ALL things GLOBAL: real, imagined or otherwise

[BILLYFRED0000]

The Cooling World
By Peter Gwynne
28 April 1975

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production — with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas — parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia — where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually.

During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree — a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.

“A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras — and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.

Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 — years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases — all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.”

Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects.

They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

[BILLYFRED0000]

Bohren has no horse in the climate change debate: As a retired professor, he is not worried about losing or gaining funding based on his opinions.
This is his answer:
Discussion: First off, let me say I consider the concept of a global mean temperature [upon which global warming statistics are based] to be somewhat dubious, and I say so in my recent book (with Eugene Clothiaux) Fundamentals of Atmospheric Radiation. A single number cannot adequately capture climate change. This number, as I see it, is aimed mostly at politicians and journalists.

The issue of global warming is extremely complicated, and it transcends science. Views on global warming are as much determined by political and religious biases as by science. No one comes to the table about this issue without biases. So I'll state some of mine.

My biases: The pronouncements of climate modelers, who don't do experiments, don't make observations, don't even confect theories, but rather [in my opinion] play computer games using huge programs containing dozens of separate components the details of which they may be largely ignorant, don't move me. I am much more impressed by direct evidence: retreating glaciers, longer growing seasons, the migration of species, rising sea level, etc.

I have lived long enough to have seen many doomsday scenarios painted by people who profited by doing so, but which never came to pass. This has made me a skeptic. Perhaps global warming is an example of the old fable about the boy who cried wolf, but this time the doomsayers are, alas, right. Maybe, but I can't help noting that some of the prominent global warmers of today were global coolers of not so long ago. In particular, Steven Schneider, now at Stanford, previously at NCAR, about 30 years ago was sounding the alarm about an imminent ice age. The culprit then was particles belched into the atmosphere by human activities. No matter how the climate changes he can correctly say that he predicted it. No one in the atmospheric science community has been more successful at getting publicity. NCAR used to send my department clippings from newspaper and magazine articles in which NCAR researchers were named. We'd get thick wads of clippings, almost all of which were devoted to Schneider. Perhaps global warming is bad for the rest of us, but for Schneider and others it has been a godsend.

Within the past 10 years or so at least four ... alarming books on the possibility of asteroid collisions with Earth were published. Such collisions, if they were to occur, would be incomparably more disastrous than global warming. I also started to read, again within about the past 10 years, The Coming Plague [published in 1995]. It painted a picture of future plagues so ghastly and sickening that I couldn't continue reading it. The shelves of bookstores groan under the weight of books proclaiming disasters of all sorts. Take your pick of how we all are going to die horrible deaths. Repent!

People who write alarmist books are either trying to make a buck or they have an axe to grind. For example, it is in the best interests of astronomers to scare us so that we'll pressure the government to support astronomy research more generously. The same is true for biology, medicine, atmospheric science [and all sciences]. This does not mean that the alarmists are wrong or even dishonest, merely that in assessing their claims we must always ask about the extent to which they will profit from our believing and acting on them.

When I was a young man I read Famine 1975! by the Paddock brothers, one a foreign service officer, the other a tropical agriculture specialist. This book profoundly affected me. The Paddocks confidently predicted massive famines in 1975, and I believed them. But the famines did not turn out as predicted. And this is just one example among many.

Skeptics about global warming are often painted as hirelings of the oil and automotive industries. Such claims irritate me. I have never earned a nickel as a consequence of my skepticism. Indeed, I have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars by it. First, you have to understand how a large research university operates. The professors are expected to obtain research grants, and in the atmospheric sciences these grants come mostly from government agencies.

In the atmospheric sciences it is difficult to get grants unless you can somehow tie your work to global warming, that is to say, to scare science. Because of my reputation, I immodestly believe that I could have jumped onto the global warming bandwagon. But I refused to do so because I would have found this repugnant.

At some universities, professors get only a fraction of their salary from the university, the rest coming from contracts and grants. Research associates and research professors often must scrounge for 100% of their salaries.

Professors not only directly profit from their research grants (summer salaries), they also indirectly profit. If Professor X has grants amounting to millions of dollars, this gives him leverage. He wants more money so he threatens to leave and take his bags of money with him if he doesn't get a whopping raise. Or he plays one university off against another. He gets an offer from another university in order to pressure his present university to increase his salary. I have seen this done many times. The system of federal grants, which hardly existed before (World War II), has created a professoriate with greater allegiance to government agencies than to their universities.

Professors who get research money to work on aspects of global warming are not doing anything dishonest or illegal. This is not graft. But when it is in the best financial and career interests of professors to raise the alarm about global warming (or anything), we should be skeptical.

Perhaps some critics of global warming are in the pay of the oil and automotive companies. If so, they should be forthright about this. But so should folks on the other side of the debate. What fraction of their salaries comes from research on global warming?

[BILLYFRED0000]

continued

Now to more of my biases. I have an MS in nuclear engineering. About 40 years ago I was designing nuclear reactors. I got out of the business mostly because of boredom .... I have long felt that burning fossil fuels is madness in the long run regardless of what this will do to climate. Burning fossil fuels creates air pollution, which is not good for anyone's health. Also, fossil fuels are the feedstock for all kinds of industries, and so burning them is like burning fine furniture to heat your house. And finally, most important of all, basing an economy on a commodity that [in my opinion] is controlled by the most backward, unstable, and violent countries in the world is madness.

Nuclear power is dangerous but so is non-nuclear power. Several years ago Petr Beckmann published The Health Hazards of not Going Nuclear in which he ... tried to account for how many people die because of fossil fuels (not including automobile accidents). And this was before Gulf War I, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and so on. [In my view] these recent wars are mostly a consequence of oil....

Many years ago I was involved in a campus debate about nuclear power. I was willing only to take the middle ground, being flanked by a professor of nuclear engineering and an "environmental activist." I considered the latter to be nearly insane. His stated position was that "the loss of a single life" was not a price he would willingly pay for nuclear power. This is madness. We are willing to accept the loss of tens of thousands of lives every year in automobile accidents with hardly a peep. Coal miners die all the time, quickly in explosions or slowly by lung disease, with hardly a word of protest....

So it rankles me that many of the same folks who did their best to undermine nuclear power are also now screaming their guts out over global warming. Mind you, I have no more to gain from nuclear power than any other citizen. I have been out of this field for 40 years and at my age am not planning a comeback.

Another [one of my biases] is many years ago I came to the conclusion that austerity was a desirable way of life in order to mitigate possible environmental degradation....

Given my way of life, it rankles me that [in my view environmentalists] are not similarly frugal. In fact, many of them are profligate by my standards, and yet they enjoin the rest of us to cut back....

Now to the biases of others. It hardly comes as a surprise [to me] that the Wall Street Journal takes shots at global warming. Conservatives believe in unlimited growth, a consumer society that consumes more and more. Good for business. [It is my opinion that] the Bush White House is in the hands of oilmen who will never accept that burning oil could have any deleterious consequences....

Both political parties, liberals and conservatives, are to blame for the U.S. not having a rational energy policy.

Conservatives are correct in that a sudden decrease in the consumption of oil would have grave economic consequences. Like it or not, the U.S. economy (indeed the world economy) is based on readily available cheap oil. We as a nation made lots of bad decisions: cars instead of mass transport in cities, trucks instead of railroads, suburbs and so on. The food that almost everyone eats is transported long distances by trucks. We are no longer a nation of self-sufficient farmers. We depend on all kinds of networks of food, water, and power kept in operation mostly by burning fossil fuels.

Liberals have a curiously puritanical view of global warming. [They think, in my view, that] our contribution to it is evidence of our wickedness.

Stated simply (and probably unfairly), [I think] conservatives do not believe that global warming exists (because they don't want it to exist) whereas liberals believe in global warming (because they want it to exist).

And then there are religious biases. Certainly one means of mitigating the undesirable consequences of climate change, whatever its causes, would be population control. But [I believe] this is not acceptable to many religions.

[I think] some Christians seem to take the view that God cannot possibly let us destroy our planet, whereas others want us to perish because of our sinful ways. Some evangelical Christians seem to be eager for the end of the Earth.

Economists take a quite different view of global warming than do atmospheric scientists. Not long ago a group of prominent economists compiled a list of pressing problems for humanity. Global warming was near the bottom of the list, which outraged the "global warmers." But in the short run global warming surely must be of little concern to someone in Africa dying of AIDS or malaria or malnutrition. Or who doesn't have clean water, education, a job.

People in China, India, and Brazil, where the bulk of humanity lives, aspire to the same standard of living as those of us in the U.S. and Europe. No matter what we do, these other countries are going to consume more fossil fuels, and there isn't much we can do about it.

Fortunately [for me], I'll be dead before the consequences of global warming become dire, if indeed they do. But I would like to stick around long enough to see this drama played out.

[BILLYFRED0000]

Whatever happened to the warmest period of the last 2000 years.

Let us first examine the effect of climatic changes as indicated by plants and animals. The cultivation of grapes for wine making was extensive throughout the southern portion of England from about 1100 to around 1300 (Lamb 1965). This represents a northward latitude extension of about 500 km from where grapes are presently grown in France and Germany. Grapes were also grown in the north of France and Germany at this time, areas which even today do not sustain commercial vineyards. The grape production in England was more than that of local farmers for their own use. The amount of wine produced in England during this period was substantial enough to provide significant economic competition with the producers in France. With the coming of the 1400s, temperatures became too cold for sustained grape production, and the vineyards in these northern latitudes ceased to exist. It is interesting to note that at the present time the climate is still unfavorable for wine production in these areas.
Estimates can be made as to the average temperature differences between the warm period and the centuries which followed. In this warm time, vineyards were found at 780 meters above sea level in Germany. Today they are found up to 560 meters. If one assumes a 0.6-0.7ºC change/100 meter vertical excursion, these data imply that the average mean temperature was 1.0-1.4ºC higher than the present. For the successful production of grapes a frost-free spring is required after the blossoms are finished. Additionally a warm summer and autumn are required to increase the sugar content. Harvesting should be accomplished before the first fall frost.
A further botanical evidence which suggests a climatic shift to a colder time is the lowering of the tree line by 70 to 300 meters in the Alps (Lamb 1977, p. 436). This observation is supported by the remains of peat deposits and forests at higher elevations than they presently occur. A similar 100-200 meter lowing of the tree line also occurred in Northern Germany. Iceland experienced a 300 meter lowering of the tree line to the present day levels (Lamb 1977, p. 228). Birch tree trunks are still being expelled at the termini of Icelandic glaciers. In addition, the decrease in temperature resulted in lower-altitude requirements for fruit-and-grain crop production areas and an extension of 20 days for the average grape ripening time.
Human remains in Norse burial grounds located in Greenland have been found which are now in permanently frozen soil. This suggests an average local temperature at the time of Norse occupation 2-4ºC higher than at present. Additionally, the finding of plant roots at this same level supports this supposition, since the permafrost layer provides a barrier to growth. There is evidence that American Eskimos occupied areas in the north of Greenland, on Ellesmere Island and the New Siberia Islands. At these locations, large dwellings made from driftwood have been found. There is also archeological evidence of large villages that were developed for whaling and fishing. These settlements eventually were forced south by climatic change until they came in contact with Viking colonies in southern Greenland. Conflict occurred, and the Viking colonies eventually died out in the 1400s (Lamb 1977, p. 248). Communication with Europe was abandoned in 1410 and not re-established until the 1720s. Europeans did not recolonize there until the 1800s. The excavation of Viking colony sites on Greenland has shown the presence of corn pollen, which implies cultivation of this crop. Historical records predating the Little Ice Age also suggest that grain was grown in the Viking colonies, an occupation not attempted again in this region until the present century (Lamb 1977, p. 257).

SKIPPING ALONG
Another theory for the cause of the Little Ice Age centers not on the atmospheric restriction of the amount of energy flowing into the earth, but on the concept that the sun itself is variable in its energy production. It is estimated that a fluctuation of only a few tenths of 1% in energy output would be sufficient to produce significant changes in climate (Budyko 1969). An interesting coincidence held meaningful by many is the absence of sunspot activity through most of the latter and most severe period of the Little Ice Age (Eddy 1976). While accurate astronomical records are increasingly difficult to obtain as one moves back in history, there is yet a convincing amount of data which allows one to have confidence in the historical sunspot record.
At present sunspots — large areas of reduced surface temperature and increased magnetic field strength — increase and decrease numerically through an approximately 11-year cycle. These changes in solar magnetic field also affect the rate at which 14C is produced on earth and may provide a retrospective record of variations in sunspot activity (Figure 1g). Observations from the 1700s to the present have established a remarkable regularity in sunspot activity. Over the years there have been numerous attempts to correlate these cycles with weather cycles. While sunspot/weather analysis has not produced a consistent correlation, it is widely accepted that sunspot activity does indeed influence the weather. However, an interesting near absence of sunspot activity is found in the early decades of the 1600s extending into the first decade of the 1700s. This time corresponds remarkably with the coldest period of the Little Ice Age.

[Black_Magic]

:rolleyes: get out the big dump truck:rolleyes: what a load of Bull:rolleyes:

[Ranger Mom]

Originally posted by Black_Magic
:rolleyes: get out the big dump truck:rolleyes: what a load of Bull:rolleyes:

Can you condense that into a sentence or two?? That is entirely TOO MUCH reading for me!!!

[Black_Magic]

Originally posted by Ranger Mom
Can you condense that into a sentence or two?? That is entirely TOO MUCH reading for me!!! :clap:

[LH Panther Mom]

Originally posted by Ranger Mom
Can you condense that into a sentence or two?? That is entirely TOO MUCH reading for me!!!
Study (or report/article) from 1975 that indicates the world was in a phase that would be too cold to grow crops and a bunch of other stuff I didn't read. :nerd: :nerd:

[44INAROW]

Originally posted by LH Panther Mom
Study (or report/article) from 1975 that indicates the world was in a phase that would be too cold to grow crops and a bunch of other stuff I didn't read. :nerd: :nerd:

dayum - that was a good year (1975) nevermind, I zoned out for a minute............;)

[duckbutter]

Originally posted by 44INAROW
dayum - that was a good year (1975) nevermind, I zoned out for a minute............;) Sure was...I was in Kindygarten. :D

[Phantom Stang]

Originally posted by Black_Magic
:rolleyes: get out the big dump truck:rolleyes: what a load of Bull:rolleyes:
That's what they'll be saying about "global warming" 32 years from NOW!!:p

[Emerson1]

I just farted. The temperature around me just rose a degree :eek: :eek: :eek:

[Black_Magic]

Originally posted by Emerson1
I just farted. The temperature around me just rose a degree :eek: :eek: :eek: Im sure that paint peeled off the wall and any insects within range went belly up.

[Emerson1]

I hope, the warm weather is bringing out the spiders

[BILLYFRED0000]

Basically this is an area of study that current global warming theorists have ignored because it supports other causes of climate change not directly connected to their theories of man made contributions. The crop and archeological evidence clearly prove that the earth was probably 2 to 4 degrees Centigrade warmer early in the last millenia. Also the absense of sunspot activity was the proximate cause in the little ice age that started around the late 1300's. Notice that CO2 was obviously not the cause of either issue.
So it is globaly cooler now and even if the temperature goes up another 2 degrees centigrade it will only reach the approximate temperatures of the warmest days of 1100 thru 1300. And since the SUV did not really come into vogue until the late 20th century, I don't see how man had anything at all to do with it then which leads me to believe that we have little to do with it now. And it is still cooler than it was then. The most interesting part of this is that it is provable now by simple observation. The grapes have never returned to the areas then noted in study. Greenland is still not habitable as it was by the Vikings and Eskimos. But they were there then.

[BILLYFRED0000]

As far as the biases issue, I was pointing out academia's ties to scare science in order to secure the funds to keep them in the money. It is not illegal or graft or necessarily even bad science but you must consider the fact that their financial future is connected to securing funds and if you say the world is fine then there is nothing to research of any significant interest to the sources of said money.

It is certainly true that there are large sums of money invested in both points of view and that money is being protected which creates a conflict of interest. This is the area that Michael Creighton really covers well. I have a link for that and will attempt to find it.

[BILLYFRED0000]

Originally posted by Black_Magic
:rolleyes: get out the big dump truck:rolleyes: what a load of Bull:rolleyes:

Such a biased and uninformed point of view.

[BILLYFRED0000]

Originally posted by Phantom Stang
That's what they'll be saying about "global warming" 32 years from NOW!!:p

Could be. Truth is we still don't know. But
If it was warmer 800 years ago than now with the population being 80 percent lower than now, how did it happen? Did they all hyperventilate creating excess co2 in the process?

[LH Panther Mom]

Originally posted by BILLYFRED0000
academia's ties to scare science in order to secure the funds to keep them in the money.
That pretty well sums it up on this and many, many other things. In order to research, you need money - to continue to get that money, you need to come up with solutions/theories/hypotheses or the money dries up.

[SintonFan]

Good stuff there BILLYFRED0000 and very good points.:clap:
.
Last week or so Al Gore was here in SA and he was very much trying to turn this global warming crap into a new religion. His speech to a conference was closed to the public and media. Now why in the heck would he do that?:thinking:

[BigTex]

Originally posted by BILLYFRED0000
As far as the biases issue, I was pointing out academia's ties to scare science in order to secure the funds to keep them in the money.

......and that is why they pass out B.S. degrees at your friendly neighborhood college or university!;)

[BILLYFRED0000]

Originally posted by LH Panther Mom
That pretty well sums it up on this and many, many other things. In order to research, you need money - to continue to get that money, you need to come up with solutions/theories/hypotheses or the money dries up.

And that is the basis for most of academicia's work as well. If the world was ok and there was no threat there would be no need for more research. Or if the world was warming but man had nothing to do with it would also dry up the money. Research without an application is useless. So make us responsible and you open up new fields of research like how to reverse it and treaties needed and whole new schemes of carbon trading and so on.

Try this on for size. Here is something that the global warming group really does not want you to know.

Two factors that were previously not of concern have recently come to the renewed attention of scientists. The first is the sun. In the past it was imagined that the effect of the sun was fairly constant and therefore any rise in temperature must be caused by some other factor. But it is now clear from work of scientists at the Max Planck institute in Germany that the sun is not constant, and is right now at a 1,000 year maximum.

I always thought that if you turned on the heater it got warmer. Which by the way nicely dovetails with a russian scientist who says that the warming causes the oceans to release ever larger amounts of CO2 thus rendering it an effect, not a cause.

[BILLYFRED0000]

This is one of my favorite snippets from the IPCC. You would know them as the UN global warming guys. Check this out.

Climate variations and change, caused by external forcings, may be partly predictable, particularly on the larger, continental and global, spatial scales.

It's really just saying: Climate may be partly predictable.

Now, the second sentence:

Because human activities, such as the emission of greenhouse gases or land-use change, do result in external forcing, it is believed that the large-scale aspects of human-induced climate change are also partly predictable.

That means: We believe human-induced climate change is predictable.

Third sentence:

However the ability to actually do so is limited because we cannot accurately predict population change, economic change, technological development, and other relevant characteristics of future human activity.

It means: But we can't predict human behavior.

Fourth sentence:

In practice, therefore, one has to rely on carefully constructed scenarios of human behavior and determine climate projections on the basis of such scenarios.
It means: Therefore we rely on "scenarios."

The logic here is difficult to follow. What does "may be partly predictable" mean? Is it like a little bit pregnant? We see in two sentences we go from may be predictable to is predictable. And then, if we can't make accurate predictions about population and development and technology… how can we make a "carefully-constructed scenario?" What does "carefully-constructed" mean if we can't make accurate predictions about population and economic and other factors that are essential to the scenario?


Seen more closely, the flow of illogic is stunning.
This was edited from several sources with footnotes and a bibio and was used in a speech by Michael Crichgton.

[Keith7]

Arctic melt worse than predictions

(CNN) -- Arctic sea ice is melting at a rate far quicker than predicted by climate change computer models and could disappear completely before the middle of the century, scientists have warned.

The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that the actual rate at which summer sea ice had shrunk per decade during the past 50 years was more than three times faster than an average of 18 of the most highly regarded climate simulations.

Retreating Arctic ice is considered a key indicator of the pace of global warming by environmentalists, and one that could have devastating knock-on repercussions for the wider climate, including warmer oceans and rising sea levels.

Declining ice levels also poses a threat to Arctic wildlife including polar bears, walruses and ringed seals.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which releases the third of three reports into the causes, consequences and mitigation of global warming in Thailand this week, the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by the latter part of the 21st century.

But the research, conducted by the U.S.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), demonstrates that the 18 models on which the IPCC has based its current recommendations could already be out of date -- and that the retreat of the ice could already be 30 years ahead of the IPCC's worst case scenario.

"This suggests that current model projections may in fact provide a conservative estimate of future Arctic change, and that the summer Arctic sea ice may disappear considerably earlier than IPCC projections," said NSIDC's Julienne Stroeve who led the study.

Climate change models of Arctic sea ice cover in September, the month when ice is usually at its minimum, suggest an average loss of 2.5 percent of ice cover per decade from 1953 to 2003. The worst case simulated by an individual model predicted a decade-on-decade reduction of 5.4 percent.

Yet when scientists studied observable data for the same period, including shipping logs, aerial photos and satellite images, they discovered the actual figure for ice loss from 1953 until 2006 to be 7.8 percent.

Furthermore, the rate of deterioration seemed to be accelerating, topping nine percent per decade since 1979.

The discrepancy between computer modelling and reality is most likely due to the fact that simulations have failed to fully take into account the impact of increased levels of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, the researchers believe.

Models have typically attributed half of the loss of ice to greenhouse gases and half to natural variations in the climate cycle. But now, many believe the first factor could be playing a significantly greater role.

Earlier this month NSICD scientists reported that winter sea ice cover in the Arctic was just 14.7 million square kilometers (5.7m square miles) -- slightly better than the all-time low 14.5m square kilometers (5.6m square miles) in 2006 -- but well short of the 15.7m average for 1979-2000.

The Arctic is especially prone to global warming because of the dangers of the so-called "feedback loop" caused by melting ice.

While ice reflects around 80 percent of the sun's heat, having a cooling effect, blue sea water can absorb up to 95 percent of solar radiation, warming up the sea and accelerating the melting process further.

"While the ice is disappearing faster than the computer models indicate, both observations and the models point in the same direction: the Arctic is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace and the impact of greenhouse gases is growing," said co-author Marika Holland of NCAR.

[BILLYFRED0000]

Originally posted by Keith7
Arctic melt worse than predictions

(CNN) -- Arctic sea ice is melting at a rate far quicker than predicted by climate change computer models and could disappear completely before the middle of the century, scientists have warned.

The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that the actual rate at which summer sea ice had shrunk per decade during the past 50 years was more than three times faster than an average of 18 of the most highly regarded climate simulations.

Retreating Arctic ice is considered a key indicator of the pace of global warming by environmentalists, and one that could have devastating knock-on repercussions for the wider climate, including warmer oceans and rising sea levels.

Declining ice levels also poses a threat to Arctic wildlife including polar bears, walruses and ringed seals.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which releases the third of three reports into the causes, consequences and mitigation of global warming in Thailand this week, the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by the latter part of the 21st century.

But the research, conducted by the U.S.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), demonstrates that the 18 models on which the IPCC has based its current recommendations could already be out of date -- and that the retreat of the ice could already be 30 years ahead of the IPCC's worst case scenario.

"This suggests that current model projections may in fact provide a conservative estimate of future Arctic change, and that the summer Arctic sea ice may disappear considerably earlier than IPCC projections," said NSIDC's Julienne Stroeve who led the study.

Climate change models of Arctic sea ice cover in September, the month when ice is usually at its minimum, suggest an average loss of 2.5 percent of ice cover per decade from 1953 to 2003. The worst case simulated by an individual model predicted a decade-on-decade reduction of 5.4 percent.

Yet when scientists studied observable data for the same period, including shipping logs, aerial photos and satellite images, they discovered the actual figure for ice loss from 1953 until 2006 to be 7.8 percent.

Furthermore, the rate of deterioration seemed to be accelerating, topping nine percent per decade since 1979.

The discrepancy between computer modelling and reality is most likely due to the fact that simulations have failed to fully take into account the impact of increased levels of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, the researchers believe.

Models have typically attributed half of the loss of ice to greenhouse gases and half to natural variations in the climate cycle. But now, many believe the first factor could be playing a significantly greater role.

Earlier this month NSICD scientists reported that winter sea ice cover in the Arctic was just 14.7 million square kilometers (5.7m square miles) -- slightly better than the all-time low 14.5m square kilometers (5.6m square miles) in 2006 -- but well short of the 15.7m average for 1979-2000.

The Arctic is especially prone to global warming because of the dangers of the so-called "feedback loop" caused by melting ice.

While ice reflects around 80 percent of the sun's heat, having a cooling effect, blue sea water can absorb up to 95 percent of solar radiation, warming up the sea and accelerating the melting process further.

"While the ice is disappearing faster than the computer models indicate, both observations and the models point in the same direction: the Arctic is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace and the impact of greenhouse gases is growing," said co-author Marika Holland of NCAR.

Keith, the gist of my thread is so what.
It was warmer and had less ice 800 years ago. Obviously nothing happend and then we went into the little ice age.
And it is quite possible that what they have been recording is that the shelves are melting but the interior of Antartica is beginning to get colder by temperature measurement. Remember basic physics. The Oceans change last and slowest. So rather than read and respond with your own opinion you have become a paste and reply artist??? This does not refute anything I said at all. We are at a 1000 year maximum of the sun. When it calms back down it will cool off and the ice will return. Now if the sun does not chill, we may have a problem. But greenhouse gasses are not the problem and never have been. They are only an
effect not a cause and the archaeology
clearly prove that the warm spot before the little ice age was at least 2 degrees centigrade warmer than now. Imagine that and explain.

[BILLYFRED0000]

questions about theology.....

When did "skeptic" become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it?

To an outsider, the most significant innovation in the global warming controversy is the overt reliance that is being placed on models. Back in the days of nuclear winter, computer models were invoked to add weight to a conclusion: "These results are derived with the help of a computer model." But now large-scale computer models are seen as generating data in themselves. No longer are models judged by how well they reproduce data from the real world-increasingly, models provide the data. As if they were themselves a reality. And indeed they are, when we are projecting forward. There can be no observational data about the year 2100. There are only model runs.

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. Because only if you spend a lot of time looking at a computer screen can you arrive at the complex point where the global warming debate now stands.

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Stepping back, I have to say the arrogance of the modelmakers is breathtaking. There have been, in every century, scientists who say they know it all. Since climate may be a chaotic system-no one is sure-these predictions are inherently doubtful, to be polite. But more to the point, even if the models get the science spot-on, they can never get the sociology. To predict anything about the world a hundred years from now is simply absurd.

Look: If I was selling stock in a company that I told you would be profitable in 2100, would you buy it? Or would you think the idea was so crazy that it must be a scam?