Sea ice holds firm

This morning's story appears to be the hoary old "Arctic sea ice in freefall" one.

The Arctic is in crisis. Year by year, it’s slipping into a new state, and it’s hard to see how that won’t have an effect on weather throughout the Northern Hemisphere,” said Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the Colorado-based NSIDC.

As usual on these occasions, I take a quick look at the Cryosphere Today anomaly page, where I find the sea ice apparently still stuck firmly in "pause" mode.

Some oddities in HadSST

Reader John McLean emails with details of some surprising finds he has made in the Hadley Centre's sea-surface temperature record, HadSST. John is wondering whether others might like to take a look and confirm what he is seeing. Here's what he has found:

1 - Files HadSST3-nh.dat and HadSST3-sh.dat are the wrong way around.

About 35% down web page https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/ there's a section for HadSST3. Click on the 'NH' label and you go to https://crudata.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadSST3-nh.dat, which has 'nh' in the file name.  But based on the complete gridded dataset that data file is for the Southern Hemisphere, not the Northern.  The two sets are swapped.  The links to named files are correct but the content of those files is wrong, likely due to errors in the program that created these summary files from the  SST3 gridded data.

Click to read more ...

Corals not as threatened as we thought

Blogging is going to be light for a few days. In the meantime, Ben Webster (£) notes that corals are not nearly as threatened as previously thought.

Claims that coral reefs are doomed because human emissions are making the oceans more acidic have been exaggerated, a review of the science has found.

An “inherent bias” in scientific journals in favour of more calamitous predictions has excluded research showing that marine creatures are not damaged by ocean acidification, which is caused by the sea absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Suppressing the good news

Just before Christmas, Steve Milloy reported on his successful bid to get the email correspondence relating to an op-ed in the New York Times, ostensibly by Richard Spinrad of NOAA and Ian Boyd, the chief scientist at Defra. this was on the subject of ocean acidification and carried a fairly scary paragraph about what scientists were said to be observing:

Ocean acidification is weakening coral structures in the Caribbean and in cold-water coral reefs found in the deep waters off Scotland and Norway. In the past three decades, the number of living corals covering the Great Barrier Reef has been cut in half, reducing critical habitat for fish and the resilience of the entire reef system. Dramatic change is also apparent in the Arctic, where the frigid waters can hold so much carbon dioxide that nearby shelled creatures can dissolve in the corrosive conditions, affecting food sources for indigenous people, fish, birds and marine mammals. Clear pictures of the magnitude of changes in such remote ocean regions are sparse. To better understand these and other hotspots, more regions must be studied

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We forgot the geography!

The British Medical Journal recently held a Q&A on climate science with, among others, Brian Hoskins. The results are paywalled, but I was amused by the excerpt from the start of the session in response to a question about why Antarctic sea ice is growing:

The anomaly in the Antarctic is due to its geography. Unlike in the Arctic, where the extent of sea ice is constrained by the North American and Eurasian land masses, Antarctic sea ice forms in the open ocean with less land constraining its formation. Antarctic sea ice is also thinner and mostly melts each summer, whereas Arctic sea ice survives longer (although the amount of sea ice lasting more than two years has declined rapidly since 1979).

If the growth is "due to its geography" you have to wonder why the climate models predicted a decrease. Perhaps climate modellers forgot to put the geography in?

Update on Dec 18, 2015 by Bishop Hill

A reader sends a copy of the full text. This is a shocker. Take this on the little ice age, for example:

The Little Ice Age was particularly apparent in the European region but didn’t represent a major decline in temperatures globally. It was probably caused by a decline in solar output in the second half of the 17th century (known as the Maunder minimum) and a higher level of volcanic activity. These factors cannot account for the long term global warming observed since industrialisation because there has not been a long term increase in solar output or a decline in volcanic activity of the necessary magnitude.

And here's the IPCC's take on the millennial temperature reconstructions, with the Little Ice Age clearly visible in the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere and the global data:

Or what about the BMJ take on climate sensitivity?

A more recent study, based on inserting observed values in a very simple model, estimated the short
term warming to be 1.05-1.80°C. Although the upper end of this estimate is lower than that of the IPCC report, the study’s findings still mean that it would only increase the time taken to reach a given level of warming by a few years. Thus, while there are uncertainties about the precise relation between increases in the rate and concentration of atmospheric CO2 with the rate of global warming, these uncertainties have relatively little bearing on what we need to do in terms of climate policy.

The insinuation that this paper (Lewis and Curry) is an outlier is of course grossly misleading, while the use of 5-95% ranges to hide the huge differences between the GCMs and the observational estimates is straight out the Myles Allen "dirty tricks" book.

In related news, it turns out that one of Hoskins' co-authors is a fan of Stefan Lewandowsky. Go figure.

Phytoplankton love carbon dioxide

Further to the last post, and with truly magnificent timing, I come across a new paper from John Hopkins University:

As anthropogenic CO₂ emissions acidify the oceans, calcifiers generally are expected to be negatively affected. However, using data from the Continuous Plankton Recorder, we show that coccolithophore occurrence in the North Atlantic increased from ~2 to over 20% from 1965 through 2010. We used Random Forest models to examine >20 possible environmental drivers of this change, finding that CO₂ and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation were the best predictors, leading us to hypothesize that higher CO₂ levels might be encouraging growth. A compilation of 41 independent laboratory studies supports our hypothesis. Our study shows a long-term basin-scale increase in coccolithophores and suggests that increasing CO₂ and temperature have accelerated the growth of a phytoplankton group that is important for carbon cycling.

So the population of coccolithophores has increased by an order of magnitude. And since coccolithophores sequester carbon dioxide when they calcify, that means a favourable carbon cycle feedback just got a whole lot bigger.

Excellent news, I'm sure you'll agree.

Eco journalists just can't help themselves

Made up of 33 low-lying coral atolls, Kiribati is shrinking as sea levels rise.

Claim made by Paul Gregoire, without citation, in Vice magazine

4.84, 4.66, 3.57, 0.48

Percentage increase in area per decade of islands in Tarawa, the main atoll in Kiribati, as reported by Kench et al.

An outbreak of sanity

The Australian is reporting that the New South Wales government has suddenly come over all sensible on the subject of sea-level rise.

The NSW government will today unveil sweeping changes to how the state’s coastline is managed, building on its insistence that local councils look at the science and evidence of individual beaches rather than blindly adopting UN predictions of climate change...The initiatives mark the second phase of the Coalition government’s demolition of the previous Labor government’s policy, which among other things directed local councils on the coast to enforce the climate change and sea level rise predictions of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Click to read more ...

Corals ask: "Ocean acidification? Are we bovvered?"

Some months back I mentioned a fascinating study about a coral reef that was thriving at pH levels far lower than predicted by the most morbid of global warming doomsters. Hot on the heels of that rather surprising work comes another paper that finds that healthy coral reefs exhibit spikes in acidity:

The researchers observed the chemistry of the water on the reef between 2007 and 2012. During that time, there were two sharp spikes in acidity – once in 2010 and again in 2011.

The team found that coral growth itself made the water more acidic as the corals sucked alkaline carbonate out of the water to build their skeletons. The corals also ate more food during these high-activity periods and pumped more CO₂ into the water, increasing acidity further.

One of the study authors wonders if coral are even bothered about ocean pH.

Jumping the climate shark

Yes folks, we may have reached peak climate drivel, with the news that we are being saved from impending climate disaster by the heroic actions of a hardy bunch of...sharks.

Turtle-eating sharks help slow global warming, scientist says

Sharks help to reduce global warming by eating sea turtles and other creatures that consume carbon-rich sea grasses, an Australian scientist said on Tuesday.

Sometimes there are no words adequate to describe the silliness of the climate change researcher.

More laughs from the Cabot Institute

The famous..erm...Maldives dykes, keeping the sea at bayAccording to one of Stephan Lewandowsky's colleagues at the Cabot Institute, more than 80% of the Maldives lie below sea level.

Although ~30 to 100 cm of sea level rise may seem insignificant, it is worth considering what this means for other regions. For example, more than 80% of the Maldives lie one metre below sea level. In this region, sea level rise has the potential to impact up to 360,000 citizens and lead to widespread migration.

I would suggest that the author, Dr Gordon Inglis, has got a bit confused here, particularly as his source says something rather different.

Gauges versus satellites

There is a fascinating post at No Tricks Zone on sea level rise, focusing particularly in the difference between the (heavily adjusted, short-term) satellite record and the (relatively pristine, long-term) tide-gauge data. The former is over 3mm per year, while the latter is much lower.

Author Dave Burton has been trying to reconcile the two numbers and has drawn a blank:

It is not possible to torture the tide-gauge data into yielding a globally averaged rate of relative sea-level rise anywhere near 3.3 mm/yr.

The upshot is that the satellite record might be as much as double the correct figure, or at least the relevant figure for coastal planning purposes. I wonder what figure is used for assessing the economic impacts of climate change?

Hansen's direst forecast?

The Daily Beast recounts James Hansen's latest prognostication of doom, under the headline 

Climate seer James Hansen issues his direst forecast yet

The immediate thing that struck me was that this must be some pretty far-out stuff, because Hansen has issued some truly blood-curdling predictions in the past. So what is it this time?

James Hansen’s new study explodes conventional goals of climate diplomacy and warns of 10 feet of sea level rise before 2100.

Click to read more ...

No, it's natural variability

In the wake of Karl et al's frantic tweaking of the global temperature data in order to get the pause to disappear, a new paper by Nieves et al, also in Science, comes up with a different theory to explain what's happening, this time putting it down to natural variability:

Recent modeling studies have proposed different scenarios to explain the slowdown in surface temperature in the most recent decade. Some of these studies seem to support the idea of internal variability and/or rearrangement of heat between the surface and the ocean interior. Others suggest that radiative forcing might also play a role. Our examination of observational data over the past two decades shows some significant differences compared to model results from reanalyses, and provides the most definitive explanation of how the heat was redistributed. We find that cooling in the top 100-meter layer of the Pacific Ocean was mainly compensated by warming in the 100- to 300-meter layer of the Indian and Pacific Oceans in the past decade since 2003.

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More on calcifiers

Updated on Jul 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In response to my comments on her appearance on BBC news, Daniela Schmidt has tweeted some thoughts. Recall that I highlighted some comments she had made in a Geology paper about calcifier exctinctions occurring tens of thousands of years after extreme temperatures were reached, contrasting this with her on-air claim that the oceans were doomed by the end of the century:

My children will be alive in 2100. I would like them to be able to swim above a coral reef and enjoy its beauty. I would like them to be able to eat mussels and oysters and crayfish and if we continue to release CO2 at the current rate this is not going to happen.

Prof Schmidt has apparently told Roger Harrabin that I have misunderstood her work. In a tweet she notes that her comments in Geology represented a citation of other scientists:

Click to read more ...