This article is based on two stories–one posted by the Daily Caller today, and one posted at wattsupwiththat.com yesterday.
The article at the Daily Caller deals with the increase of ice and the lack of melting ice in Greenland.
The article reports:
But alarmists have been neglecting an inconvenient fact about the polar region: Greenland is seeing healthy levels of ice and record cold temperatures over parts of the polar island.
Northeast Greenland saw its coldest May on record since measurements started back in 1949, and the island as a whole is colder than normal. Nuuk, the capital of Greenland, has also seen its coldest year on record, according to science blogger Steven Goddard.
Greenland is also seeing much less ice melt than normal, according to the Danish Meteorological Institute. Basically, Greenland’s ice sheet has accumulated a lot of ice, but seen little melting this year.
The article at wattsupwiththat is very scientific and illustrates how some global warming supporters (I really can’t call them scientists) have adjusted (redone) the climate data in recent years so that the fact that there has been no global warming in recent years is hidden in the new numbers.
The article concludes:
Comments from Georgia Tech Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry:
The greatest changes in the new NOAA surface temperature analysis is to the ocean temperatures since 1998. This seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements – ARGO buoys and satellites don’t show a warming trend. Nevertheless, the NOAA team finds a substantial increase in the ocean surface temperature anomaly trend since 1998.
In my opinion, the gold standard dataset for global ocean surface temperatures is the UK dataset, HadSST3. A review of the uncertainties is given in this paper by John Kennedy http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/uncertainty.html. Note, the UK group has dealt with the same issues raised by the NOAA team. I personally see no reason to the use the NOAA ERSST dataset, I do not see any evidence that the NOAA group has done anywhere near as careful a job as the UK group in processing the ocean temperatures.
The real bottom line here is that we really don’t know as much as we like to think we do. The impact of man on global climate is unknown, but as much as I hate to admit it, in the grand scheme of things, man really is a very small part.