Unprecidented warmth in Arctic

Heres an ice core taken from Baffin Island.
Gee it pretty much matches the Greenland ice cores.
But doesnt look anything like a few moss samples with a fairytale conclusion.
The Miller study is full of inconsistencies.
Like 50,000 year moss in 4 samples from ONE location being revealed at the same time as Holocene moss all over the island.
It doesnt mean squat.
Unless ALL the remaining ice cap is actually covering 50,000 year old moss.
That would be a consistent indication that temps could have been warmer today than 50,000 (or 125,000)
years ago.
But if more moss from the Holocene melts out.
It would prove this proxy is not consistant and meaningless.
Or if carbon soot caused melting today that wasnt present in the past this study is meaningless.
Or if an ice core contradicted this study it would prove this study meaningless.
Like the one ice core study I just posted.

THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: New paper shows surface temperature of Arctic icecap was warmer during most of past 11,000 years

 

“Although the Arctic has been warming since about 1900, the most significant warming in the Baffin Island region didn’t really start until the 1970s,” said Miller. “And it is really in the past 20 years that the warming signal from that region has been just stunning. All of Baffin Island is melting, and we expect all of the ice caps to eventually disappear, even if there is no additional warming.”
Temperatures across the Arctic have been rising substantially in recent decades as a result of the buildup of greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere. Studies by CU-Boulder researchers in Greenland indicate temperatures on the ice sheet have climbed 7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1991."

Heres a graph of actual temps from Baffin Island.

 

Youve read the paper but you havent made a valid point.You cant reinforce the ridiculous logic of melting ice caps as reliable proxies.
Where as Im making valid points that you are to dim to comprehend or respond to.
You have some advantage having read the dumb nice person fantasy paper.
Prove me wrong with your additional incite having read the paper.
Or else stfu.

 

Bob what advantage is there to reading the paper if you havent gained any additional incite?
Other than bragging rights.
I cited valid points which show your study is BS.
If you cant counter my points, dont bother making a strawman (Ive read the study ) argument.

 

Duplicate posting

 

Bob,

Re your topic, you should read this, and the related 2008 article cited there. I'm not even going to bother to bring it up for discussion in this forum. The issue has been known for years (per the 2008 discussion) somebody finally got clever and splined the satellite data to the land observations and got it published. Particularly interesting is the agreement with the older GISS method and this method, discussed near the end of the article. Agreement occurs once GISS uses the updated sea surface temperature data, instead of the older series. So in fact the GISS method (which gap-fills the Arctic by basically interpolating the observed ground temperatures at the arctic rim, which sets the arctic interior temperature anomaly based on the anomaly at the arctic rim) and this method (which gap-fills by fitting the satellite data to the observed ground temperatures at the arctic rim, thus allowing for a temperature gradient from arctic rim to interior, to the extent that the satellite data suggest that) are largely in agreement. That's a fair indicator that the method and findings are likely robust.
RealClimate: Global Warming Since 1997 Underestimated by Half

 

Once again, I predict Cowtan and Way will get a lot of flack over this. Tune in to the excitement at WUWT or wait for their local spokesman to report it here.

There is at least one other new publication you should be aware of:

Warming since 1950s partly caused by El Niño

 

Among the red flags: Roy Spencer, results match almost no other research, methods match absolutely no othe research, estimated climate sensitivity outside the range considered plausible (and e.g. inconsistent with paleo data), "1-D" climate model (meaning, no actual climate model), and even to my eye, unusual methods -- they got their result by assuming El Nino was a separate forcing of the model. Did you understand "invoke" in this sentence, because I think it means this assumption, not present in the data (because, see 1D model of ocean above), is how they justify assuming that ocean warming from El Nino is a forcing. "“What we found is, to explain the satellite data we had to invoke a change in clouds nine months before the peak of either an El Niño or a La Niña,” Spencer said. “When the clouds change, it takes time for that to translate into a temperature change."

This is follow-on to a widely-derided earlier paper on this topic by the same authors, see here: RealClimate: July, 2011 . The earlier one was published in a non-climate journal. As I recall, that journal said they wouldn't be fooled again. So this, by contrast, is published in the international journal of the Korean Meterological Society. Which is a step up. This journal also published Lindzen and Choi 2011 (another paper suggesting an implausibly low climate sensitivity), after that paper had been rejected by PNAS for being, well, wrong (Lindzen and Choi 2011 - Party Like It's 2009). So at least the journal is consistent in publishing works with methods and results that are well out of the mainstream.

To clarify, this is also the central theme of his book, the Great Global Warming Blunder (RealClimate: Review of Spencer’s ‘Great Global Warming Blunder’). The clarification is, if you accept his arguments, he's right and, by his own description, the rest of climate science is wrong.

So I'll give these results all due consideration.

 

Among the red flags:Cowton and Way results match almost no other research, methods match absolutely no other research, estimated climate sensitivity outside the range considered plausible

I dont need to go to WUWT for a critique ,just read the responses on RealClimate.​

BTW as far as I can tell,Cowton has no Earth science experience, Way is a grad student in geography.​

They have experience in coloring maps ,but thats their only qualification.​

​

 

The latest IPCC AR5 summary for policy makers advocated exactly what Spencer is saying here, that natural variation is big enough to overwhelm ghg warming for short periods of time. They even pointed out that the 1998 temperature spike was like caused by ENSO. IPCC and Spenser both say there is no "pause" simply the effects of badly modeled natural variation like ENSO.

As to the idea that Spenser's ghg sensitivity figure is not plausable because of paleo data, that is simply false. The research simply says it is unlikely. IPCC put a 95% confidence ratio on a sensitivity between 1.5-4 in the latest summary, previously they had 2 as the lower limit of this ratio. Events such as ocean warming and ocean oscilations were not properly modeled in the 2, so they lowered it. Spencers's estimate is still in that 2.5% statistical tail of what the IPCC considers likely, but a 2.5% chance is definitely plausable.

Which gets us to the meat of the matter. It is good that spencer is giving us new methodology, as the old methodology was the source of Trenbleth's missing heat, or heartland's pause, neither of these are scientific. We need beter methodologies to model the oceans. MBH '98 added some new methodologies though, and after these were understood, rejected. Mann seemed to modify from the rejected ideas in mbh '98 (use tree rings but don't evaluate whether changes are due to carbon dioxide or temperature, claim PCA but do the math wrong to come out with a bad result, reject multi proxy). From the results we now better model tree rings, and are on the lookout for bat statistical math. This is progress from mistakes. Spencer's methodology and math may be as bad as Mann's so we should not accept the sensitivity without further confirmation or rejection, but we should not reject the work simply because real climate is pushing other failed methods for understanding the ocean's response to warming and ghg.

 

COI | Centre for Ocean and Ice | Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut
Heres charts going back to 1958 calculating Arctic temps.
No apparent warming for 45 years.This corresponds with the Baffin Island weather station graph @ #42 showing no increase in temp for 70 years.

 

I had the impression that you taught statistics in college, or some such. I must have gotten that wrong, based on this last one.

Because I have learned from this last posting that I am incorrect if I describe an estimate in the tail of the distribution as implausible. According to this last posting, estimates in the tail of the distribution are "plausable". Since the tails of the distribution cover .... well ... everything ... then ... logically ... everything is plausible. OK, if you say so.

I suggest that you are incorrect when say Spencer and the IPCC say the same thing. Many have pointed out the impact of the El Nino cycle on short term trends. But if you do the simple and obvious thing, which is estimate the underlying trend net of El Nino, solar cycle, and volcanic activity, you simply validate a plausible rate of warming right up to the present. As was done here: Global temperature evolution 1979–2010 - Abstract - Environmental Research Letters - IOPscience Clearly not Spencer's point. Spencer, by contrast, throws away the El Ninos ("invoke"), in order to assert that there has been little GHG-caused warming and hence low climate sensitivity. Using, needless to say, methods that nobody else uses, and a rudimentary model that nobody else uses. I'm pretty sure that's not what the scientific consensus of the IPCC report says on the topic.

On the bright side, at least this time, nobody implied that I'm a liar. So that's coming ahead, for this forum, compared to the last thread I posted in.

At this point, I've spent more time on this than I care to. I thought the original analysis that I cited was interesting and on-topic for this thread, because it reconciles Bob's point about extreme Arctic warming ,with a period of apparently slow global temperature increase. As noted in the RealClimate discussion, that work addressed a long-standing issue with the data in a reasonably clever way, and generated a re-estimate of recent trend that was within the 95% confidence interval of the prior estimate (and so, pardon the expression, was a plausible improvement on prior methods). Again as noted extensively on RealClimate, short term trends vary, and it doesn't do to make too much of them. Whether this bit of methodology it will stand the test of time, I certainly can't say. I just thought it very nicely tied in with what Bob was talking about, and had not yet been brought up. I certainly won't make the mistake of bringing it up again. What the relationship is between Spencer's latest reworking of his model, and anomalous arctic warmth, I'll leave that for those who believe Spencer is correct to explain. I couldn't say.

 

What I find intriguing about Spencers paper is that he explains the mechanism involved in causing El Nino warming.
El Nino affects cloud cover causing an increase solar radiation to be absorbed in the ocean.

 

Spencer low latitudes: "mechanism involved in causing El Nino warming" would include regional wind stresses that put oceanic heat back into the atmosphere, dontcha think? Otherwise we'd have to have some evidence that cloud cover was very unusual in 1998. I have not seen publications about that. Teach me.

Spencer high latitudes: This fellow is among the few who handle and interpret passive-microwave-sounding-satellite data. If he did this for high latitudes, it could provide perspective to interpret Cowtan and Ways' 'interesting' conclusions. To date he has not, and I don't know why that is.

I persist in rejecting the notion that he is trying to mislead his audience. Probably just too busy.