Global Warming News That Won’t Be Reported

Two global warming stories that are worth noting. The first comes from Science Daily:

A Duke University-led analysis of available records shows that while the North Atlantic Ocean’s surface waters warmed in the 50 years between 1950 and 2000, the change was not uniform. In fact, the subpolar regions cooled at the same time that subtropical and tropical waters warmed…. “We suggest that the large-scale, decadal changes…associated with the NAO are primarily responsible for the ocean heat content changes in the North Atlantic over the past 50 years,” the authors concluded. However, the researchers also noted that this study should not be viewed in isolation. Given reported heat content gains in other oceans basins, and rising air temperatures, the authors surmised that other parts of the world’s ocean systems may have taken up the excess heat produced by global warming. “But in the North Atlantic, any anthropogenic (human-caused) warming would presently be masked by such strong natural variability,” they wrote.

So other oceans might be warming solely due to global warming–but not the oceans they studied! It’s a sign of the times that scientists would even feel compelled to stipulate as much. Who cares what their sense is of the things they haven’t studied? Obviously, their colleagues. As their findings are so damning–that any warming in the North Atlantic can’t reasonably be tied to global warming–without such a nod to their alarmist peers, they’d surely be locked out of the faculty lounge for good. Also, I think this chart is extremely interesting. It’s tiny, but you can find the larger, original copy here. A few weeks ago, the Scrapbook reported on the remarkable recovery of sea ice in the Arctic after this summer’s “record” thaw. (I put record in quotation marks only because (a) I’m skeptical of records that are only reliable to a few decades back and (b) obviously there have been more drastic thaws if one looks at a longer time line.) Well, it now looks as though there is more sea ice floating on the world’s oceans than there should be…or at least more than we have observed, on average, over the last 30 years. If I’m reading the chart right–and I’m no climatologist, but it looks pretty straightforward–there is some 1 million square miles of excess sea ice floating around out there. So when do we get that big New York Times story on how there’s too much sea ice?

global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg


The red line at the bottom shows the global sea ice anomoly. As you can see, there is currently a positive anomoly.

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