Sea Ice 3-D

Many of us have seen graphs of the dramatic decline of Arctic sea ice over the last 30+ years (since we’ve been monitoring it via satellites), a decline which is unmatched for at least a century and almost certainly for several thousand years. The graph of sea ice extent anomaly (monthly average data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center) shows the change plainly:

Volcanic CO2

From time to time we hear the claim that volcanoes inject more CO2 into the atmosphere than human activity. Its typical form is exemplified by a comment at RealClimate which was (quite appropriately) consigned to the “Borehole.”

When the volcano, Mt Pinatubo, erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it spewed out more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the entire human race had emitted in its entire YEARS on earth.

This claim is almost as ubiquitous as it is ridiculous, and seems to be championed by Australian geologist Ian Plimer, author of the execrable book “Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science.” Science seems to be missing from all of Plimer’s musings on global warming.

Open Thread

For discussion of topics not related to other posts.

And here’s an interesting post I found.

Chaos

Math without physics, is not physics.

There’s yet another mathturbation post at WUWT. This one, by Andy Edmonds, argues that because weather is chaotic (in the mathematical sense), it’s impossible to model climate. In fact that’s the whole argument — a lot of words, but it boils down to nothing more.

Regime Change

Last week, a headline in the Bangor Daily News read: “Heat grips much of US, so get used to it.” It was for a story from AP about the unusual early-June heat wave which afflicted much of the U.S., and includes the report that “A new study from Stanford University says global climate change will lead permanently to unusually hot summers in the coming years.”

Must-Watch Video

Courtesy plomedia, highlighted by Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

Scary.

Frankly, Not

We recently pointed to another example of mathturbation brought to you by Anthony Watts, courtesy of Pat Frank (author of this travesty in E&E). A reader asked, “could someone post a paragraph or two about the specific flaws in the WUWT presentation.”

OK.

Circle Jerk

You’ve heard of mathturbation. It has now been taken to the extreme.

Who else but WUWT to make it a group effort? Ick.

Methane Update

As we have noted previously, the second most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas (after carbon dioxide, or CO₂), is methane (CH₄), and although its concentration (only about 1.8 ppm) is far less than that of CO₂ (at 390 ppm), it’s a stronger greenhouse gas on a per-molecule basis, and it ends up transformed into CO₂ by atmospheric chemistry processes anyway. Also, more than half the atmospheric CH₄ load is due to changes wrought by mankind. Atmospheric methane concentration had stabilized from about 1999 to 2007, but recently began rising again, as reported in Rigby et al (2008).

Markov 2

In the last post we showed how Harold Brooks has applied a 1st-order Markov Chain model to the phenomenon of a significant tornado day (“STD”), in particular to explain the frequency of occurrence of long runs of consecutive STDs. An STD is defined as any day with at least one (possibly many more) tornados of strength F2 or greater (on the Fujita scale).