Real Science

After a hot summer, Bjorn Lomborg changes his mind and wants to spend $100 billion dollars to appease the global warming gods.

‘Sceptical environmentalist’ and critic of climate scientists to declare global warming a chief concern facing world”

The world’s most high-profile climate change sceptic is to declare that global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today” and “a challenge humanity must confront”, in an apparent U-turn that will give a huge boost to the embattled environmental lobby.

Full story at The Guardian

The video below shows current ice (thin red line) my June forecast (dashed line) and NSIDC’s forecast summer minimum (red horizontal line.)  Who do you think is going to be closest?

DMI shows ice extent almost unchanged over the last week.

Temperatures are forecast to be below freezing over the ice for the next two weeks

http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/YearTDeptUS.png

We keep hearing about 2010 being the hottest year ever.  Objective and unbiased scientists are rushing this incorrect information to press before La Niña spoils their party, and before the ruling party gets tossed out of Congress.

So how are things looking in the US? Despite a very strong El Niño, 62% of the US has had below normal temperatures for the year through July. To make things clearer, I split the lower 48 up into above and below normal regions.

To be precise, there are 86725 pixels below normal, and 53336 pixels above normal. As La Niña takes hold, we should see the percentage below normal increase.

Philadelphia finished July with an average temperature of 80F. That is one degree cooler than the years 1793 and 1838, and tied July 1791, 1798, 1822, 1825, 1828, and 1830. July was almost as hot as it was 217 years ago, when CO2 was at 290 ppm.

62% of the country was below normal during the non-hottest (half) year ever. Remember that Obama won a “landslide” with only 52% of the vote. Or did he? The map below shows the 2008 election by county.

Counted by area, Obama won only 28% of the US in 2008. How will he do in 2012 after bypassing the US Constitution to force CO2 regulation on an unwilling populace, during a recession with 10% unemployment?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond.

The Prince of Wales says he believes he has been placed on Earth as future King ‘for a purpose’ – to save the world.

According to DMI, July was probably the coldest on record north of 80N.

Daily mean temperatures for the Arctic area north of the 80th northern parallel, plotted with daily climate values calculated from the period 1958-2002.

JAXA showed that July had the slowest Arctic ice melt on record.

Webcams and buoy data show us that this “summer” has been frigid near the north pole.

http://psc.apl.washington.edu/northpole/webphotos/noaa2.jpg

NSIDC reported that July had “cool, stormy weather” in the Arctic.

GISS is undaunted by these facts, and has released their July maps showing most of the region north of 80N above the 1958-2002 mean.

GISS July 1200 km smoothing

How did they accomplish this feat? But having little or no data north of 80N.GISS has algorithms to make up extrapolate data across vast distances with no data. In the image below, the black areas represent “missing data”

GISS July 250 km smoothing

GISS also shows all of Greenland as above normal for July, while NOAA anomaly maps show the Greenland Ice Sheet far below normal.

Once again, GISS has little or no data on the ice sheet.

Dr. Hansen (far and away the most highly respected climatologist in the world) at GISS wrote this earlier in the year:

the 12-month running mean global temperature in the GISS analysis has reached a new record in 2010…. GISS analysis yields 2005 as the warmest calendar year, while the HadCRUT analysis has 1998 as the warmest year. The main factor is our inclusion of estimated temperature change for the Arctic region.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20100601_TemperaturePaper.pdf

Conclusion : GISS has determined that 2010 is the hottest year on record, based on their belief that the Arctic has experienced anomalously warm Arctic temperatures. All available data from other sources shows us that July was anomalously cold in the Arctic.

GISS Arctic temperatures are incorrect, and as a result their global temperature rankings are highly suspect.

Louise Gray reports in The Telegraph :

Professor Andrew Watson, a climatologist at the University of East Anglia, which was at the centre of last year’s ‘climategate’ scandal, said the extreme events are “fairly consistent with the IPCC reports and what 99 per cent of the scientists believe to be happening“.

I found that 99% number interesting, given that 31,000 scientists signed the “Global Warming Petition” – which states :

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that every skeptical scientist signed that petition. In order to meet Dr. Watson’s 99% number, the other 3,069,000 scientists must all believe that global warming dooms the planet.

East Anglia climatology is known for it’s open and thorough research, and I am sure this is no exception.

Earlier in the month, a chunk of ice broke off the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland. The press of course ran with the story as proof of Global Warming, as Anthony forecast they would.

European Space Agency Animation

So what really happened there? The video below shows movement during the last month.

During periods of time when there is no sea ice abutting the glacier terminus, the glacier is exposed to waves. The waves rock the end of the glacier and produce stresses on the ice, which cause it to crack. The cracks can be clearly seen in the ESA image ahead of separation from the glacier.

Then southerly winds pulled the ice lose and moved it towards the north. You can see in the YouTube video above how the glacial and sea ice (to the north) are continuously being blown around by the wind. The ice island is stuck in the strait and rocking back and forth in the wind.

Similar events happen in the Antarctic and are also immediately blamed on Global Warming.

WHEN it comes to Antarctica’s disintegrating ice shelves, climate change often gets fingered as the cause. But it turns out global warming was not the only culprit behind the continent’s biggest ice break-up in recent years.

The 3200-square-kilometre Larsen B ice shelf broke apart between January and March 2002 following a series of warm summers, and after melt ponds had formed on the ice shelf. The abruptness of the break-up led many scientists to lay the blame squarely on climate change. “But the picture is much more complicated,” says Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University in the UK.

When Glasser and Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado at Boulder – who has been tracking the increased movement of glaciers near the erstwhile Larsen B – reviewed satellite images from 1987 onwards, they saw giant rifts and crevasses created by long-term glaciological processes. These alone could not have caused the break-up, but probably came into play once a warming climate had thinned the ice (Journal of Glaciology, vol 54, p 3).

The Petermann ice island is 625 feet thick. Not likely that “thinning” had much to do with it breaking off.

NPR reports incorrectly (of course) on the chunk of ice :

August 13, 2010 The ice island is now drifting south through the Nares Strait between Greenland and Canada. Experts aren’t sure whether it will make it all the way to the Atlantic and what damage it might cause on its way.

The ice island is stuck in the channel and has not made it to the Nares Strait, which is now choked with ice.

Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service discovered the ice island. This is what he had to say :

On the northwest coast there is a glacier, Petermann Glacier, which is known for calving off large tabular icebergs or ice islands. We’ve been monitoring this glacier for a while expecting a large piece to fall off, and on August 5 a large section actually did break off – much larger than we actually anticipated. It was about 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) long and 10 kilometers wide…..Calving of ice islands is indeed quite average. I think what’s special about this instance is just that it’s so much bigger than any other one that’s calved. The last large one of this size was back in the ’60s. So I think it’s just the sheer size of this ice island which has everyone so excited – and perhaps also that it’s all in one enormous piece.

Conclusion : There is little or no evidence  that “global warming” had anything to do with this event, but the press has done their damage by misinforming the public once again.

“Even a big piece like this over 50 years is not that significant.  It’s just the normal rate,” he said. Muenchow warns people not to jump to conclusions. “An event like this, this specific event, all flags go immediately up, ‘Oh, let’s explain this by global warming.’ I cannot support that,” he said.

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“All the global warming hysteria that is fit to print”

As part of Hansen’s “hottest year in history,” there is heavy summer snow forecast for the Alps over the next three days.

http://www.snow-forecast.com/maps/static/europe/next3days/snow

Meanwhile, Australia, New Zealand and Argentina also enjoy heavy snow – as their special way to celebrate the world’s hottest year.

http://www.snow-forecast.com/pages/twitter

It must be that new kind of hot snow, caused by too much CO2.

Following the record minimum in 2007, experts began a fun process of trying to outdo each other with their “ice-free Arctic” forecasts. I am going to explain here why they have it backwards.

Dr. Olav Orheim, the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat, remarked in 2008 :

“If Norway’s average temperature this year equals that in 2007, the ice cap in the Arctic will all melt away (in 2008), which is highly possible judging from current conditions”

Professor Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School forecast an ice free Arctic by the year 2013.

“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007..  So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”

Dr. David Barber from the University of Manitoba has forecast an ice free summer by the year 2015.

“Things are happening much faster in the Arctic. I think it will be summer ice-free by 2015,”

These forecasts are ridiculous, but they are worse than it seems.

The 2007 record minimum was caused by southerly winds, which compacted the ice at higher latitudes and melted it at lower latitudes. The PIPS2 video below shows the thickening of the ice as the summer progressed.

A good analogy is shoveling the snow in your driveway. You decrease the area, while increasing the thickness. The last place the snow melts in your yard is the pile of snow next to the driveway. Same thing in the parking lot at the mall. The graph below shows the relative thicknesses of the ice over the last five years. In September, 2007 (during the record minimum extent) ice thickness was at a maximum.

Now consider the geographic location of the ice. The thick ice was at high latitudes near Canada and Greenland, where temperatures are coldest and the melt season is the shortest. In summary, the ice was piling up thicker in the locations where it is also least likely to melt.

In order to have a ice-free Arctic, we would have to see the opposite pattern occur – i.e. the ice would have to spread to lower latitudes and thin.

Forget about seeing an ice-free Arctic. It isn’t going to happen any time soon.

Everyone in the hurricane forecast business predicted a big season this year. NOAA reaffirmed their position this week, as reported on WUWT.

One of the main reasons cited for the forecasts was “record high Atlantic SSTs.” So let’s look at the SST anomalies in the region between the Cape Verde Islands and the US. That is the normal hurricane formation track.

SSTs have plummeted and are now not much above normal. Compare SST anomalies vs those in late May. The hurricane breeding ground has not kept it’s unusual warmth.

Has this affected hurricane formation? Circumstantial evidence says yes. Hurricane numbers are average , and ACE is well below average.

http://www.weatherstreet.com/hurricane/2010/named-storms-climatology.gif

What do readers think?

• There will be big increase in the number of hurricanes over the next three weeks
• Another slow year
• 2010 forecasts were spot on
• A record high year
• NOAA does not understand understands and predicts changes in the Earth’s environment, from the depths of the oceans to surface of the sun
• NOAA sees the world through red colored glasses

A popular theory explaining the cold, snowy weather this winter has been that it is being driven by “excess heat due to global warming.” Intuitively this makes no sense, and it doesn’t scientifically either.

If excess heat produced cold fronts and snow, we would see frontal movement occur primarily during the warmer months. Yet summer weather tends to be more stable, despite the larger amounts of energy in the system. Storms are the result of differences in energy, not absolute energy. If the entire planet was 100 degrees all the time, there would be very few, if any, storms.

Heat flows between temperature differences. It will flow from a warm object to a cold one. It will not flow from a warm object to another equally warm one. For example, if the tropics are warm in the summer and the Poles are cold, nature tries to balance it by creating hurricanes which move heat from the Tropics towards the Poles. This generally only happens in the summer/fall because there isn’t enough total energy available in the winter.

Tornadoes are similarly driven by differences in temperature. The spring of 2008 was one of the worst tornado seasons in US history, and it was typified by cold weather. Note that severe tornadoes have generally declined as the climate has warmed, and they were most frequent during the ice age scare of the 1970s.

http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/tornado/tornadotrend.jpg

Snow falls when cold air bumps into warmer moist air. Mountainous regions see more snowfall at higher elevations where the temperature is lower. Below is a chart showing monthly distribution of snow at the fifty snowiest sites in Colorado. Note that these sites are at high elevation (i.e. cold) and that the bulk of the snow falls during the coldest months.

It is true that the interior of Antarctica sees very little snow. This is due to the very low absolute humidities at minus sixty degrees, which make it nearly impossible to precipitate snow.

Wind blows between areas of high pressure and low pressure. If the entire planet was at very high (but equal) pressure there would be no wind. High pressure systems are typified by calm air. Hurricanes have very low pressure.

Now lets look at some other analogies. Two cars travelling at the nearly the same high speed in the same direction will not generate a lot of damage in a collision. A car travelling at high speed bumping into a parked car will release a lot of energy. It is the energy difference that is important.

A rock sitting on top of a high plateau has a large amount of potential energy, but no way to release it. A rock sitting on the edge of a cliff can release it’s energy by falling to a region of lower potential energy below it. It is the difference in energy that is important.

If you connect two batteries together positive to positive, and negative to negative, no energy flows. If you connect opposite polarities, energy flows quickly in the short circuit. Once again, it is the difference in energy that is important.

The point is that the snow in Florida, Washington D.C, Rome, etc. is being driven by unusually cold air which is colliding with warmer moist air. It is the difference in energy which creates the snow, not the absolute energy in the system. In order for snow to fall, it has to be cold.