Time to recognize approaching Southern Hemisphere disaster

I warned the world before, and they ignored me, but the evidence continues to mount. The Southern Hemisphere, and maybe the entire world, is headed for a frozen doom.

All day long polar orbiting satellites fly over the Antarctic and the surrounding ocean and measure the extent of the sea ice.  The amount of ice waxes and wanes with the seasons, ranging from about 2 to 16 million square kilometers between southern summer and winter.

Thirty years of this satellite data have made it possible to calculate the average ice extent for any given day of the year.  The deviation from this average is called the “anomaly.”  It is this anomaly data that reveals the impending drastic changes in the Southern Hemisphere.

Here is the anomaly data for the last three years from the University of Illinois’ Polar Research Group…

The anomaly is increasing by half a million extra square kilometers every year!!! To put this in perspective, the Earth has a surface area of about 500 million square kilometers. Roughly speaking, an additional 1/1000th of the Earth’s surface is covered by ice each year. Consider that the Southern Hemisphere sea ice maxes out at about 16 million square kilometers each year, then 32 years of the current increase rate would double this amount.

By 2050, a mere 36 years from now, the ice encased Tierra Del Fuego on the southern tip of South America will replace Greenland as the most ironically named place on Earth.  By 2100 the dairy farms surrounding the town of Gore in the Southern Plains of the South Island of New Zealand will be a frozen mockery to the same-named purveyor of global warming alarmism.

Here is what is in store for the Southern Hemisphere…

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You can’t deny this.  This is science!  My conclusion is based on the proven analysis techniques of NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally.

Has the 21st century brought us to a tipping point?

All the best data indicates that a tipping point has already occurred.  Think about this: according to NOAA data (see here and here) 8 out of 10 years with greatest Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent have occurred since 2000!  Here they are in order…

1. 9/14/13
2. 9/24/12
3. 9/24/06
4. 9/24/09
5. 9/29/05
6. 9/28/00
7. 9/8/04
8. 9/29/07

We also now know that the all time low temperature for the Antarctic was reached in 2010.  Satellite data shows that on August 10th, 2010, the Antarctic temperature descended to 136 ºF (minus 93 ºC).  This shattered the previous record of minus 128.6 ºF (minus 89.2 ºC), set in 1983.

That is a drop in the minimum recorded temperature of 7.4 ºF in a mere 27 years.  If that continues, as indicated by Jay Zwally type analysis, then the low temperature by 2100 could be minus 159 ºF (minus 106 ºC)!!!

The effects are already being felt

It is now the warm season in the Southern Hemisphere.  Sea ice is making its seasonal retreat, yet the Russian cruise ship, Akademik Shokalskiy, is trapped in the sea ice with “52 tourists, scientists and explorers” and a crew of 22.  You would think the combined brains of all those scientists on board would have kept them out of the zone of freezing water.  While the ship’s brochure points out that “Views are excellent from the large, open decks and the Navigation Bridge'” maybe they couldn’t see the ice coming from the vantage point of the “Lounge and bar, open late afternoon and evening with a wide selection of wines and spirits” (an essential feature of all scientific research vessels).  Our prayers go out to the scientists and others on this harrowing adventure as ice breakers race to free them the frozen grip of the sea.  I hope the sauna stays warm and the booze holds out until they get there.

Why the great silence?

Where are the voices of leading scientists and environmentalists?  Why haven’t you seen anything about this impeding hemispheric disaster on the front pages of the news papers or on prime-time news reports?  A subsequent post will soon answer those questions and break this issue wide open.  

Stay tuned…

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James Delingpole, please correct this mistake

The only thing that bugs me more than when climate alarmists get things wrong is when skeptics get it wrong.

A case in point is the assertion by James Delingpole that a recent volcano in Iceland put more CO2 into the atmosphere that all of human activity since 1950.

Delingpole is a vocal supporter of the skeptic community, and the fact the he has a widely viewed blog , writes for several publications and authored several books, all give his words wide dissemination.  The problem is that when a fence-sitter who is trying to make up his mind about the global warming issue realizes that somebody like Delingpole is asserting and defending an indefensible claim, well, that fence-sitter is likely to fall off the fence to the side of the alarmists.  This will happen even if Delingpole is correct on other points.  Fence-sitters don’t necessarily have the time or inclination to sort out and weigh all the arguments, and something like this can easily tip their judgement scales one way or the other.

Delingpole appeared as a guest on the Mike Rosen Show on Denver’s AM station KOA.  This is a 50,000 Watt station and tens of thousands of people probably heard this exchange.  Rosen is a pretty smart guy and usually nobody’s fool, but he let this bogus assertion slide by…

Audio version: Rosen/Delingpole 11/20/13 MP3

Rosen: 713-8585 our telephone number in Castle Rock. Cliff, you’re on 850 KOA. James Delingpole our guest. Hi Cliff.

Cliff: Mike and James, good morning.

Rosen: Morning

Delingpole: Hi Cliff.

Cliff: Hey, I finally think I have somebody who can actually answer this question.

Rosen: Alright.

Cliff: Ah, you know we’ve got, the greenies are all against cars and the exhaust, and you know, all this pollution that we put in the air. Ah, whats the equivalency of a volcano that’s erupting and spewing stuff into the air thirty miles high.

Delingpole: That’s a good question. You remember that volcano that erupted in Iceland a couple of years ago?

Cliff: Yep, that’s the one that made me start thinking about it

Delingpole: Yeah, I think that, I think that that – that volcano produced more CO2 than I think humans have produced in the last, in the last fifty years.

Cliff: Watta we gonna do about that? (…unintelligible…)

Delingpole: We should ban volcanoes.

You  can hear the entire interview (Wednesday, 10AM, 11/20/13) on KOA’s podcast

What are the facts?

The facts are well know, easily accessible, and have been presented to Delingpole before now.  Here it is summed up by the USGS…

Do the Earth’s volcanoes emit more CO2 than human activities? Research findings indicate that the answer to this frequently asked question is a clear and unequivocal, “No.” Human activities, responsible for a projected 35 billion metric tons (gigatons) of CO2 emissions in 2010 (Friedlingstein et al., 2010), release an amount of CO2 that dwarfs the annual CO2 emissions of all the world’s degassing subaerial and submarine volcanoes (Gerlach, 2011).

The published estimates of the global CO2 emission rate for all degassing subaerial (on land) and submarine volcanoes lie in a range from 0.13 gigaton to 0.44 gigaton per year (Gerlach, 1991; Varekamp et al., 1992; Allard, 1992; Sano and Williams, 1996; Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998). The preferred global estimates of the authors of these studies range from about 0.15 to 0.26 gigaton per year. The 35-gigaton projected anthropogenic CO2 emission for 2010 is about 80 to 270 times larger than the respective maximum and minimum annual global volcanic CO2 emission estimates. It is 135 times larger than the highest preferred global volcanic CO2 estimate of 0.26 gigaton per year (Marty and Tolstikhin, 1998). 

It is an embarrassment to me, as a skeptic, that the alarmist site “Skeptical Science” gets it right while Delingpole, a well know mouthpiece for skepticism, gets it wildly wrong.  This meme has been around for years and was long ago thoroughly debunked.  

I would forgive an acquaintance at a coffee shop or around the water cooler for making this mistake.  Then I would gently try to set him straight with the facts  But if you are going to put yourself forth as some kind of expert, then you need to get your facts straight.  This type of mistake may win converts to your side in the short run, but when people realize how wrong you have were, then they will not believe you even when you are right.  Worse yet, they will also be less inclined to believe other skeptics when they are right.

So, James, please fess up on this issue.  Admitting this mistake will only improve your credibility in the long run.

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By the way, this reminds me of another misinformed claim:that underwater volcanoes in the Gakkel ridge were causing reduced sea ice in the Arctic.

The Search for Acceleration, part 9, the Baltic Sea

This is part 9 of a series of posts in which I am searching for a large acceleration in sea level rise rate in the latter part of the 20th century.  Such a rise rate acceleration is needed  to reconcile the 1.8 mm per year average rise rate for the century attributed to tide gauge data and the approximately 3 mm per year rise rate for the tail end of the century attributed to the satellite data.

The Baltic Sea

There are 22 tide gauge stations in the Baltic Sea area that are at least 90% data complete from 1960 to 2005.  Eighteen of those are 90% complete all the way back to 1930 and ten are 90% complete back to 1900.  The weighting (using a 200 km threshold) is nearly constant for the entire 20th century (see weighting graph below).  I will use the usual technique of detrending, weighting, averaging and derivatives, as shown in the following slide show.  (Note that you can pause or increment the slide show forward or backward by using the buttons that appear when your cursor is placed over the image.)

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Conclusion

The following graph makes clear that the Baltic Sea tide gauge data DOES reconcile the sea level rise rate from the tide gauge data with the higher late century rise rate from the satellite data.

On the other hand, the tide gauge sea level rise rate immediately before the era of satellite data is higher than rise rate after….

See an index of the Search for Acceleration series here.

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Sources

20th century rise rate average of 1.8 mm/year

1. Church and White Global Mean Sea Level Reconstruction

2. Links to Church and White sea level data

Satellite data (about 3 mm/year): CU Sea Level Research Group

RLR tide gauge data: Permanent Service For Mean Sea Level