By Kenneth Richard on 20. December 2018
Newly published science indicates glaciers in the High Arctic Svalbard/Barents Sea region have rapidly advanced in the last decade — surging 16 kilometers since 2008, which is the greatest ice growth since 1890.
About 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, this region was 6°C warmer than today. Consequently, the region’s glaciers were much smaller (or non-existent) at that time and the sea ice was much less extensive (0-10% spring sea ice vs. today’s 80%).
“Most large tidewater glaciers in Svalbard are known to have surged at least once in the last few hundred years. However, very little information exists on the frequency, timing or magnitude of surges prior to the Little Ice Age (LIA) maximum in ∼1900. We investigate the sediment-landform assemblages produced by multiple advances of the Nathorstbreen glacier system (NGS) in order to reconstruct its Late Holocene surge history. The glacier has recently undergone one of the largest surges ever observed in Svalbard, advancing ∼16 km from 2008 to 2016.”
“By combining these data with previous marine geological investigations in inner and outer Van Keulenfjorden, we demonstrate that NGS [Nathorstbreen glacier system] has advanced at least four times prior to the recent 2008–2016 surge: twice at ∼2.7 kyr BP, at ∼1160 AD, and in ∼1890. This represents a unique record of the timing and magnitude of Late Holocene tidewater glacier surges in Svalbard.”
“Reconstructing Holocene Glacier and Climate Fluctuations From Lake Sediments in Vårfluesjøen, Northern Spitsbergen … Here, we present work from the northern coast of Spitsbergen in which we unravel the sediment sequence from a distal glacier-fed lake, Vårfluesjøen. … During the early Holocene, the glaciers in the Vårfluesjøen catchment were considerably smaller than today or had even melted completely. … D’Andrea et al. (2012) […] point to increased heat transport via the West Spitsbergen Current, and accompanying increased winter precipitation, rather than cold temperatures, to have caused LIA expansions on Svalbard.”
“During the early and mid-Holocene period, other glacier reconstructions from the west coast of Svalbard suggests that many glaciers were small or completely melted during this time interval (Svendsen and Mangerud, 1997; Røthe et al., 2015; van der Bilt et al., 2015; de Wet et al., 2018). Mangerud and Svendsen (2018) postulated that August temperatures in Svalbard were 6°C warmer from 10000 to 9000 cal. yr. BP than they are today, based on the presence of Zirfaea crispate.”
“About 60% of Svalbard is covered by glaciers today, but many of these glaciers were much reduced in size or gone in the Early Holocene. High resolution modeling of the glacial isostatic rebound reveals that the largest glaciers in Nordaustlandet and eastern Spitsbergen survived the Early Holocene warming, while the smaller, more peripheral glaciers, especially in the northwest, started to form about 5,500 years ago, and reached 3/4 of their current size about 600 years ago. Relative sea level has been rising during the last few millennia in the north and western parts of Spitsbergen, while land still emerges in the remaining part of Svalbard. Here we show that this sea level rise in the northwest is caused by the regrowth of glaciers in the Mid- to Late Holocene that slowed down, and even reversed, the post-glacial isostatic uplift and caused the crust to subside over large areas of Spitsbergen.”
“In the Korovinskoe record (Fig. 10A) the first increase in temperate deciduous tree/shrub percentages is dated to ca. 10,400 cal BP followed by a second, more pronounced increase (up to 21%) between ca. 10,100 and 9800 cal BP. The latter rise corresponds to maximum summer SSTs (i.e. 6-7°C above the mean modern SST value) reconstructed in the NE North Atlantic (Fig. 10E) and the NW Barents Sea (Fig. 10F).”
“A pollen-based reconstruction of the summer temperature anomaly at Lake Kurjanovas (Fig. 1) in Latvia suggests that the warmest interval in the area located ca. 270 km west of Korovinskoe occurred ca. 8100-5600 cal BP (Fig. 10C; Heikkila and Seppa, 2010).”
“Mangerud and Svendsen (2018) reported appearance of the most warmth-demanding mollusk species ca. 1000 km farther north of its current distribution indicating that August temperatures on Svalbard were 6°C warmer at around 10,200-9200 cal BP and that the regional climate was as warm as present by ca. 11,000 cal BP.”
“The core 70 site is characterised by extensive modern sea ice conditions (≈80% SpSIC [Spring Sea Ice Concentration]) and the downcore record represents a gradual evolution of sea ice cover in the northern Barents Sea from ice-free conditions during the early Holocene to prolonged seasonal sea ice presence prevalent in the region today. The primarily insolation-controlled southward expansion of sea ice cover previously inferred for the core site throughout the Holocene (Belt et al., 2015; Berben et al., 2017) is reflected in the CT model assessment. Consistent with the onset of the Holocene Thermal Maximum and the resulting proximity of the annual maximum sea ice edge to the core site between ca. 9.5–8.5 cal kyr BP evident from low PIIIIP25-derived SpSIC (ca. 5–15%), the CT model predicts mostly marginal sea ice conditions during this interval.”
“From ca. 10.0–1.5 cal kyr BP, ice-free conditions characterised the core 11 site, as evidenced by consistently low SpSIC (ca. <10%) and marginal sea ice conditions predicted by the CT model, and further supported by an enhancement of AW [Arctic Water] inflow to the core site from ca. 9.8 cal kyr BP (Groot et al., 2014)”
Posted in Arctic, Cooling/Temperature, Glaciers, Sea Ice |
An inconvenient truth😁
Took the words right out of my mouth.
Inconvenient to whom?
Warmer ice moves faster and warmer air holds more water.
Some glaciers surging is a prediction of global warming. Most likely in the north.
Were much smaller or non-existent glaciers during at time when temperatures were 6 degrees C warmer as CO2 concentrations were hovering around 255 ppm…”a prediction of global warming”? Do the climate models agree that 255 ppm is compatible with a sea-ice-free Arctic where sea ice coverage is 80% today, at 410 ppm?
William Meek:
You wrote, “Inconvenient to whom?”
For starters, Inconvenient to the incessant narrative [of arctic ‘out of control’ warming].
Why is it “inconvenient”? The advancement or shrinkage of glaciers is mainly dependent on two competing factors. These are precipitation and temperature. It is perfectly possible to have retreating glaciers when temperatures are falling or advancing ones when temperatures are rising provided that precipitation is doing its job.
If this thread is designed to show that temperatures are falling, it simply fails to cut the mustard. This is regardless of whether real temperatures are actually rising or falling. If, on the other hand, the purpose is to counter some of the alarmism about melting glaciers, then it hits the mark.
Temperatures are falling relative to when? The long-term record says that it’s 6 degrees colder now in this Arctic region than it was 9,000 years ago. So yes, it’s much colder now than it was then.
Another paper (not included here because it’s in a different Arctic region) says that today’s glacier extent is the highest it’s been since the last ice age peak — no more recessed than 300 years ago, during the Little Ice Age. This would not appear consistent with the alarmist claims of “staggering” ice sheet and glacier melt during the last few decades.
Bjørk et al., 2018
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0277379118301495
“Here, we present the first record of direct Holocene ice-marginal changes of the Helheim Glacier following the initial deglaciation. By analysing cores from lakes adjacent to the present ice margin, we pinpoint periods of advance and retreat. We target threshold lakes, which receive glacial meltwater only when the margin is at an advanced position, similar to the present. We show that, during the period from 10.5 to 9.6 cal ka BP, the extent of Helheim Glacier was similar to that of today’s, after which it remained retracted for most of the Holocene until a re-advance caused it to reach its present extent at c. 0.3 cal ka BP, during the Little Ice Age (LIA). [The glacier’s present extent is not different than it was 300 years ago, during the Little ice Age.] Thus, Helheim Glacier’s present extent is the largest since the last deglaciation, and its Holocene history shows that it is capable of recovering after several millennia of warming and retreat. Furthermore, the absence of advances beyond the present-day position during for example the 9.3 and 8.2 ka cold events as well as the early-Neoglacial suggest a substantial retreat during most of the Holocene. … Our results show that the ice sheet significantly retreated during the HTM [Holocene Thermal Maximum] 8-5 ka BP when temperatures were 2-4°C warmer than now (Axford et al., 2013; Buizert et al., 2018). Reconstructed summer temperatures from central east Greenland show also a pronounced early Holocene warming (Axford et al., 2017). Therefore, we infer significant retreat during the HTM since the increasing cold conditions commencing at c. 5 cal. ka BP were not sufficient to advance the glacier margin to its present position.”
Isn’t it amazing, Kenneth, how cAGW can account for all phenomena, even opposite and contradictory data are no problem for it.? What a powerful theory. //sarc//
Of course. It’s a magic gas after all.
Yes, Kenneth. It’s all due to a magic gas. It’s so magic, that it can do anything …except fix what it breaks. I guess that makes it magically malicious?
For what paleontologists tell us is roughly 500 million years CO2 hasn’t caused any harm, and now it goes over to the dark side? Is it any wonder that we are skeptical of the high priests of that silly religion?!
->KR
Nowhere do you appear to address my point that you cannot deduce temperature changes from the shrinkage or expansion of glaciers unless you also know what has happened to precipitation. Some years ago, I looked at data from a number of glaciers and the nearest weather station to them with precipitation data. I found a very weak correlation with temperatures alone but a rather better one when I introduced precipitation.
I discussed these results with a friend, (unfortunately now dead), who was actually a glaciologist. He confirmed that what I had found was simply standard glaciology. Some glaciers shrink and others expand.
I fail to see what relevance temperatures ~ 9,000 years ago have to the much more recent warming/cooling and glacial expansion, (2008-2016), to which you refer. One could argue that it shows that large changes in temperature can occur through natural causes. However, it does not show that these natural causes are also active to any great extent today.
I have made my position on AGW fairly clear on earlier threads. To repeat: I do believe that CO2 does play some part in global warming but that it accounts for somewhat less than half what we have actually observed. I have also given theoretical reasons to doubt the existence of any large scale positive feedback via water vapour. There are a number of observations which support this view.
Finally, just to be awkward, it is just about possible that warming could cause a temporary expansion of glacial length without any contribution from extra precipitation. Ice at the top of a mountain could be softened by warming so that more of it flows downhill! However, this, unlike the rest of what I have written, is pure speculation.
“Nowhere do you appear to address my point that you cannot deduce temperature changes from the shrinkage or expansion of glaciers…” – Skeptic (to Kenneth)
Looked more to me like he was showing consistency of glacier extent with temperature, rather than using glacier extent as a proxy. Why? Because in the articles quoted a proxy of past temperature was mentioned, and it wasn’t glacier extent. I didn’t see any need for him to waste time addressing it.
“Mangerud and Svendsen (2018) postulated that August temperatures in Svalbard were 6°C warmer from 10000 to 9000 cal. yr. BP than they are today, based on the presence of Zirfaea crispate.”
Better stop using strawman arguments or people might suspect that you are a SebH clone.
And since the growth of glaciers in colder climate was dealt with in the literature Kenneth cited, I assume it was unnecessary for you to inform him, or those of us who read the article, of that.
“D’Andrea et al. (2012) […] point to increased heat transport via the West Spitsbergen Current, and accompanying increased winter precipitation, rather than cold temperatures, to have caused LIA expansions on Svalbard.”
Did YOU read the article?!
I don’t think he does. He reads the headline and introduction, and then just starts writing.
The glaciers in the Arctic expanded to their greatest extent of the last 10,000 years during the Little Ice Age, or especially during the 1600s to 1900 period. Most glaciologists cite the cooler temperatures during the LIA as an important factor in the glaciation.
For that matter, considering Canada, the Northern 1/3rd of the USA, the UK, Russia…were buried in kilometers-thick ice sheets about 20,000 years ago, when the Arctic was 15 degrees C colder than today…one would think there might just be a correlation between ice sheet growth/extent and cooler vs. warmer temperatures. But perhaps Skeptik has an alternative explanation for why much of the NH was buried in ice 20,000 years ago, and why 9,000 years ago much of Svalbard was ice-free and the sea ice non-existent whereas it’s 60% glaciated with 80% sea ice coverage today. After all, he’s a skeptic.
Scientists have associated the switch from ice mass losses during the 1990s to ice mass gains during the 2000s to the dramatic cooling in the Antarctic Peninsula during the 21st century.
Engel et al., 2018
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/67D9E7D9005A3C15236477226506C334/S0022143018000175a.pdf/surface_mass_balance_of_small_glaciers_on_james_ross_island_northeastern_antarctic_peninsula_during_20092015.pdf
“Two small glaciers on James Ross Island, the north-eastern Antarctic Peninsula, experienced surface mass gain between 2009 and 2015 as revealed by field measurements. A positive cumulative surface mass balance of 0.57 ± 0.67 and 0.11 ± 0.37 m w.e. was observed during the 2009–2015 period on Whisky Glacier and Davies Dome, respectively. … Ambrožová and Láska (2016) reported a significant decrease (0.03–0.15°C a−1 [-0.3 to -1.5°C per decade]) in the temperature along the AP [Antarctic Peninsula] over the 2005–15 period with the most prominent cooling at the Bibby Hill station on JRI [James Ross Island]
“The cumulative mass gain of the glaciers around the northern AP [Antarctic Peninsula] indicates a regional change from a predominantly negative surface mass balance in the first decade of the 21st century to a positive balance over the 2009–15 period. The change in the glacier mass balance follows a significant decrease in the warming rates reported from the northern AP [Antarctic Peninsula] since the end of the 20th century. The mass gain is also consistent with the regional trend of climate cooling on the eastern side of the AP [Antarctic Peninsula].”
You call yourself a skeptic, and yet you continue to “fail to see the relevance” in noting that those who believe today’s Arctic temperatures are so unprecedentedly hot that glacier and ice sheet melt is catastrophically occurring faster than ever before (due to the CO2 global warming pollution, of course) and that sea levels will consequently rise by “10 feet in the next 50 years“? Really?
You had no idea that the “global warming” and glacier melt occurring today in the Arctic is believed to be staggering, unprecedented and catastrophic because Arctic temperatures are hotter than they’ve ever been?
You really don’t understand why pointing out that the Arctic was 6 degrees C warmer 9,000 years ago (when CO2 concentrations were only in the 250s ppmv)…or that glaciers that exist today did not exist during the Early- and Mid-Holocene because the temperatures were too warm to sustain them… or that the Arctic was sea ice free for much of the Early Holocene… is not compatible with the claims of today that say modern temperatures, glacier melt, sea ice loss, sea level rise rates…are staggering, unprecedented and catastrophic?
I’m really having a hard time believing you are even a skeptic, Skeptik. You consistently come down on the side that says CO2 is heating up the oceans (which you call “established physics” without having any citing evidence to support this view), but you call yourself a skeptic because while you believe the CO2-heats-up-water paradigm is true, it’s been, uh, exaggerated. Climate sensitivity to CO2 is lower than the IPCC claims. That’s what you think qualifies you as a skeptic?
You claim to be a skeptic, but you write like a believer.
ERRATA
I wrote “…growth of glaciers in colder climate was dealt with…”.
That should have been “…growth of glaciers in warmer climate was dealt with…”
So no matter who is right, glaciers cannot be used as a measure of climate change or not. Alarmists even make the claim that snow cover or snowfall cannot be used as a measure of global warming. It will soon get to the point that NOTHING can be used as a measure of global warming. Just accept Al Gore’s Church of Climatology as the last word and bow down in reverence to the global warming GOD. What a farce.
Yes, global warming pollution (i.e., CO2) is predicted to cause glacier surges and glacier retreats, severe droughts and severe floods, sea ice retreat and sea ice expansion, cooling and warming, heat waves and cold snaps…
No matter what happens, it can be chalked up to global warming pollution (i.e., CO2). It’s unfalsifiable.
Of course, considering data for multiple major proxies and asking what the total picture is, will probably be something they won’t want us to do. Like this:
https://realclimatescience.com/2018/12/largest-increase-in-november-sea-ice-volume-on-record/
increasing sea ice volume
increasing snow cover
colder winters
decreasing avg., max., temperatures
I can’t help but notice that the advancing glaciers are consistent with the above, and that none make sense in a warming world, especially when taken together.
It’ll be interesting to see what the Seb-II BOT writes about why we should believe them instead of our own lying eyes.
The Arctic as a whole hasn’t warmed in the last 12 years or so…
https://www.climate4you.com/images/70-90N%20MonthlyAnomaly%20Since2000.gif
Ding et al., 2018
http://www.mdpi.com/2410-3896/3/2/12/htm
“[W]e find that there was a warming hiatus/slowdown since 2005 at Ny-Ålesund. Additionally, the variation of air temperature lags by 8–9 years, which implies that the warming hiatus probably exists in the Arctic but lags behind, globally. This phenomenon is not an isolated instance, An et al. [2017] reported that the warming rate above 4000 m of the Tibetan Plateau has been slowing since the mid-2000s. … From the correlation analysis, we found Ny-Ålesund could represent most Arctic areas, especially the Atlantic-Arctic sector. … Especially air temperature, the record of Ny-Ålesund can capture the variation of surface temperature over most of [the] Arctic. … The oscillations of atmospheric dynamic systems, the methods of energy transport from low to high latitudes, and feedback mechanisms of the Arctic on climate change may contribute to the warming hiatus. … [C]limate changes in polar areas remain difficult to predict, which indicates that the underlying mechanisms of polar amplification remain uncertain and debatable.”
—
Suvorov and Kitov, 2018 (Eastern Sayan, Siberia)
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12665-017-7220-6
“The authors examined the variability of activity of modern glaciation and variation of natural conditions of the periglacial zone on climate and on dendrochronological data. Results of larch and Siberian stone pine growth data were revealed at the higher border of forest communities. … It is believed that the temperature could be 3.5 °C warmer at the Holocene optimum than at the present time (Vaganov and Shiyatov 2005). … Since 2000, there has been growth of trees instability associated with a decrease in average monthly summer temperatures. … Since the beginning of 2000, decrease in summer temperatures was marked.”
—
Westergaard-Nielsen et al., 2018
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19992-w
“Here we quantify trends in satellite-derived land surface temperatures and modelled air temperatures, validated against observations, across the entire ice-free Greenland. … Warming trends observed from 1986–2016 across the ice-free Greenland is mainly related to warming in the 1990’s. The most recent and detailed trends based on MODIS (2001–2015) shows contrasting trends across Greenland, and if any general trend it is mostly a cooling. The MODIS dataset provides a unique detailed picture of spatiotemporally distributed changes during the last 15 years. … Figure 3 shows that on an annual basis, less than 36% of the ice-free Greenland has experienced a significant trend and, if any, a cooling is observed during the last 15 years (<0.15 °C change per year).”
Nice. And all from this year, too.
I wonder how much more data like that it will have to accumulate before the warmists become stranded and unable to continue pursuing their scam?
“The Arctic as a whole hasn’t warmed in the last 12 years or so…”
Really? Unfortunately, every single one of the “standard” temperature series disagrees with you. These are UAH, RSS, HadCrut4, GISS, NOAA and BEST. Berkeley Earth and UAH are particularly important in this respect since they are mainly run by sceptics. Every single one of these shows warming in the region 70-90 °N for the twelve years from 2006-2017. I have also calculated the warming trend for the shorter period 2008-2016 for each of these series. Once again, all of them show a warming. Finally, I have repeated the exercise for every possible 20 year period between 1979 and 2017. Again, they all show a warming.
All of these calculations are based on taking the average annual temperature and applying a linear regression against time to calculate the slope, (and correlation coefficient). Against this what do we have? A graph from what is basically a blog and a “paper” of dubious provenance from an obscure on-line journal dealing with just one place in the Arctic.
I have also looked in detail at Svalbard, which is the subject of one of the papers that you originally cited. The GHCN database for the station with this name shows that there have been no adjustments over the period 2008-2016. Nevertheless both adjusted and unadjusted data show a warming. BEST also shows a warming over this period for Spitsbergen, which is the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago.
It begins to look as though my suspicion that you were indeed using glacier growth as a proxy for temperature was justified.
Finally, it would be amazing if a 6°C temperature rise did not cause a reduction in ice coverage! This, I would suggest, has very little relevance to the period 2008-2016!
Wow, Skeptik. You continue to evince your true colors. You are anything but a skeptic.
I wrote: “The Arctic as a whole hasn’t warmed in the last 12 years or so…”
Yes. Did you decide to ignore the emboldened link to the image of the HADCRUT Arctic temperature record that directly followed that statement? Apparently so. Here’s what that looks like again:
https://www.climate4you.com/images/70-90N%20MonthlyAnomaly%20Since2000.gif
Is there a clear upward trend apparent since about 2006/7? No. Nearly all the Arctic warming since the 1990s was accomplished during the 1995-2005 period. Since then, the Arctic temperatures have largely been flat.
If we look at the long-term trend, we notice that there has been no significant net warming in the Arctic in the last 80-90 years, as the 1920s-’40s were just as warm as the 1990s-2000s, with cooling in between. In other words, a temperature oscillation has occurred, much like the global record using temperature stations uncorrupted by artificial urban heat: Lansner and Pepke Pedersen, 2018. This oscillation in temperature is matched by proxy records for the Northern Hemisphere as shown here and here and here.
Again you show your hand as a non-skeptic. Berkeley Earth is not run by skeptics. Obviously your standards for what makes for a “skeptic” is skewed by your own dubious qualifiers.
No, you are wrong once again. I was not using glacier growth or recession as a “proxy” for temperature in the region during 2008-2016. The only mention of temperature changes referred to the 6 degree C difference from the Early Holocene relative to today. When it was warmer, glaciers were smaller or non-existent and the ocean was sea ice free or nearly so. When the region was colder – like it is today – glaciers are larger and sea ice is much more extensive. There is nothing unusual or unprecedented about modern Arctic temperatures, glacier extent, or sea ice extent — unless one wishes to claim (with scientific support) that modern temperatures, glacier melt, and sea ice extent are not significantly different than what they were during the Little Ice Age. That was the point of this article. You made up your own point and then proceeded to accuse me of making a point that I did not make.
Why do you think it is that scientists have stated that the surface mass gains in the Antarctic Peninsula in the last decade are consistent with the cooling that has occurred there…if it’s your belief that there is little or no connection between cooling temperatures and ice sheet/glacier growth, or cooling temperatures and sea ice extent growth (which is what has occurred in the Southern Ocean)?
Yes, I have long understood that glacier surges can and do occur during warming periods, and that glacier recession can and does occur during cooling periods. This isn’t even controversial. I would ask you to stop assuming you are providing us with information we have not read or seen before. It’s gratuitously patronizing.
If you had read the article’s title and two-paragraph introduction without the confirmation bias you tendentiously bring to the table every time you post a comment, you may have recognized that the 6°C temperature difference between 9,000 years ago and today was used to reference the difference in glacier size/extent between 9,000 years ago and today in the Svalbard region. Contrary to your assumptions, the 2008-2016 glacier advance was not suggested to have relevance to a temperature change here. It was relevant because it was the largest glacier advance since 1890 — the Little Ice Age. Considering the catastrophists’ claims that modern glaciers are shrinking unprecedentedly, and that this glacier system is doing the opposite — growing to its furthest extent since the Little Ice Age — we have yet another observation that does not support catastrophist claims/beliefs. That is why the 2008-2016 glacier advance (of 16 km) was highlighted.
Berkeley Earth run by skeptics?
Nope. Not even close.
https://calderup.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/hoodwinked-by-berkeley-earth/
Looks like the same game “Skeptic” is trying to play, and failing miserably at it.
As to elevated arctic temperatures. Note that the summer temperature is below normal.
https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-07-28082620_shadow.png
That’s not going to melt the arctic.
And it would help if the past warming weren’t “adjusted” out of existence.
https://realclimatescience.com/2016/12/more-spectacular-arctic-temperature-fraud-from-noaanasa/
See also here to find out what history they don’t want us to know about.
https://notrickszone.com/2018/08/24/arctic-summer-sea-ice-growth-trend-extends-another-year-greenland-summer-one-of-coldest-in-30-years/
A real skeptic would know that.
Well, I don’t think the Climate will change in the next week or two so A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all readers, except the believers in AGW who can have a miserable time if they want.
If you ever visit Alaska and visit a glacier, it will become obvious that some glaciers have receded over the years. The Byron Glacier in particular has receded from the edge of Portage Lake up the glacial valley a good mile or more. That was about the distance you have to walk to make it to the glacier’s leading edge. The year was 2004 in late July, early August.
The evidence from photographs do show the Byron Glacier recession since the beginning of the 20th century. The Pacific Oscillation probably does that melting.
When you see a mountain top that is covered with snow and it is August, you know the snow isn’t going to melt up there. Even though the temps were in the eighties F, the Matanuska Glacier was still there, it was in melt mode, but it wasn’t going to go away.
The east slopes of the mountain range that forms the border with Canada and the US up there in northern British Columbia are glaciated in large swaths, all ice and snow.
At Burns Lake, a logging town and some agriculture, as you left town, to the south side of the road was a small mountain, the northeast corner had a small area that was all ice, still a glacier. You are still probably 300 miles south of the 60th parallel.
As you travel further north, you expect the temps to be not warm. You are too far north for it to be more than 80 plus degrees F. You will be surprised to find out the temps do indeed reach into the 80’s.
Whitehorse in The Yukon is fifteen hundred miles from Edmonton, Alberta. You know you are a long ways from nowhere. Northern British Columbia and The Yukon Territory are incredible places on the planet. When you are at Muncho Lake, it’s wilderness, not until you arrive at the Peace River area are you back to full sustainable agricultural activity. Further north in the mountains are caribou, mountain sheep, bear at lower elevations, it is all frontier. To think that camels were living there that far north is inconceivable, but they did.
Was very surprised to learn that people from all over the world were living in The Yukon. A husband and wife from Switzerland managed a campground outside of Whitehorse. Had some lunch at a Greek cafe in downtown Whitehorse. An elderly couple from Greece were the owners. There was a woman from Uruguay there working a job with the Alaska Highway rebuilding. Some incredible road work being done in Canada at that time. The Canadian border checkpoint is twenty-five miles from Canada/US border, a no man’s land between there and Alaska. It is a lonely outpost.
Sights not soon to be forgotten, no doubt about it. The sun sets but it doesn’t get dark, not even a dusk. When you look into the forest as you go, you know there is nobody out there in that wilderness, or very few for recreational purposes, the only people there are on the highways and in the towns. The creek bed will reveal bear tracks not two hours old. Wildlife rules the wilderness up there, nobody else. har
The record low for my locale was set at -37 degrees F set in 1916 on December 16. The record high was in 1923 at 53 degrees F. One thing about winters in a climate in the middle of a continent at higher latitudes, they’re all bad. lol
Although, the weather has been good with temps in the 40s, very warm for this time of year. You are more active and have to do things to get stuff done.
The Winter of 1917-1918 was particularly bad.
[…] Arktische Gletscher rücken von 2008 bis 2016 um 16 km weiter vor in einer Region, die vor 9000 Jahr… […]
Why worry if some ice melts, calves, or dissociates from the Arctic?
It is just a meaningless idea as the Arctic ice recede and advance periodically. Humans are not in charge of this occurring!
Only the flimflam ideas congregating around some correlation of ice amount equating with ‘global temperatures’ are ever voiced, nobody notices that ice level variations rise and fall in correlation with the wholesale price of cream cheese in Northern Ireland, and also a good correlation with the percentage of prisoners retried, found not guilty, and freed in Wyoming.
Either or both of these are just as good as any other supposition with correlations as to why ice levels rise and fall.
-> KR
I have no wish to patronise you or anyone else and I would prefer not to be patronised myself. Although many of my posts are couched in terms of a reply to yourself, they are really addressed to the much wider audience of your readership/acolytes, some of whom would appear, on the basis of their comments, to have very little knowledge/understanding of the subject matter.
You accuse me of not being a real sceptic. Clearly, your, (and Yonason’s), definition of a sceptic is very different from mine. For me it is sufficient to be sceptical about only one important aspect of a theory in order to be classified as a sceptic. One certainly does not need to be sceptical about all of it. I thought that I had already made clear my disbelief in the idea of a high positive feedback from water vapour. If such a feedback is non-existent, (and I have both theoretical and observational reasons for thinking so), then the alarmist case, and the politics derived from it falls to the ground and the apparent mismatch between theory and observation becomes much less significant and much more explicable.
You and Yonason accuse me of reading only the headlines and not opening any of the links that you provide. Very occasionally this is true, but, most of the time it is not. If it were true in the present case, then how would I know that your first link was merely a graph or that your second referred to a paper which really only dealt with one location? Graphs are useful but I prefer to use both graphs and numbers. It is often difficult for the naked eye, (or at least my naked eye), to pick out trends from graphs with noisy data. Numbers are a much more sensitive technique. Sometimes, of course, numbers can be misleading. A good example of this would be to make a correlation between the temperature of the lower stratosphere and total solar irradiation. Numerically there is a good correlation but graphs of the two show that whereas TLS has two pronounced peaks TSI has three.
Obviously, if you say that your post was not meant to indicate that Arctic temperatures were rising, then I believe you. This is why I used the word “suspicion”. However, I would also like to point out that I wrote that if your post was designed to counter the alarmist stories about glaciers melting, then it “hit the mark”. It is completely unnecessary to give me a long sermon as though I believed in these scare stories. I don’t!
Going back a few blogs, you suggested that I ought to provide some empirical evidence that increasing CO2 causes warming. This is virtually impossible to do. We would have to make large sudden and irregular changes both downward as well as upward to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and observe the earth’s temperatures while doing so. Technologically, this is well beyond our current capability. What you ignored was my statement to the effect that none of the basic physics involved was unique to climate science and that all of it had received empirical verification elsewhere. The minimum basic physics involved is: Kirchoff’s laws; the Stefan-Boltzmann law; the infrared spectrum of CO2; the principle of the equipartition of energy; the acceleration due to gravity and a little bit of quantum mechanics. Which of these do you disagree with?
You’ve not been specific enough. Considering 95% of the heat changes in the Earth’s climate system are expressed in terms of ocean heat content and just 1% of heat changes are atmospheric or surface-air, CO2 concentration changes in volumes of parts per million must empirically cause water to warm for the CO2 greenhouse effect conceptualization to work in the real world. And we need to have this water heating effect of CO2 quantified. Saying “it causes warming” isn’t enough. Warming of what? Water bodies, which are what counts? Where in “basic physics” do we have empirical verification that CO2 changes in volumes of 0.000001 cause ___ Kelvin warming/cooling in water bodies? Answer: it doesn’t exist. It’s not “basic physics”. It’s hypothetical, non-real-world conceptualizing.
What if that ____ value above is 0.0000000000000001 K? Is there any way of affirming that CO2 changes have more or less of an effect on water bodies than that? Is your skepticism sufficient to acknowledge that not having these quantified values is grossly problematic, or do you think we should just dismiss this gaping hole in “climate science” empiricism and continue to proceed as if the 2 X CO2 = 3.7 W m-2/1.16 K hypothetical model/thought experiment is not actually a hypothetical model/thought experiment?
None of the basic physics involved in what? Anthropogenic global warming = CO2 concentration changes are the cause of heat changes in the Earth’s oceans. For this to be scientifically supportable, we need to have real-world empirical verification that 0.000001 changes in CO2 concentrations above a water body cause heat changes in that water body. And we need this quantified. This is “basic physics” for climate science.
Do you consider it an important-enough aspect of the AGW theory that we have no quantified real-world verification that CO2 concentration changes cause heat changes in water bodies? Or is this rather unimportant to you?
Do you consider it an important-enough aspect of the AGW theory that the uncertainty and error bars for the estimations of the radiative factors influencing climate are 10 times larger than the entire assumed radiative effect of CO2? Do you dismiss this uncertainty as unimportant?
Frank, 2008
“It turns out that uncertainties in the energetic responses of Earth climate systems are more than 10 times larger than the entire energetic effect of increased CO2.”
IPCC, 2013
“The overall uncertainty of the annually averaged global ocean mean for each term is expected to be in the range 10 to 20%. In the case of the latent heat flux term, this corresponds to an uncertainty of up to 20 W m–2. In comparison, changes in global mean values of individual heat flux components expected as a result of anthropogenic climate change since 1900 are at the level of <2 W m–2 (Pierce et al., 2006).”
Stephens et al., 2012
http://planck.aos.wisc.edu/publications/2012_EBupdate_stephens_ngeo1580.pdf
“The net energy balance is the sum of individual fluxes. The current uncertainty in this net surface energy balance is large, and amounts to approximately 17 Wm–2. This uncertainty is an order of magnitude larger than the changes to the net surface fluxes associated with increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
Are you sufficiently concerned about the “let’s use Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline” exchanges among the overseers of temperature data, or their “let’s remove 0.15 C from the 1940” warmth e-mail exchanges, or the made-up upticks and hockey sticks to allow you to question the robustness of the instrumental record or the “unprecedented” claims about today’s warmth relative to the past, or is the data manipulation in temperature records an aspect of “climate science” you’re not skeptical about?
@Kenneth
How much you want to bet that Skeptic is just SebH with a new handle? If not, he/she/it/whatever is on track to being just as annoying.
Different people. Believers that the CO2 greenhouse effect is fundamentally “basic physics” and that tendentious data manipulation has not occurred in the temperature records or that the “hide the decline” episode was a nothing-to-see here irrelevance come in quite a few varieties.
Thanks.
Same brain washing, same attitude, hard to tell one from another.
Once again, although this is framed as a reply to yourself, it is really addressed to a much wider audience.
Everybody reading this blog needs to be aware that the “standard” GHG theory only deals with SURFACE effects – or, to be more accurate, the temperature of the air very near to the surface, (say 1 metre above it). It does not address the issue of what happens below the sea’s surface. It is also an EQUILIBRIUM theory. The CMIP5 models go a bit further than this, but that is a detail.
One cannot, therefore, use ocean heat content or similar to argue against the GHG theory. The models would suggest that temperatures lag a few years behind the levels of CO2, with the lagging being more pronounced for the sea than for the land. Even if the level of CO2 in the atmosphere were to stabilise at about its present level, according to the theory, there would be no cooling but heating at the lower levels of the ocean would continue but the surface temperatures would asymptotically approach their equilibrium value and remain there.
When you asked me a few blogs back how much warming I would expect I used the most basic version of the GHG theory for a windless, waterless world where the temperature started at a uniform 15°C. My list of “long established physics, none of which is unique to climate science . . . . .“ with its forgotten addendum was for the simplest version of the theory as described above. My calculation was first done about 10 years ago when I first got interested in climate science. What I did then was to try to re-create some form of GHG theory from the basic physics that was already familiar to me. Only when I had done this did I check to see whether my version was essentially the same as the “standard” theory. Apart from some minor differences in the mathematical approximations used, they were identical.
How convenient. We cannot consider changes in ocean heat content — where 90-some percent of the heat energy in the Earth system resides — in analyzing the physical merits of the “GHG theory”, the “thought experiment” that claims, without real-world supporting evidence, that CO2 heats the Earth’s surface air by 7.2K.
Why do you write that we must not consider OHC in any analysis of the merits of the GHG theory? Probably because you recognize that, contrary to your previous claims, there are indeed no “laws of physics” that pertain to the evidence-free conceptualization of CO2 IR heating up the ocean. There is no real-world evidence, no “laws of physics”, that demonstrate CO2 concentration increases cause increases in the heat content of water bodies…and if so, how much (quantification). As a self-described skeptic, one would assume you’d consider this gaping evidence hole to be a problem for the theory. But you don’t, obviously.
Let’s go back.
First, global warming — or perturbations in the Earth’s radiative energy balance, is not about air-warming, it’s about ocean heat content. Even the IPCC acknowledges this.
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter03_FINAL.pdf
“Ocean warming dominates the total energy change inventory, accounting for roughly 93% on average from 1971 to 2010 (high confidence). Melting ice (including Arctic sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers) accounts for 3% of the total, and warming of the continents 3%. Warming of the atmosphere makes up the remaining 1%.”
For the Earth’s surface to warm, the oceans must be warmed.
I assume you would agree that, considering the vastness of the heat capacity of water vs. air, the heat flux for the Earth system is ocean-to-air, and not the other way around. In other words, the atmosphere, or air, cannot warm until the oceans do. This is Climate Science 101.
Minnett et al., 2011
http://www.researchgate.net/publication/223950477_Measurements_of_the_oceanic_thermal_skin_effect
“… the heat flux is nearly always from the ocean to the atmosphere”
—
Ellaesser, 1984
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0004698184901185
“The current eager acceptance of oceanic thermal lag as the “explanation” as to why CO2 warming remains undetected, reemphasizes that the atmosphere cannot warm until the oceans do. The logical implication follows that most current climate models are lacking in relevance; they have not been constructed with ocean surface temperature as the fundamental variable. When the problem is attacked from this view, sensitivity to CO2 is significantly reduced; a position also strongly supported by the available palaeoclimatic data.”
—
For the GHG theory to follow physical laws (your claim), it will need to be demonstrated (in the real world) that IR from GHGs not only heats bodies of water, but it does so to a detectable and quantifiable degree, allowing us to measure the effects of GHG perturbation vs. say, cloud cover changes, which have radiative forcing capabilities that are two orders of magnitude greater than CO2 perturbation and thus dwarf even the hypothetical/modeled assumptions about CO2 as a RF agent.
“The greenhouse effect of clouds may be larger than that resulting from a hundredfold increase in the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere”
And, of course, we have no such real-world evidence. No “established laws of physics” that demonstrates how much CO2 affects the heat content of water bodies. All we have are models, assumptions, and hypothetical conceptualizations masquerading as “the laws of physics”…that are sufficient to persuade people like you.
You do not appear to have any problems — as a real skeptic should — with the gigantic uncertainty and error bars inherent in climate science fundamentalism. All it takes to convince you that you’re right is to do your own calculation using the same modeled assumptive values as others have used and to come up with a result that is similar. Never mind that the modeled assumptions about GHG forcing of surface temperature that you and others have used purposely exclude the Earth’s oceans’ heat content (since IR from GHGs has not been shown to affect bodies of water to any quantifiable degree). A rather large omission this is, but it’s one that is obviously not a problem for you at all. Again, not very skeptic-like.
Yes, this is “according to the theory” stuff. Do you believe it’s true, Skeptik? If so, why? What real-world physics is this based on?
Do you also believe in the residence time for CO2 emission lasting for 100s of years? Because that’s what this even-if-we-stopped-emitting-CO2-the-oceans-will-still-heat-up belief is based upon. Again, where’s the evidence for this?
By the way, it’s not accurate to call it a “theory”. Theories are a step up from hypotheses. Both require real-world observational evidence. And we have no real-world observational evidence that CO2 IR heats up or cools down water bodies when increased or decreased. These are assumptions. So it’s a GHG assumption more than a GHG theory.
“Hide the decline” was an absolute disgrace. It is a cardinal rule when constructing time series that one should never splice two individual series unless (a) there is a long period of overlap between them and (b) they are in good agreement where they do overlap. Phil Jones completely ignored (b) and spliced series which did not agree with each other where they overlapped. Worse, he used different dates for adding in/substituting the “real” data for the various proxy series that he combined. This is not the sort of behaviour that one would expect from a professor at a British university. It reflects badly on him as well as on CRU, the UEA and the WMO who published it.
Although Jones called what he did “Mike’s Nature trick”, what he did was quite different from what Mann did. The original MBH paper which was given such prominence by the IPCC’s AR3 was quite correctly debunked by McIntyre and McKitrick. However, other authors, as well as Mann himself, have published subsequent hockey stick papers which do not have these faults. However, I am unconvinced by any of them. They are all too dependent on tree ring data and they use PCA to weight the individual bits of data according to how well they fit the modern instrumental record. Strictly speaking, one should only use PCA on groups of different types of variables to weight the groups as a whole. The danger with tree rings is that they are proxies for many things: most notably carbon dioxide and sunlight/cloud cover. Using PCA in the manner described tends to give a high weighting to rings that are really proxies for CO2. This almost inevitably produces a hockey stick!
I do not know enough about Marcott’s “uptick” to be able to comment.
Presumably by “data manipulation in temperature records” you mean the adjustments made to try to counter any bias caused by station moves, changes of instrumentation and so on. The expression “data manipulation” suggest that these adjustments are somehow nefarious. I think that this is unlikely.
To begin with, if the adjustments were nefarious why would the GHCN give us unadjusted as well as adjusted data? Why would the USHCN have a paper on its website, (now no longer available), explaining exactly how the various adjustments were made and plotting the adjusted data against the unadjusted data? Errors and unreliability – Yes, but dishonesty – No.
A few Years ago, back in 2014 to be exact, there were three different versions of adjusted temperatures for more than 1200 weather stations in the USA. These came from the GHCN, GISS and the USHCN. Back then, I compared the difference between the versions for several different pairs of years. Some of the results were truly startling.
For example, Ashland in Kentucky had values for both 1895 and 2013 in both the USHCN and the GHCN databases. The GHCN shows a warming of 1.3 °F, whereas the USHCN shows a cooling of 2.6 °F. The difference is thus 3.9°F
Of course, this is an exceptional result, but it does illustrate that the adjustments are not an exact science!
I have also tried the experiment of making adjustments using the USHCN method for stations whose data has already been adjusted and is continuous by comparing what adjustments I would have made had there been a suspicion that the station had moved. The results were not encouraging at the individual level, but, overall, the big picture was not too bad. When I did a similar exercise using a technique similar to that used by BEST, I found that the results were generally more reliable.
It seems to me that the NOAA could do itself a considerable service by publishing a temperature series based only on unadjusted data alongside their current series based on adjusted data. This would remove much of the suspicion of dishonesty which tends to surround their work.
I have actually done this myself for the period 1880-2014. Most areas still show a warming over this period, although it is usually less than that produced by the adjusted data.
The idea that scientists would deliberately fiddle their results strikes me as ridiculous. Most scientists have the brainpower to be able to earn far more than they do by engaging in something other than science. They choose not to because of the enormous satisfaction that they get from following their almost childlike curiosity. Fiddling their results would remove this satisfaction meaning that they would have impoverished themselves unnecessarily.
Wow. You believe. A skeptic you are not.
It’s not even worth taking the time to provide you with anything more than links to articles summarizing the data manipulation. I doubt you’ll read them or do more than glance over them if you do.
You’ve obviously convinced yourself that the overseers of temperature data do not have any need to make the current temperatures warmer and past temperatures cooler, or to bust the pause (Karl), or to add 0.3 C of warmth to the 1998-2014 trend from one version to the next (RSS), to “correcting” the ocean cooling…even though essentially the whole global warming construct is predicated on there not being a pause, on erasing the 1920s-1940s warmth, and eliminating the 1940-1970 cooling that spawned the global cooling scare in the scientific literature… You’re not the least bit skeptical that scientists have an agenda when it comes to temperature data, leading them to remove thousands of temperature stations from rural areas or areas that do not show warming, to re-site thermometers to urban areas and airports…
Global Temperature Data Manipulation – Thousands Of Non-Urban Thermometers Removed – 0.3°C Of Pause-Busting Warmth Added Since 1998 – 0.5°C Of Warming Removed From 1880-1950 Trend
100% Of US Warming Is Due To NOAA Data Tampering
Since 2008, 0.24°C Of ‘Extra’ Warming Has Been Added To NASA’s 1910-2000 Global Temperatures
Scientists Expose Data Manipulation, ‘Hide The Decline’, And The Post-1940s Hockey Stick Temperature Myth
Scientists Reveal How Man-Made Global Warming Is Created Via Data Manipulation, Dismissing The Sun
Reliable? CRU, NASA, BEST, NOAA Land Temp Data Conflict By Up To 90% (0.8°C), Spawning ‘Large Uncertainty’
Massive Data Tampering Uncovered At NASA – Warmth, Cooling Disappears Due To Incompatibility With Models
I assume you meant falling, not rising.
If so, yes, I did not indicate in either the article title or the purposefully succinct two-paragraph introduction to the 5 papers that the 2008-2016 glacier advance by 16 kilometers (which meant the region’s glaciers reached their greatest extent since the 1890s/Little Ice Age) was caused by cooling in this region. My only reference to temperature was the 6 degree C difference between the Early Holocene warmth and today. (And, contrary to your apparent claims, the much warmer EH temperatures were a primary cause of the nearly completely melted glaciers and spring sea ice for this region.)
My subsequent references to an apparent non-warming trend in the 70-90 Arctic per HadCRUT4 monthly anomaly data (graphed by Dr. Humlum at Climate4you) were presented to counter the commonly expressed claim that the Arctic has been warming dramatically over the last decade; instead, a pause seems more descriptive of the trend.
But I still find it a little hard to believe that as a self-described skeptic, you are unaware (“Why is it inconvenient”?) of the reason why scientific papers that indicate (a) High Arctic glaciers have advanced by 16 kilometers since 2008, (b) glaciers that exist today are far more advanced in their extent than they were when CO2 levels were in the 255 ppm range, (c) modern sea ice is vastly more extensive (80% spring sea ice cover) than it was during the 255 ppm CO2 Early Holocene (0-10%), or that (d) modern temperatures are 6 degrees C colder now, with 410 ppm, than they were during the EH, at 255 ppm. Do you really not understand why (a)-(d) might be inconvenient to the AGW cause? Really, you don’t?
Or were you just picking out one single aspect of the article that wasn’t even stipulated or claimed – that the 2008-2016 glacier advance was caused by cooling – so that you could “educate” us (skeptics) about the lack of consistent correlation between temperature and short-term glacier retreat/advance?
Apologies. In my list of the basic physics behind the AGW theory I omitted to mention the ideal gas laws.
Skeptik,
Good idea not to mention the ideal gas laws as this planet’s moist atmosphere is not much like an ideal gas.
Also of note is that Stefan-Boltzmann law fails to consider a moist gas interface as a ‘surface’.
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