Andy May 9:27 am on January 6, 2020

Greenland Ice Core CO2 Concentrations Deserve Reconsideration

Guest post by Renee Hannon

Introduction
Ice cores datasets are important tools when reconstructing Earth’s paleoclimate. Antarctic ice core data are routinely used as proxies for past CO₂ concentrations. This is because twenty years ago scientists theorized Greenland ice core CO₂ data was unreliable since CO₂ trapped in air bubbles had potentially been altered by in-situ chemical reactions. As a result, Greenland CO₂ datasets are not used in scientific studies to understand Northern and Southern hemispheres interactions and sensitivity of greenhouse gases under various climatic conditions.

This theory was put forward because Greenland CO₂ data were more variable and different than Antarctic CO₂ measurements located in the opposite polar region about 11,000 miles away. This article re-examines Greenland ice cores to see if they do indeed contain useful CO₂ data. The theory of in-situ chemical reactions to explain a surplus and deficit of CO₂, relative to Antarctic data, will be shown to be tenuous. The Greenland CO₂ data demonstrates a response to the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, Dansgaard-Oeschger and other past climate change events. This response to past climate changes offers an improved explanation for why Greenland and Antarctic CO₂ measurements differ. Further, Greenland CO₂ measurements show rapid increases of 100 ppm during warm events in relatively short periods of time.

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Andy May 8:07 am on January 3, 2020

Earth’s Ice Ages

By Andy May

The phrase “Ice Age” is poorly defined and often abused, so let’s first define the climate state during most ice ages. It is called “Icehouse Earth.” The earth is in an icehouse state when either or both poles are covered in a thick, permanent icecap (Scotese 2015). Today, both poles are covered in ice year-round, so you may be surprised to learn this is very rare in Earth’s history. In fact, out of the last 550 million years, the earth has had permanent ice caps on one or both poles only nine percent of the time.

An “Ice Age” is best defined as a geologically (or millions of years long) long period of low temperatures. This usually results in the presence of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. We are currently living in the Quaternary Ice Age, this is only the fifth significant and severe ice age in Earth’s known history, and, so far it has lasted about 2.6 million years (technically 30+ million years ago when permanent ice appeared on Antarctica). It is the most severe ice age in the Phanerozoic, the geological name for the past 550 million years. Ice Ages are rare, but humans evolved during one, so it seems normal to us.

Figure 1. Christopher Scotese’s geological interpretation of Phanerozoic global temperatures in degrees C. The vertical line on the right side, labeled “PAW” is a projection of possible anthropogenic warming according to a pessimistic IPCC climate model. In 2016 the actual global average surface temperature of the Earth was about 14.5 degrees C. as marked on the plot, in 2019 the temperature is slightly lower at 14.35 degrees according to NASA GISS. The names of the major ice ages were added by the author. After (Scotese 2015)

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Andy May 6:44 am on April 23, 2019

The big Arctic Sea-Ice shift of 2007: Ice refuses to melt

by Javier

I have maintained since 2015 that in the 2006-2007 season the Arctic underwent a cyclical phase shift, and the rapid sea-ice melting observed over the previous decades ended. A few scientists predicted or explained this shift based on their study of multi-decadal oscillations (see bibliography). They were ignored by mainstream climatology and the press because the “anthropogenic” melting of the Arctic is one of the main selling points of the climate scare. See for example:

A devastating Arctic temperature rise that could submerge coastal cities and trigger species extinction is now locked in. Business Insider March 15, 2019

Year after year the data supports my view over the desperate scaremongers like Tamino. With the passing of time it is more and more difficult to defend the idea that Arctic melting is continuing, so alarmists keep changing the metric. First it was September sea-ice extent (SIE), then September sea-ice volume, and now annual average SIE. However, the reference measurements are September minimum SIE and March maximum SIE. Continue reading →

Andy May 12:30 pm on February 26, 2019

Arctic Ice Surpasses 2018 Maximum

More on Arctic Ice by Ron Clutz.

Science Matters

Sea Ice Extends on the Atlantic Side: The animation above shows the last two weeks on the Atlantic side, with Kara achieving its annual maximum and Barents growing ice up to 86% of its max last March. In the upper right the ice solidifies down to Svalbard and fast ice forms along the mainland. On the left, Baffin ice thickens along the Labrador coast and a large mass forms along Newfoundland. The Gulf of St. Lawrence is nearly iced over. Below is the ice recovery on the Pacific side.

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Bering on the right retreats and then recovers to stay at 95% of its 2018 maximum. Meanwhile Okhotsk on the left shows a surge of sea ice, gaining almost 400k km2 over these two weeks. Bering is well below the 12 year average, while Okhotsk has already passed its 2018 maximum and is 22% above the 12 year average.

The graph below…

View original post 830 more words

Andy May 1:20 pm on February 24, 2019

Strong Arctic sea-ice growth this year

Guest Post by Javier

February is not over, and Arctic sea-ice extent is already over half a million square kilometers higher than last year at this day.

The growing season has not ended, and 2019 Arctic sea-ice extent is already higher than the previous four years and six out of the last 14 years.

Figure 1. Arctic sea-ice extent. Note the left edge of the graph is February 1, not January 1. http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/charctic-interactive-sea-ice-graph/

Arctic sea-ice has stubbornly resisted the very warm years between 2015-2017 caused by the big El Niño. Are we going to see an increase in Arctic sea-ice over the next few years? Only time will tell, but the idea cannot be discarded.

Antarctic sea-ice is also growing this year with respect to last year, so global sea-ice extent is going to see an important jump this year.

Stay tuned for the March results but the “Arctic melting pause” is alive and kicking 12 years later. It started the year Al Gore said Arctic sea-ice was doomed. Talk about timing.

Andy May 2:50 pm on February 8, 2019

Why the Green New Deal is a Bad Deal for America

Dr. Martin Capages has written an excellent new book entitled Why the Green New Deal is a Bad Deal for America. He very effectively deconstructs the “Green New Deal.” He kindly asked me to write the Foreward for the book, so I am posting a slightly revised version here.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is only the latest, in a long line of politicians, to use climate change as an excuse for world government and global control of production, distribution and exchange of goods and services, aka socialism. The global warming (or climate change, if you prefer) scare has been inexorably tied to socialism since it was conceived in the late 1980s by Maurice Strong (see the details of what Strong did in Christopher Booker’s article on him in the 5 December 2015 issue of The Telegraph, link). In short, he became the founding director of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP) and later, in 1992, he created the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Continue reading →

Andy May 10:22 am on February 6, 2019

The planet is no longer warming

By Javier

We define “warming” as a positive rate of temperature change over time. According to the main hypothesis, warming since 1951 has been due almost exclusively to the increase in GHGs (greenhouse gases), of which CO₂ is the most important one. The IPCC does not find anything else that has contributed to the observed warming. Continue reading →

Andy May Petrophysicist

Petrophysics, Climate Change and Photography

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