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Gort519
Joined: 19 May 2009
Posts: 126
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 Tue Jul 14, 2009 4:06 pm
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And all of this could have been prevented. All of it. |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1798
Location: x |
| Arctic 'warmest in 2,000 years'
Fri Sep 04, 2009 6:37 pm
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8236797.stm
Arctic 'warmest in 2,000 years'
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
Arctic temperatures are now higher than at any time in the last 2,000 years, research reveals.
Changes to the Earth's orbit drove centuries of cooling, but temperatures rose fast in the last 100 years as human greenhouse gas emissions rose.
Scientists took evidence from ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments.
Writing in the journal Science, they say this confirms that the Arctic is very sensitive both to changes in solar heating and to greenhouse warming.
The 23 sites sampled were good enough to provide a decade-by-decade picture of temperatures across the region.
The result is a "hockey stick"-like curve in which the last decade - 1998-2008 - stands out as the warmest in the entire series.
"The most pervasive signal in the reconstruction, the most prominent trend, is the overall cooling that took place for the first 1,900 years [of the record]," said study leader Darrell Kaufman from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, US.
"The 20th Century stands out in strong contrast to the cooling that should have continued. The last half-century was the warmest of the 2,000-year temperature record, and the last 10 years have been especially dramatic," he told BBC News.
On average, the region cooled at a rate of 0.2C per millennium until about 1900. Since then, it has warmed by about 1.2C.
Much debate on climate change has centred on the Mediaeval Warm Period, or Mediaeval Climate Anomaly - a period about 1,000 years ago when, historical records suggest, Vikings colonised Greenland and may have grown grapes in Newfoundland.
The new analysis shows that temperatures were indeed warmer in this region 1,000 years ago than they were 100 years ago - but not as warm as they are now, or 1,000 years previously.
"It shows that the Mediaeval Warm Period is real, and is... an exception from the general trend of cooling," commented Eystein Jansen from Bergen University in Norway, who was not involved in the research.
"It also shows there's lots of variability on the 100-year timescale, and that's probably more so in the Arctic than elsewhere."
Professor Jansen was a co-ordinating lead author on the palaeoclimate (ancient climate) chapter of the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment.
Arctic wobbles
The root cause of the slow cooling was the orbital "wobble" that slowly varies, over thousands of years, the month in which the Earth approaches closest to the Sun.
This wobble slowly decreased the total amount of solar energy arriving in the Arctic region in summertime, and the temperature responded - until greenhouse warming took over.
"The 20th Century is the first century for which how much energy we're getting from the Sun is no longer the most important thing governing the temperature of the Arctic," said another of the study team, Nicholas McKay from the University of Arizona.
The recent warming of the Arctic has manifested itself most clearly in the drastic shrinkage in summer sea-ice extent, with the smallest area in the satellite era documented in 2007.
As the Science study emerged, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was telling the World Climate Conference in Geneva that many of the "more distant scenarios" forecast by climate scientists were "happening now".
Earlier this week, Mr Ban visited the Arctic in an attempt to gain first-hand experience of how the region is changing.
"Scientists have been accused for years of scaremongering. But the real scaremongers are those who say we cannot afford climate action," he said in his Geneva speech, calling for world leaders to make bigger pledges of action in the run-up to December's UN climate summit in Copenhagen.
Richard.Black-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1798
Location: x |
| Studies of the Arctic Suggest a Dire Situation
Sat Sep 05, 2009 8:23 pm
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http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1920435,00.html
Studies of the Arctic Suggest a Dire Situation
By Bryan Walsh
Climate change is happening everywhere, but nowhere faster than in the Arctic, where annual temperatures in the far North are warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe. Sea ice on the polar cap is shrinking and permafrost is melting, putting animals like the polar bear — and the Arctic people who depend on them — in increasing danger.
While there's no doubt that the Arctic is warming — year after year, it becomes more clearly visible — it is actually a new phenomenon. In a new study published in the Sept. 4 Science, researchers led by Darrell Kaufman at Northern Arizona University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research constructed a climate record of the Arctic over the past 2,000 years, and found that the region had been cooling for almost all of that time period. Summer temperatures in the Arctic cooled by an average of 0.2 degrees C each thousand years, thanks chiefly to wobbles in the Earth's orbit around the sun that gradually reduced the amount of sunlight hitting the Arctic. Left unchecked, the Arctic would have continued that slow cooling for thousands of more years, until the Earth's orbit wobbled again.
But then something else happened — us. The Science researchers found that during the 20th century, as human beings began pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the Arctic stopped cooling and started warming. Even though the Arctic is still gradually getting less sunlight, it's still getting hotter — summer temperatures in the Arctic are 1.4 degrees C higher than they would have been if the cooling had continued unabated, according to the study. The most recent decade recorded — from 1999 to 2008 — was the warmest of the past 2,000 years. The recent warming trend has been so strong that researchers say it might have even kept the Earth from slipping into a new Ice Age — although now, of course, the world needs to deal with the opposite problem.
Another study released this week by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) examines that problem and its potential future effects — and it's not pretty. The WWF researchers found that Arctic sea ice is melting at a faster rate than expected, and that the massive land sheets in Greenland and parts of Antarctic are vulnerable. The report predicts that global sea level will rise more than 3 ft. by 2100, significantly higher than scientists had previously believed. "What we're finding is truly sobering," says Martin Sommerkorn, the senior adviser for the WWF's Arctic Program.
The study also found that the methane locked in Arctic permafrost is increasingly at risk of being released if warming continues — a positive feedback cycle that would accelerate climate change. But the impacts of a hotter Arctic go beyond that. The WWF study found that as the Arctic warms, it could alter weather patterns beyond its borders, affecting temperature and rain patterns in Europe and North America. "The Arctic is the global refrigerator for the climate system," says Sommerkorn. "Change it, and you might see even more dry summers in the Southwest and wetter winters in the Mediterranean." It's another reminder that in this season of climate change politics, we're running out of time to make a difference.
Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1920435,00.html |
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mmmmbarium
tagged & banned
Joined: 27 Dec 2005
Posts: 385
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Sat Sep 26, 2009 6:23 pm
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Hey Sorethroat... FUUCK YOU. |
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Jeanie
Joined: 18 Nov 2001
Posts: 1323
Location: North East U.S.A. |
| Shame on you
Mon Sep 28, 2009 8:39 pm
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Barium, I see you have fallen prey to those of this ugly system that degrades humanity. Try to rise above this disgraceful language, there are decent, elevating, considerate ways to express your opinions.
There is no question that in certain parts of the earth temperatures have risen. The question is what is causing it, man or cycles.? Interestingly, temperatures in other planets of our solar system are also rising. Surely it's not due to pollution or carbon dioxide....  |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1798
Location: x |
| Arctic permafrost leaking methane at record levels, figures
Fri Jan 15, 2010 11:00 pm
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/14/arctic-permafrost-methane
Arctic permafrost leaking methane at record levels, figures show
Experts say methane emissions from the Arctic have risen by almost one-third in just five years, and that sharply rising temperatures are to blame
David Adam, environment correspondent guardian.co.uk,
Thursday 14 January 2010
Scientists have recorded a massive spike in the amount of a powerful greenhouse gas seeping from Arctic permafrost, in a discovery that highlights the risks of a dangerous climate tipping point.
Experts say methane emissions from the Arctic have risen by almost one-third in just five years, and that sharply rising temperatures are to blame.
The discovery follows a string of reports from the region in recent years that previously frozen boggy soils are melting and releasing methane in greater quantities. Such Arctic soils currently lock away billions of tonnes of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, leading some scientists to describe melting permafrost as a ticking time bomb that could overwhelm efforts to tackle climate change.
They fear the warming caused by increased methane emissions will itself release yet more methane and lock the region into a destructive cycle that forces temperatures to rise faster than predicted.
Paul Palmer, a scientist at Edinburgh University who worked on the new study, said: "High latitude wetlands are currently only a small source of methane but for these emissions to increase by a third in just five years is very significant. It shows that even a relatively small amount of warming can cause a large increase in the amount of methane emissions."
Global warming is occuring twice as fast in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth. Some regions have already warmed by 2.5C, and temperatures there are projected to increase by more than 10C by 2100 if carbon emissions continue to rise at current rates.
Palmer said: "This study does not show the Arctic has passed a tipping point, but it should open people's eyes. It shows there is a positive feedback and that higher temperatures bring higher emissions and faster warming."
The change in the Arctic is enough to explain a recent increase in global methane levels in the atmosphere, he said. Global levels have risen steadily since 2007, after a decade or so holding steady.
The new study, published in the journal Science, shows that methane emissions from the Arctic increased by 31% from 2003-07. The increase represents about 1m extra tonnes of methane each year. Palmer cautioned that the five-year increase was too short to call a definitive trend.
The findings are part of a wider study of methane emissions from global wetlands, such as paddy fields, marshes and bogs. To identify where methane was released, the researchers combined methane levels in the atmosphere with surface temperature changes. They did not measure methane emissions directly, but used satellite measurements of variations in groundwater depth, which alter the way bacteria break down organic matter to release or consume methane.
They found that just over half of all methane emissions came from the tropics, with some 20m tonnes released from the Amazon river basin each year, and 26m tonnes from the Congo basin. Rice paddy fields across China and south and south-east Asia produced just under one-third of global methane, some 33m tonnes. Just 2% of global methane comes from Arctic latitudes, the study found, though the region showed the largest increases. The 31% rise in methane emissions there from 2003-07 was enough to help lift the global average increase to 7%.
Palmer said: "Our study reinforces the idea that satellites can pinpoint changes in the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from a particular place on earth. This opens the door to quantifying greenhouse gas emissions made from a variety of natural and man-made sources."
Palmer said it was a "disgrace" that so few satellites were launched to monitor levels of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane. He said it was unclear whether the team would be able to continue the methane monitoring in future. The pair of satellites used to analyse water, known as Grace, are already over their expected mission life time, while a European version launched last year, called Goce, is scheduled to fly for less than two years.
The new study follows repeated warnings that even modest levels of global warming could trigger huge increases in methane release from permafrost. Phillipe Ciais, a researcher with the Laboratory for Climate Sciences and the Environment in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, told a scientific meeting in Copenhagen last March that billions of tonnes could be released by just a 2C average global rise.
More on methane
While carbon dioxide gets most of the attention in the global warming debate, methane is pound-for-pound a more potent greenhouse gas, capable of trapping some 20 times more heat than CO2. Although methane is present in much lower quantities in the atmosphere, its potency makes it responsible for about one-fifth of man-made warming.
The gas is found in natural gas deposits and is generated naturally by bacteria that break down organic matter, such as in the guts of farm animal. About two-thirds of global methane comes from man-made sources, and levels have more than doubled since the industrial revolution.
Unlike carbon dioxide, methane lasts only a decade or so in the atmosphere, which has led some experts to call for greater attention to curbs on its production. Reductions in methane emissions could bring faster results in the fight against climate change, they say. |
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Georgie
Joined: 31 Jul 2009
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Sat Jan 16, 2010 12:18 am
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New study published in "Aerial Science" has recorded a massive spike in the amount of the ...Global Beans Consuming levels arising to er... worrying levels... !Experts say methan emissions , especially from the Eskimoan people and the entire population of polar bears, have risen by almost one-third in just five years, and that sharply rising excessive Bean Consunmption is to blame!
They fear the smell caused by increased methane emissions, will itself release yet more methane, more smell and so on.
Palm Pauler a scientist at EskimoanNorthPole University who worked on the new study, said: "High latitude livin polar bears are currently only a small source of methane but for these emissions to increase by a third in just five years is very significant. It shows that even a relatively small increase in bean consumption can cause a large increase in the amount of methane emissions."
Similar studies carried out very intensively will be out soon, indicating the implications in the Global Bean Consuming from the methan emissions produced by the ...Dutch cows!
Dutch cows also began to consume bean-based food in the last five years.
Scientists fear that Dutch cows methan may be of the same significance with Polar bears's methan...
Right...!
That's it!!
Now we get it...!!!
I am sure that after CO2, now they're gonna tax the ...lower aerial exit of our bodies...   
dependind on the amount of smell AND the sound level of the ...methan dose produced...  
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Georgie |
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Georgie
Joined: 31 Jul 2009
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Sat Jan 16, 2010 12:50 am
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Enough jokes...  
First it was CO2, now what...? ...CH4???
Global Warming...? What Global Warming...?
Global Lying..., Deceiving..., Exploiting...?
You bet...!!!
Haven't you heard?
Why don't you spare a few seconds to read this UNDISPUTABLE 'study':
http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/forum/thread14112.html
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Georgie |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1798
Location: x |
| CO2 at new highs despite economic slowdown
Mon Mar 15, 2010 7:27 pm
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=co2-highs-economy
CO2 at new highs despite economic slowdown
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - Levels of the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere have risen to new highs in 2010 despite an economic slowdown in many nations that braked industrial output, data showed on Monday.
Carbon dioxide, measured at Norway's Zeppelin station on the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, rose to a median 393.71 parts per million of the atmosphere in the first two weeks of March from 393.17 in the same period of 2009, extending years of gains.
"Looking back at the data we have from Zeppelin since the end of the 1980s it seems like the increase is accelerating" Johan Stroem, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, said of the data compiled with Stockholm University.
The rise in concentrations, close to an annual peak before carbon-absorbing plants start to grow in the northern hemisphere spring, was below the average gain over the year of around 2 parts per million.
"It still confirms the rise," Stroem said of the data from the first two weeks of March supplied to Reuters. Concentrations vary from week to week depending on the source of Arctic winds.
Carbon concentrations have risen by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution ushered in wider use of fossil fuels. A 2009 study of the ocean off Africa indicated carbon levels in the atmosphere were at their highest in 2.1 million years.
Recession in 2009 in many nations has not apparently affected gains. The International Energy Agency estimated in September that emissions of carbon dioxide would fall about 2.6 percent in 2009 because of a decline in industrial activity.
Concentrations can keep rising since each carbon molecule emitted typically lingers in the atmosphere for many years. The U.N. panel of climate scientists says the rise will cause more floods, mudslides, heatwaves, sandstorms and rising sea levels.
CLIMATE SCIENCE
The data "seem to show that we continue to emit as if there was no tomorrow," Kim Holmen, director of research at the Norwegian Polar Institute, said of the carbon readings.
The build-up of carbon dioxide, also recorded since the late 1950s in measurements from a Hawaiian mountaintop, is one of the strongest elements of climate scientists' case that mankind is to blame for global warming.
Skeptics have cast doubt on the science since leaks of e-mails from a British university last year appeared to show that some climate researchers are intolerant of alternative views.
The U.N. panel of climate scientists, itself under fire for errors including an exaggeration of the pace at which Himalayan glaciers are melting, says it is more than 90 percent sure that human activities are causing global warming.
Carbon concentrations at Svalbard peak in April after rotting plants release the gas through the winter -- land areas in the northern hemisphere are far bigger than in the south. Levels decline when plant growth resumes in the northern spring.
Stroem said there were signs that the rise in concentrations in late winter was becoming bigger than in late summer. He speculated that could be a side-effect of global warming.
A gradual shrinking of ice and snow cover in the Arctic summer, he said, might mean more plants were able to grow and so absorb carbon, masking the rise in atmospheric carbon. The death of some of the extra vegetation in winter added to emissions.
For Reuters latest environment blogs, click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1798
Location: x |
| Methane Releases from Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger,Faster
Mon Mar 15, 2010 7:33 pm
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100304142240.htm
Methane Releases from Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated
ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2010) — A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.
The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF's International Arctic Research Center. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."
Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It is released from previously frozen soils in two ways. When the organic material -- which contains carbon -- stored in permafrost thaws, it begins to decompose and, under oxygen-free conditions, gradually release methane. Methane can also be stored in the seabed as methane gas or methane hydrates and then released as subsea permafrost thaws. These releases can be larger and more abrupt than those that result from decomposition.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a methane-rich area that encompasses more than 2 million square kilometers of seafloor in the Arctic Ocean. It is more than three times as large as the nearby Siberian wetlands, which have been considered the primary Northern Hemisphere source of atmospheric methane. Shakhova's research results show that the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is already a significant methane source: 7 teragrams yearly, which is equal to the amount of methane emitted from the rest of the ocean. A teragram is equal to about 1.1 million tons.
"Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already," she said. "If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger."
Shakhova notes that Earth's geological record indicates that atmospheric methane concentrations have varied between about .3 to .4 parts per million during cold periods to .6 to .7 parts per million during warm periods. Current average methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the highest in 400,000 years, she said. Concentrations above the East Siberian Arctic Shelf are even higher.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf is a relative frontier in methane studies. The shelf is shallow, 50 meters or less in depth, which means it has been alternately submerged or terrestrial, depending on sea levels throughout Earth's history. During Earth's coldest periods, it is a frozen arctic coastal plain, and does not release methane. As the planet warms and sea levels rise, it is inundated with seawater, which is 12-15 degrees warmer than the average air temperature.
"It was thought that seawater kept the East Siberian Arctic Shelf permafrost frozen," Shakhova said. "Nobody considered this huge area."
Earlier studies in Siberia focused on methane escaping from thawing terrestrial permafrost. Semiletov's work during the 1990s showed, among other things, that the amount of methane being emitted from terrestrial sources decreased at higher latitudes. But those studies stopped at the coast. Starting in the fall of 2003, Shakhova, Semiletov and the rest of their team took the studies offshore. From 2003 through 2008, they took annual research cruises throughout the shelf and sampled seawater at various depths and the air 10 meters above the ocean. In September 2006, they flew a helicopter over the same area, taking air samples at up to 2,000 meters in the atmosphere. In April 2007, they conducted a winter expedition on the sea ice.
They found that more than 80 percent of the deep water and greater than half of surface water had methane levels more than eight times that of normal seawater. In some areas, the saturation levels reached at least 250 times that of background levels in the summer and 1,400 times higher in the winter.
They found corresponding results in the air directly above the ocean surface. Methane levels were elevated overall and the seascape was dotted with more than 100 hotspots. This, combined with winter expedition results that found methane gas trapped under and in the sea ice, showed the team that the methane was not only being dissolved in the water, it was bubbling out into the atmosphere.
These findings were further confirmed when Shakhova and her colleagues sampled methane levels at higher elevations. Methane levels throughout the Arctic are usually 8 to 10 percent higher than the global baseline. When they flew over the shelf, they found methane at levels another 5 to 10 percent higher than the already elevated arctic levels.
The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is more of a concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallows of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn't have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere. That, combined with the sheer amount of methane in the region, could add a previously uncalculated variable to climate models.
"The release to the atmosphere of only one percent of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits might alter the current atmospheric burden of methane up to 3 to 4 times," Shakhova said. "The climatic consequences of this are hard to predict."
Shakhova, Semiletov and collaborators from 12 institutions in five countries plan to continue their studies in the region, tracking the source of the methane emissions and drilling into the seafloor in an effort to estimate how much methane is stored there.
Shakhova and Semiletov hold joint appointments with the Pacific Oceanological Institute, part of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Their collaborators on this paper include Anatoly Salyuk, Vladimir Joussupov and Denis Kosmach, all of the Pacific Oceanological Institute, and Orjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University. |
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Georgie
Joined: 31 Jul 2009
Posts: 42
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| Re: CO2 at new highs despite economic slowdown
Tue Mar 16, 2010 10:40 pm
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quote:
Originally posted by Sore Throat
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=co2-highs-economy
CO2 at new highs despite economic slowdown
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - Levels of the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere have risen to new highs in 2010 despite an economic slowdown in many nations that braked industrial output, data showed on Monday.
/
Of course...!
It's because some -or better- A LOT of people have to catch their breath after their agony about their participation in the Global Fraud, thus exhaling
several ...tons of their own manmade CO2..., THAT'S WHY...!!!
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Georgie |
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Georgie
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| Re: Methane Releases from Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger,Fa
Tue Mar 16, 2010 11:09 pm
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quote:
Originally posted by Sore Throat
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100304142240.htm
Methane Releases from Arctic Shelf May Be Much Larger and Faster Than Anticipated
ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2010) — A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska... /
Now..., what we have here...?
Ah yes!
More "aerial" speculation...
It's Methane again, another green-smelly-house gas...!
Right..., well,
I would be very happy to suggest to Mrs Shakova et al, NOT TO consume tremendous quantities of Beans, as this will make her -and her colleagues- a vital part of the Methane Problem, much like the case of the now famous Dutch Cows...!!!
It is more than clear that Mrs. Shakova's "contribution" to the Methan releases is "much larger and faster than anticipated"....!
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Georgie |
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Sore Throat
Joined: 01 Sep 2000
Posts: 1798
Location: x |
| NASA projects 2010 will (likely) be the hottest year
Wed Mar 24, 2010 8:02 pm
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http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/2010/03/nasa_projects_2010_will_likely.html#more
NASA projects 2010 will (likely) be the hottest year
Global surface temperature anomalies relative to 1951-1980 mean for (a) annual and 5-year running means through 2009, and (b) 12-month running mean through February 2010. Credit: NASA GISS.
The headline to this post may surprise many Washingtonians who are still thawing out from the cold and historically snowy winter. However, not only does a new NASA draft analysis predict that 2010 will likely set a new global temperature record, but it also projects that it is "virtually certain" that a new 12-month running mean global temperature record will occur sometime this year.
Wait a second, you may say. That doesn't make sense, given the relentless cold thus far in 2010 (at least until the past two weeks), not only in Washington, but also throughout Europe and parts of Asia.
So, where is this forecast coming from?
First, as I detailed last week, the winter of 2009-2010 wasn't actually very cold from a global perspective. In fact, according to NOAA, the past winter (Dec.-Feb.) was the fifth warmest on record on a global basis.
Second, NASA's projection, which is in the form of a lengthy and technical paper that is publicly available here, is based on a combination of recent observations and historical evidence. Part of the projection rests on the continued presence of a moderate El Niño, which is a natural climate event characterized by unusually warm water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. El Niño has long been known to boost average global temperatures by warming the ocean and atmosphere. The all-time record warm year of 1998 (depending on whose statistics you cite) was a year that featured a strong El Niño, for example.
On the other hand, La Niña, which is marked by anomalously cool waters in the equatorial tropical Pacific, can lead to cooler global temperatures.
NASA's temperature projection is based in part on the knowledge that global surface temperatures tend to lag behind El Niño by about four months. Since El Niño has continued to remain at a moderate strength, and global average temperatures are already running significantly warmer than average, it follows that there is a window of another several months of extra warming within which to set a new record.
You can think of El Niño as adding another few logs on a preexisting fire. Only in this analogy, human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels are also adding their own kindling at the same time.
Decadal surface temperature anomalies relative to 1951-1980 base period. Credit: NASA GISS.
The NASA analysis argues that 12-month running mean global temperatures provide a better indication of shorter-term climate trends when compared to calendar years, for example, and may do a better job for the public of separating climate trends from weather fluctuations. The running means, the NASA scientists say, show that global average temperatures have continued rising since 1998, and have not flattened out as some have claimed.
"From a climate standpoint there is nothing special about the time of year at which the calendar begins," they state. "The 12-month running mean temperature anomaly provides an improved measure of the strength and duration of El Ninos, La Ninas, and the response to volcanic eruptions. In contrast, use of the calendar year... can be misleading, because one El Nino may coincide well with a calendar year while another is split between two calendar years."
However, the calendar year remains more relevant to our everyday lives, considering that most of us don't keep 12-month running means on our desks.
For the calendar year of 2010, NASA's analysis states, "it is likely that the 2010 global surface temperature in the GISS analysis also will be a record for the period of instrumental data." However, the analysis notes that a new record "might not occur if El Nino conditions deteriorate rapidly by mid-2010 into La Nina conditions."
Despite its technical nature, the NASA analysis makes for a fascinating read, since it provides a glimpse into how leading climate scientists are reacting to the relentless criticisms that have been directed at them in recent months, stemming from the so-called "climategate" scandal and continuing through recent controversies concerning a few errors found in the otherwise authoritative reports of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
"One lesson we have learned is that our approach of making our global data analysis immediately and routinely available, with data use by ourselves and scientific colleagues helping to reveal potential flaws of the input data, has a practical disadvantage: it allows any data flaws to be interpreted as machinations," the scientists state. "The data are too useful for scientific studies not to be made available promptly, however, so we will continue to do that on a monthly basis. Thus we have made the process as transparent as possible..."
The draft NASA analysis was written by James Hansen, a prominent climate scientist who heads up NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and three other researchers.
For more details on the study's findings, you may want to read Douglas Fischer's thorough coverage at The Daily Climate. Also, Joe Romm's post at Climate Progress has more of Hansen's thoughts on some of the more malicious recent efforts to gain unauthorized access to NASA's climate data. |
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Georgie
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Thu Mar 25, 2010 12:53 am
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Watts Up With That?
Commentary on puzzling things in life, nature, science, weather, climate change, technology, and recent news by Anthony Watts Home About Projects Policy Glossary Resources Widget Climategate Tips & Notes to WUWT
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Why Joe Bastardi sees red: A look at Sea Ice and GISTEMP and starting choices
2010
AcuuWeather meteorologist Joe Bastardi has a question about two datasets and asks:
If it is darn warm, how come there is so much sea ice?
http://www.accuweather.com/video/73159138001/goddard-data-and-global-sea-ice-doesnt-fit.asp?channel=vblog_bastardi
Bastardi asks a simple question: how can we have above normal temperatures in the Arctic and the Antarctic and continue to add to the global sea ice trend? After all we’ve been told by media stories that both the Arctic and the Antarctic continue to melt at a frenetic pace. But it looks like this year we’ll see another Arctic recovery as we’ve seen in 2008 and 2009.
Bastardi also wonders about something we routinely ask about here at WUWT: data adjustments. GISS seems to be stuck with Arctic positive anomaly, yet the sea ice isn’t cooperating. Of course just having a positive temperature anomaly doesn’t guarantee melt, but members of the public who are less discerning, who look at red hot color presentations like GISS puts out, usually can’t tell the difference.
For reference here are the images Joe uses in his presentation. I’m going to help out a bit too with some simple comparisons.
First The GISS Dec-Feb 2010 Global Surface Anomaly as Joe presents it in his video:
click to enlarge
Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=2&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=1203&year1=2010&year2=2010&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
Note that in the warmest places in the Arctic according to GISS, there are few if any land thermometers:
click to enlarge
Above: map of GHCN2 land stations (thanks to commenter Carrick at Lucia’s)
Note the cross section of the GISS data, most of the warmth is at the Arctic where there are no thermometers. The Antarctic comes in a close second, though it has a few thermometers at bases on the perimeter of the continent plus a couple at and near the center. Note the flat plateaus are each pole.
The effects of interpolation become clearer when you do a 250 km map instead of 1200 km:
click to enlarge
Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=2&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=1203&year1=2010&year2=2010&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=250&pol=reg
All of the sudden, the hot Arctic disappears. It disappears because there are no thermometers there as demonstrated by the cross section image which stops at about 80N.
Interestingly, the global surface anomaly also drops, from 0.80°C at 1200km of interpolation to 0.77°C with an interpolation of 250km.
One of the things that I and many other people criticize GISS for is the use of the 1951-1980 base period which they adopted as their “standard” base period. That period encompasses a lot of cool years, so anomalies plotted against that base period will tend to look warmer.
This famous GISS graph of surface temperatures from weather stations, shown worldwide in media outlets, is based on the 1951-1980 period:
Uncertainty bars (95% confidence limits) are shown for both the annual and five-year means, account only for incomplete spatial sampling of data.”]
Caption from GISS: Our traditional analysis using only meteorological station data is a line plot of global annual-mean surface air temperature change, with the base period 1951-1980, derived from the meteorological station network [This is an update of Figure 6(b) in Hansen et al. (2001).
GISS doesn’t provide a utility to replot the graph above with a different base period on their webpage here http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/ but I can demonstrate what would happen to the GISS global maps using a different base period by using their plot selector here http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/
Watch what happens when we use the same base period as the UAH satellite data, which is 1979-2009. The 1200km interpolated global temperature anomaly for Dec-Jan-Feb 2010 drops more than half to 0.38°C from 0.80°C.
That number is not so alarming now is it? As for the graphic, the flaming red is still there in the same places because the anomaly map colors always stay the same, no matter what the absolute temperature scale is. In the first map with the 1951-1980 base period, the max positive anomaly was 6.4°C for 1200km and 8.8°C for 250km, while in the one below with the 1979-2009 base period the max positive anomaly of 7.1C If colors were assigned to absolute temperatures, this map would look cooler than it’s counterpart with the 1951-1980 base period.
click to enlarge
Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=2&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=1203&year1=2010&year2=2010&base1=1979&base2=2009&radius=1200&pol=reg
And here’s the 250km presentation, note that the global surface temp drops to 0.34°C
click to enlarge
Source: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/do_nmap.py?year_last=2010&month_last=2&sat=4&sst=0&type=anoms&mean_gen=1203&year1=2010&year2=2010&base1=1979&base2=2009&radius=250&pol=reg
So it is clear, with the GISS anomaly presentation, you can look at it many different ways, and get many different answers. Who decides then which maps and graphs with what base periods and interpolations get sent out in press releases? Jim? Gavin?, Reto? Consensus over coffee at Monks?
The answer as to what base period GISS chooses in temperature anomaly maps to present to the public is easily answered by looking at their main page here: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/
Here’s a thumbnail of the page, and the full size version of the second graph from the top, note the caption on the top of the graph:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/giss_main_feb2010.png
Clearly, they prefer the base period of 1951-1980 as the default base period for the public presentation [as well as 1200 km smoothing] and by choosing that, the GISS results look a lot more alarming than they might be if a different base period was used, such as the 1979-2009 period used by UAH and RSS.
Anomalies can show anything you want based of choosing the base period. For example, a simple thought experiment. I could choose a base period from 11,000 years ago, during the last ice age, and plot maps and graphs of today’s temperatures against that base period. Would we see red? You betcha.
Here’s a graph that shows reconstructed northern hemisphere temps at the end of the last ice age 11k years ago, they were about 4.5°C cooler than today. Granted it’s not a global temp, but close enough for government work.
So if I used a 30 year slice of temperature 11,000 years before the present as a baseline period, our GISTEMP map would look something like this:
Obviously the map above is not an accurate representation, just a visual guesstimate. The more excitable who frequent here will likely cry foul at my abuse of the image. But it does illustrate how choices of colors and baseline periods can have a distinct effect on the final visual.
Using a cold baseline period in the past (in this case 4.5°C globally cooler than the present) makes the present look broiling hot.
Anomalies are all about the starting choices made by people. Nature doesn’t give a hoot about anomalies. Generally, people don’t either. Imagine if your local TV weather forecaster gave tomorrow’s forecast in anomalies rather than absolute temperatures. He might say something like:
It’s going to be a hot one folks! Tomorrow we’ll have a high temperature that is 0.8C warmer than the 1951-1980 historical baseline for this city. Dress accordingly.
Useful isn’t it? Even more useful if he’s the weatherman in Svalbaard and people anticipating a heat wave go out in shorts and tank tops in mid February.
While anomalies are fine for illustrating many things, including temperature, bear in mind it’s all about the starting conditions chosen by the individuals doing the analysis. It’s all about choosing a baseline “normal”, which is subjective.
So when Joe Bastardi looks at the GISS map of the world, sees red, and wonders why we have a growing ice presence, the answer is in the choice of baseline and the choice of colors used to calculate and represent the anomaly.
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Georgie |
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