Arguments
Recent Comments
Prev 582 583 584 585 586 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 Next
Comments 29451 to 29500:
-
nick12197 at 07:25 AM on 29 May 2015CO2 measurements are suspect
humanity can take spot CO2 measurements but this assumes homogeneous concentrations, which are not always true. The Committee has often spoken and said, on gases, most of Earth's heat is internal, the reason similar temperatures are found a certain distance below the surface no matter where they are taken. Under Antarctica or along the equator will have similar temperatures at a certain depth (I think it’s fairly shallow, also) Sunlight and surface heat causes daily weather and seasons, of course, but this cycle is on top of the underlying base, natural heat. This is what controls climate, says The Committee.
Greater CO2 and heat cause greater evaporation, more rainfall and both carbon dioxide and rainfall encourage plant growth which consumes the CO2 to produces oxygen. The equilibrium of oxygen and CO2 has been reached long ago and fluctuates along a very narrow band too small to have climate effect. This they say, is because of the principal atmospheric gas, nitrogen, which as we know, dominates.
They say CO2 emissions caused by human activity are insufficient to alter the equilibrium; the plant response to increased rain and carbon dioxide is very efficient. The proportion remains well inside the narrow band that does not affect weather.
Earth climate is affected by the magnetosphere and the planet's molten iron core, from which heat dissipates. Most of Earth's surface is ocean; heat reaches the seafloor, where we do not and cannot measure temperatures. This affects sea water temperatures and currents, much more sensitive to small changes. (liquids much denser than gases) These are the causes of the erratic weather patterns we have felt on Earth, attributed erroneously to manmade global warming.Moderator Response:Welcome to Sks. Please take the time to study the comments policy on this site. When you make a claim that is contrary to well known facts, then you should provide link to the sources of your information. Whatever your "committee" is, it's source of information is laughably and grossly wrong. Please dont waste people's time by commenting on an article you obviously havent bothered to read.
For the point of this article, note the linked video showing the variation of CO2 both vertically and horizontally. Note also this image which demonstrably show no such assumption of uniformity is made. You might like to also note the OCO-2 satellite which continuously measures CO2 concentration.
I suggest you take time to read some of the climate myth articles to become better informed before commenting further. And note that the extra heating from CO2 is around 100x greater than the total geothermal heat flux.
Offtopic comment has been deleted but a commentator has helpfully provided you with more information. See here
-
CBDunkerson at 22:45 PM on 28 May 2015CERN CLOUD experiment proved cosmic rays are causing global warming
jd_germany, assuming we are talking about the 'cosmic ray hypothesis' which holds that 'a decrease in cosmic rays penetrating the atmosphere could lead to decreased cloud formation and thus increased solar radiation reaching the surface' (there are others) then there would be no change in the 'greenhouse effect' and we wouldn't expect to see the cooling of the upper atmosphere (i.e. stratosphere) which is characteristic of greenhouse warming (yet, we do).
Similarly, if global warming were being driven by increased solar radiation (introduced by cosmic rays or otherwise) then we would expect to see the greatest warming increases during the day (we don't), in summer (nope), and near the equator (wrong again).
In short, this 'hypothesis' is sort of the opposite of scientific progress... multiple lines of evidence all converge to show that it is false.
-
CBDunkerson at 22:15 PM on 28 May 2015Memo to Jeb Bush: denying human-caused global warming is ignorant
Interestingly, recent polls show that even 48% of Republicans favor taking actions to combat global warming... but virtually every GOP politician at the national level still denies that we can do anything about it. The problem is that the half of GOP voters who reject reality are much more vocal, and determined to do nothing about global warming.
-
jd_germany at 17:45 PM on 28 May 2015CERN CLOUD experiment proved cosmic rays are causing global warming
Quick question: What would the cosmic ray hypothesis say about the effect on upper atmosphere temperature change?
-
bozzza at 16:34 PM on 28 May 2015Memo to Jeb Bush: denying human-caused global warming is ignorant
More advanced thinking could only ever be done by a few individuals anyway- by definition- thus we can now see emotion was always able to inspire or crush the individual. The only difference in higher thinking abilities between us and the people of eons ago is education gained via through eons of lesser and lesser non-descript method toward matters.
The elite and the proles depend on a bright spark from the masses who number 90%: then it all changes and the next revolution of thought and/or action is awaited upon.
Emotional IQ comes down to panic control: pilots and so forth concentrate on such skill sets whereas most don't. Those who succeed in any endevour can control panic to a greater degree than those that don't.
-
RM at 14:04 PM on 28 May 2015Memo to Jeb Bush: denying human-caused global warming is ignorant
I know something about influences, I was raised in a SDA home and it does take much time and thought to rid oneself of the dogma, however I find myself today as a devout libertarian and skeptical of all claims. My motto is "show me, don't tell me".
-
PhilippeChantreau at 13:40 PM on 28 May 2015Memo to Jeb Bush: denying human-caused global warming is ignorant
RM,
"what motivates a life long EPA/enviro to publish this"
Barred some sort of material reward, most likely an emotional reaction to something that happened to him. I suspect that might have been the case also for J. Curry. We are emotional beings. It served us well for the few million years during which the species lived in natural conditions. For more advanced thinking, emotions have to be more carefully managed and one has to always keep in mind that they can affect our judgment to the point of rendering it inoperative. They can also be useful.
Other things have profound influences on us. The initial conditionings applied to young people duting their formative years make an indelible mark. I have read articles by religiously raised geologists who could never shake their early conditioning from a rather fundamentalist church, and lived in a constant state of cognitive dissonance. They were having to deal with geological time scales on one hand, while the conviction had been drilled in them at a young age that the Earth was 6000 years old, a conviction that carried a high emotional charge. Humans are best equipped and worst equipped to investigate reality...
-
RM at 11:06 AM on 28 May 2015Memo to Jeb Bush: denying human-caused global warming is ignorant
Interesting, wonder what motivates a life long EPA/enviro to publish this?
-
Tom Dayton at 10:56 AM on 28 May 2015Memo to Jeb Bush: denying human-caused global warming is ignorant
Alan Carlin is a PhD economist, though he does have a Bachelor's in physics. His contentions are straight from the denialist's playbook, including the disproof of CO2 as a global warming cause because temperatures decreased in the six years from 2002 to 2008 (he claimed), CO2 rise follows temperature rise, . . . . DeSmogBlog has a profile.
-
RM at 10:36 AM on 28 May 2015Memo to Jeb Bush: denying human-caused global warming is ignorant
Slightly OT but does anyone know about Dr Alan Carlin's book Environmentalism Gone Mad? Apparently he is a 38 yr vet at the EPA and a Sierra Club chapter chairman, an aquaintance said I should read, is he legit?
-
shoyemore at 04:49 AM on 28 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
JIm Hunt #11
Well done to you !
Amber Rudd is not levelling the playing pitch - wind installations have to have community support, but fracking can be pushed through against any opposition. I hope Labour, the Lib Dems (if they can get over their shocking electoral defeats) and the Greens are on their toes to expose what a travesty that is.
You are obviously more experienced at this than I am, but I find it dispiriting to see wind developers at war with local communities much like we see the fracking companies. Did the environmetnal movement not learn anything when it was organising communites to oppose pollution and nuclear power?
-
Jim Hunt at 23:34 PM on 27 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
shoyemore - s/Gilbert/Garrett/g!
What about the situation (as in Totnes) where part of the community is strongly in favour of said wind farms, whereas another part is strongly opposed? From a technical point of view wind "farms" are much to be preferred to large scale solar PV "farms" (IMHO!).
I agree with your final sentiment. Less GBAU media PR please!
We did at least manage to get a smaller community wind project past the planners & NIMBYs down here in South Devon : http://econnexus.org/tag/sbces/
All this may be moot however. If you can believe what you read in The Telegraph:No more on shore wind farm schemes will be given the go ahead unless they have the support of local people, the new Energy secretary has said.
Amber Rudd, who was appointed last week in the post-election reshuffle, said the new powers would be in next week’s Queen’s Speech.
Miss Rudd also disclosed that the new Conservative Government would try to speed up extraction of shale gas and loosen rules so it could be extracted from under national parks.
-
Kevin C at 20:40 PM on 27 May 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
Actually, I think the 1890 Ellis paper is not open access? It's a beautiful period piece. I've attached the first couple of paras below:
The maximum and minimum readings of air temperature which appear in the Greenwich Observations are those of the maximum and minimum thermometers on the revolving stand, and refer to the civil day from midnight to midnight. When the Greenwich maximum and minimum temperatures mere first communicated to the Royal Meteorological Society for insertion in the Meteorological Records, in the table giving results for London stations, they were supplied as thus tabulated for the Greenwich volume, and as indeed previously also appearing in the Weekly Return of the Registrar General. But on this arrangement, the separate daily readings were not comparable with those of the other London stations, since the latter were tabulated. according to the plan adopted by the Society based for stations termed ”Climatological.” In consequence of which the Greenwich values, since the beginning of the year l886, have, at the request of the Society, been supplied according to the climatological plan, that is to say the reading of the maximum thermometer for the twenty-four hours ending 9h. a.m. is entered to the preceding civil day, and the reading of the minimum to the same civil day.
Without consideration of the matter it might be supposed that, with values tabulated according to the two methods described, the monthly means of the maximum and minimum readings would, on the average, be similar on both systems. But on making the necessary comparison, a perceptible difference, almost always the same direction, was found to exist, not only between the means of the maximum readings, but also between the means of the minimum readings. This, it appeared to me, might have sufficient interest for the Fellows of the Royal Meteorological Society to make it desirable to communicate to the Society the results of a comparison made for the four years 1886 to 1889. The differences found to exist between the two sets of means are given in Table I., from which Table II. is formed showing the differences in the mean temperature of the different months thereby produced, as derived from the mean of the maximum and minimum readings.
-
KeefeandAmanda at 20:03 PM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
The article above mentions Steinman, Mann, and Miller (2015), but does not explicitly mention what I think is one of their most interesting contributions to the idea of multidecadal *internal* (rather than external) variability, which is the multidecadal NMO, which is more general than either the AMO or the PMO and thus I think should be the focus rather than either the AMO or PMO. (The PMO and NMO are explained further below.) The article links to the abstract of the paper (which requires payment to read), but does not link to that summary Mann wrote which contains a nice graph of the NMO for all to see. See here
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/02/climate-oscillations-and-the-global-warming-faux-pause/
for a good summary by Mann, this summary found also at the Huffington Post and Ecowatch sites. This article giving a nice graph of the NMO, and here is a link to the graph:
http://images.huffingtonpost.com/2015-02-12-Sci15FigHuffPost.pngAs for the PMO and NMO: Mann says, "We focused on the Northern Hemisphere and the role played by two climate oscillations known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or "AMO" (a term I coined back in 2000, as recounted in my book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars) and the so-called Pacific Decadal Oscillation or "PDO" (we a use a slightly different term-Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation or "PMO" to refer to the longer-term features of this apparent oscillation). The oscillation in Northern Hemisphere average temperatures (which we term the Northern Hemisphere Multidecadal Oscillation or "NMO") is found to result from a combination of the AMO and PMO.
Here is a very recent study the article above did not mention, A. Dai, Fyfe, Xie, and X. Dai (2015):
"Decadal modulation of global surface temperature by internal climate variability"
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v5/n6/full/nclimate2605.html
This article below contains quotes from the authors:
"Scripps Study Explains Recent Pause in Global Warming"
http://timesofsandiego.com/tech/2015/04/18/scripps-study-explains-recent-pause-in-global-warming/
Quotes:
"A National Science Foundation-supported study co-authored by Shang-Ping Xie, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, attributes nearly the entire difference between observations and simulations to a climate cycle known as the Inter-decadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO)........"The new study extends this earlier modeling study by relying on observations that go back to 1920," said Xie, "We show that over nearly 100 years, the observed deviations in global mean temperature from the anthropogenically forced climate response are nearly all due to IPO."....... "Recent history suggests that the IPO could reverse course soon. Should that happen, we may see accelerated global warming rates in the coming decades," said Dai." -
Kevin C at 19:07 PM on 27 May 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
However, as I noted in my email, the Denial101x tool is primarily a teaching tool, and I had to make a lot of simplifications to make both the downloads, and the calculations fast enough. Many stations have been omitted, and all have been reduced to annual data, which introduces its own bias. It is useful for demonstration purposes and some preliminary analysis, but for serious research you need to be using something like Clear Climate Code, or at the very least the SkS tool.
Here are some more resources:
A map of all stations with and without adjustments over the past 40 years (corresponding roughly to the period of dominant human warming):
The green crosses overlay the red ones, so here is a huge version of the same map for more detailed investigation.
Note that there is a general split in the need for adjustments between more/less stable and developed countries, as you would expect, with one very obvious exception: the US. The reasons are of course well known - the volunteer network and the resulting issues with Tobs and the introduction of MMTS.
Here's a nice comparison by Zeke Hausfather on the skill of the NOAA and Berkeley algorithms for reconstructing synthetic US data with realistic errors. The NOAA method does a great job in the US, however on the basis of my own work I think that over the rest of the world, while NOAA method generally improves things, the Berkeley adjustments are more robust. It is not clear whether this is just because Berkeley have more stations - we'll find out with the switch to GHCNv4.
Finally, here are some resources from the Denial101x bonus material:
- Ellis, W. (1890). On the difference produced in the mean temperature derived from daily maximum and minimum readings, as depending on the time at which the thermometers are read. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, 16(76), 213-220. Link to abstract
- Menne, M. J., Williams Jr, C. N., & Vose, R. S. (2009). The US Historical Climatology Network monthly temperature data, version 2. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 90(7), 993-1007. Link to PDF
- Böhm, R., Jones, P. D., Hiebl, J., Frank, D., Brunetti, M., & Maugeri, M. (2010). The early instrumental warm-bias: a solution for long central European temperature series 1760–2007. Climatic Change, 101(1-2), 41-67. Link to PDF
- Brunet, M., Asin, J., Sigró, J., Bañón, M., García, F., Aguilar, E., ... & Jones, P. (2011). The minimization of the screen bias from ancient Western Mediterranean air temperature records: an exploratory statistical analysis. International Journal of Climatology, 31(12), 1879-1895. Link to paper
-
shoyemore at 19:02 PM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
_rand15_
I worked for many years with material scientists in a commercial lab, and I learned never to let statistics and nice mathematical constructs trump physics, no matter how simple, well-fitting and tractable the models seemed.
"All models are wrong, but some are useful" (George Box) and "Let models be simple, but not too simple" (Einstein) are good precepts to the modeller or analyst.
-
shoyemore at 17:06 PM on 27 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
JIm #8,
I am familiar with Gilbert Hardin and The Tragedy of the Commons, and it is a great quote. But from a practical point of view you are not going to win the hearts and minds of middle-of-the-roaders by equating their concerns with individual selfishness and greed.
Scoring an own goal for the NIMBYs when the match is just starting is not going to get you a win.
Wind farms around the world are well supported locally when the community feels ownership and sees a benefit from the siting of the turbines. I want to see more wind farms just like you do, but I wonder if the wind energy companies should put more emphasis on the communities which will host them, and less on media PR.
-
KR at 13:38 PM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
WRyan - Climate models are boundary condition solutions, where expected variation is contained within the range of possibilities. As a result, they do not predict exact trajectories of a particular set of initial conditions. We can expect the weather to vary within the range of climate model ensembles, if the predictions are good, but there is no way, really, to project exactly how internal variations like El Nino, volcanoes, the PDO, etc will track within that range.
Climate is about averages and ranges, not about predicting whether it will rain in Buffalo NY on May 9th twenty years from now. For short term solutions, weather models take very specific starting conditions and see how they might develop - with a useful range of about a week. But we can still predict that summers will be warmer than winters, and that 30 years from now average global temperatures will have risen something like 0.48C (0.16C/decade) +/- variations if nothing changes.
-
scaddenp at 13:30 PM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
Wryan - in the short term, the temperature record is dominated by internal variability - ENSO in particular. This is chaotic behaviour that defies prediction even a few months in advance. Models have no skill at decadal level prediction because of this. Noone can tell you when PDO will switch from -ve to +ve. It is also extremely unclear what effect a warming world will have on ENSO, if any. However, the range of behaviour is bound by the long-term energy balance and this is what emerges from climate models.
-
scaddenp at 13:22 PM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
Extracting a 66yt periodicy from 160 years of data is extremely fraught. And yes, I am pretty sure you will get around same value from output of climate models over same period since its source 1940s temperature depression.
Beware Von Neumann's elephant: "With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
You havent provided details but fitting 2 sines and a quadratic sounds like 9 parameters to me. (contant, linear and quadratic terms for the quadratic; amplitude, phase, and frequency for each sine).
I dont doubt that ocean cycles provide pseudo-periodic signal to the decadal noise in climate signal and that this is part of "slow down" - a series of La nina's while PDO negative. While interesting in terms of understanding causes of internal variability, they dont say much about climate.
As I understand it, it is not clear whether AMO index represents ocean noise or whether it is forced.
-
Leto at 12:32 PM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
_rand15_ @ 9
"so whatever the reason for it, I'm confident it's really there."
What does that even mean? You are describing a shape, nothing more, nothing less. The shape you are decribing is really the shape that it is?
-
WRyan at 12:08 PM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
For the shorter term predictions, is the problem with the accuracy and precision of the data or is it a problem with the precision of the climate models?
-
_rand15_ at 10:28 AM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
@scaddenp: "You might also like to run EXACTLY the same curve-fitting analysis, (quadratic and 2 sine) but with say monthly Dow-Jones average and see how good the fit is."
That would be interesting, wouldn't it? I recall from many years ago that someone published an analysis of extinctions (of species) that purported to identify a particular periodicity. I think it was around 55 million years, if memory serves. The method was fairly complex, and of course the data was pretty sketchy.
Some years later, someone else tried repeating the work, and found that when fed any pseudo data that looked roughly like the real ones, even data with some other periodicity, that the original method always cranked out that 55 million year periodicity. Somehow the method just baked it in. I remember reading the second paper with a lot of enjoyment.
In this case, it's easy to show in several ways that there's a lot of power at the 66-year period, so whatever the reason for it, I'm confident it's really there. Is it "real", in the sense that somehow heat actually is sloshing around in the oceans with that period? II would seem to be generically plausible. ENSO has heat sloshing around with periods of a year or a few years. The PDO and AMO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation) seem to be accepted phenomena, and they are generally speaking the right kind of thing (whatever may be driving them). The current indices of the PDO don't correlate too closely with the temperature anomaly record. The AMO correlates better, if I recall correctly from looking at it last year. (Actually, these indices are arrived at by subtracting off some version of the temperature trend from the data, then doing some variation of a principal component analysis. So using them to support the idea of a long-period heat sloshing may seem like a bit of circular reasoning, but at least I'm not the only one).
-
Tom Curtis at 10:22 AM on 27 May 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
daveburton @60, I had forgotten about that promise, so thankyou for reminding me. I will try to follow through shortly. In the meantime, Kevin C has published his far more usefull temperature tool. There is a brief introduction to the temperature tool here. The only thing my spreadsheet will hopefully add to the tool is the unadjusted ocean data, but we know their impacts already from Zeke Hausfather's graphs.
-
_rand15_ at 10:08 AM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
@scaddenp: "This style of curve-fitting is common. Nicola Scafetta has published on this many times. The trouble is with quadratic and two sine curves you can fit any time series well.... Unless you have a physical basis for the curve, what are we to make of it?"
Yes, of course. Not only that, but the data are too noisy to be able to discriminate between variations on the theme, or even between very different models. Yet you can't necessarily fit just any time series with two sine waves (plus a slow, nearly DC component, in this case). This analysis didn't show me that the data *is* caused by a couple of sine waves. It's in no way adequate for that. It just showed that many of the really pronounced features of the temperature record can be reduced to just a few. That's usually worthwhile.As for physical causes, I don't know about that (I'll add: "yet"). It would be better to know. I'm a physicist and engineer, I always want physical causes. You know, it's something like the tides. The causes are well known - the modification in the Earth's iso-gravitational contours caused by the sun and the moon, approximated by a dipole moment - but the way in which they combine over time, together with the detailed shapes of the ocean basins and local undersea topography and weather lead to very complex details of the time series at any given point. The details of all this may not really be known, but the general picture still gives us quite a bit of understanding even so.
Maybe existing climate models actually crank out a 66-year oscillation. That would be interesting to know about, although I don't at the moment.
-
scaddenp at 09:28 AM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
You might also like to run EXACTLY the same curve-fitting analysis, (quadratic and 2 sine) but with say monthly Dow-Jones average and see how good the fit is.
-
scaddenp at 09:14 AM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
This style of curve-fitting is common. Nicola Scafetta has published on this many times. The trouble is with quadratic and two sine curves you can fit any time series well. See here for more statistical discussion and specifically on Scafetta here. Unless you have a physical basis for the curve, what are we to make of it?
Of course you can do curve fitting with the actual physical factors (eg Schmidt and Benestad, which was a counter to another Scafetta wild claim). Compare that with yours for same period. If you want to postulate some "undiscovered natural cycle", then where is the heat coming from (ie your proposal must respect conservation of energy), and what is your explanation for the measured forcings have so little effect if you think the natural cycle is important?
If you insist on curve fitting, then a better way to do it, is use part of the data set for training (eg first 1/2 to 3/4) and then see how well it predicts the rest of the dataset, or do it in reverse.
-
_rand15_ at 07:46 AM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
I've read many discussions of the supposed slowdown or hiatus, including (of course) Tamino's posts. But no one I've read has discussed it in the rather different way I've been analyzing it. I'm in the middle of writing it up, but in short, if you look at the longest temperature record, the one from 1850 to present (e.g., HADCRUT4), you can see a number of features including a 30-year rise from about 1910 through 1940 and a 30-year flat period from about 1940 to 1970. I find that you can reproduce the entire 160+ year record surprisingly well with the sum of a smooth trend (e.g., quadratic fit), a 66.5-year sine wave, and a 21.3-year sine wave. Except for frequencies with period less than about 10 years, and so excluding ENSO and volcanos, this simple sum reproduces all the main features of the data. BTW, there is no trace of the sunspot cycle that I can find in the HADCRUT4 data.
A slowdown since around year 2000 is clear in this reconstruction, being the destructive interference of the sine waves combining with the trend, and is just ending.
Now, this may be only numerology, but the components are so few and so simple that the approach is attractive. One set of causes - two ongoing oscillations continuing for more than 150 years - interacting with a smooth, simple, concave upwards temperature trend. No need to invoke unpredictable variations in ENSO, no need to bring in special cases for other features, no mystery about the halt in warming between 1940 and 1970.
As to what these two sinusoids represent, that remains to be seen. But note that a current of only 1 km/day over a size typical of ocean basins would give times in the right ballpark. And you would think that the oceans would have to be involved in oscillations with such long periods.
-
John Mason at 07:11 AM on 27 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
That's a darned good quote, Jim! Michael - thanks for the link!
-
mdenison at 05:38 AM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
1. You make no mention of the change in forcing due to the reduction in CFC emissions. The impact of this on the rate of increase in anthropogenic forcings can be seen in the GISS forcing data. I would have expected an effect on the warming rate as large as those you report. Were you unable to find relevant literature that considered CFC's as a cause.
2. I also think that in making sense of the slowdown it is important to consider views like Taminos. I view from his pieces is that there is no slowdown unless you compare the trend using short time periods (15 years) instead of decent intervals of 30 years. With short intervals the apparant differences are meaningless due to inherent uncertainty and we must conclude that warming continues at the same pace.
A key point in making sense of the slowdown is that it is an illusion we inflict on ourselves by trying to see a pattern in short term data. If there has been a slowdown since 2000 we need to wait another 15 years to have a reasonable chance of detecting it. Past experience should warn us that the most likely explanation is that we seeing just another step of the down escalator. The explanations given above being reasons these steps can appear but they are not explanations of a real slowdown. -
Jim Hunt at 05:31 AM on 27 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
shoyemore - Just down the road from me in sunny South Devon there were plans for a twin turbine, community owned wind farm near Totnes. Here's what happened at the District Council planning meeting:
https://youtu.be/wZuENb3_Xlw
To quote a local Parish Counciller:Industrial devices provide to all the opponents of the turbines both their immediate surroundings and their enviable standard of living. Their televisions, toasters and hair dryers may not be crude designs, but we can be sure they've all been made somewhere over the horizon, out of sight. The electricity to activate these industrial devices also comes from power stations, over the horizon, out of sight. Some people here like it that way, defending their Arcadian idyll, none of whose practical comforts have been made anywhere near their green acres. Other people, I'm glad to say, see an opportunity to contribute back to the common good by using our local natural asset, abundant wind, to fuel the most benign and graceful technology ever devised to generate electric power.
In 1968 Garrett Hardin published an influential and now classic article entitled "The Tragedy of the Commons". This is the phenomenon that individual selfishness and greed in exploiting an asset common to all mankind eventually destroys that asset. We see this happening now in our exhaustion, over a few generations, of fossil fuel accumulated over millions of years. Now, the opponents of wind turbines are adding a further, bitter twist to this tragedy by opposing exploitation of an inexhaustible natural asset, the wind passing over our land.
In case you're wondering, the NIMBYs won the day.
-
Phil at 05:17 AM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
@2 "Were global temps at the higher end of predictions at some point?"
This Sks post (by Dana) contains the following statement;
The observed trend for the period 1998–2012 is lower than most model simulations. But the observed trend for the period 1992–2006 is higher than most model simulations. Why weren't Curry and McIntyre decrying the models for underestimating global warming 6 years ago?
-
Owenvsgenius at 04:45 AM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
Were global temps at the higher end of predictions at some point?
-
shoyemore at 04:21 AM on 27 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
I live across the Irish Sea in a region which possibly has much the same problems. Out government is probably most green-friendly that the British Tories, and is slightly left-of-centre economically.
We also are developing wind energy, and sometimes I think the capitalists who are backing green developments get trapped into a mirror image of their fossil fuel counterparts - lobbying high level politicians and ignoring the people who will live near the new developments. It makes things oh-so-easy for their detractors (and there are many in the media) to misrepresent them.
I know wind farms can be moved, but for a houseowner it is not good news to see your single biggest lifetime investment lose some of its value overnight. They are entitled to feel that if they are helping to save the planet then the burden is not being shared equally.
Wind farm developers should do more outreach to local communities, with the promise of jobs for example, and perhaps an electricity subsidy for local people shold not be out of the question? These small communites, often isolated, could often do with a break.
PS In the very interesting chart above, I was gobsmacked to see that UKIP voters do not look favourably on capitalism! Perhaps they are so far-right they favour some sort of proto-fascist "corporate state"?
-
daveburton at 02:40 AM on 27 May 2015Kevin Cowtan Debunks Christopher Booker's Temperature Conspiracy Theory
On Feb. 9, 2015, Tom Curtis (#34) wrote, "I intend to fully digitize both the GHCN3 and HadSST3 adjustments on a publicly available spreadsheet, as I think the results will be interesting independently of this discussion. That may, however, take a couple of weeks..."
Tom Curtis, did that ever get finished? Can you provide a link, please?
On Feb. 10, 2015, Kevin C (#38) wrote, "The GHCN tool is unfinished, frequently broken, and not ready for release, I'm not sure how you got the link. I've removed it now."
Has it been released yet, Dr. Cowtan?
-
Jeffrey Davis at 01:50 AM on 27 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
Tamino is skeptical about the reality of the "slowdown". Sketches of math.
-
ranyl at 01:03 AM on 27 May 2015Making sense of the slowdown in global surface warming
Thanks interesting article and video.
It is going to be interesting to see where 2014, 2015, 2016 put things as the current El-Nino plays out.
Do wonder whether the global temperatures might migrate towards the higher end of predictions again?
The last 12 months was the hottest to date again (April 2014, May 2015).
-
PhilippeChantreau at 00:39 AM on 27 May 2015There's no empirical evidence
Of course, there is also that pesky stubborn thing called physics. It always wins eventually.
-
dickgroff at 00:34 AM on 27 May 2015There is no consensus
I think your graphic and other references to the “97%” needs to be changed to emphasize that that figure represents climate scientists who opined on human warming in papers that were included in the study. Otherwise it incorrectly implies that 97% of ALL scientists are included. (Your graphic states this but not prominently.)
-
michael sweet at 23:59 PM on 26 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
The image of Florida shown above is produced using a satelite radar. This measures elevations to the tops of trees and buildings. I doubt Miami residents will stick around when they have to live on the roof of their houses. No area in or near Miami is higher than 8 meters above sea level. Sea level rise is much worse than the diagram. This map from Climate Central is probably more accurate. It is difficult to find accurate sea level rise maps.
-
KR at 23:38 PM on 26 May 2015The Big Picture (2010 version)
James C Wilson - You're quite correct that the satellite offset discrepencies are larger than the imbalance derived from ocean heat content. However, the observed spectral changes (Harries et al 2001 and later works) are entirely consistent with about 1 w/m2, and empirically support the radiative models that also give that imbalance value. So it's not without reason to include the satellite measures as consilient evidence.
-
Jim Hunt at 23:14 PM on 26 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
Thanks for a most interesting article John, which covers many of my own highest hobby horses!
By some strange synchronicity I have mentioned the names of Amber Rudd and David Rose in my recent musings on assorted social media. My latest article on my Arctic themed blog even suggests a possible mechanism to explain where Bob Trueman gets his "scientific" ideas from:Why It’s So Hard to Convince Pseudo-Skeptics
Be sure to watch the video at the end. Here's a brief quotation from it:
In a new study that just came out a couple of months ago they showed a single digusting image, and one single digusting image and measuring the brain activity and how the person responded to that was sufficient to allow you to identify if somebody was conservative or liberal. With a single brain image. With 95% accuracy!
-
DSL at 23:11 PM on 26 May 2015There's no empirical evidence
By the way, da, did you click on the "intermediate" tab at the top of the article?
-
DSL at 23:10 PM on 26 May 2015There's no empirical evidence
da, what exactly is "natural temperature change"? What sort of mechanisms are involved?
The claim is based on the premise that CO2 absorbs/emits thermal infrared radiation. The evidence for that premise is abundant, and there's no challenge. Increase atmospheric CO2, and the surface-to-space path of thermal infrared lengthens in time/space. -
perseus at 22:19 PM on 26 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
The election result was a tragedy for climate science and victory for the politically vested interests of the press who partly orchestrated it (because advertising works).
Of any party the Conservatives are the least interested in the Green movement, even less than UKIP voters which really says something.
Moderator Response:[JH] Graphic width reduced to conform with website maximum of 500 pixels.
-
da at 21:04 PM on 26 May 2015There's no empirical evidence
Myth has not been addressed.
Yes, CO2 is increasing. Yes, temperature is rising. This is a correlation and does not mean causation. The cause could also be natural temperature changes. What arguments are there to show that it is the CO2 and not natural temperature change causing the warming? For example: is temperature rising faster now than in earths history? If it is then it is likely to be man-made.
-
Firgoose at 20:39 PM on 26 May 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #21
So while I don't believe peer reviewed literature should die,
SkS is the way to go on top of it.
Yes, there are plenty of blogs and sites dedicated to various sciences and their specialities but SkepticalScience's format of Question and Basic+Intermediate+Advanced Answer is a wonderful model. Incorporating it would be a fine strategy for scaling the ladders of quality, accessibility and appeal.
-
jerusha at 20:20 PM on 26 May 2015Climate's changed before
This explains the climate changes in our county, i remember in my childhood weather was very predictable in seasons but nowadays this has changed completely.
Jerusha
-
uncletimrob at 17:13 PM on 26 May 2015Spoiled ballots, spoiled views: an election snapshot from Powys, Wales, UK
Slightly off topic but the Murdoch empire has done nothing for balanced reporting on global warming in Australia - I wonder if the papers mentioned are some of his. This is just one article that points to data cherry picking by Murdoch.
www.abc.net.au/news/2014-08-12/rupert-murdoch-misleading-north-south-poles/5604656
So I have no doubt that his writers/editors are picked because they agree with him. There is also little doubt that his network on Australia influenced voters to "axe the tax' ie the carbon tax at the last election.
-
chriskoz at 15:11 PM on 26 May 20152015 SkS Weekly Digest #21
Interesting article about peer reviewed articles from Singapore
Most memorable quotes from therein:
Up to 1.5 million peer-reviewed articles are published annually. However, many are ignored even within scientific communities - 82 per cent of articles published in humanities are not even cited once. No one ever refers to 32 per cent of the peer-reviewed articles in the social and 27 per cent in the natural sciences.
If a paper is cited, this does not imply it has actually been read. According to one estimate, only 20 per cent of papers cited have actually been read
If academics want to have an impact on policymakers and practitioners, they must consider popular media, which has been ignored by them.
So while I don't believe peer reviewed literature should die, SkS is the way to go on top of it.
Prev 582 583 584 585 586 587 588 589 590 591 592 593 594 595 596 597 Next
