Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal

From NOAA- NCDC

Click or ful size- From NCDC

NOAA/NCDC released a whole slew of rather grim climate news today. It’s important to remember that besides the sun and increasing greenhouse gases there is a lot of built in variability in the climate system. It’s only been in the last couple of decades that the greenhouse warming has risen out of the noise created by weather.

That said, even with El Nino gone and the sun coming out of one of it’s quietest periods of the century, the temperatures have soared. The last 4 consecutive months have been the hottest on record. The first 6 months of the year are also the hottest on record.

The mid tropospheric temps from UAH and RSS are also running near or above the warmest ever on their much shorter record.

The Arctic sea ice also continues it’s decline. The rate of decline in June was the fastest ever measured.

From NSIDC

The Antarctic is actually gaining ice due to a complex weather pattern induced by ozone depletion and cooling in the stratosphere. This cooling is also caused by increasing greenhouse gases.

I was looking for a post on something other than climate science this time, but the news is too big to pass up.

The NSIDC today posted another update of the melting Arctic sea ice. The June ice coverage was the lowest on record and the melt rate highest recorded. It is looking very possible that a new record low in Arctic ice cover may be on the way for September. If not it will be as the Duke of Wellington said after the Battle of Waterloo : “A darn near rum thing”.

From the Nat. Snow Ice Data Center (NOAA)

That is only part of the story. The thickness of the ice is also steadily dropping. As this graphic courtesy of Climate Central shows.

From US NAVY submarine data. (Climate Central graphic)

All of this could be a giant hoax.  The data being manipulated for evil purposes! You can find plenty of web sites online that will tell you so.

Ask yourself seriously though, do you really believe that? All those people in a giant conspiracy? No one is breaking the secret pact and telling?

I think most people will answer no to that. There will always be a few who say yes though.

Cape Royds, Ross Island, Antarctica (Dan's Photo-ask before using please)

Yes, they are most definitely related.

I have been very busy reading lately. Books and papers. A presentation on the science underway in Antarctica is half finished, but I keep finding new things I just have to read right away. (I’m presenting at the AMS broadcast conference  in Miami in three weeks.)

There are some very interesting graphs and images I have stumbled onto and since the desktop folder (thankfully it’s a MAC desk top) is full, it is time to write a post and show them to someone besides science geeks.

Image from Nat. Snow Ice Data Center (NOAA) click for the large pretty version in colour.

Most of them are on the melting of ice. Arctic sea ice, Greenland ice and Antarctica ice.

Let’s start with the Arctic sea ice. The melt in late summer 2007 brought the lowest amounts ever seen in the High Arctic. How is 2010 shaping up? As the graph from NSIDC shows, we may very well be on track to break that record.

The areal extent is only a small part of the picture. There have been some recent publications that indicate that the real story is in the VOLUME of the Arctic sea ice.

A model has been developed that can estimate the Arctic sea ice volume. It’s called PIOMAS and was developed at the Polar Science Center at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

So, take a look at what it’s showing:

From Polar Science Center Univ. of Washington (U- Dub).

Unlike some people, I don’t just make this stuff up!

See citation in image. click for the HD version in living colour.

Oh, but wait, there’s more. That folder is full remember…

GRACE stands for Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. A major paper published in NATURE GEOSCIENCE late in 2009 shows that the PIOMAS models melting ice is not alone. GRACE data from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets speak for themselves.

It truly is amazing what we can do with satellites now. Remote sensing in Earth science is doing incredible things. If I wasn’t 50 years old, I’d go back and get a PhD in some field of Earth science and attempt to develop a new way of measuring our planet. I’m so jealous of the young people just entering grad. school in these fields.

Still more!

I just stumbled across this graphic on John Cook’s SKEPTICAL SCIENCE blog. It has updated GRACE data through 2009 into this year. If you do not have John’s iphone/iPad app you should get it. Then the  next time someone gives you one of those silly arguments from a junk science web site about why climate change is a hoax, you can quickly show them why there idea is full of bunk.

Is he done yet you ask? Is this the power point from hell?

No on both questions I hope.

You probably know that Dr. James Hansen is the head of NASA’s Goddard Inst. for Space Studies. He is also the nation’s premier climate expert. He just published a paper on the NASA GISS temperature  record. You can read the paper here.

DO read it!

From Hansen et. al. link to the paper in this post or click image to read it.

Here is the gist:

We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade, despite large year- to-year fluctuations associated with the El Nino-La Nina cycle of tropical ocean temperature. Record high global temperature during the period with instrumental data was reached in 2010. (Physicist Joe Romm points out that this comes at a time the sun has just passed a period of low irradiance)

Hansen’s papers are so matter of fact and easy to read, that they are always fascinating. He never tries to impress with fancy language. Just the science. This paper shows pretty conclusively that all the worry about cities “contaminating” the temperature record is pretty much history now.

Oh and one last graphic.

The satellite temperatures from U. A. Huntsville. Just a few miles from where I type this.

From John Christy, Roy Spencer's data at U. A. Huntsville.

The satellite derived lower troposphere temps. are currently at record levels too. This record of course, is much shorter than the surface temp. record compiled by NASA or the others compiled by NCDC or the Hadley Centre in the UK.

You might call all of these graphs the REAL COST OF OIL. Then again the birds on the Gulf Coast might beg to differ…

Dan

Note Sat June 5 2010:
Just came across a new paper published on Arctic sea ice. The authors are a “whos who” of paleo-climate experts. They conclude that Arctic ice is now at lowest levels in “several thousand years”. The abstract and citation are posted by me in the comments of this post.

Global Temperatures since 1880. Click image to read the Paper by Hansen,Lo,Sato,Ruedy.

I spent the weekend reading a new paper that is about to be published by 4 of NASA’s top climate researchers. If you follow climate research closely, then it is no surprise.

The planet continues to warm and no, it has not stopped.   Hansen et.al point out that this recent warming occurs at a time when the sun has been very quiet and in a phase that should be causing us to cool some. The Daily Climate has a great summary of the paper for those that do not want to read all 34 pages. I’m constantly amazed at how different the real science is from what I see on cable news channels and online.

Click image to visit the new NOAA site on Arctic sea ice.

I also want to give equal time to another of  America’s respected science institutions, NOAA.

They have placed online a great site on the changes in Arctic sea ice. A tip of the cricket bat to Andy Revkin at the NYT who spotted it.

It’s a great place to get real science on the trends in Arctic sea ice.

Later,
Dan

The Atlantic portions of Arctic remain warmer than normal in January. Image from NSIDC NOAA.

It’s been a cold and very snowy winter in the Eastern USA and in Western Europe. Very likely the worst in 30 years. All that snow and cold has resulted in a very common question to every meteorologist I know and that certainly includes me. Same for every person involved in climate change research too.

WHAT HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING??

First of all most people in the climate and weather forecasting field prefer climate change instead of global warming. It’s more accurate. Secondly, if I have learned one thing over the past 30 years as a forecaster, it’s that weather is extremely local to people.

If I forecast a 10% of the area to get rain and it turns out to be a perfect forecast, I guarantee you that every person who got rain thinks I blew the forecast. It doesn’t matter if the next block over is sunny. People only care about the weather where they are.

So when we have cold and snow, people immediately chant what happened to global warming. The answer to this in short is nothing. If the whole planet was getting snow then things would be different. Climate is made up of a lot of weather. Even in a warmer world that is most certainly coming, we will still have blizzards and record lows. Just not nearly as many of them.

One of the multitude of other signs the planet is warming besides thermometers is the number of record highs is steadily increasing compared to the record lows.

The cold air, in the East of America and the West of Europe, has come from the Arctic and it has actually left the Arctic quite warm. Sea ice for January is running way below the long term average. Sea ice in December was too and if you look at December alone, then the decrease is now running at 3.3% per decade.

Below is an exc. video featuring my friend Stu Ostro, Meteorologist at the Weather Channel, along with one of the top climate experts at the Nat. Center for Atmospheric Research, that explains the answer to this months question very well. Not only that, it’s based on science instead of political opinion.

So check out Peter Sinclair’s Global Warming Crock of the Week! (gotta love that name)