Winter freezing always brought the amount of ice back to roughly the same area values, year after year. The difference is in summer and up to October.Jedi Master Spock wrote:The amount of permanently frozen sea ice has dropped sharply. Much more of it is seasonal than ten years ago, as seen here. That's a very recent and very dramatic shift. Winter ice levels haven't changed much, which is why Al Gore correcting his statement was probably a very good move on his part.2046 wrote:As for the continued and dangerous warming effect, Al Gore, for instance, claims the northern ice cap will be completely gone (though he changed this days later to 'mostly gone save for winter waterway freezes') in 5-7 years.
I've been trying to get access to the maps for 2008 and 2009. The archive, despite pretending covering years from 1979 to "present", stops at 2007. There's a file on this page that covers 2008 apparently, but it's one of those silly extensions you need very special tools to read. All we can get is the graphs on the first page, like this one, which shows things getting better around June-September 2008, compared to 2007.
I think you could probably find a diversity of models for anything related to solar irradiance as well. In reality, there are really big general claims. One, CO2 explains the problem. The other, against AGW, is based on solar irradiance, and leaves room to other elements.Jedi Master Spock wrote:The hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is the most general hypothesis being examined. A diversity of models exist supporting this claim, but they don't all agree with each other in terms of specific predictions. An inaccurate specific prediction does not test the general hypothesis, although it does test the specific models being used. The general hypothesis is more difficult to falsify, but quite clearly not impossible.2046 wrote:But instead of simple falsification of predictions, you lay out a very specific and artificial criteria of what can falsify global warming:
What do you mean exactly with the last bit of your sentence?Jedi Master Spock wrote:Except it's what we're seeing in the carbon data. Annual average CO2 levels have increased literally every single year on the Mauna Loa record - and done so, moreover, at a rate less than that of the excess human output.2046 wrote:Given that AGW argues we're putting in 3% above normal CO2 (thus 3% of less than 0.04% of the atmosphere), then this is a unique phrasing also.
Nonetheless, I concur that between deforestation and fossil fuel burning, we do allow higher than "normal" CO2 in the atmosphere. On the other hand, given evidence of widespread ancient wildfire cycles and so on (repeated soot (aerosol) and CO2 events), I think there are still a lot of questions in regards to what is "normal", and the concept of carbon sinks being overwhelmed by a mere couple of extra percent output is very odd.
I'm not getting what you mean by "net sink" here.The evidence says that the entire rest of the system is a net sink over this span - and that the CO2 levels are increasing anyway, meaning that yes, we are "overwhelming" the natural carbon sinks.
Funnily, it's been easily proved that major oil companies have been on the AGW side. Al Gore himself is a man with many ties in such business. At first glance, you'd expect them to say that oil consumption doesn't pollute so much, so they'll keep people consuming just as much oil.Jedi Master Spock wrote:Someone mentioned that Russia is a major oil exporter, and the IEA is a "market-oriented" think tank over there (think Cato Institute - the two are associated), but not adjusting for urban heat island effects correctly is one of the things that can throw a monkey wrench in whether or not we see warming actually taking place.Mr. Oragahn wrote:A Telegraph blogger relayed this.
But that's a short termed vision.
My opinion is that these guys know that the world is going to move towards other means of power production anyway.
So what they are doing is that as they diversify their revenues, they'll amass a lot from financial markets they have already invested considerable amounts of cash into, such as the CO2 market estimated at several trillions dollars. Other powerful financial groups did the same, so they will not let anyone put a lid on the well, that's pretty certain.
At the same time, the lowly consumer and other small and medium companies will be pressured by the rise of fuel/plastic costs, an after effect of greater taxation. The usual club, from BP to Exxon, Shell and Total-Fina-Elf etc., would obviously not cap their prices and assume the greater taxation. That would be very naïve. They'll pull prices up, since all of us won't have the choice but pay to keep going on with our societal and economical model.
Hell, being in control of the input of oil in any given country, and thus at the source of the "pollution", they'll be in one of the best spots to influence the price of CO2 derivatives, from which they'll make billions.
As outlandish as it is, it's a win-win situation for them, and a lose-lose-lose-lose-again situation for us.
Now, not all groups are in the same basket, and some may be lagging behind. If the Russian oil company is not as privy about key data about stock as would be US/UK/EU companies with good ties to Wall Street/City, it could be understandable why they'd try their best to even the field and not being eaten alive. Notably because if they don't make as much money as the others, they won't be able to "fix" the prices as much as they'd like to.
That, and Russian capitalists.
Nothing's black and white anyway.
There's a nice graph here looking at the different subsets. I found this article explains what the graph means a little better.
First of all, I'd really wish some address my post, notably the wikipedia graph you used as pro-AGW evidence, while its stagnation and decrease of temperature after 1943~44, despite the growing industrialization, with the peak of 43-44 that is only matched again in ~1979, as you can see on this enhancement:
Notice how, for the bracketed era ('43->'79, between the two vertical green lines), the model based on greenhouse gases completely fails to explain the observed data, while solar irradiance and ozone work much better.
Also, I put yellow dots which highlight key values in solar irradiance. Notice how the rise of temperature also appears to mimic, more or less, the rough evolution of solar irradiance.
It is possible that greenhouse gases add a bit to this, maybe enhancing the effect a little, but they're far from being the main source of temperature rise.
From the evidence of this graph alone, we see that solar irradiance and ozone is followed, on the average and with a bit of lag sometimes, by the temp rise.
This being pointed out, I can take a look at the part of your message I quoted, and see what the links say.
First, Richard Lawson's greenblog. 11th on UK green blogs, let's see...
Odd?Richard Lawson wrote:
The red line shows readings from the smaller set of 121 stations, and the blue line is for the larger set of 476 stations.
They agree very well since 1950. Before that, the red smaller set, the ones chosen by the data collectors, show colder temps. It is true that the pruned readings from 1990 on are fractionally warmer than the full set, but the difference is not significant, as both lines are cooler than the best estimate grey line.
It is odd that the selected by the WMO is more cold in the 1880s, going beyond the grey line of total uncertainty.
What the red line "reveals" is a constant increase of the temperature, while the blue line shows that despite the industrialization of the era I talked about just above, we have low temperatures in 1974 that come as colder than the peaks of 1870 and 1907.
So is it that odd? Well, I don't know, but one thing that is sure is that the data chosen by the WMO certainly makes it look like that before the industrialization, Earth was colder, and we never experienced a winter as cold as of 1870, which rather conveniently supports AGW.
While the blue line raises the same point I raised in my former post, and the mysterious 40s-70s era.
As for this Deltoid article, please notice the subtle ad-hominem:
I'm getting a little bit nervous when defenders of a given theory start abusing the words "deniers" and "right-wing". Lambert is certainly not alone here, but I can't help laughing at the idea that somehow the fact that the IEA may be more right-wing than left-wing has any relevance, especially when considering how AGW is largely pushed, on the financial and political front, by the USA, a country which when seen from outside, has very little leftist about it at all, even from the "Democrats".Tim Lambert wrote: The latest story exciting the denialosphere is being put about by novelist James Delingpole and is based on an analysis (translated here) by a right-wing Russian think tank.
I'd also point out that Sarkozy, who's working with Brown in order to put into place an EU global monitoring policy that would work in curbing CO2 emissions, is very well right-wing-liberal, with strong ties to US neocons, and didn't hesitate to arrange his political campaign as to harvest voices from the extreme right wing. On that note, I'd also like to know what the hell Blair and Brown have to do with anything truly left, aside from their social democracy.
But let's just deny this.
Which, amusingly, could appear to be a legit claim, when considering the other scandal (again) about Ben Sanders, and how he modified the IPCC report to remove all the parts from the UN scientists who were saying that there was no way to link for certainty climate change to the release of CO2 by human activities.Tim Lambert wrote: Delingpole quotes from a news story:
Delingpole adds:Delingpole wrote:
On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory. Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports. Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.
Delingpole wrote:
What the Russians are suggesting here, in other words, is that the entire global temperature record used by the IPCC to inform world government policy is a crock.
Obviously not.Tim Lambert wrote: The problem here is the IEA report does not support the claims made in the news story. I've reproduced the final graph from the report below. The red curve is the temperature trend using the 121 Russian stations that CRU has released data for, while the blue hockey stick is from a larger set of 476 stations. I've put them on top of the CRU temperatures for northern extratropics. The red and blue curves agree very well in the period after 1950, thus confirming the CRU temperatures. Well done, IEA!
The red and blue curves do diverge in the 19th century, but the one that provides more support for anthropogenic global warming is the blue hockey stick.
Which curve shows, as a whole, an averaged increase of temperature mirroring the increasing industrial activities of man? The red one.
Which one shows that for 1940s-70s, we got temperatures colder than in 1870 and 1907, which really puts AGW's logic at odds over key eras? The blue one.
Industrial Revolution in UK, pioneer.Tim Lambert wrote: The red curve shows warming in the 19th century before there were significant CO2 emissions, so it weakens the case that global warming is man-made.
Quite not, as CRU has been caught the hand in the jar, thanks to the hack.Tim Lambert wrote:If CRU (not HAdley as claimed in the Russian news story) have "tampered" with the data, it would seem that they must have been trying to make a case against AGW.
That's what I call denial of the highest order.
So what is?Tim Lambert wrote:The IEA analysis is, in any case, misguided. CRU has not released all the station data they use, so the red curve is not the CRU temperature trend for Russia at all.
Let's remember that just a couple of lines above, he said "the red curve is the temperature trend using the 121 Russian stations that CRU has released data for..."
Considering the hassle it is to extract anything from a nc file without having the proper tools built on your PC, it would have been welcome to output the data in a more friendly readable format.If you want that, all you have to do is download the gridded data and average all the grid cells in Russia. You have to wonder why the IEA did not do this.
If we're supposed to look at the grey stuff, you really need to blink fast to pretend that the blue curve is closer to the CRU estimation curve than the red one.Since Russia is a pretty fair chunk of the land north of 30 degrees north, the CRU graph above is a rough approximation of the what the CRUTEM3 trends for Russia is, and you can see that it looks like the blue curve and not the red one.
The closer to our century you get, the more you have those long odd drops, where the estimation falls below the red line, and even dips when both lines form a peak. Finally, when both curves agree, the estimation still manages to always be superior to both.
Basically, the only moment the estimation really seemed to have more to do with blue than red, was before 1900, which means when everything was less certain.
The more certain things were, the more the estimation got borked or got closer to the red curve.
Does this Lambert guy even actually pay attention to what he posts, or something?...
He's not from the IEA as far as I'm concerned, right? So that a messenger from CNN or Fox News gets the stuff wrong isn't surprising; they can't even pinpoint major European cities and borders correctly.It's nice timing on his part, but really a side-show compared to the actual 'climategate' incident. The fellow making this claim is a political hack, basically - no more a working climate scientist than Al Gore or Bill O'Reilly.
I'm amazed that so many people still tune into such channels.
Finally, regarding the IEA's affair, there's still this translation of the IEA's original Russian document. Pages 15, 18, 20 & 21 are of interest. Page 20 features the same graph you linked to, so unless I missed something, I don't see what the IEA missed out here.
EDIT: forgot to finish some sentences.
EDIT2: Take a look at this:
Holocene Fluctuations in Arctic Sea-Ice Cover Reference
McKay, J.L., de Vernal, A., Hillaire-Marcel, C., Not, C., Polyak, L. and Darby, D. 2008. Holocene fluctuations in Arctic sea-ice cover: dinocyst-based reconstructions for the eastern Chuckchi Sea. Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences 45: 1377-1397.
Background
Writing about the Arctic Ocean, the authors say that over the past thirty years "there has been a rapid decline in the extent and thickness of sea-ice in summer and more recently in winter as well," but they state there is "debate on the relative influence of natural versus anthropogenic forcing on these recent changes." Hence, they decided "to investigate the natural variability of sea-ice cover in the western Arctic during the Holocene and thus provide a baseline to which recent changes can be compared," in order to help resolve the issue.
What was done
McKay et al. analyzed sediment cores obtained from a site on the Alaskan margin in the eastern Chukchi Sea for their "geochemical (organic carbon, δ13Corg, Corg/N, and CaCO3) and palynological (dinocyst, pollen, and spores) content to document oceanographic changes during the Holocene," while "the chronology of the cores was established from 210Pb dating of near-surface sediments and 14C dating of bivalve shells."
What was learned
Since the early Holocene, according to the findings of the six scientists, sea-ice cover in the eastern Chuckchi Sea appears to have exhibited a general decreasing trend, in contrast to the eastern Arctic, where sea-ice cover was substantially reduced during the early to mid-Holocene and has increased over the last 3000 years. Superimposed on both of these long-term changes, however, are what they describe as "millennial-scale variations that appear to be quasi-cyclic." And they write that "it is important to note that the amplitude of these millennial-scale changes in sea-surface conditions far exceed [our italics] those observed at the end of the 20th century."
What it means
Since the change in sea-ice cover observed at the end of the 20th century (which climate alarmists claim to be unnatural) was far exceeded by changes observed multiple times over the past several thousand years of relatively stable atmospheric CO2 concentrations (when values never strayed much below 250 ppm or much above 275 ppm), there is no compelling reason to believe that the increase in the air's CO2 content that has occurred since the start of the Industrial Revolution has had anything at all to do with the declining sea-ice cover of the recent past; for at a current concentration of 385 ppm, the recent rise in the air's CO2 content should have led to a decrease in sea-ice cover that far exceeds what has occurred multiple times in the past without any significant change in CO2.
Reviewed 12 August 2009