Climate News from the science press

Wangler said:
How is this more revealing and informative than the rest of the writeup?

So they would really like to have more data before they have any really definitive verification of their revised model.

Okay, that is good.
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They also point up that this is the first paper using a new technique with very restricted data and is at best tentative in its conclusions. Which is only right and proper : these are serious scientists at work.

It also points up that their measured isostatic adjustment "deviates rather sharply from general assumptions". Those assumptions, of course, weren't just plucked out of the air so we either have some slightly new geology revealed, or the data isn't sufficiently representative, or a bit of both. I favour the latter, by experience :).

I hope the paper prompts more direct measurement, more likely in Greenland than Antarctica (it's not far from New England and the weather's not nearly as demanding as it used to be). It's a question of funding, as usual.
 
Please, don't follow my lead and continue the derail with discussion of the topics.

Just posting enough from recent articles about climate news from the science press to avoid a Rule 4 infraction is what we are looking for here.


:D

Seriously, we can talk more in the moderated thread if needed.
 
I guess we can see the quality of 3b's reference sources clearly, the National Pest and the idjit Delingpoole at the Guardian....

Just what don't you understand about "science press" in the topic title.?

Just a dodge on 3Bs part to avoid the moderated thread.

Meanwhile from the actual science press.

Warmer and warmer

Filed under:
— rasmus @ 13 September 2010
Are the heat waves really getting more extreme? This question popped up after the summer of 2003 in Europe, and yet again after this hot Russian summer. The European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which normally doesn’t make much noise about climate issues, has since made a statement about July global mean temperature being record warm:
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http://www.realclimate.org/
 
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Ah, the GRACE satellite data, it's been covered already. Lomiler can explain it better than I can, but as I understand it reduces the current loss due to isostatic rebound but doesn't take into account accelerating rates, and it is ultimately the rate at which it accelerates that will impact sea-level rise.

This is why the thread title calls from climate change news from the science press, not climate change news from the science press interpreted by Science Daily, then reinterpreted by a rapacious, lying, climate denying hack like Lorne Gunter.
 
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I can't find the original article in the Nature Geo-science :confused:

Nature Geoscience 3, 596 - 597 (2010)
Published online: 15 August 2010 | doi:10.1038/ngeo946Subject Category: Cryospheric science


Sea-level rise: Ice-sheet uncertainty

David H. Bromwich1 & Julien P. Nicolas1

  1. David H. Bromwich and Julien P. Nicolas are in the Polar Meteorology Group, Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio State University, 1090 Carmack Road, 108 Scott Hall, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA.
    e-mail: bromwich@polarmet1.mps.ohio-state.edu

Abstract

Gravity measurements of the ice-mass loss in Greenland and Antarctica are complicated by glacial isostatic adjustment. Simultaneous estimates of both signals confirm the negative trends in ice-sheet mass balance, but not their magnitude.

Satellite gravimetry has been playing an increasingly important role in monitoring the state of the polar ice sheets since 2002. A suite of mass-balance studies1, 2, 3 based on the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission has revealed substantial losses of ice-sheet mass in Greenland and West Antarctica.
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http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v3/n9/full/ngeo946.html
 
Nothing even shows on the JPL site tho this is of interest...

September 15, 2010
The tropical Pacific Ocean has transitioned from last winter's El Niño conditions to a cool La Niña, as shown by new data about sea surface heights, collected by the U.S-French Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2 oceanography satellite.
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http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-300
 
At least it's the science press....

Melting Rate of Icecaps in Greenland and Western Antarctica Lower Than Expected

ScienceDaily (Sep. 7, 2010) — The Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps are melting at half the speed previously predicted, according to analysis of recent satellite data.
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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100906085152.htm

we're only thermally assaulting Greenland with 2,000 Hiroshima equivalents a day instead of 4k...I'm sooooo relieved our carpet bombing is on a lesser scale :garfield:
 
A South American Hockey Stick - (via Skeptical Science):

A South American hockey stick

A new paper has just been published employing a new technique for reconstructing past temperatures (Kellerhals 2010). It uses Ammonium concentration from an ice core in tropical South America (the eastern Bolivian Andes) as a proxy for temperature. This enables them to build a temperature record going back 1600 years in a region which has had little proxy data available until now. They find a distinguishable Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in the record. Nevertheless, they also find the last few decades show unprecedented warmth over the last 1600 years.

picture.php

Figure 1: Reconstructed tropical South American temperature anomalies (normalized to the 1961–1990AD average) for the last 1600 years (red curve, smoothed with a 39‐year Gaussian filter). The shaded region envelops the ±2 standard deviation uncertainty as derived from the validation period. Poor core quality precluded any chemical analysis for the time interval between 1580 and 1640 AD.

Note that Figure 1 shows only the proxy record from the ice core - no instrumental data is included.
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2010 Tied With 1998 as Warmest Global Temperature on Record

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100919104002.htm

ScienceDaily (Sep. 20, 2010) — The first eight months of 2010 tied the same period in 1998 for the warmest combined land and ocean surface temperature on record worldwide. Meanwhile, the June-August summer was the second warmest on record globally after 1998, and last month was the third warmest August on record. Separately, last month's global average land surface temperature was the second warmest on record for August, while the global ocean surface temperature tied with 1997 as the sixth warmest for August.

<SNIP>
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Ocean Cooling Contributed to Mid-20th Century Global Warming Hiatus

The hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution, according to a new paper appearing Sept. 22 in Nature.
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Linky
 
Research Meteorologists See More Severe Storms Ahead: The Culprit -- Global Warming

http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2009/0109-global_warming_causes_severe_storms.htm

January 1, 2009 — Research Meteorologists found that the temperature changes brought on by global warming are significant enough to cause an increase in the occurrence of severe storms. Severe storms are those that cause flooding, have damaging winds, hail and could cause tornados. Their study revealed that by the end of this century, the number of days that favor severe storms could more than double certain locations, such as Atlanta and New York. Researchers also found that this increase would occur during typical stormy seasons and not during dry seasons when it may be beneficial.

<SNIP>
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Wangler said:
Linky
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might be appropriate to say that the regional cooling was more heavily influenced by this factor than the masking due to pollutants, but the article wording is poor at best, and indicative of the problems faced when attempting to use popsci reporting as an authoritative exposition of the underlying science.

Here's a link to the full actual paper for those interested and quote of the first paragraph:
The twentieth-century trend in global-mean surface temperature
was not monotonic: temperatures rose from the start of the century
to the 1940s, fell slightly during the middle part of the century, and
rose rapidly from the mid-1970s onwards1. The warming–
cooling–warming pattern of twentieth-century temperatures is
typically interpreted as the superposition of long-term warming
due to increasing greenhouse gases and either cooling due to a
mid-twentieth century increase of sulphate aerosols in the troposphere2–
4, or changes in the climate of the world’s oceans that
evolve over decades (oscillatory multidecadal variability)2,5.
Loadings of sulphate aerosol in the troposphere are thought to have
had a particularly important role in the differences in temperature
trends between the Northern and Southern hemispheres during
the decades following the Second World War2–4. Here we show that
the hemispheric differences in temperature trends in the
middle of the twentieth century stem largely from a rapid drop
in Northern Hemisphere sea surface temperatures of about 0.3 6C
between about 1968 and 1972. The timescale of the drop is shorter
than that associated with either tropospheric aerosol loadings or
previous characterizations of oscillatory multidecadal variability.
The drop is evident in all available historical sea surface temperature
data sets, is not traceable to changes in the attendant metadata,
and is not linked to any known biases in surface temperature
measurements. The drop is not concentrated in any discrete region
of the Northern Hemisphere oceans, but its amplitude is largest
over the northern North Atlantic.
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TShaitanaku said:
might be appropriate to say that the regional cooling was more heavily influenced by this factor than the masking due to pollutants, but the article wording is poor at best, and indicative of the problems faced when attempting to use popsci reporting as an authoritative exposition of the underlying science.

Here's a link to the full actual paper for those interested and quote of the first paragraph:
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The silver-lining of AGW is that the oceans are finally getting the attention they deserve :).

This research isn't about the global energy-budget, its about how the system responds to a persistent surplus or deficit. AGW isn't the first unintentional climate experiment humanity has pulled : the smog-era of the mid-20thCE was earlier.
 
Technically not from the science press, per se, but from James Hansen on attribution:

Finally, a comment on frequently asked questions of the sort: Was global warming the cause of the 2010 heat wave in Moscow, the 2003 heat wave in Europe, the all-time record high temperatures reached in many Asian nations in 2010, the incredible Pakistan flood in 2010? The standard scientist answer is “you cannot blame a specific weather/climate event on global warming.” That answer, to the public, translates as “no”.

However, if the question were posed as “would these events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?”, an appropriate answer in that case is “almost certainly not.” That answer, to the public, translates as “yes”, i.e., humans probably bear a responsibility for the extreme event.

In either case, the scientist usually goes on to say something about probabilities and how those are changing because of global warming. But the extended discussion, to much of the public, is chatter. The initial answer is all important.

Although either answer can be defended as “correct”, we suggest that leading with the standard caveat “you cannot blame…” is misleading and allows a misinterpretation about the danger of increasing extreme events. Extreme events, by definition, are on the tail of the probability distribution. Events in the tail of the distribution are the ones that change most in frequency of occurrence as the distribution shifts due to global warming.

For example, the “hundred year flood” was once something that you had better be aware of, but it was not very likely soon and you could get reasonably priced insurance. But the probability distribution function does not need to shift very far for the 100-year event to be occurring several times a century, along with a good chance of at least one 500-year event.
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Also a lot of good stuff in there about the Northern Summer temperature records:

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2010/20101001_SummerTemperatures.pdf
 
CapelDodger said:
The silver-lining of AGW is that the oceans are finally getting the attention they deserve :).

This research isn't about the global energy-budget, its about how the system responds to a persistent surplus or deficit. AGW isn't the first unintentional climate experiment humanity has pulled : the smog-era of the mid-20thCE was earlier.
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well, actually, the AGW experiment is a multi-stage experiment that may have begun (unintentionally of course) as long as several thousand years ago, but the CO2 variable phase of it started in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century, the smog/sulfur emissions masking experiment probably started at about the same time, but it wasn't until we started cleaning up the emissions for health reasons in the latter part of the 20th century that we noticed the masking effect part of that particular experiment.

The oceans are an essential key to life on our planet.
 
TShaitanaku said:
might be appropriate to say that the regional cooling was more heavily influenced by this factor than the masking due to pollutants,
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You have a point. From the last paragraph of the paper:

The spatial and temporal structures of the drop in NH2SH seasurface
temperatures suggest that the hemispheric differences in surface
temperature trends during the mid-twentieth century derive not
from hemispheric asymmetries in tropospheric aerosol loadings2–4 or
oscillatory decadal variability in the ocean8–13. Rather, the hemispheric
differences seem to derive in large part from a discrete cooling event in
the Northern Hemisphere oceans that was not geographically localized,
but had its largest amplitude over the northern North Atlantic.
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Sciencedaily is still a good linky source, regardless.
 
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