In this week’s Science magazine, science writer Richard Kerr reports on some of the goings-on at this past December’s annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. While he didn’t cover our presentation at the meeting in which we described our efforts at creating a reconstruction of ice melt across Greenland dating back into the late 1700s (we found that the greatest period of ice melt occurred in the decades around the 1930s), Kerr did cover some other recent findings concerning the workings of Greenland’s cryosphere in his article titled “Galloping Glaciers of Greenland Have Reined Themselves In.”

Here is how Kerr starts things off: “Things were looking bad around southeast Greenland a few years ago. There, the streams of ice flowing from the great ice sheet into the sea had begun speeding up in the late 1990s. Then, two of the biggest Greenland outlet glaciers really took off, and losses from the ice to the sea eventually doubled. Some climatologists speculated that global warming might have pushed Greenland past a tipping point into a scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise in sea level.

And some non-climatologists speculated disaster from rapidly rising seas as well. During his An Inconvenient Truth tour, Gore was fond of spinning the following tale:"[E]arlier this year [2006], yet another team of scientists reported that the previous twelve months saw 32 glacial earthquakes on Greenland between 4.6 and 5.1 on the Richter scale - a disturbing sign that a massive destabilization may now be underway deep within the second largest accumulation of ice on the planet, enough ice to raise sea level 20 feet worldwide if it broke up and slipped into the sea. Each passing day brings yet more evidence that we are now facing a planetary emergency - a climate crisis that demands immediate action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in order to turn down the earth’s thermostat and avert catastrophe.”

Oh how things have changed in the past 2 years. Gore’s “massive destabilization” mechanism for which the earthquakes were a supposed bellwether (meltwater lubrication of the flow channel) has been shown to be ineffective at producing long-term changes in glacier flow rate (e.g. (Joughin et al., 2008; van de Wal et al., 2008). And for still another, the recent speed-up of Greenland’s glaciers has even more recently slowed down.

Here is how Kerr describes the situation: “So much for Greenland ice’s Armageddon. “It has come to an end,” glaciologist Tavi Murray of Swansea University in the United Kingdom said during a session at the meeting. “There seems to have been a synchronous switch-off” of the speed-up, she said. Nearly everywhere around southeast Greenland, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000.

All told, it is looking more like the IPCC’s estimates of a few inches of sea level rise from Greenland during the 21st century aren’t going to be that far off- despite loud protestations to the contrary from high profile alarm pullers.

Maybe Gore will go back and remove the 12 pages worth of picture and maps from his book showing what high profile places of the world will look like with a 20-foot sea level rise ("The site of the World Trade Center Memorial would be underwater"). But then again, probably not - after all the point is not to be truthful in the sense of reflecting a likely possibility, but to scare you into a particular course of action. Read full report here.

The climate of Alaska has changed considerably over the past 50-plus years. However, human emissions of greenhouse gases are not the primary reason. Instead, the timing of the swings of a periodic, natural cycle - the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) - has made a strong imprint on the observed climate of Alaska since the mid-20th century. Despite its established existence and influence, this natural cycle is often overlooked or ignored in zealous attempts to paint the current climate of Alaska as being one primarily molded by the emissions from anthropogenic industrial activities. In truth, the climate of Alaska and the ecosystems influenced by it have been subject to the cycles of the PDO and other natural variations since the end of the last ice age (some 12,000 years ago) and likely for eons prior.

See larger image here from this paper.

It is primarily these natural cycles that are currently shaping Alaska’s long-term climate and weather fluctuations. Local and regional processes are the most important determinants of the climate experienced by local and regional ecosystems, including human populations. Global-scale influences are much harder to detect and their influence on regional scale changes is uncertain. In fact, global climate models which project changes in future climate are unable to reliably model local and regional changes - the most important ones in our daily lives.

Therefore, efforts to control global processes through local changes are largely useless when it comes to the climate. For instance, the greenhouse gases emitted by human activities each year in the state of Alaska amounts to less than 0.2 percent of the global total human greenhouse gas emissions. Industrial growth in China adds an additional Alaska’s worth of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each and every month (over and above its baseline emissions). This leads to the inescapable conclusion that even a complete cessation of all carbon dioxide emissions originating from Alaska would be subsumed by global greenhouse gas emissions increases in less than three week’s time. What’s more, carbon dioxide emissions reductions in Alaska would produce no detectable or scientifically meaningful impact on local, regional, or global climate. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the economic consequences of greenhouse gas emissions’ legislation - they have been recently estimated to be large, and negative, for the citizens of Alaska. Read full analysis here.

See Icecap paper that agrees with this analysis of the controlling role of the PDO in Alaska climate here.

The intimidation tactics and belittling words of those in global warming alarmism are only a means to cloak the weaknesses of their arguments, especially now that the scientific and economic evidence has found a broader, more receptive audience—check the latest poll results if you don’t believe me.

Put succinctly, their efforts to silence opposing viewpoints to their dogma have only proven that they are a bunch of chicken-twits. Now that doubting Dorothy has doused Elmira Gulch’s other ego with a cocktail of moderating temperatures and an economy in distress, the cries that their forecasts are “melting, melting, aagghhhh” approach a shrill peak.

What has happened in Arkansas the last few weeks is illustrative. The story starts, as is the case in so many states, with Gov. Mike Beebe’s (video link) creation of the Governor’s Commission on Global Warming. In most other states where they’ve been developed, these panels have been fashioned purely by executive fiat. Arkansas’s GCGW was authorized also by a law (PDF) to study potential impacts of global warming and ways to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions (the presumed evil behind global temperature uptick). But the GCGW was also given the mandate to “study the scientific data, literature, and research on global warming to determine whether global warming is an immediate threat to the citizens in the State of Arkansas….”

Turns out this area of “study” was only allowed to go so far. As is the standard when the Center for Climate Strategies is granted management control of a state’s climate commission (approaching two dozen so far), the prerequisite for CCS to take the job is that no debate of the climate science is allowed. Like the intolerant Al Gore, CCS cannot suffer dissent, flat-earthers, or moonwalk-deniers.

As 2008 closed, syndicated columnist David Sanders of roughly two dozen Arkansas newspapers trained his critical eye upon the sham process that was the GCGW. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Yes, six (6) times. As Dr. Ford sounded warnings about the GCGW with legislators, Sanders’s reports drew out others on the commission with similar gripes.

“The commission members themselves weren’t as big of participants as was CCS, quite frankly,” said Gary Voigt, president of the Electric Cooperatives of Arkansas. “Commission members didn’t have the input; CCS’s consultants had most of the input. There was a structure and a goal.” “As a commissioner,” said Kevin Inboden of Jonesboro’s city and water utility, “when I hear that the commission recommended this or that, it doesn’t tell the whole story. There was a lot of dissension and opposition.”

The piece de resistance of the resistance came in a legislative hearing held last week in Little Rock, in which famed atmospheric scientist skeptic Roy Spencer, “Red Hot Lies” author Chris Horner, and two myth-busters from the Science and Public Policy Institute delivered multiple puncture wounds to global warming alarmism. As a local left-wing blog threw apoplectic fits, a Democratic Senate committee chairman tried to shut the meeting down. But the pressure brought by Sanders, the scheduled skeptics, and the bold dissenters on GCGW was too much, and the hearing was held.

The Arkansas scenario was a microcosm of the alarmists’ flailing on the issue globally. The more they try to silence their opposition, and portray them as unworthy of contemplation while positing their own outrageous doomsday scenarios, the further they push themselves to the fringe in public perception. That so many who hear these calamity predictions are freezing their keisters this winter doesn’t help the warming cause.

Before long the alarmists who have so desperately and cowardly avoided debates will be begging for them, so they can recover their evaporated credibility. Read full account here.

Gavin’s statement, with respect to our NRC committee, that “It remains a puzzle to me why you thought the proposed report would be something related to the IPCC report at all” is quite astonishing. Gavin Schmidt has responded to the Climate Science request for further information on the Q&A he completed on climate modeling.  Quite frankly, I am very disappointed by his lack of professional courtesy. He also clearly wants to avoid answering the scientific questions posed in response to his Q&A. He has also decided to misrepresent the NRC meeting. His comment is below.

[Gavin Schmidt Response [see Comment #148]:The balance between justifiable criticism and unjustifiable comments is a fine line (and assessing it is a full time job). Given this is only a part time gig, there will be times when judgment calls go different ways at different times. On balance, I’m going to allow Bloom’s comments to stand (along with your critique) because he alludes to a valid point - not that behaviour or attitude determines the correctness of ones argument (it doesn’t), but that the way one behaves towards colleagues is a big determinant of how much time people will devote to addressing your concerns. Roger’s post on the NRC meeting was very odd, full of unverifiable and untrue suppositions of motives of the people there, and which did not reflect the substantive conversations that actually took place there (which concerned solar impacts on climate, not evaluating the IPCC). It is valid to point this out, as it is valid to note that people need to choose who to interact with (given the limited time everyone has). Respect is very much a two way street. - gavin]

I am only going to respond to the one substantive issue that Gavin raises; he writes: “The NRC meeting I attended was a discussion of whether a new report on solar-climate interactions would be helpful for the NRC to do. Most presentations focussed very specifically on solar-climate links. It remains a puzzle to me why you thought the proposed report would be something related to the IPCC report at all.”

To refute Gavin’s claim, I cut and paste below from the strawman document that was circulated prior to the meeting and which we discussed at the NRC meeting; it reads [ the strawman is reproduced in its entirety in Protecting The IPCC Turf - There Are No Independent Climate Assessments Of The IPCC WG1 Report Funded And Sanctioned By The NSF, NASA Or The NRC.]

“In order to understand the solar influence on climate and the atmosphere, it is essential to also understand the contributions of volcanic aerosols, as well as anthropogenic greenhouse gases and tropospheric aerosols, and other human influences such as land use changes, all of which contribute to the observed climate. Furthermore, because there is growing evidence that responses of the climate system to these various influences likely engages and modifies existing circulation patterns, it is necessary to understand pervasive climate processes (e.g., ENSO, NAO, QBO) and centers of action, and their responses to radiative forcings.

Also in need of clarification is the current wide disparity regarding how to achieve and quantify attribution. IPCC studies have primarily utilized simulations by general circulation models, which thus require that the models be sufficiently understood and validated to engender confidence that simulated global and regional fingerprints are realistic. An array of results using various statistical analyses of observations suggests that deficiencies of the climate models may compromise their ability to simulate responses to small radiative forcings, such as by solar variability (Stott et al.; Camp and Tung).”

The study under consideration would augment and advance two recent NRC reports on 1) Radiative forcing and 2) Responses, by assessing how the extended complexities of the climate system likely precludes such a separation of forcings and responses, especially in the case of solar variability.

I have tried repeatedly to constructively interact with Real Climate and Gavin Schmidt, in particular, but my interactions with him at the NRC meeting and through his blog comments clearly demonstrate that he is not interested in scientific discourse. He only supports discussing viewpoints that agree with his, and both undertakes himself, and supports ad hominem attacks by others, on those who differ with him in their scientific perspective. Read full post here.

Over the past few years, similar signs of colder than usual weather have been recorded all over the world, causing many people to question the still fashionable, but now long outdated, global warming alarmism. Yet individual weather events or spells, whether warmings or coolings, tell us nothing necessarily about true climate change. Nonetheless, by coincidence, growing recognition of a threat of climatic cooling is correct, because since the turn of the 21st century all real world, long-term climate indicators have turned downwards. Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?

There are two fundamentally different ways in which computers can be used to project climate. The first is used by the modelling groups that provide climate projections to the IPCC. These groups deploy general circulation models, which use complex partial differential equations to describe the ocean-atmosphere climate system mathematically. When fed with appropriate initial data, these models can calculate possible future climate states. The models presume (wrongly) that we have a complete understanding of the climate system. GCMs are subject to the well-known computer phenomenon of GIGO, which translates as “garbage in, God’s-truth out”.

Alternative computer projections of climate can be constructed using data on past climate change, by identifying mathematical (often rhythmic) patterns within them and projecting these patterns into the future. Such models are statistical and empirical, and make no presumptions about complete understanding; instead, they seek to recognise and project into the future the climate patterns that exist in real world data.

In 2001, Russian geologist Sergey Kotov used the mathematics of chaos to analyse the atmospheric temperature record of the past 4000 years from a Greenland ice core. Based on the pattern he recognised in the data, Kotov extrapolated cooling from 2000 to about 2030, followed by warming to the end of the century and 300 years of cooling thereafter.

In 2003, Russian scientists Klyashtorin and Lyubushin analysed the global surface thermometer temperature record from 1860 to 2000, and identified a recurring 60-year cycle. This probably relates to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which can be caricatured as a large scale El Nino/La Nina climatic oscillation. The late 20thcentury warming represents the most recent warm half-cycle of the PDO, and it projects forwards as cooling of one-tenth of a degree or more to 2030.

In 2004, US scientist Craig Loehle used simple periodic models to analyse climate records over the past 1000 years of sea-surface temperature from a Caribbean marine core and cave air temperature from a South African stalactite. Without using data for the 20th century, six of his seven models showed a warming trend similar to that in the instrumental record over the past 150 years; and projecting forward the best fit model foreshadows cooling of between 0.7 and 1 degree Celsius during the next 20-40 years. In 2007, the 60-year climate cycle was identified again, by Chinese scientists Lin Zhen-Shan and Sun Xian, who used a novel multi-variate analysis of the 1881-2002 temperature records for China. They showed that temperature variation in China leads parallel variation in global temperature by five-10 years, and has been falling since 2001. They conclude “we see clearly that global and northern hemisphere temperature will drop on century scale in the next 20 years”.

Most recently, Italian scientist Adriano Mazzarella demonstrated statistical links between solar magnetic activity, the length of the Earth day (LOD), and northern hemisphere wind and ocean temperature patterns. He too confirmed the existence of a 60-year climate cycle, and described various correlations (some negative). Based on these correlations, Mazzarella concludes that provided “the observed past correlation between LOD and sea-surface temperature continues in the future, the identified 60-year cycle provides a possible decline in sea-surface temperature starting from 2005, and the recent data seem to support such a result”.

Thus, using several fundamentally different mathematical techniques and many different data sets, seven scientists all forecast that climatic cooling will occur during the first decades of the 21st century. Temperature records confirm that cooling is under way, the length and intensity of which remains unknown. Read more here.