Still there?

Canaries and coal mines. The Arctic and the Antarctic. We will inevitably have to suffer the hysteria of the warmenistas if Arctic ice falls to a new low this summer, which looks possible. Of course, it tells us nothing about the attribution of the ice loss, which could be contributed to by a thousand other things as well as anthropogenic warming.

And when we point to the Antarctic’s increasing ice, they wail “What about the Antarctic peninsula which is warming faster than ever?”

New light is shed on this topic by a paper in Nature, which indicates that the warming in Antarctic peninsula began long before the Industrial Revolution, or the invention of the SUV:

The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth — records since 1958 suggest warming of around 3.5°C per century.

But long-term climate data has been unavailable because of the logistical difficulties associated with finding good ice-core sites, says co-author and palaeoclimatologist Dr Nerilie Abram, of the Australian National University.

“What the ice core showed was that this site started warming 600 years ago — well before the Industrial Revolution — so there was a natural climate cycle that meant this area was warming naturally,” says Abram.

The researchers say the ice core records also show that the warming has accelerated rapidly over the past 100 years.

They describe this warming “unusual (but not unprecedented) in the context of natural climate variability over the past two millennia”.

Eric Steig, who has championed the Antarctic warming story for a long time (see here) comments as well:

In an accompanying editorial, glaciologist Dr Eric Steig, says it is possible to postulate the ‘null-hypothesis’ that the warming on the Antarctic Peninsula is happening independent of recent global warming trends, but that this is highly unlikely.

“The rate of recent warming at James Ross Island is highly unusual, falling within the uppermost 0.3 per cent of all century-scale temperature trends of the past two millennia, which would compel us to reject the null hypothesis with confidence,” writes Steig, professor of glaciology at the University of Washington.

Steig says the peninsula serves as a sort of mine canary for the rest of the continent.

See? I told you there would be canaries and coal mines…

Read it here. Abstract here.

Debunked again?

In the science blogs there is currently a serious bust up between Eric Steig, author of a paper claiming that the Antarctic was warming (and therefore, in his view, putting the final nail in the sceptics’ coffin) and Ryan O’Donnell, who, with Steve McIntyre, has published a challenging rebuttal. The story is taken up in the UK Spectator this week. The main story is subscription only, but the editorial makes very interesting reading:

In January 2009, Nature magazine ran the a cover story (pictured) conveying dramatic news about Antarctica: that most of it had warmed significantly over the last half-century. For years, the data from this frozen continent – with 90 percent of the world’s ice mass – had stubbornly refused to corroborate the global warming narrative. So the study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington, was treated as a bit of a scoop. It reverberated around the world. Gavin Schmidt, from the RealClimate blog, declared that Antarctica had silenced the sceptics. Mission, it seemed, was accomplished: Antarctica was no longer an embarrassment to the global warming narrative.

He spoke too soon. The indefatigable Steve McIntyre started to scrutinise his followings along with Nicholas Lewis. They found several flaws: Steig et al had used too few data sequences to speak for an entire continent, and had processed the data in a very questionable way. But when they wanted to correct him, in another journal, they quickly ran into an inconvenient truth about global warming: the high priests do not like refutation. To have their critique (initial submission here, final version here) of Steig’s work published, they needed to assuage the many demands of an anonymous ‘Reviewer A’ – whom they later found out to be Steig himself.

Lewis and Matt Ridley have joined forces to tell the story in the cover issue of this week’s Spectator. It’s another powerful, and depressing tale of the woeful state of climate science. Real science welcomes refutation: with global warming, it is treated as a religion. As they say in their cover story:

“Nature’s original peer-review process had let through an obviously flawed paper, and no professional climate scientist then disputed  it – perhaps because of fear that doing so might harm their careers. As the title of Richard Bean’s new play – The Heretic – at the Royal Court hints, young scientists going into climate studies these days are a bit like young theologians in Elizabethan England. They quickly learn that funding and promotion dries up if you express heterodox views, or doubt the scripture. The scripture, in this case, being the assembled reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

They went through 88 pages of correspondence in their battle to have their critique published.

“So has Antarctica been warming? Mostly not – at least not measurably. Retreat of the floating Antarctic ice shelves is a favourite story for the media. But, except in a very few peripheral parts, Antarctica is far too cold to lose ice by surface melting.”

As Lewis & Ridley say in their closing paragraphs:

“Papers that come to lukewarm or sceptical conclusions are published, if at all, only after the insertion of catechistic sentences to assert their adherence to orthodoxy. Last year, a paper in Nature Geosciences concluded heretically that `it is at present impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide’ (high sensitivity  underpins the entire IPCC argument), yet presaged this with the (absurd) remark: `Earth’s climate can only be stabilized by bringing carbon dioxide emissions under control in the twenty-first century.’Likewise, a paper In Science last month linking periods of migration in European history with cooler weather stated: `Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.’ Sceptical climatologist Pat Michaels pointed out that the sentence would make more sense with `counteracting’ removed.

Science as a philosophy is a powerful, but fragile thing. In the case of climate, it is now in conflict with science as an institution.” (source)