity. In the realm of climate science, as in all fields, skepticism should not just be a tool but a fundamental stance, ensuring that our understanding of the world remains as unbiased and grounded in reality as possible, something that is becoming exceedingly rare in this age of ideological conformity.
The full open access study is available here.
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By my observation, the vast majority of “scientific” publications and anything produced by government agencies rides the Climate Change™ bandwagon. Funds for research are so intimately tied to the propaganda machine that having Climate Change™ mentioned increases certainty of getting the funding and publication.
Think of a research topic; tie it to Climate Change™ and await the funding offers.
The notion of Climate Change™ pollutes almost anything that claims to be research these days.
Here is an example – The preliminary statement to Australia’s 24-25 budget released last night:
https://budget.gov.au/content/bp1/download/bp1_bs-1.pdf
Climate gets 6 mentions. And it appears Climate Resilience™ is the new paradigm.
Big subsidies, by Australian standards, for green hydrogen. But they do come with proponent risk so might not actually get any takers. Last I heard Twiggy was headed for Arizona where electricity is still low cost.
It is a racket which is why I no longer bother with the IPCC and the modeling construct community as I expect it will suffer from a preconceived belief and controlled by governments which is the seat of infection generating a lot of pseudoscience crap.
I’m seeking ten million dollars in funding to show the relationship between global warming and snoring. I’ve been told I’m likely to get it.
We hypothesize that the counterintuitive cooling is caused by…:
Holdren physics
In spring 1976, I attended a Holdren talk on how “clean coal” was less dangerous than nuclear. One of his claims that stuck in my mind was the most deaths from “clean coal” would come from railroad grade crossing accidents. My takeaway was that he was adjusting his analysis to fit the narrative.
Let’s go back to calling it ‘global warming’ as it was before the Hiatus.
So while the proposed explanation is “scientifically plausible” it seems that your only objection is that it relies on global warming to work. And given that the world is warming surely any sensible explanation should include that as a factor. How would you expect people to explain why regions of the earth are cooling even though the world as a whole is warming without including global warming as a factor.
And it is not as if you seem to have better explanation or even any explanation at all. So as Holmes said “when you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains no matter how improbable must be the truth”
So, soon it will be so hot that we’ll freeze to death?
Well if you read the paper you will only freeze to death if you live near a glacier at an altitude greather than 4000m above sea level. It is a very localised effect.
The Holmes quote: One of the worst logic errors in literature. And that’s saying something.
Formally, it’s a form of the Fallacy of the Excluded Middle, because it excludes the possibility that something has been missed.
Incidentally, Conan Doyle was inconsistent here. Sometimes Sherlock made this statement, and sometimes he consulted Mycroft.
“So while the proposed explanation is “scientifically plausible””
NO… it is not ! It is a FAKE as any other AGW meme.
Made-to-order explanations are NOT science.
Human caused global warming has never been a factor…
Himalayas are NOT an expanding urban region.
Plausible is not possible or probable.
Plausible is only an hypothesis with minor or no supporting data and is not testible.
Thanks Sparta, you beat me to it. The scientific method starts with observation which leads to a plausible hypothesis. NOW let the “sciencing” begin, which is the part that the establishment left skips right over. Instead they move right to a declaration of consensus with control of they peer review process and then the media begins the town cryer bell ringing.
Who needs science when you have lockdown control of the propaganda, which is exactly were they want us, the great unwashed: Under the thumb of their lockdown control. They already tested the waters with COVID let the neighborhood watches begin. Send in the Brown Shirted Jackboots from the college campuses. Challenge the narrative and disappear. These are very frightening times.
Warming when and where, exactly? Because any warming is never a static thing that is exactly the same everywhere and at all times.
For instance, is it warming mostly in the tropics, the mid-latitudes, or the polar regions?
Is it warming up high (as altitude increases towards the stratosphere, temperatures essentially don’t vary any more, by altitude or by season or by time of day).
Does it make a difference where it is warming in terms of altitude or elevation? Such as, if the temperature increases from minus 30 deg C to minus 28 deg C, what difference exactly does that make to the climate and how, for instance, ice melts?
The simpleton’s version of “global warming” may be somewhat effective in swaying the ignorant, but it does not match reality.
It’s a CONCEPTUAL model. The burden is on them to verify and validate the model. You unfortunately have the whole concept of the scientific method reversed. You seem to think that just because a model gets published it’s predictions are necessarily true (if they support global warming) and it’s up to others to come up with an alternative explanation.
Quick follow-up. Models ONLY do what the modelers tell them to do. They found that global warming causes localized cooling because that’s what they wanted the model to find.
Models are mathematical opinions, opinions are not data neither are they science.
As a factor, ok. Skepticism allows that. As the principle cause, not so. Skepticism applies in questioning that assertion.
“when you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains no matter how improbable must be the truth”
Funny. I never learned it that way, although it apparently is a correct quote.
I always went with:
When you eliminate the obvious, whatever remains however unlikely is probably the answer.
If cooling rather than warming were observed in the Himalayas, would that invalidate the hypothesis?
I Britain, a placut the size of Oregon with a disproportionately large population, the utility services have found it almost impossible to match demand. In a an effort to update services and to make for a competitive market the utilities, and the power providers, were privatised. But these companies, especially in power, are little more that government tax collectors and climate change proselytisers, Quangos. Meanwhile prices for commodities have soared.
In recent times there has been problems with floods and illegal sewage disposal and the story has inevitably blamed Global Warming. With Thames Water (that services London) nearing bankruptcy the truth could not be elsewhere? These are specific engineering problems surely? Every flood and every illegal sewage discharge is an engineering failure, the lack of investment. Investors in these firms pay good dividends and rack-up their lending but their day job suffers with the outcome self evident. Climate has become a wonderful excuse for profiteering, inactivity.
In previous centuries Dutch engineers created huge waterway schemes to drain a large area of the east of England, thought necessary for agriculture land reclamation, servicing a tiny population. Apart from Victorian engineers creating a massive sewage scheme for London, disqualifying the River Thames from being an open sewer, the situation today is retrograde, neglected.Summer pending and the inevitable control on water use becomes a natural recourse to shouts of drought immanent, even after a wet winter. We are ina Civil Engineering crises and nature is but raising the problem’s profile. Caught in the jaws of the engineering ‘deniers’.
Something happens in the weather somewhere.
They plug it into a climate model – ie, they make the model give that result at that place.
The only driver of the model is, as Wilkis Eschenbach pointed out recently, the radiative forcing from man-made greenhouse gases (all natural factors are coded to add up to zero).
Therefore, the model tells them that the local feature that they have just forced in was caused by the radiative forcing, ie. by “climate change”.
There is no possible exception. None.
Willis.
What in the world is “reanalysis data”? Is that similar to model elephants wiggling their trunk?
Reanalysis is…. the combination of past observations with models to generate consistent time series of multiple climate variables.
Allegedly.
So then, calling it data by any stretch of the imagination is a misnomer.
So what these guys claim as illustrated in their graphic is that warm air at the top of the Himalayas causes the ice up high to melt, and that melt water then cools the air at the foot of the glaciers.
Well, that works great … except, uhhh, for the fact that the average elevation of the Himilaya mountain ranges is about 20,000 ft, and the average air temperature at 20,000 ft is minus 24.6 deg C/minus 12.8 deg F. Even in the mountain valleys, where presumably much of the mass of the ice in Himalayan glaciers, the elevation is still about 15,000 ft MSL, where the average air temperature is still below freezing (minus 5.6 deg C/22 deg F). The highest mountains in the Himilayas range from the mid-20,000s to Mt. Everest at 29,000 ft MSL.
They better go back to first grade where kids are taught that “below freezing” means ice is “not melting”.
Certainly mountain climbers and aircraft pilots and crew are very familiar with the standard lapse rate and what typical air temperatures are at high altitudes.
I think another misrepresentation is the ‘cooling’ via “stronger katabatic” winds, which in Colorado are warming. We get ~5°F per 1K feet of elevation drop.
You’re probably talking about the Foehn effect, if the prevailing wind is downslope, the compression of the air causes local warming and drying at the feet of mountains.
This effect is well-known for northerly winds to the south of the Alps in southeastern France (mistral winds) or northern Italy (tramontane), which bring very dry weather to the base of the mountains.
On the other hand, if a mountainous area is under an anticyclone (clear skies with very little wind), the sun warming the air in the valleys tends to produce an upslope wind (by buoyancy) in daylight hours, while at night, the colder air over the mountains sinks down the slopes toward the valleys.
Thanks, I was thinking katabatic and Foehn/Chinook winds were the same. The latter are from pressure differentials on each side of the mountains, while katabatic are strictly the cold air sinking at night and warm air rising during the day. We experience both in the Rockies. I didn’t know the katabatic effect had a name.
From the paper:
“During the warm season, the mean 2 m air temperature recorded on glaciers is above 0 °C from 9:00 to 13:00 (local time) at Changrion (Fig. 3a), a condition favourable for the exchanging of sensible heat, which in turn allows the development of katabatic winds. As a result, from the early morning (9:00) the katabatic winds flow downward reaching the maximum speed during the first hours of the afternoon and decreasing in the evening (Fig. 3b), when the upward winds prevail19.”
But that could only take place at the toes of the glaciers, not up high where the snowfall is highest and the mass of the glaciers is largest by far. And the melting could only release actual liquid water that could flow out from the toe of the glacier on the open front of the glacier, and in crevasses that extend all the way down to ground level. Otherwise, any meltwater that might result for a few hours per day will just refreeze on the surface and not flow out of the glacier.
There is also the matter of specific heat content of water vs. air. The specific heat content is the amount of thermal energy (kcal or BTU) required to cause a specific substance to change its temperature by one unit (such as deg C or deg F). Whatever heat transfer that occurs due to air immediately adjacent to an ice sheet, even if that air warms above freezing for just a few hours per day (and likely only just barely above freezing), the thermal content of the air would have to be four times that of water to cause the same temperature change.
So it is not warmer air that even melts the ice – rather it is the incident solar energy, which is independent of air temperature, that is most likely to cause melting of the ice surface. Most of that meltwater, of course, goes nowhere but seeps into the ice sheet and almost immediately refreezes, and does not run off from the toe of the glacier.
Our katabatic winds in the Western slope of the Rockies Are uphill from midmorning until late afternoon, downhill thereafter.
I keep getting emails weekly from Nature trying to get me to renew my subscription. I’m tempted to waste time telling them why I dropped it 5-10 years ago (some idiotic editorial favoring US gun control, which isn’t even a scientific problem, let alone any of their business) and why I won’t renew (they’re just AGW shills now) but it’s not worth 30 seconds of my time and they wouldn’t care. Every time I see another article like this from them, it reinforces my lack of interest.
Same here
Ditto Scientific American and New Scientist. Woke activism masquerading as science journalism.
Good post highlighting the potential for circular reasoning related to the “framing” of a topic of investigation.
“The Broader Implications of Misframed Research”
I nominate the “forcing + feedback” framing of the investigation of the climate system response to incremental non-condensing GHGs as a fundamental misconception. The gradual change in atmospheric composition does not add energy to the land+ocean+atmosphere system. To describe the expected effect as a perturbing forcing, to which a feedback response is produced, when NO ENERGY is being added to the system, leads inevitably to a range of modeling results, all the way from the lukewarmer’s benign warming to the catastrophist’s runaway heating/tipping point/hothouse.
The investigation should instead be re-framed as an analysis of what happens to the atmosphere as the compressible working fluid of its own dynamic heat engine circulations, as its infrared absorbing and emitting power in clear air are tweaked, fully recognizing the presence of clouds.
Such a re-framing might reveal that a mountain has been made from a molehill, all because of the original misframed research.
https://youtu.be/hDurP-4gVrY [Please read the entire text in the description to get the point.]
.
Wow, looks like global boiling will lead to another snowball Earth!
With advanced education you know more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing, finally arriving at things like global warming causes global cooling and men can be women.
I suggest that today most advanced education isn’t that at all- it’s all superficial. It used to be that you studied the serious thinkers, often in Latin or Greek or many in the UK. It was very demanding. Of course a math, physics or chem major will have to work extremely hard but the rest- not much. I also have respect for most engineers- one of the few professions that you get tested every day. Either your work works or it doesn’t and you’re out of a job, unless its a government job of course.
Totally agree. I should have “advanced education” in scare quotes.
That’s why “global warming” was changed to “climate change.” The latter suits all circumstances.
check out Tony Heller’s latest video
Heat is required to melt ice, which tends to cool the surrounding air. Any kid who made snowballs without gloves can tell you this.
This fact is frequently overlooked by those who think that a few degrees of warming in the Arctic will melt the ice sheet in Greenland. It would probably take thousands of years, if it ever occurred.
Correction: Energy is required to melt ice.
The energy can be kinetic (aka heat) or blowing dry air (sublimation).
Direct electromagnetic energy can also melt ice.
When ice melts, it goes through a phase change and inputs heat energy from the surroundings, usually air but a bit from other ice. This cools the air and the ice interface.
Cooler air usually flows to lower altitudes (ignoring fluid dynamics in that statement).
The question that was not addressed is what caused the ice at sub-zero temperatures at 20K feet altitude to melt into liquid. Not sublimation, which is ice to water vapor.
The question is, the surface of the ice at the top of the mountain, which does melt and refreeze even at that altitude, get sufficient energy to create liquid water in sufficient quantities to flow without freezing again.
No feminist glaciology?
So this, then, is a rehash of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth that showed a mountain with no snow as proof of global warming.
Sublimation be damned. Analysis of alternatives be damned. We know the answer and if you disagree, we will charge you, try you, find you guilty and incarcerate you.
Spanish Inquisition 101.
Thanks for this kind of opportunities to express our opinions, there are very few places like this.
One fundamental issue is fundaments 😀. I spent 15 years as a university student to achieve my degrees, 14 as a college professor, and now 5 years as an industrial scientist. My experience as a scientist inside academics is that out of the total number of faculty researchers, only a low percentage are involved in high quality investigations. As mentioned here, I’ve been a witness of faculty running research in very superficial issues, several always looking forward for the opportunity of getting grants based on the mentioning of cutting edge technology such as nano particles or hot topics such as climate change. I personally ran away from the hands of a PhD mentor who was obsessed with investigations using plants to clean up sites contaminated with heavy metals. The issue was a hot topic at the beginning of the 90’s when I was working on my Masters degree, but the ease of the research and superficiality lost interest a few years later. This professor was able to convince many to grant funds to his students based on the “importance of phytoremediation”. Using the sensation of the topic, he graduated several students on investigations changing plant names and heavy metal cocktails to study the plants ability to absorb metals. They published over a hundred papers by just changing plants and metals, but if you read 5 of them, you can
get the core of the issue, no need to read the rest. This was fortunately for me the reason to exit the group, I was able to even jump from chemistry to a biological investigation for my PhD on a topic without the “easy to do” stigma. Unfortunately I see that the climate change issue falls under this “easy thing to do” as long as you blame the cause of what you perceive as changes caused by temperature and CO2. It’s worthy to comment here that nature involves a very complex thermodynamics, where the issue of temperature and gas concentration requires other variables such as pressure and volume.
I have commented here before that the fundaments of physical chemistry do not go in accordance to the claims. For once, quantum science is clear that CO2 absorbs IR light to alter molecular vibrations, not to pass heat to the environment. A fundamental confusion I see is in the interpretation of the usage of IR light into kinetic energy versus thermal. There’s a lot of unclear issues about the so-called “greenhouse effect”: as far as I know, they assume that CO2 absorbs IR light to retain heat and warm up the environment; however, no one has proven that this is the real natural mechanism. The effect might as well work the same even when considering that the molecules just vibrate faster, perhaps making themselves more available for carbon sequestration by plants, conducting further processes such as cellular respiration, photosynthesis and the production of molecular oxygen O2 for us to breathe. The second issue is that nature has been going through cycles of up and down in temperature, dry versus wet by itself without any human intervention and no one has proven experimentally that the apparent increase in a few degrees of temperature is outside the normal cycles. The third is that although the increase of CO2 by human industrialization, it is still at a 0.04% of the total; there’s no change in atmospheric CO2, forget about causing the extremes that they profess. Somehow they have left out of the conversation the issues of biological adaptation, mutations and survival of the fittest.
I can see through the articles posted here that much of the climate change investigations go around pushing the idea, but almost zero research is focused on clarifying these kind of fundaments like the real mechanism of the green house effect. Under the assumption that they are right, they promote a unproven mechanisms that leads to wrongful methods of investigations. This in turn explains how easy it is to obtain attention and funds for a very superficial scientific investigation.
Unlike us in the industry, who need to perform all of our scientific and engineering practices of production, quality control and quality assurance under standards of investigations, such as FDA codes of regulations, ISO’s, the USP, SOP’s and CGMP, scientists like me cannot believe that the government is pushing an issue based on low quality research, when at the same time, they ask us to follow high quality investigations to determine the validity of our industrial processes.
It is double standard and unfair for the public to spend millions on the industry to show the government layers of assurance when they in return do not offer the same level of response for they climate change falsity. As I always outline: a science that refuses to revise itself, corroborate, validate, is automatically pseudoscience:
false!
Dr.JBVigo
The atmospheric greenhouse effect was discovered by Tyndall and Foote in the 19th century and quantified by Arrhenius in 1896. It’s well established science, and demonstrated frequently in high school lab experiments.
And “Dr.” JBVigo can’t understand the basic physics behind it? Maybe he should take up another profession.
That they coined the expression is true, but what they observed was warming air in a glass enclosure, aka a hot house model.
The atmosphere has no glass ceiling to keep warm air from dispersing and to allow temperatures to rise higher than the air outside a centimeter thickness of glass.
I like Foote, Tyndall, and Arrhenius. They accomplished amazing things with very primitive technology. There were precise, their experiments were documented in detail allowing anyone to repeat to prove or disprove their results, and they did these experiments not to prove something, but to discover.
By the way, Foote’s great accomplishment was identifying that heat energy and light energy were different. She did not test IR. She tested light through glass to see what effects it would have on various gasses.
Tyndall did not test IR. He tested heat. His energy source was steam. His detector was a thermo-electric pile. His experiments did comparative measurements of Cv for different gasses and gas mixtures. He studied many more that just air, water, and CO2.
The technology for measuring IR was not available in that time frame.
Arrhenius did a box with a glass lid experiment. A greenhouse.
Foote and Tyndall did both 100% CO2 and compared to air “saturated” with water vapor and got the same results from both. So 100% CO2 is roughly the same as 1% to 5% H2O for thermal rise in a closed volume..
One can definitely demonstrate a greenhouse effect, but one needs a greenhouse or equivalent to do so.
I have no clue what they are teaching in school these days, but demonstrating a temperature rise in a closed volume by injecting energy is not proving a greenhouse effect. It is demonstrating that EM passing through glass warms the glass that warms the air and essentially it is a demonstration of Cv.
Very nice Charles.