President, Your Pants Are On Fire!
September 4, 2015
tags: alaska
By Paul Homewood
Seeing as how it is topical at the moment, here are some facts about Alaska that the Messiah and David Holub apparently aren’t aware of:
1) It was at least as warm, and probably warmer in the Middle Ages there than now.
According to the paper, “ Surface air temperature variability reconstructed with tree rings for the Gulf of Alaska over the past 1200 years”:
The work of the seven scientists revealed a number of centennial trends that included "a warm interval centered on AD 950 for coastal Alaska that occurred around the time of the Medieval Warm Period," and which "for the first time," as they describe it, "includes a divergence-free view of contemporary warming that is ongoing and is comparable to the MWP." But from the graph of their results, it can be seen that the peak warmth of the MWP was actually slightly greater than the peak warmth of the Current Warm Period (CWP).
Further evidence of this fact is provided by the recent discovery of the remains of trees as the glaciers retreat, which are carbon dated back to that time, both at the Exit Glacier and the Juneau.
2) Alaskan Glaciers Began Retreating Around 1770AD
Many studies show that glaciers in Alaska began advancing in the 14thC, until reaching their maximum in the late 18thC, for instance here and here.
It is also believed that there was a temporary readvance in the late 19thC. According to Wiles et al:
The late LIA advance resulted in moraine building at nine of the study glaciers between ad 1874 and 1895. These moraines mark the greatest known extent reached by six of the study glaciers; moraines of earlier less extensive advances were presumably destroyed during this late LIA advance. At Billings, Taylor and Langdon-Kings Glaciers the c. 1890 moraine is the largest or only ridge nested within the early eighteenth-century moraine (Figure 3). Ice margins were generally close to the late LIA maximum position at the time of the first visits of scientific parties around the turn of the century”.
It is also well established that most of the glacial retreat took place long before recent decades.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/05/21/lying-accelerates-at-the-nyt/
3) Temperature Trends
According to the Federal National Climate Assessment:
Over the past 60 years, Alaska has warmed more than twice as rapidly as the rest of the United States, with state-wide average annual air temperature increasing by 3°F and average winter temperature by 6°F, with substantial year-to-year and regional variability. Most of the warming occurred around 1976 during a shift in a long-lived climate pattern (the Pacific Decadal Oscillation [PDO]) from a cooler pattern to a warmer one.
As NOAA show, there has only been a tiny increase of 0.5F/Century between 1977 and 2013.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/
Arguably, it might not even be increasing at all. The study by the Alaska Climate Research Center below shows that most sites have actually got cooler, a finding which again puts into doubt the veracity of NOAA’s homogenised version.
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
The only notable increase is at Barrow, where scientists have discovered that a massive UHI effect has distorted temperature measurements there.
As the Alaska Climate Research Center also point out:
Considering just a linear trend can mask some important variability characteristics in the time series. The figure at right shows clearly that this trend is non-linear: a linear trend might have been expected from the fairly steady observed increase of CO2 during this time period. The figure shows the temperature departure from the long-term mean (1949-2009) for all stations. It can be seen that there are large variations from year to year and the 5-year moving average demonstrates large increase in 1976. The period 1949 to 1975 was substantially colder than the period from 1977 to 2009, however since 1977 little additional warming has occurred in Alaska with the exception of Barrow and a few other locations. The stepwise shift appearing in the temperature data in 1976 corresponds to a phase shift of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from a negative phase to a positive phase. Synoptic conditions with the positive phase tend to consist of increased southerly flow and warm air advection into Alaska during the winter, resulting in positive temperature anomalies.
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
4) Record Temperatures
Just for good measure, the official record highest temperature in Alaska was 100F, set at Fort Yukon in 1915!
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records
Apparently the Messiah does not worry about anything as inconvenient as facts!
One last thing. The National Climate Assessment quoted above states:
Energy production is the main driver of the state’s economy, providing more than 80% of state government revenue and thousands of jobs.
I wonder what will happen to all those jobs in our new, glorious decarbonised future?
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