Early Christmas Gift From The Warmista!!! Blast From The Past!!! WAIS Again!!!

This really isn’t my bailiwick, this is for the people who like to torture numbers and pretend there is some semblance of reality in their final product.  For me, I love numbers.  But, in the form less tortured.  My thoughts from a long past post….

I’m not saying statistics are bad, they’re not.  Further, good honest statistics are required for advancement of civilization in general, and in the specific case of climate science, we are in dire need.  I gave up on being a statistician of any sorts long ago.  I did as soon as I realized, in the wrong hands, my beautiful numbers weren’t simply a seductive siren on a pole, but could manipulated as easily as a pimp manipulates a street walker in search of her next fix.  Its best to keep the numbers as straightforward as possible.  The less statistical acrobatics needed, the less times you’ll see her on a pole.  1+1 still equals 2, its just that she doesn’t seem to in the same way she used to.

Long time climate warriors will recall the O’Donnell/Steig row.  It was about the temperature in the Antarctic.  There was particular disagreement about the WAIS.  No, not the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.  Here’s a starter kit for those who need their memory jogged.

O’Donnell et al 2010 Refutes Steig et al 2009

O’Donnell et al entirely destroyed Steig et al.  Look at the graphics from both.

The “Ours” is from O’Donnell et al.  See the darkening in the graphic from Steig?  Notice how that isn’t there in O’Donnell?  Well, the nutters are trying to put it back.

Just off the presses!

Byrd Station Temperature Data Shows Warming On West Antarctic Ice Sheet

That’s from a hyperbole filled article quoting a new paper published in Nature Geoscience. 

Central West Antarctica among the most rapidly warming regions on Earth

From all of this we get the hyperbole that we’re all going to drown because of the melting which is(?) occurring.

“Even without generating significant mass loss directly, surface melting on the WAIS could contribute to sea level indirectly, by weakening the West Antarctic ice shelves that restrain the region’s natural ice flow into the ocean.” said David Bromwich, professor of geography at Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

Andrew Monaghan, study co-author and scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), said that these findings place West Antarctica among the fastest-warming regions on Earth. “We’ve already seen enhanced surface melting contribute to the breakup of the Antarctic’s Larsen B Ice Shelf, where glaciers at the edge discharged massive sections of ice into the ocean that contributed to sea level rise. The stakes would be much higher if a similar event occurred to an ice shelf restraining one of the enormous WAIS glaciers.”

Glaciers moving, and glacial calving is not melt.  Dolts.  They continue with their idiocy….

Researchers consider the WAIS especially sensitive to climate change since the base of the ice sheet rests below sea level, it is vulnerable to direct contact with warm ocean water. Its melting currently contributes 0.3 mm to sea level rise each year—second to Greenland, whose contribution to sea level rise has been estimated as high as 0.7 mm per year.

Now, all of this hysteria comes from extrapolated data from one research station.  One.  Well, sort of.  Here’s the new map of the Antarctic and it’s temp anomaly.

The infamous Byrd research station.

At this point, knowledgeable people should just point and laugh at these lunatics.  But, I’ll go into just a little bit more detail.  First of all, one?  One location for temp readings and from that we get 0.3mm/yr rise in the sea level?  BS.  That’s beyond stupid. 

What else can we point out about this lunacy?  Oh, yeh, the Byrd research station data isn’t really from just one place.  Nor, is it from one thermometer.  The station has been moved, closed, and reestablished several times throughout it’s history.  From the Wiki page…

It was commissioned on January 1, 1957. The original station (“Old Byrd”) lasted about four years before it began to collapse under the snow. Construction of a second underground station in a nearby location began in 1960, and it was used until 1972. The station was then converted into a summer-only field camp until it was abandoned in 2004-05.^[1]

That’s fascinating.  They’re using different thermometers, (there are several types which have their own individual issues, each one)  from different locations, with several breaks in time and conflating them into one continuous temp record.  Does anyone believe this can be done to any accuracy?  Going back to the O’Donnell row.  Let’s have a look at the raw temp record from Byrd, and a couple of the locations.  You can find this here and several other places. 

To quote Ryan O’Donnell,

Pay close attention to the post-2000 timeframe.  Notice how the winter months are absent?  Now what do we suppose might happen if we fit a trend line to this data?  One might go so far as to say that the conclusion is foregone.

So . . . would Eric Steig really do this?

Trend check on the above plot:  0.38 Deg C / decade.

……..However, we’ve yet to address the fact that the pre-1980 data comes from an entirely different sensor than the post-1980 data.

At any rate, read Steig’s Trick to for more of the same destruction of the temp record from Byrd.

Lastly, there’s one other thing to note.  Look back up at the raw temp record graphic.  As noted, these are summer readings at the end of the record.  How much melting actually occurs at temps colder than -10 deg C ??  Imbeciles, the lot of them. 

The temps recorded at the Byrd stations has contributed 0.0mm/yr melt increase of the mean sea level.

This should be fun for a bunch of skeptics who haven’t had much to do lately.  Enjoy guys and gals. 

For those not barred from discussing things on HuffPo, you can torture alarmists here.