A week after our first equipment evaluation expedition for our 2015 Arctic Basin Big Wave Surfing Contest the signs were looking good once again, albeit with a southwesterly wind once again. Here’s how our compact format surf forecast looked for noon on March 7th, courtesy of some copying and pasting from Magic Seaweed’s global surf outlook:
The North Atlantic surf forecast for March 7th 2015. Winds / Wave Height / Wave Period
You’ll no doubt note that the swell height out in mid Atlantic was off the top of the truncated scale. That’s because it’s designed for use in the Arctic Basin, where 40 foot waves are very hard to come by! Take a look at the last link below to see what I mean.
Given the wind the shelter of Putsborough was the order of the day when it came to spot selection. Water temperatures hadn’t changed significantly in a week, but the sun was shining on this occasion, which is undoubtedly preferable to the rain we experienced last time:
Donning the same gear as last time even my fingers didn’t feel cold this time around, although my partner for the day (encased in a standard winter wet suit plus separate hood) described conditions as “f…. cold!” even after warming up thoroughly, as you can see here:
Eat your heart out Anastasia Ashley! After the session considerably more energy was expended by the two of us extracting yours truly from his Tiki Prodigy 6/5/4 suit. After that I started chatting to Simon, who happened to be parked next to us in the car park at Putsborough Sands, as dusk started to descend. Here’s what happened next:
Towards the end of our conversation I explained the rationale behind our Arctic Basin big wave surfing contest, and briefly touched on some of the associated Arctic surf science. For the scientifically inclined amongst you, there’s a much longer explanation available in this companion article!
Here are some relevant Arctic sea ice metrics. We will continue to update them as the latest figures arrive throughout the rest of today:
IJIS/JAXA daily extent: 13,648,280 km² – Lowest ever level for the date in records going back to 2003
DMI “30%” daily extent: 10,676,900 km² – Lowest ever level for the date in records going back to 2005
NSIDC daily extent: 14,330,000 km² – Lowest ever level for the date
NSIDC 5 day average extent: 14,280,000 km² – Lowest ever level for the date in records going back to 1979
Cryosphere Today daily area: 12,984,410 km² – Lowest ever level for the date in records going back to 1979
As we reported on February 18th, some of the Arctic sea ice extent metrics reached the lowest levels for the date in their respective histories quite some time ago. Today though, we’re looking at a full house. The daily NSIDC and IJIS extent numbers have both been at all time lows for the date for quite some time now. Here’s how the NSIDC 5 day average extent looks at the moment:
Meanwhile a series of storms in the North Atlantic have been bringing large surf to the shores of the Western United Kingdom, and battering the edge of the sea ice in the Greenland and Barents Seas. Here’s how GFS looks currently, as visualised by MeteoCiel:
In addition this has resulted in warm air from further south being funnelled into the high Arctic, so much so that the surface temperature anomalies currently look like this:
whilst the temperatures 2 metres above the surface of the Arctic look like this:
If you look closely you’ll see that air temperatures 2 metres above the North Pole are currently similar to those around the shores of the Great Lakes of North America. As a result of all this atmospheric activity today we bring you news that both the Danish Meteorological Institute “new” 15% extent:
and “old” 30% metrics:
have now joined the club.
The Cryosphere Today area metric has been holding out against the trend in sea ice extent for weeks, but we can confidently predict that when their next update is released it too will also reveal the lowest ever Arctic sea ice area for the 65th day of the year, in records going back to 1979. Here’s how their graph looks currently:
Great White Con fantasy big wave team rider Andrew Cotton was interviewed on BBC Radio Devon last week by none other than Simon Bates! Cotty was on a trip to Hawaii at the time and pointed out to Simon that:
The thing with surf… is it’s the tides, the waves, the wind. The surf tells you when to surf. It’s not around chores or work, you have to have surf that looks good.
As luck would have it all that came together for North Devon surfers at Putsborough Sands on Saturday. Things looked promising to us a couple of days beforehand, and plans were hatched on Twitter for our first equipment evaluation expedition of 2015:
We took the heaven sent opportunity to test out our thickest winter wetsuit in the following conditions:
According to Magic Seaweed sea surface temperatures are currently around 8 °C off the coast of North Devon, and it doesn’t get much colder than that in this neck of the woods, which may have had something to do with at least one “no show” on Saturday. Simon had “volunteered” Richard Green for a “cold and dangerous” surf trip:
but Richard had a good excuse for being unable to make it since he was broadcasting on Radio Devon, and chatting to Pete Waterman amongst other things, that afternoon. We did invite Simon Bates along too, but it seems he had a previous engagement in London:
Prior to setting off for the north coast I got in touch with Trev Lumley, who is the proprietor of the Eyeball Surfcheck web site where we had discovered this enticing looking image on the Putsborough surfcam earlier that morning:
Trev told me he would be elsewhere by the time we arrived at “Spot P”, so I quickly tested out my little quiz for the day on him. He claimed never to have heard of Richard Green, whilst Simon Bates did ring a bell and the name Andrew Cotton was very familiar. When I explained the reason for my call Trev told me that he had actually heard Andrew being interviewed by Simon on BBC Radio Devon a few days previously. When pressed to decide who amongst the three names I had mentioned was most famous Trev told me that as far as he was concerned Cotty was the man, since he had known him since he was a boy. However Trev thought that Simon’s name would probably be more familiar to the average Devonian.
When we eventually arrived at the car park above the beach some heavy showers had already set in. However before plunging into the chilly North Atlantic, I took advantage of a break between the downpours and wandered around the car park at Putsborough with a cameraman in tow to discover the reaction of some of the locals to my TikiProdigy 6/5/4 suit, whilst also killing two birds with one stone by doing some research into the nature of fame and celebrity in the 21st century. Here’s my first interview, with a local lifeguard:
As you can see, our first interviewee thought the Tiki Prodigy “Looks warm”, which was comforting in all the circumstances. In addition out of our list of six celebrities Andrew Cotton was overwhelmingly the most famous. DJs Simon Bates and Richard Green, and journalists Andrew Neil, Christopher Booker and David Rose failed to achieve even the merest flicker of recognition.
More videos are on the way, but are currently still stuck in the editing suite here in the basement of the Great White Con Ivory Towers. In the meantime here are my own findings after a couple of hours at sea on my yellow sponge performing our first Arctic equipment evaluation test:
Apart from my Prodigy I was also wearing Tiki 5mm socks and 2mm bodyboarding gloves. I suffered none of the “brain freeze” reported by my even more intrepid companion, who entered the water hoodless beside me:
Because I didn’t want to lose my contact lenses I did very little duck diving. On only one occasion did I experience the thrill of cold water flushing down my back. My fingers started to feel a bit chilly as I was bobbing about out the back after my initial paddle out, but once I got into the swing of things even they were toasty for the duration. Whilst I do wonder if Tiki could be persuaded to produce some thicker gloves with webs between the fingers, my biggest problem proved to be extracting myself from my soggy suit in the pouring rain that had set in by the time I arrived back in the car park as the light was fading. To give you an idea of the problem I faced here is Andrew Cotton explaining the virtues of the chest zip version of the Zepha, which has replaced the Prodigy in Tiki’s range of cold water winter wetsuits:
The United Kingdom’s House of Lords are an unlikely bunch to be bundled under the banner of “alarmist” or even “warmist”. Nevertheless their Select Committee on the Arctic has just published a report entitled “Responding to a Changing Arctic“, and in this video the chairman of that committee, Lord Teverson, briefly outlines their findings:
Note that he starts by saying that:
Absolutely the obvious thing first of all is that with the temperatures going up [in the Arctic] at twice the rate of the rest of the world the thing that everybody is seeing is reduction in sea ice which has reduced quite substantially over recent years, and of course a lot of the Arctic is land and we have the melting ice on Greenland particularly, which is causing sea level rises in the rest of the world.
In order to get that message across the committee has also produced the following infographic:
which shows how the temperature over land has been increasing whilst the sea ice extent in the Arctic has been declining. The committee have also made all the learned evidence they received whilst producing their report publicly available. Professor Andy Shepherd from the University of Leeds told the committee that:
The majority of sea ice changes witnessed in “the past 50 or 60 years” could be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on temperatures in the Arctic region.
and:
Suggested that the length of the solar melt season had increased by around five days per decade, causing additional melting and retreat of the ice.
How strange then, that David Rose made no mention of any of this when reporting Prof. Shepherd’s views in his “Myth of Arctic meltdown” article of August 31st 2014?
How strange also, that Christopher Booker maintained in his “The fiddling with temperature data is the biggest science scandal ever” article of February 8th 2015 that:
The ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.
Regular readers will recall that we recently sent The Telegraph a lesson or two about global surface temperature “adjustments”, both of which included “a video by a scientist who has studied such matters”. It seems nobody at The Telegraph, and particularly Christopher Booker, bothered to watch it or do the homework assignments. The stated view of Jess McAree, Head of Editorial Compliance at the Telegraph Media Group, is that:
Only the most egregious inaccuracy could be significantly misleading.
We therefore take great pleasure in welcoming Dr. Kevin Cowtan from the University of York, the “scientist” mentioned above, who has kindly allowed us to reprint an article of his originally published at Skeptical Science. Please read on below the fold, and don’t forget to do your homework!
There has been a vigorous discussion of weather station calibration adjustments in the media over the past few weeks. While these adjustments don’t have a big effect on the global temperature record, they are needed to obtain consistent local records from equipment which has changed over time. Despite this, the Telegraph has produced two highly misleading stories about the station adjustments, the second including the demonstrably false claim that they are responsible for the recent rapid warming of the Arctic.
In the following video I show why this claim is wrong. But more importantly, I demonstrate three tools to allow you to test claims like this for yourself.
The central error in the Telegraph story is the attribution of Arctic warming (and somehow sea ice loss) to weather station adjustments. This conclusion is based on a survey of two dozen weather stations. But you can of course demonstrate anything you want by cherry picking your data, in this case in the selection of stations. The solution to cherry picking is to look at all of the relevant data – in this case all of the station records in the Arctic and surrounding region. I downloaded both the raw and adjusted temperature records from NOAA, and took the difference to determine the adjustments which had been applied. Then I calculated the trend in the adjustment averaged over the stations in each grid cell on the globe, to determine whether the adjustments were increasing or decreasing the temperature trend. The results are shown for the last 50 and 100 years in the following two figures:
Trend in weather station adjustments over the period 1965-2014, averaged by grid cell. Warm colours show upwards adjustments over time, cold colour downwards. For cells with less than 50 years of data, the trend is over the available period.
Trend in weather station adjustments over the period 1915-2014, averaged by grid cell. Warm colours show upwards adjustments over time, cold colour downwards. For cells with less than 100 years of data, the trend is over the available period.
In the video I demonstrate three tools which are useful in understanding and evaluating temperature adjustments:
A GHCN (global historical climatology network) station report browser. GHCN provide graphical reports on the adjustments made to each station record, but you need to know the station ID to find them. I have created an interactive map to make this easier.
The majority of cells show no significant adjustment. The largest adjustments are in the high Arctic, but are downwards, i.e. they reduce the warming trend. This is the opposite of what is claimed in the Telegraph story. You can check these stations using the GHCN station browser.
The upward adjustments to the Iceland stations, referred to in the Telegraph, predate the late 20th century warming. They occur mostly in the 1960’s, so they only appear in the centennial map. Berkeley Earth show a rather different pattern of adjustments for these stations.
Iceland is a particularly difficult case, with a small network of stations on an island isolated from the larger continental networks. The location of Iceland with respect to the North Atlantic Drift, which carries warm water from the tropics towards the poles, may also contribute to the temperature series being mismatched with records from Greenland or Scotland. However given that the Iceland contribution is weighted according to land area in the global records, the impact of this uncertainty is minimal. Global warming is evaluated on the basis of the land-ocean temperature record; the impact of adjustments on recent warming is minimal, and on the whole record it is small compared to the total amount of warming. As Zeke Hausfather has noted, the land temperature adjustments in the early record are smaller than and in the opposite direction to the sea surface temperature adjustments.
Impact of the weather stations adjustments on the global land-ocean temperature record, calculated using the Skeptical Science temperature record calculator in ‘CRU’ mode.
Manual recalibration of the Iceland records may make an interesting citizen science project. Most of the stations show good agreement since 1970, however they diverge in the earlier record. The challenge is to work out the minimum number of adjustments required to bring them into agreement over the whole period. But the answer may not be unique, and noise and geographical differences may also cause problems. To facilitate this challenge, I’ve made annualized data available for the eight stations as a spreadsheet file.
In the video I demonstrate three tools which are useful in understanding and evaluating temperature adjustments:
A GHCN (global historical climatology network) station report browser. GHCN provide graphical reports on the adjustments made to each station record, but you need to know the station ID to find them. I have created an interactive map to make this easier.
The Berkeley Earth station browser. The Berkeley Earth station reports provide additional information to help you understand why particular adjustments have been made.
The Skeptical Science temperature record calculator. This allows you to construct your own version of the temperature record, using either adjusted or unadjusted data for both the land and sea surface temperatures.
Data for the temperature calculator may be obtained from the following sources:
The GHCN station data. For daily average temperature data, look for the ‘tavg’ files. The ‘qca’ files are adjusted temperatures, and the ‘qcu’ files are unadjusted temperatures. The files are stored in ‘.tar.gz’ archives, and may be extracted using most freely available unzip software.
Finally, here are some interesting papers discussing why adjustments are required.
Menne et al (2009) The U.S. historical climatology network monthly temperature data, version 2.
Bohm et al (2010) The early instrumental warm-bias: a solution for long central European temperature series 1760–2007.
Brunet et al (2010) The minimization of the screen bias from ancient Western Mediterranean air temperature records: an exploratory statistical analysis.
Ellis (1890) On the difference produced in the mean temperature derived from daily maximum and minimum readings, as depending on the time at which the thermometers are read
Finally, for the moment at least, and lapsing back into our by now familiar (and adversarial?) style:
I’ve just had a long phone conversation with John Wellington of the Mail on Sunday. He assures me he is fit and well and back in his hot seat there, but that the long standing bone that I’ve been eager to pick with the Mail Online about Victoria Woollaston’s January 21st article entitled “Is climate change really that dangerous? Predictions are ‘very greatly exaggerated’, claims study” is the responsibility of Tal Gottesman. Here’s a brief extract of the article, to give you a little taste:
The paper, ‘Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model’, was written by Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon, Professor of Geography at the University of Delaware David Legates, and statistician Dr Matt Briggs.
It has been peer reviewed and is published in the journal Science Bulletin.
Mathematical equations used for large climate model typically require supercomputers that perform calculations quickly – some make more than 80 million calculations an hour.
and here’s the accompanying “infographic”:
I’ve been trying to get in touch with Vicky and/or her editor for several weeks now, so this is a big step forward! After a series of phone calls and emails that elicited no response “Willie SoonGate” broke earlier this week, so….
which also elicited no response, so following John’s phone call:
Hello Tal,
John was kind enough to telephone me and pass on your email address.
Further to the correspondence copied below you will note that I have had a singular lack of success directing my enquiries on the above topic to the generic MailOnline editorial address.
At the risk of repeating myself repeating myself
How do you suggest we go about starting a conversation?
If you could please outline what the issue is, we will ensure your complaint is investigated immediately.
Yours sincerely
MailOnline
Us:
Dear Madam,
Your understanding is (at long last) correct!
My first complaint is that I have received no previous response, not even an acknowledgement, to my emails of January 26th, February 2nd and February 23rd 2015. Can I safely assume that conversation using this email address will be more timely from now on? Do you by any chance possess a telephone number?
Moving on to the article in question, I will prepare a more substantive reply as soon as I have finished addressing similar issues with the Sunday Telegraph and the BBC. In brief the paper by Monckton, Soon, Legates & Briggs described in the article in question is scientific nonsense. As a famous scientist called Albert Einstein allegedly once put it:
“Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler”
As such the article is scientifically inaccurate and/or misleading, and as I am sure you must be aware allegations have recently been made elsewhere about possible reasons for that. I have been denied any discussion about a reply or “correction” to the article for 5 weeks thus far, and counting. Did you hear back from the IPCC by the way? If so, what did they say and where did you “print” it?
Two days later a UK broadsheet did indeed publish an article I feel sure Rep. Rohrabacher would approve of. Later the same morning BBC Radio 4 News reported on that article with apparent approval. For the backstory on all this please follow the first link below. Please read on for the text of my maximum 1500 character written complaint to the Beeb!
Us:
I have already spoken to Rachel about this via telephone, but she couldn’t give me a reference number or include a URL along with my complaint, so for completeness:
BBC Radio 4 News at 7 AM on Sunday February 22nd 2015 discussed the morning newspapers. The Observer’s story about Ed Miliband’s appointment of John Prescott as his “climate change advisor” was mentioned. This was followed by a reference to Christopher Booker’s article in The Telegraph. For chapter & verse please see my article at:
and then follow all the links. In brief, as assorted readers over there put it:
“Why do people like Christopher Booker keep getting away with this kind of bullshit? There must be some kind of fine for lying and misleading so blatantly.”
“Hard to believe the BBC can give any credence to such nonsense. I was really shocked and phoned BBC to complain”
or as I summarised my conversation with Rachel:
“The BBC’s apparent belief that Mr. Booker’s article provides some sort of “scientific balance” to Ed Miliband’s remarks about the need for UK plc to up its “climate change” game is so utterly ludicrous that words totally fail me.”
By way of explanation for my disbelief, please see this elementary explanation of the underlying science that I sent to Mr. Booker and his editors 2 weeks previously:
Thanks for contacting the BBC. This is an automated email acknowledging that we’ve received the attached complaint sent in this name. We’ve attached the case reference and text of the complaint for your records (see below).
We’ll normally include the full text of your complaint to BBC staff in the overnight reports we compile for them about the complaints and other reaction we’ve received today (with all your personal details removed). This ensures it will reach the right people quickly tomorrow morning. We’ll then aim to reply to you within 10 working days, or around 2 weeks, but it also depends on the nature of your complaint and whether the relevant people can respond to us in time.
We aim to use your licence fee as efficiently as we can, so if you complained about the same issues as others we will send our response to you and everyone. For the same reason we may not investigate or reply in great detail if a complaint doesn’t suggest a potential breach of BBC standards, or a significant issue of general importance. You can read about our full complaints procedures and how we consider issues which people raise with us at www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/handle-complaint/.
This acknowledgment is automatically generated from an unmonitored address so please don’t reply. If you think you’ve received this in error please contact us using our webform at www.bbc.co.uk/complaints, quoting your case reference number.
followed on February 26th by:
Dear Mr Hunt
Thank you for contacting us regarding Radio 4’s “News and Papers” as broadcast on 22 February.
We understand you feel that the article by Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph that was referred to is not a counter balance to Ed Miliband’s views on climate change as you believe it to be scientific nonsense.
We aim to provide the information which will enable listeners to make up their own minds; to show the political and scientific reality and provide the forum for debate. There is broad scientific agreement on the issue of climate change and we reflect this accordingly; however, we do aim to ensure that we also offer time to the dissenting voices.
We value your feedback about this issue. All complaints are sent to senior management and programme makers every morning and we included your points in this overnight report. These reports are among the most widely read sources of feedback in the BBC and ensure your complaint is seen by the right people quickly. This helps inform their decisions about current and future reporting.
Christopher Booker has raised the stakes in the “ClimateGate 2.0” edition of ClimateBall™ in his article in this morning’s edition of the Sunday Telegraph:
It was only the adjusted surface records which showed 2014 to have been “the hottest year on record”. The other two official records, based on satellite measurements, which only go back to 1979, show nothing of the kind.
The international fallout from my two articles has been huge. The second, headed “The fiddling of temperature data has been the biggest science scandal ever”, scored a record 30,000 comments on The Telegraph website. But what is particularly telling has been the silence of GHCN and the compilers of the other surface records in response to requests from Homewood and others for a proper explanation of how and why they had needed to make so many adjustments to the original data.
What is now needed is a meticulous analysis of all the data, to establish just how far these adjustments have distorted the picture the world has been given. Although I cannot yet reveal any details, I gather that a responsible foundation is gathering an expert team to do just that. If the results confirm what has already been unearthed by Homewood and other analysts, from the US to New Zealand, this may indeed turn out to have been the greatest scandal in the history of science.
He is apparently being aided and abetted in his latest outlandish bid by BBC Radio 4 News, who reported on his article as follows in their 07:07:25 review of the Sunday newspapers this morning:
Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph demands a meticulous analysis of the data used to justify the claim that last year was the warmest on record, something he suggests could turn out to be one of the greatest scandals in science. He says a growing number of experts around the world have found that the raw data originally gathered by weather stations was comprehensively adjusted to justify the claim.
This is of course all spectacularly shoddy science (SSS for short) by Homewood, Booker et. al. , as we informed Ian Marsden at the Telegraph Group after Booker’s previous climate bluff was trumped by a long list of climate scientists, who have in fact been anything but “particularly silent” this time around. By way of example, since Ian Marsden evidently hasn’t watched this video yet, here once again is a video by a scientist who has studied such matters, which explains the truth:
Next I called the Beeb’s complaints number (03700 100 222 – 24 hours, charged as 01/02 geographic numbers) and told Rachel that I wished to register a complaint. I manfully resisted the temptation to emit any expletives, and informed her that the BBC’s apparent belief that Mr. Booker’s article provides some sort of “scientific balance” to Ed Milibands remarks about the need for UK plc to up its “climate change” game is so utterly ludicrous that words had totally failed me.
Rachel wondered if I was talking about this morning’s edition of “Broadcasting House“. I assured her I was not, but it sounds as though I now ought to go away and listen to that from cover to cover!
It’s now the morning of Monday February 23rd 2013. I haven’t received the email confirmation from the BBC that Rachel promised me yet, so…..
I’ve also just spoken to Ian Marsden of the Telegraph Group once again. He assures me that my complaint about a previous article by Christopher Booker is being dealt with, and suggests that I file another one to ensure that I have “a proper audit trail” in this instance as well.
An IPSO complaints officer suggests following up our previous complaint via said complaints form, so….
As part of the build up to the 2015 Great White Con Arctic Basin Big Wave (Fantasy?) Surfing Contest (GWCABBWFSC for short) we’ve been researching previous Arctic Basin water sports events. You can only imagine our shock and delight when we discovered deep in the depths of the NSIDC’s “Top Secret” archives some never before seen video footage of the USS Skate surfacing “near the North Pole” in the summer of 1958. Even more astonishing than that was the moving pictures of Norbert Untersteiner being towed at high speed behind a powered water craft in the very same lead that SSN-578 had used to reach fresh air and sunshine. Firstly feast your eyes on this:
Now take a look at how 21st century big wave surfers tow into the waves created by calving glaciers:
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