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West Antarctica Warming Faster Than Thought
New submitter dgrobinson writes "NY Times reports that West Antarctica has warmed more over the last half century than was first thought. A paper released Sunday by the journal Nature Geoscience (abstract) found that the temperature at a research station in the middle of West Antarctica has warmed by 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958. That is roughly twice as much as scientists previously thought and three times the overall rate of global warming, making central West Antarctica one of the fastest-warming regions on earth."
Single weather station indicates climate too - local climate.
The difference is not spatial, it is temporal. Weather is short duration. Climate is average over long period of time.
Single weather station measures local climate over decades. It also measures local weather.
Is 4.4 much? Or is it not so much? ... disgusting.
Scientific articles that suddenly use Fahrenheit are
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You cannot tell with a single coin flip whether the coin is fair (50% probability of heads) or not. You cannot predict any particular flip of the coin. But if you flip a coin 1000 times and it comes up heads 659 times, you can say with a high degree of confidence that the coin is not fair. You still cannot predict any particular flip, but we can predict that we would see about 66 heads if we flipped the coin 100 times. If tomorrow we flip the coin 1000 times and it comes up head 831 times you have a high degree of confidence that the distribution of heads and tails changed since yesterday.
Weather is like a single coin flip. You cannot tell in advance easily whether it will rain or not or exactly what temperature it will be. But we can make statements about the average temperature in January or the average number of rainy days in April. If we see those values change over time, as we have all over the Earth, you can say that the climate is changing. With enough measurements over a long enough period of time, you can see the climate change at only one weather station. If we also see the same thing happen at thousands of other weather stations over decades, and we observe the ice sheets melting and the humidity increasing, then that's clear evidence of the climate changing.
That's the difference between weather and climate. Weather determines what you wear on a particular day. Climate determines what clothes you have in your closet.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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Amazing. I have now seen the AGW skeptic equivalent of "there are no fossils of fish turning into humans."
Most data has gaps of some kind. That's why you use statistical analysis and correction. Once again the need to deny AGW means having to deny methodologies used in vast and diverse areas of science.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You can't recalibrate a sensor and apply the correction after the fact as you don't know why the sensor lost calibration...
Even more important, you don't know when it happened, or if it all happened in one change or in several small changes. Unless you know that, any corrections you make are going to be honest guesses at best.
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I don't think it is that bad (outright fraud). It is just bias run rampant along with financial incentive to underestimate uncertainty combined with widespread failure of science education in statistics.
Isn't the entire coastline of Antarctica north?
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
no one with half a brain cell cares whether or not the cause of warming over time is due to burning of fossil fuels or some yet undiscovered natural process...the only important question is whether or not there is anything we as a people could conceivably do to mitigate the environmental changes
Fortunately those of us with more than half a brain cell realize that the two are very closely linked. If the current rise in temperature is driven by natural cycles then stopping the burning of fossil fuel will have little, if any impact. So how do you know what to do to mitigate the impact if we are not certain what is causing it? Reducing fossil fuel use is probably a good idea but when I talk to scientists active in the field of climate research they themselves say that the jury is still out on how much is human driven vs. natural but reducing fossil fuel consumption is probably a good idea while we figure it out.
so in summary shut the fuck up and deal with consensus reality for once
What an enlightened attitude. I suppose a few thousand years ago you would have been arguing that the Earth is flat because that was the consensus? I'm a scientist so actual reality, rather than a group consensus of reality, is what I'm interested in. If you want to convince be I am wrong provide evidence and reasoned argument. Swearing about a consensus will help be form an opinion about you but will do little to persuade me that I'm wrong especially when I've spoken with colleagues in climate research and they say the same: it is not yet clear how much of the recent climate change is due to humans.
The authors of TFA probably live in North America. This would explain the comment that the warming was "twice as much as previously thought".
Why is this marked insightful???? It is in essence accusing without grounds PhD scientists who spend their lives studying these things with basing the entire thesis of a paper on grade school math errors. The author isn't supplying any quotations from the article supporting his assertion, other than a single number. It seems to me that the writer of this article is a peddler of misinformation. In the relatively recent past, he would be opening himself a libel suit. In the more distant past, the author would possibly in need of practicing his pistol aim and would need to find a second for his duelling appointment.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
So, when I still worked on protein structures, each structure I ever calculated was a fabrication, since my raw spectra were averaged, zero-padded, treated with a window function, fourier transformed, phase corrected and baseline corrected, therefor, by your logic, not data, but mere fabrication. I let the publishers know that, guess I have to retract some papers and hand back my PhD then.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
You can't recalibrate a sensor and apply the correction after the fact as you don't know why the sensor lost calibration
Sure you can, you just need to know how far out it is and for how long it has been wrong, simple instruments usually suffer from simple systematic errors, a thermometer does not normally output totally random data. Another common method (that can handle random as well as systematic errors is using weighted records of nearby stations to fill in or adjust known bad/missing data. They have probably used a sophisticated version of the second technique here since that is how both NASA and the MET office treat their global data sets.
This sounds like really bad science, but it may just be really bad reporting.
It's neither, it's your ignorance of common statistical methods combined with the paranoia displayed in your sig..
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.