New study on climate change

Richard - Arctic sea ice has recovered quite nicely, to around average, but you don't hear about that in the news, do you?

Nor do you hear that "the rapid decline in (arctic) winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds."

Nor do you hear that the Antarctic sea ice is actually at an all time high.

Nor do you hear about the "bipolar seesaw" that may very well explain much (or all) of the recent Arctic sea ice melt and also demonstrate why it is not unusual.

So while I agree CO2 is a greenhouse gas and humans have contributed to a rise in the level of that gas, I am not persuaded that each and every example of "warming" somewhere on the planet is connected to CO2 - particularly when the cooling areas are conveniently ignored by the global warming cheerleaders.

 

I'm OK with that. See the Copenhagen Consensus for projects to help the world.

 

I recommend that folk actually read the excellent articles referenced here. The "cherry-picked" and misleading summaries from the articles above does not convey at all what the articles are actually saying.

Yes, of course there is now a very thin cover of ice where it had disappeared in the Arctic at the minimum in September, since the temperature is freaking freezing up there! Duh. Simply having cover says nothing about the thickness. From the article referenced (conveniently left out by the poster above):

All of that thin ice, and very likely quite a bit more of the thicker ice that didn't disappear by this last September will be completely gone by next September.

Now for the claim that the loss was caused entirely by unusual winds.

It will always be the unusual weather event that first gives you the little peak above the steadily increasing trend to hit the threshold. In this case, the threshold for massive ice cover loss. The same unusual weather events in the past did not cause a 23% ice cover loss in one year (!), because the ice was much thicker. The gradual and continuous loss of ice volume results in the ice cover (area) being much more vulnerable to small weather events. Claiming that the small weather event was entirely responsible for the ice loss shows a complete lack of understanding of high frequency weather variations layed on top of steady low frequency climate trends.

From the very good but incorrectly summarized second article referenced above (ignored in the poster's conclusions):

Lastly, we don't know why there have been unusual warmer winds since 2000. "Unusual" means out of family with past weather. Gee, that sounds like a change in the climate. That could be due to global warming as well. Unfortunately our models aren't good enough to confirm or deny that as the blame for that weather. But the point is that when you have unusual warming it certainly isn't proof that there isn't global warming!

 

Madler - I don't see how I "cherry picked" anything. I provided a quote from the article as well as a link. Other than the winds affecting ice extent, there is no definitive attribution to global warming at all - something implied but not supported or documented in Richard's original comments.

And since you did not comment on my other links regarding record high Antarctic ice extent, I guess I could accuse you of "cherry picking" in your response to my comments.



Regardless, I stand by my position that the Arctic ice melt, while apparently the largest on a quite short documented human record, is not necessarily unusual nor is it necessarily caused only or even primarily by increases in anthropogenic CO2. And I stand by my position that the areas of warming such as the Arctic are discussed endlessly by an alarmist, "cherry picking" media while areas of cooling (such as the Antarctic) are conveniently ignored.

 

Accuse if you like. I simply picked the first two. I am trying to limit the time I spend on this stuff. (I am starting a 12-Step program to spend less time on forums. Step 1 is acknowledging that I have a problem ...)

I'll leave it to others to examine and correct if necessary the commentary that you associated with the other links.

I can't resist however (still on step one of that 12 step program) to comment briefly on Antarctica. At least I will resist the temptation to research the link you provided.

First, the delay of warming in the Southern hemisphere is well predicted by the models, due to the disproportionately small amount of land mass and the resulting vastly higher thermal inertia from the oceans in the Southern hemisphere.

Second, it turns out that nevertheless the Antarctic ice mass is decreasing, based on gravity measurements from GRACE. (One of the more amazing space missions to come out of the place where I work.) Ice area is not a measure of ice mass, just like in the Arctic.

 

The environmental event I paid attention to a long time ago was the effects of Cod Fishing. There was a very intense set of heated discussions between the fishermen (Cod will last forever), politicians (let's try and keep everyone happy) and the marine science organizations (We see a lot of worrysome data, but we have incomplete data).

Needless to say, the prime weakness of the science data was that it could not bring "Proof" of the Cod being overfished. By 1993 I was reading about suicides among the Cod fishing industry since the Northwest fishing ground had eliminated Cod from the ocean as a viable stock. Now they have proof.

As for global warming, you can wait for your proof. You may actually get it.

 

"The record-breaking melt of ice in the Arctic exacerbated the warming effect in some areas so much that sea surface temperatures rose to 5°C above average in one place this year, a high never before observed [...]":
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/01/arctic-surface.html#more

And as we all know climate change never produces unusual winds.

Anyone paying attention does hear such things. The sea ice is at an all-time high because the flow of ice off the continent into the sea is at an all-time high.


As you say, it is important to pay attention to trends, not individual incidents. The subject is after all climate change, not weather change. And rather than relying on wankers and dilettantes like us, interested people should attend to discussion of the facts of global warming by atmospheric physicists and climatologists such as those at
http://realclimate.org

 

LOL. Fair enough Madler. I have the same problem. I will check out the GRACE link you provided (OK - that's not a good step in the right direction for spending LESS time on this stuff, but what the hell).

Anyway, happy new year and let's all hope things cool off in '08!

 

Richard - the first item above is an observation - it provides no insight into underlying causation, much as the NASA article I provided makes no attribution.

The second item - I don't quite understand. I'm talking about Antarctic ice extent (i.e., the amount of ice on the continent). From the data I have seen it is at an all time high (although Madler disagrees and I haven't looked at his link yet). Regardless, I am not talking about "sea ice" - and since you provide no data to support your contention that it is increased or that if it is there is any CO2-related cause and effect, I really can't comment.

 

Madler - interesting study. It seems out of sync with the other data I have seen and posted here - but I'm not claiming GRACE is necessarily wrong. However, it appears that the ice mass, if it indeed is decreasing as shown by GRACE, is mostly due to loss from the West Antarctic ice sheet - which has been known to be warming for some time as it juts out and is warmed by circumpolar westerlies, from what I understand. Data I have seen indicate that the continent as a whole is actually cooling overall except in the West Antarctic ice sheet (which is eight times smaller than the East Antarctic ice sheet). So even if there is ice loss in this area, it does little to persuade me that the interior and bulk of the continent is not cooling - which is out of sync with predictions of a "well mixed greenhouse gas" - which should cause warming in the interior.

 

Whose predictions are those? It sounds to me like you are speaking from a vastly over-simplistic model of how the Earth responds to well-mixed greenhouse gases.

Just because the greenhouse gas is well mixed does not mean that the warming is uniform or consistent in any way. The atmospheric temperature is profoundly affected by the surface, and the Earth's surface is anything but uniform.

First off, these systems are never in equilibrium. The time constant for heading in the direction of equilibrium varies quite a bit, for example depending on thermal inertia of the region. As I already pointed out, the Southern hemisphere has much more thermal inertia than the Northern due to the disproportionate amount of land in the North.

Second, even when you're at (or more correctly, closer to) equilibrium, the effect of the greenhouse gas again varies dramatically, depending on, for example, the surface albedos seen in the region.

For both cases, the effect of surface properties (such as albedo and thermal inertia) a significant distance away can affect the local atmospheric temperature depending on how and where the winds carry that energy.

Lastly, greenhouse gases are only part of the global warming story. Aerosols are significant as well, and they are not well-mixed.

I know that I'm not smart enough to know whether the interior of Antarctica should be cooling or warming early in a scenario of overall global warming due to greenhouse gases. That is a local feature of a very complicated system.

Are you smart enough to know that?

 

In the post I quoted (#101) you wrote "Antarctic sea ice", not continental or grounded ice.

 

If you haven't found it, you're not looking.

Do you really think that driving an 18 MPG vehicle is merely amusing? Or does your .sig show the embarassed smile of someone who knows he should be doing better?

 

No - I am not smart enough - but my point is that apparently the folks making the climate models believe they are, when in fact it looks like they aren't:

"The [cooling] findings are puzzling because many climate models indicate that the Polar regions should serve as bellwethers for any global warming trend, responding first and most rapidly to an increase in temperatures. An ice sheet many kilometers thick in places perpetually covers almost all of Antarctica.

Temperature anomalies also exist in Greenland, the largest ice sheet in the Northern Hemisphere, with cooling in the interior concurrent with warming at the coast....


...He added that documentation of the continental cooling presents a challenge to climate modelers. “Although some do predict areas of cooling, widespread cooling is a bit of a conundrum that the models need to start to account for,†he said."

 

Fair enough Richard. My interpretation of the graphic I linked to is grounded continental ice, not floating ice. And based on the size of the ice area we are talking about, I believe my interpretation is correct - which would preclude explaining the increase in ice due to ice breaking loose as a result of global warming.

 

Madler, you've made good point and you bring a lot to this conversation, but statements like these do you a disservice. I understand what you're trying to get across, but at the end of the day it undermines your position.

 

I can tell that you haven't ever talked to a climate modeler. I have. None of them believe the results of their models to that level of detail, which is almost down at the scale of weather.

The reporter at ScienceDaily didn't say the modelers were surprised by any of this, because they weren't. The article simply said that the models didn't predict the details of the cooling (back in 2002 that is). What a shock.

Post facto studies have shown that the cooling is likely due to a pattern of winds that shield part of the continent, that it turns out is related to the depletion of ozone there.

As I mentioned, the real world is complicated. Very complicated. Things like wind patterns, precipitation, topography, albedo, thermal inertia, and even ozone make the local and regional stories harder to interpret.

This is just one of many examples where skeptics like to use local observations ("Gee, how can there be global warming when it's been so cold in Poughkeepsie this year?") to make a case against global warming that makes no sense to anybody who is familiar with the Earth systems. Those arguments only work for people who get their science in sound bites. Which unfortunately is most of the people, including the press.

This is also one of many examples where the models aren't good enough to predict local observations. The modelers know this full well. They only make claims about globally averaged phenomena, and sometimes phenomena over large regions if many models consistently see the same, strong signal.

One example of the latter is the very pronounced warming in the Arctic as opposed to a a weaker and retarded warming in the Antarctic. That has been seen very consistently in the models all the way back to Hansen's relatively simple mid-80's climate models.

 

How exactly? I'm not getting your point.