'Among blue-water sailors like myself, the area of the ocean from 40° South to 50° South is called the “Roaring Forties” because of the strength of the winds that blow there so often.
And the next ten degrees south of that? They are called the “Screaming 50’s”. There, the winds can blow unimpeded around the globe.
Compared to the South Pole, the North Polar weather is far less complex. The North Pole is underlain by the Arctic Ocean, ice-covered most of the time. The South Pole, on the other hand, has a continent in the middle.
And it’s mostly a high elevation permanently frozen chunk of rock. It sheds icy winds and glacial chunks into the surrounding ocean. Due to the constant winds and storms, the “mixed layer” around Antarctica is deeper than anywhere in the world.
And why is this of note? Well, I was asked to take a look at a recent peer-reviewed study called “Simulated Twentieth-Century Ocean Warming in the Amundsen Sea, West Antarctica“. And where is the Amundsen Sea when it’s at home? It’s off of the coast of Antarctica, down below 60°S.
A short digression. Roald Amundsen was one of my heroes when I was a kid. He was a famed polar explorer. He led the first expedition to reach the South Pole. He was also the first man to sail the Northwest Passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic over the top of Asia and Europe. As a boy I remember seeing his ship “Gjøa”, the one that he used for the Northwest Passage, up on blocks in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. Even as a young inexperienced sailor, I was amazed at how small it is, only 70 feet (21 meters) long. Amundsen definitely had albondigas of pure brass … but I digress
The press release about the study is”Researchers demonstrate new link between greenhouse gases and sea-level rise“. Inter alia, it says:
"A new study provides the first evidence that rising greenhouse gases have a long-term warming effect on the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica. Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) say that while others have proposed this link, no one has been able to demonstrate it."
Well … in a word, no. The study doesn’t provide any evidence at all, not one scrap. What it provides instead are the results of computer models using another computer model as input.
Sigh. Look, if computer models were “evidence”, I’d be a very rich man based on my 1980’s evolutionary-based computer model of the stock market … but computer model results are not evidence. They are merely the understandings and more importantly the misunderstandings of the programmers made solid.
The study itself says:
"Our simulations are performed using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model including components for the ocean, sea ice, and ice shelf thermodynamics. Here we build on the Amundsen Sea configuration, which has been updated and re-tuned to provide best agreement with observations when forced with the latest ERA5 atmospheric reanalysis."
The “ERA5 atmospheric reanalysis” is a computer climate model which is forced with whatever data is available. The model then fills in the blanks where there is no actual data … like say the Amundsen Sea, where people only venture very rarely, and even then only in modern times.
Let me take a heel-turn to the question of the performance of the climate models. This study is about sea levels and ocean temperatures. Folks keep telling me that the climate models have done well for decades. So I looked at the first IPCC Assessment Report. Here are their sea-level projections:
To return to the Amundsen Sea ... the sea temperature and the weather are affected by the Circumpolar Current, circumpolar winds, the Antarctic Slope Current, the Amundsen Sea Polyna (open water) in the middle of the Amundsen Bay sea ice, the varying ocean depths, and the ever-changing sea ice. It’s a most intractable and complex area to model.
To return to RealWorld from ModelWorld ... As you can see, there’s been a bit of cooling in the SST in Amundsen Sea in this 41-year period.
Moving on, how well do their model results agree with the ERA5 reanalysis? YIKES! Their own models don’t even begin to approximate the ERA5 reanalysis, which is the information that is used as an input to the models. And like the Reynolds OI SST, the ERA5 reanalysis shows slightly cooling temperatures in the Amundsen Sea, where the models claim warming … bad models, no cookies!
Oh, yeah, almost forgot. I did an analysis looking for what I call “weasel words” in their study. These are words that show their conclusions are weak. They include “could”, “may”, “might”, “possibly”, “plausibly”, “potentially”, “suggests”, and “assumed”. Those words are used a total of 34 times in their study … no bueno.
In closing, the study itself says;
"Rapid ice loss is occurring in the Amundsen Sea sector of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. This ice loss is assumed to be a long-term response to oceanographic forcing, but ocean conditions in the Amundsen Sea are unknown prior to 1994. Here we present a modeling study of Amundsen Sea conditions from 1920 to 2013, using an ensemble of ice-ocean simulations forced by climate model experiments."
“Simulations forced by climate model experiments” for a location where ocean conditions are “unknown prior to 1994” … it’s models on top of models all the way down, what could possibly go wrong? It’s clearly destined to be a lead article in the “Journal of Irreproducible Results“.
I weep for the death of science."
Finally, let me mention that the Amundsen Sea is only 0.085% of the total ocean area … it appears that what we have here are scientists with models looking for funding. Not saying that’s a bad thing, just that it can easily lead to … well … this kind of study."