Bishop Hill Steig responds to Lewis
Sep 8, 2012 Climate: Surface Eric Steig has responded to Nic Lewis's letter in the Guardian, which I mentioned here. Lewis had pointed out that warming in Antarctica is restricted to the West Antarctic Peninsula. Here's Steig's response:
Nicholas Lewis (Letters, 28 August) complained that your report (Arctic ice melt likely to break record, 24 August) gave the impression that typical temperatures in Antarctica have risen as much as on the Antarctic peninsula. While he is correct about this, his letter also refers to an outdated study of his, which argued that previous estimates of overall Antarctic warming were too high. In fact, the work of Lewis and co-authors has been proven wrong.
The relevant paper here is Orsi et al, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 39, 2012, which shows that the rate of warming in west Antarctica is as great, or greater, than what we showed in our original work (Steig et al, Nature, vol. 457, 2009). Moreover, Lewis's own paper shows there has been significant warming in west Antarctica and that the average trend over Antarctica is of warming, not cooling as is often stated.
The reality is that the Antarctic is warming up and is contributing significantly to sea level rise; and that there is strong potential for a greater contribution to sea level rise from Antarctica in the future.Professor Eric Steig
University of Washington, Seattle, USA
This is very, very naughty from Professor Steig, as you can probably tell. The O'Donnell (Lewis) et al paper showed that Steig had smeared the warming from the peninsula into the rest of the continent. How Steig can think that the Orsi paper - a noisy estimate of temperatures at a single point - can affect the finding that his paper was wrong is beyond me. It looks like an obvious attempt to muddy the waters. And as Jeff Id explains here, the Orsi paper is not one that you'd like to use in preferentially anyway:
What normal thinking person would take a temperature from a lousy borehole and hold that out as superior to an actual thermometer?
I'm intrigued by Jeff Id's suggestion that the IPCC is going to cite Steig's Antarctic paper in the Fifth Assessment Report. If they do, it really must be curtains for the organisation.
[Fixed an error re the Orsi paper]
Reader Comments (29)
Has Leo salivated yet?
smacksof a desperate attempt to save what 'scientific reputation' he has.
Leo and Roger probably haven't answered their pagers yet.
Seems to me that Steig and Mann have a number of similarities.
Steig = Mann mark 2
This is post-normal science
A paper which gets the "right" answers even though it was wrong is considered to be "right".
The end justifies the means. Even if the "right" answer is itself wrong.
Shocking.
Gross conflict with narrative......
Any evidence of either increase in Antarctic ice volume/cover or a static state of affairs is simply a regional weather picture.....not indicative of the general global climate warming/change/catastrophe etc etc et-al..
Any warming however or ice loss?......
Tis all bolloc**............That's my scientific view anyhow....
As someone so eloquently said once: "climate bollocks".
So Lewis has now been designated as a denier and will be carefully watched by the team in future. Suitable pressure already being applied on the editor to prevent any further response I assume.
Ivor Ward
"The reality is that the Antarctic is warming up and is contributing significantly to sea level rise..." Measured values, or those due to models?
As an amateur about the Antarctic, I had assumed some fundamentals.
1. Floating ice that melts does not appreciably change ocean level (Archimedes) though there is minor thermal expansion if the whole body of surrounding water increases in heat content, which it need not do with melting ice.
2. Nobody has reported a thermal melt discontinuity in the Antarctic land ice core, meaning that an estimated 700,000 years have passed without melting, or there has been a faulty interpretation of the cores. Why should there be melting now?
2. Temperature reconstructions from boreholes are ill posed as to the number of parameters need to solve equations. As one who has observed many hundreds of drill holes, I would have thought that a temperature reconstruction was so ludicrous that it would not be attempted by rigorous scientists, except with the intention of confirming its lack of utility and lack of controls.I have measured the change of temperature on land at various shallow depths and the main effect is day/night variations that are greatly larger than the annual variation that is sought. Throw in some unquantified evaporation or sublimation at the forming surface and the energy balance equation becomes impossible to solve.
Is this too simple a take?
You will see Steig,O'Donnell and Orsi discussed in AR5. Why? Because they all add to the understanding of the current Antarctic climate.
Just what "they" want: policy based science.
To correct this and have policy based on science again we have to remove "them" from office.
Not the first time Climate Scientist's have given preference to proxy's over thermometers. They continue to dishonor the title "Scientist".
"...shows that the rate of warming in west Antarctica is as great, or greater, than what we showed in our original work..."
Call me Mr Picky, but surely something like 'than shown in our original work' would be a considerable improvement over 'than what we showed'. Lazy use of language does not infer the kind of rigour I want from a scientist.
'The reality is that the Antarctic is warming up and is contributing significantly to sea level rise; and that there is strong potential for a greater contribution to sea level rise from Antarctica in the future.'
Sea ice or land ice because the ice in my glass of water when it melts doesn't flow over the top of the glass.
It would seem symbolically appropraite if IPCC AR5 were to be written on duct tape if it is laced with studies like Steig's and grey literature from Greenpeace and other enviro outfits.
Geoff & Shevva -
The WAIS is not floating ice. It is grounded below sea level and hence its reduction contributes to sea level rise.
Geoff, Shevva, Harold and others
Yes, melting of the West Antarctica Ice Sheet adds to sea level. Steig links surface warming in Antarctica generally to increase in sea level. But apart from a few peripheral areas, Antarctica is far too cold to lose ice by surface melting.
The increased outflow of ice into the ocean is thought to be caused primarily by currents of deep ocean water, itself warmed naturally centuries ago, melting ice shelves from below. Jenkins et al. (Nature Geoscience, vol. 3, 2010), who sent robot submarines under a glacier outlet, concluded that this melting process is continent-wide and has been going on for a long time - too long to be blamed on anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gases.
Nic -
Switching gears slightly, I was just reading a paper by Schneider et al. on West Antarctic warming in the spring. I was quite surprised to see it use the values from Steig et al. rather than O'Donnell et al.; they mention the latter only in passing as agreeing the large spring trends in WA. Do you have any comment on the Schneider et al. paper?
Harold
I haven't studied the Schneider et al paper in enough detail to comment on its findings, but their use of the Steig results rather than ours (they refer to Steig et al as one of the three major reconstructions of Antarctic temperatures, along with Chapman and Walsh 2007 and Monaghan et al 2008/9, but not O'Donnell et al 2011) seems unscientific to me. Our paper showed that Steig's was mathematically flawed, so that its results could not be correct (except by fluke).
Schneider is an ex colleague of Steig, they have published several papers together, and he (and the peer reviewers - who maybe included Steig) also probably don't like outsiders rocking the boat. So I am not terribly surprised.
Bishop, may I suggest you have a 'ZDB bucket' just to keep these gems for posterity.
I'm sure that psychologists of the next decade would appreciate this as it would be a treasure trove of research material for a case study of CAGW alarmist lunacy in the late-20th/early-21st century.
The corruption of Mann Made Global Warming (tm) really does know no bounds???
Mailman
Thanks Nic.
Dont feed the troll Don, they thrive on the oxygen of attention.
Mailman
World - NH + SH sea ice is in balance, the Antarctic sea ice is above the average - what's the problem?
There isn't one.
Nah, Mann is much more intelligent.
Keep in mind, my opinion of Mann's capabilities is not very high.
Mark
[snip] The CAGWagon will roll on and on, untroubled by mere facts. It simply has too much government money propping it up. Scientific correctness is no match for political correctness.
I posted this at WUWT and the Air Vent. I am looking for someone to confirm my calculations, that Orsi's paper is actuallly closer to O'Donnel2010, than to Steig2009. Or show where I made my error.
Some points on Orsi. His Figure 3 shows warming of about 1.5 deg since the 80s. I believe this is what Steig is happy about.
The problem, though, is that Figure 3 shows no warming from 1957 to about about 1980. Steig said there was a warming of about 0.5 deg/decade from 1957 (correct me if the dates are wrong). That would make warming of about 2.6 deg warming to 2009 (2.15 deg to 2000). Not the 1.5 deg measured by Orsi to 2000. Orsi’s start date is moot, as he shows no warming 1900-1980.
Thus, Orsi validates O’donnel 2010 (O10), as O10 shows about 0.25 deg/decade of warming from 1957, in the location of the WAIS Divide. (yellow, 0.25 deg/decade, in the temperature scale for O10; red and 0.5 deg/decade for Steig09). O10 would give a warming of 0.25 deg/decade, vs Orsi’s 0.35, starting both from 1957.
This is also totaly ignores the fact that Orsi shows no warming for over 20 years (1957-1980), but which Steig09 says did occur.
Steig09 is actually proven wrong by the Orsi paper.Both in the amount of warming, and in the length of the warming, and in the slope of the warming. Orsi’s numbers are much closer to O10, except the slope.
Granted, Orsi’s warming is about 0.75 deg/decade, but there is only two decades of warming in his record.
Summary: From 1957, O10 shows 1.075 deg of warming to 2000. Steig09 shows 2.15 deg. Orsi’s measured warming from 1957 is 1.5 deg to 2000. O10 (-28% low) is closer to Orsi than Steig (+43% high).
caveat: most of the numbers I use are eyeballed, albeit using a ruler for Orsi and figure 3.
One of the supposed indicators of the Antarctic Peninsula warming was the collapse of the Larsen Ice Shelves. However, if you visit by Google Earth and look at historical images at somewhere like -65.325 / -60.447 from an altitude of 25km, you find that by 2-21-2010 the shelf was busy reforming. This is late summer in Antarctica, and a couple of years earlier it was open sea at that time of year, but now it is solid ice. Does this imply global cooling?