2013 the fourth hottest year in the UAH record

This won't be pleasing news to anyone, let alone the deniers at WUWT.  From WUWT (archived here):

2013 was the fourth warmest year in the satellite era, trailing only 1998, 2010 and 2005, according to Dr. John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The warmest areas during the year were over the North Pacific and the Antarctic, where temperatures for the year averaged more than 1.4 C (more than 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal. There were small areas of cooler than normal temperatures scattered about the globe, including one area over central Canada where temperatures were 0.6 C (about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit) cooler than the 30-year norm.

The Antarctic was much warmer than 'normal'

All sorts of things should shake the faith of the denialati, not least of which is the fact that according to UAH analysis, the Antarctic was one of the warmest areas -  where temperatures for the year averaged more than 1.4 C (more than 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than normal.

After all their recent ravings over sea ice around Antarctica, that should have given the deniers at WUWT pause.

I've done a quick chart of annual UAH annual global lower troposphere temperature anomalies, up to and including 2013:

Data Source: UAH

Addendum - RSS and UAH

I've included HadCRUT below, here is RSS and UAH together, for the sake of completeness.  GISTemp isn't out yet. They are fairly closely aligned, at least up until a couple of years ago. [Sou 10:19 am 5 Jan 14 AEDST]

Data Sources: UAH and RSS

Update

I've made minor corrections to the charts, using the latest data from UAH. [Sou 11:33 am 5 January 2014 AEDST]

Despite this, the denial continues - from the WUWT comments

Lots of comments of the type "I don't believe it" and "it's about to cool down" and even "warmer = cooling". You've got to admit that WUWT houses a lot of utter nutters.

RichardLH says:

January 3, 2014 at 12:30 pm
Given that we appear to be at the top of a well observed 60 year cycle then this is not unexpected. The real question is ‘How much down from here do we go and for how long?”.

Gareth Phillips queries Richard and says:

January 3, 2014 at 12:37 pm
The point is Richard, the trend remains upwards.It may be a small amount, but it is still rising, not falling or staying still. Is there any objective evidence that we are at a peak and the trend will reverse?

To which RichardLH replies (excerpt, quotes removed):

January 3, 2014 at 12:41 pm
Well the HadCrut4 says there is a 60 year and we are at the top of it.
The UAH says the same (though with only data since 1979 you can only see half a cycle).
What evidence do you have that this is an upward trend? It looks very, very cyclic to me.

Let's look at HadCRUT4 to see just how we are now at temperatures of sixty years ago. I've animated with UAH superimposed as well - with a 1981-2010 baseline:

Data Sources: UAH and UK Met Office Hadley Centre

Nope - we should surely be at the temperatures of 1953 if all that affected climate was a sixty year cycle. But no, we're not. And no-one's likely to see surface temperatures of the 1950s for at least tens of thousands of years, barring supervolcanic eruptions or some other cataclysmic event.

Incidentally, in HadCRUT4, 2013 is the eighth hottest year on record, after (in order)  2010, 2005, 1998, 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2002.

JimS demands a recount from science deniers Roy Spencer and John Christy and says:

January 3, 2014 at 1:03 pm
I find that very hard to believe, quite frankly – 2013 being the 4th warmest year in the last 30 years. I demand a recount, or, perhaps the coolists should be given opportunity to “adjust” the figures, this time, eh?

WeatherOrNot doesn't understand anomalies and says:

January 3, 2014 at 1:12 pm
Is mean global average temperature data available, rather than just the anomaly? I’d be interested to know the trend for the actual average global temperature over the years.

LT says:

January 3, 2014 at 1:13 pm
It looks like UAH continues to deviate from the other global temperature datasets. Something seems off.

dp says that warming means it's cooling - huh?:

January 3, 2014 at 1:14 pm
Having that heat in the atmosphere above the north Pacific is a net cooling effect to the planet as the ocean heat passes through the air before making its way back the the dark regions of the universe. People are viewing this as a bad thing – I don’t understand that. Rejoice, people – that is what global cooling looks like.

Steve from Rockwood rides a cycle and says:

January 3, 2014 at 1:28 pm
If there is such a thing as a 60 year cycle then using a 30 year average for the negative half of the 60 year cycle and then claiming that 2001-2013 are the warmest years is … well … entirely expected. With the positive peak of a 60 year cycle centered around 2005 anything other than 12 of 13 years being 2001 or later would be very unusual – like 1998 which shouldn’t be there (we all know why it is an exception). It seems as though the world is unfolding as it should.

Steven Mosher posts a challenge to deniers and says:

January 3, 2014 at 1:35 pm
Time for all you sun nuts and PDO fans to place your bets.
we are at solar max.. If the sun is the cause then its time to make predictions

justsomeguy31167 goes for "it's a conspiracy" of the "gremlins in the satellite" type and and says:

January 3, 2014 at 2:03 pm
Since you get your data from NASA, any chance it is “pre-cooked” Hansen and Gavin?

bazza  misunderstood the ABC, thinking that "since 1889" means it was hot in 1889, not realising it means "since records began in 1889" (in that part of Queensland) and says:

January 3, 2014 at 2:36 pm
The abc here in australia are obsessed with the hot weather we are getting in qld at the moment.They spent most of the news talking about it no mention of the extream cold in the us.At one point in the show they had a [so called] weather expert on and with great joy he said it has not been this hot since 1889 scary scary we are all going to fry.My question is what made it so hot in 1889?it was not SUVs and air con, trust me the weather is no different now than it was in the 1950s.When will this global warming madness end?so we can stop spending billions of dollars on stupid research projects like that fiasco in antarctica with there ship stuck in the ice that they claim is not there.

This is for bazza courtesy HotWhopper and the Bureau of Meteorology:

Adapted from: Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Bob Grise applies the logical fallacy of argument from incredulity when he says:

January 4, 2014 at 12:25 am
You look at all this massive ice at the poles and all that mass of water in the oceans and then do some math. The population of man per square mile of Earth is only 35, or one person per 18 acres. How the heck did that influence climate, or the amount of ice at the poles in any given year? It can’t be possible. This is nature at work. Natural variation. We have very little to no control.

Arno Arrak writes a very long post, of which the following excerpt is probably the gist of it. Step warming happened but it isn't really warming. (My para breaks and bold italics.)

January 3, 2014 at 5:07 pmThis way of calculating temperature is all wrong. What happened is that the 1998 super El Nino brought so much warm water across the ocean that it created a step warming immediately following it. That step warming raised global temperature by 0.3 degrees Celsius and then stopped. This 0.3 degrees rise looked like another El Nino at first but the temperature rise it created became a permanent addition to global temperature, starting with the year 2002. As a result, all 21st century temperatures sit on a high platform created by this step warming. It is a pretty level platform too, judging by the fact that global mean temperature has stayed the same throughout this century.

Just comparing twenty-first to twentieth century temperatures will give the impression that some kind of warming is taking place which is wrong. Warming did happen but it was a step warming and is over.

But it did leave a permanent imprint on global temperature whose consequences we must account for. It is not clear why the temperature rise it created stayed at that high level instead of going back to the pre-1998 period. Superimposed upon this platform are the 2008 La Nina and the 2010 El Nino that are part of the ENSO oscillation. That super El Nino of 1998 was itself preceded by eighteen years of temperature standstill, just like the one we have now.

Hansen noticed the temperature increase and pointed out that the ten warmest years all happened in the twenty-first century. He was right of course but he did not understand the role of the step warming and jumped to the conclusion that CO2 was responsible.

The super El Nino and its aftermath are a climate mystery that should have been intensely investigated. Nothing like this has happened for more than a century. Instead we see billions of dollars wasted on trying to prove greenhouse warming which does not exist. These “experts” controlling the money don’t have a clue about 1998 and its aftermath. Real climate science just does not interest them

You can read more dross at the archived WUWT article.

Vessel trapped off Antarctica - it's a conspiracy, sez anti-science campaigner Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts, conspiracy theorist promoter at WUWT, is now heralding another conspiracy theory.  That there was an international plot to create a blizzard off Antarctica right at the very spot and time when MV Akademik Shokalskiy was most likely to get caught in the pack ice. I gather he believes the plot was hatched by the scientists on the ship, and the captain and his crew were only too willing to participate along with, presumably the Australian and Russian governments, the media and all the passengers.  Anthony reckons it's all a "publicity stunt"!

For more Anthony Watts' conspiracy theories at WUWT, see here and here and here.

Anthony Watts has a habit of capitalising on the misfortune of others

Anthony Watts has a reputation for mocking the misfortune of others to get blog hits and make believe he's "clever".  He downplayed the tragic deaths of thousands of people (latest toll is at least 6,111 people dead and 1,779 still missing) in the deadliest disaster in the Philippines. He tried to downplay the severity of the record-breaking typhoon - in several articles, which in itself shows that the storm was regarded by the rest of the world as a major catastrophe.

The troubles of the ice-bound Australasian Antarctic Expedition are nothing compared to the disaster wrought by Haiyan, but the reaction of Anthony Watts and some of his followers can be put in the same category.

Anthony delights in the misfortune using terms like "circus", "hilarity" in his malicious taunting of the plight of MV Akademik Shokalskiy and the 74 people on board.  Some of his followers have wished the scientists and passengers dead - literally.

Here is the latest from Australia's ABC news.  Here is the live blog from the Guardian.  And for background, here is an interview with Professor Chris Turney on Lateline - from last November; and a link to the expedition website.

This short clip shows, in fast-motion, research on board the Aurora Australis, to give some idea of what scientists do in the oceans around Antarctica:

The video was filmed by Antarctic researcher Dr Frederique Olivier onboard the recent voyage of the Australian Antarctic Division's icebreaker the Research Supply Vessel Aurora Australis.  It encapsulates some of the incredible amount of work undertaken by researchers working in shifts continuously throughout the voyage to learn more about the Antarctic Ocean and its relationship to the rest of Earth's environment.

It's a Russian/Australian conspiracy, sez Anthony Watts

Back to the plight of MV Akademik Shokalskiy.  Now Anthony has moved to "it's a conspiracy".  Not satisfied with mocking the expedition, cracking jokes, telling fibs and trying to make mileage out of their situation, now he speculates that being trapped in ice was a "publicity stunt" (archived here, latest update here):

Now, with such a fantastic failure in full world view, questions are going to start being asked. For example, with advanced tools at their disposal (that Mawson never had) such as near real-time satellite imaging of Antarctic sea ice, GPS navigation, on-board Internet, radar, and satellite communications, one wonders how these folks managed to get themselves stuck at all. Was it simple incompetence of ignoring the signs and data at their disposal combined with “full steam ahead” fever? Even the captain of the Aurora Australis had the good sense to turn back knowing he’d reached the limits of the ship on his rescue attempt.  Or, was it some sort of publicity stunt to draw attention? If it was the latter, it has backfired mightily.

I'm not quite sure why he thinks that all that equipment can accurately predict the future and even  if it did give an indication they were about to be hemmed in by sea ice, how the captain and navigator could have avoided it.  Nor how Anthony is so convinced that no sea-going vessels ever gets into strife, given all that equipment.

As you can see, Anthony also doubles down on his disinformation, calling the scientific expedition a "nothing more than a party":

And when the trip is nothing more than a party for your friends and media, disguised as a “scientific expedition”, one wonders if there shouldn’t be some moratorium on such trips.

That means that he regards the scientists here and here and here are mere party-goers. Not only that but Anthony Watts regards any reporting of science and nature as frivolous frippery.  Anthony cannot abide science or nature.

How ships get stuck in thick ice

Sea ice moves.  It is blown by the wind.  I'm not an expert on the Antarctic or sea ice, but here is some information I've gathered from various places:

First, a short description of what happened to Shackleton's Endurance, in 1915, from Wikipedia:

On January 18 the gale began to moderate and Endurance set the topsail with the engine at slow. The pack had blown away. Progress was made slowly until hours later Endurance encountered the pack once more. It was decided to move forward and work through the pack, and at 5pm Endurance entered it. However it was noticed that this ice was different from what had been encountered before. The ship was soon amongst thick but soft brash ice. The ship became beset. The gale now increased its intensity and kept blowing for another six days from a northerly direction towards land. By January 24, the wind had completely compressed the ice in the whole Weddell Sea against the land. Endurance was icebound. All that could be done was to wait for a southerly gale that would start pushing, decompressing and opening the ice in the other direction. Instead the days passed and the pack remained unchanged.

Endurance drifted for months beset in the ice in the Weddell Sea. The changing conditions of the Antarctic spring brought such pressure that Endurance was crushed over the period from October 27, 1915. On the morning of November 21, 1915, the Endurance's bow began to sink under the ice and it was abandoned. [2]

Here is a video taken from a ship going through pack ice in the Arctic. The sea ice moves on the ocean and different bits crash into each other, piling up.  This video is just normal ice motion, it's not pack ice being blown in one direction, packed tightly by the strong winds off East Antarctica and thickening around a ship:

The Arctic is mostly ocean surrounded by land.  In the Antarctic it's the opposite.  It's a large continent surrounded by ocean.  This raises the matter of fast ice.

As Alok Jha, science correspondent at the Guardian who is on the ship, wrote a couple of days ago:

We arrived at Commonwealth Bay more than a week ago, dropping anchor at the edge of a glistening sheet of fast ice – so called because it is stuck fast to the edge of the land mass of Antarctica. In front of us was an alien landscape of pure, flat white. The expedition's scientists began their work. 

After Commonwealth Bay, the ship continued to follow the path of the Mawson expedition and set off for the Mertz Glacier. It got as far as Cape de la Motte.  As Alok Jha wrote in the same article:

We are at Cape de la Motte in East Antarctica, on our way to the Mertz glacier, in a sea covered in ice floes up to four metres thick and several years old, making them dense and tough. Winds have pushed these floes towards the Antarctic mainland and pinned us in. The Xue Long arrived on Friday evening and spent 12 hours pushing its way through the dense ice before its captain decided enough was enough. We were only two nautical miles from the ocean before Christmas, but that distance has now swelled to around 20 nautical miles as the blizzards and winds have continued. If the joint efforts of the Aurora Australis and Xue Long don't work, the only other option will be to evacuate the ship by air, though this would be the absolute worst case scenario.

This is a map showing where the ship is now:

Fast ice is stuck to the land, the ice pack isn't.  Winds have pushed the pack ice towards the coast, trapping the ship.  And it's got worse.  Not only has the ice covered more of the ocean, blocking any route in or out, it's being compressed and is getting thicker as the wind keeps pushing the pack ice against itself.  It has nowhere to go so it banks up. The latest is that the ice around the ship is three to four metres thick.  Too thick for any ice-breaker and the pressure could be too thick for the ship to survive intact, though I don't know about the latter.  The ship is designed for the Arctic and Antarctic.

Anthony Watts' conspiracy theory

Anthony Watts prefers a conspiracy theory.  He speculated: Or, was it some sort of publicity stunt to draw attention?

That would have required some or all of the following:

• An international conspiracy involving Russia and Australia with or without the connivance of governments of nations whose citizens are part of the expedition
• Foreknowledge of the change in wind and how it would blow the pack ice forcing it to bank up around the ship and the coast
• The ship's captain being central to the conspiracy - willingly, by coercion or by enticement such as bribery
• The ships crew being complicit and following the Captain's orders
• The scientists being willing to put their own lives and that of their colleagues, passengers, and the ship's crew at risk
• The scientists having at their disposal the means by which to coerce (by brute force, bribery or other means) the ship's captain to deliberately put himself, his crew, all his passengers and his ship in harm's way
• The scientists being so all-powerful that they could control the winds of the Antarctic and the sea ice.

WUWT-ers are willing to believe that Adelaide scientist Tom Wigley rules the world, with or without Kevin Trenberth, who they believe is arguably the most politically powerful climate scientist on earth. So it should come as no surprise that Anthony Watts' followers would swallow his yarn that one or two scientists can force the captain of a Russian ship and command the winds of the Antarctic to trap their ship behind 20  nautical miles of ice.

As others have pointed out, Anthony knows almost nothing about science and less about Antarctica.  Do you recall when he wrote about UHI disease in remote Antarctica, claiming that rising temperatures in Antarctica were caused by a couple of researchers freezing their butt off in a remote temporary camp, thousands of kilometres from the weather station?

Why didn't Anthony do any research on the subject of sea ice in Antarctica?  That should be obvious.  If he had he wouldn't have been able to spin his malicious yarns.

And does he really think that the captain of the Russian-flagged ship would deliberately get stuck in ice that is now 3 to 4 meters thick and risk it being destroyed on purpose?  Does he really think that scientists can command the winds around the Antarctic coastline? Perhaps he thinks that the scientists or passengers forced the Captain just so that he, Anthony Watts, could mock the fact that the ship got stuck in ice in a world that is warming.  Probably not.  He doesn't care about such matters.  All he cares about is trashing science and scientists and thereby getting the lowest of the low readers to his blog.

Other ships that have been trapped or sunk by Antarctic ice

Many ships have been trapped by ice in the Antarctic.  This vessel is by no means unique.  Here are just a few examples:

In January 1986, the british Antarctic expedition ship, Southern Quest, "sank in the Ross Sea Saturday night, trapped and crushed by pack ice while on its way to pick up three men who spent a year walking and skiing to the South Pole".  This was a private expedition and the aftermath is described here by John Elder.

In November 2009, a tourist ship, the Russian ice-breaker Kapitan Khlebnikov, was trapped by ice in the Antarctic for several days.  It included a BBC team who were filming for the well-known documentary "Frozen Planet".

Several fishing vessels have been sunk in Antarctic waters.  Did they, too, do it "as a publicity stunt"?

And of course there are the pioneering expeditions that battled the perils of the Antarctic waters.

How this ship got trapped

Early reports suggest the ship became trapped because the wind pushed the pack ice toward the fast ice and when it could move no further it piled up.  There will be a report of the events prepared by AMSA and maybe others after the dust has settled.  I'll leave it to the experts to apportion blame to the captain, crew, passengers, scientists, the media, global warming, WUWT's coming ice age, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth, Al Gore, the IPCC, the UN, Agenda 21 or the fickleness of Antarctic weather - in whatever proportion they see fit.

All I can say is that I expect the scientific team, the captain and crew and the passengers to come out looking a whole lot better than the despicable reaction of Anthony Watts and his anti-science fans.  It's not just good people who look like saints compared to Anthony Watts.  A lot of villains in the world would appear to smell of roses if put next to the people who worship anti-science.

Worth a "Sticky"

Anthony has made his mocking article a "sticky" to make sure his readers can see just how clever and insightful he is.  How you can't fool Anthony Watts.  This is probably what he and his nasty followers think:

Credit: Gabby's Playhouse

Addendum: I'd say this little section had a prophetic component.  Anthony has put up a detailed analysis of his blog stats for the year.  Do they "prove" he is "right"?  ha ha ha. (His article is archived here.  I can't be bothered archiving his actual report.  If readers are interested please make a request in the comment section and I'll make a copy and post a link.)

Meanwhile, in other news

From India:

Survivors of the flash floods in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in north India are still recovering from the calamity, six months on.
The floods, which has also been called the Himalayan Tsunami, left over 1,000 dead and more than 6,500 missing.

In Indonesia:

Around 18,000 people in western Indonesia have had to leave their homes after two rivers burst their banks and flooded thousands of houses, an official said.

In the Pilbara, Western Australia:

Authorities are assessing the damage after Tropical Cyclone Christine brought torrential rain and destructive winds to Western Australia's Pilbara, with residents of one town saying it was the worst in memory.

In the UK

A record number of women have appeared in the Queen's New Year's honours list...Some 1,195 people have received an award this year, and for the first time since the list was founded in 1917 there were more women (51 per cent) named than men.

(Oops - that's not terribly relevant, is it.)

From the WUWT comments

Anthony Watts really does bring out the nastier of the nasties. The worst of the comments are on his previous articles (eg as archived here, but the site seems to be slow at the moment) and are not suitable for printing on HotWhopper.  For readers who have a strong stomach comments on this latest WUWT diatribe are archived here at webcitation.org and updated here at archive.is, latest here.

Michael Ronayne says:

December 30, 2013 at 10:47 am
Question: What do you call a ship load of trapped Global Cooling Deniers who are in danger of freezing to death?
Answer: A good start!

Man Bearpig says:

December 30, 2013 at 11:14 am
This must have been the best entertainment that Penguins and Seals have seen in a long time.

Dobes says:

December 30, 2013 at 11:28 am
Why is it such a surprise the people who routinely ignore real world observation are stuck in a real world observation. I’m sure their models said the ice wasn’t there

David Becker is "not sure" about Adelie penguins being near people in Antarctica says:

December 30, 2013 at 11:28 am
The penguins in the first photo appear to be photoshopped in. I am not sure there would be a bunch of penguins right at the location at which the ship is stuck, unless they were just having a good laugh. (I will look at later pictures for a sad polar bear, just in case the biologists aboard are as competent as the “climate scientists.”)

I wonder how all these photos were taken if not by people.


Leo G gets into the spirit of Anthony's festivities and says:

December 30, 2013 at 8:14 pm
Have I got this right? A pair of Australian professors whose names sound like Christmas Turkey and Fogwilly use research funds to organise a tourist trip PR stunt in Antarctica by chartering a ship with a name that sounds like MV Academic Shocks-are-likely. A bipolar expedition?

En Passant notices the wealth of material at WUWT for psychologists and, contributing to it, says:

December 30, 2013 at 8:12 pm
At any moment Professor Lewandowsky (formerly of the University of WA and now of Bristol University) will issue a peer/pal reviewed paper entitled “Cognitive dissonance of Deniers mocking heroic CAGW pseudo-scientists trapped in global warming ice”
I cannot wait.

One interesting point of dissonance is that before they set off Professor Turkey blogged that Commonwealth Bay has been blocked for the past three years by a giant (75-mile long) iceberg that has lodged there. If he already knew that, how did this Band of Boonies intend to land? A Moses act of parting the ice and waters perhaps. Yet another mystery to be solved. I mean, Google maps would have told them it was a bad idea before they set off with my taxes in their pockets.

Let’s hope the UNSW picks up the costs as this will mean they have to close some unnecessary departments (probably medicine, engineering and physics) as this disaster shows just how important the Department of Climate Mythology really is.

Frank Kotler apparently thinks that Douglas Mawson is okay but people adding to his legacy of scientific observations are not okay, and says:

December 30, 2013 at 11:29 am
Rather arrogant for these folks to compare themselves to Douglas Mawson, IMO. Mawson was apparently a rugged guy, but he lost two crew members and nearly died himself. I guess if no one dies in this fiasco, it proves “global warming”. “Global Warming is real and dangerous.” Okay, scratch “dangerous”. “Global Warming is real and a lifesaver!” How’s thar?

Talk about deluded deniers. Gail Combs is vying for the dual awards of "biggest loonie" and "nastiest web denizen" and talks of "spin".  At the same time she is blaming the scientists on the vessel for "food riots in over 60 countries", the "real deaths of thousands in the UK" and potentially causing early deaths of millions". She says of the scientists and passengers (excerpt - with my bold italics):

December 30, 2013 at 5:55 pm
I have every sympathy for the crews and I hope like heck the Russian skipper and his 17 volunteers makes it out alive. The others, given their attitude, I have no sympathy for what’s so ever.

These are not a bunch of innocent befuddled tourists but a bunch of campaigning activists who combined with their brethren have cause food riots in over 60 countries (2008 biofuel -food crisis) the real deaths of thousands in the UK (fuel poverty), not to mention undermining the economies of several nations and potentially causing the suffering and early deaths of not thousands but millions.

If Mother Nature wants to deliver a hard object lesson to activists so be it.

The unfortunate problem is they will just find a way to spin it.

DirkH and Mervyn are busy building up their reputations as a Conspiracy Theorists First Class:

December 30, 2013 at 6:55 pm
Mervyn says: December 30, 2013 at 6:20 pm
“The media are doing an atrocious job reporting the truth about this ‘expedition’ ”

You are doing them injustice. The media are doing a splendig job lying about this expedition.

You have to know the job description.

Not all of Anthony's science deniers are getting completely caught up in Anthony Watts' hysteria.  Laurie says:

December 30, 2013 at 9:01 pm
I don’t see these people as enemies… just wrong thinking. The ice? Well, it was there and someone made a mistake. I don’t really care how they want to spin this when it’s over. I would just like to see them all safe. Ignorant and safe is …okay. Truth will win out in the end.

I wonder if this latest episode at WUWT will make anyone reassess their rejection of science and reconsider their opinion of Anthony Watts?

Abrupt climate change at #AGU13 but still no reporting @wattsupwiththat from Anthony Watts

I made time this morning to watch some of the talks at the AGU Fall Meeting.  There was a particularly interesting segment on abrupt climate change.

Sea level rise with Richard Alley in Greenland and Antarctica

It started with a talk by Richard Alley who manages to be forceful about the need to take note of the science in a very engaging way.  (He's also recognised as the only climate scientist who can use the Comic Sans font and get away with it.)

Richard Alley spoke about the potential for abrupt sea level rise, particularly if the ice in Western Antarctica breaks down.  He pointed out that with the pace of change we're forcing, we're in unknown territory.  It reminded me of the Hansen et al paper in PLOS that was published earlier this month.

Richard Alley impresses with his message, like when he spoke of Hurricane Sandy and said in his slow understated way: "So when it comes fast, it's a bad thing." And then said how the sea level rise has not been fast - yet. Later on he put up these sea level projections - with some estimates a bit higher than in the IPCC report:

Richard Alley took a shot at economists who underplay the problems, too. I'm sure they know who they are. Then he got to the big question: What will the ice sheets do?

Thermal expansion alone will result in about 0.4 m (a foot) per degree Celsius.  But that, he said, is a "thousand year problem" because it takes a long time to warm the ocean.  It's the ice sheets that are the biggest problem in the near term.  As Richard Alley said, the uncertainty is "lopsided on the bad side".  In short, the Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers in Antarctica are flowing quickly but they've got to get through a narrow neck.  If that neck gets unblocked then we're in unknown territory. The ice there represents around 3.3 metres or 10 feet of sea level rise.  It's "jammed up behind a narrow mouth".  Richard said if it retreats "we get into physics that we don't really know what to do with yet".  Ice exhibits tipping behaviour.  Nothing happens for a while then all of a sudden....

Megadroughts and food shortages

There were some other excellent talks in the session on abrupt climate change, including a session on megadroughts - which can occur with or without AGW which is a big worry.  It's like we're daring nature to do her worst.  And a talk about food security and the sort of perils we are likely to have to deal with on that score this century, including the fact that we're soon going to be calling for genetic modification because conventional plant breeding just won't produce the results we need in a changing climate quickly enough.

All up a very informative day and all from the comfort of my home.

How did Anthony Watts fare?

Well, after Day Three there is still no evidence that Anthony Watts has seen anything he's capable of reporting on at the AGU Fall Meeting.  He did manage to muscle a handshake with a real scientist and passed another one he recognised in the corridor.  And he got to ask James Hansen a question, but we don't know the answer.

I get the feeling that Anthony Watts wants to be acknowledged in some way by "famous climate scientists". It might even be the reason he went to AGU13.  On the other hand he has to keep up his image with the denialati and maintain his rage at climate science and his mocking stance towards those same "famous climate scientists" - like his tweet about a slide from Richard Alley's talk this morning.

Given Anthony hasn't been able to produce any actual reporting or commentary like he promised, and he's had no luck getting any attention from anyone who's at AGU for the science, I wonder if this is the last time he'll venture into the lions' den or was it a den of thieves?

Of course he might surprise us and, using the video camera he has in a box, provide some polished in-depth interviews with some of the world's leading scientists who attended AGU13.  I won't hold my breath.

(I just watched Sharknado which, as everyone knows, was caused by climate change.  It was at least as credible as most of the comments at WUWT!)

AGU Fall Meeting 13 #AGU13: Post-glacial rebound; Earthquakes and Disaster Preparedness; The Coldest Place on Earth

I've been watching some of the AGU videos.  This is a tiny selection.

Rebound: An Earth Story

This video won the AGU student video contest this year.  It's about post-glacial isostatic rebound and presented in a very engaging way.

Here is how Meg Rosenburg, the creator, describes it:

My submission is an education video about glacial isostatic adjustment, why we have glacial and interglacial periods, how we can reconstruct climate history, and how the Earth is responding to the retreat of the continental glaciers. I found that this topic brings together a lot of different areas of study relevant to AGU, from geophysics, to orbital mechanics, to geochemistry.

Public Lecture: Imagine America without Los Angeles - Dr Lucy Jones

Dr Lucy Jones gives a very informative public lecture and I expect it will interest disaster planners all around the world.  She talks about what to expect with a major earthquake along the San Andreas fault. It is a very comprehensive presentation. She discusses impacts on and preparedness of utilities, such as in response to interruptions to water, transport and communication.  She also discusses building codes and what proportion of buildings will be useable afterwards, if there is a major earthquake.  Lucy Jones gives examples of past events in California as well learnings from recent events around the world, such as earthquakes in Christchurch and Chile.

Even if you don't live in an earthquake zone, you or people you know may well live in a region that could or has had to recover from a major disaster such as floods, fires, landslides, tornadoes, hurricanes or cyclones. This video is relevant to all of these.  You'll probably be prompted to check your [fill in the gap] disaster plan after watching this video. (You'll have to log into AGU to see this one.  I don't think it's up on YouTube.)

Taking Landsat to the Extreme: The coldest place on Earth

By now you've probably read how NSIDC scientists have used Landsat 8 to discover the "coldest place on Earth" at minus 93.2 degrees Celsius.  It's been all over the news and all over Twitter today. (It even made it to WUWT where the poor darlings are feeling so persecuted they decided that "cold" = "no-one in the mainstream media will talk about it"!)

Here is the AGU Fall Meeting presentation by Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) describing the discovery using Landsat 8.

The NASA video below is included in the above presentation.  It shows where these coldest temperatures were observed and how it came to be so cold.

And here is a short NASA video in HD, which Ted Scambos also includes in his presentation.  It explains diagramatically how those very low temperatures come about.

That's probably enough for one blog post.  There is just so much to see at AGU13 - on all sorts of Earth science topics.

How to see the AGU13 videos

In case you missed it, the steps to getting access to the AGU13 on-demand videos are listed in my previous article   It's a bit fiddly to get through to them but well worth the effort.

Here is the schedule for the live #AGU13 videos. I don't know if they will all be made available on demand, so if there's something you want to see best set your alarm clock :)

Flashback to 1909: Professor Skeats on CO2 and water vapour acting as "a kind of a blanket"

Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931)

Tuesday 30 March 1909

Assuming then, that the astronomers' contention is correct, what other phenomena may have existed in bygone ages to enable vegetation to flourish in the South Polar regions?

I apprehend two other contingencies which might have modified the South Polar climate in bygone ages. In the first place, changes in Earth's crust, which, geographically speaking, are a constant factor, may have been of such a nature as to modify the direction of ocean, winds and currents, so that the climate of the region has passed from a temperate one into its present frigid conditions.

'A second alternative,' continued the Professer, 'depends upon possible atmospheric changes. There are, in fact, two gases suspended in the earth's atmospheric envelope, which have a most pronounced effect upon climatic conditions. These are aqueous vapor and carbonic acid gas.'

'How do these affect climate?'

'These gases act as a kind of blanket, and while transparent to heat coming from the sun, are relatively opaque to heat rising from the earth. They tend, in fact, to check radiation.'

'If these atmospheric conditions had obtained, what deductions do you make from them?'

'On the assumption that the atmospheric envelope contained an abnormal amount of these two gases, the temperature of the whole earth would have risen in consequence, and conditions would conceivably have existed at the South Pole quite consistent with extensive plant and animal life. The samples of coal brought home will, however, be required to be carefully examined before it can be accurately ascertained if tropical or sub-tropical conditions ever existed at the South Pole.'

In conclusion, Professor Skeats stated that a rise in temperature of a comparatively few degrees Fahrenheit would suffice to seriously modify climatic conditions right down to the Pole itself.

Ernest Willington Skeats

Source: The University of Melbourne

From the Australian Dictionary of Biography:

Ernest Willington Skeats (1875-1953), geologist, was born on 1 November 1875 at Berais Town, Southampton, England, son of Frank George Skeats, bank clerk, and his wife, Alice Erena, née Martin. Educated at Handel and Hartley colleges, Southampton, he entered the Royal College of Science, London, in 1893 with a studentship, receiving a first-class associateship in chemistry (1896) and geology (1897). He graduated from the University of London (B.Sc., 1st-class honours, 1899; D.Sc., 1902), with a thesis entitled 'The chemical composition of limestones from upraised coral islands, with notes on their microscopical structures'. He became a demonstrator in geology at the Royal College in 1897.

Skeats's early research work, which established his reputation as a petrologist, centred on the chemical and microscopical characteristics of limestones and particularly on the origin of dolomite. He studied samples from several Pacific islands and undertook field and laboratory studies on the stratigraphy and origin of the Dolomites of the Southern Tyrol. Using his work and that of others on modern coral reefs as a basic for comparison, he was able to show that the Dolomites owed their origin to ancient coral reefs and had undergone changes similar to those affecting modern reefs.

Appointed to the chair of geology and mineralogy in the University of Melbourne in 1904 as successor to J. W. Gregory, Skeats served as dean of the faculty of science in 1910-15 and was president of the Professorial Board in 1922-24. He retired in 1941 as professor emeritus.

In Australia he chiefly studied the petrology of igneous rocks, particularly those of Victoria. He published papers on the Devonian volcanics and granites of Central Victoria, the Cambrian basic lavas of Heathcote, the basic dyke rocks, and the Tertiary volcanic rocks of central and eastern Victoria, particularly the alkali lavas. For his scientific work he received the first award of the Daniel Pidgeon Fund from the Geological Society of London (1903), the (W. B.) Clarke medal of the Royal Society of New South Wales (1929), and the Mueller medal from the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (1937).

Skeats's research interests were reflected in the work of his postgraduate students, who concentrated mainly on petrological studies, often following on from his own pioneering work. He insisted on clarity and simplicity in research reports and encouraged publication of results. Under his leadership, the department won an international reputation as a specialist school in igneous petrology and petrography and his students, who included F. L. Stillwell and H. C. Richards, rose to high positions in the Commonwealth Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Australian universities, and in Geological Surveys in Africa and India.

A benevolent autocrat, who ran an extraordinarily neat and efficient department, Skeats was genuinely interested nevertheless in the welfare of his staff and their families and his students. He had a ready wit and a great love for Gilbert and Sullivan operas, which he played and sang by heart whenever he had occasion, particularly on student excursions. In his youth he played Association football, as captain of the Royal College of Science team in 1895-97. In Melbourne he took an interest in Australian Rules football, was an avid cricket fan and served as president of the university sports union from 1920 to 1941.

Outside the university, Skeats was active in scientific circles at local and national levels. A council-member of the Royal Society of Victoria from 1906 until his death, he served as vice-president (1908-09), president (1910-11) and trustee (1929-53). He was president of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (1924-25), a councillor for many years and elected honorary member in 1952. A founder of the Australian National Research Council (1919), he was for many years Victorian representative. He was president of section C (Geology) of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science in 1909. In 1925 he served on the projects and finance committee for the foundation of C.S.I.R., and after its establishment in 1926 chaired its mineragraphic committee.

Skeats died, childless, on 20 January 1953 at Glen Iris and was cremated. He had married, first, Mary de Fraine Whitaker (d.1932) on 23 December 1904 at Croydon, Surrey, England, and, second, a widow Anne Sheppard, née Hayes, on 4 May 1940 in Melbourne. Following the death of his wife on 18 June 1967 his estate, valued for probate at £37,617, was shared equally between the Royal Society of Victoria, the Geological Society of London, and the University of Melbourne, which also holds a portrait by Max Meldrum.

Other Flashbacks

Click here for more flashbacks relating to climate and earth science from the National Library of Australia.

The sound of ice doesn't register at WUWT

Anthony Watts, who runs a popular pseudo-science blog known as WUWT, doesn't want to believe that ice melts as the world warms up.  On more than one occasion Anthony's loudly proclaimed that seas won't rise any faster than they have been.  He seems to think that ice doesn't melt in the heat.

Icy Bay Alaska
Credit: US National Park Service

Sound has its own story to tell

Today Anthony Watts is trying to turn up the heat even more, with an article about "emotifying" melting ice.  Anthony picked up one word from a press release and blew it out of all proportion.  (The WUWT article is archived here.) The word was in this sentence:

While the symphony of melting ice might not carry the same emotional wallop as images, sound still has its own, sometimes very loud, story to tell. 

Anthony got hung up on the word "emotional" and downplayed the "story to tell".

Today's serving for his readers to wail and gnash their teeth over is work by Erin Pettit of the Glaciers Group at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  She wanted to see if the sounds made by ice could be used to monitor ice melting.  She sent some ice down to acoustic experts in Texas and they recorded video and audio of the ice melting and matched the sounds to the bubbles escaping.

Noisy glacial fjords

From Science Daily:

“If you were underneath the water in a complete downpour, with the rain pounding the water, that’s one of the loudest natural ocean sounds out there,” she said. “In glacial fjords we record that level of sound almost continually.”

While Pettit suspected the din was caused by melting ice, she couldn’t confirm that hypothesis without a more controlled experiment. So she enlisted the help of Kevin Lee and Preston Wilson, acoustics experts from the University of Texas. Pettit sent the Texas researchers chunks of glacier, which they mounted in a tank of chilled water. Lee and Wilson recorded video and audio of the ice as it melted and were able to match sounds on the recording to the escape of bubbles from the ice.

“Most of the sound comes from the bubbles oscillating when they’re ejected,” Lee said. “A bubble when it is released from a nozzle or any orifice will naturally oscillate at a frequency that’s inversely proportional to the radius of the bubble,” he said, meaning the smaller the bubble, the higher the pitch. The researchers recorded sounds in the 1 – 3 kilohertz range, which is right in the middle of the frequencies humans hear.

The abstract of the paper concludes that passive acoustic measurements can be used to monitor melting of marine glaciers.

Acoustic events and diurnal cycle in Icy Bay, Alaska

While I wasn't able to access this latest paper, I did find an earlier paper (2012) by Erin Pettit, Jeffrey Nystuen and Shad O'Neel in the journal Oceanography.  In this paper they discuss acoustics of ice melt.  Here is Figure 1 from that paper, which shows sound pressure and changes (including diurnal patterns) in a tidewater glacial fjord.  As always, click to enlarge it:

In this earlier paper, the authors made three points about the potential this work has in regard to glaciology and oceanography (my paras):

The character of these sounds and their temporal and spatial variations provide constraints on three glacier-ice-ocean processes that previously proved difficult to quantify.

• First, from small subaerial splashes to the largest full-thickness events, iceberg calving generates acoustic energy. Quantitative resolution of this process is important because calving can affect upstream dynamics, trigger disintegration of a floating ice shelf, or induce acceleration of grounded ice, contributing to sea level rise. 

• Second, acoustic observations may be useful for quantifying the submarine melt rate of ice at the terminus of a glacier or in a sub-ice-shelf cavity, which is a critical boundary condition for modeling both ice flow and ocean water circulation.

• Finally, acoustic measurements have potential to resolve variability in freshwater discharge from the subglacial hydrological system, a process that to date has completely evaded direct, quantitative measurement. Observations of sediment-laden upwelling plumes at calving margins qualitatively confirm that rivers, similar to those emanating from land-terminating glaciers, exist underneath marine-terminating glaciers. The discharge from these subglacial rivers has a diurnal cycle with occasional floods due to drainage of upstream supraglacial or subglacial lakes (Fountain and Walder, 1998).

Acoustic monitoring in the Antarctic

The paper also states that acoustics are now being used in Antarctica in the Larsen A Embayment, saying how it makes it easier to study glacier ice melts:

As this article went to press, RVIB Nathaniel B. Palmer was deploying the first hydrophone in the Larsen A Embayment (results expected in mid-2013), leveraging the efficient sound transmissions of water to study a challenging process from an easier vantage point.

Ice is alive! Erin Pettit on Antarctic ice shelves

Here is a National Geographic video with Erin Pettit, talking about Antarctic ice.  Do watch it.  It's a brilliant presentation.  It includes the sounds of ice calving and what a whale hears.  (There could hardly be a bigger contrast between science and the ignorant WUWT articles and comments as copied below.)

Girls on Ice

Erin Pettit seems like a wonderful role model for young girls.  She established a program for girls in high school - Girls on Ice.

Each year two teams of 9 teenage girls and 3 instructors spend 11 days exploring and learning about mountain glaciers and the alpine landscape through scientific field studies with professional glaciologists, ecologists, artists, and mountaineers. One team explores Mount Baker, an ice-covered volcano in the North Cascades of Washington State. The other team sleeps under the midnight sun exploring an Alaskan glacier.

From the WUWT comments

After all that wonderful science I hesitate to refer to the dark, dismal world of anti-science disinformation and denial. I'll not be deterred though.  If only one person can see the contrast between people who disdain science and real science done by real scientists in remote and dangerous parts of the world.  If just one person changes their mind and can see just how wretched are WUWT and its silly fans, then it will be worth it.

The comments at WUWT generally complied with Anthony Watts' intentions.  Most of them haven't bothered to read the article properly or try to understand the research. They are like Pavlov's dogs, responding automatically to WUWT stimuli.

Many of them were arguing how silly all those scientists are to use sound to monitor changes in ice. Others are from Anthony's Scientific Illiterati club who agitate for ignorance and the cessation of all scientific research.  The majority are of the "scientists don't know nuffin' and WUWT armchair pseudo-scientists know-it-all" variety. (Archived here.)


Eyal Porat is an obedient little WUWT-er and utters meaningless and irrelevant denierisms:

December 1, 2013 at 11:50 am
Going from pathetic to utter silliness.
The face of (post)modern science.

Pamela Gray, who has on (very) rare occasions emitted tiny sparks suggesting a well-hidden intelligence, doesn't spark at all this time when she says:

December 1, 2013 at 12:11 pm
I can imagine the next Christmas album filled with Arctic woe against a backdrop of whale songs. So which teary doe-eyed actress will they harness this time to gather our collective grief into the sound of money?

Bob Greene thinks he is being clever and says:

December 1, 2013 at 12:51 pm
The sizzle of melting glaciers? Ice sizzles when it melts? My artillery ears aren’t good enough any more to hear that. There is a before and after picture show of Alaskan glaciers circulating on Facebook. All the glaciers are gone in the after pictures. So, I suppose by around 2005-2006 (date of afters) all the glaciers in Alaska must have melted.

Noah Zark is confused by ice and says:

December 1, 2013 at 12:51 pm
Huh? When I was in Alaska’s Glacier Bay a while back, the Park Rangers aboard the ship explained that the glacier ice was blue because the air had been squeezed from it.
So is this ice from the unsqueezed upper portions of the ice?
Like Bullwinkle, “I’m so confuuuuuuuzed!”

hunter seems to think that scientists who spend money doing research are breaking the law:

December 1, 2013 at 1:08 pm
This is a nice example of how a $ billion per day is being spent on climate.
The rent seeking will not stop until the hypesters are brought to account.

Skeptik adds one-liner to the illiterati sing-a-long and says:

December 1, 2013 at 1:16 pm
How bloody desperate can they get.

alexwade is an illiterati who extols ignorance and deplores scientific research.  Alexwade says:

December 1, 2013 at 1:32 pm
Why stop at sizzling glaciers? Why not go ahead with exploding glaciers. Followed, of course, by the mandatory “it is worse than we thought” pronouncement and “more money is required” statement.

Gerry, England is an "ice age comether" but at least he seems to understand a bit of what the scientists are doing and says:

December 1, 2013 at 1:39 pm
Recording the sound of rapid arctic ice regrowth and of record antarctic ice growth will be really useful too, surely?

james griffin is of the "scientists don't know nuffin'" variety and says:

December 1, 2013 at 2:13 pm
One suspects they have never checked the daily sea ice graphs….around the same average as 79-08.

This is for james griffin:

Data source: Polar Research Group, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Louis says "those scientists don't know what they are doing":

December 1, 2013 at 2:36 pm
Does water also make sounds when it freezes? If so, is there a way to measure which sound predominates during the course of the year? Only recording the sound of ice when it melts is like only recording the temperature when it goes up.

tty says "scientists don't know nuffin'" and "don't they know that ice makes noise". Well, tty, that's precisely what they are measuring!  As for "having to hang around in the cold" - it was when she was kayaking in the frigid waters in the far north that Erin Pettit came up with the idea of using sound to monitor changes in the ice.  How does tty think they are going to monitor the sounds if they don't do it where the ice is?  By telepathy? (tty needs to watch that National Geographic video.)

December 1, 2013 at 2:46 pm
Oh my god, what idiots. This is about the silliest ”scientific discovery” I have ever heard of. Everyone who has ever been near a glacier calving in water is familiar with this sound. By the way it’s not so much a “fizzing” as an endless series of little pops. The gas bubbles in glacier ice are under considerable pressure and burst as the ice melts.

Incidentally this has nothing to do with the sounds that moving sea ice and lake ice makes. That is a quite remarkable variety of booming, groaning and roaring sounds. Sometimes they can be rather beautiful and they certainly have a lot more “emotional wallop” than the popping of glacier ice which is about as exciting as listening to a newly opened soda bottle. However You have to hang around in the cold until they happen to record them so they are probably less popular “research objects”.

Bill Illis says there's "nothing to worry about" (extract):

December 1, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Why are people so upset about some melting glaciers. What exactly lives on glaciers. Nothing.

Gerry Dorrian says "it's not science".  And he gets hold of the wrong end of the stick with his "emotify".  The press release said it "might not carry the same emotional wallop as images", not that it does.

December 1, 2013 at 3:02 pm
Making one sound that is similar to another isn’t science, it’s what special effects technicians do for a living. I can understand why they want to “emotify” the issue, though: strong emotional content engages the limbic system to the expense of the executive frontal cortex – ie histrionics turns off thinking.

Katherine hasn't bothered to figure out what the scientists are doing, and blithely echoes the "scientists don't know nuffin'" meme:

December 1, 2013 at 3:25 pm
They didn’t know ice pops and crackles?! I hear it every time I put an ice cube in a hot drink. Talk about stating the obvious in research.

---

Lee, K. M., P. S. Wilson, and E. C. Pettit. "Underwater sound radiated by bubbles released by melting glacier ice." The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 134, no. 5 (2013): 4172-4172. doi: 10.1121/1.4831292

Pettit, Erin C., Jeffrey A. Nystuen, and Shad O'Neel. "Listening to Glaciers: Passive Hydroacoustics Near Marine-Terminating Glaciers." Oceanography 25 (2012). DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2012.81

May I call Poe in Greenland? More denier weirdness at WUWT

Anthony Watts has posted an article (archived here) about the new discovery of two lakes under the ice sheet in north west Greenland.  The paper is by a team led by Steven J. Palmer of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge.  It's published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) and is available on-line (open access).

The lakes are about 500 m above sea level, right up in the north west corner.  The radar transect shows that Lake 1 (L1) is >1.1 km long and Lake 2 (L2) is > 2.4 km long. The lakes are located in a 980 km2 drainage basin and positioned 16.0 km and 11.5 km from the nearest ice divide, respectively.  The location and other details of the two lakes are shown below. (As always, click the image for a larger view):

Figure 1: Flight-line map and derived bed elevation from NW Greenland. (a) Regional context of the study area shown on a Landsat image acquired on 1 August 2002, showing radar flightlines (red lines), the ice divide (dashed black line) and the settlement of Qaanaaq (white circle). (b) Subglacial bed elevations (colour) derived from airborne ice thickness measurements along flightlines. Black lines delineate contours of basal hydraulic potential, thick black lines show the inferred extent of observed subglacial lakes, and dashed black lines show possible previous larger extent.

Source: Palmer13 GRL

It must feel great to be part of the team that made a new discovery like this one. They've obviously been looking for some time.  I came across another paper in which researchers were predicting where the most likely locations were for lakes in Greenland based on models, but it didn't look as if they had these ones on their radar (so to speak).

Figure 2 in the Palmer paper shows the radar evidence for the lakes.

Figure 2. Radar evidence for subglacial lakes. Radargrams showing data acquired along flightlines labelled in Figure 1, showing subglacial lakes (L1 and L2) on profile A-A’ (GOG2/F04T01a), with bed reflection strength shown below. Areas of sub-horizontal and brightly reflecting bed on profiles B-B’ (20120510_01_035) and C-C’ (20120510_01_074) are indicated by white bars below the radargrams. These areas could indicate the presence of saturated sediment at the bed, and therefore may indicate previous subglacial lake extent.

Source: Palmer13 GRL

As it says in the description above and elsewhere in the paper, the reflectance of the bed suggested to the researchers that the lake may have been larger in the past.  From their paper, they surmise the lakes might previously have been three times larger.

Contrast Greenland lakes with Antarctic subglacial lakes

Unlike the lakes in Antarctica, which as far as I can gather are fully contained under the ice, these Greenland lakes may be being fed by water from the outside, through cracks in the ice and they could be being fed by a nearby surface lake.  Here is an animation of a subglacial lake system in Antarctica for comparison:

As described on YouTube, the animation of subglacial Antarctic lakes shows the "dynamics of subglacial water exchange and what it looks like from space. Starting from an artist's concept of the Antarctic surface we move down to a cross section of the ice sheet with lakes hidden deep beneath. As pressure is exerted on one lake, the water in it is forced to an adjacent lake. This water movement results in elevation changes at the surface over both lakes, detectable by NASA satellites. The camera then moves to a 'top-down' view of a system of these hidden lakes and streams before dissolving into observed satellite data."

And from NASA, which was the source of the animation:

Water moving between subglacial lakes can explain elevation changes in ice stream surfaces. This animation shows modeled behavior of subglacial lakes. Depending on the pressure of overlying ice, water can pool in unusual places. Unlike a water body with no ice overhead, a subglacial lake might form on the top of a hill if it is surrounded by ice that exerts tremendous pressure. 

Another thing is that the ice is 750 m and 809 m thick over the newly discovered Greenland lakes.  Not as thick as the ice over the lakes in Antarctica.  So they are colder.  Apparently ice sheets are coldest near the top and get warmer as you go deeper, being warmed by earth beneath.



You can read more about the discovery in the paper itself or from the press release from Cambridge.

From the WUWT comments

There were a few comments that made me wonder if more people are sending up WUWT.  I'd have said most of them would have had to have been from fake deniers, except for the fact that I recognise the names from other articles.  They range from "scientists don't know nuffin" to individual commenters claiming to know all there is to know about everything - and various in-betweens. (Archived here.)


Latitude didn't read the bit about the lakes lying below about 800 m of ice... (oh, I just noticed Latitude was talking about feet not metres.  How quaint :) So maybe he did read it) ...and says he doesn't believe the scientists when they write that "the newly discovered lakes are most likely fed by melting surface water draining through cracks in the ice", because:

November 27, 2013 at 6:09 pmGreenland is a bowl…and I serious doubt if a “crack” is over 2 thousand 600 feet deep

Michael P thinks there is nothing that can be learnt from any scientific investigation of the lakes because they've been there too long.  He says:

November 27, 2013 at 6:41 pm

“Subglacial lakes are likely to influence the flow of the ice sheet, impacting global sea level change. The discovery of the lakes in Greenland will also help researchers to understand how the ice will respond to changing environmental conditions.”

Discovering the lakes now does not mean they have not been there for centuries or millenia. If the lakes have been there for a long time then they have been influencing the flow of the ice sheet for a long time and will have no added impact to sea levels. The conjecture is stupefying

norah4you hasn't a clue about where the newly discovered lakes are located, and points to a map of the western and southern settlements and says "scientists don't know nuffin":

November 27, 2013 at 7:04 pm
Discovered? Known by historians interested in old maps. Also written about in at least two sources from 12th-14th century. What scientist discovering the lakes don’t seem to know is that the ice above periodically was open, according to one of the sources, before 1341 and that the freezing of thick ice above came very quickly. Same freezing as made ‘Garden under Sandet’ in a few years going from a wealthy farm with lots of animals (stables in building show that) to an under thick ice long forgotten civilisation. Please read: Garden under Sandet, archeurope.com

Here's a map showing the settlements in southern Greenland, which Norah4you pointed to, and the newly discovered lakes.

Sources: North Greenland Ice Core Project (2004) and Archaeology In Europe and Palmer13

Steve Reddish didn't bother to read the paper or he would have found the answer to his first question.  At least he read the press release Anthony posted.  He says:

November 27, 2013 at 7:24 pm

“The two lakes are each roughly 8-10 km2, and at one point may have been up to three times larger than their current size.”

How was it determined that the lakes were previously larger? The “may have” seems to mean that they are guessing.

“The discovery of the lakes in Greenland will also help researchers to understand how the ice will respond to changing environmental conditions.”

Apparently their guess is that global warming is reducing the size of the lakes. Thus these lakes are affecting the flow rate of the ice sheet less and less.
SR

DHF thinks the scientists just made it up:

November 27, 2013 at 11:58 pm
Looks like another hilarious chapter in the climate fiction chronicle.

johnmarshall says all the scientists in Greenland can pack up and go home, because he, johnmarshall, knows everything there is to know about Greenland:

November 28, 2013 at 2:24 am
greenland ice sheet sits in a deep depression in the crust caused by to weight of the ice thus limitig any outward movement. These lakes have been there for thousands of years and have caused no movement to date.

IIRC, Bruce Cobb has been tagged as a scientific illiterati before and shows no sign of changing.  It's hard to tell whether he's arguing that scientists should not look for answers to scientific questions or whether he's arguing that they should, but they should all be of independent means and not only work for no pay, but should finance their own expeditions out of their own pockets. He says:

November 28, 2013 at 4:39 am

“Because the way in which water moves beneath ice sheets strongly affects ice flow speeds, improved understanding of these lakes will allow us to predict more accurately how the ice sheet will respond to anticipated future warming.”

And there it is; the requisite money-grubbing anti-science quote. They don’t have a clue what effect if any, these recently-discovered lakes might have, but the hope appears to be that they’ve discovered some sort of positive feedback, or Trenberth’s infamous “arctic death spiral”.

Dave in Canmore could have read a bit more before writing, but at least his brain seems to be working unlike most of the others at WUWT:

November 28, 2013 at 8:30 am

“The ice in Greenland is also thinner than that in Antarctica, resulting in colder temperatures at the base of the ice sheet. ”

I find this surprising. Antarctica ice thickness is generally >2km thick while Greenland ice thickness is generally >1km. Is there really a difference in insulation between 1km of ice and 2 ?
What’s Up With That?

Jimbo says that these scientists shouldn't be asking and answering questions.  And then proceeds to ask a lot of questions - duh!:

November 28, 2013 at 8:33 am
Why don’t these Calamastrologists just say we discovered a couple of sub-glacial lakes and leave it at that. How do we know these lakes weren’t there in 1900, 1925, 1940 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago? Oh, we do know because they say it might have been larger in the past!!! What does this tell me about the future of the ice sheet? What do they know? Is this just a discovery followed by a whole pile of guesswork?

gymnosperm thinks that experts in the cryosphere are not "serious scientists" and know nothing about ice and says:

November 28, 2013 at 9:04 am

” The thicker Antarctic ice can act like an insulating blanket, preventing the freezing of water trapped underneath the surface.”

Really? All that ice in Greenland isn’t enough “insulation”? These sorts of ad hoc preconceptions have no place in serious science.

Billy Liar must be joking when he says:

November 28, 2013 at 9:41 am
Do they have any evidence that the lakes weren’t there before they just discovered them?
Cambridge was once a great university (pre-AGW).

---

Palmer, Steven J., Julian A. Dowdeswell, Poul Christoffersen, Duncan A. Young, Donald D. Blankenship, Jamin S. Greenbaum, Toby Benham, Jonathan Bamber, and Martin J. Siegert. "Greenland subglacial lakes detected by radar." Geophysical Research Letters (2013). DOI: 10.1002/2013GL058383