Month: February 2016

Guest essay by Dr. Susan Crockford

Grim predictions of the imminent demise of polar bears – their “harsh prophetic reality” as it’s been called – have been touted since at least 2001. But such depressing prophesies have so widely missed the mark they can now be said to have failed.

While polar bears may be negatively affected by declines in sea ice sometime in the future, so far there is no convincing evidence that any unnatural harm has come to them. Indeed, global population size (described by officials as a “tentative guess“) appears to have grown slightly over this time, as the maximum estimated number was 28,370 in 1993 (Wiig and colleagues 1995; range 21,470-28,370) but rose to 31,000 in 2015 (Wiig and colleagues 2015, [pdf here] aka 2015 IUCN Red List assessment; range 20,000-31,000).

These ominous prophesies have been promoted primarily by Ian…

Guest essay by Sheldon Walker

A quick recap for anybody who missed my first article.

My first article can be found here.

I have developed a new technique for analysing global warming (and other things). It is called Multi Trend Analysis, or MTA. It analyses the data in a time interval, by calculating the trend between every possible pair of points in the interval. The trend includes all of the data points between each pair of points as well. This can involve a lot of trends. To analyse the interval [January 1975 to December 1999] involves 16,920 trends. A trend is basically a linear regression.

I have developed methods that allow large numbers of trends to be analysed quickly, and the results displayed either graphically or in a table. A trend has 4 main attributes, a start date, an end date, a length, and a slope (with global warming, the…

One of the graphs we have had on the WUWT sea ice page has been the DMI graph showing 30% concentration of sea ice extent, there has been a widening divergence between the two Arctic sea ice extent graphs produced by DMI.  WUWT reader David Burton writes:

Until a few days ago, Denmark’s Meteorologiske Institut (DMI) graphed Arctic sea ice extent two ways. They had a graph comparing the current year to the preceding ten years’ “30%+ concentration” Arctic sea ice extent, with coastal zones masked out, by graphing each year in a different color on the same horizontal timescale.

They also had (and still have) a graph comparing the current year to the preceding four years’ “15%+ concentration” Arctic sea ice extent (and I don’t know how they handle coastal zones in that version). In both graphs, the current (partial) year is plotted with a heavier black line.

Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

A scene from the NYC “peoples climate march” in September 2014

An interesting pattern developed early in the official involvement in global warming. If a person challenged the claim that humans were causing global warming (AGW), it was assumed they were on the political right. If you supported AGW, then you were on the left. This categorization is not related to the science, but to the political nature of the science involved. This occurred in two major parts. The original objective of those using global warming for their political agenda and the marginalizing of those who questioned the science by linking them to industries and their wealthy owners. The author believes the evidence shows that human CO2 is not causing AGW, that the hypothesis is not proved. This article is not written to pick political sides. Rather, it is an attempt to help understand the…

A couple of days ago, I highlighted a worst of the worst NOAA climate monitoring station in Arizona with the help of a scientist from the University of Washington.

My friend Jim Goodridge, former California State Climatologist continues to be busy in his retirement, and sends this along today. He’s been tracking a group of weather stations in California, and has been doing so for over 20 years. In fact, it was Jim who first introduced me to that light bulb moment where I realized that global warming wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be when he made this short publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society in 1996.

I guess you could say it was the graph that launched a thousand blog posts, because as we all know, CO2 can’t heat differently based on county population.

So with that in mind, have a look at his…

Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. directs me to this new forecast product from NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL). If it holds, it suggests a big cooling event ahead.

NOAA/ESRL PSD and CU CIRES Forecast in Global Tropics Domain

LIM forecasts of SST anomalies based on November-December-January 2015-2016 initial conditions. Contour interval is 0.3 degrees C. For numerical values click here.

Source: http://esrl.boulder.noaa.gov/psd/forecasts/sstlim/for4gl.html

He adds:

From the “things Earth does without our help” department:

Study: 100,000 square miles of Ross Ice Shelf disappeared in 1,500 years

From RICE UNIVERSITY

HOUSTON — (Feb. 18, 2016) — In a new study that provides clues about how Antarctica’s nation-sized Ross Ice Shelf might respond to a warming climate, U.S. and Japanese oceanographers have shown that a 100,000-square-mile section of the ice shelf broke apart within 1,500 years during a warming period after the last ice age.

The Ross Ice Shelf is the world’s largest ice shelf, a vast floating extension of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that is about the size of France. But at the end of the last ice age, it extended much farther north and covered the entire Ross Sea.

A study in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details how the ice shelf shrank during a period of climate warming following…