NASA Finally Agrees that Antarctic Ice has Long been Increasing

A NASA paper published in the Journal of Glaciology found that Antarctic ice has long been increasing in agreement with many other studies, but in disagreement with the UN IPCC report of 2013.  Its main conclusions are:

• The Antarctic ice sheet had net gains in ice of 112 billion tons per year from 1992 to 2001.
• Antarctic ice from 2003 to 2008 had a net gain of 82 billion tons per year.
• Extra snowfall in East Antarctica began about 10,000 years ago as the Earth warmed after the last Ice Age and this snowfall thickened the East Antarctic and the interior regions of the West Antarctic by 1.7 cm/year.  This accumulation over vast expanses more than offsets the melting of ice on the West Antarctic peninsula which gets so much publicity.
• The increased ice in Antarctica is now acting to reduce sea levels by 0.23 mm/year.

One of the more interesting observations on this data is that the global warming due to the end of the last Ice Age caused more snowfall in Antarctica, which serves to counterbalance the rise in sea level due to the thermal expansion of water in a warmer world.  This is one of many ways in which the Earth moderates climate changes.

The findings of this study were the result of more accurate measurements of the small thickening of the ice in most of Antarctica from satellite measurements, with the exception of the ice core investigations by others that indicated the increase in snowfall beginning 10,000 years ago.  It would not be surprising if the application of these satellite analysis methods to Greenland were to find that previous claims of large ice losses there were also wrong.  It is easy to observe large glaciers calving into the ocean while missing the slow increases of ice thickness over much larger areas.

Earth Surface Cooled from 1982 to 2006 According to Satellite Data

As is now generally known, there has been no warming of the Earth's surface since 1998 at least.  Prior to that time, we were informed that there had been a rapid warming of the Earth's surface and that it was caused by increasing CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere due to man using fossil fuels.  The 2007 IPCC 4th Report still insisted that for 25 years the Earth had been warming.  A newly published study using satellite temperature sensing specifically for detecting the Earth's surface temperature and minimizing that of the atmosphere above the surface, shows that the Earth's surface, contrary to reports, actually cooled from 1982 to 2006!

The paper is entitled Meteosat Derived Planetary Temperature Trend 1982-2006 by Andries Rosema, Steven Foppes, and Joost van der Woerd and was published in Energy & Environment, Vol. 24, No. 3 & 4 2013.  They were very surprised to find the cooling trend they reported.

Earlier satellite data analyses, originated by investigators at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, used microwave sensors to infer the temperature from microwave emissions from oxygen molecules.  Microwaves of different energies originated from various layers of the atmosphere.  One set of data originated from an altitude of about 17 km.  Another at an altitude of about 3 - 4 km.  Then by looking at data taken at oblique angles of incidence, they inferred a temperature from an altitude of about 0.8 km.  However, none of this data actually the Earth's surface temperature.  Initially, this data on the lower atmosphere had shown a small cooling effect, but after many corrections were applied, the data yielded an increase of temperature of about 0.1 C/decade in the troposphere.  The troposphere is the bottom about 10 to 11 km of the atmosphere and its temperature is not at all necessarily in direct proportion to the surface temperature.  Indeed, increased cloud cover, water vapor, and CO2 in the atmosphere may cause an increase in the troposphere temperature even as it cools the surface temperature.

The Rosema, Foppes, and van der Woerd study used the infra-red radiation at 10.5 to 12.5 micrometers wavelength to directly measure the surface temperature of the Earth.  The copy of the paper incorrectly says mm instead of micrometers.  This infra-red radiation is in the mid-infra-red part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but close to the beginning of the far infra-red.  The atmosphere is highly transparent at these wavelengths, provided there are no clouds.  There is a minor effect due to water, but none due to CO2.  The minor water absorption does add a small temperature component from the lower atmosphere to the larger component directly from the Earth's surface.  This is nonetheless a huge improvement over the oxygen emission microwave emissions which have no surface component at all.  The effects of clouds were filtered out of the data.  The daily planetary temperature was approximated as the average of noon and midnight temperatures.

Such satellite measurements are critically important.  The land surface temperature record is highly contaminated by urban heat island effects and by the bad sites chosen for weather station measurements.  Very mysterious and undocumented changes to the raw data have been made to various time period sets of data.  See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here, for instance.  The authors of this study note that 10% of their own country, the Netherlands, is now hardened surface.  Changes to ground cover, vegetation, or water surface coverage do have local effects on the surface temperature.

Indeed, they point to data for the area of the confluence of the Euphrat and Tigris Rivers in SE Iraq which showed a sudden warming when Saddam Hussein drained the extensive marshes there.  With less water in this warm area, less evaporative cooling occurred and water vapor absorbed less incoming solar insolation up in the atmosphere, so the average temperature increased.  They found another small area with warming in NW Tanzania.  There, they believe that major mining increases led to a decrease in vegetation and then a reduction in evapotranspiration.  The loss of that cooling caused surface temperatures to increase.  They also noted a cooling effect near Lake Chad and Lake Nasser in their data which they attribute to the growing size of those lakes.

From 1982 to 2006, an ocean location west of France showed a temperature decrease of 0.78 C/decade.  A location west of Senegal in the Atlantic showed a temperature decrease of 0.48 C/decade, which is less a decrease because of ocean upwelling in this area.  More generally, they report that the Atlantic Ocean, Africa, and Europe show a negative surface temperature trend from zero to 2 C/decade.  They observed that the greatest temperature decreases were in regions with greater cloud cover.  In particular, the temperature decrease over desert areas was smaller.

Increased cloud cover is correlated with increased humidity of the air.  More water vapor and more clouds both result in a lower surface temperature.  While it is harder to separate out the effect of CO2 from the overwhelming effects of water vapor, increased atmospheric CO2 probably will also increase the cooling of the surface, as I have argued.  In any case, the IPCC claim that a small surface temperature increase due to added CO2 will cause a much larger temperature increase due to more water vapor, is absolutely and clearly nonsense.

Satellite Temperature Record Now Unreliable

I have written many posts that our ground surface temperature record based on the collapsing network of weather stations around the world, is biased upward with the urban heat island effect and by obviously bad grid interpolation schemes.  I had thought that the only reliable temperature records were the satellite and ocean buoy temperature records.  I was wrong.  It now appears that since at least 2005, the satellite temperature records have not been reliable.

This revelation began with John O'Sullivan being informed that data on the temperatures across northern Lake Michigan which were automatically provided by satellite to a NOAA website operated by the Michigan State University had ridiculously high surface water temperatures widely distributed over the lake.  In fact, they implied many areas were under super-boiling conditions!  A commenter to O'Sullivan's website noted that the entire lake surface was coded in black, meaning that the cloud cover was too extensive for the satellite to produce meaningful temperatures.  He implied that this would keep these temperatures from being used in any other way in generating the satellite temperature record.  However, O'Sullivan came back with Lake Michigan maps which were not coded black and showed that many of the temperatures in the grid over the lake were differing too much locally and changing too rapidly in time.

This led to questions to NOAA, which generates the primary temperature records in the U.S. and supplies its raw data to NASA and the CRU at the University of East Anglia in the UK.  NOAA has not been very forthright with what is going on, but it has admitted that the NOAA-16 satellite has severe sensor problems.  Then they also admitted that other satellites have suffered degradation of their sensors.  Finally, Charles Pistis, Program Coordinator of the Michigan Sea Grant Extension admits that satellite data going back to 2005 may have been corrupted by bad data.  He instructs us that the NOAA-16 satellite uses IR sensors and provides a temperature which is either the surface temperature or the temperature at the top surface of a cloud.  The temperature of 604F found in one grid on a cloudy day is not likely to be either the temperature of the surface of Lake Michigan or of a cloud over it.

It is a wonder to me how one can use data from IR sensors to contribute to the global temperature record if the temperature measured is either that of the ground or of the top of a cloud or just total nonsense.  Let us suppose that the data is examined against independent cloud coverage measurements, which it is not clear is carefully done.  But, if it were, then all the temperature data would be shifted systematically to higher temperatures.  Ground and water areas under clouds are cooler during the day and will also be cooler at night more often than not if the day was also cloudy.  Charles Pistis has evaded the repeated question of whether the temperature measurement data from such satellites has gone into the NOAA temperature record.  This sure suggests this is an awkward question to answer.

The satellite data is fed automatically into records and apparently as long as it showed high enough temperatures to satisfy the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (AGW) advocates, those numbers were not given careful scrutiny going back as far as 2005.  It is, of course, hard to believe that no one did notice the errors.  One has to marvel at either the scientific incompetence this reveals or the completely unethical behavior of NOAA and its paid researchers that is laid open before us.  Possibly, in time, NOAA will provide an adequate answer to what has been going on with the satellite temperature record, but it is off to a very bad start in reassuring those of us who are not religious environmentalists, but are just interested in an objective understanding of the environment.  But, at this time, that appears to be an unlikely outcome.

Given the taxpayer money spent on the satellite and the ground station temperature records and the great importance claimed by the catastrophic AGW alarmists for the unprecedented warming of the globe they have claimed was going on, these failures in generating an accurate satellite temperature record are unfathomable.  What is worse, the raw data is known not to be available to reconstruct the ground station temperature record and one suspects it is not available for the satellite records either.  This is a catastrophe.  It is now perfectly clear that there are no reliable worldwide temperature records and that we have little more than anecdotal information on the temperature history of the Earth.  There is clearly no basis for the claims that the Earth has warmed at unusual rates in recent times or that we know anything more than some local temperatures, mostly from urban heat effect zones.

UAH Satellite Temperature Readings in 9-Year Decline

As we have observed, the land surface temperature record is unreliable and biased upward by the elimination of rural stations, the bad siting of most stations, and the application of adjustments to the raw temperature readings which create an artificial rapid temperature increase bias.  The UAH satellite temperature record showed a much weaker late 20th Century temperature increase than did the unreliable land surface temperature record.  For the period from 2001 to 2009, the atmospheric CO2 concentration continued to increase as shown by the black line in the plot above.  The UN IPCC AR4 climate models all predict a continuation of the late 20th Century temperature increase into this period based on this increasing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.  The satellite temperature record is the red-blue line and the linear trend line is the green line.  The trend line is showing a 0.84C decrease of temperature per century.  Of course, the longer term trend line of temperature since the end of the Little Ice Age has been positive.

Dr. Syun Akasofu presented the temperature trend and the decadal oscillations of the global temperature superimposed upon the longer linear trend line using the global temperature data since 1880 and up to 2000.  The linear trend line for that period is projected back into the very late Little Ice Age and forward.  The graph indicates where the temperature had been measured to be through 2008 and the IPCC AR4 report of 2007 prediction out to the year 2100 is shown.  This graph was presented at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 2009.  The pink area is the UN IPCC range of predictions, which are proving to be too high.  This is not surprising given that they were a projection themselves largely based on a time from the bottom of the last cooling temperature oscillation and the maximum of the warming oscillation of the late 20th Century.  Such climate predictions are incredibly foolish.

The upper graph of temperature is basically that between the end of the yellow box area to the present, showing a slight temperature decline.  This decline is consistent with the indicated temperature oscillations superimposed on the long term linear trend line since the end of the Little Ice Age in the Akasofu graph.  Of course, there is no certainty that the linear long term warming rate from 1880 to 2000 will be maintained into the future, since the natural forces causing this warming trend are not well-understood and they have been known to frequently change direction in the past.  But, it is a more reasonable guess than that of the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007, whose science we know to be wrong on steroids.

Solar Wind Flux Is Weakest Since Accurate Measurements Started

The Sun's solar wind provides a protective shield around the Sun from the solar wind of other stars.  This million mile-per-hour solar wind is at a minimum compared to all other measurements since accurate measurements have been performed, starting with the Space Age.  This plasma of charged particles cannot sweep other charged particles in the solar winds of other stars away once it comes into equilibrium with them in the heliopause.  The boundary of the heliopause should be shrinking as the solar wind diminishes, as measured by the satellite Ulysses in its polar orbit about the Sun in 2007.  This means that cosmic rays will no longer be shielded from Earth as effectively as they have been in the recent past.

The solar wind pressure and the magnetic field embedded in the solar wind were measured to have decreased by 20%.  The field strength at the spacecraft had decreased by 36%.  These are much bigger changes than the Sun's common irradiance changes of about 0.11% in amplitude or twice that from highest to lowest intensity.  Those who like to claim that the Sun is not the big actor in climate change, seem to believe that the only source of energy deposited by the Sun on the Earth is the direct irradiance.  It has been noted recently that cosmic rays nucleate cloud formation very effectively and clouds commonly provide net cooling of the Earth.  If the solar wind has dropped by 20%, then the shielding of cosmic rays may have dropped greatly and there may be much more cooling cloud formation on Earth.  In addition, there should be some deposition of energy in the Earth's atmosphere due to the interaction of the solar wind magnetic field with the Earth's magnetic field and due to the flux of charged particles themselves.  So, the 20% drop in the solar wind may have a large impact on the Earth's climate.

Perhaps contrary to the catastrophic AGW alarmists, it is not the case that man's emissions of CO2 have caused the temperature increases of the late 20th Century, because they claim they do not see natural forces capable of providing the necessary degree of climate change.  Perhaps there are natural forces they do not yet understand very well at all.

David Evans - No smoking hot spot

Dr. David Evans, a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, has changed his mind on the hypothesis that man-made production of CO2 is the cause of recent global warming. He tells us why in this commentary, "No smoking hot spot."

He says, "since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, 'When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?'"

The reasons for his change of mind:

• "The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it." The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10 km altitude in the atmosphere over the tropics. In 2007, the evidence was conclusive that no such hot spot exists, though hundreds of measurements have been made looking for it.
• There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that carbon dioxide emissions cause significant global warming.
• The satellites that measure the world's temperature say warming ended in 2001. The temperature has since dropped, so that it has returned to that of 1980. Land-based temperature readings are corrupted by the urban heat island effect and cannot be trusted. Only the satellite data is trustworthy and it only goes back to 1979.
• "The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect."

He notes that the last point was known in 2003, two years before Al Gore made his movie and claimed that ice cores showed that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused the prior instances of historical global warming. He and the press who did not call him on this were simply dishonest.

Evans says that the debate on global warming has "consisted of a simple sleigh of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions. In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn't noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved. If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don't you think we would have heard all about it ad nauseam by now? The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory."

I would add to this that the computer models have had a consistent record of predicting larger temperature increases than have actually occurred, even prior to the totally unexplainable recent decrease in temperatures. That is, unexplainable in terms of the carbon emissions computer models. They are more understandable in terms of such things as variations in the solar radiation reaching Earth and other natural phenomena. Indeed, there is a huge hubris at work when people make overblown predictions of man-made global warming being dominant over natural causes when we look at the record of the Earth's temperature over the last 600 million years. In that record, the present temperatures are very unusually low and the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are also very low. It is foolish to put much truck in these computer models which are totally unable to predict the past in accordance with the known record.

It is shameful that so many scientists are unable to reason this out. Of course many of them are on university campuses where science is often held hostage to socialism and anti-capitalist causes. When campus politics comes to play a role, objectivity vanishes. Some others work for government agencies, which are commonly eager to expand their powers in a war against some threat or other, which they are often happy to exaggerate or manufacture.

The Cooling Oceans and Unwarmed Atmosphere

When I brought up FireFox to check my e-mail this afternoon, I was greeted with a Yahoo video on the collapse of a part of the Wilkens Ice Shelf on the Western Peninsula of Antarctica of an ice area the size of Manhattan. It was said that at least one scientist said this is further proof of Global Warming. Well, there has long been a focus on this peninsular region of Antarctica due to loss of ice and, indeed, this part of Antarctica has lost ice for years. However, this area is a very small part of Antarctica and the vast majority of Antarctica has been increasing its ice mass for many years!

A couple of interesting commentaries have just surfaced which I would direct your attention to. In the first, Lorne Gunter wrote in the National Post in Canada, about the ocean temperature readings made in great proliferation by 3,000 Argo buoys since they were first deployed in 2003. They drift in the oceans at a depth of 2,000 meters and then about every 10 days they spend 6 hours rising to the surface, taking temperature data in each layer of the sea, and they broadcast their data to satellites, before sinking back to a 2000 meter depth. What have these ocean monitors found since 2003? There has been a slight cooling of the average ocean temperature! Given that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise, this is a bit of a problem for the Man-is-wrecking-the-Earth-with-greenhouse-gases crowd. Apparently, 80 to 90% of the global warming due to CO2 is supposed to be warming of the oceans, which are then supposed to heat the atmosphere. This article also notes that NASA has 8 weather satellites that take 300,000 temperature readings every day all over the earth, compared to a mere 7,000 measurements by Earth ground stations, [too often located near population centers.] The satellites over 30 years have found only a 0.14 degree Centigrade per decade temperature increase on average.

Christopher Pearson wrote an interview with Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne, Australia published in The Australian. Marohasy notes that referenced to 1998, the earths average temperature has since fallen and if you take 2002 as your reference point, the temperature has been about constant since then. Then she notes that the NASA Aqua satellite launched in 2002 has provided data on temperature, cloud cover, and water vapor which contradicts a key assumption of the global warming computer models. The models have all thought that increasing CO2 would produce warming, which would produce more water vapor, [and since 95% of all greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is water vapor,] this would lead to accelerated heating of the atmosphere. WRONG! The Aqua satellite data shows that the increase in water vapor leads to a counteracting cooling. Thus, in engineering terms, the assumed positive feedback is really a negative feedback. [This reduction of the CO2 greenhouse effect is presumably due to increased cloud cover with increased water vapor and the reflection of considerable radiation of the sun back into space by the clouds.]

[These brackets indicate my additional comments relative to the information in these articles.]

Thanks to Robert Tracinski who pointed these two articles out in his TIA Daily.

It will be fascinating to watch the process of many of the careless, and often immoral, scientists backing away from their errors and this emotional declaration that man is ruining the earth by using fuels that create CO2. The response of the politicians will be even more interesting and more important. They have so many plans to ride roughshod over the rights of the individual in the name of saving the planet and thereby some elite portion of the animal kingdom, which will largely not include the human part. Should cooling continue, we will hear that we must prepare for the coming Ice Age and that this will require fascist socialist control of all human activity by an international government! Scaremongers are very resourceful and they will not hesitate to convince the People to give up their rights as the only way to prevent one crisis or another. The fascist have long used the fears induced by crises, often made up, to mobilize the people in one common effort, while minimizing their tendency to use reason. This technique has been taught in fascist and socialist circles for more than 100 years and used by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, Lenin, FDR, Hitler, Kennedy (The Missile Gap, etc.), LBJ, and Clinton (Its the economy, stupid!, even as the economy was improving already from a much smaller dip than I Feel Your Pain Clinton made it out to be.)