California normal

So much for the global-warming induced, permanent drought that had afflicted California. Population in California has doubled since 1979 but water resources infrastructure has not changed much. Ground water is being consumed and depleted at an increasing pace. Yet normal weather variations are taken to be man-made global warming.

California remains normal, but Californians …….

USNews: 

An index of precipitation at eight sensors showed that just under 90 inches of rain and snow have fallen this winter in the northern Sierra Nevada. The previous record of 88.5 inches was set in the winter of 1982-1983. The average for the region is 50 inches a year, according to the state Department of Water Resources.

The record was surpassed less than a week after Gov. Jerry Brown officially declared an end to California’s drought emergency — a largely symbolic pronouncement that left in place some water-conservation rules for the 40 million residents of the nation’s most populous state.

More snow and rain is likely to pad the record before the wet season ends.

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The power of the global warming religion

Roy Spencer says it:

Global warming theory is in fact so malleable that it predicts anything. More cold, less cold. More snow, less snow.

What a powerful theory.

And what’s even more amazing is that climate change can be averted by just increasing your taxes.

But what nobody ever reports on — because it would be boring — are the storms and severe weather events that haven’t happened. For example, U.S. tornado counts have been running below average, or even at record lows, in recent years.

Amazingly, the low tornado activity has been blamed on climate change. So, too, have actual tornado occurrences!

What a grand and gloriously useful theory global warming provides us.

……. 

Winters in the U.S. are notoriously variable. Typically, if it’s warm in the East, it’s cold in the West. This is exactly what has happened this winter, except for this brief reversal before winter’s end.

Normal people call it weather. More enlightened people, in contrast, call it climate change. Next winter it could be the opposite. No one knows.

Like death and taxes, though, what is certain is that anything “unusual” that happens will somehow be blamed on your SUV.

Too much rain, too little rain, drought, flood, storms cyclones, hurricanes and – for the true fanatics – even earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are somehow due to global warming (which of course means carbon dioxide emissions).

I find the European statements (and especially the Swedish government’s) about “climate goals” particularly arrogant and idiotic.

“The government’s goal is for Sweden to be a global role model in climate conversion”.

They really think that they can change the climate? From what to what? The arrogance is boundless.

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3rd great “mass extinction” was due to an ice age and not to global warming

A new paper addresses the drivers behind the 3rd great “mass extinction” around 250 million years ago. It finds that it was due to an ice age and not due to global warming as many have speculated.

Björn Baresel, Hugo Bucher, Borhan Bagherpour, Morgane Brosse, Kuang Guodun, Urs Schaltegger. Timing of global regression and microbial bloom linked with the Permian-Triassic boundary mass extinction: implications for driving mechanisms. Scientific Reports, 2017; 7: 43630 DOI: 10.1038/srep43630

Universite de Geneve Press Release:

The Earth has known several mass extinctions over the course of its history. One of the most important happened at the Permian-Triassic boundary 250 million years ago. Over 95% of marine species disappeared and, up until now, scientists have linked this extinction to a significant rise in Earth temperatures. But researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, working alongside the University of Zurich, discovered that this extinction took place during a short ice age which preceded the global climate warming. It’s the first time that the various stages of a mass extinction have been accurately understood and that scientists have been able to assess the major role played by volcanic explosions in these climate processes. This research, which can be read in Scientific Reports, completely calls into question the scientific theories regarding these phenomena, founded on the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, and paves the way for a new vision of the Earth’s climate history. 

Teams of researchers led by Professor Urs Schaltegger from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the Faculty of Science of the UNIGE and by Hugo Bucher, from the University of Zürich, have been working on absolute dating for many years. They work on determining the age of minerals in volcanic ash, which establishes a precise and detailed chronology of the earth’s climate evolution. They became interested in the Permian-Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago, during which one of the greatest mass extinctions ever took place, responsible for the loss of 95% of marine species. How did this happen? for how long marine biodiversity stayed at very low levels? 

Researchers worked on sediment layers in the Nanpanjiang basin in southern China. They have the particularity of being extremely well preserved, which allowed for an accurate study of the biodiversity and the climate history of the Permian and the Triassic. “We made several cross-sections of hundreds of metres of basin sediments and we determined the exact positions of ash beds contained in these marine sediments,” explained Björn Baresel, first author of the study. They then applied a precise dating technique based on natural radioactive decay of uranium, as Urs Schaltegger added: “In the sedimentary cross-sections, we found layers of volcanic ash containing the mineral zircon which incorporates uranium. It has the specificity of decaying into lead over time at a well-known speed. This is why, by measuring the concentrations of uranium and lead, it was possible for us to date a sediment layer to an accuracy of 35,000 years, which is already fairly precise for periods over 250 million years.”
Ice is responsible for mass extinction

By dating the various sediment layers, researchers realised that the mass extinction of the Permian-Triassic boundary is represented by a gap in sedimentation, which corresponds to a period when the sea-water level decreased. The only explanation to this phenomenon is that there was ice, which stored water, and that this ice age which lasted 80,000 years was sufficient to eliminate much of marine life. Scientists from the UNIGE explain the global temperature drop by a stratospheric injection of large amounts of sulphur dioxide reducing the intensity of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth. “We therefore have proof that the species disappeared during an ice age caused by the activity of the first volcanism in the Siberian Traps,” added Urs Schaltegger. This ice age was followed by the formation of limestone deposits through bacteria, marking the return of life on Earth at more moderate temperatures. The period of intense climate warming, related to the emplacement of large amounts of basalt of the Siberian Traps and which we previously thought was responsible for the extinction of marine species, in fact happened 500,000 years after the Permian-Triassic boundary.

This study therefore shows that climate warming is not the only explanation of global ecological disasters in the past on Earth: it is important to continue analysing ancient marine sediments to gain a deeper understanding of the earth’s climate system.

We now have more living species than ever before. The number of “garbage” species is very high and a new “mass extinction” (the sixth) is needed to clear out the rubbish. A Herculean task and hopefully humans will not be one of the “garbage” species. When it comes it is more likely to be due to a global cooling than a global warming.

There are thought to have been 5 great “mass extinctions” in the past. A “mass extinction” removes around 30 – 50% of extent species and can be seen as a self-correcting method for getting rid of the detritus remaining from failed evolution.

But I would argue instead that mass extinctions are necessary and unavoidable. They are necessitated by the ineffectiveness of the process of evolution itself. They provide the self-correction necessary to cope with the mass of “rubbish” species created by the hit-and-miss process of evolution. The external shock is only incidental and acts as the trigger for the extinction of the highly-stressed “rubbish” species. None of the historical mass extinctions ever posed any threat to the continuation of life. Instead they have served to muck out the dung from the evolutionary stables.

The fossil record shows that biodiversity in the world has been increasing dramatically for 200 million years and is likely to continue. The two mass extinctions in that period (at 201 million and 66 million years ago) slowed the trend only temporarily. Genera are the next taxonomic level up from species and are easier to detect in fossils. The Phanerozoic is the 540-million-year period in which animal life has proliferated. Chart created by and courtesy of University of Chicago paleontologists J. John Sepkoski, Jr. and David M. Raup.

The clue lies here:

Wikipedia: Although there are 10–14 million species of life currently on the Earth, more than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on the planet are estimated to be extinct.

Evolution fails in over 99% of its attempts to create species that can survive. The 1%  of species that do and have survived may seem to be perfectly tailored for the prevailing conditions but that is putting the cart before the horse. Evolution has no direction and does not seek excellence. It only throws up a plethora of species where just 1% of those species happen to suit the prevailing conditions. One round peg out of a 100 different shapes may happen to fit a round hole but the round peg itself was not designed to fit – it happened to be the only one of many which did. For every species which is just good enough to survive, evolution gives another 99 which are not. As a process it is a remarkably ineffective one. Humans are not the result of “intelligent design”. They are just the 1% of all the species created by evolution which happened to fit the round hole of the prevailing environment.

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Man-made contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is just 4.3%

This new paper finds that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has risen by 110 ppm since 1750, but of this the human contribution is just 17 ppm. With the concentration now at 400 ppm, the human contribution is just 4.3%. The results indicate that almost all of the observed change of CO2 during the Industrial Era comes, not from anthropogenic emissions, but from changes of natural emission.

The general assumption by IPCC and the global warming fraternity that natural carbon dioxide absorption and emissions are miraculously in balance and, therefore that man-made emissions are solely responsible for the increase in carbon dioxide concentration is deeply flawed (if not plain stupid).

Clearly this paper is not at all to the liking of the religious zealots of the “global warming brigade” and is causing much heartburn among the faithful.

Hermann Harde, Scrutinizing the carbon cycle and CO₂ residence time in the atmosphere, Global and Planetary Change, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2017.02.009

Highlights

•An alternative carbon cycle is presented in agreement with the carbon 14 decay.

•The CO₂ uptake rate scales proportional to the CO₂ concentration.

•Temperature dependent natural emission and absorption rates are considered.

•The average residence time of CO₂ in the atmosphere is found to be 4 years.

•Paleoclimatic CO₂ variations and the actual CO₂ growth rate are well-reproduced.

•The anthropogenic fraction of CO₂ in the atmosphere is only 4.3%.

•Human emissions only contribute 15% to the CO2 increase over the Industrial Era.

Abstract: Climate scientists presume that the carbon cycle has come out of balance due to the increasing anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change. This is made responsible for the rapidly increasing atmospheric CO₂ concentrations over recent years, and it is estimated that the removal of the additional emissions from the atmosphere will take a few hundred thousand years. Since this goes along with an increasing greenhouse effect and a further global warming, a better understanding of the carbon cycle is of great importance for all future climate change predictions. We have critically scrutinized this cycle and present an alternative concept, for which the uptake of CO₂ by natural sinks scales proportional with the CO₂ concentration. In addition, we consider temperature dependent natural emission and absorption rates, by which the paleoclimatic CO₂ variations and the actual CO₂ growth rate can well be explained. The anthropogenic contribution to the actual CO₂ concentration is found to be 4.3%, its fraction to the CO₂ increase over the Industrial Era is 15% and the average residence time 4 years.

Conclusions.

Climate scientists assume that a disturbed carbon cycle, which has come out of balance by the increasing anthropogenic emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change, is responsible for the rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations over recent years. While over the whole Holocene up to the entrance of the Industrial Era (1750) natural emissions by heterotrophic processes and fire were supposed to be in equilibrium with the uptake by photosynthesis and the net oceanatmosphere gas exchange, with the onset of the Industrial Era the IPCC estimates that about 15 – 40 % of the additional emissions cannot further be absorbed by the natural sinks and are accumulating in the atmosphere.

The IPCC further argues that CO2 emitted until 2100 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1000 years, and in the same context it is even mentioned that the removal of human-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere by natural processes will take a few hundred thousand years (high confidence) (see AR5-Chap.6-Executive-Summary).

Since the rising CO2 concentrations go along with an increasing greenhouse effect and, thus, a further global warming, a better understanding of the carbon cycle is a necessary prerequisite for all future climate change predictions. In their accounting schemes and models of the carbon cycle the IPCC uses many new and detailed data which are primarily focussing on fossil fuel emission, cement fabrication or net land use change (see AR5-WG1-Chap.6.3.2), but it largely neglects any changes of the natural emissions, which contribute to more than 95 % to the total emissions and by far cannot be assumed to be constant over longer periods (see, e.g.: variations over the last 800,000 years (Jouzel et al., 2007); the last glacial termination (Monnin et al., 2001); or the younger Holocene (Monnin et al., 2004; Wagner et al., 2004)).

Since our own estimates of the average CO2 residence time in the atmosphere differ by several orders of magnitude from the announced IPCC values, and on the other hand actual investigations of Humlum et al. (2013) or Salby (2013, 2016) show a strong relation between the natural CO2 emission rate and the surface temperature, this was motivation enough to scrutinize the IPCC accounting scheme in more detail and to contrast this to our own calculations.

Different to the IPCC we start with a rate equation for the emission and absorption processes, where the uptake is not assumed to be saturated but scales proportional with the actual CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (see also Essenhigh, 2009; Salby, 2016). This is justified by the observation of an exponential decay of 14C. A fractional saturation, as assumed by the IPCC, can directly be expressed by a larger residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere and makes a distinction between a turnover time and adjustment time needless. Based on this approach and as solution of the rate equation we derive a concentration at steady state, which is only determined by the product of the total emission rate and the residence time. Under present conditions the natural emissions contribute 373 ppm and anthropogenic emissions 17 ppm to the total concentration of 390 ppm (2012). For the average residence time we only find 4 years.

The stronger increase of the concentration over the Industrial Era up to present times can be explained by introducing a temperature dependent natural emission rate as well as a temperature affected residence time. With this approach not only the exponential increase with the onset of the Industrial Era but also the concentrations at glacial and cooler interglacial times can well be reproduced in full agreement with all observations. So, different to the IPCC’s interpretation the steep increase of the concentration since 1850 finds its natural explanation in the self accelerating processes on the one hand by stronger degassing of the oceans as well as a faster plant growth and decomposition, on the other hand by an increasing residence time at reduced solubility of CO2 in oceans.

Together this results in a dominating temperature controlled natural gain, which contributes about 85 % to the 110 ppm CO2 increase over the Industrial Era, whereas the actual anthropogenic emissions of 4.3 % only donate 15 %. These results indicate that almost all of the observed change of CO2 during the Industrial Era followed, not from anthropogenic emission, but from changes of natural emission.

The results are consistent with the observed lag of CO2 changes behind temperature changes (Humlum et al., 2013; Salby, 2013), a signature of cause and effect. Our analysis of the carbon cycle, which exclusively uses data for the CO2 concentrations and fluxes as published in AR5, shows that also a completely different interpretation of these data is possible, this in complete conformity with all observations and natural causalities. 

Carbon Cycle – Hermann Harde in Global and Planetary Change

I expect there will be a concerted effort by the faithful to try and debunk this (and it has already started).

But I am inclined to give credence to this work – and not merely because it is in general agreement with my own conclusions about the Carbon cycle. Back in 2013 I posted

Even though the combustion of fossil fuels only contributes less than 4% of total carbon dioxide production (about 26Gt/year of 800+GT/year), it is usually assumed that the sinks available balance the natural sources and that the carbon dioxide concentration – without the effects of man – would be largely in equilibrium.  (Why carbon dioxide concentration should not vary naturally escapes me!). It seems rather illogical to me to claim that sinks can somehow distinguish the source of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and preferentially choose to absorb natural emissions and reject anthropogenic emissions! Also, there is no sink where the absorption rate would not increase with concentration.

Carbon dioxide emission sources (GT CO2/year)

• Transpiration 440
• Release from oceans 330
• Fossil fuel combustion 26
• Changing land use 6
• Volcanoes and weathering 1

Carbon dioxide is accumulating in the atmosphere by about 15 GT CO2/ year. The accuracy of the amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by transpiration and by the oceans is no better than about 2 – 3% and that error band (+/- 20GT/year)  is itself almost as large as the total amount of emissions from fossil fuels.

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The faking of climate data before the Paris conference

The “global temperature” is calculated by dividing the world into a grid, determining the temperature applying to each grid element and then “calculating” (not a simple average) a “global temperature” to apply to the world. The problem is that there are actual measurements (raw data) for just about 20% of the grid elements. These 20% are then used to “fill in” temperatures for all the other grid elements. There are algorithms devised first for “correcting” the raw data, then there are those governing the manner in which the corrected data are to be combined to fill in empty grid elements, and further algorithms to be used when combining all the elements of the grid to give a single “global temperature”. The accuracy of the raw data is only about 0.1ºC while the “global temperature” is presented to 0.001ºC, and differences of the order of 0.001ºC are used to make conclusions for  “policy” decisions. Climategate 1 revealed how data has been cherry picked and fudged for the first time. The deception continues.

Dr John Bates (formerly of NOAA) is now blowing the whistle on how the NOAA has manipulated climate data:

John Bates received his Ph.D. in Meteorology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1986. Post Ph.D., he spent his entire career at NOAA, until his retirement in 2016.  He spent the last 14 years of his career at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (now NCEI) as a Principal Scientist, where he served as a Supervisory Meteorologist until 2012.

…….. NOAA Administrator’s Award 2004 for “outstanding administration and leadership in developing a new division to meet the challenges to NOAA in the area of climate applications related to remotely sensed data”. He was awarded a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records (CDRs). He has held elected positions at the American Geophysical Union (AGU), including Member of the AGU Council and Member of the AGU Board. He has played a leadership role in data management for the AGU.

He has a guest post at Judith Curry’s blog.

Climate scientists versus climate data

Posted on February 4, 2017 

by John Bates

A look behind the curtain at NOAA’s climate data center.

I read with great irony recently that scientists are “frantically copying U.S. Climate data, fearing it might vanish under Trump” (e.g., Washington Post 13 December 2016). As a climate scientist formerly responsible for NOAA’s climate archive, the most critical issue in archival of climate data is actually scientists who are unwilling to formally archive and document their data. I spent the last decade cajoling climate scientists to archive their data and fully document the datasets. I established a climate data records program that was awarded a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal in 2014 for visionary work in the acquisition, production, and preservation of climate data records (CDRs), which accurately describe the Earth’s changing environment.

The most serious example of a climate scientist not archiving or documenting a critical climate dataset was the study of Tom Karl et al. 2015 (hereafter referred to as the Karl study or K15), purporting to show no ‘hiatus’ in global warming in the 2000s (Federal scientists say there never was any global warming “pause”). The study drew criticism from other climate scientists, who disagreed with K15’s conclusion about the ‘hiatus.’ (Making sense of the early-2000s warming slowdown). The paper also drew the attention of the Chairman of the House Science Committee, Representative Lamar Smith, who questioned the timing of the report, which was issued just prior to the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan submission to the Paris Climate Conference in 2015.

In the following sections, I provide the details of how Mr. Karl failed to disclose critical information to NOAA, Science Magazine, and Chairman Smith regarding the datasets used in K15. I have extensive documentation that provides independent verification of the story below. I also provide my suggestions for how we might keep such a flagrant manipulation of scientific integrity guidelines and scientific publication standards from happening in the future. Finally, I provide some links to examples of what well documented CDRs look like that readers might contrast and compare with what Mr. Karl has provided.

Background …..

Read the whole post here.

Of course the mainstream, politically correct media have no time for this. However David Rose of the Mail on Sunday is one of the few reporters who still has the nerve to question the fanatic, religious orthodoxy on this subject.

Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data 

• The Mail on Sunday can reveal a landmark paper exaggerated global warming
• It was rushed through and timed to influence the Paris agreement on climate change
• America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration broke its own rules
• The report claimed the pause in global warming never existed, but it was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data

By David Rose for The Mail on Sunday

PUBLISHED: 22:57 GMT, 4 February 2017 | UPDATED: 01:05 GMT, 5 February 2017

The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.

A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.

The report claimed that the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in global warming in the period since 1998 – revealed by UN scientists in 2013 – never existed, and that world temperatures had been rising faster than scientists expected. Launched by NOAA with a public relations fanfare, it was splashed across the world’s media, and cited repeatedly by politicians and policy makers.

But the whistleblower, Dr John Bates, a top NOAA scientist with an impeccable reputation, has shown The Mail on Sunday irrefutable evidence that the paper was based on misleading, ‘unverified’ data.

It was never subjected to NOAA’s rigorous internal evaluation process – which Dr Bates devised.

His vehement objections to the publication of the faulty data were overridden by his NOAA superiors in what he describes as a ‘blatant attempt to intensify the impact’ of what became known as the Pausebuster paper. …….

NOAA data manipulation (from David Rose – Mail on Sunday)

There will be more whistle-blowers now stepping out from behind the woodwork.

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97% of “climate scientists” thought Trump couldn’t win

97% of the UK media thought Brexit would lose.

97% of US political pundits thought Trump couldn’t win.

97% of polling models had an inbuilt, politically correct, confirmation bias.

97% of the US media thought Clinton would trounce Trump.

97% of the politically correct think climate is science.

97% of AGW fanatics believe the sun does not drive climate but that man does.

97% of climate funding goes to the religiously correct.

97% of “climate science” is religious belief.

97% of climate models have an inbuilt, religiously correct, confirmation bias.

97% of “climate scientists” thought Trump would be trounced.

97% of “climate scientists” are charlatans.

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74 questions from the Trump transition team which are bothering the Department of Energy

Whatever one may think of Trump, his transition team’s questions for the Department of Energy are penetrating. They are causing some little worry among the adherents of the man-made global warming religion.

Willis Eschenbach has the list of questions and his comments over at WUWT.

Man-made climate change (actually the lack of such), vast grants to companies which go bankrupt in the night, jaunts to resorts for climate meetings, prolonging nuclear power …. are all apparently within the sights of the transition team.

The questions and Willis Eschenbach’s comments are reproduced below

Questions for DOE

This memo, as you might expect, is replete with acronyms. “DOE” is the Department of Energy. Here are the memo questions and my comments.

1. Can you provide a list of all boards, councils, commissions, working groups, and FACAs [Federal Advisory Committees] currently active at the Department? For each, can you please provide members, meeting schedules, and authority (statutory or otherwise) under which they were created? 

If I were at DOE, this first question would indeed set MY hair on fire. The easiest way to get rid of something is to show that it was not properly established … boom, it’s gone. As a businessman myself, this question shows me that the incoming people know their business, and that the first order of business is to jettison the useless lumber.

Reading University shows Antarctic ice increased over last 3 decades and is largely unchanged over 100 years

You cannot have “global” warming which applies differently to different parts of the globe. If man-made CO2 is having any significant effect on “global” temperature it must be an effect that is visible in both the Arctic and the Antarctic. Even if all the Arctic ice melts but the Antarctic ice does not then “global” warming is clearly not “global”.

A new study by Reading University shows that Antarctic ice is largely unchanged over 100 years and increasing over the last 3 decades. The man-made “global” warming theory is just not possible with these results.

Research article

21 Nov 2016

Estimating the extent of Antarctic summer sea ice during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration

Tom Edinburgh^1,a and Jonathan J. Day¹¹Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, Reading, UK
^acurrently at: Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Received: 13 Apr 2016 – Published in The Cryosphere Discuss.: 29 Apr 2016
Revised: 11 Sep 2016 – Accepted: 18 Sep 2016 – Published: 21 Nov 2016

Abstract. In stark contrast to the sharp decline in Arctic sea ice, there has been a steady increase in ice extent around Antarctica during the last three decades, especially in the Weddell and Ross seas. In general, climate models do not to capture this trend and a lack of information about sea ice coverage in the pre-satellite period limits our ability to quantify the sensitivity of sea ice to climate change and robustly validate climate models. However, evidence of the presence and nature of sea ice was often recorded during early Antarctic exploration, though these sources have not previously been explored or exploited until now. We have analysed observations of the summer sea ice edge from the ship logbooks of explorers such as Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and their contemporaries during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration(1897–1917), and in this study we compare these to satellite observations from the period 1989–2014, offering insight into the ice conditions of this period, from direct observations, for the first time. This comparison shows that the summer sea ice edge was between 1.0 and 1.7° further north in the Weddell Sea during this period but that ice conditions were surprisingly comparable to the present day in other sectors.

Citation: Edinburgh, T. and Day, J. J.: Estimating the extent of Antarctic summer sea ice during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, The Cryosphere, 10, 2721-2730, doi:10.5194/tc-10-2721-2016, 2016.

Eurekalert writes:

Ice observations recorded in the ships’ logbooks of explorers such as the British Captain Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton and the German Erich von Drygalski have been used to compare where the Antarctic ice edge was during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration (1897-1917) and where satellites show it is today.

The study, published in the European Geosciences Union journal The Cryosphere, suggests Antarctic sea ice is much less sensitive to the effects of climate change than that of the Arctic, which in stark contrast has experienced a dramatic decline during the 20th century. ……

……. Jonathan Day, who led the study, said: “The missions of Scott and Shackleton are remembered in history as heroic failures, yet the data collected by these and other explorers could profoundly change the way we view the ebb and flow of Antarctic sea ice.

“We know that sea ice in the Antarctic has increased slightly over the past 30 years, since satellite observations began. Scientists have been grappling to understand this trend in the context of global warming, but these new findings suggest it may not be anything new.

“If ice levels were as low a century ago as estimated in this research, then a similar increase may have occurred between then and the middle of the century, when previous studies suggest ice levels were far higher.”

The new study published in The Cryosphere is the first to shed light on sea ice extent in the period prior to the 1930s, and suggests the levels in the early 1900s were in fact similar to today, at between 5.3 and 7.4 million square kilometres. Although one region, the Weddell Sea, did have a significantly larger ice cover.

Published estimates suggest Antarctic sea ice extent was significantly higher during the 1950s, before a steep decline returned it to around 6 million square kilometres in recent decades.

The research suggests that the climate of Antarctica may have fluctuated significantly throughout the 20th century, swinging between decades of high ice cover and decades of low ice cover, rather than enduring a steady downward trend.

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“Adjusting” temperatures is a political exercise in a politicised “science”

To pretend that politicised science does not exist is to be naive. To state as a religious conviction that man-made CO2 is causing global warming is little different to the religiously expressed beliefs by politically correct media that Brexit would not happen or that Trump could not win. Climate “scientists” and their gullible followers need to remember that all beliefs can only exist in the space of ignorance.

I dislike algorithms for “calculating” an artificial “global temperature” by “adjusting” and “weighting” raw data to suit pre-conceived notions of what final result should be. It gets worse when the “adjustments” about past temperatures are variable and are themselves “adjusted” every year. The reports about every year being hotter than the last are actually just a statement that “adjustments” every year are greater than the last.

I reproduce Tony Heller’s post about the US temperatures in realclimatescience:

NOAA Adjustments Correlate Exactly To Their Confirmation Bias

Posted on November 21, 2016 by tonyheller

Thermometers show the US cooling since about 1920, but NOAA massively cools the past to create the appearance of a warming trend.

These adjustments make a spectacular hockey stick of data tampering.

When plotted against atmospheric CO2, the correlation is almost perfect.  NOAA is tampering with the data exactly to match their theory.

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Highest level of November snow in Stockholm for 111 years

Dagens Nyheter is one of the most “politically correct” newspapers in Sweden. It believes – not in mono-cultural, multi-ethnicity (which works) – but in fractured multi-culturalist societies (which don’t). It believes people should get what they desire and not what they deserve.

And it believes in the religion of global warming being due to man-made emissions of carbon dioxide.

No doubt the record snowfall in Stockholm will also prove “global warming”.

snow in Stockholm 9th November 2016 — photo TT (via DN)

Dagens Nyheter: 

The worst snowfalls in Stockholm in 111 years.
It has not snowed in Stockholm this early in the winter since SMHI statistics started in 1905.

“It’s about record levels, which, on Thursday morning, will be  official”, says Stina Kihlgren, meteorologist at SMHI. A formal measurement of snow depth is made only once a day in Stockholm, 07:00 each morning at the Observatory. When Stockholm woke up on Wednesday ,SMHI measured 21 centimeters of snow. At midday there was an unofficial listing that showed 30 centimeters. “And then the snow continued to fall. It has been between 30 and 40 centimeters in total. The probability is very high that there will be a new record”, says Stina Kihlgren.

She refers to the measured snow depth in Stockholm in November, where the previous peak was in 1985 at 29 centimeters. “The snow has fallen for several days, it has been very intense.” 

But not to worry. As global temperature numbers continue to be fiddled with new algorithms every year, the snow will, no doubt, disappear.

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