Chris Knight

Since your post is clearly an attack on my person, I just cannot understand how you can be so duplicious in what you are saying here. I used your own quoted evidence (extracts from IPCC palaeoclimate chapter) to show how I believe the IPCC report does not appear to be an honest representation of data. Now, Dev, if you like, criticize those points that I have indicated on the diagram 6.10 taken from The IPCC report chapter 6, how, in several ways, the diagram appears to be misleading, and show me how I am wrong, that the present appears to be much warmer than 1000 years ago, when represented in that way, when in fact the proxy data is not conclusive.

Here's another interesting read - going back to 1964! http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin...p;filetype=.pdf and here's a little taster:

Briffa, as lead author of chapter 6 did a good job of making the MWP disappear. Fig 6.10 was presented in such a way that the present seems to be much warmer than 1000 years ago. The recent instrumental record is attached, some say "spliced", onto the combined (selected) reconstruction records (of which none compare in extent to the current instrumental temperature highs), and the spread of MWP reconstructed temperatures is downplayed. There were several other visual tricks, apart from redisplaying the disputed "hockey stick": Whether this is an honest, conscientious representation of the data, I leave up to the viewer.

Perhaps you should ask the New Scientist's journos and editors, Dev, they seem to think that a lot of folks have been led to believe in a non-existent MWP as supposed by respected (and now outmoded) figures in the past such as Hubert Lamb, and that Briffa and others have gone to great lengths in AR4 {chap. 6.6, fig 6.10, explained in detail in (box 6.4)} to convince governments that such climate extremes not only did not (likely) happen in the past, but do not happen except (very likely) by human intervention, by increasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere post-industrially by continued burning of fossil fuels, as we see today. Better still, ask your friends in Exeter, they will (very likely) have the best answers.

Look on the bright side - the MWP has been rehabilitated, and can come out of the closet once more. At least one more wiggle can be reinstated in the climate record. Those who attempted to deny it existed now don't have to.

Ripost...but the last warming period lasted 30 years, and we all know what happened in the mid 2000s, just as some were predicting imminent disastrous global warming that never came...

It's called the 'canyon effect', and research has shown the effects are real with regard to nocturnal heat retention in urban areas. I wish you would back up your thoughts with more than just personal anecdotes, Dev, not like you at all! The Metoffice has a nice article on microclimates. The increase over time is a positive feedback, an overall knock-on effect, and particularly noticeable when mean temperature is calculated from maximum and minimum temperatures, rather than integrated dT.

Clean air is also having an effect on epiphytes. Less soot and acid rain increases the ability of lichens to survive, which in turn fix atmospheric nitrogen directly on the bark of trees (as well an on exposed stone, roofs and weathered concrete paving), as well as holding surface water, giving a mistletoe seedling a better chance of surviving the difficult transition from adhered surface seed to anchored semi-parasite. It is possibly increasing in the south of England http://www.mistletoe.org.uk/InBritain/InBr...I990sSurvey.htm You can reduce impact on affected trees by pruning some of the growth each year - sell it locally in early December - pubs may be interested. Inspect host trees for new seedlings, they can be removed with a sharp knife, taking some of the surrounding bark, coat the wound with vaseline, tape the area to exclude light. Common host trees in London area are apple, lime and False Acacia (Robinia).

Not exactly true that you need an increase in urbanisation for the heating potential to increase: The vertical profile of city centres change, invariably towards taller buildings, increasing the potential to warm from early morning and late evening sun, where the rays fall perpendicular to the buildings. Taller buildings mean more people per square metre, more journeys per day, more work equipment for the added personnel, more heat to get rid of in summer, more space to keep warm in winter. The downside is longer shadows. More people working in city centres requires longer commuting times, and increasing housing concentration in the suburbs. Supplies and services increase for increased populations. Suburbs change - gardens become hard-standings for vehicles, warmer suburbs lose lawns and shrubberies to mediterranean patios and decking. Overgrown areas are made more "manageable". Roadside trees are removed when they become a cause of uneven pavements or blocked drainage gulleys, and remain unreplaced. Buildings darken with age due to dirt, algae and weathering of surfaces, decreasing the albedo. Warmer cities get upgraded with added air conditioning, older air conditioning units get upgraded by more efficient air conditioning units. Urban areas are far from static, and rarely shrink.

Here's a wonderful quote from R.A. Pielke Sr.'s home page: “Koutsoyiannis et al. (2009) claim that climate is not changing due to human activities (climate is “naturally trendy”: Cohn & Lins, 2005), and that climate models do not provide a credible basis for assessing possible future impacts. Rather than "deniers" or any other soubriquet, those who doubt AGW should be known as "Naturally Trendy People"

Ahh, trust - it is such a wonderfully human, if not totally a scientific term.

An ever farther out possibility: Coincidence of an event waiting to happen, and a trigger from somewhere else in the cosmos?

Wonderful views Ice, here and in the north. Thanks for posting them. I particularly like: http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets...2.2009093.terra and the similar views from the Arctic where frigid blasts from over the polar ice create distinct parallel streams of snow-clouds heading away from the poles, as the air streams pass over open waters. Beautiful.

My conscience deals with life positively, not negatively. Creating bogiemen where there is nothing to fear, when there are real evils in the world which we can actually do something about is worse than denial of the existence of bogiemen IMO. Ridicule is one way of dealing with the constant barrage of doom and gloom that comes from some quarters, "Senna the Soothsayer", from "Up Pompeii" springs to mind. But back to Arctic Ice Thickness. We are observing in detail now what has been hidden in the past. Even the researchers in the link I posted report that estimated total Arctic ice volume over the last sixty years has varied by as much as 6 thousand cubic kilometres in as short a time as 12 years over the period of 1954 to 1966, but they are not naive enough to claim that the accompanying global cooler temperature trend caused the ice growth. Instead, changes in the Beaufort gyre were reported to be responsible, led by wind pattern changes, which in turn led to ice drifting to regions where greater thickness build-up were possible. These are not indefinite, invented models based on projections from hindcasts. They are analyses of data.

I understand why you are lost GW - you attempt to equate energy to temperature. It is an easy trap to fall into. Energy as heat is short lived. James Watt, and other steam energy pioneers, understood and exploited the fact that you could use water, a common substance on earth, to transduce heat into mechanical energy. He understood some of the properties of the atmosphere, water and energy in the form of heat that drives the great engine of the weather and climate. He understood that an energy source provides heat, that water was an excellent means of transforming that heat into a source of mechanical energy, because it trapped the energy until it changed phase and then could exert tremendously greater mechanical energy as a gas than as a liquid. (He also realised that as well as a potential energy source, it was also a latent energy source - he could have also become a refrigeration engineer or heat pump specialist - should the demand have arisen at that time.) Energy as radiation is very short lived. This planet transduces energy in many ways. Radiation as longwave is a sure means to lose the energy into space. However, if we follow the really energetic weather pathways in the earth's atmosphere, we understand why the industrial revolution followed the rather reliable conversion of heat energy from liquid to gaseous water, and not the rather limpid, but pretty conversion of dry ice to ankle high fog, because CO2 is merely a biproduct, not a major player. The former allows great empires to be founded, and the traditions of slavery to be ended on a wealth of all nations through honest trade, the latter allows sequined youth to dance themselves into hedonistic destruction through narcissistic addiction to S&D&R&R, and then to waste all that CO2 in removing the only worthwhile component of coffee, caffeine.

Any geologist, like Carter, involved in drilling programs is, of course, funded partly or entirely by petrochemical interests (often on the basis that the institution they find themselves working for is funded by grants from such business sources), and therefore tarred with the tag "Big Oil". Funnily enough if anyone cares to look at the CV of Pachauri, chief honcho & mouthpiece of IPCC - you can immediately see he was involved in the oil and gas business, as an economist, mind you, not as a physical scientist. I think that this iffiness by association is prejudice of the first kind, including my exemplification of Pachauri, which is not meant as an ad-hominem criticism of the man, just a paradigm of how the slur works in practice. Please read the (scientific, and critical) publications of Carter - there are plenty of direct links in the link I provided to make up your own mind if the fellow is a raving denialist or a genuine scientist (or both!) rather than the precis' of those who would praise or castigate him on their own prejudicial grounds. I am not saying I 100% agree with Carter either, but at least he is open and outspoken about his understanding of the climate debate, and his palaeoclimatological credentials are open to scrutiny.

Here's one - Bob Carter:

Go here, and follow the instructions to download the article - neat eh? Cherchez l'auteur.

Aw, come on Noggin, it was only a Reliant Robin at the best of times!

Hi Iceberg, I didn't comment on the other thread where you posted the plot of model runs from NASA, that it seemed to overwhelmingly imply a shift to El Nino conditions over the next few months, as I guess you intended it to, even though you admit above to knowing that neutral conditions are forecast by other model ensemble runs. I thought it would be a shame to spoil your fun there, and of course, you, and NASA may be right! Now, GW, do SSTs contribute to gridded global temperatures? Or is it that these global temperatures warm or cool the seas? Let's put it another way. How much do you think the last few years of exposed Arctic Ocean waters has added to the global temperature? I may be misinformed, but don't NASA/GISS include the Arctic in the GISTEMP series, whereas HadCRUT3 doesn't - and thus the fondness of the former if one wants to demonstrate how warm the world has become, or the latter if one wants to compare to the satellite record, without looking silly? Now who was so fond of showing all the meltWATER pools during last years Arctic Summer? I'll give the Newbies a clue - it was Gray-Wolf! Does all this water indicate an "ice desert"? If you look up the Alfred Wegener Institute archive reports from the RV Polarstern as it toured the Arctic from August to October (including a NW passage in 4 days (is this a record anyone?)), the major weather problem was fog (you can't see Ice through fog, which is rather important even for Ice-strengthened vessels), and fog is what you get with water saturated air at near zero temperatures. Evaporation rates were as good as they could get, over Icefloes and dark water. I think Rothrock found that the (submarine upward sonar) data was rather sparse, due to certain cold war restrictions, and now, mostly lost. The AWI has some interesting reanalyses on ice volumes and thickness over the last half century or so: http://www.awi.de/en/research/research_div...ments/?type=123 1958 was a fortuitous year to start measurements for those who think that the Ice has been steadily thinning. 5 years earlier, and the trend would have not been so clear-cut. I really hope so. Or it is the last gasp of some desperate (for some unknown reason) to believe that "we (have) done us all in"! Aside: C'mon Bill, let's go down the pub and have a pint or two... set the world to rights, let the b*****s freeze up there in't frozen Noorth. :lol:

Hello GW Whereas El Nino ups the "global temperature", it doesn't often do much for North Atlantic/Arctic weather - 1998 was hardly a record breaker HadCET-wise. I don't know where Iceberg gets his data either - NOAA's most recent forecast is less bullish - http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_...s-fcsts-web.pdf indicates nothing more than ENSO neutral conditions into the summer - any talk of El Nino this early is a case of ramping IMO. Perhaps NASA have been looking at GWO's website :lol:

I'd love to know where you get your data - "single year ice...less than a metre thick"! You haven't been looking in your freezer again, have you? Here's some data from the Alfred Wegener Institute: Table 1: Summary of late summer ice thicknesses in the Transpolar Drift shown in Figure 3 Year Mean thickness incl. water (m) b Open water fraction (%) Mean thickness, ice only (m) b Modal thickness (m) 1991a N/A N/A 3.11±1.03 2.50 1996 a N/A N/A 3.11±1.12 2.45 1998 a N/A N/A 2.88±1.49 2.10 2001 a N/A N/A 2.41±0.98 1.95 2001 2.20±1.05 5 2.31±0.95 1.90 2004 2.59±1.27 1 2.63±1.24 2.20 2007 (April) c 1.81c (3.31±1.51) 0.3 1.82c (3.32±1.35) 1.65c (2.35) 2007 1.27±0.77 2 1.30±0.76 0.90 a from Haas (2004) b Mean ± 1 standard deviation c Values are seasonally adjusted. Brackets show original April thickness. (sorry about the table formatting) I also think that the article and the PDF were referring to the winter thickness. Much of the current winter First Year Ice is approaching it's maximum thickness at the moment - about 2.5-3m thick, and of course it will be reduced to nothing, or less than a metre by September, if it happens to drift to an unsympathetic region of the Arctic. Three metre thicknesses disappear in days if the ice drifts too far south into the Atlantic in summer. Are you still anticipating a year-on-year decline in Arctic ice extent, GW? A younger, thinner ice pack in spring 2008 survived better than the spring 2007 pack, which had proportionately more MYI. Another foggy cool Arctic summer maybe in the offing?

looks like the gremlins struck again. please carry on as if nothing happened....

So 1 kg of moist air can contain anything up to 0.999999999... kg of water, as long as the pressure and temperature are high enough, and the rest ( the 0.00000000...) is air

So if "nearly" half a meter =19% the five winter average thickness was in excess of "nearly" 2.5 m Funny though, how difficult it seems to get estimates of thickness even now, let alone at any time over the last five years! These DAMOCLES people sure play their data close to their chests, or else they talk to the press from alternative orifices.