Anatomy of Tim Ball's conspiratorial pseudo-science at WUWT

I'm perpetually puzzled by Anthony Watts who at time shows signs that he yearns for respectability, giving voice to Tim Ball, who is by any benchmark an utter nutter loon and conspiracy freak.

Tim Ball in almost every article shows he hasn't left the 1970s. Today he's barely entered it. In the manner of religious fundamentalists, Tim doesn't accept any scientific knowledge that was developed after 1970, and he doesn't accept most science that was developed before then either. He makes up his own from fragments of books written by people he took a fancy to up until he was in his early 30s. (Tim was born in November 1938. Any science done after 1970 doesn't exist in Tim's mind, and most done before 1970 is wrong - in Tim's mind.) Like Peter Pan Tim didn't grow up. He exists in a dark fantasy of his own creation where ogres roam. Tim's ogres include Maurice Strong, an oil industrialist who was Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in the early 1970s, and was the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. If there is one type of person that Tim can't abide (apart from Jews and scientists), it is anyone who thinks it's important to protect our natural world. The list of ogres who roam Tim's nightmares is too long to list here but it includes climate scientists Tom Wigley, Michael Mann, and Andrew Weaver. Tim's heroes include Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden.

Greenland 2015: Anthony Watts denies Arctic amplification

Arctic amplification means that surface temperatures in the high northern latitudes are rising faster than elsewhere. The reasons for this include positive feedbacks from the reduced ice cover as the world heats up.

Anthony Watts has announced that he's an Arctic amplification denier (archived here). He doesn't "believe" this is happening:

Figure 1 | Temperatures anomaly for the period 2001-2015 by latitude. The base period is 1951-1980. The chart clearly shows the Arctic amplification to the right. Data source: GISS NASA

Actually, I don't think Anthony knows what Arctic amplification is. In his blog article at WUWT today, he was writing about a new paper on the Greenland melt of 2015, saying:

And in this case, they are citing a single event to claim “Arctic amplification” has set in. 

There are all sorts of things wrong with that sentence.

Greenland really has been melting, can someone tell Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts has decided once again that he, ex-weather announcer, knows all about ice in Greenland, and the real experts "don't know nuffin'". His headline (archived here) is: "Failed claim right out of the gate: Climate change altering Greenland ice sheet & accelerating sea level rise". And he took it upon himself, the ahem Greenland pseudo-scientist at WUWT, to continue:

From the “why worry, the 99.7% of the ice is still there” department and York University comes this climate claim that has to do with a natural event in 2012, and just doesn’t hold up as being driven by “climate change”. More details on that below.

If 20% of the ice in Greenland melted, there'd be a rise in sea level of about 1.2 metres or 4 feet. But leaving his "why worry" aside, Anthony was protesting a new paper in Nature Climate Change by Horst Machguth and a large team of scientists. The paper was related to the widescale melt of the surface, such as happened in 2012. It's also to do with the overall warming of Greenland and surface melting in general, particularly the implications for melt runoff and sea level rise.

The latest Arctic report card shows that last year (2015), more than half of the ice sheet had a surface melt, which was the most widespread melt since 2012, and was "above the 1981-2010 average on 54.3% of days (50 of 92 days)".

It's not just a random surface melt that ices up again quickly, either. Greenland is losing ice mass, as the chart below (from the same report) shows:

Fig 1. | Cumulative change in the total mass (in Gigatonnes, Gt) of the Greenland Ice Sheet between April 2002 and April 2015 estimated from GRACE measurements. Each symbol is an individual month and the orange asterisks denote April values for reference. Source: Arctic Report Card

Tasteless and ignorant at WUWT: A repugnant combination in denial of rising sea level

Anthony Watts sense of humour would not be shared by most decent people. It might even shock. Today he has copied an ugly cartoon that he said was posted by Rick McKee on Anthony's WUWT Facebook page (archived here). To save you looking, I'll describe it.

The cartoon pictures seven bearded men dressed in gear the colour of the garments worn by Buddhist monks, all wearing a crucifix around their necks. Bearded Christian Buddhists? The men are all kneeling in front of a puddle of water. Behind them is a large figure in black wielding a large knife and wearing a full face mask. That figure is probably meant to signify an ISIS militant. To the right is what I think is meant to be a caricature of President Obama, talking to the kneeling bearded men (I think they are meant to represent journalists brutally beheaded). Underneath is the caption: "I just want you to know I'm throwing the full force of the U.S. military behind stopping the horror of this rising sea level!"

The word "horror" is highlighted in red and underlined.

Anthony thinks this is funny. Seriously. He thinks the brutal murder of journalists in the middle east is cause for mirth and mockery. He put his cartoon under the headline and text:

Friday Funny – the horror of rising sea levels in context

As many know, Mr. Obama made some wild claims about climate at the recent U.S. Coast Guard Academy commencement.

For example:

“The world’s glaciers are melting, pouring new water into the ocean.  Over the past century, the world sea level rose by about eight inches.  That was in the last century; by the end of this century, it’s projected to rise another one to four feet.

Tim Ball does a Denier Don on the top of a very cold ice sheet in Greenland

Globally, what were the coldest 300 years since civilisation? In the past 10,000 years? What were the warmest and what were the coldest and how do they compare to the 21st century. It's an interesting question and one to which there doesn't seem to be a definitive answer. The best answer looks to be the coldest 300 years in the Little Ice Age.

There have not been a lot of attempts to reconstruct global surface temperatures of the entire Holocene. It's tricky. One of the hardest things is getting an indication of what has happened in the southern hemisphere. There's not much land down here compared to the northern hemisphere and the seas are deep. Still, intrepid scientists have been putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

The PAGES 2k Consortium has been working out past temperatures in different parts of the world, and reporting other aspects of past climates. It's an ongoing project.

Marcott13 was a reconstruction that caught the eye of the denialati. I don't know what it was that they didn't like about it but I think it still holds the record for the greatest number of protest articles from deniers in the shortest amount of time. Probably the fact that it showed how warm it's starting to get these days, compared to the past, didn't endear the work to the denialati.

Duet on Ice: More denier silliness at WUWT

This will be short-ish - by HotWhopper standards :). It's about a duo of articles at WUWT. About ice at opposite ends of the earth - Greenland and Antarctica.

Jim Steele's Bold Greenland Prediction

Jim Steele wrote an article (without mentioning Camille Parmesan once!) predicting that Greenland will start accumulating ice next year. He pulled something out of thin (Arctic) air and wrote:

And based on historical analyses, Greenland will likely begin gaining mass in the coming years.

Sea levels and global ice volumes over the past 35,000 years

Comments on this topic are closed. There is a new article on sea level where comments are welcome.

Sou 24 October 2014

---

Anthony Watts has seen fit to post a rather silly comment from Eric Worrall about a new PNAS paper on sea level and ice. Anthony also adds his tuppence-worth. (Archived here.)

The paper is from a team led by Professor Kurt Lambeck of The Australian National University (ANU).

A fascinating journey up and down the seas

What the Kurt Lambeck and his co-authors have done is paint a wonderfully vivid 35,000 year history of changes in sea level and major ice sheets.

It's taken me a while to read the paper. In part because the subject matter is provided in rich detail, and in part because I found it so fascinating. It's extraordinarily well written. The authors have managed to cram a huge amount of information into the few words allowed by PNAS, while writing in a manner that a lay person like myself could understand.

Anthony Watts fails to save face, pretending not to be excited

Remember a couple of days ago how Anthony Watts was itching to "sue the pants off" skeptical science? How he just knew that they were up to something nefarious. How he figured that John Cook and his team were going to defame deniers? (Would that even be possible?)

He was wrong.

To hedge his bets Anthony later added that perhaps they were going to say something about science itself but if they were, they'd do it in Monty Python style like the 10 out of 10 video that some group came up with (not SkepticalScience), which deniers pretend "shock horror" about. He was wrong about that, too.

A failure to predict - and more

In a pathetic attempt to save face, today he wrote:

The latest propaganda stunt from the Skeptical Science Kidz is underway and it is about as exciting as it is predictable. 

If it was as exciting as it was predictable by Anthony, then he's saying he failed to find it exciting just as he failed dismally in his attempt to predict it.

At least he's owning up to his failure to predict. Or did he make another gaffe and was wanting to make out that he did predict it, when he didn't, but messed up and said it was very exciting.

The SkepticalScience initiative was exciting enough for Anthony to write two articles about it, wasn't it.

What other dismal failures does he achieve in his delayed reaction to 97 hours?

Anthony Watts mistakes Greenland for the entire world - and gets even Greenland wrong

Anthony probably likes to think he deceives his readers well. Perhaps he does, but that's because his readers are only too willing to be deceived not because Anthony is any good at deception.

His deception today is that he presents the ice sheet way up on a freezing cold summit in central Greenland as a good proxy for the entire world.  That's as ridiculous as presenting the Simpson Desert as a proxy for the entire world.

Anthony put up a chart of GISP2 temperatures and couldn't even get that right, labeling it as stopping in 2000, when in fact it stopped in 1950 and shows the temperature up to 95 years before 1950. In other words, it doesn't show any temperatures past 1855.

Flawed chart from WUWT, annoted by HotWhopper

See if you can spot other things wrong with the chart. I mean the chart itself, not just the fact that the average global temperature on earth is quite a bit higher than minus 30 degrees Celsius. Or the fact that temperatures in any one spot on land will fluctuate more than the average temperature over the entire earth.

Anthony Watts thinks weather happens by magic

Then Anthony disputes the fact that all weather now is affected by the amount of energy in the system. He seems to think that physics doesn't apply with some weather. Quoting climate scientist Kevin Trenberth, Anthony wrote:

“all weather is now connected to climate change” – Yikes, every cloud is hiding a climate change boogie man now?

Yes, Anthony. If there was less energy in the system then weather would be different. What do you think. Is some weather governed by magic?

Anthony knows he's a loser, so invokes Godwin's Law

Then he sees a Nazi salute in a friendly wave. He wrote:

I had to chuckle though, because the SkS kids went to all this trouble to make this page where when you mouse over one of the cartoon character climate scientists, their arm goes up in the air to say “hey, I’m part of the consensus!”. That sort of high salute reminds me of the Nazi dress up photos we found last year on the Skeptical Science website. 

Can you believe that Anthony sees a Nazi salute in this sort of pose? What a warped mind he must have.

Professor J Marshall Shepherd. Credit: SkepticalScience

The dress up photos he refers to are about how some people at SkepticalScience coped with Anthony Watts and other lowlifes calling them Nazis in the past. Instead of letting it get to them they made light of the disgusting name-calling. In private. On a private website. Then the images were stolen.


Oh, and it looks as if HotWhopper is getting to Anthony too. Excellent!


PS While I was writing this article, readers were commenting about Anthony's recent effort and picked out other points of interest.

From the WUWT comments

biff33 thinks it was predictable. Maybe, but Anthony failed to predict it.

September 8, 2014 at 3:21 am
Don’t you mean as boring as it is predictable?

Kit Carruthers wonders what goes on in Anthony's twisted mind when he sees children waving.

September 8, 2014 at 3:44 am
Anthony, so do school kids remind you of Nazis? They put their hands up too!

knr decides to act the fool and writes:

September 8, 2014 at 3:56 am
Trenberth ‘missing heat ‘ is a result of poor science not of good theory.
For if temperatures had increased in the way they said they would, STELLED SCIENCE, with increases in CO2 , then there would be no need for any ‘missing heat ‘ in the first place . The fact he cannot justify or even remotely prove his ‘missing heat’ idea is the reason why he tried to reverse the null hypothesise in the first place. And approach which results in a total fail for any undergraduate handing in an essay, would seem to be an acceptable standard with climate ‘science’ professionals . And they wonder why they consider a joke. 

Oatley finds it rather odd that Anthony Watts claims the average global temperature of earth is around minus 30 degrees Celsius, and asks:

September 8, 2014 at 4:05 am
Help me understand the RH scale on the graph…

jmrSudbury doesn't comment on Anthony's major mistake, but answers Oatley's question:

September 8, 2014 at 4:50 am
The air temperature of Greenland averages near -30 C. — John M Reynolds

richard verney looks again at Anthony's chart and wonders how the settlers survived in ancient Greenland:

September 8, 2014 at 6:03 am
I do not disagree with your summary of the charts, but is the reconstruction of the past temperatures accurate?

How could the Vikings with their primitive technology (and no mechanical aids such as mini diggers and tractors) have farmed Greenland for a couple of hundred years if the temperatures were only about 1 or so degrees warmer than today? That is the question that should be asked when tuning the proxies.

Where they were located (and I accept that their settlements were not spread right accross Greenland), it must have been about 4 degrees (and possibly more) warmer than it is today, if not just 1 or 2 harsh winter would have wiped them out.

Greg is a bit worried that Anthony Watts is giving publicity to proper science communicators (instead of the usual WUWT fare of paranoid conspiracy theories):

September 8, 2014 at 4:54 am
This is too feeble to even bother trying to counter it.
Don’t flatter thier sorry efforts by reading and commenting on them. 

JLC is baffled that anyone would be interested in what climate scientists have to say about climate. It just goes to show how out of touch with reality are deniers. JLC - most people aren't very interested in the pseudo-science quackery and paranoid conspiracy theories, which is the normal fare at WUWT.

September 8, 2014 at 5:30 am
This baffles me. It might increase the number of hits on their website and entertain the true believers but I can’t see that it would achieve anything else. 

Arctic warming: It's not natural variability, it's all down to soot, sez Anthony Watts at WUWT

In yet another "anything but CO2" article (archived here, latest update here), Anthony Watts wants to blame all the recent warming in Greenland on soot.  He reaches left, right, up and down to get out of carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas and warming the world. Which is pretty funny when he also tries the "I'm a reasonable man, really I am" tack by posting articles where he pretends that he really does think there is such a thing as the greenhouse effect.

What's even funnier is that Anthony is downplaying the role of natural variability in his effort to blame soot for Greenland warming.

Changes in atmospheric circulation caused some of the Arctic warming

Anthony is disputing another Nature paper, this one is about attribution of the causes of the very high amount of warming in Greenland and north eastern Canada. Going by the abstract and the press release, the authors have concluded that up to half the recent warming in Greenland and north eastern Canada may be natural variability. These areas have been warming at around 1° Celsius a decade since 1979, which is about twice that of the global average temperature rise.  The scientists have found that about half of this (0.5° Celsius a decade) is related to changes in atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic, caused by a warmer western tropical Pacific Ocean.

From ScienceDaily.com:

The natural variations in the new study related to an unusually warm western tropical Pacific, near Papua New Guinea. Since the mid-1990s the water surface there has been about 0.3 degrees hotter than normal. Computer models show this affects the regional air pressure, setting off a stationary wave in the atmosphere that arcs in a great circle from the tropical Pacific toward Greenland before turning back over the Atlantic.

"Along this wave train there are warm spots where the air has been pushed down, and cold spots where the air has been pulled up," Wallace said. "And Greenland is in one of the warm spots."

In previous studies, Wallace and Battisti have documented the existence of decades-long climate variations in the Pacific Ocean that resemble the well-known shorter-range El Niño variations.

This particular location in the tropical Pacific may be a "sweet spot" for generating global atmospheric waves. A series of studies led by co-author Eric Steig, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences, working with Ding and Battisti, showed that waves starting in the same place but radiating southward are warming West Antarctica and melting the Pine Island Glacier.
Researchers can't say for how long the tropical Pacific will remain in this state.

"Our work shows that about half of the warming signal in Greenland comes from the predictable part -- forcing of climate by anthropogenic greenhouse gases -- but about half comes from the unpredictable part," Steig said.

The atmosphere makes the world seem small

The world is large, but studies like this show that the world isn't so large that the ocean right down near New Guinea, which is in the tropical southern hemisphere can affect the Arctic, way up north. And at the same time this same area of the Pacific is causing atmospheric waves that are warming West Antarctica and melting the Pine Island Glacier.

Anthony's sooty fixation

Anthony doesn't believe it.  He wrote about a photo of a pool of water in Greenland, which I traced back to here originally.  Anthony isn't talking about the dirty snow in the foreground. He's talking about the dark section of the pool in the shadow.

Water Filled Canyon (Greenland) Although snow has dammed outflow from the lake, nearby melt streams continue to fill sections of the canyon where snow has not accumulated.

Credit and Source: Polar Science Center, University of Washington

Anthony doesn't say how he can tell from a photograph what is causing the darker colour in the pool - whether it's dust or dirt or soot or algae or just extra deep water or all of these. Anthony Watts has done his photo-science and decided that it's definitely soot, writing:

[Note: part of the answer is in the photo they provide with the press release below, but they don't see it. - Anthony]...

...Note the black at the bottom of the melt pool, that’s carbon soot. That’s something the UW authors aren’t paying attention to....

…it has a big effect on albedo, and thus absorbed solar insolation, likely far more so than CO2 forcing, 

Another thing is, if Anthony had bothered to read the abstract and the references, he'd have noticed that the authors do indeed acknowledge that black soot does play a part in warming the Arctic (and the world). If he'd read the paper the scientists referenced, he'd have noticed that black carbon, although it does have a large effect it's not as large a forcing as CO2. As Hansen and Nazarenko wrote:

The substantial role inferred for soot in global climate does not alter the fact that greenhouse gases are the primary cause of global warming in the past century and are expected to be the largest climate forcing the rest of this century.

You may recall that Anthony has tried this argument before, misrepresenting the findings of another more recent study, which showed that the impact of soot on the Arctic depends on where it comes from. If it comes from the Arctic itself it will have a bigger impact than if it comes from the mid-latitudes. ("The Arctic surface temperature is almost 5 times more sensitive to black carbon emitted from within the Arctic than to emissions from mid-latitudes.")

Since I started this article, Anthony has added another photo showing how the albedo on Greenland has changed over the years. Thing is, it's not just dirt and dust and soot that causes the surface to become darker. As it states in the NASA article that Anthony refers to, it's not just soot:

Climate scientists have long expected that Earth’s icy North would become less reflective as global temperatures rose. Rising temperatures melt snow and ice. The uncovered terrain is darker—ocean water, vegetation, bare ground—so the area absorbs more sunlight than it used to, leading to more warming, which causes more melting. In short, the loss of reflectiveness amplifies the initial warming. This feedback is underway on Greenland’s ice, especially since 2006, a year that marks a fundamental shift toward a warmer, greener Arctic, according to the Arctic Report Card.

...The darkening in the non-melting areas, says Dr. Box, is due to changes in the shape and size of the ice crystals in the snowpack as its temperature rises. Snow grains clump together, and they reflect less light than the many-faceted, smaller crystals. Additional heat rounds the sharp edges of the crystals. Round particles absorb more sunlight than jagged ones do. 

Here is a chart showing overall contributions of humans to global warming. CO2 is by far the biggest followed by methane, but soot plays quite an important role as well. Click for larger view.

Figure TS.7 Radiative forcing of climate change during the industrial era shown by emitted components from 1750 to 2011. Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

A couple of other points. Anthony wants to blame the hotter Greenland and north eastern Canada on soot. What about the rest of the Arctic? Is soot not falling there? And is there more soot falling in the Arctic now than it did in the past?  I don't know the answer to those questions, but from what I've read there isn't any more soot being produced than there was in the past. If anything, it's decreasing.

The really weird thing is that in his focus on soot (much of which comes from human activity), Anthony is downplaying the role of natural variability in the recent rapid warming of Greenland and north eastern Canada, which is what the paper was all about after all.

From the WUWT comments

Surprisingly a lot of people are quizzing Anthony on his interpretation of the photograph he showed above. He's not having a good day.

Francisco Fernandez thinks that we should have all perished by now. He's quite impatient and has no concept of geological time scales when he says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:35 am
What I don’t get is, with all this modelling and VERY (sarc) high climate sensitivity, how is it that there’s still life on earth?

Wouldn’t the extintion of the dinosaurs, due to a catastrophic event that obliterated the species, would have caused more damage than mere CO2 <0.04%v/v?

Now, I am not sure if the dinosaur extintion due to the meteorite is a fact or theory. But if it is a fact, shouldn't it shed some light on how resilent the climate is?

steveta_uk thinks the study means he doesn't have to be concerned about global warming and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:36 am
If they’re right, and 1/2 the warming is natural, then that about agrees with the recent lower estimates for sensitivity, and means that the expected 1.5C warming by 2100 is nothing to panic about.
So Steig has joined us at last!

john challenges Anthony and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:40 am
Anthony, is it ALL carbon soot? Does wind blown glacial dust, or atmospheric dust, also take on a dark color when submerged? Not disagreeing about albedo effect, just wondering if carbon is the only source of dark coloration at the bottom of a melt pool on a glacier.

Billy Liar also challenges Anthony and says:

May 8, 2014 at 7:47 am
Can someone point to a chemical analysis of the black stuff in that Greenland pond?
I’m sceptical that it is ‘soot’. Oh, and where does the red stuff that you see over arctic glaciers occasionally come from?

When Paul Woland compliments Anthony for posting an article from Nature, Anthony sticks to his photo-science:

May 8, 2014 at 7:48 am
Well done WUWT for finally starting to publish research papers that, like virtually all climate-related papers in Nature, attests to the reality of significant temperature increases caused by carbon dioxide emissions.

REPLY: So like the authors of the paper, you missed what was in the photo too? – Anthony

SIGINT EX quibbles with Anthony, but Anthony is sticking to his guns:

May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am
No soot in the pool ! Just a photograph, low sun angle, shadow and diminished illumination against a very bright foreground on top ! Particulate measured in Firn and glacier ice is at the ppm level. Not enough to make a difference.

REPLY: No, sorry, you are wrong. It’s soot, dust, etc. people have sampled the bottom of those pools. Read the links provided before inserting foot in mouth. See map I’m adding from NASA showing deposition – Anthony

Neil says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am
Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?

richard says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:27 am
To me the dark part looks like a deeper part of the water, i notice that there are no darker parts elsewhere or if it is does the movement of water carry it to one part.

The bottom of the picture shows discoloration of the snow- soot? that has melted and yet everywhere else looks pristine. 

Shawn in High River doesn't realise that the scientists have crunched the numbers and says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:44 am
How do they know that exactly half is due to AGW and the other half is the unpredictable part? How did they come up with that figure of 50% AGW ?

hunter confuses Greenland and north eastern Canada with the entire world when he says:

May 8, 2014 at 8:58 am
In a sense they are back peddling from the apocalypse. Now it is only 50% due to evil humans. Last year it was all human CO2. Is it due to highconfidence that the AGW believers have ‘won’ and will see their self-serviing policies imposed no matter the facts?

Steven Mosher becomes a bit impatient with Anthony Watts and his fake sceptics and says:

May 8, 2014 at 9:39 am
“Neil says: May 8, 2014 at 8:15 am Stupid question: how do you know it’s soot and not some dark tunnel carved into the ice?

1. There is no evidence that this photo shows soot.
2. Its assumed and asserted as fact.
3. Note the lack of skepticism about this “evidence”

That said, soot plays a role. thats part of the human forcing equation.
If you want to know how much of a role soot plays you have to run a GCM.
or you can just speculate and assert that it plays a major role.

Science: build a tool to try to understand the role of soot.

Politics: assert that its all down to soot. no comprehensive data, no methods, a few pictures, no testing of the hypothesis.. just assertion.

Doug Proctor also thinks that Greenland is the whole world and says:

May 8, 2014 at 9:55 am
To say that half is natural, not human-caused, is to say that you are a denier (of consensus, IPCC science). It is to say that any action to reduce human generated CO2 will have half the effect of the IPCC scenarios, and kill both the economics and the actual result of what is proposed “must” happen. 

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Qinghua Ding, John M. Wallace, David S. Battisti, Eric J. Steig, Ailie J. E. Gallant, Hyung-Jin Kim, Lei Geng. Tropical forcing of the recent rapid Arctic warming in northeastern Canada and Greenland. Nature, 2014; 509 (7499): 209 DOI: 10.1038/nature13260

Hansen, James, and Larissa Nazarenko. "Soot climate forcing via snow and ice albedos." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 101, no. 2 (2004): 423-428. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2237157100

Sand, M., T. K. Berntsen, Ø. Seland, and J. E. Kristjánsson (2013), Arctic surface temperature change to emissions of black carbon within Arctic or midlatitudes, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50613.

Greenland has been (partly) white for a very long time, when will it turn green again?

Today Anthony Watts has an article about Greenland (archived here).  He copied a press release about how scientists have evidence that the ice sheet in Greenland could be 2.7 million years old. This could be something of a surprise, because recent thinking was that the ice sheet may have almost disappeared in MIS 11, about 400,000 years ago (eg Alley et al 2010).

I found out that the paper was published yesterday in Science Express. From sciencedaily.com:

The new discovery indicates that even during the warmest periods since the ice sheet formed, the center of Greenland remained stable; "it's likely that it did not fully melt at any time," Vermont's Bierman said. This allowed a tundra landscape to be locked away, unmodified, under ice through millions of years of global warming and cooling.

"The traditional knowledge about glaciers is that they are very powerful agents of erosion and can effectively strip a landscape clean," said study co-author Lee Corbett, a UVM graduate student who prepared the silty ice samples for analysis. Instead, "we demonstrate that the Greenland Ice Sheet is not acting as an agent of erosion; in fact, at it's center, it has performed incredibly little erosion since its inception almost three million years ago."...

The scientists examined the lowest 13 m of the GISP2 core, which had not been examined closely.  GISP2 is in central Greenland.

Source: North Greenland Ice Core Project (2004) 

That lowermost section of the core had a lot of sediment in it. The team used measurements of measurements of atmospherically produced (meteoric) ¹⁰Be, carbon and nitrogen in the sediment to figure out things like where the sediment came from and how old it was.  What they discovered was that below the silty ice in the lowest 13 m of the core was 48 cm of diamict lying over granite. The ice at the summit is frozen to the bed and, through modeling, the scientists estimate it's been in place for "at least the last several glacial cycles".

¹⁰Be comes from the atmosphere (produced by cosmic rays) and precipitates or falls down to the surface and sticks to the soil.  It has been used to date soils and to estimate the rate of erosion.  Measurements of this, plus organic carbon and total nitrogen allow a picture to be built up of the history of the ice sheet and the underlying surface.  From sciencedaily.com:

...The researchers expected to only find soil eroded from glacier-scoured bedrock in the sediment at the bottom of the ice core. “So we thought we were going looking for a needle in haystack,” Bierman said. They planned to work diligently to find vanishingly small amounts of the beryllium—since the landscape under the ice sheet would have not been exposed to the sky. “It turned out that we found an elephant in a haystack,” he said; the silt had very high concentrations of the isotope when the team measured it on a particle accelerator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“On a global basis, we only find these sorts of beryllium concentrations in soils that have developed over hundreds of thousands to millions of years,” said Joseph Graly, who analyzed the beryllium data while at the University of Vermont.

Without going into too much detail, what I gather is there was too much ¹⁰Be in the soil for anything but a very long period of exposure to the atmosphere. Longer than would have been possible if the soil had been exposed in more recent interglacials. They concluded that "the data are most consistent with soil formation prior to the existence of the present GIS".  And given that it's still there intact, they concluded that the ice sheet has been very stable at the base and has been there for the best part of the past 2.7 million years. Before that, it was likely tundra. In fact the ¹⁰Be under the Greenland ice sheet was found to at levels very similar to the permafrost tundra in Alaska today.

This of course has implications for what will happen as we heat up the planet.  From ScienceDaily.com again:

Many geologists are seeking a long-term view of the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, including how it moves and has shaped the landscape beneath it -- with an eye toward better understanding its future behavior. It's 656,000 square miles of ice, containing enough water, if fully melted, to raise global sea levels twenty-three feet -- "yet we have very little information about what is happening at the bed with regards to erosion and landscape formation," said Corbett.

What is clear, however, from an abundance of worldwide indicators, is that global temperatures are on a path to be "far warmer than the warmest interglacials in millions of years," said Bierman. "There is a 2.7-million-year-old soil sitting under Greenland. The ice sheet on top of it has not disappeared in the time in which humans became a species. But if we keep on our current trajectory, the ice sheet will not survive. And once you clear it off, it's really hard to put it back on."

This puts the final nail in the coffin for last year's WUWT article about how Greenland ice sheet was only 650 years old.  That article had a not-so-brief appearance at WUWT before Anthony finally responded to the guffaws (even from deniers) and took it down.

From the WUWT comments

It doesn't suit the crowd, some of whom want to argue about Eric the Red and the vikings. Lee says:

April 17, 2014 at 8:10 pm
Least we forget that the Vikings grew crops on Greenland 1000 years ago where permafrost exists today.

mickgreenhough says:

April 17, 2014 at 11:07 pm
In 982 Eric the Red sailed west from Iceland and found a ‘green land’ He started a settlement there which grew to 4-5000 people and 150 farms. It lasted some 400years until the ‘Little Ice age’ of the Middle Ages saw the return of ice to Greenland. [redacted link]

Colorado Wellington says:

April 17, 2014 at 11:16 pm
“Greenland really was green! However, it was millions of years ago,” said Rood …
Expanding on the authors’ pop commentary we must conclude that Erik the Red knew this and decided to wait it out.

Stephen Singer says:

April 17, 2014 at 5:46 pm
I’d suggest that it’s more likely humankind and other species are likely to disappear before the Greenland ice sheet does. One needs to remember that the earths continents are tectonic plates in very slow motion. Anybody think they know where the current continents are going to be in say 1-100 million years from now and what species will still exist. Your guess on that question maybe more accurate than current prognostications about what a few 100 parts per million increase in CO2 will do to all earths species.

Mike Bromley the Kurd says:

April 17, 2014 at 5:53 pm
“[it] will have a fundamental influence on how fast and high global sea levels rise from human-caused climate change.”

I beg your pardon? Talk about an agenda-powered presupposition, in bold face. That slithered by the reviewers like sub-glacial slime mold.

George Turner raises an interesting possibility and says:

April 17, 2014 at 5:53 pmThis raises the interesting possibility of finding fairly fresh remains of long extinct species, either in Greenland or Antarctica.

William McClenney says (excerpt):

April 17, 2014 at 5:58 pm
Two of the main problems with some of the central Greenland cores, in particular GISP and GISP2 are described in: http://epic.awi.de/10226/1/Nor2004a.pdf

“The two deep ice cores drilled at the beginning of the 1990s in central Greenland (GRIP1–3 and GISP24,5, respectively 3,027m and 3,053m long) have played a key role in documenting rapid climate changes during the last glacial period. However, it quickly became clear that the bottom 10% of at least one (and most probably both) of these ice cores4,6–9 was disturbed owing to ice folding close to the bedrock. The Central Greenland ice core records are fully reliable climate archives back to 105,000 years before present (105 kyr BP), but the disturbances mean that no reliableNorthern Hemisphere ice core record of the previous interglacial (the Eemian climatic period) was known to exist in the Northern Hemisphere.”

The first problem being that ~10% of the bottom core is folded.

The second problem is that no ice dated older than 105,000 years has been described in the literature to my knowledge, which is what makes this somewhat dubious.

It is exceptionally difficult to age date ice, particularly if it has been disturbed. It normally requires layer counting, registration with known tephras (volcanic ash layers) etc. etc. So I will be interested to see how they dated this ice to some 25 TIMES older than the oldest known ice (at least known to me). 

If William had read the paper or the press release or Anthony's article, he'd have seen that the scientists weren't dating ice, they were dating the soil and sediment at the bottom of the ice.


spangled drongo says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:05 pm
What’s our current trajectory? Warming or cooling?

Then there are the conspiracy theorists like DirkH, who says:

April 18, 2014 at 2:37 am
The money quote at the end. Scientists prostituting themselves for the globalist cause. Well, they always wanted to become the benevolent technocrat dictators of the entire world anyway.
They’re all giddy for dictatorship.

James Martin says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:26 pm
What bothers me in reading this is how any climate scientist – or any layperson with an IQ over 90 – not come to realize the true magnitude of global climate variability, and from this see that the amount of increase in the latter part of the last century was nothing new or out of the norm? The spin is so apparent as to be nauseating – and to suggest we are headed for being warmer than any previous interglacial? Really?? Why not post some numbers from prior interglacials and let’s compare, rather than make some comment that some would take as truth because some “expert” said it is so.

Rick K says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:30 pm
What is clear, however, from an abundance of worldwide indicators, is that global temperatures are on a path to be “far warmer than the warmest interglacials in millions of years,” said Bierman.

THAT… is a lie.

Mark 543 says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:33 pm
Even at high end warming estimates it would take hundreds of years to melt the Greenland ice sheet. The problem for future generations is that they will never have stable coastlines.

Eve says:

April 17, 2014 at 6:47 pm
They gave ti add the last bit to get their paper published. Even though they know that this planet has done nothing but cool through it’s life.

SIGINT EX says:

April 17, 2014 at 7:53 pm
For more than three decades, Science and the American Association of Science have been allied to fraud and malfeasance, unethical behavior and lack of morality.
Yet again, “Science” stands up to be beheaded yet again.
A sad epitaph.

Science is moving way too quickly and far beyond the comprehension of asybot who says (and I sympathise):

April 18, 2014 at 12:32 am
I am getting tired of the time frames used in some of these models papers and reports, 2 million years here, 4 million years there. I have lived and farmed on my property for a little over 25 years in some places the land has “settled” 6 to 10 feet (ok, 2-3 mtrs) without a 2 mile icecap. Add to that that in a news item today the “Keppler” scientists have found an earth like “Rockey” planet 500 light years away in a solar system where it is called “Kepler186-F” .

Sorry but can some one help me here ? How can we see a “rockey” planet the size of earth 500 light years away? (We can barely see ice movements in the arctic from a 100 miles up!) In a solar system that has a red dwarf star (less bright than our sun). Can some one put that in physical perspective .

This is a grain of sand and then compare it to what Keppler 186f would look like from our point of view. I know the answers are going to include ” the permutations of the orbits of the other planets etc etc I do not believe for one second the scientists coming to these conclusions are much different than Mann etc . The conclusions they give are almost, if not impossible, to contest they have all the funding to keep on keep on going on. The Keppler project is important but do they have any template to hold up, ( gee maybe I am getting way to skeptical.) to compare their findings of today with? 

---

Paul R. Bierman, Lee B. Corbett, Joseph A. Graly, Thomas A. Neumann, Andrea Lini, Benjamin T. Crosby, Dylan H. Rood. Preservation of a Preglacial Landscape Under the Center of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Science, 2014 DOI: 10.1126/science.1249047

Alley, R.B., et al., History of the Greenland Ice Sheet: Paleoclimatic insights, Quaternary Science Reviews (2010), doi:10.1016/j.quascirev.2010.02.007

A miscellaneous collation: fires, ice and cycles...

There is little to report from denier bloggers this past couple of days. (In Anthony Watts' latest, he's running a competition to see who is the most offensive - "alarmists" or "fake sceptics" - archived here.)

In any case, I've been suffering what I can only describe as heat fatigue (not quite the same as heat exhaustion).  Thankfully a cool change came through yesterday afternoon.  (Last night I slept for nearly 12 hours straight.)

Bushfires rage in Australia

Firefighters who were busy battling blazes across south eastern Australia weren't so fortunate and wouldn't have got much sleep.  They were too busy fighting major fires on the outskirts of Melbourne, in the Latrobe Valley, in far east Gippsland and the southern Flinders Ranges in South Australia as well as elsewhere.  Twenty homes were thought to have been destroyed in Victoria yesterday.

It's been another hot summer down here, with more than our share of days over 40 degrees in south-eastern Australia and up north too.  The fires have been bad, but not as bad as other years.  Below is a comparison of mid-January last year with fires across Australia today:

Some of the people commenting at WUWT seem to think that the world is heading for an ice age, because it's the most snow the USA has seen in 20 years or something.  However there's no hint down under of any ice age cometh-ing.

Feel free to treat this as an open thread and comment about anything at all relating to climate.  Here are a couple of articles to get you going.

How Greenland's ice sheets are melting

First from ScienceDaily.com: Greenland ice sheets are melting from above and below - more measurements are sorely needed. An excerpt:

The paper describes the mechanisms causing the melting of the ice sheet, particularly at its margin, where the glaciers extend into the ocean. This so-called "submarine melting" has increased as the ocean and atmosphere have warmed over the past two decades.

"What a lot of research around Greenland and the fjords has shown is that if the North Atlantic Ocean warms, then these warm waters will rapidly reach the fjords and hence the margins of Greenland's glaciers," says Straneo.

But scientists today know that the situation is more complex than just "a warmer ocean melts ice."

A warmer atmosphere is resulting in increased surface melting above the ice sheet, and this runoff too enhances submarine melting. Surface melt water falls through cracks in the glacier creating a freshwater river that rushes out into the ocean at the base of the glacier, sometimes 600 meters (1,800 feet) below sea level. This river mixes rapidly with the dense, salty seawater, contributing to the heat transfer from the ocean to the ice, resulting in even more submarine melting beneath the sea surface.

Accelerated trade winds over the Pacific

Matthew England from the University of New South Wales and colleagues have a paper in Nature Climate Change, which suggests that stronger than normal trade winds across the Pacific have meant that global surface temperatures haven't risen as much as they might have in recent years.  From the ABC News:

It was found the winds were churning the Pacific like a washing machine, bringing the deeper colder water to the surface and pushing the warmer water below.

"The phase we're in of accelerated trade winds particularly lasts a couple of decades," Professor England said.

"We're about 12 to 13 years in to the most accelerated part of the wind field. "It's important to point out there's a cycle we expect to reverse and when they do reverse back to their normal levels we'd expect global warming to kick in and start to rise."

Professor England rejects the argument from sceptics that the slowdown suggests global warming is not as bad as first thought and that the climate models are not working.

"We want the community to have confidence in the climate models," he said. "They are very good but in this instance the wind acceleration has been that strong and that much stronger than what the models projected."

Cycles in the South

For the cycle afficionados, David W. J. Thompson and Elizabeth A. Barnes have found periodic behaviour in large-scale Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation.  From the latest issue of Science (paywalled):

Periodic behavior in the climate system has important implications not only for weather prediction but also for understanding and interpreting the physical processes that drive climate variability.

Here we demonstrate that the large-scale Southern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation exhibits marked periodicity on time scales of approximately 20 to 30 days. The periodicity is tied to the Southern Hemisphere baroclinic annular mode and emerges in hemispheric-scale averages of the eddy fluxes of heat, the eddy kinetic energy, and precipitation. Observational and theoretical analyses suggest that the oscillation results from feedbacks between the extratropical baroclinicity, the wave fluxes of heat, and radiative damping.

The oscillation plays a potentially profound role in driving large-scale climate variability throughout much of the mid-latitude Southern Hemisphere.

---

Fiammetta Straneo, Patrick Heimbach. North Atlantic warming and the retreat of Greenland's outlet glaciers. Nature, 2013; 504 (7478): 36 DOI: 10.1038/nature12854

Matthew H England et al. Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus. Nature Climate Change, February 9, 2014; doi:10.1038/nclimate2106

David W. J. Thompson and Elizabeth A. Barnes, Periodic Variability in the Large-Scale Southern Hemisphere Atmospheric Circulation; Science 7 February 2014: Vol. 343 no. 6171 pp. 641-645 DOI: 10.1126/science.1247660

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

Sequel to: Anthony Watts visits Greenland and finds Airport UHI disease!

Update - see below for Anthony Watts' acknowledgement.

---

Who could forget Anthony Watts finding UHI disease at Maniitsok airport in Greenland?

Greenland sets new record high temperature this year: Confirmed

Here's the sequel. From Jason Semonow, Capital Weather Gang at Washington Post:

Today, John Cappelen, senior climatologist at the Danish Meteorological Society, emailed me to let me know the record high of 25.9 C (78.6 F) set on July 30 at Maniitsoq stands.

“I have now accepted the record at Maniitsoq based on further analysis,” Cappelen said.

At issue was whether the temperature measurement, taken at an airport location, was legitimate. Artificial heat sources at airports can sometimes corrupt temperature readings.

“We were faced with two options,” Coppelen explained. “We could reject the observation, or we could approve it. If we chose to overrule it, it could be based on two things. One was a faulty sensor/station…and that was not the question – the sensor measured exactly as it should. The second was if we had suspected that extreme local conditions played their part. Here the situation is more debatable, because the station is an airport station that is not necessarily completely optimal in relation to international guidelines for climatological data measurements.”

But Coppelen said the mere fact the temperature was recorded at an airport is not a reason for it be thrown out as few existing weather observing stations in Greenland are ideally sited.

“Within the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) prescribed practices, among other things, measurements – as an example – should be taken over a short lawn,” Coppelen said. “This can be done in Denmark almost anywhere, but in Greenland almost no places.”

Coppelen concluded: “The station in Maniitsoq is within the quality frame practicable/possible for this type of meteorological measurements in Greenland, so it is approved. Alternative would be to question many observations and weather records for Greenland…it doesn’t make sense

DMI press release here.

As a reminder, I posted some suggestions for the weather station siting since Anthony Watts complained it was no good, pointing out the other suggestions were even darker, with not a lawn in sight.

Should we anticipate an article by Anthony Watts acknowledging the record temperature set at Maniitsok in Greenland this year?

Update 

Friday 13 Sept 3:39 pm: 

Anthony Watts has posted the fact that a record has been recorded in his latest WUWT Hot Sheet (archived here).  He hasn't updated his original article (archived here). H/t Thomas Murphy.

The original HotWhopper article and the follow up.

Anthony Watts of WUWT gets noticed by Capital Weather Gang at The Washington Post

Update: There is a sequel :)


Anthony Watts of WUWT has hit the big time, being noticed by The Washington Post.  But he's not the only one :)

I didn't mention what prompted Anthony's humourous efforts to find something wrong with a weather station in Greenland the other day.  It was a short article by Jason Samenow of Capital Weather Gang at the Washington Post observing that a record temperature had been reported by the Danish Meteorological Institute.

Jason was subsequently plagued by tweets from Anthony Watts, demanding he issue a "retraction".  Not once, not twice but three times.  Anthony also sent an email.  Anthony really got his knickers in a twist over that one.  Here are his tweets:

@capitalweather you'll need to issue a retraction, sorry. http://t.co/Bh5rz2kVTe
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) August 10, 2013

@capitalweather @JSamenow Are you guys going to issue retraction? Been 24 hours now. http://t.co/Bh5rz2kVTe
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) August 11, 2013

@capitalweather @JSamenow Are you guys going to issue retraction? Its been 48 hours now. http://t.co/Bh5rz2kVTe What will it take?
— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) August 12, 2013

The Maniitsok temperature reading is valid but may or may not reach the record books

Jason Samenow has now posted a response.  He did what Anthony doesn't seem to have done.  He wrote to John Cappelen, data management specialist and senior climatologist at DMI.   Cappelen replied that the reading was valid but because the weather station doesn't comply with all WMO standards, it might not get into the record books.  He wrote: "It is generally very hard to follow the WMO standards in all details in arctic areas, but this sensor is placed so influence from the surroundings can have affected the reading in a way, so the reading maybe will have to be rejected." He will let him know once they've considered the matter and made a decision.  You can read the reply at Capital Weather Gang in Washington Post.

The only reason I know all this is because I happened to look at the live stats for my blog and noticed a sudden influx of visitors.  Went to see what the fuss was all about and discovered that @capitalweathergang had retweeted this:

MT @greenoctopus: If you're really going to use @wattsupwiththat as a source, consider a rebuttal: http://t.co/PGG90ibpwk
— Capital Weather Gang (@capitalweather) August 12, 2013

John Samenow also referred to yours truly in a comment underneath his article.  @capitalweathergang has a few more followers and Washington Post has a few more readers than both HotWhopper and WUWT.  Some of them came here for a look see.  Nice - and thank you to @greenoctopus :)

(As usual, Anthony can't wait to let his readers know that he has some clout in cyberspace.)


PS Now we wait with bated breath for Anthony tell the Japan Meteorological Agency why all the weather stations in Japan are wrong! (H/t @shawnmilrad).

PPS Without a smidgen of self-awareness, Anthony's headline for his article is "Shoot first ask questions later".  Yet it was he who shot first without asking questions, and it took Capital Weather Gang to ask the question of the people who would know the answer.