WHY GREENLAND & ANTARCTIC ICE SHEETS ARE NOT COLLAPSING August 30, 2009

WHY GREENLAND & ANTARCTIC ICE SHEETS ARE NOT COLLAPSING

Via NZ Climate Science
Posted 29 August 2009

“The global warming doomsday writers claim the ice sheets are melting catastrophically, and will cause a sudden rise in sea level of many metres. This ignores the mechanism of glacier flow which is by creep: glaciers are not melting from the surface down, nor are they sliding down an inclined plane lubricated by meltwater…Variations in melting around the edges of ice sheets are no indication that they are collapsing. Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.” –  Cliff Ollier and Colin Pain, writing in the newsletter of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists.

LINK to download pdf

NOAA Blunder Explains Claims of Warming Oceans? August 29, 2009

NOAA Blunder Explains Claims of Warming Oceans?

Jennifer Marohasy Blog, August 29, 2009

SCIENTISTS at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center (CPC) appear to have made a blunder with a data adjustment and splice resulting in sea surface temperatures being warmer than they would otherwise be by about 0.175 degrees C over the last two decades.

Roy Spencer, from the University of Alabama, discovered the error just a few days ago which according to meteorologist Anthony Watts, accounts for 24% of the 0.74 deg C global warming claimed for 1905-2005.

The mistake was made about 10 years ago following a request from the World Meteorological Organization for NOAA to standardize the period from which temperature anomalies are calculated.

I have puzzled as to why Australian government advisors claim sea temperatures have been increasing over the last ten years – perhaps they have been referring to sea surface temperatures and focusing on this dud data.

Read the rest here

Sun causes ‘La Nina-like effect’ on earth August 28, 2009

Sun causes ‘La Nina-like effect’ on earth

ABC, August 28, 2009

Changes in the sun’s radiation cause a small La Niña-like effect on earth, an international team has found.

They say this together with another process involving ozone in the upper atmosphere, amplifies the effect of the sun on earth’s climate.

Australian climate scientist, Julie Arblaster of the Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne and colleagues report their findings in today’s issue of the journal Science.

“It’s a small signal but it does explain some of our climate variability,” says Arblaster.

Scientists have long known that more sunspots increase the amount of radiation that reaches the earth.

The total energy that reaches earth from the sun varies by around 0.1% across an approximate 11-year solar cycle, say Arblaster and colleagues.

But what has long puzzled researchers is that the influence of this variation on the earth’s climate has been more than two times greater than would be expected.

Arblaster and colleagues have investigated a number of theories as to why this is the case and think they may have solved the mystery.

“We’re trying to understand the mechanism of how this change in the solar output amplifies in the climate in terms of temperature and rainfall,” says Arblaster.

Read the rest here

Some Facts about Global Climate Change That You Won’t Read in the Popular Press August 27, 2009

Some Facts about Global Climate Change That You Won’t Read in the Popular Press

By Joseph D’Aleo
ICECAP

Temperatures have been cooling since 2002, even as carbon dioxide has continued to rise.

CO2 is not a pollutant, but a naturally occurring gas. Together with chlorophyll and sunlight, it is an essential ingredient in photosynthesis and is, accordingly, plant food.

Reconstruction of paleo-climatological CO2 concentrations demonstrates that carbon dioxide concentration today is near its lowest level since the Cambrian Era some 550 million years ago, when there was almost 20 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as there is today without causing a “runaway
greenhouse effect.”

Temperature changes lead, not lag, CO2 changes on all time scales. The oceans may play a key role, emitting carbon dioxide when they warm as carbonated beverages lose fizz as they warm and absorbing it as they cool.

Indeed, greenhouse models show the warming should be greatest at mid to high atmosphere levels in the tropics. But balloon and satellite observations show cooling there. The greenhouse signature or DNA does not match reality, and the greenhouse models thus must greatly overstate the warming – and in a court of law would have to be acquitted of any role in global warming

The sun has both direct and indirect effects on our climate. Solar activity changes on cycles of 11 years and longer. When the sun is more active it is brighter and a little hotter. More important though are the indirect effects. Ultraviolet radiation increases much more than the brightness and causes increased ozone production, which generates heat in the high atmosphere that works its way down, affecting the weather. Also, an active sun diffuses cosmic rays, which play an important role in nucleation of low clouds, resulting in fewer clouds. In all these ways the sun warms the planet more when it is active. An active sun in the 1930s and again near the end of the last century helped produce the observed warming periods. The current solar cycle is the longest in over 100 years, an unmistakable sign of a cooling sun that historical patterns suggest will stay so for decades.

The multidecadal cycles in the ocean correlate extremely well with the solar cycles and global temperatures. These are 60 to 70 year cycles that relate to natural variations in the large-scale circulations. Warm oceans correlate with warm global temperatures. The Pacific started cooling in the late 1990s and it
accelerated in the last year, and the Atlantic has cooled from its peak in 2004. This supports the observed global land temperature cooling, which is strongly correlated with ocean heat content. Newly deployed NOAA buoys confirm global ocean cooling.

Warmer ocean cycles are periods with diminished Arctic ice cover. When the oceans were warm in the 1930s to the 1950s, Arctic ice diminished and Greenland warmed. The recent ocean warming, especiallyin the 1980s to the early 2000s, is similar to what took place 70 years ago and the Arctic ice has reacted much the same way, with diminished summer ice extent.

Antarctic ice has been increasing and the extent in 2007 was the greatest in the satellite monitoring era. It has continued above the 3 year average

What will it take for the media to let go of their biases and begin doing their job, reporting the truth?

See pdf here (first published in the Energy Tribune).

Wherefore art thou Niño? August 24, 2009

Wherefore art thou Niño?

Posted on Climate Change, August 22, 2009

This essay addresses the question of whether tropical waters are likely to warm or cool in the last half of 2009. Necessarily it also addresses matters such as:

• The character of warming cycles in the tropics.
• The usefulness of the ENSO 3.4 Index as a proxy for tropical warming events.
• The driver of sea surface temperature change in the tropics.
• Change in the nature of this driver over time.
• The contribution of warming cycles in the tropics to global temperature change.
• The place of greenhouse theory in explaining global temperature change.

For a description of the data used for this analysis see Kalnay, E. and Coauthors, 1996: The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis 40-year Project. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 77, 437-471. This data can be accessed at: http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/data/timeseries/timeseries1.pl

Global temperature is strongly influenced by change in sea surface temperature in the global tropics. There is a lag of about six months from tropical to global peak. There is no argument as to the driver of global temperature on a year to year basis. Until recently many observers (including the UNIPCC) have maintained (without any justification whatsoever) that the ENSO oscillation is temperature neutral on decadal and longer time scales. That assertion is now widely questioned. We must ask how much, and whether all of the change in global temperature can be attributed to the cycles of warming and cooling in the tropics. The strong temperature gain between 1978 and 1998 has been attributed to man’s influence on the basis that “we know of no other reason for the change that has been observed.” That logic is now in question. Was something really obvious simply overlooked? There is still no evidence for the greenhouse induced ‘hot spots’ in the upper atmosphere. Is the UNIPCC assertion that the recent warming is due to the activities of man classic case of jumping to premature conclusions in the face of abundant evidence to the contrary.

Frequently the collapse of a solar cycle is associated with cooling in the tropics while the onset of a new cycle is associated with the initiation of a strong warming event. However, Cycle 24 is unusual. The sun is spotless even though 10.7cm radio flux has been increasing since late 1998. Just when is the big warming event to be expected and will it be as big as 1997-8?

Read the rest here

Kevin Libin: You’ll just have to take our word on the global warming stuff August 23, 2009

Kevin Libin: You’ll just have to take our word on the global warming stuff

By Kevin Libin
National Post, August 18, 2009

Though a striking number of prominent scientists have recently recanted their initial belief in manmade global warming, joining an already robust community of distinguished skeptics, those who continue to advance the theory could be their own worst enemy. Whatever the truth is about anthropogenic climate change — the contention that carbon dioxide emitted by human industrial activity — the tendency among some climate-change believers to embellish the effects of planetary warming has only served to undermine their credibility in the eyes of the public and, less so, the media.

For years, global warming advocates held up every calving ice shelf, failed crop or natural disaster as proof of a dawning warming apocalypse; whether it was too much rain, or not enough — either way, it was abnormal, and the fault of Big Oil and anyone questioning that, labeled a “denier.” As Vicky Pope, a senior British climatologist, citing overblown claims of rapid melting of arctic sea ice, and the ice sheet around Greenland, bemoaned earlier this year, for scientists, “overplaying natural variations in the weather as climate change is just as much a distortion of the science as underplaying them to claim that climate change has stopped or is not happening.”

But probably nothing could damage the credibility of climate change believers than the recent revelation by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) that it has lost or destroyed all the original data used to construct historic global temperature records.

The CRU, at the University of East Anglia in the UK, which has been using information collected from weather stations across the globe for decades, is probably the most widely cited source worldwide for those mounting a case that the earth has exhibited an inexorable warming trend: its website boasts that CRU’s research has “set the agenda for the major research effort in, and political preoccupation with, climate research.” The critical raw climate data responsible, which scientists of all climate-creeds have a natural interest in, is now gone, apparently, forever. With the exception of a handful of countries that the CRU has agreements with to sell its data, all that remains for the bulk of the statistics are “value added” versions, which is to say, consolidated, homogenized data. Actually, the CRU says it doesn’t even have all the data for countries it has data-sharing agreements with. “We know that there were others, but cannot locate them, possibly as we’ve moved offices several times during the 1980s,” the CRU writes in a rather embarrassing explanation for all this posted on its website.

The Unit makes this admission now, coincidentally, as it faced a flurry of requests, under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act, to make available its data to interested researchers. The CRU, it seems, had not been much in a sharing mood prior to that. UK’s register reports that Professor Phil Jones, the fellow in charge of maintaining the CRU data set, told an Australian researcher a few years back that he refused to publicly share his statistics. “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” The idea that scientific progress rests completely on the constant testing and retesting, verifying and refuting, of studies, seems not to be shared by Mr. Jones, even though this particular data set had massive implications for policymaking in pretty well every country on the planet. Unfortunately for him, as part of a publicly managed and funded organization, his group was nonetheless subject to transparency laws, and so, when researchers sought to shake the data loose without his consent, it had mysteriously vanished. “We have never had sufficient resources to keep track of the exact source of each individual monthly value,” they explained in coming up dry for the FOI requests. As Stephen McIntyre, the Canadian economist famous for his addiction to poring through volumes of mind-numbing climate statistics, and occasionally finding errors (as he did, with Ross McKitrick, in deconstructing and undermining the famous “hockey stick” graph), writes on his Climate Audit blog, it appears that the impoverished CRU even lacked filing cabinets in which to store its records.

Read the rest here