An international team of scientists, led by British Antarctic Survey (BAS), has produced a new map showing how much heat from the Earth’s interior is reaching the base of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. The map is part of a new paper accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
The team has produced the most up to date, accurate and high-resolution map of the so called ‘geothermal heat flux’ at the base of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Of the basic information that shapes and controls ice flow, the most poorly known about is this heat
Stenni et al (2017), Antarctic climate variability on regional and continental scales over the last 2000 years, was published pdf this week by Climate of the Past. It includes (multiple variations) of a new Antarctic temperature reconstruction, in which 112 d18O and dD isotope series are combined into regional and continental reconstructions.
(…) What does this all mean? Are models consistent with observations or not? Up to the recent very large El Nino, it seemed that even climate scientists were on the verge of conceding that models were running too hot, but the El Nino has given them a reprieve. After the very large 1998 El Nino, there was about 15 years of apparent “pause”. Will there be a similar pattern after the very large 2017 El Nino?
It is far too early to judge this year’s global temperature developments and their significance regarding the long-term warming trend.
The United Nations climate change conference, held in Bonn this year, is always the cue for press releases from the World Meteorological Office and the UK Met Office in which they give their assessment of the year based on 9-10 months of data.
Dealing with the El Nino of recent years (and don’t forget the ‘Pacific Blob’ before that) they have had difficulty with explaining what part of the record temperature was due to El Nino and natural, and what was anthropogenic.
The plots attached here are taken from the MOYHU blog maintained by Nick Stokes here. The software on the blog allows the global temperature anomaly data for each month for the last several years, it also allows the mesh showing the temperature measurement points to be turned on and off.
Though advocates of the dangerous anthropogenic global warming (AGW) narrative may not welcome the news, evidence that modern day global warming has largely been driven by natural factors – especially solar activity – continues to pile up.
Much of the debate about the Sun’s role in climate change is centered around reconstructions of solar activity that span the last 400 years, which now include satellite data from the late 1970s to present.
Study Bolsters Theory of Heat Source Under West Antarctica
A new NASA study adds evidence that a geothermal heat source called a mantle plume lies deep below Antarctica’s Marie Byrd Land, explaining some of the melting that creates lakes and rivers under the ice sheet. Although the heat source isn’t a new or increasing threat to the West Antarctic ice sheet, it may help explain why the ice sheet collapsed rapidly in an earlier era of rapid climate change, and why it is so unstable today.
by Deming Kong et al., November 30, 2017 in Quaternary International
High-resolution surface temperature records over the last two millennia are crucial to understanding the forcing and response mechanism of Earth’s climate. Here we report a bidecadal-resolution sea surface temperature (SST) record based on long-chain alkenones in a gravity sediment core retrieved from the northern South China Sea. SST values varied between 26.7 and 27.5 °C, with a total variability ∼1 °C over the last 2000 years.
At Dr. Roy Spencer’s site, regular commenter Des posted a very interesting analysis with respect to September 2017 on UAH6 and the Top 10 first-9-months-of-the-year. Des has graciously allowed me to use their work. Everything that appears below is from Des until you see the statement “Written by Des.” below:
Top 10 Septembers on the record:
1. 2017 (+0.54)
2. 2016 (+0.45) … EL NINO
3. 1998 (+0.44) … EL NINO
4. 2010 (+0.37) … EL NINO
5. 2009 (+0.27) … EL NINO
6. 2005 (+0.25) … EL NINO
7. 2015 (+0.25) … EL NINO
8. 1995 (+0.22) … EL NINO
9. 2012 (+0.22)
10. 2013 (+0.22)
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for October, 2017 was +0.63 deg. C, up from the September, 2017 value of +0.54 deg. C (click for full size version).
18O is a rare isotope of oxygen. The ratio of 18O to the normal 16O in foraminifera fossils (“forams”) can be used to estimate paleo-ocean temperatures. Higher values mean lower temperatures. A recent article on geologypage.com (here) led me to Bernard, et al., 2017, which has experimental data that suggest 18O concentrations can be altered in fossils by solid-state diffusion after fossilization. This can corrupt the measurement and the resulting calculated temperature
Les scientifiques en déduisent que le réchauffement global actuel pourrait potentiellement être “sans précédent” sur les 100 derniers millions d’années. L’étude de ces géochimistes, publiée dans Nature Communications, constitue une sorte de pavé dans la mare des paléoclimatologues qui utilisent depuis les années 1950 ce “paléothermomètre” aidant à bâtir les modèles actuels sur le réchauffement climatique
The HadCRUT4.5 temperature anomaly for September calculated by spherical triangulation is 0.54C, a fall of 0.17C since August. Temperatures have seemingly returned to a long trend after the 2016 El Nino.
September Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) are now available, and we see downward spikes in ocean temps everywhere, led by sharp decreases in the Tropics and SH, reversing the bump upward last month. The Tropical cooling in particular factors into forecasters favoring an unusually late La Nina appearance in coming months.
Regular readers at Anthony’s Watts Up With That will know that for several years, since July 2013 in fact, I have been trying to publish an analysis of climate model error.
The analysis propagates a lower limit calibration error of climate models through their air temperature projections. Anyone reading here can predict the result. Climate models are utterly unreliable. For a more extended discussion see my prior WUWT post on this topic (thank-you Anthony).
by S. Kamal et al., September 30, 2017 in Environment SystemsDecisions
Within this scope, the results reveal a pattern of the climatic effect of desert urbanization with nighttime warming and weaker, but significant daytime cooling. This effect is confined to the urban area and is not sensitive to the size of the city or the detailed land cover types in the surrounding areas. The pattern is identified in both winter and summer.
Physical, mathematical and observational grounds are employed to show that there is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the issue of global warming. While it is always possible to construct statistics for any given set of local temperature data, an infinite range of such statistics is mathematically permissible if physical principles provide no explicit basis for choosing among them. Distinct and equally valid statistical rules can and do show opposite trends when applied to the results of computations from physical models and real data in the atmosphere. A given temperature field can be interpreted as both “warming” and “cooling” simultaneously, making the concept of warming in the context of the issue of global warming physically ill-posed.
Temperature and Water Level (MSL) are two hot topic measurements being widely bandied about and vast sums of money are being invested in research to determine whether, on a global scale, these physical quantities — Global Average Temperature and Global Mean Sea Level — are changing, and if changing, at what magnitude and at what rate. The Global Averages of these ever-changing, continuous variables are being said to be calculated to extremely precise levels — hundredths of a degree for temperature and millimeters for Global Sea Level — and minute changes on those scales are claimed to be significant and important.
Boosted by warmer than normal water in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean that peaked in June and July, global average temperatures in the atmosphere rose to record levels in September, according to Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Not only was it the warmest September on record, it was also the warmest month (compared to seasonal norms) in the 38-year satellite temperature record that wasn’t associated with an “officially recognized” El Niño Pacific Ocean warming event.
(…) We are left with conjectures and other speculation, both in the recent past and for the future. For this, climatologists develop models with which they can test their hypotheses. But these models are obviously overheating. (…)
A number of authors, including the IPCC, have argued that climate models have systematically overstated the rate of global warming in recent decades. A recent paper by Millar et al. (2017) presented the same finding in a diagram of temperature change versus cumulative carbon emissions since 1870.
In the climate debate, though, it pays to read the small print. Official climatology does not usually admit its many errors: instead, we are ordered to obey the “consensus”, as the Party Line is these days rebranded. On reading the headlines, I suspected at once that the true purpose of the latest admission, by Millar et al. in the current issue of Nature Geo“science”, is to minimize and thus to conceal the true magnitude of past over-predictions.
With the help of satellite observations from 188 lakes worldwide, scientists have shown that the warming of large lakes amplifies their color. Lakes which are green due to their high phytoplankton content tend to become greener in warm years as phytoplankton content increases. Clear, blue lakes with little phytoplankton, on the other hand, tend to become even bluer in warm years caused by declines in phytoplankton. Thus, contrary to previous assumptions, the warming of lakes tends to amplify their richness or poverty of phytoplankton.
