Breaking…

Vast iceberg breaks off Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctic

(Question: These “icebergs” they speak of – where did they come from in the pre-warming era, when ice shelves remained intact?)

The full Wilkins 6,000 square mile ice shelf is just 0.39% of the current ice sheet (just 0.1% of the extent last September). Only a small portion of it between 1/10th-1/20th of Wilkins has separated so far, like an icicle falling off a snow and ice covered house. And this winter is coming on quickly. In fact the ice is returning so fast, it is running an amazing 60% ahead (4.0 vs 2.5 million square km extent) of last year when it set a new record. The ice extent is already approaching the second highest level for extent since the measurements began by satellite in 1979 and just a few days into the Southern Hemisphere winter and 6 months ahead of the peak. Wilkins like all the others that temporarily broke up will refreeze soon. We are very likely going to exceed last year’s record. Yet the world is left with the false impression Antarctica’s ice sheet is also starting to disappear.

“Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”
Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”
Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant.”
Duffy: “It’s not only that it’s not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there’s any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it’s put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary.”
[…]
Marohasy: “That’s right … These findings actually aren’t being disputed by the meteorological community. They’re having trouble digesting the findings, they’re acknowledging the findings, they’re acknowledging that the data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they’re about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide.”
Duffy: “From what you’re saying, it sounds like the implications of this could be considerable …”
Marohasy: “That’s right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer’s interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point.”

Related: At island retreat, Branson and friends seek to save a world ‘on fire’

NOAA Class “A” station at Hay Springs, NE.

More

They write these headlines without so much as a nod to their own absurdity – “The Mystery of Global Warming’s Missing Heat” (link fixed)

Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren’t quite understanding what their robots are telling them.
This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.
In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.

Now, watch the struggle to make the facts fit the narrative;

One possibility is that the sea has, in fact, warmed and expanded — and scientists are somehow misinterpreting the data from the diving buoys.
But if the aquatic robots are actually telling the right story, that raises a new question: Where is the extra heat all going?
Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research says it’s probably going back out into space. The Earth has a number of natural thermostats, including clouds, which can either trap heat and turn up the temperature, or reflect sunlight and help cool the planet.
That can’t be directly measured at the moment, however.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have adequate tracking of clouds to determine exactly what role they’ve been playing during this period,”
Trenberth says.It’s also possible that some of the heat has gone even deeper into the ocean, he says. Or it’s possible that scientists need to correct for some other feature of the planet they don’t know about. It’s an exciting time, though, with all this new data about global sea temperature, sea level and other features of climate.
“I suspect that we’ll able to put this together with a little bit more perspective and further analysis,” Trenberth says. “But what this does is highlight some of the issues and send people back to the drawing board.”

Kevin Trenberth has been mentioned here before – in this 2005 quote from a resigning Chris Landsea, citing IPPC misrepresentation of hurricane research;

It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity.

Two years later, Trenberth was still using hurricane Katrina as evidence of global warming.

Because while the headline “United Kingdom collapses to size of a marble” may be entertaining in the abstract…

“We are halfway through March, and the sun has been very quiet, Ap magnetic index remains low, sunspots are zilch, all we have is a bit of solar wind from the occasional coronal hole. […] This is the one that worries me though, as I’ve pointed out before, we have that step function (or discontinuity) in 2005 (see red arrows) which gives the impression that something just “switched off” in the solar magnetic dynamo.”

While you’re there, check out this post and help out if you can.

Will the Real Global Average Temperature Trend Please Rise?

In AR4 IPCC projects warming of 0.2C per decade for the next two decades in a variety of its climate change scenarios. That will take a lot more warming than we’ve seen in recent decades. And with the leveling off of the trend in recent years, even if an upward trend resumes, at present it seems highly unlikely that we will see a rise of 0.4C over the next two decades. Of course, the future has a way of humbling all forecasts. But perhaps the apocalypse is not as near at hand as some fear.

Or, as climatologist David Phillips puts it – “storm porn”;

To date, this winter is the coldest in 12 years and Phillips’s winter forecast is considered 70 to 75 per cent accurate, which he said is pretty good for a long-range prediction.
“It wasn’t necessarily the perfect forecast but I think to many Canadians it was bang on because there was something to complain about, it was a tough winter,” he said.
“And I must say, in kind of a perverse way I’ve been delighted in a way the way winter unfolded, I felt confident that it would.”

Whoa. 75% accuracy is “pretty good” for a seasonal forecast? He get in touch with those climate modellers, no? They have it nailed down to the century.
Related: The media snowjob on global warming. And brace yourself for more manufactured “storm porn”, as this Ottawa Citizen report suggests that “145 leading Canadian scientists” managed to put a 500-page report together blaming this winter’s widely predicted “wild weather” on “more heat into the atmosphere” without managing to stumble across this year’s La Niña, or the news that global temperatures have been slowly dropping for the past 10 years.

(Source – “Jim B” in the comments here)

“No matter how many slides he shows you, it is too warming!”

More innocent victims of planetary fever…

KARE-TV reported that ice is unusually thick in Minnesota this winter, and it is killing the fish.
On some lakes, that thick ice sheet, and snow cover have proved to be a double-whammy for the fish population. The DNR says that blocks sunlight, affects photosynthesis, and robs fish of oxygen. So-called winterkill can then occur.
So, rather than leave the fish to die, the DNR temporarily lifted the limits on more than 30 lakes this winter. Anglers can catch as many fish as they want. “They would die anyway, might as well have an ability to use these fish,” said Roy Johannes, DNR Fisheries Program Consultant.

With over 500 USHCN climate stations now surveyed –

13% of the sites (those rated “1” or “2”) met acceptable standards.

It seems like just yesterday that we stayed glued to the television sets as the permanent evacuation of Manhattan unfolded on the cable news networks…

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is ‘plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately’, they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Hard to believe it’s been three years.
h/t

Big honking climate science puzzle here – FORTRAN geek needed, apply within.

Please – If you do not have the skills/background to contribute to the linked discussion, don’t clutter their work with off-topic junk. Use this one for general comments.
But I do encourage you read the thread, as something very curious happens …

Continue reading →

This just in from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration;

Increased Hurricane Losses Due to More People, Wealth Along Coastlines, Not Stronger Storms, New Study Says
A team of scientists have found that the economic damages from hurricanes have increased in the U.S. over time due to greater population, infrastructure, and wealth on the U.S. coastlines, and not to any spike in the number or intensity of hurricanes.
“We found that although some decades were quieter and less damaging in the U.S. and others had more land-falling hurricanes and more damage, the economic costs of land-falling hurricanes have steadily increased over time,” said Chris Landsea, one of the researchers as well as the science and operations officer at NOAA’s National Hurricane Center in Miami. “There is nothing in the U.S. hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts.”

BBC;

A bus company’s efforts to cut global warming emissions have led to services being disrupted by cold weather.
First Eastern Counties Buses, which runs services in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, said bio-diesel had turned waxy in sub-zero temperatures.
The thicker consistency of the diesel meant fuel lines became blocked.
The company said it had suspended use of the bio-diesel, and was refuelling buses with ultra low-sulphur diesel which is not temperature sensitive.

h/t

About 100,000 migratory birds disappeared in recent fierce snow storms in eastern China, state media reported Sunday.
Meanwhile, as a world warms…

Snow continued to fall in Jerusalem Tuesday after an overnight storm which blanketed city streets.
A raging snow storm that blanketed most of Greece over the weekend also continued into the early morning hours on Monday, plunging the country into sub-zero temperatures.
Because of a harsh and snowy winter, wildlife managers will start feeding starving deer near Eagle and Wolcott [Colorado] for just the third time in almost 25 years.
A cold air mass with west winds is expected to drive wind chills to the 20 below zero mark after midnight tonight. The cold will linger over much of southeastern Wisconsin Tuesday and Wednesday, with overnight wind chills of 11 to 25 below, according to the NWS.
The number of Afghans killed by the chilly weather continued in the snow-covered Afghanistan has reached almost 1000 …
News agencies said it was the most severe frost on Hoang Lien Son Mountain in at least 40 years – and the longest cold snap ever recorded in Vietnam.

I’ve noticed this pattern, too:

The scientists who interest me in this field are those who can draw on the experience of a lot of people who have come before them. And uniformly in these areas I find scepticism. People who write mathematical models of complex systems for a living tend to find the climate models very unconvincing. Geologists find the arguments very unconvincing. Engineers find the arguments unconvincing. And astrophysicists find the arguments unconvincing.

But among government-funded alarmists we find, unsurprisingly, unanimous alarm. After all, their research funding would dry up without the steady drumbeat of doom

Despite having hundreds of sonar contacts over the years, the trail has since gone cold and Rines believes that Nessie may be dead, a victim of global warming.

At the National Research Council;

Tapping oversees the operation of a 60-year-old radio telescope that he calls a “stethoscope for the sun.” Recent magnetic field readings are as low as he’s ever seen, he says, and he’s worked with the instrument for more than 25 years. If the sun remains this quiet for another a year or two, it may indicate the star has entered a downturn that, if history is any precedent, could trigger a planetary cold spell that could bring massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere.
The last such solar funk corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. While there were competing causes for the climatic shift—including the Black Death’s depopulation of tree-cutting Europeans and, more substantially, increased volcanic activity spewing ash into the atmosphere—the sun’s lethargy likely had something to do with it.

(emphasis mine).