Beam Me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 02/28/2009 4:59:55 PM PST by neverdem
Few phenomena generate as much heat as disputes about current orthodoxies concerning global warming. This column recently reported and commented on some developments pertinent to the debate about whether global warming is occurring and what can and should be done. That column, which expressed skepticism about some emphatic proclamations by the alarmed, took a stroll down memory lane, through the debris of 1970s predictions about the near certainty of calamitous...
--snip--
So the column accurately reported what the center had reported. But on Feb. 15, the Sunday the column appeared, the center, then receiving many e-mail inquiries, issued a statement saying "we do not know where George Will is getting his information." The answer was: From the center, via Daily Tech. Consult the center's Web site where, on Jan. 12, the center posted the confirmation of the data(pdf link) that this column subsequently reported accurately.
The scientists at the Illinois center offer their statistics with responsible caveats germane to margins of error in measurements and precise seasonal comparisons of year-on-year estimates of global sea ice. Nowadays, however, scientists often find themselves enveloped in furies triggered by any expression of skepticism about the global warming consensus (which will prevail until a diametrically different consensus comes along; see the 1970s) in the media-environmental complex. Concerning which:
On Feb. 18 the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that from early January until the middle of this month, a defective performance by satellite monitors that measure sea ice caused an underestimation of the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles, which is approximately the size of California. The Times ("All the news that's fit to print"), which as of this writing had not printed that story, should unleash Revkin and his unnamed experts.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I think it’s a disgrace how the clowns at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center are trying to blame this on the satellite. When you lose 193,000 square miles of ice, you might want to recheck your data unless losing 193,000 square miles of ice was your original intention. Good thing there were others out there who were watching these people and called BS on their figures.
Yep. In fact it was the blogosphere that pointed out their errors. They didn’t find it by themselves or any other scientific body.
When the Ice start losing extent in January, I thought it was weird.
Tom Nelson has been on excellent on exposing nsidc screw ups.
peer-reviewed work just doesn't mean what it used to. The only time when scientist take the time to critically review something, is if it disagrees with their agenda. A sad state of affairs.
How big an error is 193K square miles of arctic ice as a percentage of total arctic ice? I have no handle on the magnitude of this ommission.
“How big an error is 193K square miles of arctic ice as a percentage of total arctic ice? I have no handle on the magnitude of this ommission.”
California is about 163K square miles. One might think an error would show up on diligent scientist’s map.
Consider a model arctic ice cap which is a circular cap extending from the pole to 75N latitude.
It will have an area of 3350K sq miles.
To increase that area by 193K to 3543K sq miles, you have to extend the cap to 74.57N latitude.
So the error amounts to a little less than 1/2 degree of latitude in the size of this model ice cap.
Thank you.
Ooooohhhh dr_lew, that is such a teeny tiny number, it can't possibly mean anything -- can it? I mean, it's almost insignificant isn't it? Or could it be that's just the manure you were trying to spread with your disingenuous and off the mark reply to "percentage of coverage".
Instead of telling someone how to build a watch when asked what time it is, why don't you whip out your calculator and do the simple math? You are truly a piece of work. A consummate shill and true believer in algore warming.
Not at all. I don't have any intention of minimizing this error. I represented the 193K sq miles as a strip 30 miles wide and 6433 miles around, which seems to me an appropriate way to address what the error means in terms of a model circular ice cap.
Lose your calculator???
Dr Lew, 1/2 a degree in lattitude in a circular band that runs the entire outside of a hypothetical circular polar cap is still a massive error. We couldn’t have GPS with that kind of standard. If scientist can’t spot that then why do we call them scientists in the first place? Might as well call them laymen. But we aren’t talking about that. We aren’t talking about some hypothetically thin band, we are talking about a chuck of land larger than California. What reasons do you have for defending their major f-up that gave so much fuel to the fire of global warming alarmism?
Here is the website describing the error, which was due to "sensor degradation" in a satellite. They say it was a 4% underestimation during the first two weeks of February, and then the sensor failed badly around Feb 16, which is when they realized the problem.
If scientist can’t spot that then why do we call them scientists in the first place? Might as well call them laymen.
Well, it was a bad sensor, and they spotted it by comparison with another sensor.
But we aren’t talking about that. We aren’t talking about some hypothetically thin band, we are talking about a chuck of land larger than California.
A chunk of land? Working from the numbers, the shape of this missing area is entirely hypothetical. I thought it was conceptually appropriate to represent it by a reduction in size of an idealized ice cap. Their web page offers a map showing the "missing data" scattered through the Hudson Bay and Baffin Sea region, and elsewhere.
What reasons do you have for defending their major f-up that gave so much fuel to the fire of global warming alarmism?
I didn't make a defense of any kind. I merely responded to the question by offering a way to visualize the reduction in the ice coverage implied by the error.
I actually over-represented the error by my choice of 75N as a boundary. ( I think I stated the example backwards by calling the 74.57N cap the smaller one, when it would be the larger one. ) In my example the reduction was from 9.18 million km2 to 8.68 million km2, or 5.4 %( Note that their error estimate is 500K km2, so it's one significant figure. ) Their graph shows a true sea ice extent of 15 million km2, so a reduction of .5 million is an error of 3.3 %, but they call it 4%. In my idealization, this would be a retreat of the southern boundary of the circular ice cap from 70.24N latitude to 70.57N latitude.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with your example.
The problem seems to be that your example doesn’t give the same VISUAL as the ‘size of California’ example.
Even though the ‘area’ in question in both examples would be exactly the same.
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