Supreme Irony #2 - Mauna Loa and Hawaiian Temperatures

Supreme irony #1 was of course "Assessing Recent Warming" which I posted on the 7th. of this month, in which I pointed out that the temperature at Washington Airport, just across the Potomac river from the capital, home of NOAA and the then president "Halt climate change" Barack Obama, had shown no warming since 1974. This time I start with the Mauna Loa Observatory, home of the "Keeling Curve" of atmospheric CO2 concentration. Here's a superb topographical map of Hawai'i Island, known in the state of Hawai'i as "Big Island", for obvious reasons - its area is greater than all the other islands of the archipelago put together. If you want to save a copy, click on it and right-click "save image as" or whatever your browser uses:

The red circle marks Lo'ihi, a "sea-mount", an active undersea volcano which will eventually break the surface (in at least decades) as a new addition to the island chain. Mauna Loa is the big brown peak in the middle, and a dirt track leads eastward to the town of Hilo, where there's Hilo Airport, home to an atmospheric weather station. There they record temperature etc, and launch radiosondes to measure temperature, humidity and ozone to 30-35 km altitude:

Steve about to release a radiosonde. Source: NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory.

Check out the link to ESRL - well worth a read, and abstracts of papers on the role of ozone in climate included. The big "hill" in the background is dormant volcano Mauna Kea, at 4205 metres the highest point in the islands. Notice the grey volcanic soil - it took a great deal of work from the 1920s onwards to level the site for the airport, cutting away hard volcanic rock. Read about that here if you're interested - it's another good read. Happily, all the fixed surface instruments are on grass - I'd imagine that soil would get hotter than tarmac in the sun. OK - enough background stuff - cut to the chase, and the temperature record for Hilo Airport since 1950 - the reason for the start date will become clearer later.

Hilo Airport 1950-2016.  Source: GISS

I've circled 1966 in red - no warming since then until 2015-6. Global Warming delayed by a mere 50 years. Next temperature station to the NW is at Kahului Airport on Mau'i Island:

Kahului Airport, Mau'i.  Source: GISS

No warming at all since 1977 - I can't use a Loess filter because of the gap from 2005 to 2009, so I've plotted a linear trend 1977-2016. It's essentially flat. Skip an island or two with no current data, and we come to Honolulu, the capital city, and of course UHI - Urban Heat Island effect. Has that affected the temperature record? Almost certainly, however:

Honolulu Airport 1950-2016.   Source: GISS

I've circled 1984 - no warming since then. Notice there's no 2015-16 "spike" either, as seen at Hilo. I suspect something has happened there to cause it. I'm checking it out. Last but not least, further to the NW is Lihue, Kaua'i Island:

Lihue, Kaua'i, 1950-2016.   Source: GISS

No warming since 1970 (circled). So there we have it - an entire US state with a documented lack of "Global Warming" - it never was global, and there are many places all round the globe showing either a total lack of late-20C warming, or even cooling. If many Sceptics would stop their incessant and negative complaining about GHCN/GISS adjusted and "homogenised" temperature data, and actually use the extensive unadjusted database, there's an Aladdin's cave of debunking material to be extracted and put to good use.

Why did I start most of the charts at 1950? I found a real little gem from the EPA, "What Climate Change Means for Hawaii". It kicks off:

Hawaii’s climate is changing. In the last century, air temperatures have increased between one-half and one degree (F).

Not a very good start - even though my charts above start at 1950, it's clear there's been a rise of around 1°C (almost 2°F) since then, and on full plots as much as 2°C (3.6°F) over the last 100 years. There's even a graphic to illustrate their error:

It's clear that Honolulu (top, brown) has increased from below 76°F to well over 77°F. There's no mention of the fact that even on this confused and confusing spaghetti-chart, it's clear that Honolulu hasn't warmed since the mid-1980s; that Hilo hasn't warmed since the mid-1960s; that Lihue hasn't warmed since about 1970, and that Kahului (grey, barely visible) hasn't warmed since the late 70s.

After some waffle about ocean warming (they say about 1°F) around Hawaii damaging coral reefs, there's this:

Greenhouse gases are also changing the world’s oceans and ice cover. Carbon dioxide reacts with water to form carbonic acid, so the oceans are becoming more acidic. The surface of the ocean has warmed about one degree during the last 80 years. Warming is causing snow to melt earlier in spring, and mountain glaciers are retreating. Even the great ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica are shrinking. Thus the sea is rising at an increasing rate.

Errr - CO2 reacts with sea-water, but it doesn't form carbonic acid (H2CO3). The author's using kindergarten science. Even highly-carbonated soft drinks have only very tiny amounts of carbonic acid in them. Most of the CO2 remains as CO2 in solution. Look it up, as I did, whereas this author, in common with many alarmists and their camp-followers, never have. Sea-water is strongly buffered, and the addition of CO2 reduces the alkalinity (negative pH) only a little.  Saying that CO2 increases "acidity" is like saying that a reduction in your bank overdraft has "increased your bank balance".

Warmer air can certainly hasten snow-melt in spring, but it would take decades to centuries for slightly warmer air to have any effect on glaciers and ice-shelves. Air simply hasn't got the heat capacity and therefore content to do it over a few years, despite what glaciologists touchingly believe - they do have very vivid imaginations, and clearly know no relevant physics. A strong negative feedback is that melted surface ice (water!) evaporates, cooling the water. Latent heat of evaporation for water is an order of magnitude greater than latent heat of fusion for ice. Glaciologists also touchingly believe that surface melt-water can "permeate cracks in the ice" to reach the bottom of a glacier and "lubricate the base", so the glacier will advance faster. Ice-cold water can somehow permeate ice which is below freezing point to reach the base? Yeah, right - more "settled science".

Try heating your bath water using a fan-heater in the bathroom (don't try this at home!). In a well-insulated room, it would take weeks for the water to reach equilibrium with the hot air temperature. Topic for a future post here!

"Thus the sea is rising at an increasing rate." - well it's not. The "great ice sheet" on Greenland was shrinking, but that's slowed in recent years, not accelerated.  The only part of the "great ice sheet" on Antarctica to display any melting was at the northern end of the Antarctic Peninsula - the very tip is even outside the Antarctic circle. Several papers published recently show that the "increasing temperatures" on the peninsula flattened off after 1990, and have been decreasing over the last 10-15 years. Topic for another post!

Satellite data shows global sea-level to be increasing at about 3 mm/year since 1993, and despite what some Sceptics would have you believe, in general, satellite data agrees fairly well with tide-gauge data. However, a big factor in the 3 mm/year figure was due to surface warming in the western Pacific, that's PDO and ENSO related, and both indices are reversing trend. Also, the satellites sample a lot of sea surface where there are no tide-gauges, and so it's likely that previous estimates of global rise have been under-stating the case for many decades. In general, tide-gauges show no late 20th.C acceleration correlating with atmospheric warming at all. Dozens of mainstream papers document that. I'll finish this post soon, I promise, just one last quote:

Since 1960, sea level has risen between two and eight inches relative to Hawaii’s shoreline. Sea level rise can make Hawaii’s existing coastal hazards—such as waves, hurricanes, tsunamis, and extreme tides—even worse. Additionally, rising sea level has accelerated coastal erosion, which has resulted in wetland migration and cliff collapse. Chronic erosion has affected more than 70 percent of Kauai and Maui’s beaches over the last century.

"Between two and eight inches" is a pretty wide estimate. Eight inches is the accepted estimate for global rise from 1880. I'll go into that in a post (in preparation) about sea-levels around the archipelago. I accept that many beaches have suffered "Chronic erosion", but I contend that the main reason is steeply-shelving beaches, which are prone to "Chronic erosion" whether sea-level is rising or not. That's well-documented. Have a look at this from the same EPA document:

Firstly, that pale golden sand is not Hawaiian sand. The islands are composed of very dark basaltic rocks - they're the tops of very large volcanoes. The natural colour is the same as the soil in the "balloon" picture above. The islands are famous for their "black beaches". Secondly, it's easy to see that the bottom shelves steeply down from the beach. This is the flank of a volcano, after all. The beaches aren't threatened by "climate change" but by natural erosion and longshore currents and rip-tides off the beaches - they're well documented too. Currents dangerous for swimmers erode beaches. Rising sea-levels must play a small part, and a gradually increasing part, but these exaggerated claims are just the usual "blame everything bad on climate change" meme. "What Climate Change Means for Hawaii" is just the usual alarmist nonsense, permeated by a few truths. Par for the course,

Antarctica Larson C ice shelf close to becoming one of biggest icebergs ever - or not

Really? The entire ice shelf? It must be true, if the Christian Science Monitor says so:

Antarctica's Larson C shelf is about equal to the area to the state of Delaware. Its collapse might be imminent. 

JANUARY 6, 2017 —Scientists with the British Antarctic Survey now believe that the fracturing of the Larson C ice shelf from the polar cap is imminent, after a rift in the shelf grew vertiginously in the last month of 2016. 

The thread connecting Larson C to the rest of Antarctica is now just more than 65,600 feet long, surveyors from the Britain’s Project Midas say. 

Apart from the ice shelf being about equal in area to Delaware, not one of the statements is correct. They're not simply misquotes. The BAS scientists believe nothing of the kind - their article is titled Giant iceberg set to calve from Larsen C Ice Shelf, and that the calving is imminent. Surveyors from Britain’s Project Midas believe nothing of the kind either. They wrote: (my bold)

Larsen C Ice Shelf poised to calve. 

The Larsen C Ice shelf in Antarctica is primed to shed an area of more than 5000 sq. km following further substantial rift growth. After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18 km during the second half of December 2016. Only a final 20 km of ice now connects an iceberg one quarter the size of Wales to its parent ice shelf.

No one but a moron could fail to grasp what those articles stated and meant. CSM author David Iaconangelo clearly isn't a moron, but is what might be euphemistically termed "economical with the truth".

Grist isn't much better - an editor retitles a "cross-post" and reorders images with captions removed to give a very different impression to the linked Climate Central article.

"Antarctica’s fourth biggest ice shelf is on the verge of collapse" shrieks Grist. However, the picture at the top of the page

.... is of the Larsen B disintegration in 2002. There's no caption, nor is it referred to in the text. Below the author's name is stated "Cross-posted from Climate Central". That link is to the article by CC author Andrea Thompson, titled Large Iceberg Poised to Break Off From Antarctica. Does she, or any of her quoted sources think "Antarctica’s fourth biggest ice shelf is on the verge of collapse"? No, this is just Grist once again changing a word or two, or misquoting a link or two, to push its catastrophic view of anything that might be remotely connected to what they think is the coming apocalypse. Also, that picture has been cropped to remove a distance scale at the bottom, as the Larsen B was about the size of the piece splitting from Larsen C. The scale might give the game away.  The one in the CC article, is captioned quite correctly The breakup of Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf as it looked on Feb. 23, 2002. Click image to enlarge. Credit: NASA

The breakup of Antarctica's Larsen B ice shelf as it looked on Feb. 23, 2002.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: NASA

It's not a "cross-post" - Grist has altered the title, removed image captions, and reordered images from the CC article, to create the impression that the images are of Larsen C. Removing captions, editing images, and showing them out of context to create an impression not intended by the original author is more than breaking the rules of attribution, it's fraud.

Unusually, I find the CC article generally factual, informative, and links back up the text, though there are one or two disputed claims.

Author Andrea Thompson headed her article with this close-up image of part of the rift:

A large rift in Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf, photographed by NASA's IceBridge mission on Nov. 10, 2016. The rift surged ahead by about 10 miles in late December.
Click image to enlarge. Credit: NASA/John Sonntag

In the Grist "cross-post", that image follows a a paragraph about the disintegration of Larsen B, and has the caption "NASA". The intention is now obvious, and totally unforgivable.

On a more factual note, the rift is about 500m (metres, not miles) wide, 350m deep in the centre, and is currently about 80km long, according to Project MIDAS. Some articles say 80 miles, and if the scale on the graphic below, is accurate, 150 km would be more like it. Not that it matters to you maybe, but I'll check. It's not unusual for genuine mistakes to go unnoticed by authors:

Source: Project MIDAS

The graphic is of more than a little personal significance - I was born just about where the second "s" in Swansea is located top right (although Wales is a little further north, and a lot warmer than its position on that graphic.

I've read a few articles that say words to the effect that the rift has just been discovered (where did they get that?), but it's been monitored since 2011.

Even the BBC managed to get it right:

Huge Antarctic iceberg poised to break away 

An iceberg expected to be one of the 10 largest ever recorded is ready to break away from Antarctica, scientists say. A long-running rift in the Larsen C ice shelf grew suddenly in December and now just 20km of ice is keeping the 5,000 sq km piece from floating away.
Larsen C is the most northern major ice shelf in Antarctica.
Researchers based in Swansea say the loss of a piece a quarter of the size of Wales will leave the whole shelf vulnerable to future break-up.
Larsen C is about 350m thick and floats on the seas at the edge of West Antarctica, holding back the flow of glaciers that feed into it.
Researchers have been tracking the rift in Larsen C for many years, watching it with some trepidation after the collapse of Larsen A ice shelf in 1995 and the sudden break-up of the Larsen B shelf in 2002.

They even end the piece with

"We are convinced, although others are not, that the remaining ice shelf will be less stable than the present one," said Prof Luckman.
"We would expect in the ensuing months to years further calving events, and maybe an eventual collapse - but it's a very hard thing to predict, and our models say it will be less stable; not that it will immediately collapse or anything like that."
As it floats on the sea, the resulting iceberg from the shelf will not raise sea levels. But if the shelf breaks up even more, it could result in glaciers that flow off the land behind it to speed up their passage towards the ocean. This non-floating ice would have an impact on sea levels.
According to estimates, if all the ice that the Larsen C shelf currently holds back entered the sea, global waters would rise by 10cm.
All that is very much in the future. There are few certainties right now apart from an imminent change to the outline of Antarctica's icy coast.
"The eventual consequences might be the ice shelf collapsing in years to decades," said Prof Luckman,
"Even the sea level contribution of this area is not on anybody's radar; it's just a big geographical event that will change the landscape there."

Prof. Luckman is one of the Project MIDAS team, based in Swansea. I like very much "We are convinced, although others are not...". It shows some humility, the acknowledgement that it's a personal team view. A good note to end on.

UPDATE 10/1/2017

I've been scanning through articles on the British Antarctic Survey website. I've always thought
the BAS to be a reactionary and somewhat alarmist bunch. I had already noticed this, on the page referenced above:

Glaciologist Professor David Vaughan OBE, Director of Science at British Antarctic Survey, said, “The calving of this large iceberg could be the first step of the collapse of Larsen C ice shelf, which would result in the disintegration of a huge area of ice into a number of icebergs and smaller fragments.
“Because of the uncertainty surrounding the stability of the Larsen C ice shelf, we chose not to camp on the ice this season.  Researchers can now only do day trips from our Rothera Research Station with an aircraft nearby on standby.”

In 2015 they said this:

The team, who continue to monitor the ice shelf closely, predict that a collapse could occur within a century, although maybe sooner and with little warning. A crack is forming in the ice which could cause it to retreat back further than previously observed. The ice shelf appears also to be detaching from a small island called Bawden Ice Rise at its northern edge.

"Within a century" - what's changed in the 19 months since that statement? Prof. Vaughan has dramatically changed his view - back in 2015:

Professor David Vaughan, glaciologist and Director of Science at BAS, says:
“When Larsen A and B were lost, the glaciers behind them accelerated and they are now contributing a significant fraction of the sea-level rise from the whole of Antarctica. Larsen C is bigger and if it were to be lost in the next few decades then it would actually add to the projections of sea-level rise by 2100.

On the same page - "within a century" and "the next few decades". However, contradictions like this aren't unusual on the BAS website. Members have very differing views, and careful reading reveals very different "facts" too. The thickness of the Larsen B shelf, which disintegrated in 2002, is given as 200 metres, and on one page a very unlikely and obviously incorrect 1km. That last article I quoted, actually a press release titled New study shows Antarctic ice shelf is thinning from above and below has this lead-in:

The Larsen C Ice Shelf — whose neighbours Larsen A and B, collapsed in 1995 and 2002 — is thinning from both its surface and beneath. For years scientists have been unable to determine whether it is warming air temperatures or warmer ocean currents that were causing the Antarctic Peninsula’s floating ice shelves to lose volume and become more vulnerable to collapse. This new study takes an important step forward in assessing Antarctica’s likely contribution to future sea-level rise. 

The research team combined satellite data and eight radar surveys captured during a 15-year period from 1998–2012. They found that Larsen C Ice Shelf lost an average of 4 metres of ice, and had lowered by an average of one metre at the surface. 

Lead author, Dr Paul Holland from British Antarctic Survey (BAS), says:
“What’s exciting about this study is we now know that two different processes are causing Larsen C to thin and become less stable. Air is being lost from the top layer of snow (called the firn), which is becoming more compacted — probably because of increased melting by a warmer atmosphere. We know also that Larsen C is losing ice, probably from warmer ocean currents or changing ice flow. 

“If this vast ice shelf — which is over two and a half times the size of Wales and 10 times bigger than Larsen B — was to collapse, it would allow the tributary glaciers behind it to flow faster into the sea. This would then contribute to sea-level rise.”
The Antarctic Peninsula is one of the fastest warming regions on Earth, with a temperature rise of 2.5°C over the last 50 years.

"Air is being lost", "probably because of increased melting by a warmer atmosphere". Here's a plot of the "warmer atmosphere" since 1995:

Larsen C - GISS unadjusted data.

I don't think so. What's amazing, is that many glaciologists and climate scientists never keep up-to-date with the latest data, but rely on published papers, many of which are out of date within a few years. I read something a dated a few weeks ago by a glaciologist, publishing regularly in this field, who cited "the continuing warming on the Antarctic Peninsula". An Ostrich is a large flightless bird, claimed to occasionally put its head in the sand. Some scientists are sightless birds, with their heads continually in the sand. More on the "continued warming" (/sarc off) soon.

"Assessing recent warming" (2017) put in perspective

ScienceMag (AAAS) published a "rebuttal" of the whole idea of any 21st century pause in global temperature increase a few days ago. The Sceptical blogosphere is awash with indignant posts (and comments) claiming data tampering, or "torturing the data until it confesses". I'm reserving my judgement, except to say that the "pause" has been widely acknowledged by climate scientists, referred to in the last IPCC report (AR5), and concerns surface temperature. The Hausfather et. al. article (not AFAIK peer-reviewed, not that that means much these days) concerns sea surface temperature, a wholly different kettle of fish (I really didn't think of that as a pun, honest!).

ABSTRACT 

Sea surface temperature (SST) records are subject to potential biases due to changing instrumentation and measurement practices. Significant differences exist between commonly used composite SST reconstructions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Extended Reconstruction Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST), the Hadley Centre SST data set (HadSST3), and the Japanese Meteorological Agency’s Centennial Observation-Based Estimates of SSTs (COBE-SST) from 2003 to the present. The update from ERSST version 3b to version 4 resulted in an increase in the operational SST trend estimate during the last 19 years from 0.07° to 0.12°C per decade, indicating a higher rate of warming in recent years. We show that ERSST version 4 trends generally agree with largely independent, near-global, and instrumentally homogeneous SST measurements from floating buoys, Argo floats, and radiometer-based satellite measurements that have been developed and deployed during the past two decades. We find a large cooling bias in ERSST version 3b and smaller but significant cooling biases in HadSST3 and COBE-SST from 2003 to the present, with respect to most series examined. These results suggest that reported rates of SST warming in recent years have been underestimated in these three data sets.

Here's Figure 1 from the article:

Fig. 1 Comparison of the different ERSSTv3b, ERSSTv4, buoy-only, and CCI SST monthly anomalies from January 1997 to December 2015, restricting all series to common coverage. ERSSTv4 is shown as a broad band for visualization purposes; this band does not represent an uncertainty range. The series are aligned on the 1997–2001 period for comparison purposes. Spatial trend maps are also available in fig. S1, and a similar comparison with Argo data is shown in fig. S2.

What it amounts to, is that the authors have found data series which match their agenda, and found reasons to ignore the other data series which don't. Par for the course these days. As it happens, I've been compiling a set of regional temperature records using GISS data (unadjusted of course), since before Christmas. Just to be different, I'm not ignoring data which doesn't match my agenda, I'm concentrating on large areas of the globe which show interesting results on analysis. More in later posts. For the moment, I thought it might be interesting and amusing to look in detail at the temperature record nearest to President Obama's residence (soon to be vacant for a very short period) and NOAA  headquarters at 1401 Constitution Avenue, Washington DC. The thermometer is at Washington National Airport, just 5km across the Potomac river from NOAA, just inside Virginia.

1880-2016

The 11-year Loess filter shows an uptick around the middle 2000s, after a bumpy "plateau" from 1973. No late 20th C warming evident at all. However, the Loess filter works in a way which includes future change (weighted). If the filter range is constrained to 1880-2009, we get:

1960-2016, Loess range to 2009

Warming began in 2010, after a 27-year "pause". Washington itself would undoubtedly show warming, mostly due to the "Urban Heat Island" effect, but the airport is on the west bank of the Potomac, effectively rural and uncontaminated. A little ironic, that a thermometer just across the river from the nation's capital, seat of a president pledged to "halt global warming" shows no 21st C warming until 2010. The plateau runs from 1974, when he was 12yo - he can't claim responsiblity!

More soon, beginning with Pacific islands. Watch this space.

"Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America" - final reality check

Last year I shredded the Sallenger et al. paper "Hotspot of accelerated sea-level rise on the Atlantic coast of North America" here. Now, with updated CGPS data from SONEL, I can finally place the headstone on its grave. South of Boston, the coast is subsiding, and subsiding at a generally increasing rate all the way south to Florida. Sandy Hook, a rather inconsequential spot, which all boat traffic in and out of New York harbour pass with barely a glance, had the honour of being one of the few sites along the NW coast with published GPS data. I say had, because SONEL has carried out a massive update of sites worldwide, adding fairly up-to-date data to many. Sandy Hook now has a downloadable record from 1995 to 2013. The record shows that the downward rate has been increasing from less than 2 mm/year in the late 1990s to over 3 mm/year in the three years 2011-2013. I've used the entire record for station SHK5, 2007-2013, which plots at -2.57 mm/year. The SONEL analysis shows -2.65 mm/year, but I've taken account of a few short-term gaps in the data; I assume they didn't. Here's the SONEL plot:

And mine:

Sandy Hook 1993-2015 (Sea-level satellite era):

The relative rate (relative to the tide-gauge/land) is 5.36 mm/year. Absolute rate (relative to the Earth/Geoid) is 2.79 mm/year. The subsidence rate is almost half the relative rate.

The SONEL plot for New York Battery Park, where both tide-gauge and GPS pillar are located:

The rate during the late 1990s was around -1 mm/year. My analysis:

The chart for New York (Battery Park) 1993-2015:

Relative rate is 3.92 mm/year; absolute rate, allowing for subsidence of 1.93 mm/year is 1.99. The "Hotspot" isn't one of sea-level rise, but one of subsidence. Sallenger et al. were also being somewhat disingenuous when they claimed that the rates of subsidence along the coast "were almost constant", and therefore didn't affect their complex analysis or results. They weren't constant when the paper was written, and the rates are generally increasing over the last 20 years; some very little, some like New York and Sandy Hook, significantly increasing. The "Hotspot" was an artefact of questionable and almost impenetrable analysis, ignoring the inconvenient past, and coastal subsidence.

Note also the obvious cycles which appeared in the record after 1970 - large and small alternating. Sallenger et al. used PSMSL annual average data, and so they wouldn't have been obvious. Take some data and torture it using complex and (to me, impenetrable) statistical techniques I imagine most sea-level experts and authors couldn't fathom, and get the answer you want. What I do know is that those techniques aren't suited to relatively small datasets, which is what you have if you use annual average data. Also PSMSL omit years from annual data, even if just one month is missing. The annual data Sallenger et al. used had quite a few years missing, shrinking their database even further.

Something else Sallenger et al. failed to mention is that a comparable rate of rise occurred before the mid-1950s. Somehow their "long-term" analysis wasn't quite that long:

Trend, in mm/year for 30-year sliding window, end year on x-axis.

The red circle marks 2009, the end year for the "Hot-spot" analysis. It's easy to see the rate of increase was much higher prior to 1953. If the whole record shows an inconvenient truth, just analyse part of it.

Vanuatu - something unusual and somehow encouraging

I'm busy updating spreadsheets for Pacific islands, mainly those in the Pacific Sea Level Project of the Australian National Tidal Unit - the straight-up and factual branch of the BOM. I updated Vanuatu last of all, as I'm working in alphabetical order. Here's the chart for the full record from 1993 to last month (November 2016):

The level has dropped to almost exactly what it was in 1993, from a peak in 2008-9. It seems to be a combination of SOI dropping from its high in 2009-10, a drop in sea temperature from 2008, and a rise in barometric pressure after 2011. A change of 1 hPa (=millibar) results in a change of 1cm in sea-level. Higher pressure, lower sea-level, and vice-versa. "Storm-surge" is due to low pressure (and high onshore winds) in a storm system. This is SOI to November 2016:

I'm checking on nearby (well, relatively) stations to see if there's anything remotely similar. I've already checked CGPS station data; here's that for Port Vila; the tide gauge is about 1 km away at the Cruise-ship port.

Source: SONEL

Although the red velocity analysis on the left says "Not robust", there's little change. More later maybe.

The Road to Solar - No, it's a Solar Road!

The sheer stupidity of some people is a constant source of amazement to me. Some bureaucrats and politicians (national and local) have their heads so far up their backsides they can't see the bleedin' obvious. There are quite a few stories on news sites over the last two days, about a project, a very expensive project, to install a "Solar Road". The best quote is from a "green" techno-site engadget -
A French town just installed the world's first 'solar road'

The tiny town of Tourouvre-au-Perche in Normandy, France no longer has to worry about how it will power its street lights. The Sun will handle that.

The link is to a guardian article. There are similar articles in the Daily Mail, Le Monde, and hundreds of others across the world. Street lights - they come on automatically at dusk. Dusk - when the sun has dropped below the horizon. When Solar panels aren't producing any electricity. Not one of the journalists, nor the many commenters on those pages, some of whom were critical of the relatively vast cost of the kilometre-long solar array spotted that it won't be generating any electricity when the street-lights are due to switch on. Simply amazing

Australia's "Poster Children" updated and analysed

I read a great deal of absolute rubbish on the 'net about sea-levels. Someone speaking at the American Geophysical Union meeting recently claimed that Miami was suffering more frequent flooding due to sea-level rise. Ignoring for a moment that much of Miami was already below tidal high-water before it was built, proper examination reveals that the rate of subsidence is greater than the rate of sea-level rise. At Cape Canaveral, further north, the measured rate is just over 5mm/year, but CGPS (Continuous GPS) data shows the land close to the tide gauge to be sinking at 2.8mm/year - the greater part of the rise is due to subsidence along the coast.

A couple of years ago, I read what I considered to be an outrageous claim - that the Tidal Unit (formerly National Tidal Centre) of the BOM was publishing "exaggerated data" in the ABSLMP (Australian Baseline Sea Level Monitoring Project) series. Worse, that the data was "homogenised". Well, it's impossible to "homogenise" tide-gauge data. Each gauge uses a different base-line for measurements, referred to as "Tide Gauge Zero". It's a "virtual" reference level, referenced to a physical benchmark (the TGBM or "Tide gauge Bench Mark") at the gauge site, one of a set, the remainder being on the adjacent dockside or land.

I'll relate the full story in a later post, but for now just let's say it concerned the record for Sydney, and that for Port Kembla, some 64Km to the south. Here's the full chart for Sydney, to October 2016.

Sydney 1914-2016.   Source: BOM

While the long-term rate for Sydney is 1.02 mm/year, it's easy to see that any short-term rate depends entirely on the start point. Start in 1997 or 1998, when there was a "dip" due to the 1997-8 El Niño, and you get a very high trend; start in 1990, a much lower rate. I've plotted the rate for a 20-year sliding window, using annual average data:

Rate (mm/year) for 20-year sliding window; end year on X-axis.

Port Kembla (an ABSLMP station), installed in 1991:

Port Kembla 1991-2016   Source: BOM

Sydney 1990-2016 for comparison.

Sydney 1990-2016  Source: BOM

Both together, after Port Kembla data adjusted by +58mm - the offset due to the different "Tide Gauge Zero" benchmarks.

Sydney & Port Kembla compared; 1991-2016

The claim of "homogenistation" is egrarious bullshit, invented by the morally, evidentially and statistically challenged. Put even more forcibly, it's a lie.

On to Fremantle, another source of claims and misinterpretation. The full plot first:

Fremantle, WA 1897-2016

This is the chart for Hillarys (Boat Yard), on the far side of Perth from Fremantle, to the north.

Hillarys, WA 1992-2016

Fremantle 1992-2016 for comparison:

Fremantle, WA 1992-2016

And both together, with Fremantle adjusted down by 64mm:

Hillarys/Fremantle over-plotted; Fremantle adjusted down by 64mm

Hillarys starts somewhat lower than Fremantle, but they plot together from 2002 onwards. It's easy to show such correlation between adjacent stations around Oz, even if they're several hundred Km apart. Even if it were possible to "homogenise" gauge data, the tides do a perfectly good job already.

Data is sourced from The main BOM Tidal Unit for Sydney and Fremantle, and from the AMSLMP project for Port Kembla and Hillarys.

NOTE: I've just discovered that SONEL have updated with data for many Oz stations. The CGPS pillars are often very close to tide gauges. At Hillarys they're co-located, and the latest plot shows a drop of 2.78 mm/year:

Source: SONEL

Updates include data for many of the Pacific islands, including Sceptic poster-child Tuvalu. Watch this space.

There are none so blind....

A couple of days ago, I was chatting to a friend in our local watering hole - Yates' in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, UK. I'd been telling him how BBC documentaries had become un-watchable for me, mainly because of the constant and intrusive background music."Don't you watch Attenborough?" he asked "Now there's a guy knows what he's talking about."  I nearly choked on my beer, but said nothing. "It's really getting bad in the Arctic - the polar bears are becoming extinct". I asked why that was. "The ice is melting, and the bears can't catch the seals they feed on". "What do the bears eat in the summer, when there's no ice?" I asked innocently. "They live on the body fat they got in the winter, from eating seals in the winter", he replied. I followed up with a low blow - "Where are the seals in the summer?". "I don't know, on the land, I expect". I had him on the ropes - "Where are the bears in the summer?". He pondered a moment - "they must be on the land too?".

"Then what's the problem - seals on land, bears on land - bears catch seals, bears eat seals, period?". "It's not as simple as that" he parried. "Why is that?". "You're not an expert!" he said. "I don't need to be an expert, just be able to use my brain and think!", He was silent. "You'll be telling me next that penguins in the Antarctic need the ice to catch fish?", His eyes showed a glimmer of triumph - "Yes, they do!". The coup de gras from me "How do they catch fish in the summer, when there's no ice?". He was on the ropes again, and getting desperate "This argument is getting nowhere!".

He just wouldn't see that his "factual" documentaries were only telling half the story, pushing a message of starvation and extinction, climate change and global warming; in fact pushing against the truth. I didn't bother pointing out that polar bears are omnivores, and will eat anything - rotting whale carcasses, fish (yes - they can catch fish!), berries, small mammals, leaves and grass. We still chat regularly. I don't bring up any contentious subjects, and I think he's relieved I don't.

UPDATE: In case anyone thinks I'm talking out of my posterior, here's some current research debunking the idea that reduction in Arctic ice will spell doom for the iconic polar bear:

Demographic and traditional knowledge perspectives on the current status of Canadian polar bear subpopulations 

Abstract
Subpopulation growth rates and the probability of decline at current harvest levels were determined for 13 subpopulations of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) that are within or shared with Canada based on mark–recapture estimates of population numbers and vital rates, and harvest statistics using population viability analyses (PVA). Aboriginal traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) on subpopulation trend agreed with the seven stable/increasing results and one of the declining results, but disagreed with PVA status of five other declining subpopulations. The decline in the Baffin Bay subpopulation appeared to be due to over-reporting of harvested numbers from outside Canada. The remaining four disputed subpopulations (Southern Beaufort Sea, Northern Beaufort Sea, Southern Hudson Bay, and Western Hudson Bay) were all incompletely mark–recapture (M-R) sampled, which may have biased their survival and subpopulation estimates. Three of the four incompletely sampled subpopulations were PVA identified as nonviable (i.e., declining even with zero harvest mortality). TEK disagreement was nonrandom with respect to M-R sampling protocols. Cluster analysis also grouped subpopulations with ambiguous demographic and harvest rate estimates separately from those with apparently reliable demographic estimates based on PVA probability of decline and unharvested subpopulation growth rate criteria. We suggest that the correspondence between TEK and scientific results can be used to improve the reliability of information on natural systems and thus improve resource management. Considering both TEK and scientific information, we suggest that the current status of Canadian polar bear subpopulations in 2013 was 12 stable/increasing and one declining (Kane Basin). We do not find support for the perspective that polar bears within or shared with Canada are currently in any sort of climate crisis. We suggest that monitoring the impacts of climate change (including sea ice decline) on polar bear subpopulations should be continued and enhanced and that adaptive management practices are warranted.

The researchers point out that:

Polar bears evolved from a common ancestor with the brown bear. The range of estimates for the age of polar bears as a species ranges from 4 million years based on deep nuclear genomic sequence data from both paternal and maternal linages (Miller et al. 2012) to 120 thousand years based on the mitochondrial genome (matrilineal) (Lindqvist et al. 2010). If polar bears have existed for the last 4 million years, they would have emerged during the mid-Pliocene approximately 1.25 million years before the onset of northern hemisphere glacial cycles (Bartoli et al. 2005). If polar bears emerged any time prior to or during the previous glacial cycle, they would have persisted through the Eemian interglacial period. During the Eemian interglacial, mean annual temperatures were 4°C warmer than the current interglacial (Holocene) for northern latitudes (Müller 2009), and some northern locations reached temperatures as high as ~7.5°C warmer than the mean temperature for the same area over the last thousand years (Dahl-Jensen et al. 2013). Both scenarios suggest that polar bears are able to mitigate impacts from sea ice decline to an extent not fully exhibited in modern times. Currently, the IPCC predicts globally averaged temperatures to warm ~2°C by 2100 and considers warming of ~4°C by 2100 to be possible although unlikely (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2013). Reduction in the heavy multiyear ice and increased productivity from a longer open water season may even enhance polar bear habitat in some areas (Stirling and Derocher 1993, 2012; Derocher et al. 2004; Rode et al. 2014). The majority of Canada's polar bears inhabit the Canadian Arctic archipelago (Obbard et al. 2010), where 5 of 13 subpopulations are currently and historically ice-free in late summer and early fall (Lunn et al. 2002; Aars et al. 2006; Obbard et al. 2010). Given the persistence of polar bears through the current and previous interglacial periods, and their ability to accommodate extended retreats onshore and based on the empirical observations of climate and sea ice change (S7), it seems unlikely that polar bears (as a species) are at risk from anthropogenic global warming. However, some subpopulations may experience diminished range, reduced productivity and subsequent decline in numbers if sea ice declines occur as predicted (Stirling and Derocher 1993, 2012; Derocher et al. 2004). While there are many projections of climate change that suggest a nearly ice-free Arctic to occur in the warmer months (i.e., September) (IPCC 2007, 2013, Durner et al. 2009; Amstrup et al. 2010; Mahlstein and Knutti 2012; Overland and Wang 2013), there are currently no global climate model (GCM) projections of climate change that suggest a totally ice-free Arctic in any season or month.

.... so there.

 I'll diversify for a moment, because I've never posted anything personal, or connected with where I live. Wycombe is a somewhat "frayed around the edges" town in the Chiltern Hills, designated an "Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty". Here's Yates' pub - well-managed, good cheap food, good beer, relaxed, friendly and hard-working staff, and a correspondingly relaxed clientèle.

Yates', Frogmore, High Wycombe

This is Wycombe High Street, a pale imitation of what it might have been if the local borough council had constrained development and preserved several much older shops and houses.

High Wycombe High Street

There's a street-market on Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. High Wycombe borough was originally "Chepping Wycombe", Chepping being a corruption of the Old English "Ceapen" meaning a town market. I can't find a pic of the whole market, but here's a colourful corner, situated centre-right in the pic above.

Wycombe market - a historical remnant of a prosperous past.

And a couple from the surrounding beechwoods and countryside.

An ancient "dyke" or boundary ditch in the beechwoods about 10 miles from Wycombe.

Bluebell carpet in the spring

Picture-postcard windmill on a windy ridge.

That'll do!

Australia's B.O.M & "Homogenisation" - they must think we're stupid

Australian scientist and blogger Jennifer Marohasy has been leading a small but vocal group campaigning for the Bureau of Meteorology to explain and defend "homogenisation" of temperature data for Australian stations. Their new, improved, value-added and of course, scientifically and mathematically sound database has, in most cases, turned a long-term static or cooling trend into a warming trend. They call it ACORN-SAT. You and I might call it GHCN/GISS outback style - if the present isn't warming to suit their meme, then by god, they'll cool the past, and "prove" local and global warming.

In most cases, the process leads to lowering past temperature data in a series of steps, supposedly corresponding to breakpoints in the series due to station moves, claimed station moves, statistical "discontinuities", or undocumented and therefore unjustified adjustments. Now this was something I could really get my teeth, and my Excel 2000 skills into. Yes, it's the 2000 version - if it ain't broke, don't spend money on a newer version.

I started several draft posts, downloaded shedloads of B.O.M. data, unadjusted GHCN/GISS data, PDF documents, bookmarked scientific literature, created new spreadsheets, chart graphics, googled for images of towns, cities, weather stations. The B.O.M. got very defensive when challenged a couple of years ago. Jennifer and her small group were tilting at a very big and huffily self-righteous windmill. The B.O.M. actually produced some documentation. What right had these upstarts to question their methodology and intent?

Then, a couple of days ago, I had an epiphany; I'd clearly missed something, something very important. The fact was, the B.O.M. has never, ever made the adjustments they'd claimed were necessary! If there's a documented station move, for example from a town out to a rural site, a small temperature change would be expected. In this case, likely to be downward because of the removal of the "urban heat-island" effect. They've identified and quantified such steps in the record at many sites. They believe an appropriate adjustment should be documented and applied, in this case an upward adjustment. The ACORN-SAT database appears not to contain any such adjustments, despite what the B.O.M. has documented, and everyone, until now, has believed.

I'd been looking at the "Station Adjustment Summary" for Amberley, Queensland. There was just one significant adjustment, forward from 1980:

2.  1 January 1980—breakpoint detected by statistical methods.
•  Night-time temperatures started to appear much cooler relative to surrounding                   stations.
•  No accessible documentation for Amberley in 1980, but a breakpoint of this size              would normally be associated with a site move.
•  Min T adjusted by -1.28 °C; no detectable impact on Max T so no adjustments made.

Adjusted by -1.28°C - wouldn't they apply an increase if temperatures "started to appear much cooler relative to surrounding stations"? You'd expect so, but that -1.28°C adjustment was correct - applied to data prior to 1980, thus leaving the "much cooler" data from 1980 onwards unchanged! The shape and trend of the resulting "homogenised" plot becomes identical to what would have resulted from a positive adjustment, but shifted down by the amount of the reversed adjustment. This is the plot of the change to average minimum temperatures for Amberley; for all my graphics, click to see a larger version, or right-click and "save as" to save them:

From the Station Adjustment Summary for Amberley.

The first thing to note is that the "difference" is positive because the author has subtracted adjusted from raw data. If you're comparing A with B, the correct way is to subtract B from A, not vice-versa. Compare 10 with 8, and the difference is 2, not -2. There's no change to raw data after 1980; if post-1980 data was "much cooler relative to surrounding stations", then it remains so. I've plotted ACORN-SAT adjusted against raw for Amberley:

Raw data series (blue) versus ACORN-SAT (red); difference (black)

The raw and adjusted series track together from 1998 rather than 1980 because a second, undocumented adjustment was made after 1996; a 2-step change. From 1980 to 2016, raw minimum trends flat. That's right - no change since 1980. The B.O.M. has what might be termed a "positive attitude" to temperature series; they like to see upward trends - flat or negative has to be "corrected".

Average annual minimum or maximum series are no good metric for measuring or tracking anything, yet they're what the Bureau uses exclusively, and to my knowledge, no other large private nor state-funded meteorological organisation does this. I'll back my up assertions in a future post. In the meantime, here's a plot of monthly average minima for 1978-1983, which spans the Bureau's "breakpoint":

Monthly average minimum temperatures

There's no "step change" evident in 1980. The dip in winter 1982 was caused by a record cold June & July. Minima generally "drifted" down after 1981 to around 1998 - which point coincides with the undocumented adjustment.

Jennifer's campaign focussed on the record for Rutherglen; the story's the same there, though more complicated:

Raw data series (blue) versus ACORN-SAT (red); difference (black)

Raw average minimum and ACORN-SAT adjusted track together (minor differences) from 1974. There's no net upward change due to the claimed adjustments in the Adjustment Summary. I've checked the other Adjustment Summaries, and a few other sites which should show adjustments. In every case, the changes resulted in raising or lowering previous temperatures, not those from the adjustment point forward. The B.O.M. isn't in  the business of correcting anomalies to create ACORN-SAT; they're in the business of changing the past to suit an agenda.

Green Elites, Trumped?

Her's an amazing article from The Wall Street Journal. I've reblogged it, without further comment, from Greenie Watch. It's by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. Who he? His profile and list of WSJ articles is to be found here.

Green Elites, Trumped

The planet will benefit if the climate movement is purged of its rottenness.

Hysterical, in both senses of the word, is the reaction of greens like Paul Krugman and the Sierra Club to last week’s election. “The planet is in danger,” fretted Tom Steyer, the California hedge funder who spends his billions trying to be popular with green voters.

Uh huh. In fact, the climate will be the last indicator to notice any transition from Barack Obama to Donald Trump. That’s because—as climate warriors were only too happy to point out until a week ago—Mr. Obama’s own commitments weren’t going to make any noticeable dent in a putative CO2 problem.

At most, Mr. Trump’s election will mean solar and wind have to compete more on their merits. So what?

He wants to lift the Obama war on coal—but he won’t stop the epochal replacement of coal by cheap natural gas, with half the greenhouse emissions per BTU.

He probably won’t even try to repeal an egregious taxpayer-funded rebate for wind and solar projects, because red states like this gimme too. But Republican state governments will continue to wind back subsidies that ordinary ratepayers pay through their electric bills so upscale homeowners can indulge themselves with solar.

Even so, the price of solar technology will continue to drop; the lithium-ion revolution will continue to drive efficiency gains in batteries.

Mr. Trump wants to spend on infrastructure, and the federal research establishment, a hotbed of battery enthusiasts, likely will benefit.

In a deregulatory mood, he might well pick up an uncharacteristically useful initiative from the Obama administration. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission quietly is revisiting a scientifically dubious radiation risk standard that drives up the cost of nuclear power.

What a Trump election will do is mostly dismantle a green gravy train powered by moral vanity that contributes nothing to the public welfare.

A phenomenon like Trump, whatever its antecedents, is an opportunity—in this case to purge a rottenness that begins at the commanding heights. The New York Times last year published a feature entitled “short answers to the hard questions about climate change” that was notable solely for ignoring the hardest question of all: How much are human activities actually affecting the climate?

This is the hardest question. It’s why we spend tens of billions collecting climate data and building computerized climate models. It’s why “climate sensitivity” remains the central problem of climate science, as lively and unresolved as it was 35 years ago.

Happily, it only takes a crude, blunderbussy kind of instrument to shatter such a fragile smugness—and if Mr. Trump and the phenomenon he represents are anything, it’s crude and blunderbussy.

As with any such shattering, the dividends will not be appropriated only by one party or political tendency.

Democrats must know by now they are in a failing marriage. Wealthy investors like George Soros,Nat Simons and Mr. Steyer, who finance the party’s green agenda, have ridden the Dems into the ground, with nothing to show for their millions, and vice versa.

On the contrary, the WikiLeaks release of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s emails only dramatizes what a liability they’ve become, demanding attacks on scientists and even loyal Democrats who don’t endorse their climate-disaster scenarios. Their anti-coal, anti-pipeline, anti-fracking stance especially hurts Dems with union households, which turned out in record numbers for Mr. Trump.

It was always crazy to believe in an unprecedented act of global central planning to wean nations away from fossil fuels, but equally idiotic not to notice that our energy economy is ripe slowly to be transformed by technology anyway.

One greenie who is beyond the need for handouts is Bill Gates, who has made himself non grata by saying the current vogue for subsidizing power sources that will always need subsidies is a joke—an admission of defeat.

Honest warriors like Mr. Gates and retired NASA alarmist James Hansen insist real progress can’t be made without nuclear. Why haven’t others? Because the Tom Steyers and Bill McKibbens would sacrifice the planet 10 times over rather than no longer be fawned over at green confabs. That’s rottenness at work.

There’s a reason today’s climate movement increasingly devotes its time and energy to persecuting heretics—because it’s the most efficient way to suppress reasoned examination of policies that cost taxpayers billions without producing any public benefit whatsoever.

The theory and practice of climate advocacy, on one hand, has been thoroughly, irretrievably corrupted by self righteousness—blame Al Gore, that was his modus. Yet, on the other, it has allowed itself to become the agent of economic interests that can’t survive without pillaging middle-class taxpayers and energy users—exactly the kind of elitist cronyism that voters are sick of.

Without attributing any special virtue to Mr. Trump, he represents a chance for a new start. He might even turn out to be good for the planet.