Showing posts with label arctic. Show all posts

Written by fatih al-farahat in ,


Climate Gate's Phillip Jones Admits no Global Warming Since 1995





Professor Phil Jones has bowed to the inevitable and accepted the reality that the data was showing him for fifteen years.  Fifteen years is a long time to go without creditable evidence of global warming.  This at least ends the spurious debate over the validity of supposed ongoing warming.

The climate warmed modestly over perhaps-s two decades leading up to 1995, at which point it peaked and settled back rather gently.  That is noteworthy, because known cooling events are quite abrupt.

I have been arguing recently that the evidence supports an increase in Atlantic heat distribution that we know little about.  We suffer from almost no data points but the two that I have are powerful.

The first is that the velocity of the Gulf Stream slowed sharply or something significant happened.  Again we have too little data.

The second is the discovery that during the Bronze Age, when temperatures were warm and constant for millennia or two in Northern Europe, the temperature of the Atlantic surface waters was an astonishing two degrees warmer!

Those are my two data points.  It tells me that the most likely forcer of warming in the northern hemisphere is changes in the Atlantic heat machine.  The evidence to date supports exactly that interpretation.

The Arctic sea ice continues to disintegrate and should be largely gone in 2012.  Even the scientists up there are now saying that this is true in a tone that suggests that they cannot believe their eyes.  The press has not quite woken up yet and more troublesome, they are still attached to the anthropogenic theory which is simply inadequate to now explain what is happening in the Arctic.



Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995

By JONATHAN PETRE

Last updated at 5:12 PM on 14th February 2010


Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
There has been no global warming since 1995
Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes

Data: Professor Phil Jones admitted his record keeping is 'not as good as it should be'

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers. 

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organizational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory. 

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by skeptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that skeptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analyzed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

     
Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.

Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.
Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.

That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realized that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.

Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organization in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.

But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not. 

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.
But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

Skeptics’ said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

Professor Jones criticized those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the skeptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

He said that until all the data was released, skeptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.



Written by fatih al-farahat in , ,


Bronze Age Climate Restoration



Those who followed my blog last year saw me work at tracking and isolating the various likely factors responsible for the temperature variation experienced throughout the ten thousand year Holocene. A big question mark was the existence of a two thousand year or more Bronze Age optimum that ended with the Hekla event in 1159BCE. We ran down a lot of factors and in fairness none appeared up to the task of explaining that particular optimum.



Since then, the climate has precipitously cooled and then warmed slowly over decades approaching the former optimum but actually coming nowhere close. The Rhine has been frozen several times throughout history and each time local climate took a long time to recover.



Yesterday’s item finally provides a creditable mechanism to operate this engine.



We have a layer of freshened water that is between one to two hundred meters thick lying on top of the underlying ocean waters. The temperature of these underlying waters is about two degrees over the freezing point of fresh water ice. That is a huge supply of available heat that if actually mixed with the overlying ice would eliminate it.



The upper layer is a degree or so below the freezing point. This means that a sustained warm spell and plenty of help from winds could remove this layer. If this layer is removed, it becomes decidedly harder for sea ice to form at all and its breakup the next summer will simply put it back to the way it was.



With surface temperatures a couple of degrees above freezing during the summer, the land will warm up and as happened during the Bronze Age, the permafrost will disappear.



It is pretty obvious that the Hekla event gave twenty years without crops and that means the gain of at least a couple of meters of sea ice each of those years. Over twenty years that likely added up to a beginning round of forty meters. The process likely continued at a slower pace for centuries longer until the sea ice approached a thickness of even a hundred meters or more.



What happens with sea ice is that as it ages the salt is slowly removed and this salt mixes into the surrounding ocean were normal circulation takes it eventually out into the Atlantic.



Thus the post Bronze Age cold spell produced a fresh water layer sitting directly on top of the polar sea. The lack of severe storms failed to produce any mixing since it was way too thick anyway.



The present situation and some fortuitous winds appear to have thinned this layer and have led to the present gross reduction in sea ice thickness. I do not think that the remaining sea ice is any more than part of a two year cycle of ice passing through the gyre and if not that yet, is about to be.



The big question now is whether the winds or normal seasonal warming, sufficient to remove this fresh water cap anytime soon. We are at the point in which it can do a lot of good. Yet I am aware we have been here before for decades even only to have it abruptly end.



And that mechanism is now a little clearer. For some reason we get a summer or two without any melting and suddenly we have a lot of ice. One Alaskan Volcano could do that. It really is that quick. If this mass of left over freshened water from Hekla could be eliminated though, we could return to Bronze Age conditions.

Written by fatih al-farahat in , ,


Conclusive Evidence on GW?


Nice story, but it appears that we must wait a while to hear the evidence. I hope that they can bring in fresh proxy work to back these claims up. Two thousand years is a long time and the quality and consistency matter. Past work was only convincing for five hundred years after a big fudge.

Nobody disputes the two hundred year rise in temperature, except that it is better explained as a rebound from the little ice age. This leaves us exactly nowhere when is comes to current interpretation.

We must wait for follow up to this little bit. This item may be the recent rehash of the Mann report that is just as flawed but has been going the rounds. (that was the report that floated the famous hockey stick) The recent effort got panned for the same reasons.

Anyway, the claim here is 2,000 years and I am waiting to see what that means. If valid, it would be important.
yes the earth's tilt is taking us away and this is a contributer to cooling, except the time frames involved are in millennia. Somehow this is no fit for decadal behavior.

Conclusive evidence of man made global warming found in Arctic geological record

September 6, 11:50 AM
Environmental News Examiner Niki Fears

http://www.examiner.com/x-18564-Environmental-News-Examiner~y2009m9d6-Conclusive-evidence-of-man-made-global-warming-found-in-Arctic-geological-record

While some have argued that global warming is merely a natural trend, new conclusive evidence gathered from the geological record in the Arctic prove that the increasing temperatures are not a natural cycle and are indeed caused by human activity, mainly, the burning of fossil fuels.

Darrell S. Kaufman , a leading climatologist from Northern Arizona University, lead a team of researchers who collected tree rings, glacier ice samples, 14 ice cores from various lakes around the Arctic and other evidence that showed a clear trend, that temperatures in the Arctic did not begin to rise until the Industrial Revolution hit which is when we began to empty tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The past ten years has shown a sharper increase almost three times higher than any other period in the past 2,000 years.

So what about the arguments that this warming is just a natural trend? Because the Earth has been slowly tilting the Arctic away from the sun, the region should actually be a degree or so cooler. That would be the natural trend, for the gradual cooling of the Arctic not a warming as some naysayers have suggested. But instead, the Arctic temperatures have increased by more than a couple of degrees.

This evidence is also strengthened by the shrinking ice and high melt rate found in Arctic regions as well. With such overwhelming evidence, many are starting to realize that Global Warming deniers are clearly not motivated by the facts but are motivated by a personal, and profitable, agenda that has nothing to do with looking out for the best interest of the public.

Many are hoping that this large amount of evidence will finally get people to realize that the naysayers have been bullying them into supporting big pollution causing businesses such as the oil and coal industry for their own agenda which is harming all of us. It is time to say no to the oil and coal agenda and work together for a healthy and sustainable future.

Written by fatih al-farahat in , ,


Lorne Gunter on 'Climate' Science

Lorne Gunter does us a service by describing the propaganda war been unethically waged on behalf of the global warming theory. I have commented a bit on this, but the amount of guff I must wade through for the occasional gem has become annoying. Some of it has fallen to the level of verbal fisticuffs.

It has been my interpretation that the climate in the Northern Hemisphere has been warmer over the past three decades, but not unusually so. It is as if we have shifted a half degree or so and have held it there while the sea ice melts away. This behavior is completely in accordance with the history of the Holocene and may represent a restoration of past climatic conditions.

In fact it is plausible to me that human activity has improved many parts of the Northern microclimate sufficient to have plausibly given us a slight edge. I would mostly though, assign those effects to our heat production throughout the winter. It may not seem significant, but it can prevent rivers from freezing over and perhaps do more. Of course agriculture allows the land to heat up much faster and for a lot of incoming energy to avoid absorption. The trees are gone. Add it all up and we may well be on the way to having a permanently warmer north until another volcano lets go.

In any event, it is clear that the Arctic sea ice is continuing to melt away and now on the edge of final collapse.

One other thought. There is a discrepancy between the north and the south. The south has appeared to be stable at least while the north has been warmer. Human heat production and cover modification is a plausible starting point in terms of explanation.

Lorne Gunter: 'Real' scientists flee from evidence that challenges climate claims
Posted: July 08, 2009, 9:15 AM by NP Editor

If you visit drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures-- the site of a scientist who, for 30 years, has used satellites to monitor global temperature -- you will see that as of the end of June, the Earth is no warmer than it was in 1979. Over the past three decades, the Earth's temperature has been above average some of the time and below average some of the time. Now it is right on the 30-year average.

Indeed, while 1998 was the warmest or second-warmest year on record, no year since has been as warm. And while there have been more warm years than cool ones in the past decade-and-a-half, the trend, since at least 2003, has been downward.

And -- this is the one I really like -- according to climatedepot.com,since Al Gore released his movie An Inconvenient Truth in October 2006, the Earth's temperature has lost 0.74F, almost exactly the amount the UN's climate panel claims was gained in the entire 20th century. The latter stat is apropos of nothing. As a correlation of Al Gore's bombast vs. worldwide temperature averages, it is pure fluke. But you can bet that if there had been a similar rise in the past 33 months, the headlines would be blaring that the end of the world was near. Yet such a precipitous drop-off elicits nothing more than a little blog chatter.

If there is a cause for the decline in temperatures over the past nearly three years, it is the inactivity of the sun, not the hyperactivity of the former U. S. vice-president and his apocalyptic theories. Our solar system has been at the end of one 11-year cycle of sun spots and solar flares and waiting for the long overdue commencement of another.

The current inter-cyclical period has seen an especially inactive sun. Last August was the first month in nearly a century in which there were no sun spots at all. Only just now do solar scientists think they are observing the beginning of the next round.

Still, if anything, the rhetoric of global warming and climate change has become even more frenzied since 2006, not less, even to the point where scientists skeptical of the warming theory are being gagged by the Obama administration and the UN.

At a time when lawmakers in the United States and Canada are considering new regulations on energy use, new taxes on its consumption and new controls on carbon dioxide emissions -- all of which could compound our economic woes -- they are hearing mostly just from one side of the debate.

Recall that during the Bush years, scientists and environmentalist often claimed that U. S. government research into climate change was being stifled by the Republican administration. Never mind that during the Bush years the United States spent nearly $2-billion a year on climate research, almost all of it on the environmentalists' side, or that the government scientist who most frequently claimed to be censored -- NASA's James Hansen -- gave media interviews and speeches, published academic papers or wrote newspaper articles more than 1,400 times during the Bush administration. There were always journalists ready to regurgitate the insistence of activist scientists that their vital warnings on warming we being squelched, whether they were or not.

In 2003, when a U. S. Environmental Protection Agency study claiming recent climate change was "likely mostly due to human activities," was edited by Bush administration officials to tone done such definitive language, activists, networks and newspapers screamed of a conspiracy by the White House and oil companies to suppress the truth.

But when evidence arose last week that the EPA had killed an internal report claiming that much had changed in the past year and that a reassessment of climate predictions was needed, there was barely a media peep. Instead, EPA climate analyst Alan Carlin was told his conclusions would have "a very negative impact on our office."

Similarly, UN scientists gathering in Copenhagen this week to discuss what must be done to save polar bears, have excluded Canadian researcher Mitch Taylor, perhaps the world's foremost polar bear expert, because (according to a memo to Dr. Taylor obtained by London's Daily Telegraph) of "the position you've taken on global warming." According the hosts of the conference, Dr. Taylor's views doubting man-made warming "are extremely unhelpful."

To quote a vocal critic of the Bush administration, "real scientists aren't afraid of opposing views."

National Post