Recycling Arctic cyclones at WUWT

In my last article I commented how Anthony Watts seemed to have forgotten that he'd already published three articles on Trenberth and Fasullo in the last month, when he put up his fourth article about the paper.

Today he's reposted/recycled another article from last month.  This time about cyclones in the Arctic.   Here are the web archives - December 2013 and January 2014.

Maybe Anthony needs a check up.  I mean forgetting once can be put down to normal human forgetfulness.  Forgetting twice can be put down to not reading the articles he posts.  But forgetting twice in two consecutive days?

More (smaller, short-lived) cyclones than previously thought

Anyway, (if I recall correctly - ha ha) I didn't write about it back in December so here's a summary, based on this article at ScienceDaily.com.  The article was about findings presented at AGU13:

From 2000 to 2010, about 1,900 cyclones churned across the top of the world each year, leaving warm water and air in their wakes -- and melting sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.

That's about 40 percent more than previously thought, according to a new analysis of these Arctic storms.

A 40 percent difference in the number of cyclones could be important to anyone who lives north of 55 degrees latitude -- the area of the study, which includes the northern reaches of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia, along with the state of Alaska.

The finding is also important to researchers who want to get a clear picture of current weather patterns, and a better understanding of potential climate change in the future, explained David Bromwich, professor of geography at The Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

Anthony previously wrote about the 2012 Arctic cyclone - 27 August 2012 and 19 September 2012 and 24 September 2012 and 27 December 2012 and maybe elsewhere.  In those articles he was implying that the record low summer arctic ice in 2012 could be all blamed on the cyclone.  (In other articles Anthony's posted photos of various ships, misrepresenting where they were and when, in an futile effort to claim that the sharp decline in Arctic sea ice isn't "unusual".)

In these latest articles, Anthony seems to be implying something but I'm not sure what - maybe that Arctic cyclones are causing all the Arctic ice to melt? He wrote:

News media back then seemed to think this was a new thing, and downplayed the role of the cyclone is breaking up sea ice, preferring to attribute it to the omnipotent global warming. Apparently it’s just business as usual for the Arctic.

Still, it's a more rational hypothesis than blaming the Arctic summer ice decline on icebreakers!

Summer is the time for cyclones

Now the thing is that the whole reason that the cyclones weren't easily detected was because they were so small and short-lived, unlike the mammoth cyclone in 2012.  Naturally Neven is right on top of this topic at his Arctic Sea Ice blog.  Neven wrote a number of articles on the big 2012 storm, such as this one.  And in regard to Arctic summer storms in general, here is a quote from an article he referenced last August, here:

“People seem to have this thought that all this storminess is unusual,” said Mark Serreze, an Arctic climatologist and center director at NSIDC. “Well it’s not. It simply isn’t. Summer is the time for cyclones.” Arctic summers are not calm. In fact, the months of August and September see a maximum amount of cyclonic activity. Not every summer is very stormy, but overall, the Arctic is the Arctic for a reason.

So if Anthony Watts and his band of science deniers think that the Arctic is melting purely because of cyclones, that would be wrong.

Anyway, that's enough of that.  Arctic sea ice is Neven's specialty.  His blog is a mine of information and habituated by people who understand and are interested in science.  (Avoid anti-science blogs like WUWT unless you want your brain filled chock-a-block with nonsense.)

Quote of the Week at WUWT: Taking Precautions with Roald Amundsen

Anthony Watts has put up a Quote of the Week, attributed to Roald Amundsen (archived here, latest update here).  It's quite a good quote:

“Victory awaits him, who has everything in order – luck we call it. Defeat is definitely due for him, who has neglected to take the necessary precautions – bad luck we call it” 

As Anthony Watts indicated, "Roald Amundsen, led the expedition to first reach the South Pole (Dec, 1911) and captained the Gjøa, which was the first vessel to sail through the entire Northwest Passage (1903-06)"

What else did Roald Amundsen do?  He was an adventurer more than an explorer or scientist. His first attempt to reach the South Pole failed, but undeterred Amundsen tried again the following spring. The following is all based on material from Wikipedia:

"Amundsen’s expedition benefited from his careful preparation, good equipment, appropriate clothing, a simple primary task (Amundsen did no surveying on his route south and is known to have taken only two photographs)."

Not science and not surveying then.  It was a simple goal to reach the South Pole.  Pure adventure.

Amundsen had quite a bit of bad luck.  He "spent two winters frozen in the ice without having achieved the goal of drifting over the North Pole".  The goal was to get the ship frozen in ice and drift over the North Pole.

He failed in an early attempt to fly over the North Pole.

He also went bankrupt at one stage.

He died while on a rescue flight - his plane probably crashed in fog on the Barents Sea.

His ship Gjøa was returned to Norway in 1972.  I don't know how much it cost to do so :)

Roald Amundsen was a great adventurer and explorer and through his expeditions he and his team did contribute quite a lot to the world's knowledge and science.  And I expect he did attempt to plan as well as possible, just like most people taking a trip into dangerous territory.

But I wonder, was Anthony wanting to hold up Roald Amundsen as a risk avoider who never encountered bad luck because of his excellent planning?  The same Anthony Watts who cowers at the thought of attending a science conference a couple of hours travel from his home in safe, sunny California.  (The same Anthony Watts who cadged funds from his followers to pay for the trip and more - and did he end up paying for attendance or did he get in for free and pocket the change?)

From the WUWT comments

There are only three so far, including this one from an uber-conspiracy theorist of the Tim Ball kind, rogerthesurf, who says:

January 5, 2014 at 8:25 pm
No section for Agenda 21 issues which is the parent of AGW as well as global web of UN non benign issues?

I cover some of them in my posts at http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com but the issue is larger than that and miles larger than AGW which is only one of many side shows.

Cheers
Roger 

If you're curious about what occupies rogerthesurf 's mind, I've archived his latest article here. He is afraid. Very afraid.

With the updated archive there are more gems, including these, with a congrats to Anthony for his OWG/NWO conspiracy articles:


jdseanjd says (excerpts):

January 5, 2014 at 11:21 pm
Quite agree roger. Can’t leave it all to Christopher Monckton.
Too many people want to argue minutiae, while ignoring the bigger picture.
Fair play to Anthony, he has published some of my rants re UN Agenda 21 on WUWT. And he’s just published an article on overpopulation, the fallacy behind the fallacy of global warming, so he’s getting there, in his steady scientific way.

jdseanjd has more to say (some excerpts from a longer comment, equally bad):

January 6, 2014 at 1:37 am
Rogerthesurf hi.

Just clicked on your link, & I’m staggered by how deeply embedded the commie bureaucracy is, & how ruthless they are. & also how dumb they are.

Some facts which may help you. There are 3 city states on this planet which :
1) pay no taxes.
2) have their own police/army.
3) are not subject to the laws of the lands in which they are situated.

These are :
1) The Vatican = Vatican Bank, run by Jesuits, & owns Bank of America.
2) The City of London = Bank Of England = Rothschilds, (& Royal Family) = ‘The Crown’
3) DC in Washington = The FED = Rothschilds + Warburgs + Schiffs + Rockefellers, etc.

...In particular, ‘The Crown’ is a corporation, owned by anonymous private Central Banksters, which owns Canada & New Zealand & Australia. Even The Queen Of England has to ask permission of The Lord Mayor of London to set foot in The City Of London, which shows you who’s in control.

...What I believe is happening is that technology & population numbers have made such huge progress in the 20th century that the 1%s have grown afraid of losing the control they have hitherto enjoyed. In particular they fear losing control of Energy, because cheap & plentiful energy is the basis of all progress in society.

...Back to UN Agenda 21. It’s the Control Freak Coward 1%s desperate play to hang on to control in the face of exponential technological progress. They have decided to cut back world population to approx 500,000,000, from its present ~ 7 billion. That means “disposing of” 13 out of 14 people now alive.

They have also decided to abolish private property, & the family. You are seeing what huge progress they have made in Christchurch. In the UK, most of our politicians, bureaucrats & Govt departments have been heavily infiltrated by Communist front organisations, led by a shadowy group known as “Common Purpose”. In the US, I believe it’s “Common Core”. They are not above using totally vile techniques, such as bribery & blackmail, to suborn people to their cause.

...The irony is that these mad plotters will be redundant once the entrepreneurial & middle classes have been squeezed out of existence, leaving just the 1%s & an agrarian serf class of only ~ 500,000,000 to service their needs. Tricky Marxist plotters will be surplus to requirements, & will be disposed of.

It’s all totally mad, of course. Ron Paul,one of the very few politicians I respect, spent 20 of his 23 years a a Texas Congressman trying to arrange an audit of the FED. He failed, which amply demonstrates where true power lies in our nominally “Democratic” society. He has now retired, having handed the cudgels to his son Rand Paul. He now focuses on homeschooling, ie getting kids out of the dumbing down brainwashing system we call our state schools. He has resigned himself to the sane survivors having to pick up the pieces, & start again, after the “Catastrophe” he predicts the mad 1%s will cause....

The sound of ice doesn't register at WUWT

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

Icy Bay Alaska
Credit: US National Park Service

Sound has its own story to tell

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

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

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

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

Noisy glacial fjords

From Science Daily:

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

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

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

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

Acoustic events and diurnal cycle in Icy Bay, Alaska

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

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

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

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

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

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

Acoustic monitoring in the Antarctic

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

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

Ice is alive! Erin Pettit on Antarctic ice shelves

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

Girls on Ice

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

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

From the WUWT comments

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Bob Greene thinks he is being clever and says:

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

Noah Zark is confused by ice and says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is for james griffin:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

Old and new warming in the Eurasian Arctic and denier weirdness at WUWT

Anthony Watts seems to have put his foot in it again, but has pulled it out just a little (archived here - updated here).

Today he posted an article about a new paper with some analysis of an ice core from the Eurasian Arctic, in the vicinity of the Kara and Barents Seas. Going by his note at the bottom, perhaps Anthony originally tried to use the paper to "prove" something about Cowtan and Way - maybe that it was wrong.  His note reads:

[Note: this original post was written during my workday and making a comparison to the Cowtan and Way paper, and like sometimes happens during my day, I got interrupted, and then got off on a tangent that wasn't correct. To correct my mistake, I've republished this post sans that tangent. Later I'll get back to my original idea when I have more time.  - Anthony]

My guess is that we'll be waiting for about the same length of time for him to write about his "original idea" as we'll be waiting for his promised publication about "Watts et al 2012 draft paper", which has been slipping so far down the sidebar at WUWT that it's looking as if it's about to drop right off.

Resurrecting an old favourite

In honour of this new paper, Anthony resurrected an old favourite of the denialati:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

The above is from a newspaper article that's been circulating among the denialati for years.  You can read the full article here.  The article describes how the west coast of Spitzbergen right up to the north was significantly warmer than normal back in the early 1920s.

It may well have been the same factors operating in both locations in the early part of last century.  The Opel paper doesn't specifically mention Spitzbergen but it does discuss Arctic-wide changes.

Here is a map of the eastern portion of the Arctic region, showing the locations of the Akademii Nauk (AN) ice core and Spitzbergen (click for larger view):

Adapted from Google Earth

AN ice core may tell 3,000 years of climate history

Back to the paper itself, which is open access.  The paper is by Thomas Opel, D. Fritzsche, and H. Meyer and published in the journal Climate of the Past.  In it, they provide more climatic information about the region as derived from an ice core.  The conclusion of the paper is that the Akademii Nauk (AN) ice core has the potential to provide a 3,000 year or so high resolution record of the climate of the western Eurasian Arctic:

The results presented in this paper highlight the potential of the AN ice core as a high-resolution climate archive for the Late Holocene, i.e. about the last three millennia. Beside a long-term decrease due to climate cooling and ice-cap growth the AN 18O record shows evidence of major temperature changes over the last millennium that are representative at least of the western Eurasian Arctic, i.e. the Barents and Kara seas region. Of particular importance are several abrupt cooling and warming events leading e.g. to the absolute SAT minimum around 1800 and the absolute SAT maximum in the early 20th century, accompanied by significant changes in sodium concentrations. The ETCW exhibits a specific double-peaked shape typical of the Barents and Kara seas region. Abrupt changes in the last centuries might be caused by internal climate dynamics related to shifts of atmospheric circulation patterns and corresponding sea-ice feedbacks.

Anthony Watts confuses local with global

I think Anthony Watts was hoping for more, maybe even proof that global warming isn't happening.   Or maybe he was hoping it showed that the Arctic summer sea ice isn't really on a death spiral.  Or maybe that "it's natural" and "it's the sun" or "climate always changes".  In his article Anthony writes (my bold italics):

Of course, just like the surface temperature record, the long term trend is up, but clearly there is also a pause since the double peak, and that’s hard to explain in the face of a linear increase of (some claim exponential) GHG emissions.

Climate shifts in the past may be "hard to explain" but not in the way Anthony suggests.  Anthony is confusing local climate with global climate.  You would think he would have learnt by now that at the regional and local level, surface temperatures don't necessarily follow global temperature trends.  But even after all his years announcing weather followed by several years blogging about it, Anthony Watts still doesn't seem to know the first thing about weather and climate.

As an aside, you'll have noticed that Anthony Watts, despite claiming to keep a climate blog, isn't even clear about the single biggest factor affecting climate today - greenhouse gas emissions.  They are indeed still rising exponentially.  It's not been a linear rise.  There are already signs that 2013 will create a new record in greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate shifts in the Arctic - a see-saw effect?

The paper provides some explanation for climate shifts in the Eurasian Arctic.  In the body of the paper the authors expand on the following relevant part of their conclusion:

Abrupt changes in the last centuries might be caused by internal climate dynamics related to shifts of atmospheric circulation patterns and corresponding sea-ice feedbacks

They discuss a possible see-saw effect operating across the Arctic at certain times, for example:

Whereas our AN 18O and the Arctic-wide SAT records (Kaufman et al., 2009; PAGES 2k Consortium, 2013) display similar patterns in the 11th and 12th centuries, they show clearly contrary trends in the 15th and 16th centuries (Fig. 6). Abrupt cooling events in the Barents and Kara seas region are accompanied by warming events on the Arctic scale and vice versa. The causes of these differences may be similar to those already discussed for the periods around 1800 and in the early 20th century. This pattern might be interpreted as a kind of SAT see-saw on a predominantly spatial scale (Eurasian vs. North American Arctic) but may contain also, to a lesser extent, seasonal effects (annual vs. summer).

The modern record at the AN ice core site

In the comments, the arguably most respected layperson who watches the Arctic, Neven, pointed out that the paper reports temperatures only up to 1998, after which temperatures are likely to have gone up even further.  NevenA says:

November 19, 2013 at 12:51 pm
That graph unfortunately ends in 1998, whereas we can safely assume that Arctic amplification and surface air temperature rate acceleration kicked in after that.

Well, Anthony didn't like that one bit.  After all, he's busy trying to prove that "all the science is wrong" by referring to the science (yeah, illogical what?).  Anthony responds in-line writing:

REPLY: simply because you say it does? Show/prove it “Gunther” – Anthony

Zeke Hausfather provided some links to temperature data for the region, at greater or lesser distances from the AN ice core.  Here is the closest record I could find at Berkeley Earth.  It is located at 79.553N 90.596E, compared to the AN core which was from 80.52 N, 94.82E.

Source: Berkeley Earth

The above station is the one referenced by Opel et al (2009), which was also the reference cited in Opel13, the paper discussed in this article.  Opel09 stated:

After a SAT maximum in the 1950s, Golomyanny data show a cooler period until 1980 and a warming trend since 1990, though without reaching the values of the 1950s.

The records for that station only go back to the 1930s, not the 1920s.  Berkeley Earth record is a bit different from Opel09, suggesting that until the last few years, the highest temperature was in the early 1940s.  I'll leave it to the experts to sort that one out.  The above record also suggests hotter than ever temperatures now, since the 2009 paper was written.

"Isolated pockets of humanity require warmth"

Anthony swings into his "UHI disease" mode and disputes temperature records he doesn't like - even when they are supported by such obvious signs of warming as the huge drop in summer sea ice in the Arctic.  I guess he still thinks that you don't need warmth to melt the ice.  Anthony makes silly comments like:
"What may be happening is that the stations that are left have a warm bias."

Zeke Hausfather points out that the recent warming in the Arctic is "not particularly controversial" and that "pretty much anywhere you look in the arctic, the land warming post-2000 is pretty remarkable".  To which Anthony sullenly and obstinately replies:

REPLY: Still, I’d like to know what individual station records are active and which ones are not – and when. One thing I’ve noted studying Arctic stations is that they all tend to be isolated pockets of humanity, which require warmth. Warmth that of course becomes local waste heat. Do you have a mechanism to show what records make up your regionalized temperature potpourri and when they were made inactive? – Anthony

Who could forget this classic case of Anthony Watts and human warmth and ice, this time in Antarctica :)

Comparing millennial records across the Arctic

In any case, the paper is more about having a high resolution millenial record of the climate for the region, not about whether the temperature this year at the site has yet reached that of the 1920s maxima - for which there is not a single unbroken source of annual or seasonal data.  (Although it does look as if it's been as hot recently if not hotter.)

Here is the chart from the paper comparing the data from the AN ice core with that of other analyses going from 1998 and back as far as 1100 years in some cases.  The AN data is in light gray for each section.  Click for larger view:

Fig. 6. AN 18O record (including linear trends for 900–1760 and 1800–1998) compared to (from top to bottom) Austfonna and Lomonosovfonna-18O (Isaksson et al., 2005), Vetreniy ice-cap 18O (Henderson, 2002; data from Kinnard et al., 2011), Arctic summer SAT anomalies (Kaufman et al., 2009), Arctic annual SAT anomalies (PAGES 2k Consortium et al., 2013), AN sodium concentrations, and Arctic sea-ice extent (Kinnard et al., 2011) records. Displayed are 5 yrm values for AN 18O (thin line), 15 yrm values for AN 18O, Austfonna and Lomonosovfonna 18O, Vetreniy ice-cap 18O, Arctic annual SAT anomalies, AN sodium concentrations and Arctic sea ice (thick lines) as well as 10 yr means for Arctic summer SAT (thick line). For easier comparison, to each graph the AN 18O 15 yrm record is added in light grey in the same scale as above and adjusted for the best fit of the 20th century maximum (except for Arctic sea ice). Abrupt warming and cooling events exceeding the dominant variability of the AN 18O record are marked by a red asterisk. Note the different scale for the Lomonosovfonna 18O record.

No medieval climate anomaly at Akademii Nauk

I expect Anthony Watts is in a bit of a bind.  He wants to use Opel13 to "prove" something about global warming.  He's not sure what he wants to prove.  He seems to have settled on the fact that there was a warm period early last century.  But then if he accepts the paper, he may be forced to gloss over the fact that there was no evidence of a medieval climate anomaly or the little ice age at that particular location.

Neither a pronounced Medieval Climate Anomaly nor a Little Ice Age are detectable in the AN 18O record. In contrast, there is evidence of several abrupt warming and cooling events, such as in the 15th and 16th centuries, partly accompanied by corresponding changes in sodium concentrations. These abrupt changes are assumed to be related to sea-ice cover variability in the Barents and Kara seas region, which might be caused by shifts in atmospheric circulation patterns. Our results indicate a significant impact of internal climate variability on Arctic climate change in the last millennium.

People who follow climate science rather than climate disinformation won't have any problem with the above.  They know that there were some regions of the world where temperatures got quite warm during medieval times (eg Greenland) and many parts of the world where it got cold in the little ice age.  They know that different parts of the world can get cold while other parts get warm and vice versa.  (Anthony Watts and his crowd find all that a bit too complicated.)

From the WUWT comments

Here are some examples of denier weirdness from the comments (archived here).

philjourdan doesn't have a clue what was reported in the paper itself but he gaily says "it's devastating":

November 19, 2013 at 12:52 pm
This paper is devastating to the whole AGW issue. Instead of seeing a rise, we now have a 60+ year pause, at least in the Arctic which is supposed to be the canary in the AGW coal mine. The pause is easily twice as long as any increase that caused the kerfuffle in the first place. In simple terms, there is no there there. We have a planet ignoring the carbon based units that inhabit it.

Espen doesn't seem to realise that Arctic warmth in the early 20th century is not news to climate scientists and says:

November 19, 2013 at 1:35 pm
Zeke Hausfather, yeah, right, so probably the current warm period in the arctic is a little warmer than the one in the early 20th century. But that pesky early 20th century Arctic warming is nevertheless a huge problem for those that desperately want the Arctic to be the canary in the AGW mine. Like, for instance, Tamino, who got so p***ed that he black listed me permanently when I used that warm period to question his toying around with Bayes theorem here.

Crispin in Waterloo but really in Ulaanbaatar makes a very odd comment about the medieval climate anomaly being a "colder deviation" and says:

November 19, 2013 at 2:25 pm
...The Medieval climate anomaly was a strongly colder deviation from the 8000 year long term cooling trend so it is probably correct to call it anomalous. We are very lucky it didn’t stay down.

Rhoda R has made up her mind about past warming, its duration and probably its location. She doesn't give tuppence for science or data and says:

November 19, 2013 at 2:40 pm
Using the term “Medieval Climate Anomaly” is an attempt by the warmist crowd to belittle the impact of sever hundred years when the climate was warmer than it is today. Using the term “anomaly” implies a brief, transient event — something not really worth mentioning.

Truthseeker ignorantly says "who cares":

November 19, 2013 at 4:24 pm
Really why do we care what the artic does? It is mostly sea ice which will have little effect on sea levels regardless of the state it is in. With less ice, navigation will become easier and less risky. It really is not important enough to waste any time or resources on.

And finally, a gem from our old mate jim Steele who says (excerpt):

November 19, 2013 at 4:58 pm Not much observational data to support warming since the 50s!

Really, Jim?

Source: Polar Science Center, University of Washington

And if you don't like "models" how about this?

---

Opel, Thomas, et al. "Eurasian Arctic climate over the past millennium as recorded in the
Akademii Nauk ice core (Severnaya Zemlya)." Clim. Past, 9, 2379–2389, 2013 doi:10.5194/cp-9-2379-2013

Opel, Thomas, et al. "115 year ice-core data from Akademii Nauk ice cap, Severnaya Zemlya: high-resolution record of Eurasian Arctic climate change." Journal of Glaciology 55.189 (2009): 21-31.

Anthony Watts promotes Denier Don Easterbrook's bad "science" and conspiracy ideation

I see that Anthony Watts has hauled out Denier Don Easterbrook to dust the cobwebs off his flawed Greenland ice core charts and make more allegations of nefarious intent against real scientists.

If you're wondering what Don's latest idiocy is all about, it's the recent Miller et al paper.  Although I was sent a copy of the paper by a reader (many thanks!), Richard Telford tells it better than I could.  There are two three short articles at Richard Telford's excellent blog, Musings on Quantitative Palaeoecology, which cover the Miller paper very well and are easy to read (and have nice pictures!):

• “Unprecedented” – skeptic flypaper
• More on Mosses (Miller et al 2013)
• Man with one graph declares war on mosses (more on Miller et al 2013)

Denier Don dismisses on-site observations from his armchair arguing if what happened in far eastern Canada didn't happen on the summit of the ice sheet in Central Greenland then it can't have happened at all (or some such nonsense).  He also writes:

Even if the conclusions in the paper were correct, they wouldn’t prove anything about CO2 as the cause of climatic warming, so this statement suggests that the real purpose of the paper was to push CO2 at the expense of objective science.

Denier Don assumes nefarious intent - a classic hallmark of the conspiracy theorist.

If you read the archived WUWT article, you'll see that Denier Don Easterbrook is claiming that ice can move over artic moss that's 120,000 years old without harming the moss at all and without even disturbing the roots of the moss.  He's not strong on logical thinking is Denier Don.

I notice Anthony Watts is still letting Don put up his flawed charts of GISP2, claiming that a temperature series that actually starts in 1855 began in 1945.   This is after lots of his readers over the years have told him it's wrong.  Even justthefactswuwt agrees it's wrong.  But what do Anthony Watts or Denier Don care?  Anything goes at WUWT as long as it denies the science.

You'll also note with relief that Anthony Watts finds nothing wrong with the weather station labelled "Clyde NWT", though I don't think it is one of these new ones.  One problem with the record Anthony and Don used, which neither of them will tell you, is that the GISTemp records for that location only go up to November 2010. And there are lots of gaps in what records there are.  Also, it's a bit of a distance from the research site.

The scientists themselves have given an indication in their report of how the local weather has changed.  The ice cap is melting and mosses emerging after 120,000 years under ice, so that says something!

From the WUWT comments

Most of the WUWT readers aren't crash hot on logic and subsribe to Denier Don's conspiracy theory (archived here).

Ron House talks about the "recent few 1,000 years' warming" (is he a closet warmist?):

November 2, 2013 at 10:48 pm
This isn’t the end of the nonsense. They tell us the moss is quickly destroyed when it thaws, which is why they know it hadn’t thawed before. Okay, but what if we had done their survey 50 ya, 100ya, during the LIA, the MWP, the dark ages? Would we have found freshly exposed moss then? By logical deduction from their own claims, we cannot now know what would have been found. Perhaps old moss would have been found at all these times? Or at least the warmer ones? And that would prove that the recent few 1,000 years’ warming had nothing to do with AGW. Since by their own claims the disproving experiment cannot be done, their uniqueness claims are not scientific, just guesswork.

Pippen Kool is on the ball, though and replies to Ron:

November 2, 2013 at 11:06 pm
perhaps. but it wouldn’t be the moss was found in this study …that moss was buried then.

jorgekafkazar doesn't bother with the study itself, he agrees with Denier Don that it must be part of the "CAGW" conspiracy and says:

November 2, 2013 at 10:31 pm
” One wonders how this bad logic got past peer review. ”
This one doesn’t wonder. The process has been corrupted for political reasons and financial gain.
Nice post, Don.

 George McFly.....I'm your density is another conspiracy theorist and says:

November 2, 2013 at 11:07 pm
The last line says it all: “the real purpose of the paper was to push CO2 at the expense of objective science”

phlogiston says - Hey, I'm a conspiracy crank too - don't forget me!:

November 2, 2013 at 11:57 pm
This is a perfect example of politically driven pseudo-science: to jump from a single small, flawed study to a political concluding message, totally ignoring the existing body of scientific data on the subject. The paper is aimed straight at the media and politicians, over the heads of the scientific community.
Mann, Marcott, Miller … who will be the next mendacious machiavellian?

Sea ice: Out of the mouths of WUWT-ers

Thought I'd post a few of the comments from WUWT.  These are from justthefactswuwt's article about global sea ice (archived here).  No, I'm not going to comment on the fact that justthefactswuwt thinks that the world has "stopped warming".  Well, maybe I'll just show one of the charts he uses as evidence, with my own notations as an animated gif. I suggest clicking on the chart for the larger version because it's very wide:

Adapted from Cryosphere Today

From the WUWT comments

Contorted thinking from Robin Hewitt who says (excerpt, my bold italics):

October 21, 2013 at 6:45 am
I rather hope the ice does not stick around. If we get a big ice anomaly year then that puts up the average ice cover that all subsequent years will have to match. The sceptics get one chance to thumb their noses at the catastrophists and then have to pay for ever more.

I think Robin is saying that even if the ice didn't melt as much one year, it's on a downward spiral in the medium term.


David in Cal has never heard of coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation climate models.  I wonder what he'd say if he learnt about the earth system models, which include not just the ocean and the atmosphere but biogeochemical cycles like the carbon cycle, the sulphur cycle, and ozone.  David in Cal writes:

October 20, 2013 at 10:52 pm
To say that extra heat is hiding in the oceans is to admit that all the climate models are wrong. After all, no climate model specifically includes heat moving into and out of the oceans (as far as I know.)

DR thinks the greenhouse effect is old hat and says:

October 20, 2013 at 10:28 pm
Funny how the Warmastrologists want to change what was actually predicted when this all came to the forefront. When things didn’t work out as predicted, they simply make it up as they go along. The “greenhouse effect” was all the rage back then. Today they’d just wish it would go away because it just ain’t happening the way we were told it would.

MrX says "they always come back baffled" but I'm guessing it's not for the reason he thinks:

October 20, 2013 at 8:28 pm
Jimbo says: October 20, 2013 at 1:32 pm I kept trying to explain to Warmists that most sceptics are fervent proponents of climate change. The climate always changes.
——————
YES! I do the same. It’s amazing how much I get asked “What? You don’t believe in climate change?” And I always respond back, “Climate change is a skeptical position. Of course I believe in climate change. Unprecedented and catastrophic global warming is your side’s position. If it isn’t unprecedented, then it’s happened before (aka climate change) and it’s natural and not catastrophic. Nothing to worry about.”

They always come back baffled and completely confused about their own position. Sometimes they’ll throw a word in about not liking the fact that used “global warming” or some other nonsense. But they never know how to argue against the fact that it can only be climate change if it’s not unprecedented.

How's this for logic and understanding?  RACookPE1978 goes for a "cool - cool" argument:

October 20, 2013 at 9:02 pm

Chris B says: October 20, 2013 at 8:33 pm So the argument that, a decade of reductions in Arctic Sea Ice Extent indicates we are on the verge of Dangerous Warming, is unsupported then?

True. The false arguments about Arctic amplification – the fears that a continued loss of Arctic sea ice from its current extents is dangerous – ARE unsupported and ARE wrong.

The numbers show that, additional loss of arctic sea from today’s sea ice extents from mid-August through mid-April cause more loss of heat from the newly exposed ocean areas than can be absorbed from the sun. More Arctic ice loss from today’s levels means more cooling in August, September and October. More snow on the land surfaces around the Arctic as well..

On the other hand, the INCREASED Antarctic sea ice at minimum AND maximum extents all year DOES reflect more heat energy and DOES cause increased cooling of the planet.

There's a heap more convoluted thinking going on in that thread.  If you're bored you can read the archived version here.

Black carbon in the Arctic as viewed by WUWT - plus more about soot and methane

Anthony Watts posted an article about a new paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research Atmosphere.

Anthony had a headline: In the Arctic, nearby soot may be a larger forcing than CO2. However there was nothing in his article to support his headline so one can only conclude that he made it up out of thin air in keeping with his latest disinformation push.

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.

It depends on from where the black carbon comes

The researchers set out to quantify the impact of black carbon emissions from different sources - comparing that emanating from within the Arctic with that coming from the midlatitudes. They found that if the black carbon was emitted from within the Arctic, it had "an almost five times larger Arctic surface temperature response (per unit of emitted mass) compared to emissions at midlatitudes".  The AGU report states (my bold italics):

Black carbon emitted within the Arctic is more likely to stay at low altitudes and thus to be deposited on the snow and ice there, whereas black carbon transported into the Arctic from mid-latitudes is more likely to remain at higher altitudes. Because of this, the Arctic surface temperature is almost 5 times more sensitive to black carbon emitted from within the Arctic than to emissions from mid-latitudes, the authors find.

How many WUWT readers understood what was written?

The first thing that struck me in the comments was that I don't think either Anthony or his readers understood the study or what it found.  Going by the headline, Anthony was just aiming for more disinformation and didn't bother to read what he copied and pasted.  His readers were no better. So far, I only counted three responses (out of 26) that demonstrates that any reader has understood the research or the findings.

The second thing that struck me in the comments, was the inability of some people to hold two complementary ideas in their brain at the same time.  It is as if there is only room for one.  This disability is interesting in the context of Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians.  (See here for a summary in the context of climate science denial).  Altemayer talks of the RWA's as being recognised for their ability to hold two conflicting ideas in their brain at the same time.  For example, they can swear black and blue that earth is warming because of the sun and in the next breath they'll swear black and blue that the earth isn't warming and then say that it's cooling and then say it's warming but it's caused by ENSO or the PDO.

Maybe the head of the RWA is so full of conflicting notions that it has no room for complementary notions.

Here is an example from Bob who says (extract):

August 13, 2013 at 6:37 pm CO2 doesn’t seem to be working all that well as the cause, so we need to switch to carbon, I suppose....

Here are more comments from the WUWT crowd, but this time to demonstrate how WUWT readers don't bother to read or understand before jumping in feet first:

Owen in GA hasn't bothered to read the WUWT article and hasn't understood what the research was about.  He seems to think it was just to see if black carbon caused melting:

August 13, 2013 at 6:21 pm  I don’t see why they didn’t expect to see this. Ice has an almost perfect reflection surface, put something that is almost a perfect black body on top of it and absorbed energy changes as far as is possible. I would have to run a series of experiments to put actual numbers on it, but the common sense factor of this seems evident. Occasionally the universe throws a curve ball at ya, but usually only on really large or really small scales.

For starters - Owen in GA hasn't bothered to read what the researchers were studying.  Next he's incorrect saying "ice having an almost perfect reflective surface".  Ice does have high albedo compared to, say, the open ocean.  But it's not perfect and is less than snow.  Owen in GA immediately doubles up on his lack of understanding by telling the researchers how they should have done their research.  It would help a bit if he learnt that "alot" is two words not one (yeah, I'm being petty now):

August 13, 2013 at 6:29 pm  The problem here though is they do all their “experiments” in a computer rather than in the universe. Would have to see the methodology to see if they used any actual observations such as solar intensity, shine angle, carbon absorption rate/conversion of effective solar to temperature and length of day. Such a simple model could tell you alot about what effect black carbon “might” have, but until you instrument the heck out of a patch with alot of black carbon and a control patch with little to no black carbon and measure the actual on the ground effect you have not done a real experiment.

Owen in GA throws in the towel and says:

August 13, 2013 at 6:48 pm  I don’t know why this article bugs me so much. I read them all, but only comment occasionally when something either grabs my funny bone or sticks in the craw.

Maybe it's because Owen in GA didn't bother to digest the article and the research findings.

Wyguy declares himself as one of the 8% Dismissives and says:

August 13, 2013 at 7:02 pm “Black carbon ….. is one of the major causes of global warming, after carbon dioxide emissions.” When I read that, I quit reading. The author(s) lost all credibility in my eyes.

Impact of cutting soot and methane - not as much benefit as previously thought

There are a couple of more interesting comments, though.  This time about a PNNL study on the impact of cutting soot and methane emissions, which has recently been published in PNAS and is discussed here in Scientific American.  You can read the press release from PNLL here.  An excerpt:

Cutting the amount of short-lived, climate-warming emissions such as soot and methane in our skies won't limit global warming as much as previous studies have suggested, a new analysis shows. The study also found a comprehensive climate policy (including methane) would produce more climate benefits by 2050 than if soot and methane were reduced alone.

Steven J. Smith1 and Andrew Mizrahi (2013) Near-term climate mitigation by short-lived forcers, PNAS,  doi: 10.1073/pnas.1308470110

WUWT is below average in the Arctic

Anthony Watts does come out with some beauties from time to time.  That's being generous.  He comes up with doozies almost every time he puts fingers to keyboard.

Today he's blogged an article telling everyone that the climate predictions and projections for 2100 haven't yet all come to pass, and it's already 2013.  I mean, there's only 87 years to go.  All those scientists must be wrong.

I won't bother going into detail about everything he's written.  I'll just mention a few things in passing.  For example, I notice he switched to the USA part way through and ignored the rest of the world.  He put up statistics on hurricanes that were still hurricanes by the time they made landfall in the USA.  That way he could avoid Sandy as well as all the other tropical cyclones in the world. And why he put up tornadoes I don't know, because the science isn't in on what will happen with tornadoes in a warmer world.  He put up winter snowfall in the USA but failed to mention the record melt from April to May this year.  He most certainly avoided mentioning Australia's Angry Summer and all the other signs of global warming in recent years.  It would have spoilt the story he's spinning and upset the punters no end.

What you won't have noticed (because what self-respecting person reads Anthony Watts' blog, bar we blog war people) is that Anthony doesn't seem to know what an average is.

The Arctic is getting hotter

Anthony seems to be trying to tell his readers that the Arctic hasn't warmed, despite the fact that sea ice is disappearing at a faster rate than projected.

Here is a plot of temperature for the Arctic from GISTemp.  It shows the anomalies from the 1951 to 1980 mean for latitudes 64N to 90N.  The average annual temperature for the Arctic has risen by more than 3 degrees Celsius since the late 19th century, by almost one degree since the Arctic warm spell in the 1930s and by almost two degrees since the early 1970s.

Data Source: NASA

Here's a chart showing the amount of sea ice in the Arctic (blue) and Antarctica (dark red) in the month of their respective annual minima for the period since 1979, as well as the total sea ice (green).  Of course the total isn't the total at a real point in time because the months of the minimum are different north and south.

Data Source: NSIDC

What is the "climatic normal" at WUWT?

Getting back to why I said that Anthony is trying to kid people that the Arctic isn't warming.  He put up an animated version of the chart below, showing each year from 1958 onwards.  The chart is described by DMI as the daily mean temperatures for the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel, plotted with daily climate values calculated from the period 1958-2002.  (Note that this is a smaller area that the GISTemp chart above, which is north of the 64th northern parallel.)  Anyway, Anthony claimed:

The DMI plot of Arctic temperature for 2013 (at the end pause of this animation) hasn’t gone above the climatic normals since this dataset began in 1958.

Source: Danish Meteorological Institute

Really?  It's a very mixed up sentence to start with.   I assume by "climatic normal" he means the average as calculated by DMI, which is the mean of the period 1958-2002 (the solid green line).  If Anthony means that no year has gone above the "climatic normal" then it doesn't make sense.  The temperature has to have gone above normal at least half the time between 1958 and 2002 - right? Or if not as much as "half the time", considerably above normal some years.

If he means that 2013 hasn't gone above the mean, then he's blind as a bat.

If he expects the Arctic Basin north of 80N to get much warmer than freezing in summer time, then he doesn't know much about the Arctic.  Remember, we're talking above the 80th parallel here.  If your geography is a bit rusty, here is the region we're referring to.  It's the bit inside the circle marked "80".  It's not even all of the Arctic Ocean, and very little land:

Source: Wikipedia

Does Anthony think his chart is an actual physical mean temperature of the Arctic?

I wonder does he also realise that the data is from a model.  It's data assimilation and reanalysis - as described here.  DMI warns readers to not use the charts as a measure of actual physical mean temperature but to use them to compare years.  Here's what DMI say (my bold italics):

The temperature graphs are made from numerical weather prediction (NWP) "analysis" data. Analyses are the model fields used to start NWP models. They represent the statistically most likely state of the atmosphere, given the information available to make the analysis. Since the data are gridded, it is straight forward to deduce the average temperature North of 80 degree North.

However, since the model is gridded in a regular 0.5 degree grid, the mean temperature values are strongly biased towards the temperature in the most northern part of the Arctic! Therefore, do NOT use this measure as an actual physical mean temperature of the arctic. The 'plus 80 North mean temperature' graphs can be used for comparing one year to an other....

The process of making the analysis is called "data assimilation". In an NWP data assimilation system many, very different types of observations and other information are combined in a statistical manner. In practice the assimilation is done via adjusting a recent NWP forecast, a so-called first guess. Because the data assimilation system knows about interrelations of different model variables, assimilation of for example a pressure observation, will adjust not only the pressure, but also wind and temperature. Precisely how much weight to give different types of observations, and how far to distribute their effect in the first guess field, is deduced statistically. The analysis is the maximum likelihood estimate of the state of the atmosphere, provided the statistical information is correct.

An NWP analysis is based on vastly more information than available from any single observing system. Data from ground, aircraft, bouys, ship, satellites, radiosondes, etc. are all combined to adjust the first guess field. As a consequence the quality of an analysis is much better than what can be obtained from gridding, or treating in other ways, data from a single or a few observing systems.

In the plot, the red curve is based on the average 2 m temperatures north of 80 degree North, from the twice daily ECWMF analyses. These are gradually becoming better and more detailed, as the NWP model system at ECMWF is improved with time. That is why the name shift with time (e.g. from T799 to T1279 in year 2010).

... The green curve is based on ERA40 data for the period 1958 to 2002. ERA40 data are in fact analyses, made in the same way as above, but done as a hind-cast, using a fixed version of the NWP model, and spending time on carefully validating and eventually correct or remove all observations found to be in error, before the data assimilation. These, so-called "re-analysis", data represent our best estimate of the properties of the atmosphere for the period they cover.

I think that's about enough on Anthony's misdirection for one blog article, don't you?

Has the earth tipped on it's side?

From the Arctic Ocean ...(click for larger pic)

Photo Source: Arctic Ocean 9 August 2013 NPEO PAWS Buoy 819920. 

...looking a bit squelchy too.

Sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctica

Arctic sea ice watching season is here again. I was prompted to look at what is happening overall when I read a post by Perennially Puzzled Bob Tisdale. He's busy trying to prove that "all the models are wrong".  Unlike real scientists, Bob isn't about to "fix" them.  (Not sure he'd want to even if he could.)

In the case of sea ice projections, all the models are wrong, though CMIP5 is something of an improvement over the previous generation (CMIP3) models in regard to the Arctic.  In the Antarctic, more sea ice doesn't mean it's getting colder, particularly when as it warms, more ice shelves and glaciers break up and fill up the sea.

Antarctic sea ice and models

As far as Antarctica goes, researchers from the British Antarctic Survey write in the abstract of their recent paper that most models overestimate the sea ice extent at the minimum in February and some have less than two thirds of the observed ice extent at the maximum in September.  Not only that, but the models don't model the trends from 1860 to 2005 well.   The abstract concludes with this:

The negative SIE trends in most of the model runs over 1979–2005 are a continuation of an earlier decline, suggesting that the processes responsible for the observed increase over the last 30 years are not being simulated correctly.

Turner, John, Thomas J. Bracegirdle, Tony Phillips, Gareth J. Marshall, J. Scott Hosking, 2013: An Initial Assessment of Antarctic Sea Ice Extent in the CMIP5 Models. J. Climate, 26, 1473–1484. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00068.1

Exploring the matter further, a US team of researchers suggests that the problem may be in part due to the fact that observed internal variability in the Antarctic region is large and that the observed shifts in winds are not well simulated in the CMIP5 models.   Here is an excerpt from the abstract (my bold) and the full paper is available here:

...whether these models can be dismissed as being wrong depends on more than just the sign of change compared to observations.

We show that internal sea ice variability is large in the Antarctic region, and both the observed and modeled trends may represent natural variations along with external forcing. While several models show a negative trend, only a few of them actually show a trend that is significant compared to their internal variability on the time scales of available observational data. Furthermore, the ability of the models to simulate the mean state of sea ice is also important. The representations of Antarctic sea ice in CMIP5 models have not improved compared to CMIP3 and show an unrealistic spread in the mean state that may influence future sea ice behavior.

Finally, Antarctic climate and sea ice area will be affected not only by ocean and air temperature changes but also by changes in the winds. The majority of the CMIP5 models simulate a shift that is too weak compared to observations. Thus, this study identifies several foci for consideration in evaluating and improving the modeling of climate and climate change in the Antarctic region.

Mahlstein, I., P. R. Gent, and S. Solomon (2013), Historical Antarctic mean sea ice area, sea ice trends, and winds in CMIP5 simulations, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50443

Watching the sea ice disappear

To finish up here is a chart.  It shows the average extent for the minimum months in the Arctic and Antarctic. (Click the chart to enlarge it.)

Source: NSIDC

You'll see I've taken a bit of a liberty and added the areas together to give a 'total', although it's not a 'total' in any temporal sense, because the Arctic monthly average is for September whereas the Antarctic monthly average is for February.

Just the same, the minimum month at each hemisphere is when the sun shines the most on the sea. So if there is less ice then more heat is absorbed by the ocean.  In winter when there is lots of ice cover, then the sun doesn't shine anyway.  It's dark.  So the sea ice doesn't reflect sunlight back to space at that time.