Deja Vu all over again: climate worries of today also happened in the 20’s and 30’s

Two days ago I highlighted a news story from the Washington Post Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt dated from November 2nd 1922. That brought a flood of interest and some other interesting finds along with it as other readers contributed what they found on the story.

One of the most interesting finds was a study published in the Monthly Weather Review in September 1933 Titled:  IS OUR CLIMATE CHANGING? A STUDY OF LONG-TIME TEMPERATURE TRENDS.

The first page of the original article is below:

Click this link for the full PDF of the article.

What is most interesting about this article is that it stems from a  realization that the regular weather patterns they used to know were now acting differently. For example this form the article:

The phase of weather, or climate, that is attracting attention at the present time is not these short-period changes from warm to cool, and vice versa, for they are always present, but rather an apparent longer-time change to cool periods that seem to be less frequent and of shorter duration, and warm periods that are more pronounced and persistent.

And when you look at some of the city temperature graphs presented in the article, such as the one below, the parallels between them and some graphs presented in the present day are striking:

There is even the familiar argument and rebuttal about the Urban Heat Island effect:

It has been suggested that these tendencies to abnormally high-temperature records in recent years may be more apparent than real, in that data cited are nearly always from large cities where the thermometers may have been unduly affected by artificial influences that do not obtain in the open country. We have examined this phase of the matter and find that the suggestion is not well taken.

In the concluding remarks, the is the recognition of climate change to a warmer regime:

All of these confirm the general statement that we are in the midst of a period of abnormal warmth, which has come on more less gradually for many years.

Of course we all know what happened next, 1934 became the hottest year on record, the dust bowl and great depression occurred, followed by World War II. The climate changes again, a return to a colder phase lasting all the way until about 1978 when the “new ice age” was being discussed. Then the great PDO shift occurred and warming has been the norm since then.

The Sloppy Science of Global Warming

A guest post by Roy. W. Spencer

While a politician might be faulted for pushing a particular agenda that serves his own purposes, who can fault the impartial scientist who warns us of an imminent global-warming Armageddon? After all, the practice of science is an unbiased search for the truth, right? The scientists have spoken on global warming. There is no more debate. But let me play devil’s advocate. Just how good is the science underpinning the theory of manmade global warming? My answer might surprise you: it is 10 miles wide, but only 2 inches deep.

Contrary to what you have been led to believe, there is no solid published evidence that has ruled out a natural cause for most of our recent warmth - not one peer-reviewed paper. The reason: our measurements of global weather on decadal time scales are insufficient to reject such a possibility. For instance, the last 30 years of the strongest warming could have been caused by a very slight change in cloudiness. What might have caused such a change? Well, one possibility is the sudden shift to more frequent El Niño events (and fewer La Niña events) since the 1970s. That shift also coincided with a change in another climate index, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

The associated warming in Alaska was sudden, and at the same time we just happened to start satellite monitoring of Arctic sea ice. Coincidences do happen, you know…that’s why we have a word for them.

We make a big deal out of the “unprecedented” 2007 opening of the Northwest Passage as summertime sea ice in the Arctic Ocean gradually receded, yet the very warm 1930s in the Arctic also led to the Passage opening in the 1940s. Of course, we had no satellites to measure the sea ice back then.

So, since we cannot explore the possibility of a natural source for some of our warming, due to a lack of data, scientists instead explore what we have measured: manmade greenhouse gas emissions. And after making some important assumptions about how clouds and water vapor (the main greenhouse components of the atmosphere) respond to the extra carbon dioxide, scientists can explain all of the recent warming.

Never mind that there is some evidence indicating that it was just as warm during the Medieval Warm Period. While climate change used to be natural, apparently now it is entirely manmade. But a few of us out there in the climate research community are rattling our cages. In the August 2007 Geophysical Research Letters, my colleagues and I published some satellite evidence for a natural cooling mechanism in the tropics that was not thought to exist. Called the “Infrared Iris” effect, it was originally hypothesized by Prof. Richard Lindzen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

By analyzing six years of data from a variety of satellites and satellite sensors, we found that when the tropical atmosphere heats up due to enhanced rainfall activity, the rain systems there produce less cirrus cloudiness, allowing more infrared energy to escape to space. The combination of enhanced solar reflection and infrared cooling by the rain systems was so strong that, if such a mechanism is acting upon the warming tendency from increasing carbon dioxide, it will reduce manmade global warming by the end of this century to a small fraction of a degree. Our results suggest a “low sensitivity” for the climate system.

What, you might wonder, has been the media and science community response to our work? Absolute silence. No doubt the few scientists who are aware of it consider it interesting, but not relevant to global warming. You see, only the evidence that supports the theory of manmade global warming is relevant these days.

The behavior we observed in the real climate system is exactly opposite to how computerized climate models that predict substantial global warming have been programmed to behave. We are still waiting to see if any of those models are adjusted to behave like the real climate system in this regard.

And our evidence against a “sensitive” climate system does not end there. In another study (conditionally accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate) we show that previously published evidence for a sensitive climate system is partly due to a misinterpretation of our observations of climate variability. For example, when low cloud cover is observed to decrease with warming, this has been interpreted as the clouds responding to the warming in such a way that then amplifies it. This is called “positive feedback,” which translates into high climate sensitivity.

But what if the decrease in low clouds were the cause, rather than the effect, of the warming? While this might sound like too simple a mistake to make, it is surprisingly difficult to separate cause and effect in the climate system. And it turns out that any such non-feedback process that causes a temperature change will always look like positive feedback. Something as simple as daily random cloud variations can cause long-term temperature variability that looks like positive feedback, even if in reality there is negative feedback operating.

The fact is that so much money and effort have gone into the theory that mankind is 100 percent responsible for climate change that it now seems too late to turn back. Entire careers (including my own) depend upon the threat of global warming. Politicians have also jumped aboard the Global Warming Express, and this train has no brakes.

While it takes only one scientific paper to disprove a theory, I fear that no amount of evidence will be able to counter what everyone now considers true. If tomorrow the theory of manmade global warming were proved to be a false alarm, one might reasonably expect a collective sigh of relief from everyone. But instead there would be cries of anguish from vested interests.

About the only thing that might cause global warming hysteria to end will be a prolonged period of cooling…or at least, very little warming. We have now had at least six years without warming, and no one really knows what the future will bring. And if warming does indeed end, I predict that there will be no announcement from the scientific community that they were wrong. There will simply be silence. The issue will slowly die away as Congress reduces funding for climate change research.

Oh, there will still be some diehards who will continue to claim that warming will resume at any time. And many will believe them. Some folks will always view our world as a fragile, precariously balanced system rather than a dynamic, resilient one. In such a world-view, any manmade disturbance is by definition bad. Forests can change our climate, but people aren’t allowed to.

It is unfortunate that our next generation of researchers and teachers is being taught to trust emotions over empirical evidence. Polar bears are much more exciting than the careful analysis of data. Social and political ends increasingly trump all other considerations. Science that is not politically correct is becoming increasingly difficult to publish. Even science reporting has become more sensationalist in recent years.

I am not claiming that all of our recent warming is natural. But the extreme reluctance for most scientists to even entertain the possibility that some of it might be natural suggests to me that climate research has become corrupted. I fear that the sloppy practice of climate change science will damage our discipline for a long time to come.

Roy W. Spencer is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. His book, Climate Confusion: How Global Warming Leads to Bad Science, Pandering Politicians and Misguided Policies that Hurt the Poor, will be published this month.

New solar cycle 24 goalpost established

As I mentioned a few days ago, there was a panel that NASA convened to look at solar cycle 23/24 predictions.

From this story on space.com where they talk about the opposing views solar scientists have for cycle 24 they offer some opinions. NOAA Space Environment Center scientist Douglas Biesecker, who chaired the panel, said in a statement:

 […] despite the panel’s division on the Sun cycle’s intensity, all members have a high confidence that the season will begin in March 2008

Well, obviously March 2008 isn’t happening:

Current sun: blank

So now there’s a new set of numerical predictive numbers issued by NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. You can see the March 2008 updated prediction page here:

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml

There is a lot of discussion there on how the numbers are derived, but plainly absent from the discussion is the real meat of the issue. The goalposts for the start of Cycle 24 have now been moved to May 2008. In addition to the discussion of the “hows” on that page, he also produced a set of numerical data for the prediction curves which you can see here: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict.txt

I’ve plotted the data for you below.

Click for a larger image

Notice how cycle 23 gets longer and longer, with a sharp upturn for cycle 24 starting in late 2008 and early 2009. Hathaway still believes cycle 24 will be slightly more in amplitude than cycle 23, while others think it will be lower.

I’m no solar physicist, but based on what I’ve seen, I’m betting the goalposts will be moved again in May, pointing to a start in August or September 2008. This would be more in line with the latest numbers predicted by the Space Environment Center (SEC):

We’ll see what happens. I’m still very much concerned about the apparent step change in 2005 to a lower plateau of the Geomagnetic Average Planetary (Ap) index. Which is something that does not appear in the previous cycle:

click for a larger image

What is most interesting about the Geomagnetic Average Planetary Index graph above is what happened around October 2005. Notice the sharp drop in the magnetic index and the continuance at low levels, almost as if something “switched off”.

UPDATE - Joe D’Aleo of ICECAP writes in with this:

This site http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24.html catalogs the many forecasts of the next cycle with links where available. The majority of these forecasts (23 of the 33) forecast a quieter cycle 24 than 23.

The Clilverd forecast http://users.telenet.be/j.janssens/SC24Clilverd.pdf  is the lowest (peak SSN 42).

Dikpati http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2004/sunspot.shtml  the highest (peak SSN 169). Hathaway of NASA was second highest (peak SSN 160) though he projected that cycle 25 could be quietest in centuries due to dramatic slowing of the conveyor belt of hot plasma http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/10may_longrange.htm

If we go to May or later before the solar min is reached, cycle 23 will be the longest cycle since the late 1800s.

Bristlecone Pines: Treemometers or rain gauges ?

Over on Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre has been making a series of posts that have been putting the final nails in the coffin for Michael Mann’s MBH98 paper. This paper was responsible for the famous hockey stick graph which is based on tree ring data from Bristlecone Pine trees. Mann’s work implies them to be excellent proxy indicators of temperature, and due to their age, a profound record of temperature. Problem is,  it looks like most of the results is Mann’s paper have been thoroughly discredited by the work of McKittrick and McIntyre in 2005, plus McIntyre’s more recent work.

At 4600-4800 years old for some of the oldest trees, Bristlecone Pines (BCP) certainly have seen most if not more than all of human recorded history, so it seems logical to look to them for answers about our temperature history.

One of the graphs Steve McIntyre recently produced was this one:

About this graph he notes:

Here’s the MBH98 PC1 (bristlecones) again marking 1934. Given that bristlecone ring width are allegedly responding positively to temperature, it is notable that the notoriously hot 1934 is a down spike.

Since 1934 is generally accepted now to be the hottest year on record in 20th century it is indeed curious that 1934 in Mann’s data shows up as a down spike.

But seeing what happened with 1934, one has to wonder what do these trees really record in their tree ring growths? Is it temperature as Mann speculates? Or is it any number of other things related to plant growth in various combinations?

How not to measure temperature, part 53: Find the NOAA thermometer in this picture

Click picture to find the thermometer

One of the things learned from the www.surfacestations.org project is how the conversion of standard mercury thermometers in Stevenson Screens to the newer MMTS type electronic thermometers has resulted in many USHCN stations being placed closer to buildings. This is a result of cable trenching issues and NWS COOP managers general lack of equipment and time to do effective cable laying. The spec for the MMTS thermometers allows for cables up to 1/4 mile in length between the sensor and the display.

The MMTS thermometer in the photo above is no exception to this problem (if you can find it).

This station above is in the middle of America’s agricultural belt, in Hay Springs, Nebraska. It is a standard COOP station #253710 at an observer’s residence. It is a Class “A” station according to NCDC so data from it does make it into the climate record.

On the other side of town we have the official USHCN climate station of record there, COOP # 253715 located at the Mirage Flats irrigation District Office. While you’d think that the rural “great plains nature” of this station would provide for a better environment, like the one above, it is also at about 5 feet from the building, but doesn’t have shrubbery affecting daytime sun and nighttime reflected IR like the other station:

Click picture for a larger image

In either case, the placement so close to heated buildings certainly doesn’t provide what would be considered a quality measurment environment for temperature. According to the NCDC database records, the USHCN station was converted from a Stevenson Screen to a MMTS in 1989.

These stations were surveyed by surfacetstations.org volunteer Eric Gamberg. To see the complete photo album, please see this link.

One of the hopes I have as we survey more stations in the midwest is that we’ll find better quality siting and placements. I hope these examples are not indicative of what we’ll find in the great plains.

You ask, I provide. November 2nd, 1922. Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.

Roger Carr recently wrote in comments:

HELP WANTED: I am trying to purchase (or plunder) a full copy of this story, mentioned here on this forum:

A Washington, D.C. resident John Lockwood was conducting research at the Library of Congress and came across an intriguing headline in the Nov. 2, 1922 edition of The Washington Post: Arctic Ocean Getting Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.

The article mentions “great masses of ice have now been replaced by moraines of earth and stones,” and “at many points well-known glaciers have entirely disappeared.”

The original source of the story resurfacing recently was from an Inside the Beltway column of August 14th, 2007. The newspaper article was located in the Library of Congress archives by James Lockwood.

Here is the text of the Washington Post (Associated Press) article:

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.

UPDATE:

The source report of the Washington Post article on changes in the arctic has been found in the Monthly Weather Review for November 1922. It is much more detailed than the Washington Post (Associated Press) article. It seems the AP heaviliy relied on the report from Norway Consulate George Ifft, which is shown below. See the original MWR article below and click the newsprint copy for a complete artice or see the link to the original PDF below:

 

Click the article to see the full article changing-arctic_monthly_wx_review.png.

The PDF of that page exists here from NOAA’s archives. Thanks to Michael Ronayne for locating it and many other resources you can find in the comments section below.

If Yogi Berra were here to comment on the hullabaloo over the changes in the arctic today, I’m pretty sure he’d say. “It’s Deja Vu all over again”.

UPDATE:  If you like the work being presented here and the work of my nationwide project at www.surfacestations.org you may want to consider taking a look at this entry to lend a hand.

I need a little help

I’m often amazed at the reach this blog has been getting worldwide. Last month, I found it hitting almost a quarter million visits. This month it is on track to exceed 300,000. And you never know who will drop by. For example MIT’s Richard Lindzen dropped by a few days ago and offered some insight and a graph.

Along those lines I’ve recently been given an offer of a sit down visit with one of the principal organizations and investigators of climate science today. I won’t say who just yet, (except to say it is not Al Gore) but I can say that the offer is genuine and exciting.

It also comes with a price tag, since I have to fund the travel, hotel, etc. myself.

When I first set out to do the surfacestations.org project, I did so with no expectation of funding. I rather like it that way because I think that when you are handed a wad of cash with the expectation of producing a result in exchange, sometimes the pressure of doing so can be a detriment to true curiosity and discovery. I once worked in a University environment, and I saw the pressure to produce.

But this visit I’ve been offered is going to take a bit of cash to do, and rather than beg supporters I have what I hope will be a better idea. I don’t like begging, but I do like providing useful things for meteorology.

So here’s my pitch. I have a weather radar program for the USA NEXRAD network, and a darn good one at that. It’s called StormPredator. Knowing that I have many people that frequent this blog who enjoy meteorology and severe weather tracking, I’m hoping those of you that like the work that I do will consider buying it to help fund my trip. You get something, I get something, we both win. Plus I’ll have one heck of a blog report when I get back from this meeting.

My idea for Stormpredator came from my working with old WSR-3, WSR-57, and WSR-74 weather radars with round PPI scopes. I wanted to create a weather radar program that anyone could use, not just a “met head”. I wanted a weather program that would be useful, educational, and fun at the same time.

It looks like this:

Besides round PPI mode, it also can be setup in a rectangular presentation. It has 3D topography for the entire USA, and can track and animate storms, do popup and email alerts, provide ETA estimates, forecasts, satellite imagery, and even send pictures to your website or cell phone. It’s loaded.

It is used by storm trackers, 911 centers, dispatch centers, TV stations, radio stations, schools, amateur radio operators, and just regular folks that like to track storms.

It has a boatload of features. Check them out here.

There is no subscription fee for the radar or other weather data, and the program will operate using any type of Internet connection. It is also inexpensive for what it does, at $39.99. (or $10 more for a CD ROM version).

If watching the weather interests you, I hope you’ll consider buying a copy to help me fund my trip. Thank you for your consideration.

If you don’t live in the USA, and can’t use the program above for that or any other reason, but would like to help out, I have provided a donation page via PayPal on the surfacestations.org website.

Poll: majority of British say they are being snookered

The London Times conducted a broad poll. In it was an interesting question:

The government is imposing ‘green taxes’ as an excuse to raise money rather than to help save the environment

The answer was quite telling:

To Tell The Truth: Will the Real Global Average Temperature Trend Please Rise? Part 3

To Tell The Truth: Will the Real Global Average Temperature Trend Please Rise?

Part III

A guest post by Basil Copeland

Again, I want to thank Anthony for the kind invitation to guest blog these musings about what is going on with global average temperature metrics.  It has been a most interesting, and personally rewarding, experience.  My original aim was quite modest, but I fear that the passion that many feel for this issue prevented them from seeing that.  So in this final part to this series, I want to try to make my aim more clear, and to show how a lively exchange of ideas can lead to new insights.

The IPCC has made the earth’s global average temperature trend a central focus in the debate over anthropogenic global warming.  In the AR4 report of Working Group 1, they state:

The range (due to different data sets) of global surface warming since 1979 is 0.16°C to       0.18°C per decade compared to 0.12°C to 0.19°C per decade for MSU estimates of        tropospheric temperatures.  (Chapter 3, Page 237)

Similar, if not the same, estimates are reported in Table 3.3, Page 61, of the Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.1 of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (accessible here: http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-all.pdf ).  Presumably, these estimates provide some kind of basis for the IPCC SRES scenarios that assume 0.2C per decade warming over the next two decades. 

Figure 1

From what I can tell in reading the representations of the sources for these estimates, they are based on a straight-line linear regression that includes corrections for serial correlation.  In other words, regressions that look something like what are shown in Figure 1.  The trend at the top is from Appendix A, Page 130, Figure 1, of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program report just cited.  The second is taken from the RSS website (http://www.remss.com/data/msu/graphics/plots/sc_Rss_compare_TS_channel_tlt.png  accessed on March 15, 2008).  Both show a warming trend of 0.17C/decade since 1979.

Are these “good” estimates of the historical trend since 1979?  Forgive me, but I refuse to accept them as authoritative ex cathedra, nor will any true scientist expect me to.  Bear in mind, I’m taking the data for what it’s worth, and am overlooking any questions about the reliability of the surface record, such as what Anthony is looking into (or Steve Mcintyre at www.climateaudit.org), or the kind of urbanization and land use effects reported by Ross McKitrick and Patrick Michaels. My concern is solely with the technical procedures used to estimate the “trends” that are commonly cited for evidence of global warming.  Bottom line?  There are problems with the way those trends are computed that overestimate the degree of global warming since 1979 by 16.3% to 41.3% (based on results presented below).

In Part II I attempted a demonstration of this using what might be considered to be rather a rather blunt or brute force approach — a test of whether there was a significant “structural break” (the way we describe it in my field of study) after 2001, along with whether or not linear trends are distorted by the effect of the 1998 El Nino.  Nothing in the comments that followed the posting of Part II fundamentally undermined the validity of my conclusions.  The chief concerns seemed to be that my decision to test for a structural break (or “change point”) at the end of 2001 was arbitrary (it wasn’t), or whether one could say anything meaningful about a cyclical system like climate from linear trend lines.  Well, with respect to the latter, that horse is out of the barn, and we’re being told — by supposed authorities — that there has been X degrees of global warming per decade since 1979 on the basis of linear trend lines.  If they can use linear regression to claim that global warming is proceeding apace, well please excuse me for doing the same in questioning them.

Still, the comments were provocative, and encouraged me to dig further into my toolbox of econometric techniques to see if I might be able to come up with something that would alleviate some of the concerns commenters had about what I did.  So it occurred to me that I might treat the weather like a “business cycle” and model it with Hodrick-Prescott smoothing.  (If you want an explanation of what that is, look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodrick-Prescott_filter ).  The results are presented, for the four global average temperature metrics we are using, in Figures 2 through 5.

Figure2 - click for a larger image

Figure3 - click for a larger image

Figure4 - click for a larger image

Figure5 - click for a larger image

Those who think we should let the data tell us where the “change points” are should find this approach more appealing, as well as those who believe we should be modeling the data with non-linear techniques.  But in the end, the point is the same: the “real trend” over the 29 years we are looking at is substantially less than we get using straight-line regression.  With the exception of GISS, Hodrick-Prescott smoothing results in even lower estimates of the degree of global warming over the past 29 years.  As shown in the following Table 1, compared to the two methods I’ve employed, the straight line regression method relied upon by IPCC and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program overstates global warming since 1979 by anywhere from 16.3% (using GISS) to 41.3% (HadCRUT). 

No one should be offended by what I’ve done, or what I’m saying.  True science is always open to the possibility of refutation.  Given the policy implications that hang on conclusions about the degree of global warming that has occurred in recent decades, we should take a closer look at what the supposed authorities are telling us, and see if there are not perhaps some significant short-comings in the way they have calculated the degree of global warming in recent decades.

Sun still blank, no sign of cycle 24

This is a quick post since I’m caught up in a lot of work this weekend. Moderation will be slow so don’t be worried if your posts don’t show for several hours.

Last month I wrote:

———————
From this story on space.com where they talk about the opposing views solar scientists have for cycle 24 they offer some opinions. NOAA Space Environment Center scientist Douglas Biesecker, who chaired the panel, said in a statement:

 […] despite the panel’s division on the Sun cycle’s intensity, all members have a high confidence that the season will begin in March 2008.

———————-

We are halfway through March, and the sun has been very quiet, Ap magnetic index remains low, sunspots are zilch, all we have is a bit of solar wind from the occasional coronal hole.

The forecast from SWPC is flatness for the 10.7cm band:

This is the one that worries me though, as I’ve pointed out before, we have that step function (or discontinuity) in 2005 (see red arrows) which gives the impression that something just “switched off” in the solar magnetic dynamo:

Additionally, the sunspot forecast from SWPC calls for sunspot numbers to be very low for the remainder of 2008, which seems to put a kibosh on the consensus formed by NASA’s convened solar scientist panel which made that prediction of “…the season will begin in March 2008” uttered by panel chair Biesecker quoted above.

We live in interesting times.