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Unforced Variations: Feb 2016

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This month’s open thread.

Just so you know, a lot of people have complained that these threads have devolved – particularly when the discussion has turned to differing visions of solutions – and have therefore become much less interesting. Some suggestions last month were for a side thread for that kind of stuff that wouldn’t clog interesting issues of climate science. Other suggestions were for tighter moderation. The third suggestion is that people really just stay within the parameters of what this site has to offer: knowledgeable people on climate science issues and context for the science that’s being discussed elsewhere. For the time being, let’s try the last one, combined with some moderation. The goal is not to censor, but rather to maintain somewhere where the science issues don’t get drowned out by the noise.

Reader Interactions

173 Responses to "Unforced Variations: Feb 2016"

  1. Utilities are not in the way? Bull. Fighting feed in tariffs. Fighting off-grid homes. Unfairly paying those that do have feed-in tariffs. Lobbying against subsidies for stand-alone… or any… “renewables.”

    But, Bill Gates is killing the world’s food production ability by pushing the soil-killing GMO nonsense, so…

    This is why techies are one of the biggest obstacles to solutions: Their God is tech, and tech has little to do with sustainable systems.

  2. Edward Greisch:

    Utility companies are not in the way. GW is not easy to solve.

    Yes and no.

    Utilities that depend on selling power produced in large centralized plants do stand in the way, for example by resisting “net-metering” laws that promote the development of small-scale, consumer-owned power generation.

    But that’s only one reason why GW is not easy to solve.

  3. Re Arctic sea ice maxima:

    Thanks, Hank…

    A little recreational charting–based on NSIDC reports of the maximum from 2008-2015–yields graphs of the day of year at which the annual ASI maximum occurred, and also the extent value.

    http://i1108.photobucket.com/albums/h402/brassdoc/ASI%20recent%20maxima%20DOY%20amp%20extent.png

    As expected, there’s a lot more variability than trend evident, though there are suggestions of trends, per Eyeball Mark I. That is, it looks as if maxima could be getting earlier, and (more strongly suggested) maximum extents could be getting earlier. I’d bet that a longer set of data would show that both are happening, but unfortunately, the archived reports only go back to 2008. (I’m guessing that reflects growing interest in ASI since AR4.)

    So, to get the earlier maxima, I expect you’d have to download the daily data from NSIDC and run an analysis to identify the maxima for 2007 and earlier. Should be easy for an ace in “R” or something like that, but that doesn’t describe me.

  4. “…maximum extents could be getting earlier.”

    Argh.

    “…getting *smaller*”, of course. Sorry.

    BTW, if someone with stats software chops does want to jump on the earlier data, I wonder what the correlations with extent as of, say, Jan 31 each year would look like?

  5. BTW, the most recent extent value currently is for Feb. 23: 13.175 km^2.

    The highest value for 2016 so far actually happened on Feb. 9: 14.214 km^2.

    The extent has been basically flatline since then, just minor fluctuations. Basically the entire Arctic continues much warmer than normal:

    http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/rnl/sfctmpmer_01a.rnl.html

    So, it’s just possible that we’ve already seen a stunningly early, and record-low maximum this year. It’s too early to say for sure, but it seems a possibility, depending on what the Arctic weather gods decree over the next couple of weeks. Re that, there’s the forecasts available from the trusty Climate Reanalyzer site the University of Maine runs. It shows an Arctic regional anomaly of ~7 degrees right now, and the 7-day forecast has that declining irregularly to the low 3s by March 1. Not sure that’s going to give us a whole lot of ice regrowth, and who knows what will happen after that? But it’s an interesting set-up, for sure.

  6. I note that the Gentlemen Who Prefer Fantasy have kicked off a new series of lie-filled literature with their GWPF Technical paper 1. Be mindful that this is the bit of the GWPF, the Foundation, that is supposed to be factual as the Foundation-part is a registered UK charity (an educational charity no less,) and so collects tax funds from the government because it is meant to be doing good works, rather than lie and distort fact.
    Their Technical Paper 1 is “STATISTICAL FORECASTING – How fast will future warming be?” PDF here by Terence C. Mills, a misguided soul from Loughborough University. Analysing HadCRUT4 & RSS TLT & CET, Terence manages to conclude “A clear finding presents itself for the two global temperature series. Irrespective of the model fitted, forecasts do not contain any trend, with long-horizon forecasts being flat, albeit with rather large measures of imprecision even from models in which uncertainty is bounded.” I note that even with all that imprecision, the 2015 HadCRUT4 data (not used by Terence) would make a bit of a nonsense of his graphed projections – one would sit December 2015 on a 98% confidence line, the other would sit above a 99.9% confidence line.
    If anybody has expertise in in the use (or in this case, misuse) of ARIMA models, perhaps the particulars of the garden path this “leading expert” is following could be explained.
    (This is not the first time Terence has examined temperature series although ten years back his results were less in line with the lies of GWPF.)

  8. 149, 151,

    One of the greatest monopolists of the age thinks that monopolistic utilities aren’t a problem, and that monopolistic agriculture is not a problem. Huh!

    Carry on ignoring (real) free markets boys. If only people would realize you guys have figured it all out for them, they could stop bothering to think and make decisions, and follow your detailed instructions for the […]topian future.

  9. OK, curiosity got the better of me, and I managed to wrangle the daily data from NSIDC with Excel:

    http://i1108.photobucket.com/albums/h402/brassdoc/Long-term%20ASI%20mas%20extent%20trends.png

    Interestingly, while the expected drop in maximum extent materialized, the expected retreat to earlier max dates did not–in fact, the trend seems to be to later maxima, not earlier ones. And now that I see the result, I seem to vaguely recall some discussion about this counter-intuitive result some time back on Neven’s sea ice site.

    So Vendicar and I were both wrong: it doesn’t appear that maxima are getting earlier.

  11. BPL, your radiative identity 2) phase change does not sound right. Absorption causing heating causing sublimation, yes, but heat first, which you have already included.

  12. “So Vendicar and I were both wrong:” – 159

    Fit a parabolic curve to the data a month from now to see when the “real” ie. “more realistic” peak occurred.

    It is still too early to claim that even a noisy peek has been reached.

  15. #162–Yes, on the 25th extent ticked up to 14.237 million km2, surpassing the early February value noted in my #155. Vendicar’s projection of a max around the 27th is in play, though. We’ll see what the weather gods decree.

  20. Fyfe, Meehl, England, Mann et al. (2016) Nature climate change article: A lot of ink has been spilt about global warming…

    Comment by Conspiracy theorist — 27 Feb 2016

    A lot of ink has been ‘spilled’ trying to clean up poor grammar and annoying trolling. Link to metafilter, linked to a pay walled publication by Mann. What’s your point?

  22. #171–That’s not about trend estimation in any real sense, it’s about how big anomalies appear to be on a map showing spatial trends. Quite a different problem–and more of a ‘communications’ than ‘analytic’ one, IMO.