Arctic warming: a 1947 hysteria

A hotel at Spitsbergen

Steve Goddard found a pretty interesting article from the Saturday May 31st, 1947 edition of the West Australian published in Perth,

ARCTIC phenomenon: Warming Of Climate Causes Concern

It's interesting to observe these things especially this summer when the NH sea ice anomaly stands at –2.2 million squared kilometers or so which means a significant deficit but the sea ice is so far well above the late Summer 2007 minimum.




Incidentally, there's been an excess of the ice in the Antarctica throughout this year although it's smaller than the Arctic deficit. The disagreement between the two hemispheres indicates that these two cold regions haven't agreed to join a global climate treaty yet. ;-) They just don't respect any global climate change; climate change is always primarily local. See more charts and pictures at The Cryosphere Today.

Recall that I actually believe that it's likely that there will be an ice-free Arctic summer before 2100 and I don't think that there's any problem with it.

It's interesting to put the worries about the Arctic temperature change in some perspective. Let me first repost the full 1948 newspaper article:

ARCTIC PHENOMENON
Warming Of Climate Causes Concern

LOS ANGELES, May 30. – The possibility of a prodigious rise in the surface of the ocean with resultant widespread inundation, arising from an Arctic climatic phenomenon was discussed yesterday by Dr. Hans Ahlmann, a noted Swedish geophysicist at the University of California Geophysical Institute.

A mysterious warming of the climate was slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, Dr. Ahlmann said, and, if the Antarctic ice regions and the major Greenland ice cap should reduce at the same rate as the present melting in the Arctic, oceanic surfaces would rise to catastrophic proportions and people living in the lowlands along their shores would be inundated.

He said that temperatures in the Arctic had increased 10deg. Fahrenheit since 1900—an "enormous" rise from a scientific standpoint. The waters in the Spitsbergen area in the same period had risen three to five degrees in temperature and one to one and a half millimeters yearly in level.

"The Arctic change is so serious that I hope an international agency can speedily be formed to study the conditions on a global basis," he added. He pointed out that whereas in 1910 the navigable season along western Spitsbergen lasted three months it now lasted eight months.

As we know, there's been some re-cooling after the 1940s ended. Dr Ahlmann's 1947 dreams about an international organization obsessed with the climate panic became a reality. We're not inundated by the oceans (the level changed by 10 cm or so since 1947 and no human could really detect the change) but we surely are inundated by the IPCCs, UNFCCCs, Czech Globes, GISSes, CRUs at UEA, and similar stinky and despicable institutionalized garbage.

The article talks about a 47-year period 1900-1947 when the increase of the Arctic temperature was quantified as 5.5 °C. If you use the Lumo formula for the modern carbon dioxide concentrations\[

c = 280 + 22.3 \exp\left(\frac{{\rm year}-1920}{57}\right)

\] you will see that the concentrations in 1900-1947 went from 296 to 316 ppm; the multiplicative increase is 1.068 times which is 0.095 doublings of the concentration (calculate the base-two logarithm).

On the other hand, in a similar 47-year interval 1965-2012, the concentrations went up from 329 to 392. The ratio is 1.19 which corresponds to 0.25 doublings (calculate the logarithm). That's 2.65 times larger than 0.095 we got before.

So if you attributed the 5.5 °C of the Arctic warming between 1900 and 1947 to the greenhouse effect caused by the carbon dioxide, you would predict that\[

T(2012)-T(1965)\approx 2.65\times 5.5\,{}^\circ {\rm C} \approx 14.5\,{}^\circ{\rm C},

\] The Arctic has obviously not warmed by more than fourteen Celsius degrees since the mid 1960s. It hasn't even warmed by a third of it. The predictions one would extract from the attribution of the climate change to the carbon dioxide are ludicrously wrong.

Well, more modern graphs actually suggest that the warming since the minimum in the late 1960s was less than 1.2 °C, more than an order-of-magnitude lower than the prediction. The same graph via Bob Tisdale makes it likely that the Arctic warming between 1900 and 1947 was around 1 °C, too.

This is just an example. Worriers in 1947 should have just accepted the apparent rise of the average Arctic temperature by 5.5 °C in 47 years as a normal, natural process. That's what Nature likes to do, especially in the polar climate. To say the least, today, in 2012, we know very well that most of the 5.5 °C warming reported in 1900-1947 had nothing to do with the rise of the gas we call life. And if you believe the "refreshed reconstruction" we are using these days, 80 percent of the Arctic warming reported in the 1947 newspapers hadn't taken place at all.

Has our ability to reconstruct the temperature improved since 1947? We must still use the same raw data that the climatologists could have already used back in 1947. Can we apply more accurate corrections? Do we really know that the corrections are making the results more accurate and not less accurate? Do we believe that most of the a posteriori adjustments are motivated by impartial improvements in the methodology rather than someone's desire to distort the data in a particular direction?

There are lots of questions. But some of them have rather clear answers, too. Theories attributing sensational temperature changes to the increase of the carbon dioxide concentration the atmosphere don't work. Their failure actually looks hysterical. And in some cases, the very measurements of the temperature change turn out to be bogus.

And that's the memo.