http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2009/02/25/antarctic-warming.html

Guess deniers were wrong after all.

An article in the Washington Post today on how VP Cheney’s staff edited — censored — testimony of a CDC official about the health threat due to global warming.

Members of Vice President Cheney’s staff censored congressional testimony by a top federal official about health threats posed by global warming, a former Environmental Protection Agency official said yesterday.

Breakup images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf.

Nod to Hank Roberts for his link at Real Climate.

According to an article in the New York Times, measurement bias had a role to play in the apparent drop in SSTs during the 1940s, but has no consequence for long term trends — abstract in Science.

Data sets used to monitor the Earth’s climate indicate that the surface of the Earth warmed from 1910 to 1940, cooled slightly from 1940 to 1970, and then warmed markedly from 1970 onward1. The weak cooling apparent in the middle part of the century has been interpreted in the context of a variety of physical factors, such as atmosphere–ocean interactions and anthropogenic emissions of sulphate aerosols2. Here we call attention to a previously overlooked discontinuity in the record at 1945, which is a prominent feature of the cooling trend in the mid-twentieth century. The discontinuity is evident in published versions of the global-mean temperature time series1, but stands out more clearly after the data are filtered for the effects of internal climate variability. We argue that the abrupt temperature drop of 0.3 °C in 1945 is the apparent result of uncorrected instrumental biases in the sea surface temperature record. Corrections for the discontinuity are expected to alter the character of mid-twentieth century temperature variability but not estimates of the century-long trend in global-mean temperatures.

Apparently, Jim Hansen was right. The Bush Admin was trying to obfuscate, deceive and delay.

From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said, NASA’s public affairs office “managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public.” It noted elsewhere that “news releases in the areas of climate change suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency, and scientific dilution.”

Officials of the Office of Public Affairs told investigators that they regulated communication by NASA scientists for technical rather than political reasons, but the report found “by a preponderance of the evidence, that the claims of inappropriate political interference made by the climate change scientists and career public affairs officers were more persuasive than the arguments of the senior public affairs officials that their actions were due to the volume and poor quality of the draft news releases.”

The political interference did not extend to the research itself or its dissemination through scientific journals and conferences, the investigators said. “We found no evidence indicating NASA blocked or interfered with the actual research activities of its climate scientists,” the report said, but as a result of the actions of the political appointees, “trust was lost, at least temporarily, between the agency and some of its key employees and perhaps the public it serves.”

New ice core data shows that greenhouse gasses higher today than during entire 800,000 years of data.

This is why I have been absent from this blog and the climate blogosphere for the past month or so. I am so tired of the climate wars, so fed up with the denialists and their deception and outright stupidity. Of course, the persistant among them will demand to see the data, will decry that it takes too long to get it, will cast aspersions against the scientists involved and will find all manner of ways to discount this data.

I’m fed up to my craw. I guess I don’t have the heart for it. I’m going to focus on the research rather than the naysayers, for their time is past and they are nothing but a human liability. Posts from now on will only focus on evidence and research, not on the foibles of the denialists and their ilk.

Arctic ice disappearing at an alarming rate, according to an article in the Vancouver Sun.

Ice was the last thing David Barber was worried about when he and an international team of scientists made plans last year to have their research icebreaker frozen into the Beaufort Sea for the winter.

But when the Amundsen sailed into the western Arctic in November, the ice that normally begins to take hold in October hadn’t even begun to gel.

“Even by mid-December, the southern Beaufort Sea was still wide open,” said Barber, a University of Manitoba sea ice physicist and chief scientist aboard the Amundsen. “That’s over a month longer than the time freeze-up normally occurs.”

Barber and his colleagues got an even bigger surprise when they sailed north into M’Clure Strait, the main channel connecting the Northwest Passage to the western Arctic. The strait is legendary as a gateway for thick, rock-hard, multi-year ice that piles in from the Beaufort Sea, but Barber and his colleagues found nothing but clear sailing.

“It was surreal,” he said. “The weeks spent on the ship were some of the most remarkable of my career. The multi-year pack ice had migrated about 150 miles (240 kilometres) north from where it has traditionally been located. So the ice-associated, high-pressure system that traditionally forms over the southern Beaufort at this time of year was displaced.

“All that cyclonic activity that was drawn in by the warm, open water not only made for some rough sailing, it also put more heat into the air, keeping the local climate warmer than usual

Deniers will point to this and argue that the models didn’t predict this much warming and so the loss of ice must be due to factors other than AGHGs. Certainly climate science does not understand the complexities of ocean circulation and all the other factors involved in arctic climate perfectly. However, this should not give us any cause to lollygag. Quite the opposite.

I spent the day attending a conference on adaptation to climate change in the second most vulnerable part of Canada — the Palliser Triangle. The conference brought together researchers, academics, policy people and activists to examine and discuss the evidence of climate change in this area and what issues relating to adaptation to climate change exist for vulnerable communities. Paleoclimate research using lodgepole pine cores dating back a thousand years suggests that this area experiences frequent decadal droughts. Indeed, when Palliser explored this area in the 18th C, he wrote back that no settlers should be brought here since it was so dry and could not support settlement. Of course, settlers came and broke the land, starting farms and communities. The dustbowl of the ’30s threatened to return the area to its former state, but innovative responses including the development of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Centre and the Special Areas in Alberta helped those residents who did stay adapt, with new farming techniques and irrigation projects. The area turned into one of the richest grain and cattle farming areas in Canada — part of Canada’s and the world’s breadbaskets.

Adaptation to climate is part of what makes humans what we are — able to live virtually anywhere in any climate. As the moderator of the conference said, we are in for up to several degrees of warming, based on the best scientific knowledge, and so we had better start planning now for how we will adapt.

In other words, denialists can make this or that claim about data or scientists or errors in papers, but the evidence is clear that climate has already changed and is due to change even more in the next century. The time for senseless debates over hockey sticks and graphs and the like is over. The time to talk about solutions, including mitigation and adaptation is now.

More on the conference later.

Especially when I read articles with passages like this:

“Canadian ice shelves have undergone substantial changes in the past six years, starting with the first break-up event on the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, and the loss of the Ayles Ice Shelf,” said Dr. Luke Copland of the University of Ottawa. “These latest break-ups we are seeing have come after decades of warming and are irreversible,” said Dr. Derek Mueller of Trent University.

Only five large ice shelves remain in Arctic Canada, covering less than a tenth of the area than they did a century ago.

1/10th of an area they covered a century ago?

This report on climate change and national security is an example of the reality outside of the climate war blogs. 

On uncertainty:

Former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan enjoys a good debate. But he also knows there are times when debate must stop and action must begin. With respect to climate change, he says that time has arrived. “We seem to be standing by and, frankly, asking for perfectness in science,” Gen. Sullivan said. “People are saying they want to be convinced, perfectly. They want to know the climate science projections with 100 percent certainty. Well, we know a great deal, and even with that, there is still uncertainty. But the trend line is very clear.”

“We never have 100 percent certainty,” he said. “We never have it. If you wait until you have 100 percent certainty, something bad is going to happen on the battlefield. That’s something we know. You have to act with incomplete information. You have to act based on the trend line. You have to act on your intuition sometimes.”

In discussing how military leaders manage risk, Gen. Sullivan noted that significant attention is often given to the low probability/high consequence events. These events rarely occur but can have devastating consequences if they do. American families are familiar with these calculations. Serious injury in an auto accident is, for most families, a low probability/high consequence event. It may be unlikely, but we do all we can to avoid it.

So, while the rest of the world has moved on to review options to address the risk of warming, some parts of the blogosphere have continued to focus on old battles and tearing open old wounds. As an academic, I can do this because it is important to understand the past and its part in constructing the present, but minds like HB need to focus on what is happening today and solutions. I hope we can see that mind, and the minds of others, turned to that issue rather than focusing on the past.

I suspect that C A won’t because this all the deniers have — the Hockey Stick is their touchstone that proves — to them at least — that they are right.

Evidence shows otherwise and most everyone else knows better.