WUWT predicts highest Arctic September sea ice extent in ten years

The readers at WUWT have put in their sea ice prediction to arcus.org at 6.11 million square kilometres average for the month of September. (Archived here.)

Here it is compared to previous September averages, I've put in a red line to show the WUWT prediction. Click to enlarge:

Adapted from arcus.org

Anthony applied a weighted average to the top five most popular predictions. WUWT-ers think the average ice extent will be the same as it was around ten years ago, in 2004.

Here are the averages for the month of September going back to 2006 (the archives didn't go back any further), from NSIDC:

• 2006 5.9 million square kilometers
• 2007 4.28 million square kilometers
• 2008 4.67 million square kilometers
• 2009 5.36 million square kilometers 
• 2010 4.90 million square kilometers
• 2011 4.61 million square kilometers
• 2012 3.61 million square kilometers
• 2013 5.35 million square kilometers
• 2014? 6.11 million square kilometers? (WUWT prediction)

I myself won't take a guess. The Arctic is too fickle and I'm not an expert. Here's the latest chart from NSIDC. Click the image to view larger:

The graph above shows Arctic sea ice extent as of June 1, 2014, along with daily ice extent data for four previous years. 2014 is shown in blue, 2013 in green, 2012 in orange, 2011 in brown, and 2010 in purple. The 1981 to 2010 average is in dark gray. Sea Ice Index data.
Source: NSIDC

I came across a recent paper in Nature Climate Change by David Schröder, Daniel L. Feltham, Daniela Flocco & Michel Tsamados. The authors reckon they've come up with a better approach to predictions - look at the melt-pond area in the spring. The abstract says in part:

...here we show that the Arctic sea-ice minimum can be accurately forecasted from melt-pond area in spring. We find a strong correlation between the spring pond fraction and September sea-ice extent. This is explained by a positive feedback mechanism: more ponds reduce the albedo; a lower albedo causes more melting; more melting increases pond fraction. Our results help explain the acceleration of Arctic sea-ice decrease during the past decade. The inclusion of our new melt-pond model promises to improve the skill of future forecast and climate models in Arctic regions and beyond.

If you want to keep up with the latest in the Arctic, I recommend Neven's Arctic Sea Ice blog.

From the WUWT comments

william's contribution must be a Poe, he says he saw a NOAA documentary called "The Day After Tomorrow":

June 10, 2014 at 9:12 am
Whatever the extent, all of the Polar bears will be drowned and life on our planet will cease when the atlantic conveyor stops and North American temperatures drop to 100 degrees below zero. I saw a documentary put out by NOAA called “The Day After Tomorrow”. Thank goodness our president is going to shut down all the coal plants so that all those people dont freeze to death. There are not enough books to burn to stay warm through something like that!

Jim Hunt offers some good information about Arctic sea ice, but Anthony will have none of it. It's too sciency for Anthony who says that Arctic ice extent has nothing to do with volume:

June 10, 2014 at 9:32 am
Re: @Anthony says: June 10, 2014 at 8:55 am
It’s not my “own views” Anthony. In fact it’s a long list of useful facts and figures for anybody attempting to forecast the future of Arctic sea ice. A long list of useful information still noticeable only by its absence from the WUWT sea ice reference page.

REPLY: We aren’t forecasting volume, we are forecasting extent, so again, your views that we should pay attention to volume graphs on your website (your favorite hobby horse) in this extent forecasting exercise are irrelevant. Don’t clutter up this thread further – Anthony

Anthony really doesn't like scientific comments, it upsets his denier audience. He prefers comments like this one, from Joe Bastardi, award-winning meteorologist and greenhouse effect denier. Joseph Bastardi says (excerpt):

June 10, 2014 at 8:49 am
...One thing is certain. even if it gets NEAR NORMAL given what its been the past 10-15 years since the warm amo really took hold, we can safely say that co2 has nothing to do with this. ...

dbstealey is a Little Ice Age bouncer who keeps contradicting himself trying to cover too many bases while still denying human-caused global warming, and says:

June 10, 2014 at 9:38 am
As we see here, the planet is still recovering from the Little Ice Age. Naturally polar ice is going to decline.

Notice that in the [natural] global warming since the LIA, the trend has remained within its long term parameters. Despite all the alarmist predictions, there has been no acceleration in global warming [in fact, GW has stopped].

If polar ice declines, so what? As with rising CO2, that would be a net benefit: much shorter transit times for shipping, with much reduced fuel costs, an open northwest passage, less need for icebreakers, etc.

The only reason polar ice is discussed is because of the endless predictions that Arctic ice would soon disappear. The alarmist crowd is desperately hoping that it does. But so what if it does? It’s all good… and it’s all natural.

ripshin says it's cold in Virginia so there'll be a lot of ice in the Arctic in September:

June 10, 2014 at 10:18 am
June feels a lot cooler here in central Virginia than it used to…so I’m going with more ice: 7.75 MsqKM. “Today, I go for the gusto.”
rip

Steven Mosher linked to some charts (see third one down for different projections), but Anthony doesn't want to acknowledge the disappearance of Arctic sea ice:

June 10, 2014 at 11:20 am

https://sites.google.com/site/pettitclimategraphs/sea-ice-extent

REPLY:IMHO, any graph that uses “death spiral” as part of the description should be ignored – Anthony

---

Schröder, David, Daniel L. Feltham, Daniela Flocco, and Michel Tsamados. "September Arctic sea-ice minimum predicted by spring melt-pond fraction." Nature Climate Change (2014). doi:10.1038/nclimate2203

Putting on an old EPA hat, WUWT revisits peer review

Anthony Watts has another copy and paste (archived here), this time from some right wing crowd that calls itself the National Association of Scholars, not to be confused with the National Academy of Sciences.

In short, the article is just another denier diatribe, long on insinuation and short on substance.

I checked out the National Association of Scholars at SourceWatch and they don't sound like the sort of crowd that any self-respecting person would want to be associated with. I'm surprised that Anthony Watts would promote them. Publicly at any rate, he frowns upon racist bigotry (not so much sexism). I guess beggars can't be choosers. This is from SourceWatch:

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) is a non-profit organization in the United States that opposes multiculturalism and affirmative action and seeks to counter what it considers a "liberal bias" in academia.[1]

In 2010 and 2011, its president was espousing climate contrarianism under the group's auspices, with no evident expertise in the climate science field.[2]

The rest of the SourceWatch article makes interesting reading. It looks as if National Association of Scholars has an extremely large (unwieldy) board that rarely if ever meets. Is it just another organisation providing plum posts for a small number of ideologues?

This is another long article, because the WUWT article is about another article which is in turn about yet another article. This HW article features the National Association of Scholars, the ITSSD, and the EPA and its Office of Inspector General as well as some WUWT comments.  I don't want to dissuade you, but I'll warn you that apart from introducing organisations new to HotWhopper, it's simply more of the same old hat denier nonsense - largely about peer review.  Still, if you're interested and you're on the home page, click here to read on...

"Expert" David Legates tells US Senate Committee that CO2 is animal food

This'll tickle your funny bone. Anthony Watts has been privileged with an advance copy of testimony to a US Senate Committee (archived here, with the pdf file of the testimony copied here). It probably makes him feel so important to have a copy before it's presented. (Surely that's frowned upon.) Some members of the US Senate Committee for Environment and Public Works obviously wanted to have a little fun at the expense of the US taxpayers, so they called up a chap by the name of David Legates to testify.

David has impressive credentials. He says:

I am a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware and I served as the Delaware State Climatologist from 2005 to 2011. I also am an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Agricultural Economics & Statistics and the Physical Ocean Science and Engineering Program. I received a B.A. in Mathematics and Geography, a M.S. in Geography, and a Ph.D. in Climatology, all from the University of Delaware

I checked because I found it almost impossible to credit that a university would employ a ratbag like David Legates. It does - but he doesn't have any profile there :(

CO2 is animal food!

I started reading his testimony but had to stop on page two when I got to this bit:

Considering that CO2 is food for plants and animals...

Yep, you read that right. Here it is in black and white and grey - see page two:

David Legates isn't just running the normal denier spiel that "CO2 is plant food". Now it's animal food, too. Do you reckon he feeds his livestock CO2? Would he feed it to them frozen, you know, slabs of dry ice which would look just like salt licks? Surely not. Do their tongues stick to the CO2 when they try to lick it?

David Legates might call himself a climatologist, but he's a science denying climatologist. He has graced this blog before - here and here. Oh, and he's a member of the Cornwall Alliance cult.

Pity David's animals. Pity the poor Delawarians :(

Dennis T. Avery cycles toward an ice age; Anthony Watts senselessly ignores the ice @wattsupwiththat

They do have some funny ones at the Heartland Institute and doesn't Anthony Watts love 'em. This one's called Dennis T. Avery and apparently he's been an ice age comether for some time. He even scored a Wikipedia entry to prove it :)

Not only that, but he scored a ClimateProgress post all to himself when he couldn't tell the difference between growth and growth rate. And a SourceWatch entry. Now he's really hit the bigtime with a HotWhopper entry - but it's not all for himself. Ice age comethers are a dime a dozen at WUWT.

Dennis used to work for the government - the US Department of Agriculture. (Deniers forgive him because he's one of them.) I wonder how it feels to be a laughing stock among his former colleagues. It's easy to infer from his WUWT "guest essay" (archived here) that he doesn't accept the greenhouse effect. He was writing about an article by Geoffrey Parker in the NY Times. The article itself was about how climate change contributed to wars and social unrest in the past and postulated that it may well do the same as the world warms and food production is affected.  Dennis wasn't buying it. I think he figured that droughts only happen when there's a cold spell or something like that. He wrote:

Almost all past agricultural and cultural collapses occurred during “little ice ages,” not during our many global warm periods. 

Now I don't know if that's right or wrong but I do know that the way things are going, humans will never have experienced a global warm period like the one we're heading towards. The blue line in the chart below covers the period since civilisation. The red line is what's projected over the next few decades. Probably before this century is out.

Adapted from Jos Hagelaars

Dennis doesn't accept that we're warming the world. People in the future will probably feel heat like humans have never felt before. Ever. Not in all the time since we evolved. Dennis wrote:

The danger is the cold, chaotic weather of the “little ice ages” themselves. That will shrink agricultural zones and shorten growing seasons. Another such icy period is inevitably coming, though not likely in the next two centuries, if past cycles are an accurate guide.

Regardless, for the next 20-25 years, humanity will likely be in another cooling period, caused by the sun’s reduced energy output and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. We are about 150 years into the modern warming. Since the shortest of these warm periods during the Halocene was 350 years, and they generally last 350 to 800 years, it is unlikely that we will enter another Little Ice Age for a couple more centuries. 

That's it. He's doing climate by numbers - and not very useful numbers at that. He thinks that there are some sort of long term cycles lasting between 350 and 800 years - which is a nice wide margin for him, isn't it. He offers no evidence for his claim and it's not one I've ever come across before.

He's wrong of course. We aren't due for a major glaciation for around 50,000 years and as for mini ice ages, only if there's a few supervolcanic eruptions or an all-out nuclear war.

Anthony thinks that ice doesn't melt in the heat - again

Meanwhile, Anthony Watts has written another silly article (archived here) about how ice doesn't melt when it gets hot. Oh, he doesn't say so in so many words. What he does is claim that seas won't rise over the coming decades, or not by much. He reckons that the rate of sea level rise is currently linear (he's wrong) and that it won't change as West Antarctic ice slips into the ocean.  Anthony decided on the following senseless headline:

Making sense of senseless sea level scares in Norfolk Virginia – 60% of the rise is from subsidence, the remainder from landfill settling

It was Anthony's own article that was senseless, not the fact that seas are going to rise quite a lot. He didn't manage to make much sense, as usual. I've written enough about his fantasies on that score already (such as here and here and here and here) so I'll send you over to Tamino's excellent take down.

Before you go - or afterwards, if you want to see a couple of very good videos about sea level, try these two.

From the WUWT comments

Just a small selection today. First Goldie discusses the impending ice age that won't cometh for a very long time and says:

June 2, 2014 at 12:22 am
That sounds about right. But at the moment we have a group of people who are determined to blame everything on too much Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere. I suspect the North Atlantic will freeze over and this group will still be trying to assign it to Carbon Dioxide. The reality is of course that these people belong to an interesting cabal who are anti any form of carbon based energy and instead would prefer to have half the population of the planet freeze to death whilst trying to use so called renewables. Indeed their thinking is so odd that they would probably prefer it if half of the population froze to death. 

ffohnad is writing about sea level rises and says:

June 1, 2014 at 8:46 pm
Do these people actually believe the ice caps could melt while the temperature remains far below freezing even with the 3 degree worst case projection ? It appears that only the dumbest portion of our population are hired by the media. 

Denier weirdness: Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a touch of the sun at WUWT...

Wondering Willis Eschenbach has a touch of the sun**. He is wondering if the sun can affect the temperature on Earth (archived here). He's been analysing the surface temperature to see if he can detect the effect of the solar cycle.

Now everyone here knows that the solar cycle does have a small impact on the amount of energy reaching the surface. The latest IPCC AR5 WG1 report states on page TS-21:

Satellite observations of total solar irradiance (TSI) changes since 1978 show quasi-periodic cyclical variation with a period of roughly 11 years. Longer-term forcing is typically estimated by comparison of solar minima (during which variability is least). This gives a RF change of –0.04 [–0.08 to 0.00] W m–2 between the most recent (2008) minimum and the 1986 minimum. There is some diversity in the estimated trends of the composites of various satellite data, however. Secular trends of TSI before the start of satellite observations rely on a number of indirect proxies. The best estimate of RF from TSI changes over the industrial era is 0.05 [0.00 to 0.10] W m–2 (medium confidence), which includes greater RF up to around 1980 and then a small downward trend. 

And elsewhere in section 5-8 :

Typical changes measured over an 11-year solar cycle are 0.1% for TSI and up to several percent for the ultra-violet (UV) part of SSI (see Section 8.4).

Willis can't find the signal because it's so tiny it's buried in the noise and he doesn't take out the other factors affecting surface temperature. (Nor would he read science. He prefers to try to figure things out for himself, which is why he gets into such a mess.)

Willis is a Gaia fan

Willis holds to a Gaia-style hypothesis, which he sets out as:

Which of course leads to the obvious question … why no sign of the 11-year solar cycles?

I hold that this shows that the temperature of the system is relatively insensitive to changes in forcing. This, of course, is rank heresy to the current scientific climate paradigm, which holds that ceteris paribus, changes in temperature are a linear function of changes in forcing. I disagree. I say that the temperature of the planet is set by a dynamic thermoregulatory system composed of emergent phenomena that only appear when the surface gets hotter than a certain temperature threshold. These emergent phenomena maintain the temperature of the globe within narrow bounds (e.g. ± 0.3°C over the 20th Century), despite changes in volcanoes, despite changes in aerosols, despite changes in GHGs, despite changes in forcing of all kinds. The regulatory system responds to temperature, not to forcing.

And I say that because of the existence of these thermoregulatory systems, the 11-year variations in the sun’s UV and magnetism and brightness, as well as the volcanic variations and other forcing variations … well, they make little difference.

Which is a circular argument. Willis doesn't say what causes the temperature change in the first place. In fact he's arguing that the earth is insensitive to forcing. Which would mean that there would be very little change in temperature and the earth would never get to any of his temperature thresholds.

Wild swings and roundabouts

But that's not what I'm writing about.  You may remember that Willis has often said (wrongly of course) that the surface temperature has varied by ± 0.3°C over the 20th Century and he's repeated that nonsense again today. He's never said where he's dug up that silliness from.  Here is a chart to show how wrong he is. The surface temperature just keeps on going up and up and up. It's not varying by ± 0.3°C at all:

Data source: NASA GISS

What's two degrees among friends?

Today Willis wrote the following:

The earth’s temperature swings on the order of 6°C peak to peak over the course of a year. Why would it not respond over an 11-year period?

Then he changed his mind (without admitting to it) and wrote something different:

Despite the presence of the “near-infinite heat sinks” of the ocean and outer space, the global temperature changes by 4°C or so over the course of the year. And the hemispheres swing much more than that, 6°C for the southern hemisphere and a 13°C swing for the northern hemisphere.

 Heck, what's two degrees Celsius between friends at WUWT :)

[I've deleted some text here because, as Arthur pointed out I did some analysis using monthly anomalies, not monthly temperatures, which of course wouldn't show up actual differences over the year. How dumb is that! The above point still stands. Sou.]

From the WUWT comments

There is an awful lot of nonsense in the comments as you can imagine.  However, the first comment is from a rational human being.  Nick Stokes is the first cab off the rank and corrects just one of Willis' errors in the quote and says:

May 24, 2014 at 1:46 pm
“I hold that this shows that the temperature of the system is relatively insensitive to changes in forcing. This, of course, is rank heresy to the current scientific climate paradigm, which holds that ceteris paribus, changes in temperature are a linear function of changes in forcing." 

The standard climate science view is not that the climate is insensitive to changes in solar forcing, but that no significant changes have happened. That, while the sun is indeed the energy source, it is a very steady source. So no stability mechanism need be postulated.

Adding quickly:

OK, I can hear the protests – I mean no big oscillations in solar output in the period Willis is looking at.

To which Willis Eschenbach weirdly responds (extract - removed Nick's comment):

May 24, 2014 at 2:03 pm
Dear heavens, save me from pettifogging lawyers. Nick, the standard view is exactly what I said it was—that changes in temperature are a linear function of the changes in forcing. If you don’t understand that, read up on the supposed “climate sensitivity”. It has nothing to do with the sun at all. w.

What is Willis on about - does he not regard the sun as a forcing? That would be truly weird. Nick Stokes can't figure him out either, from the look of it, and says:

May 24, 2014 at 2:25 pm
Willis Eschenbach says: May 24, 2014 at 2:03 pm “Dear heavens, save me from pettifogging lawyers.”

No pettifog here. Your proposition is that a lack of sunspot cycle in the data supports a “dynamic thermoregulatory system”. I say that there was no significant change in forcing in the first place, so lack of observed response does not support thermoregulation.

Blue Sky says:

May 24, 2014 at 2:34 pm
Willis Eschenbach creates a straw man and than destroys it. Stick a feather in his hat.

You'll enjoy this comment. RoHa says, quoting Willis:

May 24, 2014 at 6:35 pm
“Unfortunately, the dang facts got in the way again”

They often do. I’ve told you before,you should leave those things alone and stick to pure speculation.

Roy Spencer doesn't bother pointing out that Willis' whole article is about chasing a phantom, but is enjoying the to and fro and says:

May 24, 2014 at 2:45 pm
Willis, I’m always happy to see someone other than myself pi$$ off a bunch of people. :-)

Because the topic is the sun, Lief Svalgaard joins in from time to time as usual. At one point he says:

May 24, 2014 at 5:25 pm
DaveR says: May 24, 2014 at 5:13 pm Put another way…. because the earth climate is not responding to the 11-year sunspot cycle (which we know is creating variable energy output) there must be some equally offsetting effect in the interface between the two systems.

No, the more likely reason is simply that the variation of the energy output is too small to have any significant effect.

Roy UK begs Willis to give him a clue as to what is causing the remarkably rapid rise in global temperature and says:

May 24, 2014 at 3:14 pm
So its not the sun. And it ain’t CO2. What in the world is it? C’mon Willis give us a clue…
Or is it just something that we should not worry about?

Louis has a bright idea to counteract nonsense like CO2 or Milankovitch forcings and says cosmic dust caused the ice ages:

May 24, 2014 at 6:36 pmIf it isn’t Sun cycles that cause changes to the climate, what other causes could there be?
Astronomers say we are currently located inside a low-density zone that is about 10 times lower in neutral atoms than the average of 0.5 atoms/cc elsewhere in the Milky Way on average. So what effect would there be if the solar system passed through a denser medium, such as an interstellar cloud? Could a higher-density zone block some sunlight from reaching Earth or have some other effect?

After a search, I found the following comment at http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q1372.html:

“When the solar system enters such a cloud, the first thing that will happen will be that the magnetic field of the Sun, which now extends perhaps 100 AU from the Sun and 2-3 times the orbit of Pluto, will be compressed back into the inner solar system depending on the density of the medium that the Sun encounters. When this happens, the Earth may be laid bare to an increased cosmic ray bombardment.”

Could passing through a cosmic dust cloud have caused ice ages in the past? If increased cosmic rays cause more clouds, couldn’t that cause cooling and possibly account for past ice ages? I have no idea one way or the other. I’m just throwing it out there because I haven’t seen any mention of such a possibility.

Our old mate, Roger Sowell talks about it being "prudent to act" (though Roger admits he knows bugger all) - and prepare for the ice age that cometh! (extracts):

May 24, 2014 at 4:12 pm
I agree that “it’s the evidence, stupid.” But, it is not the 11-year cycle that is the evidence of interest. the long-term solar cycles, of which we know very little, are the subject of interest, at least to me. They may or may not be regular cycles.

It is well-known that climate gets very cold when the sunspots disappear for decades on end. We have, as far as I know, no proven, accepted causal mechanism why the absence of sunspots causes the Earth to cool. There is the cloud and cosmic ray hypothesis, with cosmic rays modulated by the sun’s magnetic field.

Do we actually need a proven, causal mechanism before it is prudent to act?...

...In my May, 2012 speech to the chemical engineers in Southern California, I made the point that we have excellent correlations over hundreds of years that show weak sunspot cycles produce global cooling. ...

Mick draws an analogy and says:

May 24, 2014 at 3:59 pm
Willis, You can’t see the 100Hz AC if you stick a thermometer in the chicken soup coking on the hot-plate.

This doesn’t mean there is no oscillation of incoming energy, but the thermal inertia is acting as a low-pass filter…..

Also…. 0.5deg Celsius variation is significant for us humans, for our comfort. But looking at it in absolute terms, not much different between 300K or 300.5K ..about as much as in the Sun’s delta TSI ….me think.

(I hope my English is comprehensible enough…. apologize if it’s not, spell check struggle to understand my accent)

sabretruthtiger quoted Christopher Monckton (who joined the fray and opposed Willis), and sensibly, if somewhat incompletely, says that the sun (and volcanoes) would of course cause natural variation in climate (excerpt):

May 24, 2014 at 4:06 pm
...Nicely put, Mr Eschenbach put in his place somewhat.

Honestly there can surely be no other cause of natural variability other than the sun, it, along with axial tilt/proximity cycles can be the only causes of variability once electromagnetic and volcanic earth-based anomalies are discounted as the system is heat driven.

But what do I know, I’m not a climate scientist, Mr Eschenbach it would be extremely helpful if you could respond to Monckton’s assertions and give us an alternative to what drives natural variability.
Cheers

There is a lot of nonsense in the comments, which you can read here, if you've nothing better to do.

---

** I couldn't find this on the internet, but in my part of the world having a "touch of the sun" means that a person has temporarily lost his marbles :D

CO2 Downunder: The greening of Anthony Watts and his greenhouse effect deniers

Update -- see below.

Anthony Watts has an article up (archived here) about a new paper in Nature, except he doesn't know what he's writing about (as usual). His headline was:

Unsettled science: New study challenges the consensus on CO2 regulation – modeled CO2 projections exaggerated

No, Anthony. Modeled CO2 projections aren't exaggerated.

WUWT conspiracy nutters thrive with high CO2

Anthony's opening line was not only wrong, it was pure conspiracy ideation:

I’m really quite surprised to find this paper in Nature, especially when it makes claims so counter to the consensus that model projections are essentially a map of the future climate.

That's feeding the paranoia of the nutters at WUWT, who think that journals filter out science that doesn't support a consensus.  The opposite is true. Journals, particularly high profile journals like Nature, prefer papers that buck the consensus, that make headlines, that help promote the journal.  This paper doesn't buck any consensus in any real way. Instead it probes the detail and adds more knowledge.

Fact is, Anthony is getting his (dis)information from another denier website. Not a wise thing to do if you are interested in science, which Anthony isn't. He's a science disinformer so naturally rather than interpret the science, he interprets interpretations of science disinformers :)

Floods led to massive plant growth in semi-arid regions

Anthony got the paper right up to a point. What the large team of researchers found was that the record floods in Australia boosted vegetation so much that it sucked up a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.  As the abstract states (my paras and bold italics):

We use a terrestrial biogeochemical model, atmospheric carbon dioxide inversion and global carbon budget accounting methods to investigate the evolution of the terrestrial carbon sink over the past 30 years, with a focus on the underlying mechanisms responsible for the exceptionally large land carbon sink reported in 2011 (ref. 2). 

Here we show that our three terrestrial carbon sink estimates are in good agreement and support the finding of a 2011 record land carbon sink. Surprisingly, we find that the global carbon sink anomaly was driven by growth of semi-arid vegetation in the Southern Hemisphere, with almost 60 per cent of carbon uptake attributed to Australian ecosystems, where prevalent La Niña conditions caused up to six consecutive seasons of increased precipitation.

In addition, since 1981, a six per cent expansion of vegetation cover over Australia was associated with a fourfold increase in the sensitivity of continental net carbon uptake to precipitation.

Our findings suggest that the higher turnover rates of carbon pools in semi-arid biomes are an increasingly important driver of global carbon cycle inter-annual variability and that tropical rainforests may become less relevant drivers in the future. More research is needed to identify to what extent the carbon stocks accumulated during wet years are vulnerable to rapid decomposition or loss through fire in subsequent years.

What happened in Australia

Australia's long term average precipitation over the period 1900 to 2009 was 453 mm. In 2010 it was 703 mm and in 2011 it was 708 mm. That's a lot more rain. That made those two years combined the wettest since records began in 1900 and is attributed to La Niña, which also brought above average rain to southern Africa and northern South America. The rain was extra heavy, even for La Niña, because of global warming. The seas are hotter so more water is evaporating.  As reported at The Conversation, GRACE satellites estimated a decrease in ocean water mass of 1.8 trillion tonnes, with water shifted from the oceans to land. Sea levels dropped by a massive 5 mm.

Here is an illustration of what happened to the vegetation:

Modelled carbon uptake of the Australian landscape in December 2009 (before) compared with the start of the big wet in December 2010 (after). Adapted from Source: The Conversation.

Semi-arid regions vs tropical rainforests as carbon sinks

Thing is, conventional wisdom holds that it's tropical rainforests that are the most important carbon sink and will continue to be so. However this new research shows that semi-arid regions may become increasingly important as carbon sinks if events such as those described above occur more often. Semi-arid regions represent around 40% of the world's land surface.

A roller coaster of carbon shifts?

Australia as you know is also prone to drought and bushfires. Australia is the second driest continent on earth, after Antarctica. Any person who lives up the bush will tell you that the worst fire risk comes after a "good season". Lush vegetation dries out and fires take hold. What that does is unleash all that carbon that's been taken up by the extra growth and returns it to the atmosphere.

During the big wet, there weren't so many fires. It wasn't just Queensland that got wet, half of my own home state was under water for much of the 2011 summer. Much of Central Australia was virtually a giant lake. Western Australia had huge floods as well. The authors state that fire emissions were suppressed by about 30%, which "contributed even further to the continent's greening".

The good news of this carbon sink is tempered by the bad. In wet seasons there will probably continue to be a lot more carbon stored in new vegetation and in the soil. However with the projected climate change across much of Australia, it's likely that there will be more droughts and fires, which will result in all that carbon going back into the atmosphere. It won't stay locked up.

The interesting thing buried in the detail of the article at The Conversation, is that Australia has been greening more since the 1980s, not all with a good outcome (note the expansion of invasive species). The authors write:

In addition to the unprecedented vegetation greening of Australia during 2010 and 2011, we also observe a greening trend over the continent since 1980s, particularly during the months of the Australian autumn (March, April, and May).

That has happened for a number of reasons, including increased continental rainfall over the past few decades; plants growing in an atmosphere with increasing carbon dioxide using water more efficiently; and changes in land management such as fire suppression, expansion of invasive species, and changes in livestock grazing that have led to more woodland.

There have been previous studies that show that the increased carbon dioxide in the air is leading to more growth in Australia's native flora (as elsewhere in the world), particular in the arid regions. I wrote about this research on my slumbering Sou from Bundangawoolarangeera blog.

Where Anthony Watts gets it wrong - a short-lived sink

Of course Anthony Watts misrepresents the science. He isn't even aware of the paper itself. He only linked to an article in Nature about the paper calling it "a new paper". And he missed out completely on showing the article in The Conversation by two of the paper's authors.

Anthony wrote (my bold italics):

The authors find links between the land CO2 sink in these semi-arid ecosystems “are currently missing from many major climate models.” In addition, they find that land sinks for CO2 are keeping up with the increase in CO2 emissions, thus modeled projections of exponential increases of CO2 in the future are likely exaggerated.

Obviously Anthony is wrong when he claims that land sinks are keeping up with the increase in CO2 emissions, otherwise atmospheric CO2 wouldn't be above 400 ppm or rising at 3 ppm a year, like it is. It's simple arithmetic. While it is quite possible/probable that some climate models don't provide for CO2 sinks in semi-arid regions during big wets like the recent ones in Australia, I don't know where Anthony got his bit about exaggeration from either. It's not in the page he published from the Nature article about the paper (by Daniel B. Metcalfe). He probably got it from his denier blog source or maybe he just made it up. What the authors say at the Conversation is that the large uptake of carbon in 2011 was likely short-lived, because there was a rapid decline in the sink strength in 2012. So that suggests that Anthony is wrong as usual.

More volatility in CO2 levels

The ramifications of the research are that there is likely to be a lot more volatility in CO2 levels. Vegetation in semi-arid regions isn't like that in tropical rainforests.  The latter store carbon in hardwoods, which can lock it up for centuries. By contrast, in semi-arid regions carbon is stored in grasses and shrubs, which are relatively short-lived and prone to fire and drought, which quickly releases the carbon back into the atmosphere.  The authors say:

Increasingly, semi-arid regions are driving variability in how much carbon dioxide remains in the Earth’s atmosphere each year. And that has major implications for the long-term, including whether future climate change will slow down or accelerate further.

There's not very much information about the carbon budget in arid and semi-arid regions and I expect this research will lead to more. It could be that climate change will accelerate a lot, or proceed more slowly. I won't be betting on the latter until there's a lot more information.

Update

There is an excellent FAQ on this topic, prepared by the researchers.

From the WUWT comments

As usual, deniers at WUWT only like stuff that they think supports their ideology. Being fake sceptics, they don't check facts for themselves.  Also, the greenhouse effect deniers are out in force, suggesting that Anthony is rapidly losing faith with more rational, intelligent fake sceptics (if there is such a beast). Maybe Anthony's readership is shrinking to the utter nutters:

RayG is a greenhouse effect denier who refuses to read science. He stopped reading at the first hurdle, and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:14 am
I stopped reading at the assertion that in the first sentence that CO2 is the main driver of global climate change. I also note that there are no citations to support this claim.

hunter is another greenhouse effect denier and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:18 am
While the assertion that CO2 is *the* climate thermostat is dubious, at least this article is exploring one of the significant failings of the current CO2 obsession.

Latitude says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:23 am
Well, I mean really….
who was stupid enough in the first place to think an additional 2 ppm/yr would overwhelm the system

Dave says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:41 am
RayG says: I stopped reading at the assertion that in the first sentence that CO2 is the main driver of global climate change. I also note that there are no citations to support this claim.

Obama said it’s a fact. So it’s gotta be true, right? 

Londo says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:43 am
“I stopped reading at the assertion that in the first sentence that CO2 is the main driver of global climate change. I also note that there are no citations to support this claim.”

Perhaps that was the price to pay to get the paper through toll gate known as peer review. If there is one unsupported claim that you probably can publish in any climate journal that’s probably it.

Rhoda R says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:44 am
RayG says:
Ray, it may be that that statement was the only way that this study could have been published. I suspect that if the man-made, developed countries driver for C02 is shot down there will be much less interest in government funding of AGW research. 

Michael Gersh isn't just a greenhouse effect denier, he doesn't even accept basic chemistry, that burning hydrocarbon releases CO2 and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:48 am
As many of the actual scientists who have been espousing the “CO2 as Devil” meme walk away from the bad science, this paper tries to reveal that humanity may not even be the cause of higher CO2 concentrations. Those to whom Warmism is a religion will pretend not to notice.

Eliza is hopeful that it's one of the nails in the coffin and figures if climate science gets the chop then the world will magically stop warming. She says:

May 22, 2014 at 12:23 pm
Its probably a discrete “first” way out for NATURE so none of the big AGW shots notice. Its a climb down and we will be seeing more and more of this until the “norm” will in fact be the skeptic position, The whole AGW scam will only completely disappear when the funding dries out. For example, it is highly unlikely that Labor if they win the next election in Australia will pick it up again since Abbot has basically cut off all funding for AGW research and propaganda.

José Tomás says:

May 22, 2014 at 2:43 pm
Nature and other papers have obviously noticed that CAGW has no future (they are not idiots), but you cannot backtrack and save face at the same time.
So, expect lip service paid to CAGW for a long time, even while published articles go in the opposite direction. 

pokerguy says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:10 am
Can’t speak to the particulars, but seemingly excellent news that this paper has seen the light of day in the current repressive atmosphere. Is it possible things are changing a bit?

agfosterjr says:

May 22, 2014 at 12:52 pm
We see little mention of the Andean Altiplano, where possibly the growth of some species is limited more by CO2 scarcity (partial pressure) than by temperature or rainfall. Current interpretation of mud cores from Lake Titicaca indicates no certain history of Holocene forestation, but oddly enough, introduced eucalyptus (from Australia, of course) has no trouble growing at 4000 meters. It has been in the region for over a century, and is used for firewood and pole wood. If I were concerned with carbon capture I would plant lots of trees up high.
Of course eucalyptus introduces the potential for forest fires, as we have seen in Oakland and recently in Valparaiso. –AGF

This little curiosity caught my attention, not just because agfosterjr seemed to think that aforesting the tiny percentage of the world's land above 4,000 metres would make a huge difference to CO2, but because of his comment about eucalypts. When I looked it up I came across this article from 1999 that stated: The most abundant tree specie is eucalyptus. Growth and development of eucalyptus in the Altiplano is very slow, due to the adversity of the environment such as constant frost and prolonged period without precipitation. So it looks as if eucalyptus growth is retarded by cold and dry conditions.  According to the paper, the trees grow (very slowly) as spindly shrubs. Cold is the main thing stopping trees growing above the treeline generally.  (I guess that means the treeline will rise with global warming.) In the Andean Altiplano, lack of water doesn't help either.

David Ball fails arithmetic

A lot of comments were generated after David Ball failed arithmetic. David Ball, is a chip off the old block,  and says:

May 22, 2014 at 11:47 am
As Don Easterbrook pointed out (do not recall the thread), a change from 300ppm to 400ppm is NOT a 30% increase in Co2, as alarmists constantly shout.

No, David, it's a 33% increase. The increase from preindustrial 280 ppm to 400 ppm is a 43% increase in atmospheric CO2. When he's corrected by Scott Scarborough, David doubles down on his arithmetic failure. David Ball says:

May 22, 2014 at 12:28 pm
Firstly, have the courage to address me directly. Secondly, go back to math class.
The clue is ppm. Get a clue:

Various other commenters weighed in, all supporting Scott Scarborough. David Ball retorts with his weird arithmetic, which has nothing to do with his original claim. What he's calculated isn't the amount of increase in CO2 (which has increased by more than 40%), he's talking about the change in CO2 as a percentage of the total atmosphere - going from 0.03% to 0.04%:

May 22, 2014 at 2:41 pm
The difference is 0.0001, which, expressed as a percentage is 0.01%.

What a nutter. Typical of the denialati David Ball is not just very confused about what it is that he's calculating, he's doing a fairly standard version of "how can a trace gas keep the world warm". His dad is a greenhouse effect denier, too, and co-author of the "sky dragon slayers" book - among other things.

---

Benjamin Poulter, David Frank, Philippe Ciais, Ranga B. Myneni, Niels Andela, Jian Bi, Gregoire Broquet, Josep G. Canadell, Frederic Chevallier, Yi Y. Liu, Steven W. Running, Stephen Sitch & Guido R. van der Werf, "Contribution of semi-arid ecosystems to interannual variability of the global carbon cycle." Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13376

Daniel B. Metcalfe, "Climate science: A sink down under." Nature (2014) doi:10.1038/nature13341

Donohue, R. J., M. L. Roderick, T. R. McVicar, and G. D. Farquhar (2013), "Impact of CO2 fertilization on maximum foliage cover across the globe's warm, arid environments", Geophys. Res. Lett., 40, doi:10.1002/grl.50563.

Roberto Quiroz and Sassan Saatchi, (1999) "Mapping Aquatic and Agricultural Vegetation of Altiplano Using Spaceborne Radar Imagery",  from JPL-NASA website.

What you are witnessing @wattsupwiththat is denialism in action, with Tom Sheahen

Anthony Watts has now written not one, not two, not three, not four but at least five articles protesting the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet. I've commented on two of those, here and here.

His latest is from a chap called Tom Sheahen, who rejects science because of his politics. He signs every denier manifesto he can lay his hand on. Yes, he's one of the 100 people who signed a CATO document formally rejecting science. Tom's also signed his name to other utter nuttery, telling the US Supreme Court that:

CO2 is not in any sense an unwanted by-product of the production of useful energy. Rather, the combustion of carbon based fuels to produce CO2, and the capture of the energy released by that process, is the whole idea....

Tom Sheahen gives a lesson in denier-speak

Tom's article is mainly one in which he translates normal language into "denier-speak". It's mostly a lot of vague arm-waving gobbledygook, though not as gobbledy or gooky as one of Anthony Watts' other darlings, Tim Ball. After explaining what people really mean in denier-speak, at one stage Tom writes:

Elected officials striving to be responsive to their constituents’ concerns are often pressured by advocacy groups who have latched onto an incorrect interpretation of words. Scientists are sometimes guilty of riding a bandwagon that formed when the public misunderstood and exaggerated their original meaning; perhaps it’s convenient, prestigious and financially advantageous to let that confusion continue uncorrected. The effect snowballs and leads to new laws being passed, with expensive new regulations. Years later, with nothing accomplished, people ask “Oh, is that what you really meant?” Then the blame game begins, after much taxpayer money went down the drain unnecessarily.

That's not a bad lesson in denier speak. It's got just the right tinge of conspiracy ideation and nefarious intent. Tom doesn't give any examples of new laws and expensive new regulations that have sent money down the drain unnecessarily, needless to say. It's all denier theatre.

The above paragraph, you'll have noticed, embodies the unwritten assumption that all deniers are so stupid that they don't understand the purpose of particular laws and regulations. In fact Tom makes that assumption (that deniers are stupid) more than once. Elsewhere he writes:

• The word “average” is easily misunderstood. 
• In the absence of quotation marks, italics or capitals, ordinary citizens have no idea that the controversy is rooted in radically different meanings of the same words.

I expect now Anthony Watts will try to remember to put all controversial phrases in italics or between inverted commas, like Christopher Monckton does, so his dumb deniers will be know they must be translated into denier-speak. Will he be more precise in his use of "average" I wonder and specify whether he is referring to the mean or the mode or the median?

Tom Sheahen takes his deniers to Antarctica

Given that Tom's formally declared his allegiance to science denial it's a bit odd that he writes about geology - and then goes on to write about Antarctic ice. (Tom's name is also spelt as Tom Sheahan or Tom Sheehan in different places but it's the same chap AFAIK.)

What Tom's doing is having another shot at soothing the scaredy cats at WUWT. He's carefully explaining to them that terms used by geologists may have a different meaning to those same words used in general conversation.  The words he picks are time-related.

This is what Tom wrote:

Q. On TV I saw that the ice in Antarctica is collapsing, and that will raise sea level and inundate cities. Others reports say this will take thousands of years. How serious is the problem?

What you are witnessing here is a result of confusion between the public perception of the ordinary meaning of words, and the very special definitions used in scientific discourse.

Geologists deal with changes in the earth that occur over epochs of millions of years. Anything that happens in less than 10,000 years is “sudden,” and something happening in only 1,000 years is “instantaneous.” To geologists, the word “collapse” is appropriate for a 10,000 year process.

Tom apparently rejects the recent science that shows that parts of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) are slipping into the sea very quickly. He claims:

A hot-topic in the media these days has to do with the West Antarctic Ice Shelf (WAIS), a region comprising about 8% of the ice covering Antarctica. Within that region, there are two glaciers that are sliding down to the sea at a steady pace, as glaciers always do. They comprise about 10% of the WAIS, less than 1% of Antarctic ice. This descent has been in progress for several thousand years, and is neither new nor man-caused. It will go on for a few thousand more, after which they’ll be gone. In the parlance of geology, those two glaciers are collapsing.
If that doesn’t sound to you like your usual meaning of the word “collapse,” you’re absolutely right. It’s a specialized geological term.

Unfortunately, the major media overlook the distinction of meanings, and then make the further generalization from two specific glaciers to the entire WAIS, and moreover to Antarctica in general. Scientists who point out the small actual glacier size (and volume of ice) are brushed aside in the rush to get a headline or a flamboyant sound byte that will keep the viewers tuned in. Words like unavoidable collapse carry a sense of foreboding.

There is so much wrong with what Tom wrote that I won't bother with a listed rebuttal. Instead I'll point out that the melt of West Antarctica is happening. Not at a steady pace but at an accelerating pace. Not over 10,000 years but right now. And the West Antarctic ice sheet will add up to four metres (or more) to sea level when it's melted. The glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea alone will add a metre to sea level worldwide.

The groundline is moving back at nearly 2 km a year. Yes, that's right. Eric Rignot and colleagues have reported that over the nineteen years from 1992 to 2011:

• Pine Island Glacier retreated 31 km at its center - that's 1,632 metres a year on average.
• Thwaites Glacier retreated 14 km along its fast-flow core - that's 737 metres a year on average.
• Haynes Glacier retreated 10 km along its flanks - that's 526 metres a year on average.
• Smith/Kohler glaciers retreated the most, 35 km along its ice plain - that's 1,842 metres a year on average.

I haven't yet written about the other paper that hit the headlines at the same time as the Rignot paper. The second paper is by Ian Joughin, Benjamin E. Smith and Brooke Medley and was published in Science last week (16 May). Like Rignot14, they were studying the ice sheet in the Amundsen Sea Embayment, in particular the Thwaites and Haynes Glaciers. Here is a map, courtesy of AntarcticGlaciers.org . If you click to enlarge the image, you can see Thwaites next to Pine Island on the Amundsen Sea.

 

Credit: AntarcticGlaciers.org

What the scientists found was that the collapse of WAIS has already begun. In the paper, when they refer to Thwaites Glacier they are also including Haynes Glacier and together they contribute almost half the ice losses to the Amundsen Sea (52 Gt/year of the 105Gt/year measured as at 2007).

The thing is that once Thwaites goes, so does most of the West Antarctic ice sheet from that area, which will eventually raise sea levels by anything up to four metres or so.

As reported in ScienceDaily.com:

The good news is that while the word "collapse" implies a sudden change, the fastest scenario is 200 years, and the longest is more than 1,000 years. The bad news is that such a collapse may be inevitable.

"Previously, when we saw thinning we didn't necessarily know whether the glacier could slow down later, spontaneously or through some feedback," Joughin said. "In our model simulations it looks like all the feedbacks tend to point toward it actually accelerating over time; there's no real stabilizing mechanism we can see."

What is apparently happening is that the warmer Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) is thinning the ice that's on the continental shelf around Antarctica, which means that the glaciers aren't being held back to the same extent any more. From the paper:

Currently, elevated melt rates on the Amundsen Coast are largely driven by increased transport of warm CDW onto the continental shelf rather than by direct warming of the CDW (6). If the conditions responsible for this transport abate, melting should lessen. Thus, we simulated 100 years of high melt (m = 3 and 4) followed by reduced melt (m = 1) for the remainder of the simulation (Fig. 3B). Although the reduction in melt slowed the rate of loss, at the end of these 250-year simulations, losses were substantially greater relative to the sustained m = 1 simulation.

Eric Rignot explains this in an article in The Guardian (well worth reading - h/t idunno):

...Ocean heat is pushed by the westerly winds and the westerlies have changed around Antarctica in response to climate warming and the depletion of the ozone. The stronger winds are caused by a world warming faster than a cooling Antarctica. Stronger westerlies push more subsurface warm waters poleward to melt the glaciers, and push surface waters northward.

The rapid collapse threshold - 1 mm/year of sea level rise

On the issue of how long this will take, the research suggests it could happen after a couple of centuries and probably in less than a thousand years. Which isn't all that long even on human time scales. And once she goes, she goes quickly. From the paper:

When simulated losses exceed 1 mm/year of sle [sea level equivalent], much greater losses generally follow within a few years. Using our basin-scale model, however, such rapid collapse is difficult to model, especially because interaction with other basins becomes increasingly important. Thus, we take 1 mm/year of sle to be a threshold that, once crossed, marks the onset of rapid (decades) collapse as the grounding line reaches the deepest regions of the marine basin. In our 250-year simulations, only the highest-melt, weak-margin simulation reaches this critical threshold. Therefore, we have extended the remaining simulations to determine when this threshold is reached (fig. S2 and Table 1). For all but the lowest-melt simulations (m = 0.5), the onset of rapid collapse begins within a millennium. 

So what we need to watch for is the amount of loss a year. That's not all. The paper has some provisos.

An important feature of our numerical simulations is that they reveal a strong sensitivity to mechanical and/or rheological weakening of the margins, which can accelerate the rate of collapse by decades to centuries. Thus, future models will require careful treatment of shear margins to accurately project sea-level rise. Our simulations also assume that there is no retreat of the ice-shelf front. Full or partial ice-shelf collapse should produce more rapid retreat than we have simulated. In addition, we have not modeled ocean-driven melt that extends immediately upstream of the grounding line, which could also accelerate retreat.

That means, the ice could melt sooner rather than later.  I'm thinking that it will be very important to keep a close watch on what is happening in West Antarctica over coming decades (and centuries).

There's 7 metres more waiting in East Antarctica

Eric Rignot warns that it's not just West Antarctica that's going to hit us with all this extra seawater. There's a marine glacier, Totten Glacier, in East Antarctica that will add seven metres (23 feet) to global sea level. He doesn't give a time frame but writes:

There is also a bigger picture than West Antarctica. The Amundsen sea sector is not the only vulnerable part of the continent. East Antarctica includes marine-based sectors that hold more ice. One of them, Totten glacier, holds the equivalent of seven metres of global sea level.

Controlling climate warming may ultimately make a difference not only about how fast West Antarctic ice will melt to sea, but also whether other parts of Antarctica will take their turn. Several "candidates" are lined up, and we seem to have figured a way to push them out of equilibrium even before warming of air temperature is strong enough to melt snow and ice at the surface.

Unabated climate warming of several degrees over the next century is likely to speed up the collapse of West Antarctica, but it could also trigger irreversible retreat of marine-based sectors of East Antarctica. Whether we should do something about it is simply a matter of common sense. And the time to act is now; Antarctica is not waiting for us.

What is the threshold for denialism?

One thing that I wonder, when I read papers like these two (Rignot14 and Joughin14) and then go across to WUWT to read how strongly they protest the facts, is why? Why do they pretend that ice doesn't melt as it warms? I mean, given all the caveats, this could mean a rapid rise in sea level within their lifetime, and easily within their children's lifetime. They can't all be 90 years old and childless. They can't all care so little about the future of human society. What is it that drives them to such an imbecilic reaction to strong warnings? There must come a day when deniers reach a threshold of fact that will be impossible to reject (leaving aside the certifiable nutters).

From the WUWT comments

emsnews is an ice age comether and he's wrong. Even a grand minimum won't stop global warming. emsnews says:

May 21, 2014 at 4:14 pm
Except if this is the beginning of another Maunder Minimum due to the sun, those glaciers won’t be suddenly or slowly melting into the ocean. Quite the opposite.

cnxtim copies and pastes the usual irrelevant, meaningless denier slogans and says:

May 21, 2014 at 4:53 pm
All this scaremongering is inexorably delivering the CAGW flock into the “chicken little idiot’ brigade in the eyes of the GP – and good riddance to them and their public purse budgets.

Frank K. is scared shitless but not about global warming or rising seas. He's a denier of the paranoid conspiracy persuasion and says:

May 21, 2014 at 5:02 pm
To add to what others have said, it is quite clear to me that the misuse of scientific press releases for political gain is deliberate. Global warming (or climate change, disruption, …whatever) has NEVER been about science, but rather a means to fundamentally change (and destroy) our ways of life. And the left wing, progressive zealots will not cease until their mission is acomplished. 

george e. conant is overwhelmed by Tom's generosity in telling him not to be scared by Yahoo News items about hottest Aprils and global warming and rising seas, so much so that he can't help shouting:

May 21, 2014 at 5:11 pm
This may be off topic a wee bit BUT, I just scrolled through the Yahoo News Feed… OH MY GAWD, one article after another about Global Warming , all bad, all catastrophic , some already mentioned in these comments … I am seeing a ramping up of the Alarmism to levels just unbelievable. David Suzuki now demanding that politicians who are Climate Deniers should be (need to be) LOCKED UP… The Antarctic collapsing, Hottest April Globally , on and on …. WOW. And Thank you Dr. Sheahen, excellent article. 

LogosWrench is another one who proves Tom's assumption about deniers and says:

May 21, 2014 at 5:19 pm
Now add to that our intellectual waste lands known as universities that teach words have no meaning apart from what the hearer desires. So there you go. Cooling is caused by warming and other such nonsense.

noloctd is a nasty as well as stupid denier who laughs aloud at the difficult legacy he's leaving his (presumably) nephew and says:

May 21, 2014 at 5:49 pm
A liberal family member has assured me that a Maunder Minimum like event will have NO effect this time because there is 400 PPM of CO2 in the atmosphere. He’s a soon to be grad student in something social sciency, but insists that he knows all about geology and the other sciences. He is convinced to the point of obsessive worry that humans are the cause of all climate change and that Antarctica will melt in his lifetime and innundate a good portion of the dry land, not just the coasts.

Alas, I can’t laugh too loudly as he’s family after all. 

Oh, a real live normal rational person slipped in a comment. Chris says:

May 21, 2014 at 7:31 pm
Dr. Sheahen said” Within that region, there are two glaciers that are sliding down to the sea at a steady pace, as glaciers always do.

The “steady” pace has doubled from the 80 billion tons/year in the 2005-2010 time period to 160 billion tons/year during the latest measurements. I wouldn’t call that a steady pace, I’d call it a rapidly increasing pace. 

The deniers did have a bit of trouble with the meaning of the word "average". So Tom's assumption about deniers was proven again. There were several comments, with various people explaining what different "averages" mean, for example, swifty is correct when saying:

May 21, 2014 at 9:27 pm
The midpoint of a range, when listed in ascending or descending order, yes, it is called the median. 

I suppose since they are still debating grade school arithmetic, there isn't much reason to hope deniers will understand the intricacies of a melting cryosphere.

---

E. Rignot, J. Mouginot, M. Morlighem, H. Seroussi, B. Scheuchl. "Widespread, rapid grounding line retreat of Pine Island, Thwaites, Smith and Kohler glaciers, West Antarctica from 1992 to 2011".. Geophysical Research Letters, 2014; DOI: 10.1002/2014GL060140

Joughin, Ian, Benjamin E. Smith, and Brooke Medley. "Marine Ice Sheet Collapse Potentially Under Way for the Thwaites Glacier Basin, West Antarctica." Science 344, no. 6185 (2014): 735-738. DOI: 10.1126/science.1249055

Snow-befuddled deniers at WUWT

The mood at WUWT can be measured by the type of comments. Today it's a bit of a mixture. Some people noticed a really silly and wrong analysis, which I wrote about earlier. Yet on the same day, the nutters came out of the WUWT woodwork when Anthony posted about brand new paper on snow (archived here).

Anthony got a press release from the University of Bristol (via Eureka Alert), where scientists W. R. Berghuijs, R. A.Woods and M. Hrachowitz studied the impact on stream flow of less snowfall. Based on their research they argue that, contrary to what is commonly thought, where there are significant reductions in the proportion of precipitation falling as snow (as opposed to rain), there will most likely be a reduction in the mean streamflow.

They've based their analysis on observations in 420 catchments in the USA.  Which is rather a lot, isn't it. As they say in the press release:

“With more than one-sixth of the Earth’s population depending on meltwater for their water supply, and ecosystems that can be sensitive to streamflow alterations, the socio-economic consequences of a reduction in streamflow can be substantial.

“Our finding is particularly relevant to regions where societally important functions, such ecosystem stability, hydropower, irrigation, and industrial or domestic water supply are derived from snowmelt.”

From the WUWT comments

The deniers at WUWT are virtually unanimous in their rejection of this paper. Almost all of the people commenting at WUWT think the research is useless. The thing is, though, that just as deniers have only one thing in common when it comes to climate science (they all reject it but for a multitude of different reasons), this time some deniers reject the study because they say it's wrong. Others reject it as useless because the findings are "obvious"!

Anthony Watts sets the ball rolling, writing:

From the University of Bristol  and the department of obvious science.

Charlie Martin says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:06 pm
Golly, I bet in areas with monsoons, the outflow of the river depends significantly on how much raInfall there is.

Joel O'Bryan didn't bother to read the article but had to have his say, and says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:13 pm
So a warmer world is a drier world???? I think not.

norah4you opts for the "scientists don't know nuffin'" meme and says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:24 pm
Is it possible that some educated persons might send the Alarmists no matter if the later has or hasn’t degree or scholartitle a hint of what every 4th grader around the world should have learnt – the Water cycle? Sadly enough the alarmists seems to have missed that essential part.

Brian M. Babey also opts for "it's wrong" and says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:35 pm
B.S. Snowfall moisture is based upon the temperature it is formed. Warmer the temperature the more moisture is in it! As a person who lives in Snowy and Cold Climate of Minnesota, this is crap research. For Example a quarter inch of rain can produce either 1 inch of snow or 4 inches of snow depending upon the temperature, While a quarter of rain at any temp is still the same. So instead of it falling as snow it will fall as rain. LOL, too much stupidity from people who dont have a clue about cold and snow. FYI last winter i recorded a low of -23.9 F. As a side note i think we need to stop recording snowfall in inches of depth and only measure content of moisture, because 96 inches of snow one season isn’t the same as 96 inches of snow in another since moisture content varies!

Does Steve Case want an honest answer to his question when he asks:

May 18, 2014 at 5:36 pm
Let’s see, precipitation (rain & snow) changes with regard to the ratio between rain and snow, but overall in a warmer world there is more precipitation. And we are being told that more rain and less snow equals less flow in the rivers.

How stupid do they think we all are? 

Latitude, I think, comes down on the scientists are correct side, but maybe for the wrong reason when he says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:48 pm
They already knew this:
With more than one-sixth of the Earth’s population depending on meltwater for their water supply
But they didn’t know this:
New research has shown for the first time that the amount of water flowing through rivers in snow-affected regions depends significantly on how much of the precipitation falls as snowfall.
…and they got paid what for this?

Nick Stokes asks a pointless question, given the venue, and says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:51 pm
It’s not obvious science. It asks the relevant question, how does the amount of river runoff vary depending on whether a given amount of precipitation falls as rain or snow? Is that something you all knew? 

TimB says - well, I'm not really sure what he's saying except it's clear that he toes the illiterati line and claims the research is useless:

May 18, 2014 at 5:55 pm
Meh. Snow allows the trees to have a more continuous supply of water. No snow, trees die. Less trees, more albedo and more water available to people. It’s win-win-win. Or it’s such a narrow view of the entire coupled process as to be virtually useless information.

John Eggert is an expert on peer review (WUWT-style) and just knows it shouldn't have passed. I wonder how he thinks the scientists got their data, of which most goes back to 1948? He says:

May 18, 2014 at 5:58 pm
The statement “How river flow is generated in snowy areas is poorly understood due to the difficulty in getting appropriate measurements. ” tells me these people don’t know what they are talking about. In Ontario, the electrical utility measures snow pack regularly and has a clear view of how many inches of water it contains. This is used by many parties to estimate how much runoff there will be (this has been going on for decades). Also, there are two periods of increased water flow. The spring freshet, associated with snow melt and the fall freshet associated with precipitation from the contrast of the impending winter and the departing summer (for want of a shorter term, Joe Bastardi could give a long and detailed description I’m sure). How river flow is generated in snowy areas is VERY well understood. How did this pass peer review?

John Eggert, being a dinky di true blue fake sceptic who makes it his business to scoff at anything and everything that's published in a science journal, wouldn't realise that the lead author has a PhD in civil engineering, and that he and Dr Woods are with the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bristol, and that Dr Hrachowitz is also an engineer and is an expert in hydrology in the Water Resources Section, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. John says:

May 18, 2014 at 6:06 pm
Nick Stokes: Nothing in science is obvious. Else Aristotle would have known that F=ma. This “study” is rehashing settled science, or to use the appropriate term for “settled science”: engineering. Civil engineers have been doing this type of work for years. It is somewhat important in things like dam design. The authors of this study have reinvented a wheel. And a hand chiseled stone wheel at that.

José Tomás also misses the point of the study and its findings when he says:

May 18, 2014 at 6:25 pm
You don’t need to live in a snowy country to know that.
Even here in Brazil, a virtually snowless country, small kids in school learn about the water volume in the Amazon River basin depending on the melting of the winter snow on the Andes…
Indeed, “How did this pass peer review?”

Pamela Gray misses the point of the research too, and foolishly says:

May 18, 2014 at 6:41 pm
The water content in snow pack and the conditions of the melt season are bigger measures of water flow in rivers during the summer/fall season. Snow pack and melt rate have been studied and results used for decades to manage water resources for agriculture purposes in closed ecosystems like Wallowa County. This article sounds like the authors are at the kindergarten stage.

Finally, there is a lone WUWT commenter (apart from Nick Stokes) who seems to have understood the article, though I'm not sure his conclusions can be applied universally. kenwd0elq says:

May 18, 2014 at 7:02 pm
This makes at least a little sense; precipitation that falls as rain runs downstream IMMEDIATELY, while snow remains on the ground and flows downstream at the rate of the snow melting.

Further, in places like the Sierra Nevada, rain not only runs downstream immediately, it also causes accelerated snowmelt.

So if the goal is a constant flow in the river rather than flood and drought, we either need precip as snow, or we need dams and reservoirs to control the downstream flow. Good thing we have them!

Hoser decides the scientists are wrong and says:

May 18, 2014 at 7:59 pm
A significant fraction of precipitation as snow is lost through sublimation. Rain will either run off or flow as groundwater. Certainly some will be lost through evaporation, but not during the precipitation event. Did the authors confuse total discharge and peak discharge? Peak snow melt will occur in spring, Multiple rainfall in a season would tend to decrease snow pack and reduce peak discharge unless a powerful late winter warm storm melts a substantial snow pack. The point is, if it rains, the water will stay on (lakes, streams) or in the ground. If it snows, a lot of the moisture will be lost to the air (typically from tree branches). Thus, it is likely the paper is quite wrong.

Jimmy Finley doesn't like Nick Stokes barging in uninvited (and spouting sciency stuff) to a denier festival  and says (excerpt with quote removed):

May 18, 2014 at 8:25 pm
Nick Stokes says:
...The question I want to ask, is, how truly stupid, arrogant and unknowing about the world are you? What are you, who has some snide remark to offer all the “deniers” here? We would really like to see your CV, and all the exalted degrees from exalted Universities, so we can give you proper respect. 

Steve Keohane who, being a typical WUWT fake sceptic, didn't look at the research let alone the data the scientists provided, says:

May 18, 2014 at 8:42 pm
Agreed, not worth reading.
In Colorado they watch accumulation of snow and water equivalency, time of accumulation maximum, and continual water flow rates for the Colorado River at least, the data already exists and they aren’t looking at it. Typical.

I didn't count up the votes, but you can if you want. I'd say the WUWT comments can be grouped into four categories:

• It's so obvious that the research was a waste of time and, of course, money
• It's wrong and proves that scientists don't know nuffin' - and therefore the research was a waste of time and, of course, money
• I don't understand what the article is all about but I like seeing my name in cyberspace at the world's most read anti-science blog
• It's useful science (almost no-one)

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W. R. Berghuijs, R. A.Woods and M. Hrachowitz, "A precipitation shift from snow towards rain leads to a decrease in streamflow", Nature Climate Change, Vol 4, June 2014. doi:10.1038/nclimate2246