Arctic melt raises strategic issues, US defence officials warn

PeteJul 10th, 2007 - 15:38:56

What's this - a branch of Government admitting that Global Warming is happening ? Hope Bush doesn't know

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wimb reportJul 10th, 2007 - 16:57:02

Jul 07 - Officials at Live Earth Johannesburg have blamed the effects of climate change for poor audience attendance at yesterday's South African event.

Organiser John Langford believes extremely cold weather in the region - it snowed last week for the first time in a quarter of a century - kept people away from the concert, which starred Joss Stone, UB40, Angelique Kidjo and Baaba Maal.

Speaking before the event, Langford said, 'We're expecting 10,000 here tonight. It's a bit chilly, and we've had a strange winter... is it climate change? We had snow in Jo'burg last week for the first time in 25 years.'

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realnessJul 10th, 2007 - 16:58:52

You cant worry about global warming without taking care of terrorists, thankyou g.bush...

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icemanJul 10th, 2007 - 17:00:52

Jul 07 - Solar scientist David Archibald's paper to Lavoisier Group seminar showing evidence that the world will cool between now and 2030.
Excerpts: 'The next ice age is overdue.

'Ken Schatten is the solar physicist with the best track record in predicting solar cycles. His work suggests a return to the advancing glaciers and delayed spring snow melt of the Little Ice Age, for an indeterminate period.

'In the near term, the Earth will experience a significant cooling due to a quieter Sun.

'In a few short years, we will have a reversal of the warming of the 20th century.

'Our generation has bathed in the warm glow of a benign, giving Sun, but the next will suffer a Sun that is less giving, and the Earth will be less fruitful.

'If it doesn’t feel hotter than it was in 1980, it is because it isn’t hotter than it was in 1980.

'Most rural temperature records in the United States were set in the 1930s and 1940s. Greenland had its highest recorded temperatures in the 1930s and has been cooler since.

'The hottest year to date in the United States was 1936.

'What I have shown in this presentation is that carbon dioxide is largely irrelevant to the Earth’s climate. The carbon dioxide that Mankind will put into the atmosphere over the next few hundred years will offset a couple of millennia of post-Holocene Optimum cooling before we plunge into the next ice age.

'There is no correlation in the geologic record between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature. The Earth went into an ice age 450 million years ago despite a level of atmospheric carbon dioxide that is ten times what it is today.

'There are no deleterious consequences of higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

'Higher atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are wholly beneficial. Anthropogenic Global Warming is so minuscule that the effect cannot be measured from year to year, and even from generation to generation.

'Coral reefs first formed back in the Devonian period when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were ten times what they are today.'

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!!Jul 10th, 2007 - 19:41:34

Amazing how people can try and spin facts to suit their imbedded point of view - several record high temperatures are dismissed as 'not being unusual, so doesn't prove Global Warming is happening',
yet a cold day which hasn't been matched for a quarter century is suddenly taken as evidence that the next ice age is on the way
Plus -

Firstly, some background. In a rather silly post from NZ denialist Vincent Grey over at Jen Marohasy, a fellow by the name of David Archibald popped up, spouted the usual shill crap, and the directed readers to his relatively recently published paper in Energy & Environment.

You asked for solar - climate papers. Look no further than my own effort:
www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/Archibald.pdf
Now, Lavoisier is a crazed denialist group based in Australia so the fact that the article was reprinted there didn’t bode well.

Archibald goes on to claim his paper is peer-reviewed. Ian Castles informs me that E&E really does have a peer-review process and he has, in fact, reviewed papers for them himself.

But in this case, I’m not so sure. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement.

So, what is so wrong with Archibald, D.C. (2006) Solar cycles 24 and 25 and predicted climate response?

To begin with, there are some, ahh, editorial and grammatical errors.

Pick what is wrong with these two paragraphs at the top of page 31.

Badalyan, Obridko and Sykora’s projection of solar cycle 24 maximum of approximately 50 is shown in figure 1 with solar cycle activity back to the end of the Maunder Minimum. Solar cycle 25 is also expected to be weak. The rise in amplitudes prior to the Dalton Minimum mimics the rise in amplitudes from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.

Badalyan, Obridko and Sykora’s projection of a solar cycle 24 maximum of approximately 50 is shown in Figure 1 with solar cycle activity back to the end of the Maunder Minimum. Solar cycle 25 is also expected to be weak. The rise in amplitudes prior to the Dalton Minimum mimics the rise in amplitude from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century.
Yes, Archibald has written the same paragraph twice. It doesn’t appear to be a printing error either as each of the paragraphs are slightly different (i.e. projection of solar cycle 24 maximum verses projection of a solar cycle 24 maximum).

The Dalton Minimum is spelt Delton below. There’s a space missing in …..experienced a2.0C decline.

Quibbles maybe, but basic errors such as these indicate little effort was put into the writing and no effort was put into the review. E&E editorial staff clearly don't read the papers they publish.

In the introduction Archibald gives a backgrounder on some of the literature linking solar cycles to climate. Mentioned are the correlations between the solar cycle amplitude and temperature, solar cycle length and temperature etc. It’s fairly shoddy and ignores the literature which refutes the idea that these correlations indicate that solar changes are the main driving force behind recent climate change. I don’t intend to look at the introduction in depth here.

What I do intend to cover is the ‘original work’ part of the paper.

To determine a temperature baseline for predicting response to solar cycles 24 and 25 (we’re currently in 23), Archibald takes a startling approach. Instead of using world-wide temperature data, only data from the US mainland is used. Additionally, Archibald decided that only data from rural meteorological stations should be used to avoid the urban heat island effect. Fair enough, you may say. But the catch is, he chose just 5 stations out of the hundreds and hundreds available! Not only did he only choose 5, all 5 were within several hundred miles of each other in South Eastern USA!

The possibility of these stations being representative of anything other than the small local region they covered is non-existent.

There must be something special about the chosen five. And there sure is – they show lower temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century compared to the first half. This actually forms one of the major conclusions of the paper!



The conclusion is that for the current and recent temperature record for all of North America:

The profile indicates that temperatures remain below the average over the first half of the twentieth century.
What Archibald forgets to mention is that most met. stations across the US and indeed most of the world show that it is warmer in the latter half of the 20th century than the first. This trend is evident in non-heat island affected rural stations, as well as urban stations.

Archibald has clearly showed a regional phenomena and falsely claimed it is representative, when even the NASA GISStemp database he has used shows many, many stations where this isn’t the case. All are ignored and the reason why isn't given (though I think we can hazard a guess).

I find it simply unbelievable that Archibald would make such an obviously wrong claim that is based on insufficient non-representative data. But he does, and it’s there for all to see.

Moving right along.

Archibald then decides to predict what the temperature response to solar cycles 24 and 25 will be. To do this he first hypothesizes that temperature is responding to solar cycle amplitude (in this case, the number of sunspots per year). Instead of 5 meteorological stations, this time he decides to use only 1, De Bilt in the Netherlands!

Archibald produces this strange graph, with only 1 data point per solar cycle verses average annual temperature. A liner regression (I’m assuming) is performed, but there is no mention of the slope of the line or its R^2 value. Ignoring this, Archibald claims:

By expanding the time interval studied to 1705 to 2003, a good correlation of temperature and solar cycle amplitude is evident. This is shown in Figure 4 which demonstrates a correlation between solar cycle amplitude and annual average temperature at de bilt, Netherlands.




Here’s the thing, temperature data for De Bilt and sunspot data are available are available for every year from 1705. Why not see if they correlate? Here’s why:



The correlation is very weak (the slope of the line) and the predicative value of the model is also very weak (the R^2) value. Unsurprisingly, it shows that other factors are more important in driving temperature in De Bilt.

So what data points did Archibald use? To be honest, I can’t work it out. It appears that he has taken the maximum solar amplitude value for each cycle and plotted it against the temperature for that year only.



As you can see, some of the data points are the same, but some aren’t. One doesn’t like to suggest that he’s fudged the data so I’m sure there’s a good explanation ;)

This time the slope’s slightly better but the predictive value is even worse. And by ignoring nearly all the available data, the graph is meaningless anyway.

What’s interesting is what Archibald hasn’t shown, as usual. Here’s the smoothed solar cycle data from 1706. You’ll note maximum amplitude of each solar cycle has been getting smaller since 1956.



Here’s De Bilt’s temperature plotted over the same period (5-year floating average shown).



You’ll notice temperature has been sharply increasing since 1960-odd, which is exactly the opposite of what should be happening according to Archibald’s model. Larger solar cycle amplitude should equate to higher temperature, only that hasn’t been the case for some 50 odd years. He has, of course, completely ignored this, maybe becasue it's likely due to that evil conspiracy, AGW.

Archibald shows another graph, which I couldn’t be bothered re-creating, as I’ve really no idea what he’s done, that purportedly shows that solar cycle length displays an even better correlation with temperature than solar cycle amplitude (again, no slope and no R^2).



Here it gets weird. Archibald goes on to conclude that based on solar cycles 24 and 25 with predicted amplitudes of around 50 (hardly anyone is actually predicting this, most predictions are much higher), the correlation equation from his second graph shows a declining temperature of 1.5C in the US!. But his second graph has a correlation based on solar cycle length, not solar cycle amplitude, so it isn’t applicable! He then claims in the next paragraph that the 1.5C figure actually comes from the temperature response to cycles 5 and 6, and not the correlation I guess.

I’ll fire of an email to Archibald and hopefully he’ll drop by to explain how I’ve got it all horribly wrong and defend his paper. Or maybe not.

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icemanJul 10th, 2007 - 20:48:03

Good try but it didnt work...Is Al Gore on the board of Occidental Petroleum?

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!!Jul 10th, 2007 - 22:01:21

If you want to believe fairy tales and spin and biased scientists, but ignore facts that's your funeral

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icemanJul 10th, 2007 - 22:30:57

Scientists who probed two kilometers (1.2 miles) through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record said Thursday the planet was far warmer hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed.
DNA of trees, plants and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest.

That contrasts sharply with the prevailing view that a lush forest of this kind could only have existed in Greenland as recently as 2.4 million years ago, according to a summary of the study, which is published Thursday in the journal Science.

The samples suggest the temperature probably reached 10 degrees C (50 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer and -17 C (1 F) in the winter.

They also indicated that during the last period between ice ages, 116,000-130,000 years ago, when temperatures were on average 5 C (9 F) higher than now, the glaciers on Greenland did not completely melt away.

'These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken,' said Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a co-author of the paper.


'What we've learned is that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought.'

In a separate paper, also published in Science, European experts said they had analysed the world's deepest ice core, enabling them to reconstruct patterns of warming and glaciation over the past 800,000 years.

The 3,260-metre (10,595-feet) core was drilled into the East Antarctica icesheet at the Franco-Italian base, Dome C. The drillers, gathered in a venture called the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) stopped just 15 metres (48.75 feet) short of the bedrock.

Using traces of the hydrogen isotope deuterium in air bubbles trapped in the ice layers, the scientists built a record of greenhouse-gas concentrations over the aeons, which in turn provides a record of temperature.

They found the temperature varied widely, by as much as 15 C (27 F) over the 800,000 years. In the last Ice Age, which ended around 11,000 years ago, the temperature was 10 C (18 F) lower than today.

The EPICA team had previously analysed the Dome C core to a depth equivalent to 650,000 years ago.

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realnessJul 10th, 2007 - 22:34:42

The real fairy tale is now calling Global Warming, 'climate change'. I guess stating there is a concensus is fact? Just call everything oil spin and bury your head in denial. Yes if you dont fight terrorists you cant worry about 'climate change'...Thankyou G. Bush...Ignore terrorists and you get 911...Thanks Al Gore and Clinton...

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!!Jul 11th, 2007 - 07:47:42

Solar activity 'not the cause of global warming'
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 11 July 2007
Claims that increased solar activity is the cause of global warming - rather than man-made greenhouse gases - have been comprehensively disproved by a detailed study of the Sun.

Scientists have delivered the final blow to the theory that recent global warming can be explained by variations in the natural cycles of the Sun - a favourite refuge for climate sceptics who dismiss the influence of greenhouse-gas emissions.

An analysis of the records of all of the Sun's activities over the past few decades - such as sunspot cycles and magnetic fields - shows that since 1985 solar activity has decreased significantly, while global warming has continued to increase.

Mike Lockwood, of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, Oxfordshire, said: 'In 1985, the Sun did a U-turn in every respect. It no longer went in the right direction to contribute to global warming. We think it's almost completely conclusive proof that the Sun does not account for the recent increases in global warming.'

The study, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A, shows there is no doubt that solar activity over the past 20 years has run in the opposite direction to global warming, and therefore cannot explain rises in average global temperatures.

Dr Lockwood and his colleague Claus Fröhlich, of the World Radiation Centre in Davos Dorf, Switzerland, have produced the most powerful counter argument to suggestions that current warming is part of the natural cycle of solar activities. 'There is considerable evidence for solar influence on Earth's pre-industrial climate, and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial change in the first half of the last century,' they write.

However, since about 1940 there has been no evidence to suggest that increases in global average temperatures were caused by solar activity. 'Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanisms is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified,' the two scientists said.

The theory that past changes in solar activity may have explained some changes in the climate before the industrial revolution is not in dispute. In previous centuries, for instance, notably between about 1420 and 1570, when the Vikings had to abandon their Greenland settlements, solar minima corresponded with unusually cool weather, such as the 'little ice age' of the 17th century.

But climate sceptics have exploited this to dispute the idea that man-made emissions are responsible for global warming. In the recent Channel 4 programme The Great Global Warming Swindle, the rise in solar activity over the latter half of the 20th century was erroneously presented as perfectly matching the rise in global average temperatures.

Dr Lockwood said he was outraged when he saw the documentary, because of the way the programme-makers used graphs of temperature rises and sunspot cycles that were cut off in the 1980s, when the two trends went in the opposite direction.

'The trouble is that the theory of solar activity and climate was being misappropriated to apply to modern-day warming. The sceptics were taking perfectly good science and bringing it into disrespect,' Dr Lockwood said.

The Royal Society said yesterday: 'There is a small minority which is seeking to confuse the public on the causes of climate change. They are often misrepresenting the science, when the reality is that the evidence is getting stronger every day.'

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PeterJul 11th, 2007 - 10:48:35

Iceman - to answer to your question 'is Al Gore on the board of Occidental Petroleum' - List of board members follows:

Occidental Petroleum Corp.
(OXY:NYSE)

July 10, 2007
Name (Connections) Board Relationships Title Age
Ray Irani 83 Relationships Chairman of the Board, Chief Executive Officer, President, Chairman of Executive Committee, Member of Dividend Committee and Member of Charitable Contributions Committee 71

Other Board Members on Board of Directors*
Name (Connections) Board Relationships Primary Company Age
John Chalsty 125 Relationships Teagle Foundation Incorporated, The --
Rodolfo Segovia 11 Relationships Occidental Petroleum Corp. 69
Aziz Syriani 48 Relationships The Olayan Group 63
Rosemary Tomich 11 Relationships Occidental Petroleum Corp. 68
Spencer Abraham 11 Relationships The Abraham Group, LLC 53
Ronald Burkle 172 Relationships The Yucaipa Companies, LLC 53
Edward Djerejian 40 Relationships Global Industries Ltd. 66
John Feick 11 Relationships Occidental Petroleum Corp. 62
Irvin Maloney 11 Relationships Occidental Petroleum Corp. 75
Walter Weisman 84 Relationships Fresenius Medical Care AG & Co. KGAA 70
R. Dreier 58 Relationships Ryland Group Inc.

So, in case it is too difficult for you to work out for yourself, the answer to your question is NO. (and Gore holdings in Occidental were sold more than 6 years ago)

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PeterJul 11th, 2007 - 11:07:50

Iceman - you rather shoot yourself in the foot with the quote of a 15 degree temperature range over 800,000 years. A little thought will reveal that this is a mere 1 degree change every 50,000 years or so. Yet currently, temperatures have risen by 3/4 of a degree in just the last 100 years. It's this rate of current change which is the problem, not events which changed extremely slowly thousands of years ago
Perhaps you need a few other arguments to bolster your flagging case. How about -
Secret group discovered in Greenland hacking icebergs to bits with spades to demonstrate global warming.
Montana Institute of snow - analysed 9 different snowflakes in the Andes and concluded they're bigger now that the old days. Thus, although there are less snowflakes, there must be 80% more snow
Or the claim that 55% of glaciers are growing - in 21st Century Science and Technology, which just happens to be owned by an american millionaire named Lyndon Larouche (who also claimed the British Royal family is running an international drugs syndicate !) Clearly a reliable source
Or the drowning of the islands of Kiribati was caused by excessive condensation from their cooking pots

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realnessJul 11th, 2007 - 13:00:03

Yawn

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