Antarctic Sea Ice Complete Video

Antarctic temperatures and sea ice are becoming quite a hobby. It should make for some interesting discussion around the campfire this summer – not really. It takes my computer about 15 hours to calculate this movie and it took all day to figure out how to make the movie work. Actually it takes a minute then wait, then a minute and wait again. I finally got a reasonable quality video at 15 frames per second, one frame per day from 1978 – 2009. Before you watch the video Figure 1 is a map of the Wilkins ice shelf which apparently is about to melt every hot January summer at the south pole.

Figure 1 - Wilkins Ice Shelf - A map of the Antarctic Peninsula with the location of the the Wilkins Ice Sheet, which is on the southern portion of the peninsula. Credit: British Antarctic Survey

The melting of the Wilkins ice shelf has happened over and over prompting numerous articles like the following.

Inhofe Got the Message – EPA Busted

Sen. Inhofe Calls for Inquiry Into ‘Suppressed’ Climate Change Report

A top Republican senator has ordered an investigation into the Environmental Protection Agency’s alleged suppression of a report that questioned the science behind global warming.

The 98-page report, co-authored by EPA analyst Alan Carlin, pushed back on the prospect of regulating gases like carbon dioxide as a way to reduce global warming. Carlin’s report argued that the information the EPA was using was out of date, and that even as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have increased, global temperatures have declined.

“He came out with the truth. They don’t want the truth at the EPA,” Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla, a global warming skeptic, told FOX News, saying he’s ordered an investigation. “We’re going to expose it.”

It’s Simple

Climate Bill Helps Utilities More Than Oil Companies

The bill, which creates a market for carbon dioxide permits potentially worth more than $100 billion a year by 2020, regulates the way the allowances could be traded to guard against speculation with derivatives that lawmakers say might drive up the prices of electricity and gasoline.

“This bill tries to help utilities and manufacturers move to a low-carbon economy without harming consumers, draw farmers into the carbon market and keep that market transparent to prevent improper profit-taking,” Tim Profeta, director of the Durham, North Carolina-based Nicholas Institute of Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University, said in a telephone interview. “The oil industry got fewer free permits because lawmakers believe these firms can pass the relatively low cost to their consumers without affecting their bottom line.”

Well the bill has nothing to do with not harming consumers, but you can say anything these days.

More than 70 percent of the allowances would initially be given away.

CO2 Currency of Corruption

Associated Press-Henry Waxman

The ugly face of Global Warming Greed

America has got to wake up. We’ve fed our children too much cool-aid and they’ve grown the critical thinking ability of fish. Their minds rot in our school systems taught by unionized government officials espousing an ever more watered down curriculum which deliberately discourages competition in favor of feelings. Everything is reasonable – always. The rule of law, the right to vote, free speech, how can they learn what made America great?

The government under the not so long in the tooth Department of Education, has succeeded in breeding a culture where everything is reasonable, nothing is ever unreasonable just vote your mind, help everyone. Recently Acorn worked to steal an election, lied about it’s intent and received large contracts from government after the party they worked so hard to put in office got voted in – yet we hear almost nothing. I’m not saying Obama would have lost, but do we really know? Consider that more people registered to vote in Detroit Michigan than actually live there. This did not happen in twenty years ago this was not and is not acceptable, nor is the complete radio silence of the media on this issue. Acorn still managed to ruin their false image so badly they are changing their name, but they still got the money. You rarely hear about it because, everything is reasonable in America and our behind the scenes state controlled media is happy with the result.

When you listen to the news and media both left and right leaning, the message is freedom is what made America great, free speech and the right to vote. Of course this is important and it’s a nice feel-good message but the truth is somewhat different from the sales pitch. In reality, the freedom to compete is what made America great. It’s a much colder and more difficult reality but it’s the truth. Freedom to compete gave us car companies which were unmatched. Freedom to compete gave us a powerful retail industry, plentiful energy and companies which were flexible enough to grow and shrink as needed to supply the world with food and goods, anyone with the will and understanding could start a company and succeed against world competition. Freedom to compete gave us the best medical system in the world.

Corrections to Surface Temperatures

There is a very interesting post by Michael Hammer at Jennifer Marohasy which looks into the magnitude of the corrections to temperature data.

How the US Temperature Record is Adjusted

She looks at the corrections applied by the NOAA, apparently the UHI correctoin has been removed. The only reducing factor in the correction group.

Figure 1 Corrections applied

RegEM weight calculation – a different approach

This is a guest post by NicL  who has been working on Antarctic station weighting in the background.  His method uses a brute force method for calculating trend sensitivity on the Antarctic reconstruciton.  After discovering that the B matrix in TTLS created a different weighting for each set of years that had different active surface station data, creating a solution which gives weighting becomes more complex.

Nic found less weighting for the peninsula and more for the ross ice shelf which is more in line with my original suspicion.  However, my own impression is that by area the peninsula is still heavily weighted and several stations are negatively weighted.

I haven’t checked the calculations myself but the method is straightforward although time consuming.  I hope you like it.

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Jeff Id and Ryan O have done a lot of good work on calculating the effective weights of the different surface stations in Steig’s main satellite AVHRR data based reconstruction.  I would like to present the results of a slightly different approach to this issue.

As Jeff Id has pointed out (Improved Weight Calculation, Air Vent, 15 June 2009), the B matrices used in TTLS RegEM vary across time.  That is because the set of input series having actual values varies with time: the B matrices are identical for different times that have the same set of missing values.  Obviously, whenever an input series has no actual value it has a zero weight in the reconstruction values for that month.  However, I am not sure that fluctuations over time in the weight of individual surface stations is of particular relevance.

To my mind, the key question is what weight the temperature trends in each surface station have in the overall temperature trend of the reconstruction – both Steig’s reported (spliced) trend based on the actual satellite data post 1981, and the trend implicit in the “unspliced solution”, being that using the three principal components (PCs) implicit in the missing values imputed by the reconstruction.  I suspect that time-averaging the weights derived from the B matrices would in particular not give accurate weights for the unspliced solution, since the B matrices only give weights for the missing data points that are imputed.  Moreover, actual data from one station may, through its effect on the covariance matrix, affect the weights given in the B matrices to data from other stations in months where the first station does not have actual reading.  Therefore, I don’t think that the weights in the B matrices can be relied on to give an accurate measure of the effect of the data from a station on the overall reconstruction.

Anti-Science, Supression of Speech – Bush’s Fault?

The Obama administration is in full socialist form. In our last post we saw the internal emails where the Obama administrations EPA boss refuses to make an internal report critical of global warming public.  Alan Carlin attempted to put the report in the comments open  to the public and was told the following – in a PDF email exchange link link here..

The Administrator and the Administration has decided to move forward on endangerment.

Take a look at that wording it should of course read “have” decided, now you could say this is the result of a simple typo, however it’s more likely that it was an edit where one of the Admin’s was not present in the original typing.  It likely read ‘ the administratioin has decided’ not ‘the administrator’.

Either way the decision goes against the governments own laws for function.  Imagine what would happen if Republicans or Bush attempted this type of chicanery.   Do you think the leftist media would let it go?

Stifle

Check out this story on WUWT.  The EPA is absolutely busted red-handed suppressing information for their upcoming regulation fest.  I wonder if the cries of anti-science will come?

The EPA suppresses dissent and opinion, and apparently decides issues in advance of public comment

Think what would happen if Bush did this.  The politics trump everything and are forcing me to change my mind about this corrupted science.

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Update:

Click on these email scans where Al McGartland basically threatens Alan Carlin with his job for working on this.  The database remark by his boss and assignment of more work for his efforts.

Michael Mann – Steppin’ in it.

Mondo, called my attention to a Mike Mann RC quote in an Air Vent thread.   Thanks again to my alert readers, without whom I would never find this stuff.

The timing of this reply by RC is interesting in that it came on the 22nd, right after my post on the hockey stick creation. It’s not directed toward the Air Vent in particular but apparently a site I don’t know of that is discussing similar issues. Either way he addresses some of the points exposed here in the hockey stick posts.

In his reply he admits foreknowledge of the fact that any signal can be pulled from proxy data.

Historic Hockey Stick – Pt 2 Shock and Recovery

This post is about testing how well Mann 08 CPS (composite plus scale) can recover a signal from artificial ARMA proxy data. ARMA is just a fancy method to create artificial signals which match the noise and autocorrelation of a measured one. If you’re not familiar with this – don’t worry, it doesn’t matter.

In the last post we saw that Mann CPS hockey stick maker can make any shape you want using the same method and data used to make a hockey stick temperature curve. It happens because any data which doesn’t correlate to a pre-determined curve is discarded. This leads reasonable folks to say incorrectly – If it is temperature it should correlated so the method is reasonable. What’s missing from this seemingly reasonable understanding is that the response of the correlation sorting to noise level is non linear.  In high or medium noise cases correlation can become a cherry pick of your favorite noise.   This post takes the next step and looks at how well CPS does at retrieving a signal from both zero average random data and random data with a signal.

Obamanable

Right after speaking on the hideous Iranian bastard government, Obama moved into his plans for the ‘green’ economy and how it’s going to make jobs for everyone.

Now, the second issue I want to address is our ongoing effort to build a clean energy economy.

This week, the House of Representatives is moving ahead on historic legislation that will transform the way we produce and use energy in America.

This legislation will spark a clean energy transformation that will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and confront the carbon pollution that threatens our planet.

This energy bill will create a set of incentives that will spur the development of new sources of energy, including wind, solar, and geothermal power. It will also spur new energy savings, like efficient windows and other materials that reduce heating costs in the winter and cooling costs in the summer.

The Bipolar Antarctic, Studies in Contradiction

This link was called to my attention by Anthony Watts from a reader in WUWT thread.  The article is issued by the US National Center for Atmospheric Research. Written by Rachel Hauser.

Antarctic Warming, Antarctic Cooling

My bold…

Until recently, the Antarctic ice sheet looked to be bucking the global warming trend. This assessment relied on temperature data collected from a sparse network of mostly coastal weather stations. To provide a more complete picture of Antarctica’s historic surface temperature regime, a team of U.S. scientists employed an innovative technique to construct 50-year estimates of the near-surface temperature anomalies for the entire continent. The resulting climate field reconstructions for 1957-2006 show an overall warming trend across Antarctica, with this trend being strongest over the West Antarctic ice sheet.

From Dr. Steig.

Steig adds that their results also agree well with similar work by previous researchers. “The main thing we added is information about what is happening in West Antarctica, a large region of the continent that is particularly lacking in weather stations,” he explains.

Hockey Stick CPS Revisited – Part 1

Updated to include Dr. Mann’s words.

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The last time I did this, R was a brand new language to me. After 6 months messing around in my free time I speak rudimentary R with a C accent. R is a totally free language that anyone can download and learn. This post is a demonstration of the methods behind the Mann08 CPS hockey stick reconstruction. The difference between this and the numerous posts I did before is better R programming and a lot more comments in the code. If you’re serious about understanding vs advocating, you can figure this out. There is not one person I can think of who has ever commented here, incapable of figuring this out.

CPS is composite plus scale, which is an invented method for calibrating proxies to measured temperatures in paleoclimatology reconstructions. In paleoclimatology methods are too often invented to find the signal in the noise – this is not a new problem and it stems from the large signal to noise ration of paleo-data. If you happen to be a paleoclimatologist who does temperature reconstructions, please try your methods on ARIMA data with a known signal before employing it on whatever your proxy is.

I have hundreds of new readers, who didn’t get the day by day experience of my discovery of climatology math. Well some of my early work was a little rough, however it was correct and the specifics still stand uncriticized.

This post was prompted by some people in blogland (despite the complete lack of rational criticism) claiming that my demonstrations of the CPS hockey stick math is faulty rather than the actual hockey stick itself. An oddly reversed situation which could only exist in the new progressive anti-world. Actually, I don’t recall any real criticism of the method or the result other than statements around the AGW crowd that – ‘it’s been proven wrong’.

I’ve cleaned up the code and seriously over-commented it in the hopes that honest people will be able to understand what is going on here. I’ll do a short explanation for it but the primary explanation is in the programming code. To understand it fully you should to read it step by step and run it.

Michael Mann knows full well that this result exists, his explanation is as follows from an RC thread.

Actually, this line of attack is even more disingenuous and/or ill-informed than that. Obviously, if one generates enough red noise surrogate time series (especially when the “redness” is inappropriately inflated, as is often done by the charlatans who make this argument), one can eventually match any target arbitrarily closely.

You can note that this post uses his Actual data rather than red noise data. Dr. Mann’s continued explanation is here.

What this specious line of attack neglects (intentionally, one can safely conclude) is that a screening regression requires independent cross-validation to guard against the selection of false predictors. If a close statistical relationship when training a statistical model arises by chance, as would be the case in such a scenario, then the resulting statistical model will fail when used to make out-of-sample predictions over an independent test period not used in the training of the model. That’s precisely what any serious researchers in this field test for when evaluating the skillfulness of a statistical reconstruction based on any sort of screening regression approach.

So a potentially overstated statistical check is what determines if CPS works. This is in fact false, CPS is incapable of recovering an accurate signal from data. A fact which I will demonstrate in these next few posts. This post however, does not address the statistical validation issue, it does however demonstrate that Dr. Mann is correct that any signal at all can be made using Mann08 math and data. A truth for many of his hockey stick creation methods.

An explanation of Composite Plus Scale (CPS).

Explaining Ice Core CO2 Lag

DeWitt Payne has done an interesting post here regressing ice core CO2 and deuterium temperature proxy information to examine the plausibility of CO2 amplification of temperature swings between ice ages. This is a favorite point of climate naturalists🙂 regarding temperature swings in distant history, however there may be an explanation. Read on with an open mind, because physics doesn’t care what we think. -Jeff Id

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On The Relationship of CO₂ and Deuterium Isotope Shift in the Dome C Ice Core

An understanding of the fundamentals of the standard hypothesis of what is called the atmospheric greenhouse effect is required to be able to concentrate on the true uncertainties. Proponents of a high climate sensitivity to doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration claim that a high sensitivity is required to explain the magnitude of the temperature change from glacial to interglacial conditions. The shift in climate is thought to be triggered by small changes in insolation at high latitudes caused by cyclic changes in the Earth’s orbital parameters (Milankovitch cycles).

However, the size of the change in insolation is not sufficient according to the standard hypothesis to cause a temperature shift of the size observed. I have a problem with the assumption in the link above that interglacial climate conditions are stable and a decrease in insolation is required to trigger an ice age, but that’s not what I want to discuss here. Some mechanism or combination of mechanisms is required to amplify temperature change. The two main contributors are thought to be ice/albedo feedback and CO2.

We know with reasonable confidence from measurements of atmospheric samples trapped in bubbles in ice cores that CO2 is correlated with temperature as determined by the shift in deuterium/hydrogen isotope ratio. We also know with reasonable confidence from atmospheric radiation transfer theory and the characteristics of the infra-red absorption spectrum of CO2 that atmospheric CO2 acts to increase the surface temperature of the planet compared to a planet with no atmosphere.

However, the ice core measurements have CO2 concentration changes lagging temperature. Is amplification of temperature change by CO2 still plausible? Arguments against significant climate sensitivity for CO2 as demonstrated by ice core data include:

1. The change in CO₂ concentration is an effect of temperature with a significant time lag so it can’t affect the temperature.

2. If CO₂ really does amplify the temperature increase, the onset of the amplification should be obvious when temperature and CO₂ are plotted on the same graph.

I will demonstrate that amplification of temperature change by CO2 is indeed plausible even though changes in CO2 concentration follow temperature rather than lead.

What’s to Say

Well I learned another lesson in global warming today. Again, it’s become an effort of know your enemy, I didn’t even know I had so many enemies. I put some reasonable statements up on a pro-AGW blog http://www.climaterogress.org and found the first comment I made was clipped. Don’t they think of the best names, Real Climate, Open Mind, Climate Progress, it all sounds like clean green earth. As stated here many times, there is no denial of climate change by myself only questions. However, my questions are apparently far too dangerous to publish.

I did my usual and began reading the background of the guy in charge of the blog.

As resume’s go, his isn’t too bad ..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_J._Romm

After all, phd’s MIT and all that. Not to mention Clinton’s deputy energy secretary, ah yes now I remember! I suppose we should all give up and bow to his holiness, well except for one little detail. He’s a socialist nut being paid to pretend to be a scientist while advocating global warming. Why did a little post by me (a fringe blogger) need to be clipped? My post discussed the recent Global Climate Change Impacts Report -no cussing, no swearing and on topic. The report is nothing more than propaganda about science hurled at congress and America and that wasn’t discussed by me.

The blog article is HERE I saved the attempted posts because after the first one was clipped, I realized this site was apparently another leftist site like Tamino where scientists pretend to be open minded, yet are nothing more than political hacks pushing their views of governance. The difference is that this guy is supposed to be non-partisan to keep his tax-free status.