Elsewhere

Bob Grumbine calmly explains to Tony about the problem in trusting Steve Goddard,

There's a bit of a tempest at WUWT and Steven Goddard's regarding satellite data on sea ice. And there are some anxious comments about FOIA filings to be made regarding data that's been hidden. I have to concede that it takes a bit of a historian to know what's really being said in the IPCC first report regarding sea ice. (see page 224, figure 7.20 for the source of the tempest.) Fortunately, I am such a historian :-) To give away the ending: There's nothing terribly dramatic going on in the sea ice or the history. But I'll take the chance to talk history of sea ice analysis.

The tempest arises because the figure shown there has sea ice cover in the early 1970s in the Arctic being notably lower than it was through the 1980s. (Curiously, no interest is displayed at either site regarding the Antarctic being far higher in the 1970s than the 1980s.) If the figures were commensurate with the satellite observations such as those used in the Cryosphere Today anomaly figures, it would suggest that the Arctic coverage of the last few years wasn't as remarkable as we've generally thought. (On the other hand, it would also say that the 'record high' Antarctic coverage of recent years was not particularly high at all, a point being neglected at both sites.)

Go read the whole story. Meanwhile at the place where this all started, the Weasel, Julienne Stroeve and Bob try and clear things up, summarized by Guenther Kirschenbaum

What is so complicated about this whole Skate picture?

The Skate is famous for surfacing at the North Pole, so someone inadvertently assumed that picture must have been from that event and said so on the Internets. Then someone who really badly needs to refute the existence of AGW comes by, copies the whole thing and goes: “Hahaa, there you go, warmistas! There was open water at the Pole in 1957! No AGW! Hahaa!”

Of course, this half truth travels around the world a couple of times and gets so much attention that folks find out that this picture wasn’t made at the Pole in 1959 (not that it matters, it was a piss poor argument to begin with), and they change the caption.

As can be expected, this changing now becomes the focus, accompanied by a casual “I’m interested in nailing down the date on the one in question”.

First the Goddard conspiracy theory du jour, and then this, together in one post. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. As always, top notch science, Anthony.

In other news, the Yorkshire Ranter wanted to know how the Montreal Protocols could have been passed.

Perhaps more telling is this NASA web page, which describes the output from the Goddard Space Flight Centre's Chemistry-Climate Model given inputs corresponding to a world that kept using the stuff. It's either utterly terrifying, or enormously inspiring, depending on how you look at it. Rowland, Paul Crutzen, the British Antarctic Survey people who did the fieldwork...they essentially saved the world.

But what really interests me was how they got the Vienna and Montreal protocols passed. I had the vague impression that something had changed since 1989, that the ex-tobacco industry unscience industry was only cranked up later to bash the climatologists. In fact, I'm wrong. A comment at Realclimate points out that they were indeed targeted by the usual suspects. Rowland was accused of being a KGB agent trying to destroy capitalism

Eli had a thought

One of the things was that Dupont and ICI management was still full of chemists and that Thatcher herself (although they are reluctant to take credit) was an Oxford chemistry BA. So even though they didn't want to believe the science they had the tools to understand it.