World's Energy Crisis Postponed?

by leavingwt 58 Replies latest social current

leavingwt

My apologies to leavingwt for taking this thread off the subject.
No problem.
Every few weeks, this forum kicks around a Global Warming football.
BurnTheShips

The models in question did not predict this cooling because it is the result of SOLAR ACTIVITY. It being solar activity puts it in the domain of solarphysicists not climatologists. It is thus unfair to say they botched anything up. Being a quirk in solar activity it is inevitable that the sun will go back to normal. Twenty years is just a guess, the actual range is 1 to 100 years.
Climatology has to take into account solar inputs or it is worthless. The sun is the main driver of climate and weather. This is a nonsensical attempt at a rebuttal.
BTS
villabolo

BurnThe Ships:
"Climatology has to take into account solar inputs or it is worthless. The sun is the main driver of climate and weather. This is a nonsensical attempt at a rebuttal.
No burns you just don't understand the proceedure. Until now Climatologists assumed that the sun would stay steady, so yes they did take that simple assumption into account. What they did not take into account was a fluctuation in the suns activity. Even Solar Physicists weren't expecting this.
Now that the sun has cooled off climatologists have to make two separate predictions. One prediction if and when the sun will stay cool throughout the duration of their model and another prediction in case the sun goes back to normal.
Sooner or later the sun will go back to normal but what are people and their so called leaders going to do with that pause? What they've always done, nothing.
villabolo
BurnTheShips

Until now Climatologists assumed that the sun would stay steady, so yes they did take that simple assumption into account. What they did not take into account was a fluctuation in the suns activity. Even Solar Physicists weren't expecting this.
Really, that simply has to be bull crap. We've known about the solar cycle since the early 1800's. We've known about it's impact on climate since at least the 1970's. The Maunder minimum was responsible for the "little ice age" of the 16th-17th century. We've had theories of solar variation and orbital cycles forcing climate since at least Milankovitch, which is decades earlier than that. We've also known that the latter half of the 20th century was a time of stronger solar activity than during the previous hundred years. This omission casts a long shadow on the faithful of the Church of Goreball Worming.
BTS
villabolo
FROM WWW.REALCLIMATE.ORG
A warming pause?
Filed under:
— stefan @ 6 October 2009
The blogosphere (and not only that) has been full of the “global warming is taking a break” meme lately. Although we have discussed this topic repeatedly, it is perhaps worthwhile reiterating two key points about the alleged pause here.
(1) This discussion focuses on just a short time period – starting 1998 or later – covering at most 11 years. Even under conditions of anthropogenic global warming (which would contribute a temperature rise of about 0.2 ºC over this period) a flat period or even cooling trend over such a short time span is nothing special and has happened repeatedly before (see 1987-1996). That simply is due to the fact that short-term natural variability has a similar magnitude (i.e. ~0.2 ºC) and can thus compensate for the anthropogenic effects. Of course, the warming trend keeps going up whilst natural variability just oscillates irregularly up and down, so over longer periods the warming trend wins and natural variability cancels out.
(2) It is highly questionable whether this “pause” is even real. It does show up to some extent (no cooling, but reduced 10-year warming trend) in the Hadley Center data, but it does not show in the GISS data, see Figure 1. There, the past ten 10-year trends (i.e. 1990-1999, 1991-2000 and so on) have all been between 0.17 and 0.34 ºC per decade, close to or above the expected anthropogenic trend, with the most recent one (1999-2008) equal to 0.19 ºC per decade – just as predicted by IPCC as response to anthropogenic forcing.
Figure 1. Global temperature according to NASA GISS data since 1980. The red line shows annual data, the larger red square a preliminary value for 2009, based on January-August. The green line shows the 25-year linear trend (0.19 ºC per decade). The blue lines show the two most recent ten-year trends (0.18 ºC per decade for 1998-2007, 0.19 ºC per decade for 1999-2008) and illustrate that these recent decadal trends are entirely consistent with the long-term trend and IPCC predictions. Even the highly “cherry-picked” 11-year period starting with the warm 1998 and ending with the cold 2008 still shows a warming trend of 0.11 ºC per decade (which may surprise some lay people who tend to connect the end points, rather than include all ten data points into a proper trend calculation).

Why do these two surface temperature data sets differ over recent years? We analysed this a while ago here, and the reason is the “hole in the Arctic” in the Hadley data, just where recent warming has been greatest.

Figure 2. The animated graph shows the temperature difference between the two 5-year periods 1999-2003 and 2004-2008. The largest warming has occurred over the Arctic in the past decade and is missing in the Hadley data.
If we want to relate global temperature to global forcings like greenhouse gases, we’d better not have a “hole” in our data set. That’s because global temperature follows a simple planetary heat budget, determined by the balance of what comes in and what goes out. But if data coverage is not really global, the heat budget is not closed. One would have to account for the heat flow across the boundary of the “hole”, i.e. in and out of the Arctic, and the whole thing becomes ill-determined (because we don’t know how much that is). Hence the GISS data are clearly more useful in this respect, and the supposed pause in warming turns out to be just an artifact of the “Arctic hole” in the Hadley data – we don’t even need to refer to natural variability to explain it.
Imagine you want to check whether the balance in your accounts is consistent with your income and spendings – and you find your bank accounts contain less money than you expected, so there is a puzzling shortfall. But then you realise you forgot one of your bank accounts when doing the sums – and voila, that is where the missing money is, so there is no shortfall after all. That missing bank account in the Hadley data is the Arctic – and we’ve shown that this is where the “missing warming” actually is, which is why there is no shortfall in the GISS data, and it is pointless to look for explanations for a warming pause.
It is noteworthy in this context that despite the record low in the brightness of the sun over the past three years (it’s been at its faintest since beginning of satellite measurements in the 1970s), a number of warming records have been broken during this time. March 2008 saw the warmest global land temperature of any March ever recorded in the past 130 years. June and August 2009 saw the warmest land and ocean temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere ever recorded for those months. The global ocean surface temperatures in 2009 broke all previous records for three consecutive months: June, July and August. The years 2007, 2008 and 2009 had the lowest summer Arctic sea ice cover ever recorded, and in 2008 for the first time in living memory the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage were simultaneously ice-free. This feat was repeated in 2009. Every single year of this century (2001-2008) has been warmer than all years of the 20th Century except 1998 (which sticks out well above the trend line due to a strong El Niño event).
The bottom line is: the observed warming over the last decade is 100% consistent with the expected anthropogenic warming trend of 0.2 ºC per decade, superimposed with short-term natural variability. It is no different in this respect from the two decades before. And with an El Niño developing in the Pacific right now, we wouldn’t be surprised if more temperature records were to be broken over the coming year or so.
Update: We were told there is a new paper by Simmons et al. in press with JGR that supports our analysis about the Hadley vs GISS trends (sorry, access to subscribers only).
Comments
metatron

GISS data lacks credibility:
http://globalwarmingquestions.googlepages.com/giss
Everything's melting?
http://www.iceagenow.com/Growing_Glaciers.htm
Let a champion come forward, as with Julian Simon, and make a big public bet on this. Let's see Al Gore challenge a skeptic and bet his house. I say no one will do this because they know this is a political ploy and power grab.
metatron
metatron

Oh, and you might enjoy these thumbnail photographs about the accuracy of temperature stations:
http://www.surfacestations.org/odd_sites.htm
metatron
villabolo

Metatron, you want others to read those amateurish sites but you don't bother to read what I posted about Nasa, its satellite evidence, and other pictorial evidence about glaciers retreating. Yes there are flukes-glaciers that grow but they are the exception. A recent National Geographic article listed 15 out of 16 glaciers that were in retreat. Of course, that leaves the 1 out of 16 crying out: cherry pick me! cherry pick me!
So one more time:
www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/earthandsun/climate_change.html Scroll down to the second image from the top to watch time lapse photography of the North Polar ice cap shrinking.
www.worldviewofglobalwarming.org
Then there is the testimony of the Natives who have been living in Greenland, Canada and Alaska. The permafrost is thawing, the streets are sinking in places, houses are leaning all because the ground beneath them is melting. I guess those natives must all be part of the Socialist Conspiracy tm that is out to destroy us.
villabolo
B-Rock

hen there is the testimony of the Natives who have been living in Greenland
Did you say GREENland? Why the heck did they call it GREEN if it was so much colder centuries ago?
Yes there are flukes-glaciers that grow but they are the exception.
Wow, those nonexceptional common run of the mill glaciers are simply a-mazing! They were able to anticipate our CO2 emissions by over 150 years! Glacier Bay Alaska, off of the USGS site:
But really, the fix is in. Our emissions are directly tied to the quality of our rock music. As you can see, the proliferation of sucky bands will inevitably change the situation. Correlation equals causation. RockandRollthropogenic global warming is the cause of our troubles. The Witnoids were right!
B-Rock

Ooooo! Pretty charts. Look at those glaciers go!
One of the panicky claims of global warming catastrophists is that some sort of "unprecedented" melting and retreat of glaciers is occurring tied to anthropogenic global warming. I have seen anecdotal evidence for a while that this melting of glaciers began long before the 1950-present "anthropogenic" era, but I had not seen anything systematic on the topic until I discovered this study by L. Oerlemans et al as published in Science in 2005. Download Oerlemans 2005 as pdf. His results look like this (click to enlarge):
His data for the last decade is a little squirrelly because the data sets he uses are slow to update, but the overall picture is pretty clear — a pretty steady 150+ year history of steady retreat, with the only change is slope being a flattening rather than an acceleration of the curve. Here are a few individual glaciers he highlights:
One is again left in a quandary - if recent glacial retreats are due to anthropogenic warming, then what cased the retreats before 1950 or so? And, whatever caused the earlier retreats, what made this natural effect "switch off" at the exact same instant that anthropogenic effects took over?
Update: Here is a piece of annecdotal evidence to match, a map from Alaska Geogrpahic on the retreat of the glaciers at Glacier Bay

World's Energy Crisis Postponed?

FROM WWW.REALCLIMATE.ORG

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