You’ve heard it a thousand times before – greenhouse gases are causing the Earth to warm, there is more warming in the Arctic than other parts of the planet, and the permafrost is melting away. Remind the world that permafrost holds carbon and methane that can be released into the atmosphere, throw in some pictures of a drunken forest (below), claim that the permafrost melting is some type of global warming time bomb, and you will be embraced by the global warming alarmists. Do a web search on the subject of global warming and permafrost melting for 1,000s of additional ideas.

Figure 1. “Drunken forest” undoubtedly caused by widespread melting of the permafrost?

We have covered the permafrost issue before, and over and over, this story seems to be far more complex than one might expect. A recent article in Global Change Biology is yet another addition to the complicated warming = melting of permafrost issue.

(more…)

Several errors have been recently uncovered in the 4th Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). These include problems with Himalayan glaciers, African agriculture, Amazon rainforests, Dutch geography, and attribution of damages from extreme weather events. More seem to turn up daily. Most of these errors stem from the IPCC’s reliance on non-peer reviewed sources.

The defenders of the IPCC have contended that most of these errors are minor in significance and are confined to the Working Group II Report (the one on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability) of the IPCC which was put together by representatives from various regional interests and that there was not as much hard science available to call upon as there was in the Working Group I report (“The Physical Science Basis”). The IPCC defenders argue that there have been no (or practically no) problems identified in the Working Group I (WGI) report on the science.

We humbly disagree.

(more…)

The Technical Summary of the most recent IPCC reports states that “Over the 1961 to 2003 period, the average rate of global mean sea level rise is estimated from tide gauge data to be 1.8 ± 0.5 mm yr–1.” “The average thermal expansion contribution to sea level rise for this period was 0.42 ± 0.12 mm yr–1, with significant decadal variations, while the contribution from glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets is estimated to have been 0.7 ± 0.5 mm yr–1. The sum of these estimated climate-related contributions for about the past four decades thus amounts to 1.1 ± 0.5 mm yr–1, which is less than the best estimate from the tide gauge observations. Therefore, the sea level budget for 1961 to 2003 has not been closed satisfactorily.”

That is indeed very interesting – the average rate of sea level is around 1.8 mm per year, and the IPCC can account for only 60% of the increase. This uncertainty is compound considering IPCC’s statements that “The global average rate of sea level rise measured by TOPEX/Poseidon satellite altimetry during 1993 to 2003 is 3.1 ± 0.7 mm yr–1. This observed rate for the recent period is close to the estimated total of 2.8 ± 0.7 mm yr–1 for the climate-related contributions due to thermal expansion (1.6 ± 0.5 mm yr–1) and changes in land ice (1.2 ± 0.4 mm yr–1). Hence, the understanding of the budget has improved significantly for this recent period, with the climate contributions constituting the main factors in the sea level budget (which is closed to within known errors). Whether the faster rate for 1993 to 2003 compared to 1961 to 2003 reflects decadal variability or an increase in the longer-term trend is unclear”.

As you might guess, there is much to be done to improve our understanding of sea level rise.

(more…)

We have all heard over and over that the icecaps are melting, glaciers are retreating, and sea level is rising as ice around the world turns to liquid water. We have covered this topic many times in our essay series, but we revisit the ice issue given two recent and important publications in the science literature.

(more…)

The wonderful Christmas season is upon us, and no Christmas story would be complete without snow. If you really like snow, Greenland is the place for you! The snow there lasts all year long and is 1,000s of feet deep in the interior – a white Christmas is guaranteed every year in this winter paradise.

Anyone following the global warming debate is aware that Greenland is a favorite topic of the apocalypse crowd – melt Greenland, sea level will rise, the ocean currents will be disrupted, and the climate of the world will be changed for thousands of years — all thanks to our inability to slow-down our greenhouse gas emissions. The rhetoric from Copenhagen recently was full of disasters involving rapid melting of Greenland. Within the past week alone, we found the headlines “Warming Hits Greenland’s Hunters” and “The Maldives and Greenland’s Ilulissat: Two Countries Experiencing Global Warming at an Alarming Rate”.

(more…)

The one thing that is the most certain about climate change, is that no matter what happens, we’ll have to adapt. In fact, even if the climate doesn’t change a lick, adaptations will take place, aimed at improving our overall health and welfare by either better protecting us from, or taking better advantage of, the prevailing climate conditions. Such has always been the case, and such always will be.

This is something that global warming alarmists either fail to understand, or fail to acknowledge.

(more…)

There is a bit of press covering a just-published paper that concludes that the current climate and ecological conditions in a remote lake along the north shore of Canada’s Baffin Island are unique within the past 200,000 years—and anthropogenic global warming is the root cause. Which of course, spells t-r-o-u-b-l-e.

Somehow, that temperatures there were several degrees higher than present for a good third of the past 10,000 years and that there has been virtually no temperature trend in the area during past 50 years—the time usually associated with the greatest amount of human-caused “global warming”—was conveniently downplayed or ignored.

Go figure.

(more…)

Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?

The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.

Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season.

Figure 1. Standardized values of the Antarctic snow melt index (October-January) from 1980-2009 (adapted from Tedesco and Monaghan, 2009).

The silence surrounding this publication was deafening.

(more…)

Of all the potential woes bandied about with regards to “global warming,” the only one which really is in uncharted territory is a large and rapid rise in sea level. Otherwise we are rather routinely exposed to all nature of weather extremes as they are a part of the natural climate. Droughts, floods, heat waves, tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. have impacted human societies in the past and they will continue to do so into the future—with or without “global warming.”

The degree to which we are affected by extreme weather depends on a number of factors, especially preparedness.

One of the driving forces motivating us to “be prepared” (aside from our scout leader), is the frequency with which extreme weather occurs. Generally, the more frequent something negative occurs, the more we act to prepare ourselves. So, in this sense, if weather extremes do be more common in the future, we’ll more than likely quickly become better prepared to deal with them—lessening their negative impacts and probably boosting the economy along the way as we build the necessary precautions into our way of life (consider the improved building codes in Florida after Hurricane Andrew, or the response in Chicago (and France) in the aftermath of killer heat waves). In truth, the impact of climate change is very low compared to the impact of climate itself.

However, one exception to this could be sea level rise. As an organized society, we have pretty much experienced the global ocean level being pretty close (within a couple of feet) to where they are now. True, the global sea level has been creeping upwards for the past 10,000 years (after the big jump up at the end of last ice age) and true, we have had to make some adjustments to a few of our particularly vulnerable coastal cities, but by and large the sea level hasn’t been rising at a rate so great as to cause large societal disruptions or reorganizations.

(more…)

For another look at how the results of the latest work by Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis—which show, among other things, that the earth’s climate most likely shifted into a state which could result in a slowed rate of global warming lasting for another decade or so—are impacting the processes (both scientific and political) of climate change, see this piece over at MasterResource.org.