A powerful story about global warming in Alaska that has set Twitter aflame

Larry Kummer, Editor

11 years ago

Summary: Let’s review the story that today set Twitter afire with panic about global warming. It’s a story of science, skillful writing, and a very gullible America. The 21st century might prove unpleasant for America unless we tighten our game.

Contents

NASA’s photo of the Day
Plaiting the facts
One step more, into agitprop
The rest of the story about warming Alaska
For More Information

(1) NASA’s photo of the Day

Let’s review the story that today set Twitter afire with panic about global warming. But first let’s rewind the tape to see the source of the story.

NASA Image of the Day Gallery: “Rare Clear View of Alaska“, 19 June 2013 — Photo above.

On most days, relentless rivers of clouds wash over Alaska, obscuring most of the state’s 6,640 miles (10,690 kilometers) of coastline and 586,000 square miles (1,518,000 square kilometers) of land. The south coast of Alaska even has the dubious distinction of being the cloudiest region of the United States, with some locations averaging more than 340 cloudy days per year.

That was certainly not the case on June 17, 2013, the date that the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this rare, nearly cloud-free view of the state. The absence of clouds exposed a striking tapestry of water, ice, land, forests, and even wildfires.

… The same ridge of high pressure that cleared Alaska’s skies also brought stifling temperatures to many areas accustomed to chilly June days. Talkeetna, a town about 100 miles north of Anchorage, saw temperatures reach 96°F (36°C) on June 17. Other towns in southern Alaska set all-time record highs, including Cordova, Valez, and Seward. The high temperatures also helped fuel wildfires and hastened the breakup of sea ice in the Chukchi Sea.

(2) Plaiting the facts

Nothing remarkable in this story. But in the hands of skilled alarmists it becomes: “A Clear View of Alaska — and Maybe Our Future“, Phil Plait, Slate, 20 June 2013. Plait is an astronomer who worked for 10 years on Hubble Space Telescope data, and now writes about science — with a side line in climate alarmism (e.g., calling people “deniers” who cite science research he doesn’t like). Plait connects the NASA story with some current research, ignores contrary research, and produces a standard example of climate propaganda.

The reason the state is cloudless is because of a huge high-pressure system squatting over the state. This has also brought record high temperatures to much of the state. This reminds me of the same sort of system that’s been plaguing Greenland and which caused record ice melting last year.

A new study just came out possibly linking that Greenland system to global warming. It’s not a direct link; that is, it’s not that things are warmer now so we got more melting. What may be happening is that the changing climate is affecting the pattern of the jet stream, causing warmer high-pressure systems to sit and stay in one place in what’s called a blocking pattern.

In other words, weather patterns are changing because the climate is changing. The Arctic climate system in particular may be undergoing a rapid evolution due to changing conditions there; loss of sea ice (which exposes darker water, increasing the amount of heat absorbed from sunlight), the wobbling of the jet stream, and more subtle variations are playing havoc with the normal weather.

The melt in Greenland and the high temperatures in Alaska may be more signs — like we needed more — of the reality of climate change. Even scarier is the fact that the climate models used before didn’t predict this sort of thing. The climate is very complex, and it’s hard to model it accurately. This is well-known and is why it’s so hard to make long-term predictions.

A few points:

When other people question the infalibility of climate models, they become “deniers”.
Also note the daft “the reality of climate change”. The climate has always been changing. Who denies that? Scientists study how and why our climate is changing.
The very article he cites disagrees with Phait: “The analysis shows that ocean temperatures and Arctic sea-ice cover were relatively unimportant factors in causing the extra Greenland melt.”
Note how he describes the new study. We’ll come back to that.

(3) One step more, into agitprop

Next a reporter picks up the story and exaggerates it into agitprop: “Why NASA’s latest photo of Alaska is freaking people out“, Jake Ellison (staff), blog at SeattlePi (website of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer), 21 June 2013. It went vital; Mr. Ellison and his Editor are probably exchanging high-fives!

At first glance, it’s just a great photo of nearly the entire state of Alaska on an exceptionally clear day. What could be the problem? Well, turns out that photo shows an anomaly that some are fretting signifies yet another big shift in global climate – a shift toward the hot. NASA writes (without saying “global warming”):

He then quotes from the NASA story, which didn’t mention global warming. Probably because the writer — knowing more than Ellison and Plait — did not see a connection to global warming. NASA has not been shy about writing about global warming when they believe it is relevant.

Ellison then quotes various stray bits of data. After all, there is always unusual weather somewhere. He cites no evidence that these patterns are unusual. He then shifts to discuss a new paper in the International Journal of Climatology discussing weather in Greenland. Neither Ellison or the authors make any connection to Alaska’s weather. Being a professional journalist, Ellison does report the key conclusion — but buries the lede (i.e., puts the sensational part at the opening, the key part at the end). Professor Hanna, one of the co-authors, concludes:

“Taken together, our present results strongly suggest that the main forcing of the extreme GrIS surface melt in July 2012 was atmospheric, linked with changes in the summer North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Greenland Blocking Index (GBI, a high pressure system centred over Greenland) and polar jet stream which favoured southerly warm air advection along the western coast.

“The next 5-10 years will reveal whether or not 2012 was a rare event resulting from the natural variability of the NAO or part of an emerging pattern of new extreme high melt years. Because such atmospheric, and resulting GrIS surface climate, changes are not well projected by the current generation of global climate models, it is currently very hard to predict future changes in Greenland climate. Yet it is crucial to understand such changes much better if we are to have any hope of reliably predicting future changes in GrIS mass balance, which is likely to be a dominant contributor to global sea-level change over the next 100-1000 years.”

Other than Plait — who has no background in climate science — Ellison mentions nobody “freaked out” by the photo. Professor Edward Hanna is not “freaking out”. I suggest that you and I not allow Ellison’s agitprop to freak us out.

Also note that neither Plait nor Ellison mention the IPCC’s conclusions, even as a reference point. In what might be desperation at their failure to gain sufficient public support to implement their policy agenda, climate alarmists have moved beyond the IPCC into manufacturing their own climate stories — as we see today.

(4) The rest of the story about warming Alaska

Plait and Ellison’s articles are especially irresponsible considering the rest of the story.

There is no need for journalists to rely on propagandists like Plait for information about climate change. In addition to the IPCC there are a host of research facilities studying every aspect of our changing world. Such as the Alaska Climate Research Center, whose work I posted in May 2009 and again this January.

Here is their Temperature Changes in Alaska page (red emphasis added).

The topic of climate change has attracted widespread attention in recent years and is an issue that numerous scientists study on various time and space scales. One thing for sure is that the earth’s climate has and will continue to change as a result of various natural and anthropogenic forcing mechanisms.

This page features the trends in mean annual and seasonal temperatures for Alaska’s first-order observing stations since 1949, the time period for which the most reliable meteorological data are available. The temperature change varies from one climatic zone to another as well as for different seasons. If a linear trend is taken through mean annual temperatures, the average change over the last 6 decades is 3.0°F.

… The figure shows the temperature departure from the long-term mean (1949-2009) for all stations. It can be seen that there are large variations from year to year and the 5-year moving average demonstrates large increase in 1976. The period 1949 to 1975 was substantially colder than the period from 1977 to 2009, however since 1977 little additional warming has occurred in Alaska with the exception of Barrow and a few other locations. The stepwise shift appearing in the temperature data in 1976 corresponds to a phase shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from a negative phase to a positive phase.

Being scientists, they published their research in a peer-reviewed journal: “The First Decade of the New Century: A Cooling Trend for Most of Alaska“, G. Wendler, L. Chen and B. Moore, Open Atmospheric Science Journal, 2012 — Abstract (red emphasis added):

During the first decade of the 21st century most of Alaska experienced a cooling shift, modifying the long-term warming trend, which has been about twice the global change up to this time. All of Alaska cooled with the exception of Northern Regions. This trend was caused by a change in sign of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), which became dominantly negative, weakening the Aleutian Low. This weakening results in less relatively warm air being advected from the Northern Pacific.

This transport is especially important in winter when the solar radiation is weak. It is during this period that the strongest cooling was observed. In addition, the cooling was especially pronounced in Western Alaska, closest to the area of the center of the Aleutian Low. The changes seen in the reanalyzed data were confirmed from surface observations, both in the decrease of the North-South atmospheric pressure gradient, as well as the decrease in the mean wind speeds for stations located in the Bering Sea area.

Update

No post about the work of climate scientists goes by without some anti-scientist zealot denouncing it. See the Comments for today’s example.

America has a long tradition of anti-rationalism. Perhaps we can no longer tolerate this as a peccadillo.