Climate Change skeptics? [ot]

True, snow cover doesn't equal Winter length. But there is a correlation. About the same as late Spring snow cover.

Lost for words

Today Anthony Watts is lost for words. So lost that when he found out that NCDC/NOAA had responded to a query from Politifact, he just posted the response "without comment" (archived here). The response from NCDC was, unsurprisingly, that their algorithms are working as intended. You can read it in full in the archived WUWT article. It is just as Nick Stokes and others wrote.

Anthony peevishly wrote "The NCDC has not responded to me personally, I only got this by asking around." Yeah, you'd think that after Anthony's lunatic rantings at all and sundry and misrepresenting the NCDC they'd at least have paid him the courtesy of writing to him, the "bigger than Ben Hur" denier blogger, "personally"!

He stomped about for at least three hours trying to figure out how to get back at the NCDC/NOAA for ignoring him and his anti-science blog. "How could they do that?" He fumed. "I just put in a huge amount of effort telling my readers how bad and unscrupulous and wrong and positively evil the NOAA is and they ignore me."

The fact that it was Anthony who was so dreadfully wrong in almost everything he wrote about the US temperature record would have been beside the point. He wanted to stir up a hornets' nest, but the hornets flew off over his head. He wasn't worth even a little sting.

Wow. That's an impressive rationalization.

Whaling logbooks could hold key to retreating Arctic ice fronts

ICE fronts from the early 19th century were far more advanced around the Arctic than they are today, researchers analysing whalers’ log books from this time have discovered.

The findings have been revealed as part of the ARCdoc research project, led by the University of Sunderland, which analyses historical logbooks recorded by explorers, whalers and merchants during epic expeditions, between 1750 and 1850. The project aims to increase our scientific understanding of climate change in this environmentally important region. The logbooks include famous voyages such as Parry’s polar expedition in HMS Hecla and Sir John Franklin’s lost journey to navigate the Northwest Passage.

Some of the most significant data to emerge from the project has come from painstaking analysis of 60 log books belonging to whaling vessels, which contain descriptions of sea ice advancing and retreating every summer, all of which were recorded by whalers who ventured farther north than anyone else.

Phd Student Matthew Ayre has mapped what the ice was doing during that 100 year period, around the Davis Straits area, and at a time pre-dating the emergence of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. A comparison with satellite data from the last 30 years of this area shows the ice was far more advanced than it is today.

Dr Dennis Wheeler said: “Significantly this is the first time we have ever had direct observational information on the ice fronts in the North Atlantic and Davis Straits area before 1900. Until the introduction of satellite information from the 1970s, we didn’t know what the ice was doing. Well, now we know that it was more advanced, therefore the retreat of the ice in the last 30 years is part of a more recent and new pattern of climate change, so these log books contain absolutely vital climatologically information.