Spoof or genuinely nuts? Another conspiracy theory at WUWT about shrinking glaciers

The latest conspiracy theory at WUWT is of "preposterous" claims that glaciers are disappearing. More specifically, someone called Roger Roots doesn't "believe" that glaciers in Glacier National Park are shrinking as quickly as scientists say they are. The evidence? He can't find the old web pages from USGS.

If you've visited the USGS website since the 26 April this year, you'll have seen that it's rolling out a new website, with the modern format suited to tablets. From the new site:

See updates below (now two).

Glaciers retreat faster than ever, with Anthony Watts and his ice melt denial

A new paper has been published in the Journal of Glaciology, by a big team of 39 researchers from more than 30 countries. It's from the the World Glacier Monitoring Service, which has been compiling worldwide data on glacier changes for more than 120 years. The title of the paper says it all:

Historically unprecedented global glacier decline in the early 21st century

The paper is open access, so anyone can read it. Some, like Anthony Watts don't bother. He's too busy complaining, with his usual "claim" dogwhistle:

Claim: Glaciers melt faster than ever

From the UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH and the “lets ignore some of these other growing glaciers” department

Seriously? Does Anthony Watts think that glaciers won't melt faster than ever as the world heats up faster than ever? True. He doesn't. He's often indicated that he doesn't believe that ice melts when it gets warm enough.

Elevated Denial: Mountains can't get warmer, everyone knows they are cold! sez WUWT

In another spurt of denier weird at WUWT, Anthony Watts from the denier blog WUWT, copied and pasted a press release about a new paper in Nature Climate Change. The paper was about warming at high altitudes.

Anthony again added some words written all by himself (archived here). He seems to be taking a renewed interest in his blog. That must be about ten sentences he's written in two days. About the same number of words he's written on his blog in the past four months or so.

Elevation-dependent warming or how some altitudes are warming faster

Transecto Cordillera Americana TCA Source: MRI

This time the article Anthony copied is about investigations into whether or not some high altitude regions are warming faster than average.

Anthony's headline is wrong. He wrote: "Despite ‘extremely sparse’ data, Mann’s buddy Ray Bradley seems sure that ‘High mountains are warming faster than expected ‘

Notice how he just had to get in a snipe at Professor Michael Mann who had nothing to do with the paper. That is straight from the Disinformer 101 textbook. It was applied give his mob someone else to aim at, in case they were bored with the topic of the article. However that's not what I meant when I said the headline is wrong. In the material that Anthony copied, but didn't absorb, one of the authors said:

Lead author Nick Pepin of the University of Portsmouth, U.K., says, “There is growing evidence that high mountain regions are warming faster than lower elevations and such warming can accelerate many other environmental changes such as glacial melt and vegetation change, but scientists urgently need more and better data to confirm this. If we are right and mountains are warming more rapidly than other environments, the social and economic consequences could be serious, and we could see more dramatic changes much sooner than previously thought.”

There is a difference between "seems sure" and needing "data to confirm this". The scientists have found evidence that some high mountain regions are warming faster than lower elevations, but this needs to be confirmed.

Shifting into high gear: Amundsen Sea Embayment melt - Antarctica

While WUWT has slowed to a crawl the science hasn't. So today I'll just write about a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL).

A large team led by Tyler C. Sutterley has found that in fast-melting regions of Antarctica, the rate of melt has tripled during the last decade. The team includes scientists from the USA, France, the Netherlands and the UK and includes some whose names you'll probably recognise, such as Eric Rignot and Isabella Velicogna. They did a comprehensive analysis of measurements of glaciers in the Amundsen Sea Embayment over last 21 years, evaluating and reconciling observations from four different measurement techniques. The loss has been accelerating, a lot.

UCI and NASA glaciologists, including Isabella Velicogna and Tyler Sutterley, have discovered that the melt rate of glaciers in West Antarctica has tripled, with the loss of a Mt. Everest's worth of water weight every two years.

Credit: Michael Studinger / NASA  Source: UC Irvine

Eric Eugenics Worrall makes a glacially silly blunder down under at WUWT

There wasn't much of note at WUWT over the weekend. There was another Christopher Monckton piece on the lower troposphere temperature. In two separate articles in almost as many days, Christopher has jumped from a "pause" of 13 years and 4 months to a "pause" of 17 years and 10 months. He doesn't know if he's coming or going, does he.

Anyway, I knew it wouldn't take long before more really stupid appeared. Sure enough it has.

Eric "eugenics" Worrall** is a science denier from Australia. When Anthony Watts runs out of guests to write his essays, he resorts to ning nongs like Eric "eugenics" to fill his daily quota.

This time Eric doesn't disappoint. He wrote a short piece about a new paper in PNAS by a group of researchers from around the world, led by Henrick Rother of the University of Greifswald in Germany. The press release was from the University of Queensland, where another author is located, Professor Jamie Shulmeister.

The paper is about how the climate in the southern hemisphere can behave differently to that in the Northern Hemisphere and how New Zealand glaciers melted and grew at times different to glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere, including during times of global climate change. They are strongly influenced by the Southern Ocean.

Eric "eugenics" got a lot wrong for such a short "essay". First he confused the Pacific Ocean and Southern Ocean. Next he decided that since glacial change is slow and happens over millenia, then that means that all climate change will be slow.

He doesn't seem to appreciate that the whole earth isn't covered in glaciers. Or that ice sheets in places like West Antarctica will probably disappear over centuries, not thousands of years. Or that the fact that because some processes are slow doesn't mean that all processes are slow. Eric wrote:

The study described in the press release, in my opinion, has interesting implications for modern climate change. Even if alarmists are right about climate sensitivity to CO2, if the Pacific Ocean has the capacity to retard major climate shifts,  for thousands of years, then we have thousands of years to solve any problems we might be causing – which kind of takes the urgency out of the issue.

Eric, it's the Southern Ocean, not the Pacific Ocean. The Southern Ocean is the one around Antarctica. The one that's influencing the climate of Australia and New Zealand as well as Antarctica.

Secondly, it's not retarding climate change. Climate change is happening everywhere. From the press release:

Scientists are calling for a better understanding of regional climates, after research into New Zealand's glaciers has revealed climate change in the Northern Hemisphere does not directly affect the climate in the Southern Hemisphere.

The University of Queensland study showed that future climate changes may impact differently in the two hemispheres, meaning a generalised global approach isn’t the solution to climate issues.

UQ School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management Head Professor Jamie Shulmeister said the study provided evidence for the late survival of significant glaciers in the mountains of New Zealand at the end of the last ice age – a time when other ice areas were retreating.

“This study reverses previous findings which suggested that New Zealand's glaciers disappeared at the same time as ice in the Northern Hemisphere,” he said.

“We showed that when the Northern Hemisphere started to warm at the end of the last ice age, New Zealand glaciers were unaffected.

“These glaciers began to retreat several thousand years later, when changes in the Southern Ocean led to increased carbon dioxide emissions and warming.

”This indicates that future climate change may impact differently in the two hemispheres and that changes in the Southern Ocean are likely to be critical for Australia and New Zealand.” 

Other studies show that the Southern Ocean is important and affects climate not just in our part of the world. Changes in the Southern Ocean also affects climate globally through the large scale ocean currents. Those are the slow climate changes. The deep currents in the ocean (the global conveyor belt) take about a thousand years for one cycle. What we're doing now will affect Earth for thousands of years.

I don't think the fact that the two hemispheres can behave differently is news. Apparently it is news that New Zealand glaciers didn't change in synchrony with those in the Northern Hemisphere. The supplementary information is interesting. It's available to all and gives some detail about how the researchers worked out what happened in the past with regard to New Zealand glaciers.

As for what is happening right now, well at least some of the glaciers in New Zealand have been retreating quite a lot. Others not so quickly.

If Eric thinks that climate change won't affect him in Australia in his lifetime, then he's wrong. Australia and New Zealand are already feeling the effect of climate change.

From the WUWT comments

cnxtim lives up to his/her reputation as a greenhouse effect denier and says:

August 4, 2014 at 12:17 am
It seems to me you cant discuss the climate without chucking in a reference to CO2
I mean, whatever happened to the Ozone layer? Once upon a time it was ‘flavour of the month’ I know these days, methane is making bid for a mention – we shall see…

simple-touriste says:

August 4, 2014 at 1:11 am
So we are doomed (as always), but not synchronously? 

Alan the Brit must be another greenhouse effect denier because he says:

August 4, 2014 at 1:50 am
“when changes in the Southern Ocean led to increased carbon dioxide emissions and warming.”
Always stick to the meme! Why not say “when changes in the Southern Ocean led to increased warming and carbon dioxide emissions!” Sure fits the Ice-Core data, warming first, emissions next! Ho hum! Keep the rent money flowing guys & gals, keep it coming, the taxpayers knows nothing! 

They are all coming out to play. Bruce Cobb says:

August 4, 2014 at 4:11 am
They are keeping the “CO2-caused warming” meme alive. Mix good science with garbage science and you get garbage science. 

Bill H. makes an observation about denier inconsistency and says:

August 4, 2014 at 5:02 am
Interesting that this paper is being so well received on WUWT. The recent paper by Neukom, Gergis et al. also discussed the marked divergence of temperature trends in the two hemispheres prior to the 20th century and was more or less universally excoriated. Maybe the fact that it provided evidence that the mediaeval climate anomaly was a N. hemisphere phenomenon, with the S. hemisphere showing distinct cooling at this time, has something to do with that.

Perhaps it isn’t just the “warmist” side of the the debate that clings to certain sacred truths. 

njsnowfan is an ice age comether and says (excerpt):

August 4, 2014 at 5:11 am
It looks like the opposite may already be starting to happen Now, S hem will enter a little ice age first then N hem with low solar.

This has to do with S. Hemisphere current sea ice. Many say that increases or decreases in solar do not directly effect earths climate. I have been seeing many connections with solar cycle #24 since it is a quiet cycle and Static of strong cycles is not blocking the True Data. 

**Eric Worrall earned the nickname "eugenics" because he made a habit of likening climate science to the study of eugenics in the 1930s, particularly when he commented at Watching the Deniers. It's his version of Godwin's Law.

---

Rother, Henrik, David Fink, James Shulmeister, Charles Mifsud, Michael Evans, and Jeremy Pugh. "The early rise and late demise of New Zealand’s last glacial maximum." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2014): 201401547. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1401547111

What is the difference between Anthony Watts and an elephant?

Sometimes Anthony Watts mocks science.
Often Anthony Watts mocks science.
Usually Anthony Watts mocks science.
Almost always Anthony Watts mocks science.

There is at least one attribute that Anthony Watts has in common with an elephant.  Neither can understand science (though I can't positively vouch for the elephant in that regard).  I'd be tempted to say neither are good at arithmetic too, but the elephant is probably better at numbers than is Anthony Watts.

Where they differ is that an elephant never forgets.  Anthony Watts on the other hand...


Today he shows that on very rare occasions, Anthony Watts likes a scientific paper.  He posts an article about a paper that discusses the role of soot in the recession of glaciers in Europe soon after the beginning of the industrial revolution.  Anthony has a headline with a question: (article is archived here):

Black Carbon Soot shrank the 19th century glaciers – but why isn’t it listed as a culprit today?

From the University of Colorado at Boulder comes this press release and accompanying photo. The photo, showing hazy pollution laden air in the Bernese Alps, makes me wonder why they don’t attribute current glacier ice loss issues to soot. Asia in particular, is a leader in soot production, right next to those Himalayan glaciers that the IPCC erroneously told us would be gone by 2035.

But it is and "they" do, it's just that Anthony forgets his own articles...

Anthony forgets his own articles so quickly.  Here is just a sample (all links from archived versions):

• From WUWT in December 2009 - soot in the Himalayas, courtesy NASA
• From WUWT in November 2008 - soot in Asia, again courtesy NASA
• From WUWT in January 2013 - soot on ice generally, courtesy JGR-Atmospheres
• From WUWT in November 2010 - an article that includes a discussion of the impact of soot in the Himalayas

...and many more.

Thing is, almost every time Anthony writes an article about soot he pretends it's he who discovered the impact - and afresh.  He wouldn't know about soot or carbon if not for the scientific research that he usually mocks.  Yet he also hates organisations like the EPA that regulate the amount of pollution.  He is anti-soot but rejects attempts to control it.

Full of contradictions as well as having a very bad memory, as well as taking credit for things he wouldn't be able to do in a pink fit, or understand.

HotWhopper readers also know that although Anthony Watts has been mocking science for a few years now, particularly climate science, he's yet to open and read an IPCC report.  If he had, he'd have read about soot or black carbon and it's impact on snow, ice and albedo, for example - here as well as in the diagram showing radiative forcing in Chapter 2 of the IPCC AR4 WG1 here:

Source: IPCC AR4 WG1

And now for the science...

Here is the abstract of the PNAS paper by Painter et al, which Anthony writes about this time (my para breaks):

Glaciers in the European Alps began to retreat abruptly from their mid-19th century maximum, marking what appeared to be the end of the Little Ice Age. Alpine temperature and precipitation records suggest that glaciers should instead have continued to grow until circa 1910.

Radiative forcing by increasing deposition of industrial black carbon to snow may represent the driver of the abrupt glacier retreats in the Alps that began in the mid-19th century. Ice cores indicate that black carbon concentrations increased abruptly in the mid-19th century and largely continued to increase into the 20th century, consistent with known increases in black carbon emissions from the industrialization of Western Europe.

Inferred annual surface radiative forcings increased stepwise to 13–17 W⋅m−2 between 1850 and 1880, and to 9–22 W⋅m−2 in the early 1900s, with snowmelt season (April/May/June) forcings reaching greater than 35 W⋅m−2 by the early 1900s. These snowmelt season radiative forcings would have resulted in additional annual snow melting of as much as 0.9 m water equivalent across the melt season. Simulations of glacier mass balances with radiative forcing-equivalent changes in atmospheric temperatures result in conservative estimates of accumulating negative mass balances of magnitude −15 m water equivalent by 1900 and −30 m water equivalent by 1930, magnitudes and timing consistent with the observed retreat.  

These results suggest a possible physical explanation for the abrupt retreat of glaciers in the Alps in the mid-19th century that is consistent with existing temperature and precipitation records and reconstructions.