Tag: arctic

Natural Forcing Of Arctic Climate

 Increasingly Affirmed By Scientists

Gajewski, 2015

Three years ago a cogent paper was published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature that was surprisingly candid in its rejection of the position that the substantial warming and sea ice reduction in the Arctic occurring since the late 1970s should be predominantly attributed to anthropogenic forcing.

Dr. Quinhua Ding and 6 co-authors indicated in their paper that internal processes — natural variability associated with planetary waves and the North Atlantic Oscillation — are drivers of the recent Arctic warming and sea ice reduction, concluding that “a substantial portion of recent warming in the northeastern Canada and Greenland sector of the Arctic arises from unforced natural variability.”

Ding et al., 2014

“Rapid Arctic warming and sea-ice reduction in the Arctic Ocean are widely attributed to anthropogenic climate change. The Arctic warming exceeds the global average warming because of feedbacks that include sea-ice reduction and other dynamical and radiative feedbacks.  We find that the most prominent annual mean surface and tropospheric warming in the Arctic since 1979 has occurred in northeastern Canada and Greenland. In this region, much of the year-to-year temperature variability is associated with the leading mode of large-scale circulation variability in the North Atlantic, namely, the North Atlantic Oscillation.”  

“Here we show that the recent warming in this region is strongly associated with a negative trend in the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is a response to anomalous Rossby wave-train activity [planetary waves related to the Earth’s rotation] originating in the tropical Pacific. Atmospheric model experiments forced by prescribed tropical sea surface temperatures simulate the observed circulation changes and associated tropospheric and surface warming over northeastern Canada and Greenland. Experiments from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 models with prescribed anthropogenic forcing show no similar circulation changes related to the North Atlantic Oscillation or associated tropospheric warming. This suggests that a substantial portion of recent warming in the northeastern Canada and Greenland sector of the Arctic arises from unforced natural variability.”

Since 2014, there have been several more scientific papers that have been published documenting the significance of natural forcing processes in the Arctic and how they may override a clear detection of an anthropogenic influence.

But 2017 already seems to be an exception.  Papers that document the dominance of natural forcing —

Analyses show that global temperatures continue their rapid cooling trend, as Schneefan here writes. What follows are excerpts of his recent comprehensive analysis.

The cooling comes naturally in the wake of the moderate La Nina conditions that have ruled over the past months.

In April surface temperatures 2 meters above the ground plummeted as the following NCEP chart shows:

Source: weatherbell.com/temperature.php

Global satellite temperature anomaly from the mean measured by the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) rebounded a bit after a large March drop.

Source: UAH Global Temperature +0.27 deg. C.

Foremost the atmosphere above the oceans cooled the most during March, 2017. This is clearly depicted by the UAH: an anomaly of +0.29°K to +0.09°K compared to the WMO 1981-2010 mean.

Plot UAH satellite temperatures von UAH in the atmosphere 1500 m altitude (TLT) over the oceans. Note the rose colored curve shows the ARGO ocean buoys’ mean of the sea temperature to a depth of 2.5 m, with 37-month smoothing. Source: www.climate4you.com/, sea surface temperature estimates: UAH.

Global RSS satellite data show a rapid cooling since early 2016:

Moreover despite the powerful warming El Niño event of 2015/16, the unfalsified satellite data in 2016 show that no new significant global heat record was seen when compared to the El Niño year of 1998. We are talking about hundredths of a degree, completely within the boundaries of uncertainty.

No significant warming in 20 years

The powerful linear global cooling continued in April 2017 and will continue for the time being, Schneefan writes.

What does that mean for the global warming? Schneefan adds:

The IPCC global warming claimed by the climate models has been missing for almost 20 years. And that despite the constantly rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations!”

And just days ago, Kenneth Richards here showed that there hasn’t been any warming over the entire southern hemisphere at all. The warming of the past decades is not even global.

What is now becoming glaringly obvious is that the IPCC has wildly overestimated its projected global warming for the future. When the IPCC models from the various IPCC reports are compared to the observations, the result gets vividly illustrated by the following chart showing the satellite observed temperatures from January 2001 to June 2016:

The Global Warming Speedometer for January 2001 to June 2016 shows observed warming on

Here’s the reality:

According to NOAA, Northern Hemisphere sea ice has declined somewhat since 1980, but it certainly is not “vanishing”:

And when you consider that NOAA has a pre-1980 sea ice record, you might reasonably wonder what all the fuss us about.

That’s why the NYTimes is called “fake news.”

#

Related Links: 

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: Believing CO2 controls the climate ‘is pretty close to believing in magic’

Lindzen on Arctic sea ice:

Satellites have been observing arctic (and Antarctic) sea ice since 1979. Every year there is a pronounced annual cycle where the almost complete winter coverage is much reduced each summer. During this period there has been a noticeable downtrend is summer ice in the arctic (with the opposite behavior in the Antarctic), though in recent years, the coverage appears to have stabilized. In terms of climate change, 40 years is, of course, a rather short interval. Still, there have been the inevitable attempts to extrapolate short period trends leading to claims that the arctic should have already reached ice free conditions. Extrapolating short term trends is obviously inappropriate. Extrapolating surface temperature changes from dawn to dusk would lead to a boiling climate in days. This would be silly. The extrapolation of arctic summer ice coverage looks like it might be comparably silly. Moreover, although the satellite coverage is immensely better than what was previously available, the data is far from perfect. The satellites can confuse ice topped with melt water with ice free regions. In addition, temperature might not be the main cause of reduced sea ice coverage. Summer ice tends to be fragile, and changing winds play an important role in blowing ice out of the arctic sea. Associating changing summer sea ice coverage with climate change is, itself, dubious. Existing climate models hardly unambiguously predict the observed behavior. Predictions for 2100 range from no change to complete disappearance. Thus, it cannot be said that the sea ice behavior confirms any plausible prediction.

It is sometimes noted that concerns for disappearing arctic sea ice were issued in 1922, suggesting that such behavior is not unique to the present. The data used, at that time, came from the neighborhood of Spitzbergen. A marine biologist and climate campaigner has argued that what was described was a local phenomenon, but, despite the claim, the evidence presented