"Warming Island" myth

It seems that global warming alarmists love to use anecdotes to persuade people that their hysteria is justified. Al Gore, John McCain, the New York Times, and other alarmists continually talk about Mt. Kilimanjaro, make silly claims about Eskimo language, or the specter of cannibalism. Of course, these anecdotes are often false or have nothing to do with global climate change.

The latest myth has been exposed at the World Climate Report. This myth concerns a story in the New York Times, which claims that a spit of land that was thought to be a peninsula was revealed to be an island when a glacier connecting to Greenland retreated. The article notes:

Despite its remote location, the island would almost certainly have been discovered, named and mapped almost a century ago when explorers like Jean-Baptiste Charcot and Philippe, Duke of Orléans, charted these coastlines. Would have been discovered had it not been bound to the coast by glacial ice.

Maps of the region show a mountainous peninsula covered with glaciers. The island’s distinct shape — like a hand with three bony fingers pointing north — looks like the end of the peninsula.

Now, where the maps showed only ice, a band of fast-flowing seawater ran between a newly exposed shoreline and the aquamarine-blue walls of a retreating ice shelf. The water was littered with dozens of icebergs, some as large as half an acre; every hour or so, several more tons of ice fractured off the shelf with a thunderous crack and an earth-shaking rumble.

The folks over at World Climate Report decided to do a little sleuthing and found that "Warming Island" was known to be an island 50 years ago. Read the whole story here.

Global temperatures 'to decrease'

The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer.

But this year's temperatures would still be way above the average - and we would soon exceed the record year of 1998 because of global warming induced by greenhouse gases.

Full story here.

Correction to Hadley Center temperature record

The Hadley Center in the UK, which maintains a global temperature record, has announced that it has discovered an error in the way its temperature data is displayed. The data represented in this graphic (also see here) is smoothed to eliminate the sharp fluctuations.

However, when performing the smoothing procedure, they used the months of January and February of 2008 to represent the whole of 2008. The gives those two months the same weight as twelve months. When the data is smoothed, this propagates the over-weighted influence of those two months into previous months. Because January and February 2008 have been "unusually cool," they pull previous years downward as well, making it look like recent years seem cooler. As noted in the Hadley Center announcement:

We have recently corrected an error in the way that the smoothed time series of data were calculated. Data for 2008 were being used in the smoothing process as if they represented an accurate estimate of the year as a whole. This is not the case and owing to the unusually cool global average temperature in January 2008, the error made it look as though smoothed global average temperatures had dropped markedly in recent years, which is misleading.

As has been noted at Climate Audit and Watts Up With That, the same problem existed last year (2007) when a very warm January made recent years look unusually warm. However, the Hadley Center didn't catch the error at that time. It seems that they only notice errors when they erroneously cause temperatures to go down, but not when they erroneously cause temperatures to go up.

Anthony Watts attributes this to "expectation bias," where errors that confirm the expectations of the Hadley Center researchers are missed, while errors that do not confirm their expectations are missed.

2008 International Conference on Climate Change

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change held in New York last month was a big success. Audio of the presentations are now available here.

I previously posted Anthony Watts power point presentation. Now you can hear his speech.

Earth's Oceans Aren't Warming

An article on NPR discusses research showing that there has been no warming in the world's oceans over the last four years. The article states in part:

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

I suppose it's possible that scientists are misinterpreting the data, a possibility that the article raises. But there are other possibilities as well for what NPR has dubbed a "mystery." The first, of course, being that the oceans aren't warming. It is also quite possible that they haven't been warming for some time and we are just learning of it. It is also possible that the warming suddenly abated in 2003.

As bad as the land-based surface temperature record is, the ocean temperature record is worse. Coverage is spotty at best, with a good portion of the record restricted to shipping lanes, leaving vast areas of the ocean wholly unsampled. Moreover, numerous methods have been employed over the years to measure the ocean's temperature, including dipping uninsulated wooden buckets into the ocean, bringing them on deck and inserting a thermometer (prior to WWII). Using the same method but with insulated buckets (after WWII) and measuring the temperature at the engine intake (also after WWII).

Temperature readings from uninsulated buckets have a cold bias due to evaporation. Engine intake temperatures contained a warm bias due to the engine room. Taken together, a warming trend is introduced over and above whatever is actually occurring in the oceans.

There have also been buoy measurements and infrared sea surface data taken by satellites. The buoy data is good, but again somewhat spotty. The satellite data give much better coverage but is affected by cloud cover and volcanic aerosol contamination, introducing a cooling bias. So all of the methods used to measure ocean temperature have had problems and biases that make it difficult to know exactly what has been going on with ocean temperatures over the last 100 years.

The ARGO array has only been deployed since 2003 and offers far better coverage and accuracy than previous measurements. It will be interesting to watch the data coming out of the ARGO array over the next couple of decades. Here's a flash demonstration of the ARGO system.

The article also states:

In recent years, heat has actually been flowing out of the ocean and into the air. This is a feature of the weather phenomenon known as El Nino. So it is indeed possible the air has warmed but the ocean has not. But it's also possible that something more mysterious is going on.

However, the air hasn't warmed either. Indeed, according to Richard Lindzen at MIT, there has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.

This graphic from a post by Basil Copeland at Watts Up With That? further emphasizes the lack of warming over the last few years.


Here are some comments on the NPR story from Roger Pielke, Sr. at Climate Science.

NOAA: Coolest Winter Since 2001 for U.S., Globe

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has announced that, "The average temperature across both the contiguous U.S. and the globe during climatological winter (December 2007-February 2008) was the coolest since 2001."

Some of the temperature highlights presented by NOAA are:

• In the contiguous United States, the average winter temperature was 33.2°F (0.6°C), which was 0.2°F (0.1°C) above the 20th century average – yet still ranks as the coolest since 2001. It was the 54th coolest winter since national records began in 1895.

• Winter temperatures were warmer than average from Texas to the Southeast and along the Eastern Seaboard, while cooler-than-average temperatures stretched from much of the upper Midwest to the West Coast.

• With higher-than-average temperatures in the Northeast and South, the contiguous U.S. winter temperature-related energy demand was approximately 1.7 percent lower than average, based on NOAA’s Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index.

The full press release is available here.

Antarctica still not warming

Do you believe that the South Pole is warming and that the Antarctic ice cap is melting? Just about everybody does. But as is often the case with global warming, the truth is quite different than what is reported. Numerous peer-reviewed papers have shown that the Antarctic is cooling and gaining ice mass. The most recent study to look at Antarctic temperature trends is published in the Journal of Geophysical Research (abstract can be read here).

The researchers found a statistically insignificant positive trend in Antarctic temperatures during the period 1960-2005. They found a weak negative trend from 1970 to 2005. Finally, they found a widespread, but again, statistically insignificant warming trend from 1992 to 2005. In other words, there's a whole lot of nothin' going on at the South Pole.

Source:
Monaghan, A. J., D. H. Bromwich, W. Chapman, and J. C. Comiso (2008), Recent variability and trends of Antarctic near-surface temperature, Journal of Geophysical Research, 113, D04105, doi:10.1029/2007JD009094.