Climate Data Information

The Georgia Institute of Technology has recently released details of a study of the relationship between Arctic Sea Ice and Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover. The press release summarises it as “The researchers analyzed observational data collected between 1979 and 2010 and found that a decrease in autumn Arctic sea ice of 1 million square kilometers -- the size of the surface area of Egypt -- corresponded to significantly above-normal winter snow cover in large parts of the northern United States, northwestern and central Europe, and northern and central China.” This goes some way to explaining the fact that whereas Arctic Sea Ice has been tending to decrease (at 53,000 km2/year) snow coverage has declined more slowly (at 22,000 km2/year). The importance of snow and ice is their role in the albedo feed-back mechanism. Snow reflects almost all the incoming energy, water and land (at least the northern boreal forests where most snow falls) reflect about 10%. So, other things being equ

The realclimate.org blog has a thread posted by Barry Bickmore related to an article which appeared in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). The original article was written by a group of eminent scientists with little specific expertise in the science of climate change. To summarise in over-simplistic terms they said that they could accept Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) but not Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). The WSJ published a response by a group of equally eminent climate scientists who supported CAGW. The posting of Barry Bickmore looks at some of the claims in more detail than would be possible in a newspaper column. One point the first group of scientists had made was that climate models had not captured the recent stasis in temperatures. Bickmore’s response was that “individual models actually predict that the temperature will go up and down for a few years at a time, but the long-term slope (30 years or more) will be about what those straight lines say.” Be