LEVELS of atmospheric carbon dioxide have been steadily rising, but since about 1998 global warming has stalled. Some climate scientists claim the reason has everything to do with the sun.
A little over a month ago a planning meeting was called to discuss whether more research should be undertaken by the US National Academy of Sciences/US National Research Council in particular to consider the role of solar forcing on climate.
Well known meteorologist and blogger Roger Pielke (Sr) was at the meeting and claims that compelling evidence was present showing that current climate models do not adequately represent the solar influence on climate.
Dr Pielke and a few others supported the need for a National Research Council study on this issues, but those at the meeting who also participate in the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were against the idea. Dr Pielke writes at his blog:
“The intensity of the dismissive and negative comments by a number of the committee members, and from even several of the agency representatives, with respect to any view that differed from the IPCC orthodoxy, made abundantly clear, that there was no interest in vesting an assessment of climate to anyone but the IPCC.
“The IPCC is actually a relatively small group of individuals who are using the IPCC process to control what policymakers and the public learn about climate on multi-decadal time scales. This NRC planning process further demonstrates the intent of the IPCC members to manipulate the science, so that their viewpoints are the only ones that reach the policymakers.
“If the NSF, NASA and the NRC are going to appoint and accept recommendations by groups with a clear conflict of interest to protect their turf [in this case the IPCC], they will be complicit in denying all of us a balanced presentation of the physical science basis of climate change, including the role that humans have.
“The obvious bias in the 2007 IPCC WG1 report is illustrated in the weblogs
Documentation Of IPCC WG1 Bias by Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Dallas Staley – Part I
Documentation Of IPCC WG1 Bias by Roger A. Pielke Sr. and Dallas Staley – Part II
“As it stands now, there are no independent climate assessments of the IPCC WG1 report funded and sanctioned by the NSF, NASA or the NRC.
“The agency representatives at the NRC planning meeting on December 8 2008, either are inadvertantly neglecting the need for independent oversight, or they are deliberately ignoring this lack of an independent assessment because the IPCC findings fit their agenda on the climate issue. In either case, the policymakers and the public are being misled on the degree of understanding of the climate system, including the human role within in it.”
************************
Roger A. Pielke (Sr.) has a B.A. in mathematics and a M.S. and Ph.D. in meteorology. Dr Pielke has served as Chairman of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Weather Forecasting and Analysis, Chief Editor of Monthly Weather Review, Editor-in-Chief of the US National Science Report to the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics, Co-Chief Editor of the Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences, and Editor of Scientific Online Letters on the Atmosphere. He was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 1982 and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union in 2004.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
Is there no end to the claims that “since about 1998 global warming has stalled”? Do you not realise that over ten years, noise dominates? Do you not understand that physically and statistically, this claim is totally meaningless? There’s clearly no point reading the rest of the post when you start off so badly. Try reading this.
RW: Tamino’s trend is yet another Madoff lie, as he claims we have had 100 years of temp rise with a trend of 0.018oC p.a., i.e 1.8oC However GISS shows only 0.73 since 1896. Spreading false growth rates is an indictable offence in the financial world, as Madoff is finding out. RW and Tamino: you better both watch out.
BTW, the Mauna Loa CO2 reading for Dec 2008 is out at last, showing a rise of just 1.64 ppm, an increase of only 0.0042 percent over Dec 2007. Offering growth at that rate would have kept Bernie out of clink. Strange how the Medja have not reported this is the lowest Dec on Dec growth rate since 2004.
“The IPCC is actually a relatively small group of individuals who are using the IPCC process to control what policymakers and the public learn about climate on multi-decadal time scales.”
That’s the UN IPCC.
That same UN that has lost all cred with normal people.
Can anyone list just one functional UN department?
Roger Pielke’s account reads as nothing more than a dummy spit.
Tim Curtin: no, Tamino claims no such thing. Read the article. See the bit where he says “let’s create some artificial data, the sum of a steady trend at a rate of 0.018 deg.C/yr…and pure ARMA(1,1) noise…. With these parameters, it’ll have just about the same structure as GISS monthly temperature data since 1975.”
But that’s quite beside the point. The point is that even when the trend is monotonously upward, the noise pattern can create apparent downward ‘trends’. Believing in those ‘trends’ requires you to blind yourself to reality.
RW, Tamino and many other believers, are being forced into more statistical artifice to tell their disintegrating story. Torturing the data until it tells the story wanted is not a good practice because reality tends to override the stats. You are showing signs of desperation by believing the stats story over your own eyes. Of course you may live in an area where it has not gotten noticeably colder, and therefore, can not relate.
How unusual is the recent series of warm years?
E. Zorita
Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS Research Centre, Geesthacht, Germany
T. F. Stocker
Physics Institute and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
H. von Storch
Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS Research Centre, Geesthacht, Germany
Previous statistical detection methods based partially on climate model simulations indicate that, globally, the observed warming lies very probably outside the natural variations. We use a more simple approach to assess recent warming at different spatial scales without making explicit use of climate simulations. It considers the likelihood that the observed recent clustering of warm record-breaking mean temperatures at global, regional and local scales may occur by chance in a stationary climate. Under two statistical null-hypotheses, autoregressive and long-memory, this probability turns to be very low: for the global records lower than p = 0.001, and even lower for some regional records. The picture for the individual long station records is not as clear, as the number of recent record years is not as large as for the spatially averaged temperatures.
Received 5 October 2008; accepted 18 November 2008; published 30 December 2008.
Citation: Zorita, E., T. F. Stocker, and H. von Storch (2008), How unusual is the recent series of warm years?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L24706, doi:10.1029/2008GL036228.
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 35, L23712, doi:10.1029/2008GL035984, 2008
What is causing the variability in global mean land temperature?
Martin Hoerling
Earth System Research Laboratory, NOAA,
Boulder, Colorado, USA
Arun Kumar
Climate Predicton Center, NOAA,
Camp Springs, Maryland, USA
Jon Eischeid
Earth System Research Laboratory, NOAA,
Boulder, Colorado, USA
Bhaskar Jha
WYLE Information Systems,
Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA
[1] Diagnosis of climate models reveals that most of the observed variability of global mean land temperature during 1880–2007 is caused by variations in global sea surface temperatures (SSTs). Further, most of the variability in global SSTs have themselves resulted from external radiative forcing due to greenhouse gas, aerosol, solar and volcanic variations, especially on multidecadal time scales. Our results indicate that natural variations internal to the Earth’s climate system have had a relatively small impact on the low frequency variations in global mean land temperature. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the recent trajectory of terrestrial warming can be overwhelmed (and become colder than normal) as a consequence of natural variability.
Given global monitoring capabilities and advanced climate modeling tools, can the behavior of the global mean land temperature be anticipated for coming years and decades? What is the likelihood, for instance, that internally generated coupled ocean-atmosphere variations could drive colder global mean land temperatures and temporarily mask the externally forced warming trend? The answer to the question hinges on the expectation for global SSTs. In particular, colder than normal global SSTs would appear to be a necessary condition to cause coolness in terrestrial temperatures. In this regard, it is worth noting that 30 years have passed since global SSTs were last observed to be cooler than normal (1921–1970 climatology). Not coincidentally, an identical period has also passed since global mean land temperatures were also last cooler than normal. If one assumes that the 0.20°C standard deviation of annual global mean land temperature prior to the 1970s was the result of internal variability alone, then in light of the current warming amplitude of 0.8°C, an internally generated cold event of the magnitude of at least four times the standard deviation would be required for global mean temperature to be cooler than 1921–1970 mean. It is expected that a detailed analysis of the sources of variance in the time series of global mean land temperature will advance our capability to predict and to guide development of prediction systems for the annual and decadal variability.
The IPCC/AGW promotion industry has done to climate science what eugenics did to evolution in the late 19th- mid 20th century.
I saw an excellent take down of the current financial mess last night. One of the most interesting points was how the modelers of financial risk were able to garner huge honors and consensus support, up to and including the Nobel Prize in economics, yet miss out on basics.
They, like the AGW promotion industry, confused projections for data models for explanations and consensus for truth.
The price for doing this with our financial system will be something we are all paying for the rest of our lives. The price for following the same follies irt climate science may actually be higher.
Luke,
Just where ever has there been a ‘static climate’ to model?
Jennifer, any article starting with the “1998” claim is completely discredited.
What would it take to show GW is not unnatural? How much geological history? How does one prove that the past 150 years is outside the norm?
Now for the kicker. Where is the historical record that we have ever had runaway warming? Where is the record that shows it was due to CO2?
There is ample evidence showing that CO2 has been many times higher than today. Climate sensitivity to CO2 is falsified.
re the “1998” bit – I’m pretty sure that is Jennifer’s intro bias showing, and should not really taint the reading of the article. I know I’ve been in meetings in my life where I wanted one way, and the people who wanted the other way won. Such is life.
RW
As a layman I find it incredible that a trend line can be caused by ‘dominant noise’. Surely the temperature anomalies on the graphs are not ‘noise’? I would very much like to have an answer from a believer in AGW to the question “How many years of global cooling do you need to have before you will abandon your belief in AGW? – even if you can prove that there has been no cooling this century”
on a post addressing the monopoly of global warmers in the offices of gov, luke trots out a conga line of climate changing J P Morgans, from the committee of public information.
Has NOAA figured out where that extra atmospheric kenetic motion is hiding? Perhaps in a ‘hot pocket’ over Siberia? Or maybe it’s all in the great Arizona “red spot” Anthony Watt’s discovered the other day?
Soon the committee will be passing directives to weather bureaus ; “Cold fronts will be henceforth refered to as ‘less warm zones’ – by directive of President Obama’s committee for public information.”
So a ten year span is just ‘noise’ but 100 years, with dubious data sources, and changes well within the margin of error is a clear and dramatic trend? lol.
There is no end to AGW believer rationalizations.
RW, we all understand that a short term downward trend of 10 years can be riding on a longer term upward trend. It is infantile to assume that we don’t realize that. I really think that Tamino was “kicking in an open door” (a Dutch saying). However, his argument can be equally employed to dismiss the importance of the 30 year upward trend that is now being heralded by the IPCC as evidence of man induced global warming.
Luke indicates the use of ….” a more simple approach to assess recent warming at different spatial scales without making explicit use of climate simulations. It considers the likelihood that the observed recent clustering of warm record-breaking mean temperatures at global, regional and local scales may occur by chance in a stationary climate.”
I think the catch is in that word “recent”. All such studies start with a base period of time. Whatever the statistical method, essentially they produce a graph which will demonstrate either a trend (up or down) or no trend at all (neutral).
It is not wrong to consider a decadal trend. It is not wrong to condsider a multi-decadal trend.
BUT such studies are strictly confined to the base period. In the absence of a comprehensive theory of climate, extreme care must be taken in drawing conclusions in relation to phenomena which develop over centuries or millenia on the basis of decadal of multi-decadal trends.
An analogy might be the movement of the stars in our galaxy. Since it takes around 200,000 years for the earth to revolve around the galactic centre, direct observation and measurement of that motion is thin on the ground. However, the situation is rescued by the theory of universal gravitation which allows reasonably accurate calculation of movement into the past as well as into the future.
Such is not the case with a ‘theory of climate’. Whatever strides may have been made towards such a theory we are not there yet.
Accordingly, it seems to me that the only course at present available to us is to study ancient climates. Against that time base, the statements made by some in relation to dangerous anthropogenic warming trends appear to be unsupported by the available evidence.
re the “1998″ bit – I’m pretty sure that is Jennifer’s intro bias showing, and should not really taint the reading of the article.
it is like reading an article on tactics in chess. in the first line, the author gets the movement rules for pawns wrong.
now the rest of the article could still include some tactical gems. but the chances are really really really small!
So a ten year span is just ‘noise’ but 100 years, with dubious data sources, and changes well within the margin of error is a clear and dramatic trend? lol.
There is no end to AGW believer rationalizations.
i have said this quite often now. apart from the problems with short term “trends”, there is a real big problem with a “trend” starting in 1998. simply because the 1998 trend will show a VERY different result to the 1997 and the 1999 one. A TREND THAT GOES UP OR DOWN DEPENDING ON ONE YEAR CHANGES TO THE STARTPOINT, IS NOT A TREND!
However, his argument can be equally employed to dismiss the importance of the 30 year upward trend that is now being heralded by the IPCC as evidence of man induced global warming.
no.
the 30 years number was there BEFORE the AGW “controversy”. looking at 30 years makes a lot of sense, because of the increase in our CO2 output over that time.
looking at 10000 years to evaluate man made global warming, is simply stupid.
“looking at 10000 years to evaluate man made global warming, is simply stupid.”
This tells all about the mindset of the AGW zealots.
You simply will not understand that what we are saying is, that climate has changed before and it was warmer and colder without human interference.
Your premise is, that now, it is human induced climate change and to you, it’s a dogma you cannot abandon. CO2 is increasing, yet the temp. does not follow as predicted.
Wow, Hansen states that the best estimate of the GHG warming trend is now ~0.15°C per decade. This is significant.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2009/20090113_Temperature.pdf
How much further down can he go?
RW:
“The point is that even when the trend is monotonously upward, the noise pattern can create apparent downward ‘trends’. ”
This is the part where both you and Tamino are fools.
The fact that Tamino was able to find downward trends within the data is simply another case of Tamino pulling the wool over people’s eyes with his statistical sophistry. He purposely fails to reproduce a real world comparison where several data sets are all in agreement. We have both satellite data and ground data that independently confirm the flattening of the trend. We have HadCrut3, RSS, and UAH. We also have a lack of warming of the oceans for the last 6 years. And we have a lack of sea level rise for the last 3 years.
In order for Tamino to produce an example that wasn’t simply a lie, he would have had to take two or three runs and then he would have had to shown that these runs all had decade long periods that exatly overlapped where there was no warming. And he would have had to use the first two or three runs that he created. Of course he couldn’t do that. In addition, the independent data sets create what you are calling “noise” in almost exactly the same way. In other words, the satellite data falls when the surface data falls. The satellite date rises when the surface data rises. The match isn’t exact, but it is pretty close. You are never going to get such an effect from noise runs. And the reason is that the satellites and the ground stations are not measuring noise – they are measuring natural variation. And since what you are calling noise is, in fact, mostly real temperature variation, then the warmers should be able to explain what elements of variation are overriding the trend. But of course they cannot.
Jennifer’s statement is exactly correct. And you look like the fool for swallowing Tamino’s agenda driven hat tricks.
Sod:
“A TREND THAT GOES UP OR DOWN DEPENDING ON ONE YEAR CHANGES TO THE STARTPOINT, IS NOT A TREND!”
Are you still making those silly noises Sod? All trends, including those used by the warmers, change if you change the starting point.
I have already shown you, multiple times, that using the 98 El Nino is not a problem because it is immediately followed by a long La Nina. I have also shown you that there were 7 ENSO events over the period, and that their overall effect on the trend was tiny. And I have shown you that applying Gavin’s ENSO corrections to the HadCrut3 data has almost no effect on the slope of the trend. So why are you still ranting about the inconsequential?
Stuart: I got a direct answer from a climate fellow over at BraveNewClimate (not Prof Brook I don’t think though) and he suggested that it would take another 5-6 years of similar temperatures (with no other reason such as lots of la ninas or say volcanoes etc) for the “cooling” trend to become significant statistically. Now you guys may claim tha is concenient… but it seemed to me to be an honest statistical answer.
Why don;t you go to Real CLimate or Bravenewclimate and ask the question. Of course if you say “I think you guys are all turkeys, climate science is a hoax, just how long does it have to cool for to see that!” you will not get the same answer as “Guys, I read a lot about post 1998 cooling… in your opinion how much longer would temperatures need to plateau for to become statistically relevant.”
Will one of the climate zombies please explain how a sea surface temperature driven global temperature increase could be the result of CO2 forcing when 95% of solar radiation is absorbed by cloudless oceans. On my maths that leaves only 5% remaining to be subject to CO2 mollestation. Put simply, Albedo = potential for CO2 mollestation.
See the range of albedos for differing planetary surfaces at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albedo
Meanwhile, a desert on cloudless land will absorb up to 70% of insolation, leaving a comparatively massive 30% remaining subject to CO2 mollestation. Cleared land absorbs less than a forest but the actual change in albedo from land use change is only in the order of 5%, in a band running from 5% to 15% albedo for forests and 10% to 20% for pasture.
The albedo for snow ranges from 40% for old snow to 85% for fresh snow and this might seem critical were it not for the fact that the majority of snow cover takes place during winter when solar radiation is lowest. The albedo (percentage) is high but the actual inputs are low.
Yet, planetary albedo is 30% and this essentially the same for both oceans and land. Clouds being the main agents that bring these two surfaces into balance. And of course, the climate muddles are notorious for their uncertain treatment of clouds.
This uncertainty is due to the fact that they both reflect insolation and prevent the escape of infrared radiation. In fact, when clouds over oceans, and any other highly absorbing surface, reflect insolation they do so at a higher altitude than the surface layer. And this means that the height of the intervening cloud will determine how much atmosphere (and CO2) is available for the “blanketing” or climate forcing of that reflected energy.
The reflection from a cloud at altitude of 5,400 metres will have only half the volume of atmospheric CO2 for climate forcing as the reflection from the ocean or land surface. The higher the reflecting cloud, the less atmosphere and CO2 is available for climate forcing. Most of the CO2 underneath that cloud is rendered redundant. This is further complicated by the fact that lower to medium level clouds like stratus can have an albedo of 35% while Stratocumullus will have an albedo as high as 75%.
What this means is that the entire greenhouse industry is fixated on the climate forcing impacts of non-cloud atmospheric agents when, over the 70% oceanic portion of the planetary surface (+ the forested portion of land surface) variations in direct solar heat absorption take place on a scale 6 times greater than the cloudless potential for climate forcing. That is, maximum cloudless oceanic absorption is 95% of insolation while average net clouded absorption is only 70%. And the remaining 30% albedo is exposed to up to 50% less CO2 than the surface 5%.
Talk about one eyed kings in the kingdom of the blind.
Jeremy C
“Roger Pielke’s account reads as nothing more than a dummy spit.”
Obviously the ramblings of a demented idiot that is not actually able to read or understand anything and also has no idea what a Dummy Spit is.
Sod,
So, AGW promoters get to pick and choose when and where to measure, and skeptics have to do what AGW believers want…Not.
1998 is a great place, because according to the AGW community, that is the the year that the AGW signal of temp increases became quite clear.
That temps are not going up, as predicted, since then, is a great place to start a trend.
That temps have changed in the last 100 years a sparrow’s burp- within the MOE is the most interesting part of this yet.
That even Hansen is leaving his AGW flock milling around as he lowers his temp estimates is just icing on the cake.
But as always, when an AGW believer is pressed, the unfalsifiable nature of AGW beleifs becomes obvious.
“…since about 1998 global warming has stalled. ”
Has the total heat capacity of the climate system increased, decreased, or stalled since 1998?
The largest component of the climate system’s heat content is the oceans*. The volume of the oceans seem to have expanded steadily since 1998**, along with the CO2 level. Is this a coincidence? Could these two rising trends be related somehow?
references:
* http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~jsmerdon/papers/Beltrami_et_al_Journal.pdf
* http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL-76939-2006-AB.pdf
** http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/sea-level-drop.jpg
I looked at the Tamino blog posting. Let’s keep this simple:
“a steady trend at a rate of 0.018 deg.C/yr”
91 years x 0.018c/yr = 1.6C temp increase.
The IPCC is forecasting a 2-6C temperature increase in around 90 years from now. Why does Tamino base the analysis on half the IPCC mean forecast annual trend — rather than a reasonable 4C? (middle number).
Is this because he feels the IPCC is wrong by more than 50 percent? Or because he can’t make the numbers work if he uses the actual forecast average trend? (Then the problem for a 10 year time frame does become obvious perhaps.)
As I’ve said before, I’m sceptical of the contrarians but when clumsy sleight of hands are obvious from ‘respected’ sources I become equally sceptical of the ‘orthodox’ position.
Stuart: I got a direct answer from a climate fellow over at BraveNewClimate (not Prof Brook I don’t think though) and he suggested that it would take another 5-6 years of similar temperatures (with no other reason such as lots of la ninas or say volcanoes etc) for the “cooling” trend to become significant statistically. Now you guys may claim tha is concenient… but it seemed to me to be an honest statistical answer.
From:
http://www.nationalpost.com/scripts/story.html?id=525590
Even Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, reluctantly admitted to Reuters in January that there has been no warming so far in the 21st Century.
You may have heard earlier this month that global warming is now likely to take a break for a decade or more. There will be no more warming until 2015, perhaps later.
Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U. N.’s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.
Of course, Mr. Keenlyside– long a defender of the man-made global warming theory — was quick to add that after 2015 (or perhaps 2020), warming would resume with a vengeance.
Climate alarmists the world over were quick to add that they had known all along there would be periods when the Earth’s climate would cool even as the overall trend was toward dangerous climate change.
Sorry, but that is just so much backfill.
Will. I think you will find that Tamino’s “rate of 0.018” was referring to an alleged observed trend over the last 100 years or so, although Giss records only 0.7oC. The IPCC’s central forecast for BAU in 2100 is 3oC, +/- 1.5. As I pointed out in my Quadrant article, Arrhenius forecast a global 3.4oC for 50% increase in atmospheric CO2, and 5.5oC for a doubling of CO2, to 560 ppm. Thus he predicted a declining rate of increase per extra ppm of CO2. It is far from clear why IPCC predicts that large acceleration from the observed 0.7oC, for the not quite 50% increase in CO2 to date, for the next 50%, given general agreement (even by IPCC and Garnaut) that temperature increase with respect to rising CO2 is logarithmic, i.e flattening, not accelerating. The truth is that both the science and math of the IPCC are wobbly and about to keel over.
“The volume of the oceans seem to have expanded steadily since 1998**”
Not true. There has been no rise in sea level in the last three years, and there has been no rise in the oceans heat content in the last six.
Below is the address Prof. Ian Plimer gave to the Sydney Mining Club last November.
It proves beyond doubt that AGW proponents cherry pick data, that there is a large body of scientific peer reviewed papers by sceptical scientists, and that what we are observing now is normal climate variation.
http://www.sydneyminingclub.org/presentations/2008/november/plimer/player.html
Anyone who asserts that climate sceptics don’t publish in the peer reviewed journals is not in command of all the facts.
Hi Tim,
“I think you will find that Tamino’s “rate of 0.018″ was referring to an alleged observed trend over the last 100 years or so, although Giss records only 0.7oC.”
I wanted to keep it as simple as possible…. if you want to start talking about logarithmic rates, etc., you start getting into feedbacks, and other aspects of atmospheric physics, which nobody is really qualified to discuss except for atmospheric physicists. If Tamino has intellectual integrity he should redo the analysis with the average predicted rate of warming as per the IPCC, and then show me that 10 years of cooling, flat or very mildly warming temperatures, is still credible. If so, I’ll accept the argument. If he has to plug a number into his analysis that is well below the lowest outcome forecast by the IPPC, I think everyone will obviously have a problem with that. Maybe his analysis will still work if he uses a realistic number, but at the very least it looks bad when he doesn’t.
Louis… what makes you think all thouse journal articles were sceptical?
MattB: ” what makes you think all thouse journal articles were sceptical?
Have you listened to and looked at the slides in Plimer’s address? When you can demonstrate that, come back. Knowing Plimer I don’t think he would waste time on non sceptical papers.
MattB:
Who said the articles were sceptical – I said explicitly that climate sceptics do get published in the peer reviewed journals. I made no comment one way or the other on those articles specifically.
so you don;t think he would bulk up the list with articles that study solar things and slip them in a slide to make it look like there is a mountain of peer reviewed “evidence” against AGW?
Actually I didn;t pick up on a audio link. I just read the slides assuming that was all there was to it.
RW,
“Is there no end to the claims that “since about 1998 global warming has stalled”? Do you not realise that over ten years, noise dominates? Do you not understand that physically and statistically, this claim is totally meaningless?”
Uhmm well, no. I don’t understand that testing a hypothesis on a trend against data to see if the hypothesis model is in line with the outcome is statistically meaningless. In fact, exactly that is done all over the world by all kinds of professions that uses models: engineers, miners, economists, traffic planners etc. Are we all wrong? If so, the development the world have seen is an illusion? The bridges failed, the cars don’t work, the airplanes crashes, cancer is not detected?
Can you please explain why a basic technique all sane people over the world uses to validate models would not apply to climate science?
MattB
It should play automatically so I suggest you perhaps click the play button at the bottom of the player screen.
Someone with Plimer’s reputation would not make that crass error. There is a mountain of peer reviewed evidence against AGW – its called GEOLOGY. Climate is in our academic purview, because of the rocks.
Oh by the way ocean acidification might become a problem if we ran out of rocks. You seem acid rain dissolves rocks which results in alkali runnoff which goes to the oceans.
Steve Short might add to this inconvenient fact.
But no MattB, Plimer would not have bulked up the slides to give the impression. Better you listen to what he said before replying.
Louis… I have the PC volume muted at work… so I guess when I pressed play and it was a ppt presentation I had not expected any sound so it didn’t occur to me there was a sountrack. honest circumstances.
He gives an excellent example of trying to understand climate, when you have no idea of the physics of the forcings, or the current state of the science. To claim that the last 11 years of climate change are due purely to solar forcings flies in the face of the evidence. He should stick to what he knows.
Are you still making those silly noises Sod? All trends, including those used by the warmers, change if you change the starting point.
here is how the 30 years trend changes with a change of start year: basically it doesn t.
the ten years trend on the other hand changes DIRECTION twice if you add/subtract 1 year!
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1978/plot/wti/from:1979/trend/plot/wti/from:1980/trend/plot/wti/from:1981/trend
I have already shown you, multiple times, that using the 98 El Nino is not a problem because it is immediately followed by a long La Nina.
your method was horrible. sorry Tilo, but you showed nothing.
Thanks Tilo, for responding with:
“There has been no rise in sea level in the last three years, and there has been no rise in the oceans heat content in the last six.”
Move your goalposts much?
1998 was not in the “last three years”, it was eleven years ago. 1998 was not six years ago, it was eleven years ago.
And how can you say there was no rise in the last three years when the satellite data have the highest ever recorded sea level within the last year of data (35.757 @ 2008.407)?
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.jpg
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.txt
It may be true that ocean heat content has not risen in the last six years, it is much harder to measure (there is no global satellite measurement system like there is for GMSL). If so, then how do you explain continued rising sea levels during the same time frame? If it is not due to thermal expansion, then the only short term mechanism is melting land ice. That would both depress ocean heat content as the ice absorbs heat from the ocean to melt the calving icebergs, and raise sea level due to increased mass of water. Is that really helping your argument?
If we move the goalposts back to 1998, can we all agree that sea level is higher now by 25 to 30mm than 1998?
And that higher sea level, whether due to thermal expansion or melting cryosphere or both, is fully consistent with continued global warming (in the context of increasing heat content of the climate system).
Why do we obsess about the heat content of the atmosphere when it comprises 3% of the total climate system?
I want to correct my earlier remarks. Upon re-reading AR4, I did find a sentence that asserts a likely .2c/decade rise for the first few decades of the 20th century. AR4 does cover its bases well and asserts that all temperature rises between .4C and 3.8C are “probable”.
The lesson here is to check what alarmists claim in the media and in press releases (typically 4-6C temperature increases asserted as likely) versus what is actually claimed. “Best estimates” for temperature increases based on different scenarios range from 1.8C to 4C. Temperature trends over the last 10 years aren’t statistically impossible and only fall in the unlikely range for the time being. So long as temperatures shoot up by about half a degree over the next 10 years or so (as some temperature “catch up” now needs to take place), the IPCC should be on target for its middle guesstimate.
That was meant to read “21st century…”
MattB
Fair enough – you would need to listen to it at home then.
Sod,
You omit other more important factors for sea level rises and falls – crustal rising and sinking. Tuvalu is sinking because the seafloor under it is sinking (its on a volcanoe), extraction of ground water, and all sorts of other factors excluded from consideration. These are generally geological factors which are excluded in toto from the IPCC reviews.
As for sea level it has been rising and falling at all levels for a very very long time. The present sea level changes are not unusual at all.
You do make a valid point about the heat content of the atmosphere representing 3% of the total climate system – yopu might ponder why the geological contributions to the climate system, by modulating the temperatures of the oceans, are not factored into this. And once yuou accept that geological factors dominate, then what drives those?
The AGW issue is in a mess because fundamental geological fact has been ignored from the outset.
AGW is a politically driven movement that uses science to get its point across. Unfortunately the science is not being done well at all.
Hi Louis,
I agree that geological processes are and have always been affecting sea level. But these are very slow processes – they are functions of the Earth’s mantle moving around. The mantle moves, but it is really, really slow. It certainly can’t explain the sudden, rapid volumetric increase of the ocean since 1998 (just to pick a time point relevant to this thread).
“The present sea level changes are not unusual at all.”
Your are conflating the slow geological mantle movements with the rapid sea level rises that happened as a function of Ice Ages. They were a function of ice masses growing and melting. That is a function of climate processes. Ice masses melt when they gain heat – from the climate system (with a boost from Milankovich), not from geological processes. You actually sound overly alarmist if you are comparing the present rate of sea level change to the end of the last Ice Age. It’s fast, but not that fast.
Only climate can explain why the rate of sea level rise has increased from ~.5mm/yr two centuries ago, to 1mm/yr fifty years ago, then to 3mm/yr over the last few decades. Can the mantle suddenly speed up its activity by a factor of 6? Just as CO2 start to build up? Seems an unlikely coincidence. Geology doesn’t change that fast.
There are no natural factors that explain the gradually increasing, and accelerating, heat content of the ocean and cryosphere over the last 200 years. Only CO2 has been gradually and exponentially increasing over that time frame.
Milankovich forcings are neutral to cooling at present.
Solar was up for a few hundred years, but flat recently during the most rapid GMSL change.
Did I miss any other natural factors?
Regards,
Brad
Brad, there’s no point discussing mantle geology with Louis. He doesn’t believe in plate tectonics…
NT: ”
Brad, there’s no point discussing mantle geology with Louis. He doesn’t believe in plate tectonics…”
And what the heck has that got to do with mantle geology – belief in plate tectonics – means an absence of science.
How freaking stupid can one become.
Brad – perhaps you should listen to Plimer’s address and specifically the bit about the many variables ignored in explaining sea level changes.
As for me conflating slow mantle movements with rapid sea level rises – oh where did I do that?
You obviously have not listened to Plimer’s address, so I maybe do that before instructing 62 year old practising geologists how to bang rocks.
Hi Louis,
When you and Plimer compare the most rapid sea level changes at the end of the last ice age (he says 10mm/yr) to the slow changes in mantle convection rates, oceanic subduction rates, etc – that is confusing climate caused sea level changes with geologically caused changes. Geology did not change at the end of the last Ice Age, climate did.
A simple way to resolve this is consider the rapid increase in the rate of sea level change occuring over the last few decades (from 0.5mm/yr to 3mm/yr). Is this caused by a sudden change in mantle convection, MOR basalt heat, or some other subsurface phenomena?
Or is it caused by a change in the heat content of the ocean and cryosphere?
If you aren’t even willing to directly answer this question, then you are avoiding the facts in front of you.
I do appreciate your willingness to discuss this, but I am worried that you will continue to avoid the subject of heat content in the climate system.
Brad,
The end of the last ice remains one of the most controversial and disputatious areas of science.
One factor which most seem to ignore is the massive depletion of ground water reserves by humanity. Lance Endersbee has described this in detail elsewhere on this blog, and in his book.
I side with Endersbee that ground water is not recycled rainwater, (some of it is) but generally humanity has extracted an enormous amount of water, caused signficant land subsidence, and this water has not returned back into the lower crust – for one simple reason, it can’t from a density contrast. So it goes into the oceans and this water source is ignored in climate science because of the entenched belief that all ground water is recycled rainwater, and hence not a factor.
Humanity has recently had the technology to pump enormous quantities of water from bore holes and most of these are now dry – oddly this has happened over the last 50 years or so since WWII.
You also need to keep things in perspective – elsewhere on Jen’s blog is a diagram prepared by Lance Endersbee that shows graphically to scale the thickness of the oceans in comparison to the Earth itself. It is a whisper thin layer of water, so the thermal behaviour of this film of liquid will be dominated by the Earth itself.
Other subsurface phenomena need to include the large electrical currents passing through the atmosphere via the flux tube events, into the earth. The Earth is very hot down below and that heat cannot be supplied by radiogenic sources, since these deplete over time. The only energy source left is electricty and it is only recently that NASA has identified them. So here is an entirely newly discovered source of heat that no one suspected.
Thirdly I see the Earth’s surface as its interface between itself as a quasi metallic ball immersed in the electric plasma of the solar system. The physical activity on that interface would be dominated by electrical forces, but these are not well understood, though electrical engineers are well aware of them when they affect the various systems we have built. Again Science Daily reported on this recently. The association of lightning with tropical hurricanes etc suggests that rather being effects of atmospheric motion in hurricanes that the observed lighting might instead indicate the presence of electrical forces generating those hurricanes, most of that electrical activity occurring in dark current mode, so we don’t see it. We do know that hurricanes are associated with electric fields in excess of 10,000 volts per metre.
I suggest you Google Bruce Leybourne and read his published papers on surge tectonics and EM effects – geology does have a reasonable explanation for the PDO but it’s ignored.
If the only thermal inputs to the climate system are solar radiation and heat retention by greenhouse gases, then we should have worked it out by now. That it remains a highly disputed area of science sgtrongly suggests we heed Fred Hoyle’s observation – that after allocating enormous resources to a problem, for a long period of time with many, many scientists, and we still have not solved the physics, then maybe that is because we are thinking with the wrong ideas.
I am suggesting that we should include electricity as a significant input into the climate system.
“Is there no end to the claims that “since about 1998 global warming has stalled”? Do you not realise that over ten years, noise dominates?”
Well thats an own goal by a confirmed idiot if ever we did see one.
Hi Louis,
As I feared, you studiously avoided answering the question of climate system heat content. Instead, you tried two diversions.
1st, the depletion of groundwater. You put up a ridiculous strawman – that climate science is ignoring this contribution to sea level rise. And then you implied that it is responsible for the observed accelerating sea level rise.
20 seconds of googling is enough to disprove both obfuscations.
Measurement and modeling of the very thing you claim is ignored:
http://discover-decouvrir.cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/dcvr/jsp/showresult.jsp?article=0
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2006WR004941.shtml
ftp://ftp.csr.utexas.edu/pub/ggfc/papers/2000GL011595.pdf
Estimates of terrestial water used in sea level change budgets:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page5.php
And if you can bring yourself to lay eyes in the dreaded IPCC reports, they have a section called “5.5.5.4 Anthropogenic Change in Land Water Storage” where they estimate the total net contribution to sea level change to be “on the order of 0.05mm/yr, with an uncertainty several times as large”.
All the estimates and measurement that I could find agree that this is a very minor contributor to sea level change.
Diversion #2: Electricity as an input to the heat content of the climate system.
I’ll consider it when you can show some data. Can you point to any published study that estimates the magnitude of this effect, in watts/square meter, or joules/yr for the Earth?
Thanks in advance for your data,
Brad
P.S.
Will you be able to answer the question about the total change in the heat content of the climate system since 1998?