I Smell A Rat at NSIDC – Earliest satellite maps of Antarctic and Arctic sea ice

At the bottom of this post is a screen capture of an article at NSIDC concerning some early satellite pictures of the Arctic and Antarctic.

The article is titled “Earliest satellite maps of Antarctic and Arctic sea ice”.

Go ahead an read it at NSIDC (link) or in the screen capture.

Some things jumped out at me right away:

1) The Antarctic data is very specific comparing September 1964 to September 2012 and August 1966 to September 1986.

2) Why did they compare August 1966 to September 1986? The lowest average for August is 1986, but it was 17 million sq km, not 17.5 million.

3) The 15.9 million sq km for August 1966 is 1.1 million sq km lower than the lowest “modern” mean for August. Which means Antarctic Sea Ice has been growing since 1966 (at least in August).

4) Why are they so incredibly unspecific about the Arctic? “early satellite data” for September is compared to  “broadly similar to the 1979 to 2000 average”. Why not give values for specific years?

5) 6.9 million square kilometers for some September in the 1960s would be 700,000 sq km lower than the highest Arctic Sea Ice which occurred in 1980. Isn’t that evidence of Arctic Sea Ice being cyclic?

6) I smell a rat. Why so ambiguous about the years in the Arctic? What are they hiding?

Wind Farm Could Cause Cancer, Diabetes

Conservation groups in Southern California sued the Department of the Interior on Tuesday in an attempt to block construction of a wind farm they claim could cause nearby residents to develop health problems ranging from diabetes to cancer to attention deficit disorder.

“The project is an unnecessary industrialization of pristine wilderness areas,” they said in the complaint.”

Original Article

Antarctic Sea Ice – A record for the day

Antarctic Sea Ice area is still at a record amount for day 260. Using the data from Cryosphere I have graphed the record breaking Antarctic Sea Ice data.

Highlighted are 2012, 2007 and the median for 1979-2008.

Greenland Temperatures from stations with data from the 1800s.

Greenland Temperatures from stations with data from the 1800s. Updated link here.

It was warmer in the past.

These are the warmest years for each month and season.

Station	SEP	OCT	NOV	Autumn	DEC	JAN	FEB	Winter	MAR	APR	MAY	Spring	JUN	JUL	AUG	Summer
Upernavik	1928	1960	1878	2010	1873	1929	1947	1947	1916	1905	1932	1932	2008	2011	1960	2011
Ilulissat	1915	1960	1878	2010	1978	1929	1986	1929	1916	1905	1933	1932	1997	1960	1960	1960
Nuuk	2010	1960	1878	2010	2010	1917	1901	2010	1916	1953	2010	1932	1947	2008	2010	2010
Quaqortoq	2010	1960	2010	2010	1978	2010	1901	2010	1932	1881	1935	1932	1929	2003	1960	1929
Tasiilaq	1939	1915	2002	1941	1933	1987	1932	1929	1929	1926	1933	1929	1932	1939	2010	2003

Steig’s “Hockey Stick” and CRUTEM3 Southern Hemisphere.

Steve McIntyre has a post up looking at Siple Dome ice core data and Gavin Schmidt’s claim that the data shows”exceptionally high values in the late 20th Century “.

Steve includes an R script and a link to the data so I graphed it myself with a few minor tweaks. The peak year in the period from 1840 to 1994 was 1881.

In the last few days I’ve been graphing some of the data so I thought I would look at CRUTEM3 Southern Hemisphere to see if 1881 was exceptionally warm. And there is some confirmation of ~1881 being really, really warm. These are the ones that jumped out at me (graphs are below).

The 2nd warmest August in the Southern Hemisphere was 1884.

The 3rd warmest December was 1881.  (First was 1850, 2nd was 1977)

The 3rd warmest September was 1878.

The 5th warmest July was 1877.

The 2nd warmest June was 1873.

 

  

I appreciate Gavin prompting Steve to look at the data so I would look at the CRUTEM3 SH data and realize …. what “global” warming?

Is the USA warming? The NOAA data says”It depends” – Part 1b

Part 1b. Part  1 and part 1a explain.

This animated gif is the  14 of the 48 lower states cooling or essentially flat since 1895. Click on it for the full effect.

Westcoast Cooling Overlayed on Google Maps

My previous post on Westcoast cooling was written a few weeks ago and only published today.

Since that time I have learned how to map the data using an [R] package called RGoogleMaps. And then I used Graphics Magick to turn all the png files to an animated gif.

 

 

Temperatures at a standstill for 10 years

Dr. David Whitehouse:

“If you look at the instrumental temperature record, HadCrut3 for example, it’s obvious that there are features in the temperature curve that each require an explanation. The initial low temperatures and rough standstill between 1850 – 1910 (there was a brief warmish phase at about 1875). The rise between 1910 and 1940, the standstill between 1940 – 1980, the rise 1980 – 2000 and the standstill 2000 – 2010. Standstills are not unusual. It is also interesting that in the 50 years since 1960 when the IPCC says greenhouse gasses became the dominant climate driver, there has been temperature increases in only two of five decades! In fact, since the start of the instrumental period in 1850 only 50 of the 160 years have been part of an increasing trend.

Recently the UK Met Office conducted a series of simulations incorporating climate change models with decadal fluctuations in climate and concluded that one out of every eight decades would show a ten-year standstill, but that no standstill will last as long as 15 years. Since we have three standstill decades since 1960 this data seems to be somewhat outside the conclusions of the simulations. Each year is now significant as a prolonged hiatus in temperature acquires more and more statistical significance in taking the observations away from the theoretical predictions.

The IPCC says there should be an increase, on average, of 0.2 deg per decade. In Hadcrut3 the increase for 1979 – 2008 is 0.18 deg per decade which seems to fit in with the IPCC estimates. However, the trend for the past decade is zero making a revised estimate for the 1980 – 2000 period as 0.27 deg per decade.

Looking at atmospheric data, which is independent of the weather station data used in HadCrut3 (I am grateful to Lubos Motl for these figures), from RMS AMU between January 1979 and 2011 the increase was 0.14 deg per decade. However, the figure for 2001 – 2011 is minus 0.04 deg per decade. That is, if anything, the world has got cooler, although still within a statistical constant line within errors of measurement.

http://thegwpf.org/the-observatory/3192-warming-what-warming.html

Decrease in Cloud Cover causes 3x as much warming as CO2

The decrease in Earth’s reflectance from 1984 to 2000 translates into an albedo decrease equivalent to a forcing of 6.8W/m^2.

That is almost 3 times as much warming as claimed by the IPCC for warming caused by CO2 from 1850 – 2.4W/m^2.

http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2011/05/study-finds-global-warming-from-natural.html

http://www.iac.es/galeria/epalle/reprints/Goode_Palle_JASTP_2007.pdf