NASA: Record Jan-May temps

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NASA is once again getting their record temperatures by making up temperatures across the Arctic.  Meanwhile, the Danish meteorological institute which has measured high Arctic temperatures (north of 80˚N) consistently since 1958, has noted temperatures only slightly above normal since January.  In fact, Jan-May 1958 was nearly the same temperature-wise in the high Arctic as Jan-May 2010.

But NASA finds a few weather stations around 65˚N, adjusts their recorded temperatures upward by a couple degrees, and then paints deep red all over the Arctic, which significantly raises global temperatures so they can put out their press releases.

I guess I'm not surprised that you still trot this garbage out here every month, Hoffman.

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http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100610/full/news.2010.292.html?s=news_rss

There's a new study that finds that the scare stories of catastrophe across Asia as massive rivers dry up thanks to glacier melt are exaggerated.  The river levels are actually more influenced by Monsoonal rains than by glacier melt.  While diminished glaciers will reduce river flows, it won't have nearly the impact that a failed monsoon can have. 

Failed monsoons are a much larger threat during colder times on earth.  During warmer times, the equatorial eastern Pacific often cools as trade winds strengthen.  With warming across the Indian and Western Pacific oceans and more moisture transfer from the oceans into the air, the typical monsoons are enhanced and more regular.  While the deserts of the SW USA and Mexico and western South America see drought, Australia and the monsoon belts of southern Asia have regular, dependable monsoons nearly every year.  It was this type of pattern that allowed empires to thrive across southeast Asia during the Medieval Warm Period.

When the earth began to cool, it disrupted the trade winds and caused El Niño conditions to prevail in the eastern Pacific.  This shifted the normal moisture belt from Indonesia to the central Pacific where it fell over open water.  While Peru, Chile, Mexico, and the SW USA saw more rainfall... the very nature of El Niño did not mean a steady supply of moisture to these areas.  Instead it was feast or famine while the monsoons failed much more often across Asia and Australia withered in drought.

The biggest difference between the MWP and Little Ice age in much of the world wasn't that the MWP was warmer and the LIA colder... but that the weather during the MWP was generally fairer and more consistent.  Europe had consistently warm summers with dependable rainfall that allowed bumper crop harvests while the empires of Mexico faltered in constant drought that lasted decades at times.  In contrast, the weather during the colder LIA was completely unpredictable.  Some summers were warm and productive while others were cold and very wet or very dry that caused flooding and crop killing droughts.  Winters rather than being consistently mild and wet across Europe became much more variable with some being warm and wet and many others frigid cold with deep snows.  Even the deserts of North America that benefited from higher rainfall on average couldn't depend on good rains every year.. many years it hardly rained at all while during others crops were washed out.

So what's the point here?  The point is that a warmer planet will mean more consistent and more dependable weather patterns because the difference in temperatures between the equator and poles, which drives all of our weather, becomes smaller and the clash of hot and cold air becomes smaller.  So while deserts can increase in size in a warmer world, the weather is much more predictable... and any farmer, even in the marginal arid high plains, will tell you that predictable, consistent bad weather is better than an unpredictable crapshoot.

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http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html

It should be noted that while Arctic sea ice is well below normal... about 1.1 million sq. km below the norm for this time of year, the Antarctic is at near record highs for this time of year at 1.335 million sq. km above normal.

THis means that global sea ice is a quarter million square kilometers above normal right now.  When was the Antarctic sea ice record broken last?  Late summer 2007 (late winter down there) just as everybody was having veritable heart attacks over the loss of ice in the Arctic that was a sure sign of global warming.

Yet that entire time, global sea ice was above normal.  You heard absolutely NOTHING about that.

During El Niño winters, sea ice extent tends to be well above normal because the fringes of the Arctic get cold while the high Arctic stays warmer.  This means while the extent is larger, the ice thickness is lower than normal.  Then during La Niña winters, the opposite occurs.  Extent is below normal but the thickness is well above normal.

It should still be known that ice thickness has almost completely recovered int he high Arctic since the huge losses during summer 2007 so the chances of a repeat of 2007 is unlikely.  The melt has been quick in the past month as the fringes of the Arctic melt off where there was large areas of thin ice.  But the high Arctic ice is quite thick thanks to the restorative winters of 2007/08 and 2008/09. 

It'll be interesting to see how they spin it this year.  In 2007, the big story was about the record low sea ice extent.  Then in 2008, when the extent was larger than 2007 despite frantic calls from the alarmists that the ice was in a downward spiral, they instead focused on the record low amounts of ice that was at least a year old.

In 2009, when the minimum was yet larger than 2008 and much of the ice was now 2 years old, they switched the focus to the lack of 2 plus year old ice.

I'm sure this year the focus will be on the lack of 3 plus year old ice and the same alarmist press releases will be put out about how rotten the ice is and how it is melting away even though nearly every expedition to showcase this has ended early and in disaster when the people were woefully unprepared for the frigid cold.  (They figured it'd be balmy up there since it's so "warm".. when in fact, the ice didn't actually melt in 2007 as much as get compressed together by an anomalous wind pattern that pushed the ice into a smaller area.  Large parts of the ice cap actually thickened dramatically during SUMMER 2007 which is very unusual... all because of wind.  Temperature had nothing to do with it).

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Antarctic ice cover anomalies since satellite measurements began in late 1978.



Actual ice extent over the past 2 years:


The physics involved in the climate of Antarctica are poorly understood.  The reason that the Antarctic ozone hole is so much more severe than the Arctic "hole" which is just a seasonal weaker spot, and not a hole at all, is because the Antarctic is a landmass surrounded by water, and the Arctic is the opposite.

Also, and this is very important:  Atmospheric Co2 levels are not any lower in the Antarctic than anywhere else.  In fact, they are higher than in the tropics and in the high Arctic.  Without the mixing that occurs elsewhere and the relatively high Co2 levels, by the very physics of greenhouse warming and greenhouse theory, Antarctica should be warming at a good clip.

But something tells me that high co2 levels in the Antarctic actually don't make a bit of difference in the temperature there.  This is why when you have major carbon emissions from vast forest fires, like in Indonesia in 1997, you don't see any extra warming from them once you remove other noise from the climate trends... but that's not kosher because it doesn't fit nicely with AGW theory.