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.

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.

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.

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

lgunter@shaw.ca

Sea Ice Underestimated

I grabbed this out of Newsmax, and it is more a report on bad luck than anything else. I do not bother to track it that closely I had noticed that the reports made little sense in view of apparent conditions and just ignored them anyway. That just shows that my own confidence in the data is low and that I know it is all subject to correction. This is fine, because the important numbers are final seasonal calculations. This year we should have a substantial sea ice recovery over the past two years.

Our winter was clearly cold and long lasting. The new sea ice is maxed out and will take longer to destroy. I also suspect that spring is coming to the Arctic in its traditional time slot.

As I have been posting, this emphatically ends the 1990 – 2007 Northern Hemispheric warming cycle and returns us to weather comparable to the seventies and the eighties. The remaining open question is whether we are facing further cooling. History says we are, and the ongoing lack of sunspots is not a comfort, because that suggests that we may lose a little bit each year until it finally kicks back in.

In the meantime the global warming fanatics will have their work cut out for themselves as this so far modest cooling cycle asserts itself.

All we need now is a volcano to do its thing and give us a wrecked growing season. It has happened and it will happen again.

If we have learned anything though, it is that a number of factors are really impacting the final climatic output. They include sunspots (reflecting solar output), macroscopic decadal climate shifts, and small doses of little else that folks get excited about.

Those Macroscopic Decadal Shifts are very important because they are the mechanism by which surplus heat is shifted from the equator to the poles for final disposition. The size and duration of these events are such as to make efforts to fine tune the effect of CO2 if any as utterly meaningless.

The effect is reduced to the impact of a wind driven cross current on the tide.

The shifts that are apparent include the Pacific decadal Shift and the forty year hurricane cycle.

Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated Due to Sensor Glitch

www.newsmax.com

Climate change alarmists are quick to point to diminishing Arctic sea ice as an indicator of global warming. But a faulty sensor led scientists to underestimate the extent of the ice — by an area larger than California.

The error began in early January and persisted until mid-February, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado, which releases estimates of Arctic sea ice.

The problem was caused by the malfunction of a satellite sensor used for daily updates on the extent of Arctic sea ice.

The NSIDC explained on its Web site: “On February 16, 2009, as e-mails came in from puzzled readers, it became clear that there was a significant problem — sea-ice-covered regions were showing up as open ocean . . .

“Upon further investigation, we found that data quality had begun to degrade over the month preceding the catastrophic failure.

“As a result, our processes underestimated total sea ice extent for the affected period. Based on comparisons with sea ice extent derived from the NASA Earth Observing System Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer sensor, this underestimation grew from a negligible amount in early January to about 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles) by mid-February.”

The area of California is about 163,700 square miles.

The NSIDC uses Department of Defense satellites to obtain its Arctic sea ice data, rather than more accurate National Aeronautics and Space Administration equipment, Bloomberg.com reported.

The Arctic ice cap retreated to its smallest extent on record in 2007, then posted its second-lowest annual minimum at the end of last year’s melt season, and the NSIDC said the recent error does not change its view that the ice is retreating.

Global Warming Heat

This is a good as time as any to comment on the global warming debate. Recent days have seen some fairly hysterical mutual abuse between the two camps who have even gone so far as to associate themselves with the politics of the left and right.

I want you to think about what I just said. How can an issue of science have anything whatsoever to do with your political ideas? That a conservative senator chose to hire a staffer to locate sources that challenged the deluge of pro warming material that is at least as sloppy as any on the other side of the debate is still a necessary public service.

At least I know that the more egregious nonsense will be challenged as they should be.

The debate is now descending to the juvenile art of labeling.

What I must remind everyone is that we are living in a climatic era rightly named the Holocene. Our era has demonstrated a temperature range of variability of about two degrees. Over and over again we have warmed up to present conditions and sometimes a bit higher, before tumbling back as much as two degrees. This channel has been good for ten thousand years and there is no suggestion that it ever varied out of that range, including the little ice age.

I was hopeful that the present warm spell could be maintained as happened during the medieval warm period. It chose not to on the basis of the past twelve months. We have lost a degree as you may have well noticed.

All things been equal we have returned fully to lousy weather for decades. An equally fast advance in warming is an unprecedented climate event in terms of our knowledge, while a fast chilling such as we just experienced is not. In other words a quick recovery is out of the question while an additional drop is not.

Neither side has bothered to put the debate in the perspective of the Holocene which leaves nothing to debate at all.

I have argued ample reasons for the existence of the Holocene, but that is unimportant inasmuch as it clearly exists and is the subject of several earlier posts.

It appears that the Holocene exhibits natural governors that are able to keep the climate well channeled. We have just watched a forty year accumulation of heat be handily discharged into Arctic with minimal effect. I imagine if it got far too cold that the gulf stream would sharply strengthen or the Pacific would do something.

A year ago I was prepared to give the global warming hypothesis a chance. All the Earth had to do was maintain the temperature regime. It did not.

Sorokhtin Comments on Climate Change

Here is a solid article by Sorokhtin on the factors affecting our climate. I have seen previous intimations that the viewpoint of the Russian science community was radically different from ours and with more justice since their data has been kept much longer than ours.

Without question the earth has been hit with a sustained warming effect for the past forty years that has been eroding the Arctic Sea Ice, as well as causing glacier retreat. I have also pointed out that if this established trend is sustained for just another five years that the sea ice will be cleared fully each summer.

Now over the past eighteen months we have experienced a major whipsaw in northern climate that has been poorly explained. We had a very warm winter and summer that impacted heavily in the Arctic and should have left a large reservoir of residual heat there. That was followed abruptly by a very cold winter season, putting the lie to any ideas that all that heat would slow down the winter chill.

Again, we will be watching this next season with great interest to see if the conditions attained last year repeat at all. Obviously if we are commencing another cooling cycle, then the sea ice will expand quite rapidly over the next few seasons. I will be a little disappointed as I could have used a few more years of hot air in the Arctic.

However, it may turn out that 2007 was the true solar cycle peak for a couple of centuries. It was neat to be there and it would be even neater to see all the ice disappear for at least a while. In the meantime, it strikes me that the polar heat loss system may not be closed at all as we would expect and that heat will be found to escape upward more readily than expected. That seems to be the dominant effect in the Antarctic.

A cold spell soon to replace global warming

13:54 | 03/ 01/ 2008

MOSCOW. (Oleg Sorokhtin for RIA Novosti) - Stock up on fur coats and felt boots! This is my paradoxical advice to the warm world.

Earth is now at the peak of one of its passing warm spells. It started in the 17th century when there was no industrial influence on the climate to speak of and no such thing as the hothouse effect. The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases.

The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason--solar activity and luminosity. The greater they are the warmer is our climate.

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

This is my point, which environmentalists hotly dispute as they cling to the hothouse theory. As we know, hothouse gases, in particular, nitrogen peroxide, warm up the atmosphere by keeping heat close to the ground. Advanced in the late 19th century by Svante A. Arrhenius, a Swedish physical chemist and Nobel Prize winner, this theory is taken for granted to this day and has not undergone any serious check.

It determines decisions and instruments of major international organizations--in particular, the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Signed by 150 countries, it exemplifies the impact of scientific delusion on big politics and economics. The authors and enthusiasts of the Kyoto Protocol based their assumptions on an erroneous idea. As a result, developed countries waste huge amounts of money to fight industrial pollution of the atmosphere. What if it is a Don Quixote's duel with the windmill?

Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt. The classic hothouse effect scenario is too simple to be true. As things really are, much more sophisticated processes are on in the atmosphere, especially in its dense layer. For instance, heat is not so much radiated in space as carried by air currents--an entirely different mechanism, which cannot cause global warming.

The temperature of the troposphere, the lowest and densest portion of the atmosphere, does not depend on the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions--a point proved theoretically and empirically. True, probes of Antarctic ice shield, taken with bore specimens in the vicinity of the Russian research station Vostok, show that there are close links between atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and temperature changes. Here, however, we cannot be quite sure which is the cause and which the effect.

Temperature fluctuations always run somewhat ahead of carbon dioxide concentration changes. This means that warming is primary. The ocean is the greatest carbon dioxide depository, with concentrations 60-90 times larger than in the atmosphere. When the ocean's surface warms up, it produces the "champagne effect." Compare a foamy spurt out of a warm bottle with wine pouring smoothly when served properly cold.

Likewise, warm ocean water exudes greater amounts of carbonic acid, which evaporates to add to industrial pollution--a factor we cannot deny. However, man-caused pollution is negligible here. If industrial pollution with carbon dioxide keeps at its present-day 5-7 billion metric tons a year, it will not change global temperatures up to the year 2100. The change will be too small for humans to feel even if the concentration of greenhouse gas emissions doubles.

Carbon dioxide cannot be bad for the climate. On the contrary, it is food for plants, and so is beneficial to life on Earth. Bearing out this point was the Green Revolution--the phenomenal global increase in farm yields in the mid-20th century. Numerous experiments also prove a direct proportion between harvest and carbon dioxide concentration in the air.

Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence--not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.

Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man's influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.

Earth is unlikely to ever face a temperature disaster. Of all the planets in the solar system, only Earth has an atmosphere beneficial to life. There are many factors that account for development of life on Earth: Sun is a calm star, Earth is located an optimum distance from it, it has the Moon as a massive satellite, and many others. Earth owes its friendly climate also to dynamic feedback between biotic and atmospheric evolution.

The principal among those diverse links is Earth's reflective power, which regulates its temperature. A warm period, as the present, increases oceanic evaporation to produce a great amount of clouds, which filter solar radiation and so bring heat down. Things take the contrary turn in a cold period.

What can't be cured must be endured. It is wise to accept the natural course of things. We have no reason to panic about allegations that ice in the Arctic Ocean is thawing rapidly and will soon vanish altogether. As it really is, scientists say the Arctic and Antarctic ice shields are growing. Physical and mathematical calculations predict a new Ice Age. It will come in 100,000 years, at the earliest, and will be much worse than the previous. Europe will be ice-bound, with glaciers reaching south of Moscow.

Meanwhile, Europeans can rest assured. The Gulf Stream will change its course only if some evil magic robs it of power to reach the north--but Mother Nature is unlikely to do that.

Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, is staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute.

Lorne Gunter and Arctic heat transport

An excellent editorial in the National Post this morning by Lorne Gunter on the Global Warming flap. It is titled 'A warmer Arctic? Blame Mother Nature'.

He makes two telling points. The first is not particularly new, in that he points out that the really good data that we have all been relying on is rather recently gathered. Satellite image image gathering is only 28 years old and our Arctic weather data is only about fifty years old for North America. The second point is that Russian weather data goes back much longer and this tells a very different story.

This editorial was inspired by the recent article in Nature by Rune Graversen and others that takes the position that there is a long atmospheric heat transport cycle that accounts for all the observations. It makes the additional observation that this cycle of heat transport has a long history, hardly news to my readers. In fact it has been the historical record that has motivated my exploration of all heat transfer scenarios. Needless to say, these folks do not support the CO2 causation hypothesis.

The Russian data collected over a century appears to support a scenario in which we have just passed a peak heat period and are now about to enter a prolonged cooling period. Next summer will be a true stress test of what is really happening out there in the Arctic.

The real question is whether the atmospheric heat transport hypothesis is sufficient to explain the historic record, including the recent warming trend. I personally am a little skeptical simply because the heat content of a cubic mile of the Gulf Stream trumps hundreds of cubic miles of warmer air. Of course the exchange mechanisms also matter except that the Arctic is the end of the line for excess heat.

We really have insufficient data to prove either case except to find ourselves blowing in the wind. If we have a sharp reversal in Arctic temperature conditions that is sustained for the next twenty years, then perhaps the atmospheric model will be deemed robust enough.

At the moment we have a purportedly cooler winter throughout North America, although that could merely be an advantageous reorganization of air flows. Right now, California appears to be catching the pineapple express and we are having pleasant weather instead. I think that they needed to top up their reservoirs.

The Russian data, which needs to be more available, paints a picture of long lasting past weather cycles that we cannot ignore and force us to temper our enthusiasm. The current warming trend in the Arctic if sustained for about seven more years will sweep the Arctic clean in the summer and increase solar energy absorption. A reversal now will put that scenario off for decades at least.

Warming Arctic Surface Water

This article highlights an unexpected consequence of the clearing of sea ice from a huge expanse of surface water. The surface temperature climbs way more than expected because the wind has blown any pack ice far away. This was not so obvious in previous years simply because the open areas developed later and were much smaller.

This indicates that summer surface temperatures in the Arctic Ocean will climb to the same levels once full ice removal is possible and a decent summer season is established. This also suggests that a fair amount of moisture will find its way into the Arctic atmosphere increasing precipitation on the Greenland icecap. So while the edges of the cap will experience greater melting, the cap itself will be adding ice faster.

I used to have a copy of the raw ice core data from back in the nineties when they were not charging for it. I had it because I wanted to get a handle of the precise timing of the Pleistocene Nonconformity and even to confirm it was for real(it was). It now strikes me that that same data may be sensitive enough to pick up those time periods in which the Arctic was ice free in the summer. I hate hard drives.

Note also that a direct result of this is winter ice thicknesses dropping from an average of 80 centimeters to an average an average 25 centimeters thinner or about 55 centimeters. This is a huge effect and it alone means that the sea ice could clear even sooner next season allowing an even earlier attack on the perennial ice. We are clearly well past any tipping point because this is a cumulative effect that will happily clear out all the sea ice over the next several years.

For this process to properly reverse now, something radical has to change and permit a large chilling effect. And since that type of response takes a long time to set up, I suspect that we are in for a few centuries of warmer Arctic climate.

Without Ice Cap, Arctic Waters Warm To As Much As 5C Above Average

Written by The Naib

Record-breaking amounts of ice-free water have deprived the Arctic of more of its natural “sunscreen” than ever in recent summers. The effect is so pronounced that sea surface temperatures rose to 5 C above average in one place this year, a high never before observed, says the oceanographer who has compiled the first-ever look at average sea surface temperatures for the region.

Such superwarming of surface waters can affect how thick ice grows back in the winter, as well as its ability to withstand melting the next summer, according to Michael Steele, an oceanographer with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. Indeed, since September, the end of summer in the Arctic, winter freeze-up in some areas is two months later than usual.

The extra ocean warming also might be contributing to some changes on land, such as previously unseen plant growth in the coastal Arctic tundra, if heat coming off the ocean during freeze-up is making its way over land, says Steele. (who incidentally is speaking Wednesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco)

He is lead author of “Arctic Ocean surface warming trends over the past 100 years,” accepted for publication in AGU’s Geophysical Research Letters. Co-authors are physicist Wendy Ermold and research scientist Jinlun Zhang, both of the UW Applied Physics Laboratory. The work is funded by the National Science Foundation.

“Warming is particularly pronounced since 1995, and especially since 2000,” the authors write. The spot where waters were 5 C above average was in the region just north of the Chukchi Sea. The historical average temperature there is -1 C (the salt in ocean water keeps it liquid at temperatures that would cause fresh water to freeze). This year water in that area warmed to 4 C, for a 5-degree change from the average.

That general area, the part of the ocean north of Alaska and Eastern Siberia that includes the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea, experienced the greatest summer warming. Temperatures for that region were generally 3.5 C warmer than historical averages and 1.5 C warmer than the historical maximum.

Such widespread warming in those areas and elsewhere in the Arctic is probably the result of having increasing amounts of open water in the summer that readily absorb the sun’s rays, Steele says. Hard, white ice, on the other hand, can work as a kind of sunscreen for the waters below, reflecting rather than absorbing sunlight. The warming also may be partly caused by increasing amounts of warmer water coming from the Pacific Ocean, something scientists have noted in recent years.

The Arctic was primed for more open water since the early 1990s as the sea-ice cover has thinned, due to a warming atmosphere and more frequent strong winds sweeping ice out of the Arctic Ocean via Fram Strait into the Atlantic Ocean where the ice melts. The wind effect was particularly strong in the summer of 2007.

Now the situation could be self-perpetuating, Steele says. For example, he calculates that having more heat in surface waters in recent years means 23 to 30 inches less ice will grow in the winter than formed in 1965. Since sea ice typically grows about 80 inches in a winter, that is a significant fraction of ice that’s going missing, he says.

Then too, higher sea surface temperatures can delay the start of freeze-up because the extra heat must be discharged from the upper ocean before ice can form.

“The effect on net winter growth would probably be negligible for a delay of several weeks, but could be substantial for delays of several months,” the authors write. We are getting very close to the tipping point, or maybe we have already moved past it. Either way these continued warnings from the nations best scientists mean that we need to take much more drastic action, and soon. Without an immediate reduction in green house gas emission we are dooming ourselves to a world with a fever. If only our government could pull it’s head out of it’s ass long enough to realize this we might be alright. I suggest you call up your congress person and bitch at them till they hang up on you, do this every week or until we have change. If they keep voting the way you don’t like, vote for someone else who will vote the way you want.

The Sargasso Sea as a proxy

As I have posted earlier, there is a natural tendency for the Northern Hemisphere to warm while there is an equally natural tendency for the Southern Hemisphere to cool. The 2000 year extended warming of the Bronze Age is the stabilized result of this tendency. This means that for the Northern Hemisphere, that the only important question is how did it cool off in the first place.

The afore mentioned tendency is simply driven by the fact that the bulk of continental land surrounds an Arctic Ocean that is able to prevent the production of an Ice cap, while we have a mirror image in the Antarctic. It is actually an amazing arrangement that will now be stable for millions of years since the only Ice cap in the Antarctic will continue to calve surplus ice into the ocean. In fact it looks like an extraordinary coincidence and I do not ordinary coincidences.

And then we have the coincidence of the Maunder sunspot minimum coinciding with the cyclic temperature low that gave us the Little Ice Age. My own thoughts are this is not too much of a coincidence since it would have simply worsened a natural condition. If this one hundred year event had nailed it to coincide with a peak in the apparent 1000 year cycle, then that would have been highly unusual. Instead it hit while the Northern climate was likely already past its cooling phase and simply deepened and delayed the recovery part of the projected cycle.

The point made is that the loss of that 0.1 percent solar sunspot radiation for a hundred years was enough create the so called Little Ice Age because it actually acted on an already cooling Northern climate. If it were to happen now, the effect would be a great deal less than in 1600 AD.

One aspect of global warming that was not been talked about is the recent findings of solar scientists of three separate mechanisms by which the sun could warm or cool the Earth, the most important of which is an ongoing increase in ultra violet light. It appears to have led the observed climatic effects for the past several hundred years, although I do wonder how this data match could be possibly reliable. It would be actually nice if solar variation was sufficient too make all the observed changes. It is certainly the big engine compared to all other mechanisms.

Since the sunspot cycle is hitting a minimum this year, it is reasonable that the next five years should be simply cold as the effect catches up. I am not that optimistic but we may have a standstill in the Arctic for five years, although during this last cycle there was ongoing ice loss. In fact since the cycle is ten years in length and the previous cycle maxima was in 1998 we may face a surprisingly good year for sea ice removal in 2008.

That brings us back to the most important climate driver of all. That is the temperature of ocean currents and as important the individual seas. Remember that a sea needs to be properly defined as a body of water that is slowly rotating with perimeter currents interacting with other seas to exchange energy and salinity. The South Atlantic gyre is one as is the Arctic. The point is is that the temperature ranges in the Sargasso Sea and in the Caribbean Sea were both 2 to 3 degrees Celsius cooler than today during the Little Ice age.

This is a huge difference that may have been effected by variations in solar energy. The problem is that my back of the envelope calculations tell me that these variations are actually way too weak by a factor of at least ten. That puts us back into the antarctic cooling engine. As the Antarctic cold zone expands, it is able to stimulate an increase in mixing with adjacent seas and this strongly increases current flow heading north almost as a pulse. This happens in both the Pacific and the Atlantic.

The problem for forecasting is that this mechanism is going to lead or lag other climatic effects by decades. The north will progressively warm while slowly pushing the triggers to the switch point. When the influx of cold water comes, there will still be plenty of inertia in the climate and it will take a long time for the impact to assert itself.

In point of fact, using the Sargasso Sea as a proxy, it appears that we had a 1000 year decline from the 1000 BC to 0 AD, a 1000 year advance from 0 AD to 1000 AD and a 1000 year decline from 1000 AD to a couple of hundred years ago. The variation around that curve was at least one degree per century which is exactly what we are experiencing.

And as I have been observing, we are about to break into warm side of the curve above which the arctic seas will clear. Once the Arctic is clear a warm north will be stable for a while.

Again using Sargasso Sea proxy, it is obvious that although we have entered an uptrend, we are due for a reversal within that uptrend that could last a century. If we are lucky, we will clear the Arctic before that happens and we will have and extended warm spell.

In the meantime it would be good to develop a similar database for every sea on Earth so that we can actually map historic global sea temperatures which will then allow us to properly model historic climate conditions.

Bjorn Lomborg and Global Warming Excress

Bjorn Lomborg has weighed in with a recent column on the ongoing global warming debate essentially decrying the rather strident and poorly supported positions of some of the more exuberant promoters of the global warming ideology. I also find it difficult to mistake a natural upward adjustment in the the apparent average temperature regime of the Northern Hemisphere for the End of the World, particularly when it appears to be offset with an equivalent minor downward shift in the Southern Hemisphere.

I also have great faith in the public's ability to discern aberrant nonsense for what it is, and those that cannot are usually pretty good at canceling each other's votes out.

What Bjorn does do is argue rather persuasively that a warmer Northern climate may actually be a Good Thing. Simply the reduction of the winter death rate is a benefit.

In the meantime the wack crowd would have a massive rise in sea levels and are predicting a temperature shift of over 2 degrees or pick your number.

In the real world, it is believable that the shift in the Northern Hemisphere is around 1/2 a degree over the past century depending on how the calculation is made. It is believable only because surplus heat is slowly eliminating the perennial sea cover of the Arctic.

I think that we can all agree that the Arctic is the area most affected and also the place where this heat is expended. I think that we also can agree that the sea ice effect extends to a maximum of thirty degrees south.

A back of the envelope calculation then suggests that a half degree shift in northern temperatures will mean at least a seven fold shift of 3.5 degrees in the arctic and more likely a ten fold shift of 5.0 degrees.

The reverse is also true and probably had a lot to do with the determination of the half degree shift in the first place. Obviously a shift of 2.6 degrees would give the Arctic a short violent tropical summer before it crashed back into winter.

I think it is far more likely that we are actually looking at the optimal shift right now and that it will not shift any more. This does not mean that changes in the Arctic are over. In fact they have just begun. That half degree shift is much more effective than anyone realizes as yet.

Clear seas in the Arctic by 2015

NASA published this report a month ago on the Arctic sea ice conditions over the past two years.

http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/quikscat-20071001.html

A couple of very suggestive observations are made and need to be noted. Of course, the fact that ice coverage has been reduced is obvious to everyone and the known 60% reduction in total ice volume between the two data collection dates of 1957 and 2000 has also been commented on extensively by myself. In fact, this has led to my own analysis and prediction of a likely date for total sea ice disappearance as early as 2015.

I am only able to say for sure that it should not be much sooner. The NASA report calls even that into question.

The last two years saw a significant shift in the arctic wind regime that has had the effect of speeding the clearing of the sea ice off most of the Arctic and inducing the release of substantial long term ice into the lower latitudes. The article reads as if this has never happened before or has never been observed before.

This presumably implies that a lot more atmospheric heat is now finding its way into the Arctic helping the process of melting along. This is new, then the next question is whether it will be stable. It certainly supports a global transition in the weather regime and explains the warmer winters that we have experienced in the temperate climes.

In any event, hugely larger open water areas allowed a lot more solar energy to be absorbed by the Arctic Ocean this summer, perhaps because this switch was turned on. The question is whether this is a new wind regime that helps bring northern temperate zones back to their pre little ice age highs.

It actually makes a lot of sense that this is exactly what will happen. The high temperatures experienced in Scandinavia over five hundred years ago could well be the result of a natural wind regime adding a couple of degrees of extra warmth in combination with a clearing out of sea ice from Arctic waters.

In other words, we have already reached the optimum temperatures previously established in the past and it is simply taking time for all the effects to be fully expressed.

The past two years have seen the Arctic start the clearing process in a fairly convincing manner. Even though I was even predicting the rapid decline long before the process was underway, I did not fully recognize the actual onset.

A permanent wind system that delivers heat into the Arctic is a natural and predictable outcome of an atmospheric warming cycle regardless of it's causes. How else might we get rid of surplus heat in the Northern Hemisphere?

A wind system sustained by an ice freed Arctic in the summer should be a powerful engine in spreading the new regime around the Arctic Basin.

The next interesting question will be if this trend is sustained as we go into the next season. I thought that last season's behavior was very much a part of the normal ebb and flow of the warming process itself.

I can now suggest that if this climate trend is shifting to a new Arctic regime, that the winds and related heat transfer will actually be as strong or stronger than this season and will continue to strengthen over the next several seasons until all the summer sea ice is gone and the system can stabilize.

In other words, clear sailing in the Arctic by 2015 is possibly more likely than ever.

Arctic and Antarctic heat balance

The one fact that I find most disturbing about the Global Warming debate is that climatologists think that the Antarctic temperature has dropped by a degree. What this is really saying is that it is very likely that the net heat gain in the Arctic is almost exactly offset by the net heat loss in the Antarctic. Which implies that the greenhouse gas explanation is spurious.

The effect unfortunately looks a lot different at the two poles, due in the one case to a nearly closed off circulation system and a strongly disrupted one on the other hand. I think it will be very difficult to achieve scientific precision. However, the greenhouse effect is categorically not warming the Antarctic, and it needs to be if the theory is to retain any credence.

It makes total sense that the two poles are slightly out of balance in their ability to lose and gain heat. Variability is then a function of the corrective process. And it appears that over the centuries, the Arctic tends to warm and the Antarctic tends to chill. As I posted earlier, this can be corrected by the expedient of injecting a larger mass than normal of cold Antarctic water into the Atlantic.

The last major injection took place in the fifteenth century, triggering the little ice age in Europe. What we do not understand is if this process is triggered by a warming Arctic in some manner or is just random. With our sparsity of knowledge, we see a likely direct connection from this one data point. Yet I am not sure that we can trace another such event since the Bronze Age. The Romans did grow grapes in England after all.

We really need to get a better handle on post Bronze Age climate. The cooling effect could actually be controlled by a normal low level pulsing of the currents that may cycle through several decades and is only rarely disturbed.

Without a corrective measure, I am certain that the Arctic will return to Bronze Age conditions, which we are swiftly approaching right now. Those conditions are inherently stable unless there is an injection of cold water into the South Atlantic.

Now you know why I am looking over my shoulder.

Clear Sailing by 2020 at the North Pole

The press has woken up to the opening of the Northwest Passage. In the meantime, I see continuing babble over predictions on the rate of ice loss. These boys are mathematically challenged and it is becoming annoying. Let me clarify things.

We lost 60% of the ice thickness and by extension 60% of the total ice M between 1957 and 2000. If we conservatively assume that the loss rate was the same throughout this period, the annual loss rate R can be discovered by the simple equation:

C = M - 43R expressed as percentages and C been the current percentage of the original M(1957).

Therefore R = (M-C)/43 or: R = (100 - 60) /43 or: R = approx. 1% of M

The apparrent current loss rate can be calculated by dividing 1% by 40% remaining to give us 2.5%.

Except that it is obviously faster than this. If we project that the prinicipal warming only seriously started in the early eighties, we have instead R = 2% and a current effective loss rate of 5% which actually appears to match current experience. This also means that in the last seven years we have lost an additional 14% of the original M leaving a current C of 26% or only 13 more years,instead of the more sedate forty years.

On top of all that the clearing of the majority of the Arctic ocean is allowing a greater heat absorption than usual and a thinner winter icesheet this winter.

I think that we actually have as little as ten years of summer sea ice cover left and that further warming will eventually expand the clear season to early August.

As stated earlier, the only thing that is going to halt this runaway is a major cold snap, perhaps caused by an injection of SouthPolar water into the South Atlantic. A late summer cruise along the northern coast of Ellesmere Island with a short hop to the North Pole in 2016 is very appropriate and on my to do list.

The end of the Ice Age forever

For the last two weeks, I have posted my chapter on the Pleistocene Nonconformity in order to fully present and properly develop my principal thesis that the million year ice age ended permanently 12,500 years ago, because the earth's crust slipped thirty degrees.

Our climate is still adjusting, but we can make some general conjectures.

1 The Antarctic sea ice perimeter, stabilized around the time the Bronze Age ended causing a slight drop in ocean temperatures.

2 The invigorated Gulf Stream, a direct result of the nonconformity will continue to dump heat into the Arctic. Will it be enough to eliminate the multiyear sea ice pack?

We can also state a couple of iron clad facts:

1 Solar output variation is subject to extremely minor variation, simply because the inputs are almost invariable, certainly by human time scales. There is no more hydrogen been added. And yes, we have just come off a variation high and it has gone back to rest. These are almost predictable.

2 Polar ice caps are polar ice caps. No other type can exist at sea level and their natural perimeter is within 15 degrees of the pole. All the apparent counter evidence we have immediately disappears with the Pleistocene Nonconformity.

You can now perhaps understand my global perspective on the issue of climate change a little better in my future posts.