“Study: Melting sea ice major cause of warming in Arctic“. Anthony Watts tries to distract from a Nature climate paper [update: PDF here.] by muttering about transient temperature recording errors that never actually enter the climate data.
Dr. James Screen of the University of Melbourne reports that Arctic climate change is driven more by declining sea ice than by warmer air circulating up from lower latitudes.
Sea ice 2007 minimum. NASA
Graham comes to his senses, dumps support for climate bill, “Lurch” in a lurch. A Republican politician, South Carolina’s Senator Graham, withdraws his support for an energy bill because he doesn’t like an immigration bill. Clearly, the problem was with the energy bill and Sen. Graham as “come to his senses”.
Oh, wait. The Washington Post article actually says that Sen. Graham felt that “only a focused effort on a climate and energy bill could ensure its passage.“
Kind of the opposite of Anthony’s headline.
Anthony’s commenters aren’t fooled though, they know that Sen. Graham is a despised “Democrat in Republican clothing.”
“Dial “M” for mangled – Wikipedia and Environment Canada caught with temperature data errors.” Anthony Watts finds another report of cherry-picked errors in raw airport temperature data again, this time by “Ecotretas” about the Canadian High Arctic community of Eureka, Nunavut. Darn those human beings and their inconsistent data entry! Or those malfunctioning gadgets! Or maybe those trucks running right beside the thermometer! Or something.
These kinds of data quality errors are corrected before being used in climate modeling. Hence irrelevant to the Global Warming debate. Anthony almost figures it out here (italics mine):
[Here is where it really gets strange, I’ve added two screencaps from Environment Canada, on for the monthly data, another for the daily data from July 14th, 2009. They don’t match! The 20.9C value never appears in the July 14th hourly data. Click images below to enlarge, EC’s July 2009 Monthly report on the left, July 14th, 2009 daily/hourly data on the right. Perhaps EC corrected the error in the daily/hourly data, but missed the monthly? – Anthony]
Also, as a geologist and a Canadian, I always laugh when people like Anthony get confused by map projections. According to him the Eureka airport data is “responsible for the very big stripe on the very top of Canada.” Um, no. It looks that way because the Earth is being represented using the cylindrical Mercator projection method, which distorts (magnifies) polar regions.
“Mann 2008 a Victim of Sudden Oak Death?” Anthony Watts is eager to join the new round of uninformed nit-picking over tree ring chronologies. He posts some comments from Canadian sourpuss Steve McIntyre on the subject, quote-mining various news reports. Otherwise, his contribution is a Star Trek and Peanuts graphic and a link to a whack-a-mole copy of the Dr. Mann “spoof” video.
Dr. Mike Baillie of Queen’s University in Belfast has stated that the oak tree ring data he is being forced to release is not useful for temperature proxies, but the infamous Dr. Mann uses some oak ring data in his hated “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction. This clearly proves that the “hockey stick” is a lie! Or something. If you ignore all the other data.
Wait, do Anthony or McIntyre have any idea why Dr. Mann included this data in his reconstruction? Um, no. Doesn’t seem to stop them from complaining though, does it?
“Airlines Blame Flawed Computer Modelling For Up To $1.7 Billion Loss“. Anthony Watts rounds up some like-minded comments about the impact of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption. Apparently gubmints are ruining everything and computer models are all flawed.
The IATA, a lobby group for the airline industry, would have preferred to roll the dice and keep flying through the ash clouds from the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland. The astroturf Global Warming Policy Foundation says ‘right on, them gubmits can’t tell us what to do!’
The GWFP is actually just co-opting this topic to declare that they want “to bring reason, integrity and balance to a climate debate that has become seriously unbalanced, irrationally alarmist, and all too often depressingly intolerant”. We have to “balance between risk and reward“, in this instance, the airline’s profits versus their passenger’s lives. Just like coal and oil company profits have to be ‘balanced’.
The dangers of flying through an ash cloud. Source: BBC News.
What’s happening in the air? The criticized Numerical Atmospheric-dispersion Modelling Environment (NAME) has been updated with new safety thresholds based on better detection and risk assessments. Commercial flight has resumed with much smaller “no-fly” zones.
Denialists are trying to paint this as another example of a computer modeling failure, but the system, which accurately modeled the ash dispersion, has simply been updated with better risk analysis.
“Royal Ash: Royal society jumps on magma driven worry express“. Anthony Watts posts more idiocy from Steven Goddard, this time referencing dumb Hollywood disaster flicks to mischaracterize a collection of papers about geological responses (mainly seismic) to climate change. Steven seems to suggest that, over the weekend, the Royal Society whipped up a series of papers from the 2009 conference on Climate forcing of geological and geomorphological hazards (read the preface here) to capitalize on concern over the Icelandic eruptions. However it’s the denialists who specialize in insta-bunk.
Here’s one of the ‘outrageous’ statements in the Daily Telegraph (ugh) article that he links to:
And he warned: ”The rise you may need may be much smaller than we expect. Looking ahead at climate change, we may not need massive changes.
”One of the worries is that tiny environmental changes could have these effects.”
Earth (so to speak) to Steve and Anthony: the planet is in many ways quite delicately balanced. Some small changes can trigger large geologic events. That’s the gist of the Royal Society’s papers. Please don’t substitute your arrogance for rational thought processes.
Reply to: “Ice cap thaw may awaken Icelandic volcanoes” Steven Goddard tugs on his alleged “volcano researcher and igneous petrologist” hat to declare that melting Icelandic ice caps will actually make the volcanoes less dangerous. Of course it’s always easier to nit-pick over a magazine article than it is to do the same to the scientific paper it is based on.
Steven discusses the melting point of basaltic minerals (failing to recognize that Icelandic magma also contains the more explosive rhyolitic minerals) and estimates that losing 500m of ice would only lower the magma melting point by about 0.5°C. Then he wanders off into an irrelevant discussion of ash and steam. With less ice/water around there would less volcanic plume and more bubbling, so Global Warming would be good! Like most denialist arguments, this is both inconsequential and irrelevant.
As it turns out, in Iceland the magma is rising at roughly 5 cm/yr and the glacial mass loss equates to removing 5 cm/yr of rock. Thus the effective rate of magma ascent has doubled due to de-glaciation. Doesn’t seem inconsequential to me…
Nice try, Steven. But I’m glad to see you didn’t miss the chance to make a snide allusion to Al Gore’s recent misstatement about the temperature of the earth’s core. Snap!
“Where’s the Climate Beef?” Willis Eschenbach decides he can disprove Global Warming by talking about just the USA. And the WUWT commenters are gobbling it up.
I don’t think anything further needs to be said…
“IPCC AR4 also gets a failing grade on 21 chapters“. Anthony Watts wants you to know that Donna Laframboise (blogger) and a team of denialist “citizen auditors” have performed a grade school (literally) evaluation of the IPCC’s 2007 Assessment Report’s (“AR4”) references. The report, which Donna refers to as “the United Nations’ Nobel-winning climate bible“, gets an “F” for 21 of the 44 chapters, based on their personal assessment of the references.
“We’ve been told it’s 100 percent peer-reviewed science.” Um, no you haven’t. And the bulk of the claimed low-quality references are in the “Impacts” and “Mitigation” sections, not in the far more important “Climate Science” section.
Nothing is said about the physical science or historical evidence, of course. Funny how often “citizen” gets used as a descriptive badge among denialists.
Anthony finishes optimistically: people are beginning to laugh at the “robustness” oft touted in climate science. You’d better unplug your iPod, Anthony…
Oh Donna, you get an “F” too.
“Pilgrimage to Montana“. Steven Goddard takes on the glacial retreat at Glacier National Park. It’s all natural, of course.
Now that Arctic ice area is normal , Antarctic ice area is normal , sea level rise is failing to accelerate , temperatures are below all of Hansen’s scenarios , and the IPCC has proven itself to be untrustworthy – where can the CAGW religion go? Simple … Montana!
Steven tells us that the glaciers in Glacier National Park started declining before there were SUVs. How could that be? Also, its snowy in Glacier National Park right now (early April).
Now it’s a fact that most Montana glaciers reached their recent maximums about 150 years ago and have been in retreat since but what has the recent trend been? Steven of course doesn’t tell us, but try this quote:
As recently as 1975, many North Cascade glaciers were advancing due to cooler/wet weather during the 1944-1976 period. However, by 1987, all North Cascade glaciers were retreating. However, since 1976 these glaciers have receded rapidly. Between 1984 and 2007, they have lost an average more than 12 m in thickness and 20 to 40% of their volume.[10].
I also love how Steven tries to manipulate charts. On two charts, of Montana summer temperature and winter precipitation, he slaps a big horizontal line (the “average”) to help people miss inconvenient statistical trends. Thus “proving” that there has been no local climate change that could be linked to the glacial retreats.
Wott's Up With That? 