Daily Archives: August 10, 2011

Driftwood On Ice
Doug L. Hoffman

Tracking the flow of ice in the Arctic is difficult. Reconstructing the extent and flow in times past is even more difficult. An interesting new report has turned to driftwood, embedded in the Arctic pack ice, as a way of deciphering Arctic climate conditions over the last 10,000 years. The researchers found a climate record that is in good agreement with previous histories, including such events as the Medieval Warm Period, the Little Ice Age and the Holocene Thermal Maximum. In fact, they found temperatures during the HTM to be 2° to 4°C higher than today. They also found a complementarity oscillation in sea-ice abundance between East and West that is not correctly simulated by current ice models. (The Resilient Earth)

New paper finds some Antarctic temperature measurements show false warming of up to 10°C (18°F)

A paper published today in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology finds that temperature measurements on the Antarctic plateau “are shown to be significantly warm biased by solar radiation,” resulting in temperature measurements up to 10°C (18°F) warmer than actual temperatures. The authors find that the summer Sun heats the housing for the electronic thermometers causing the warming bias during summer, which is also exacerbated by low wind conditions. Surface temperature measurements are particularly important at the poles, because satellite measurements of temperature do not include data poleward of 82.5° North and 70° South and the only available measurements in these areas are from surface temperature stations. Considering the tiny change in global temperature over the past 161 years of only 0.7°C, this newly-discovered large warming bias of up to 10°C calls into question data from areas critical to the AGW debate. (Hockey Schtick)

Comments On the British Met Office Press Release “Pause In Upper Ocean Warming Explained”

… First, if “…more of the heat stored in the upper ocean to be released into space”, this represent Joules that will never contribute to global warming. To compensate for this loss of heat, if global warming is to fit the IPCC model predictions, there must be well above average heating in the coming years to “catch up”. This large loss of heat also further supports the findings in

Spencer, R.W.; Braswell, W.D. On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance. Remote Sens. 2011, 3, 1603-1613.

that the IPCC models are inaccurately representing this aspect of the climate system (see also my post). Spencer and Braswell wrote

“….the satellite-based metrics for the period 2000–2010 depart substantially in the direction of lower climate sensitivity from those similarly computed from coupled climate models…”

The British Met Office also wrote “Secondly, heat can be temporarily moved to the deeper ocean below 700m…”. They fail, however, to present what time period is meant by “temporary”. Indeed, heat transfer to deeper in the ocean will disperse horizontally and likely would only slower reemerge, if ever, (decades or centuries?) back into the upper levels of the ocean.

The news article is also making the typical error of assuming that the ”recent pause in warming [occurs] despite continued increases in greenhouse gases.” This assumption concludes (erroneously) that the added greenhouse gases dominate the climate system over the last ten years. However, as documented by Spencer and Braswell, and others, natural climate variations are larger than modeled by the IPCC multi-decadal predictions. (Roger Pielke Sr.)