By Art Horn, Meteorologist
On October 21st the Associated Press came out with a story entitled ”Sea Ice Melting as Arctic Temperatures Rise.”
The gulp in my throat I felt after reading this ominous analysis was brought on by the implication that it’s all over for the Arctic. The fat lady is belting out an apocalyptic version of “Hot Town Summer in the City.” The ice will be gone before you can say Igloo! Polar bears will be stalking large refrigerated fishing vessels, eating the crew and taking over the ship in a last ditch effort to stay cool. The impression one gets after reading the story is that something new is happening in the Arctic.
If you live in the real world you know that this story is another attempt to keep the global warming momentum alive. It’s a bit like trying to salvage any sitting Democrats congressional seat. There’s been no global warming in a decade. The climate change fire is running out of fuel. Stories like this one are equivalent to tossing another twig on the dying embers.
The climate of this planet is always doing something, either warming or cooling. This change happens on time scales that make it difficult for humans to appreciate due to our brief 70 to 100 year visit here. The earth has been warming unevenly for about 300 years. You’re telling me that “global warming” is old news? The short answer is yes. Three hundred years ago we were at the bottom of the “Little Ice Age”. This little ice age was a 450 to 500 year cold spell that in part prompted people to get out of frozen Europe and find something better. Columbus went south not north! If one examines temperature data derived from oxygen isotopes in ice cores drilled in places like Greenland, you find that today’s temperature is, get ready for this, unremarkable! In fact the data shows us that today’s temperature is actually significantly cooler than most of the last 10,000 years (fig. 1). We live in the interglacial, the warm time between the ice ages. The Greenland ice core data also show a rather disturbing temperature trend. It’s been getting colder for 3,000 years. There have been 17 ice ages in the last two million years of the earth’s history. Eventually history will repeat itself and another ice with grip the planet.
The story from the AP seems to indicate that the warming of the Arctic is unprecedented and that global warming (caused by our way of building civilization) is the root evil causing it. The reality check in the Arctic is that it’s all happened before. The simple truth is that the sun warms the earth unevenly. The poles get the least amount of sunlight annually and the equatorial regions get the most. This makes it hot in the tropics and cold at the poles. In some years the forces of nature get a little out of balance and the areas of cold and warm are displaced. This is what happened this year and it is not unusual.
The winter of 1978 was a good example of this. Warmer air aloft was displaced into the Arctic (fig. 2). This warmer air piled up on top of the colder air below and produced large areas of higher atmospheric pressure. These massive, heavy “blocks” in the atmosphere re-arranged the global temperature patterns, pushing colder air farther south in some regions. This resulted in a very cold and severe winter in the middle latitudes that year. Record breaking blizzards shut down the Midwest and east coast of the United States. But nobody was talking about global warming back then, they were worried about the coming of the next ice age! Earth’s temperature had been falling for more than three decades. All the stories you read about global warming today were about global cooling then, go figure!
Another example of Arctic warming producing cold mid-latitude winters was 1936. Once again warmer air aloft pushed the cold air southward resulting in bitterly cold weather across almost all of North America and a large portion of Asia (fig. 3). Niagara Falls in Western New York state froze solid that winter.
The bitter winter of 1917 came at a very bad time for soldiers fighting in the First World War in Europe. A massive, warm blocking high pressure area over northern Canada and Greenland forced arctic air southward into all of Europe and most of Asia (fig. 4).
The winter of 2010 was another example of this same weather pattern. A large blocking high pressure area over the Arctic diverting colder air farther south, not new and not unusual (fig. 5). The AP story talks about the record breaking snows in the Middle Atlantic States. All that snow was from three slow moving storms. In most winters these would have been farther north where people are more accustomed to them. Last winter the blocking Arctic high pressure pushed the cold air southward and with it the paths of the winter storms.
As they say records were made to be broken. Our historical temperature and snowfall record are but a tiny blip in the context of the last 10,000 years. When it comes to nature and weather records expect the unexpected.
See PDF here.
ICECAP NOTE: Note some of the apparent warming in recent years is due to the many issues in the global data bases that exaggerate recent warmth (PDF). Also this like most all the stories on the arctic don’t have any sense of history. A cyclical pattern of temperatures and ice extent has been observed for centuries in the arctic as shown here by Leonid Klashtorin (PDF). See also this P Gosselin Not Trick Zone post Rahmstorf/Schellnhuber Confirm No Anthropogenic Climate Change!
by Geraldo Luis Lino
The Anthropogenic Global Warming Hypothesis (AGWH, for short) is simple, direct and appealing; the only problem is that it flunks the scientific method test, and I challenge any of its proponents - whether they are scientists or laymen - to prove otherwise.
In the most simple terms, the scientific method comprises basically: 1) the formulation of a hypothesis; and 2) the confirmation of the hypothesis by means of data observed in the real world. If the observed data do not fit the hypothesis, it must be reformulated or, eventually, abandoned. However, even when it is confirmed by a certain data set it is not uncommon that new ones fail to match it, resulting in the need of formulating a new hypothesis to account for them.
This is how science advances - and also the reason why scientists must remain permanently “skeptical” concerning the prevailing body of knowledge (so, every scientist worth of their salt is a skeptical, not only those who criticize the AGWH, as the “warmists” seem to think).
With that in mind, let’s examine the AGWH:
1) The hypothesis:
Mankind would be affecting (dangerously) the climate dynamics with its carbon emissions - specially CO2 - since the 18th century Industrial Revolution.
2) The needed proof:
In order to substantiate the AGWH, there would have to be some perceivable variations in the evolution patterns of climatic parameters, such as the temperature, or climate-influenced ones like the sea level, as compared to their behavior before the Industrial Revolution. That in such a way that the human influence after the 18th century could be clearly discerned. Such interference would reveal itself by means of unprecedented temperatures and sea levels and a positive acceleration of their variation rates, as compared to their patterns in the historical and geological past. These would be unquestionable “fingerprints”, as the “warmists” like to say.
3) The evidences:
According to the 2007 IPCC report (AR4), the global average atmospheric temperatures have risen 0.8C and the global average sea levels have risen 0.2 m (about 8 inches) since the late 19th century. It turns out that during the Holocene, the 12,000 year-old geological epoch in which Civilization has been existing, there have been several periods with temperatures and sea levels higher than the present ones. For instance, in the Middle Holocene, around 5,000-6,000 years ago, the sea levels were up to 3 meters higher and the average atmospheric temperatures were 2-4C higher than the current ones.
Also, the so called Medieval Warming Period occurred between the 10th and 13th centuries A.D., when temperatures were 1-2C higher than the current ones.
As to the variation rate of those indicators, the temperature rise since 1870 means an average rate of less than 0.6C per century. Well, just before the beginning of the Holocene 12,900 years ago, when the Earth was recovering from the last Ice Age, the temperatures fell again suddenly and a very cold period (called the Younger Dryas) ensued and lasted for some 1,300 years before the temperatures rose again to reach the levels prevailing during the Holocene. In both transitions from warming to cooling and from cooling to warming conditions, the temperatures fell and rose between 6-8C in just a few decades, a rate one full order of magnitude faster than the one of the latest 140 years (it clearly indicates that the Earth can go without the contribution of the human carbon emissions in order to produce such extreme climatic oscillations).
The same can be observed in the sea level, which rose 130 meters since the peak of the last glaciation 22,000 years ago. Most of this elevation occurred between 18,000 and 6,000 years ago, when there was a rise of 120 meters - an average rate of one meter per century, seven times faster than the recent rising rate and fast enough to make quite an impression on all the ancient peoples who inhabited the continental shores (it is not a coincidence that many of them had legends about a world deluge).
All this can be inferred from geological, geomorphologic, glaciological, oceanographic, biological, archeological and historical evidences from all continents (the excellent www.co2science.org website provides an easy access to hundreds of such studies).
Hence, the big question: if in the Middle Holocene, when dung and firewood were the only fuels used by Mankind and the world population was at least two orders of magnitude smaller than today’s, there were temperatures and sea levels considerably higher than the present ones; if the atmospheric warming at the end of the Younger Dryas 11,600 years ago and the sea level rise between 18,000 and 6,000 years ago were much faster than the observed since the 19th century; so, where are the evidences that would allow us to point to the “human fingerprint” in the small variations of the latest 140 years, against the background of the much wider and faster natural oscillations of the historical and geological past?
The answer is: there aren’t any (for evidences I mean, obviously, hard facts observed in the physical world, not mathematical concoctions extracted from the climate models).
4) Corollary:
The AGWH has no support in the real world evidences. Hence, the political agenda of changing the entire energy basis of the world economy, which is 80%-plus dependent on fossil fuels, is misguided, to say the least, and misanthropic at the worst. So, its real motivations must be looked for in quarters other than real science.
Geraldo Luis Lino is a Brazilian geologist and author of the book “The Global Warming Fraud: How a Natural Phenomenon was Converted into a False World Emergency” (published in 2009 in Portuguese, with over 5,000 copies sold so far, and soon to be published in Spanish in Mexico)
See post here.
See comments on Global Warming: Facts and Factoids here
Guest Post by Steven Mosher, WUWT
Not the funniest Monty Python sketch, but for me it illustrates what the climate wars have finally come down to: blackmail. The examples range from the benign - pressuring journalists not listen to skeptics - to the professional - pressuring colleagues to avoid working with skeptics, to the petty - Ammann refusing to do a paper with McIntyre because it would be bad for his career - to the bizarre, blowing up people who refuse to sign a pledge to cut their carbon emissions.
Aptly titled, “no pressure”, this video depicts the common fantasy people have about those with whom they disagree. “Why can’t we just blow them up? “ When reasoned words don’t work, there is an ineluctable progression through the following stages - naming calling, caricature, demonizing, dehumanizing, through fantasy attacks which culminate in action. Doing something about it. Showing them you mean business.
Wegman is the perfect target. Perfect because he is not central to the skeptical position. Perfect because he’s just doing a job. Perfect because it will send a message. Shooting the messenger always does.
And the message it sends is that they will come after you with every sort of pressure if you refuse to comply. To be sure there are weak forms of pressure from the skeptic side: the recent legal action taken against Mann is a useful example. For the most part, however, the skeptics have no power, and so they are left using the meager legal tools they have: the FOIA and the subpoena.
Skeptics cannot impanel committees to whitewash and they cannot go on witchhunts. This is most clear in the case of the NCDC misappropriating the work of Anthony Watts. As Watts details here when his work was misappropriated he really had no recourse except to write a strong letter. To their credit NCDC remedied the matter by fixing the attribution, something Wegman could do by climate science corollary.
What if Watts, however, had taken legal action against NCDC and had offered to withdraw that action if the NCDC retracted its work. Blackmailing the science because of a mistake made in the preparation of a document. What would be next, asking that papers be withdrawn because of grammatical infelicities, or typos?
And so Bradley now walks in Anthony’s shoes. How well does he fit them? Did he write to Wegman and ask for proper attribution? Or did he follow in the 10:10 path and try to blow Wegman up ?
In a comment at CA Donald Rapp tells us
“The issue is not whether Wegman committed plagiarism as a technicality, but rather, who cares? Obviously, Wegman had nothing whatever to gain from using words written by Bradley in reviewing Bradley’s work. Lost in all this is the question of whether Wegman was right - and I believe that he was. If Wegman was right, then the various hockey sticks prepared by Mann, Bradley and Hughes, Esper Cook and Schweingruber, Mann and Jones, and Mann et al. are all bogus. While dozens of people continue to file their comments on whether it was plagiarism or it was not, that is akin to fiddling while Rome burns. Meanwhile, the hockey stick continues to spread through our schools and textbooks like a plague, while Bradley desperately tries to protect his turf from the truth by discrediting Wegman personally. Proof of this is that Bradley has offered to stop his prosecution (persecution?) of Wegman if Wegman will remove his report from the Congressional Register. It is like a burning of the books. Farenheit 451 all over again.”
Steve McIntyre quotes from Bradley’s mail.
“I filed a complaint with George Mason University (where Wegman is a Professor) & they have set up a committee to investigate my complaint. I[A] recent letter from their Vice-Chancellor indicates that they expect the committee to report their findings by the end of September.
That’s the long & short of it. I have told the University that I am prepared to drop this matter if Wegman makes a request to have his report withdrawn from the Congressional Record. No response on that.
Thanks
Ray [Bradley]”
Maybe Bradley had a different game show in mind.
Jim - “I’m not a criminal lawyer” Edwards frames the issue nicely
“That would be amazing because, if so, it may be evidence of an honest-to-goodness crime [not the imagined crimes AGW-debaters are constantly crowing about].
It looks like Bradley is threatening to ruin Wegman’s career unless he alters his prior Congressional testimony.
That smacks of post-facto extortion or witness tampering. [both potential felonies]
I don’t practice criminal law, but it does not look good to me.”
Or we can be charitable and suggest that Bradley is a Burro for even contemplating bringing this pressure to bear on Wegman. Finally, Wegman’s University is in Virginia, my sense is that Cuccinelli might take notice of it, were it brought to his attention.
Read more here.