Whatever happened to global warming?
The title of this may be a surprise. So might the fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not last year, or 2007, but 1998. For the last decade we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. What's more, climate models did not forecast it even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise. So what on earth is going on?
Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man's influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming. They argue there are natural climate cycles over which we have no control which dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?
During the last few decades of the 20th century, our planet did warm quickly. Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the sun increasing; 98% of the earth's warmth comes from the sun. But research published by the Royal Society two years ago seemed to rule out solar influences. Its approach was to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare them with changing global temperatures. The results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
One solar scientist, however, Piers Corbyn, from the long range forecasters Weather Action, disagrees. He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says, that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.
Then there are oceans; the earth's great heat stores. And according to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the temperatures of the oceans and the planet are related. He says the oceans have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most significant is called Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). For much of the 1980s and 90s, it was in a positive cycle- ie warmer than average. Global temperatures were warm too. But in the last few years it's started to cool down. In the past such cycles have lasted for nearly 30 years.
So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles. Professor Easterbrook continues 'The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling'
So what does it all mean? Climate change sceptics argue this is evidence they have been right all along. They say there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it's insignificant compared to nature.
But those scientists who are equally passionate about man's influence on global warming argue their science is solid. The Met Office's Hadley Centre, responsible for future climate predictions, incorporates factors like solar variation and ocean cycles, along with man-made greenhouse gases, into its climate models. It says temperatures have never gone up in a straight line, and there will always be periods of slower warming, or even temporary cooling. What's crucial is the long-term trend in global temperatures. And that, according to the Met Office, is upward.
To confuse the issue even further, last month, another member of the IPCC, Dr Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University , said that we may indeed be in a period of cooling worldwide temperatures that could last another 10-20 years. But he makes it clear he has not become a sceptic; he believes that this cooling will be temporary, before the overwhelming force of man made global warming reasserts itself.
So what can we expect in the next few years? Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office says warming is set to resume quickly and strongly. Indeed, it predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998). Sceptics say it's unlikely temperatures will reach the heights of 1998 until 2030 at the earliest; indeed it's possible that because of ocean and solar cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.
One thing's for sure. The debate about what's causing global warming is far from over. Some would say it's hotting up.
A version of this article also appears in the Science & Environment section of the BBC News website.
Hello, I’m Paul Hudson, weather presenter and climate correspondent for BBC Look North in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. I've been interested in the weather and climate for as long as I can remember, and worked as a forecaster with the Met Office for more than ten years locally and at the international unit before joining the BBC in October 2007. Here I divide my time between forecasting and reporting on stories about climate change and its implications for people's everyday lives.
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~01~RS~)
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Hello Paul Hudson
I've just finished reading your interesting piece in the BBC science and environment section. I have some questions for you.
You point out the 1998 was the warmest year recorded. Fair enough - by some measures it was. But does it therefore make any sense to start a time period to measure any change in climate with a warmest year? Surely (since as we both know climate is noisy) starting with a warmest year will skew (end point bias?) such an analysis? To illustrate this, what are the trends to today from 1997 or 1999? I think both show a warming trend do they not? See http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warming-pause/ for a discussion of all this.
Piers Corbyn. Piers Corbyn is a fine self publicist, but his views on weather and climate are most dubious. He constantly exaggerates the accuracy of his weather forecast, though the truth is he's no more accurate than a guess, and his polemics about climate change, though often humorous, are more politics than science.
Professor Don Easterbrook. I find it strange you would also quote Dr Easterbrook, who is a geologist. I'm a farmer, perhaps I also know more about climate change the climatologists :) ? And who is to say changes to the PDO aren't an effect rather than a cause?
So, why not, instead of Piers Corbyn and Dr Easterbrook not seek out the views of people like Dr Gavin Schmitt or Dr Stefan Rhamsdorf?
Finally, I think you are not right about what Dr Mojib Latif said. What he said, and how it's been misquoted is summed up here: http://deepclimate.org/2009/10/02/anatomy-of-a-lie-how-morano-and-gunter-spun-latif-out-of-contro/
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Peter,
I agree it does depend on the year you start from.
I have used the "Wood for the Trees" web site to produce trend lines from Met Office data from 1998 through to 2005. Every one, except 1999, shows a downward trend in temperature over the past 10 years. (It is interesting to note that the Met.Office themselves quote the ONLY ONE which shows a positive trend on their web page)
Bob Tisdales most up to date blog on global ocean temperatures is most interesting.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/10/update-of-nodc-levitus-et-al-2009-ohc.html
He is simply quoting up to date information on ocean heat content. All show cooling except the South Pacific. Paul is simply pointing out there is an increasing amount of information suggesting that the world might be cooling. The met office claims of "half the temperatures above the 1998 high" will be most interesting over the next 10 years. Time will tell.
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I cannot offer 'expert' scientific comment on the topic of global warming, or otherwise, just a modicum of common sense, I hope, but it does certainly seem that 'something' is happening to the global temperature patterns of our planet. However, I still remain a sceptic about some of the more extreme predictions being purported.
It would seem to me that there are now a lot of vested interests attached to the global warming theories and that is fuelling some of the more outlandish claims and considerable speculation. One has to wonder if there are instances of the science being 'adjusted' to satisfy personal agendas rather than offering solid evidence. Indeed, the topic has become an 'industry' in itself and there would seem to be a lot of band wagon hopping, not least because many of those so occupied would seem to be enjoying a rather pleasant materialistic and sociable life style, not to mention perceived personal prestige, from their activities. Is that my being cynical? That may be so. But does one not observe so much official cynicism on a daily basis that one now finds difficulty with accepting many things as being factual, or truthful, or accurate?
However, the implications of the pro-global warming science being inaccurate could be equally as dramatic on our quality of life. For example, we are running like lemmings into covering huge areas of our open countryside with those hideous wind-farms. Also, it would seem we are now to dive headlong into a belated nuclear power building programme, a policy which has been hidden from public view for decades because of the perceived political disadvantages from the controversy attached to that mode of electricity generation. (Incidentally, here in France 83.9% of electricity is 'nuclear', for better or worse.)
Say whatever one likes, wind-farms are not attractive, they are not even efficient and their actual environmental impact has yet to be verified. (Indeed, what are the 'environmental' effects of the manufacture, transport, installation and maintenance of thousands of these monstrosities? Then there is their predicted short working life.) As for nuclear power stations, they are probably just as unpopular and nobody has so far offered plausible solutions for the handling of waste products.
In that respect, one cannot take government and energy generating industry public relations information as guidance on either global warming or climate change. The power generation industry especially has, belatedly, seen what they perceive as being sound commercial reasoning behind jumping on the wind-farm band wagon and governments will promote anything once they perceive that to be a useful vote-catching policy to which they can append some plausible sound bites. Yes, I am again being deliberately cynical. Indeed, on the Look North programme on Friday evening last, the presenters with understandable enthusiasm announced the building of a new coal fired power station at Hatfield. This is to use the very latest technology for capturing and pumping the carbon discharge into redundant gas wells under the North Sea. Nice idea until all of those wells are full. Also, nobody really knows how efficacious that will be, or safe. However, it is a nice 'political' idea. Indeed, the energy minister interviewed proudly proclaimed they had policies in place to 'satisfy' electricity demand well into the future. Note the word, 'satisfy'. That does not address that perception of ever increasing material and economic growth, nor the environmental impact that goes with that!
There is, however a topic which is all but taboo but will certainly influence our impact upon the environment of this planet and the quality of life for its inhabitants, population levels.
Although the subject of population growth is not really the topic under discussion here, that for me is the greatest challenge we face. The fact is that we are gradually destroying large areas of natural habitat, mostly to satisfy human survival needs and especially because of government perceptions that society must aspire to constant economic and material growth. Indeed, if those parts of the world which are currently growing at an unprecedented rate attain the level of economic and material growth predicted, (such as India, China and Brazil which already account for half of the global population), any measure we take to stabilise our global warming impact will be insignificant (we can all but forget reductions!).
Yes, the studies must continue and yes, we must not ignore the potential impact upon our globe of climate change if an inexorable temperature increase occurs as some predict. Certainly, as far as I can ascertain, there can be no disadvantages from legislating for that, other than ubiquitous crackpot electricity generating schemes which, presumably, can be dismantled. However, having said that, if the problem of population levels is not addressed, that will have a devastating effect on this plant and especially upon its occupants, the life styles of whom will become increasing intolerable and confrontational as those truly habitable areas of the planet become increasingly overcrowded. One must not lose sight of the fact that large parts of the planet can never be reasonably considered as being 'habitable'.
Perhaps a small anecdote may serve to emphasise my point of view.
Recently, I engaged in an group discussion on various topics and the subject of population levels was included. One member of the group, who describes himself as a 'geographer' (I think he is a retired geography teacher) boldly proclaimed he believed the planet could support a population of 30 billions. However, he did not offer suggestions on how that population could be reasonably sustained! (Incidentally, this same person is the proud owner of no less than three houses in three different countries.)
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To clearly state "For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures." looks at odds with the evidence.
By looking at the MET office graphs which appears to show the last decade as the warmest ever recorded with many of it's years being among the hottest recorded. How could there have been no increase?
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
It also seems odd that '11 years' is stated and not 10 or the last decade. Wouldn't the extra year include 1998 the one claimed to be the hottest on record? This will bias all the subsequent years, and give a less accurate picture of both this decade and the longer term temperature.
I reluctant to make an accusation but this would seem to be cherry picking for effect.
Overall the whole article seems to distort the scientific position on climate change and gives the impression that the science is not settled, something our own Royal Academy, not to mentions the worlds scientific academies and institutions, would disagree with.
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This article is atrocious. The author has evidently been picking over denier blogs for his 'science'. It is stuffed full of factual errors, distortion of the science, cherry picking, ignorance of trend analysis and continual false equivalence between the opinion of unnamed 'sceptics' and peer-reviewed, credible climate science.
Here are just some of the errors and distortions in this piece:
1. warmest year on record = 2005, not 1998 - and you don't establish a trend by picking the last high point - due to an extremely strong El Niño - and drawing a line from there. By that method we'd have been in a 'cooling trend' about a dozen times in the past century - when the clear trend is really *up*.
2. warmest ocean temps on record = 2009 (90% of global warming goes in to the oceans) - why is that not mentioned? Is the author ignorant of this very well-known and significant event?
3. "...the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures." - that's wrong - see above - and the 10 warmest years on record all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008. It shouldn't take a genius to realise the significance of that in determining a long-term trend.
4. "...our climate models did not forecast it..." - nonsense. Combined model accuracy is very good - http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/is-climate-modelling-science/
5. "Climate change sceptics, ... say they saw it coming." - 'sceptics' say a lot of things. Most of them aren't true. And if you dredge enough Denier blogs you can find just about any hypothesis.
6. "During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly. Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing." - even though incontrovertible evidence shows that solar output was decreasing while temperatures were rising. He's not quoting 'sceptics', he's quoting scientific illiterates.
7. "...one solar scientist Piers Corbyn ... disagrees." - he's not a 'solar scientist', he's an eccentric weatherman who has a 'secret formula' to predict future weather - and his predictions have an accuracy similar to random guesses - but that doesn't stop him trying to sell them to anyone who is gullible enough to buy them.
8. "According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated." - this is not new science! Does the author think that we just realised that ocean temperature has a relationship to atmospheric temperature?! Incredible.
9. "Climate change sceptics argue that this is evidence that they have been right all along." - they argue that *anything* that appears to cast doubt on any part of the science proves that they have been right all along. It doesn't make any difference if it is true or supported by science or even if it was known and accepted all along.
10. The comments re. Mojib Latif are Denier spin - Birth of a climate crock - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khikoh3sJg8 explains it
11. "The Met Office says that warming is set to resume quickly and strongly. ... Sceptics disagree." - the same trick over and over - attempt to suggest that there is serious debate, when in fact it is scientists on one side, wingnuts on the other.
12. "One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global warming is far from over.*" - Note the language - first it's "for sure" and then "it seems" that the debate is "far from over". The reality is that there is **no** credible scientific debate about the reality of global warming - there hasn't been for many years.
Basically, this article is built on a false equivalence that climate scientists say one thing and some (unnamed) climate 'sceptics' say another - so the argument must be equally balanced! Let's teach the controversy! It's the exact tactic used by creationists to create 'controversy' where none exists.
I'd say this journo is a Denier who is trying to inject doubt where there is none and distort the science to make it appear there is legitimate debate over what is happening. There is not. There is no credible scientific debate about whether anthropogenic climate change is real - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change.
The only legitimate, credible debate in climate science now is "How bad? How fast?"
This piece of 'journalism' is a disgraceful misrepresentation of the state of climate science. The BBC should pull it - and the author. Move him back to weather presenting, because he is clearly not capable of writing about climate science.
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Interesting blog. Something as complex as the global weather systems doesn't lend itself to simple descriptions. The CO2 levels are rising (this recession year aside) and the energy capacity of CO2 is well understood. Predicting the ultimate effects is what ordinary people want, yet it is very hard.
There are a couple of things that annoy me. The first is the short-sightedness of people like our local MEP, who can't understand that moving away from fossil fuels is an opportunity not a problem. Ignoring global warming, fossil fuels won't last forever, importing gas is a security risk and acidification of the oceans is very bad news. New technologies could be an economic goldmine, getting left behind will hurt us.
The second are the people who want to combat climate change by fiddling with the effects rather than addressing the causes. See my blog: http://allotment-chris.blogspot.com/2009/09/climate.html
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Hello Paul,
It is interesting to see the BBC has taken up the challenge of some balanced reporting on this issue. It is always concerning when one side of any scientific debate seems to get ignored by the main stream press, whichever side one happens to agree with.
w
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Mr Hudson is to be congratulated for standing up and stating that the King has no clothes. The last 10-11 years has seen virtually no increase in warming. That's a fact that can be checked using the woodfortrees site http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997/trend. You can type in Hadley's data and get the same result. Those that deny this flattening of temperature bizarrely point to realclimate as if this is some sort bible - it isn't! Anyone who reads that site knows exactly what it is! The fact that they censor opposing viewpoints really speaks volumes, and contributors there are blissfully unaware that learned people (not me!) are trying to add their piece to educate, but cannot.
The comment above by DavidCOG is quite amusing. David, I'm not going to go through your post, but just say that it's grossly inaccurate my friend. First of all, the wamest year was 1998 (it's only Nasa Giss that say it was 2005. GISS use proxy data, such as that which is over 1,000 miles away to obtain Arctic temp data). HadCRUt don't use such proxies, and therefore their results are going to be more indicative. However, it's best of all to use lower tropospheric data - which also shows 1998). Secondly, ocean temps: http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/10/update-of-nodc-levitus-et-al-2009-ohc.html Look at the last graph. Item 3 on your list shows 'incorrect thinking'. As one year is very hot (1998) then years around that year will also be high. This gives a skewed result when looking for "the hottest years". Of course! They will all be around THE hottest years! No big mathemarical surprise there! As for 4, climate models didn't forecast a flattening of temps for 11 years - Hansen's Scenarios certainly didn't! I don't think it fair to pick through the rest of your list, suffice to say that I think in time we'll find that global temperatures are matched very well to ocean current variations, not CO2.
On the wider issue, I find it odd that the BBC has made no mention of the record sea ice extent in Antarctica. Warmists just want to concentrate on the tiny 5% of it that shows a little warming. Five of the six highest ice extents ever recorded in Antarctica have occurred in the last 10 years! Clearly Antarctica isn't playing the warming ball, and is thus ignored by Warmists and the BBC. Odd.
It's a shame that we're pouring money down the drain by thinking we can affect global temps. We should be putting money aside to use as adaption to climate temps, whatever they may be - and they may well just be cold temps too! I wonder for how much longer Warmists can carry on saying that warming will resume. It's been 11 years now of flattened temperatures. How much longer before the obvious has to be admitted?
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Sir, I have read your article on Global Warming and find the sudden realisation that the BBC may have been wrong is like a breath of fresh air. I have long maintained that models were not giving the correct answer, on the basis of garbage in, garbage out, and the Hadley Center as hiding behind their claims of global experts.
I alwasy wonder why the hadley Center ignored satellite temperature data especially since in 1990 2/3rds of the surface temperature stations closed down, the numbers fell from some 6400 to 2300, which did not give an adequate data spread. They also ignore the Argo data set which have shown that sea temperatures have fallen over the last 10 years.
Research has long shown that historically temperature rises have been followed by rises in CO2, probably the oceans outgassing due to reduced gas solubility with higher temperatures, so CO2 cannot drive temperature. It is also interesting to note that all the models show elevated temperatures in the troposphere in the tropics but neither radiosonde, dropsonde or satellite can find any raised temperatures.
Again the IPCC have data that shows that the annual output of CO2 from burning fossil fuels is but 3% of the total global CO2 budget. They also say that the gas responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect is water vapour the remaining 5% is made up of CO2, NO, CH4 etc. Why the concentration on CO2 whichis not only responsible for so small an input but is also vital for life. No CO2, no life.
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--The results were clear. "Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can't have been caused by solar activity," said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).--
That is a very surprising comment. The warming in the early decades of the 20th century was very similar in magnitude to that experienced in the latter decades of the 20th century. The IPCC themselves attribute the early 20th century warming to solar effects, so I'd suggest Dr Piers return to looking at the science and stop being an advocate.
As we have seen with the hockey stick, the ignorance of the massive problems with the weather station network (www.surfacestations.org for more on this), the scientific cherry-picking; scientists have not been keeping their own house in order and it has been left to independent statisticians and analysts to sort their science out for them. Power corrupts, and climate science is a good example of scientists who have let power over policy influence their studies. It's not new and will happen again.
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1998 is the warmest year on record, however, the top 12 warmest years are
1998, 2005, 2003, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2001, 1997, 1995, 1990, 1999, 2000
ARGUE WITH THAT! That data is up to and including 2007, so is a touch out of date, but the point stands.
Thats not model data, thats measured climate fact.
Next, Climate scales are LONG TERM, this is not talking about a year, or a decade, you need 20 odd years to look at the weather trends. Over the next 100 years CO2 emissions will cause a dangerously large amount of warming, warming we will not be able to mitigate for everyone, the wealthy will survive having caused the problem, the worlds poor will die in massive numbers, its akin to genocide what we will do if we don't act fast and we don't make swift cuts.
You, Mr Hudson, with actions like this blog are helping the people who would see this genocide happen, this sort of opinion will cause the population at large to doubt climate change, that weakens the political regieme in Copenhagen in December and we won't make the hard decisions there we need.
This blog is a disgrace to the BBC, one of the finest news institutions in the world, supposedly unbiased, fair and accurate, it is tarnishing the corporation, it should be taken down and you Mr Hudson, Sacked.
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I had hoped that Paul would have replied to address his critics especially the great critic of his article by DavidCOG.
He is Met Office trained, but this piece is so far from what their science says that I really do think some explanation on how has presented his information is called for.
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I found the article interesting, but I also question the statement about 1998 being the hotest date. Turns out that at least for data in the US collected by NASA. The original numbers were wrong due to a heat bias from where the met stations are located.
Please see
http://www.norcalblogs.com/watts/2007/08/1998_no_longer_the_hottest_yea.html
This site describes how the data error was detected, and that NASA has since changed the figures.
Turns out that 1934 was the hotest year in the US - as in the Dustbowl era.
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Congratulations Mr Hudson, your little article has got the denial-o-sphere hysterical - "The BBC says global warming has stopped! It might have been the sun all along!" - their scientifically illiterate denial has been validated because another scientific illiterate wrote a piece that got published by the BBC. Great work!
~~~
SmokingDeepThroat:
Your comment is a compendium of Denier talking points, scientific illiteracy, fallacious arguments and outright falsehoods. Standard Denier output.
There's a reason you have to reference a blog by some armchair enthusiast - it's because peer-reviewed science from credible sources do not say what you want them to. The dataset mentioned on that blog has not been reviewed. It also is not like-for-like against the official ocean index, it measures down to 700 m. whereas the official dataset uses measurements down to 2000 m. What the armchair expert on that blog has done is cherry pick one dataset because it seems to confirm what he wants to be true - just as you've cherry picked 1998 to define your 'trend'.
You continue to squawk about drawing a line from 1998 (highest every recorded El Nino event) to today. Why not 1997 or 2000? It's because that won't give you the trend you want. Nor will any other multi-decadal trend line.
You say that only GISS uses proxy data and that HADCRUT3 does not. From the HADCRUT3 home page: "Analyses of over 400 proxy climate series (from trees, corals, ice cores and historical records) show that the 1990s is the warmest decade of the millennium and the 20th century the warmest century." Also, contrary to your claims, GISS provides the more accurate measure because it includes weather station data from the Arctic - and the Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else.
> ...I think in time we'll find that global temperatures are matched very well to ocean current variations, not CO2.
Creationists also think in time that we'll find that all life was created 6000 years ago by their god.
I see you've switched the "record ice extent!" game from the Arctic to the Antarctic. You Deniers played that for years - looking only at ice extent (area) and ignoring volume, ice flow speed and age of ice which all showed what is now incontrovertible - the Arctic - and Greenland - are rapidly melting. You're as wrong about the Antarctic as you were about the Arctic.
Every major science academy of every major industrialised country on the planet confirms anthropogneic climate change. A recent poll showed that 97% of active climatologists agree that human activity is causing global warming. There is no credible disagreement of the science - the only disagreement comes from economists, politicians, sideshow blogs and scientifically illiterate wingnuts in comment boxes all across the web.
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Lazarus. Please explain YOUR post at 4! Your own link shows the dip in global temps, and you evidently haven't had access to 'woodfortrees' http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997/trend so rather than Mr Hudson explaining, would you please do so? Thank you.
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"You continue to squawk about drawing a line from 1998 (highest every recorded El Nino event) to today. Why not 1997 or 2000?"
Because 1998 was the peak of the warmth, since which we've been cooling.
Even central England temperatures have declined by around 2c since the peak of the warmth here, so we're clearly riding pillion with the global trends.
It would be appreciated if you adapt your tone, so that we can have a civil discussion of the science.
As for "Analyses of over 400 proxy climate series (from trees, corals, ice cores and historical records) show that the 1990s is the warmest decade of the millennium and the 20th century the warmest century." - very few of the proxies show this. It is only Michael Mann's cherry picking method of looking for a hockey stick that gets you this result. The only proxies that show a hockey stick are the equally flawed Finnish lake sediments, Californian bristlecone Pines, and a single tree in Siberia. The rest of the proxies are very mixed as it is only by mining the data that Mann and his cohorts such as Keith Briffa have been able to come up with a hockey stick (and "get rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period", which was the intention all along).
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DavidCOG. No, I didn't cherry pick 1998, it was what is being talked about in the second line of Mr Hudson's piece - please apologise. Secondly, my link IS for 1997, not 1998, so you're wrong yet again! Even the link clearly said '1997', so how did you miss it?
I see you liked to get a link in between denying warming (which I don't) and Creationism. How pointless is that?
Also, I haven't 'switched' anything. I never mentioned the Arctic, but I will if you want. As for the Antarctic, I'm guessing you haven't heard of the latest paper in Geophysical Research Letters http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/09/lawrence-solomon-global-blushing.aspx
As for your last paragraph, it's not that man has an affect on climate, it's how much? You haven't even learned that! I don't think it fair on Mr Hudson or the other readers that we exchange our views back and forth, and seeing as you have failed to properly read what I wrote, then I certainly won't waste my time on you, my friend.
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For those interested: Here again is the green line
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997/trend
which didn't come out in the original link. If it still doesn't come out then right click the entire link and past it into your browser.
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bioPingo1. Yes, the CET is very interesting, and does indeed follow global temps very well. There's a web page somewhere (I'll try and find it if I can) that averages the last 10 years of CET, and it shows that every month this year bar March and April has been cooler. The Met Office's site says that every month bar January was OVER the 1961-90 baseline, which doesn't seem indicative at all.
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You don't just need proxies to show warming, input hard cold meterological data into climate models and you get a warming trend.
If you are a denier, i ask this, accept you are wrong for a second, do you want to see your children pay for your mistake? We have 70 years of oil left, we need oil for energy, plastics etc etc etc, it needs replacing, Climate Change is a good reason, but Oil will only get more expensive, it makes economic sense to avoid climate change as right or wrong it will help out in the years to come.
It is happening, its been happening for 250 years, we are approaching a point of no return, we have to act and we have to act NOW
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"The Met Office's site says that every month bar January was OVER the 1961-90 baseline, which doesn't seem indicative at all"
They refuse to update their baselines, as the period they reference has some anomalously cold periods. It's all for PR purposes and not science.
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Exiledportfan,
Thanks for making your post a bit more civil.
"input hard cold meterological data into climate models and you get a warming trend." Not the last decade plus, that is what Paul's balanced blog is all about.
We can't avoid climate change - a look through history shows you that. Climate stability is a false hope.
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> Because 1998 was the peak of the warmth, since which we've been cooling.
No. It was an *outlier* due to the biggest El Niño event ever recorded. But I've said that twice already and you've either ignored or not been able to understand what that means. Try watching a video to see if that helps.
By the method you Deniers are using - cherry picking 1998 - the same method would have told us that "we are in a cooling trend!" in 1909, 1918, 1948, 1965, 1991 (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/Fig1.gif) - and each time you'd have been wrong, just as you are now. The *trend* is determined by multi-decadal data series - and that trend is clear - it is *up*. And there is only one process that can explain the warming - anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
What you're doing is saying that every national science academy of every major industrialised country on the planet have got it wrong - or are lying in some massive conspiracy - and that you and a collection of blogs written by nobodies (as provided by your fellow Denier, SmokingDeepThroat) know better than the planet's climate scientists.
Who to believe? Blogs and rightwing rags or peer reviewed science that is confirmed and accepted by virtually every climate scientist on the planet. Tough choice - for those incapable of rational, evidence-based thinking.
I'll leave you with some words from an official Met Office report: "Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand." - amazing that one of those with their head in the sand used to work for the Met Office and is now writing drivel for the BBC on the subject.
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I agree with bioPingo1 - the problem I see is that the scientists are acting as advocates instead of as scientists.
To those who call me a "denier" let me say that I have a Bachelor of Science degree. In the process of accumulating that - I was taught to be a skeptic. That means - don't take any scientific "theory" as gospel, and be ready to look at the evidence. You also have to be ready to accept that new evidence means you modify your theory.
This is a problem with the scientist as advocate - they become believers instead of scientists.
Now add the ecological movement that takes this as religion (and a business!)
You get public policy that isn't well informed, and can damage an economy to the point of breaking it.
Consider Solar power. I had breakfast with a friend today and spoke to him. He lives on a ranch where he uses a well to get his drinking water and was complaining about the pump not always going off when it should (causing the storage tank to overflow.) He isn't happy because the pump costs him a significant chunk of change. I asked him why hadn't considered solar for his ranch. His response was that when you hear the panacea of Solar power marketed - you never hear about the other costs. (Oh - did I mention that he has started at least a couple of solar cell manufacturing companies in his extensive Silicon Valley career?) Other costs include the maintenance, and the replacement costs of the arrays. They can have a low as a 10 year life span (about the payoff cost at current energy prices!)
Yet we have solar power marketed as the answer to our job creation problems and our environmental problems.
Look under the covers folks! Question the data. Certainly the link I provider earlier proves that not all is kosher. Just this week there was a scandal announced concerning the Tree Ring data that has been used to document historical temperature. Turns out the scientists were data-picking! Once you use the entire data set, the warming claims get washed out.
Again - science by it's very nature is being the skeptic. Science doesn't work by consensus!
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BioPingo1, a mod?, i thought my previous post was perfectly civilised, my opinion there is valid, and the BBC shall hear my complaint regarding this blog in full and in the proper form, not hiding behind an online avatar.
As for climate stability, indeed, a chaotic system can not be 'stable' however we will make decisions over the next few years that will determine the level of climate change we will face, the levels are periously close, half a degree warming can make a staggering difference between whether the long term future of the human race is possible or potentially not. The hundreds of millions of potential victims throughout Africa, Asia, central america, where people will die or be forced to migrate. If people think immigration is bad now, have a look in 2050, Climate change could lead to wars over borders and resources.
We are in an epoch known as the Quarternary, a period in geological history where the dominant planetary condition has been ice caps. There is growing call for that period to have ended in 1750 and a new period formed called the anthropocene, to highlight the change we have made.
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Exiledportfan,
"half a degree warming can make a staggering difference between whether the long term future of the human race is possible or potentially not"
No. We're an adaptive and inventive species. We can live in climates of annual mean below zero or above 25c, a huge range. We have experienced 0.6c warming in the 20th century with no deleterious effects - indeed weather-related deaths are now lower than ever.
But don't let facts bother your alarmist trip.
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Ok,
We have seen ~0.75C warming since 1750, IPCC predictions range for another 1.4-6.4C warming for 2000-2100, based on something like 20 different climate models, using a family of scenarios for the planetary development to 2100.
Thats simulations and data from PUBLISHED PEER REVIEWED literature and the IPCC reports. Thats science in the open both results and methods, open for challange, open for debate.
This blog is full of unreferenced tripe, methods are secretive or unstated, that is not viable science. Considering the author of the blog is scientifically trained, quite shocking, the sort of shoddy work that a first year science undergraduate at university would be failed for.
Debate in science is open and welcomed, arguements and challanges accepted, but only possible if methods are open and results replicatable.
Now, to the warming, if net warming from 1750-2100 goes above 2C, then we see some real dangers become present from changes to weather patterns (who needs a monsoon in india, nothing alarmist about losing that is there? Only the (soon to be) most populous nation on the planet losing its harvest. Closer to home, enjoyed the floods of summer 2007 + 2008? Nice stormy winters? Only more frequent as increasing energy in the winter weather systems generates worse low pressure cells in the N.Atlantic. Now, half a degree once we are over makes ever more crucial differences.
As for being an adaptive species, we will adapt, (very interesting New Scientist article on how we might adapt in a worst case scenario climate situation such as living in Antartica in 2100), But how many will die? Disease, famine etc. Food supplies are overly stretched at present, Africa dries out, central USA becomes a dustbowl, the worlds breadbasket goes empty.
Even sceptics must surely agree with the statements of Lord Stearn (2005) in his famous report were he (roughly paraphrasing) said "The costs of mitigation far outweight the costs of doing nothing and the event occuring"
Can we honestly risk doing nothing? Right or wrong, the risk is too great, we are playing with potentially BILLIONS of lives, do you think we have that right? We act now, we have to, in 7 years time, we could already have passed the point of no return based on the predictions of a piece of peer reviewed published science (den Elzen et al, 2007)
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congratulations! Paul Hudson is one of those perky weather guys on the BBC. He knows all about stuff like better bring your raincoat it might rain. I think he's not quite as funny as David Letterman was. He is certainly not nearly as famous as Al Roker, the NBC guy. Oh yeah, what's my point? Yes doesn't know anything about climatology. So get off his back. Stupid scientists. You are bashing on him because he's not reading peer reviewed journals. He can't read them. Please, he doesn't know any calculus or math, and it's not his job anyway. His job is to be perky. Real perky.
I have a message for the republicans that have quoted Paul Hudson because he "signals a change in the BBC." He's just a weather guy. If David Letterman said global warming was a myth would you suddenly believe that executives at NBC had a "U turn"? Please, conservatives you are embarrassing yourselves by quoting Paul as a signal that now the BBC has (in your words) more "balanced" coverage of the AGW debate.
He's the weather dude. On tv. And he's perky.
On the other hand, maybe if you're a conservative trying to peddle the idea that global warming is a myth, this is the closest to a scientists you're ever gonna get.
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Exiledportfan,
"We have seen ~0.75C warming since 1750, IPCC predictions range for another 1.4-6.4C warming for 2000-2100, based on something like 20 different climate models, using a family of scenarios for the planetary development to 2100."
1) Half of this warming is by IPCC admission attributable to natural factors (they call it solar forcing, although I see it as a more uncertain).
2) All these climate models have similar inputs, in particular with regards to greenhouse gases. They are not independent. They also have a track record of having NO predictive skill. THey are having to be continually adjusted to even be able to explain recent climate. They are the equivalent of feeding roulette wheel history into a model and expecting it to have predictive ability. Even the IPCC refuse to call these models as predictions, instead referring to them by the weasel words as "projections".
"Thats simulations and data from PUBLISHED PEER REVIEWED literature and the IPCC reports. Thats science in the open both results and methods, open for challange, open for debate. "
The Mann hockey stick was peer reviewed. It was subsequently found by Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit so be scientifically flawed, a criticism backed up by the Wegman Report into the episode and the National Academy of Sciences.
The global temperature datasets have still not been peer reviewed, and much of the data and algortihms used to create them are hidden from other scientists.
"Now, to the warming, if net warming from 1750-2100 goes above 2C, then we see some real dangers become present from changes to weather patterns (who needs a monsoon in india, nothing alarmist about losing that is there?"
Can you explain how this could even occur, or is it just wild speculation?
" Closer to home, enjoyed the floods of summer 2007 + 2008? Nice stormy winters?"
THis shows you haven't been following the science. AFter one or two dry summers, we were being told to plant Mediterranean strains of droughs resistant plants in the UK. If you look through the BBC archives you will find this story. I guess those following climatologists' advice back then now have a sorry looking garden?
No, global warming would mean we ought to enjoy warmer and drier summers as the jetstream goes north. The floods of 2007 and 2008 were caused by a sunken summer jetstream, something that happens when the globe is cool or cooling. The only climate change the floods of 07 and 08 can be attributed to is that of global cooling. Please read up on the science of this and stop the alarmist speculation.
"Even sceptics must surely agree with the statements of Lord Stearn (2005) in his famous report were he (roughly paraphrasing) said "The costs of mitigation far outweight the costs of doing nothing and the event occuring""
Lord Stern used to some perverse discounting factors, effectively making it that richer generations were subsidised by poorer ones. With normal discount factors, that are more commonly used by proper economists, we are better to wait until the science is improved. We don't want to take costly actions now that will lead to further pain down the road, when the science is clearly not settled.
"the risk is too great, we are playing with potentially BILLIONS of lives"
Climate stability is a false hope.
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Well done Paul for bringing a bit of commonsense to the debate. AGW is a scam. There is no evidence for it; it only exists in faulty computer models.
Keep up the good work. You appear as a breath of fresh air within the BBC.
Signed: PAWB46 (a physicist, like Piers Corbyn, and a person who has studied the SCIENCE of the climate, not the rhetoric).
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Sir, I have read your article on Global Warming and find the sudden realisation that the BBC may have been wrong is like a breath of fresh air. I have long maintained that models were not giving the correct answer, on the basis of garbage in, garbage out, and the Hadley Center as hiding behind their claims of global experts.
I alwasy wonder why the hadley Center ignored satellite temperature data especially since in 1990 2/3rds of the surface temperature stations closed down, the numbers fell from some 6400 to 2300, which did not give an adequate data spread. They also ignore the Argo data set which have shown that sea temperatures have fallen over the last 10 years.
Research has long shown that historically temperature rises have been followed by rises in CO2, probably the oceans outgassing due to reduced gas solubility with higher temperatures, so CO2 cannot drive temperature. It is also interesting to note that all the models show elevated temperatures in the troposphere in the tropics but neither radiosonde, dropsonde or satellite can find any raised temperatures.
Again the IPCC have data that shows that the annual output of CO2 from burning fossil fuels is but 3% of the total global CO2 budget. They also say that the gas responsible for 95% of the greenhouse effect is water vapour the remaining 5% is made up of CO2, NO, CH4 etc. Why the concentration on CO2 whichis not only responsible for so small an input but is also vital for life. No CO2, no life.
I trust that the BBC will build on this moment of clarity and realise that Climate Change has been happening for 4.6 Ba and will continue with no help from us. Global Warming is not a religion but a small part of the earth's natural cycles.
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What interested me in Paul's article was this;
"The scientists' main approach was simple: to look at solar output and
cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those
trends with the graph for global average surface temperature." So it seems correlations are accepted as good science when it is convenient.
I decided to educate myself in global warming some time ago, my MSc is in Electronics not climate, and I came across the references that we were all about to die as the magnetic poles were about to flip and this would cause an ice age, so I decided to check it out.
I looked at trends of the movement of the magnetic poles and global
temperatures and was criticised because correlation does not prove
cause and effect. If you are interested you can see the remarkable
correlations and download my paper published in Energy and Environment
from;
http://www.adriankweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Climate_Change.htm
note if there was no AGW, the IPCC would have to disband, AGW is their sole reason for existence, ever heard a of a turkey voting for Christmas?
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Paul I've long been a fan of your banter with Christa on Look North, but I'm a bit surprised you wrote this considering what you normally say on TV about global warming.
I'm heavily in favour of more accurate pieces on the subject like this from the BBC, just be aware that certain elements have not reacted kindly to fair and balanced reporting from the BBC before as seen on the below link.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/08/bbc_blog_bully/
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I am not a scientist, just an ordinary person of average intelligence trying to sort fact from fiction in the media. I am delighted that at last someone at the BBC has actually reported this information about global temperature changes which has been around a long time, and has been reported on the internet.
I think I am reasonably impartial, and I have found it very frustrating that the BBC and other organisations seem to follow the current scientific orthodoxy with an almost religious fervour - there is no room for dissent or debate of any opposing views.
I would like to hear the main differing viewpoints aired on the BBC so I can then make up my own mind about what I believe to be true, but it doesn't seem to work like that. When I told my work colleagues today that there seemed to be evidence that global warming peaked in 1998, they were incredulous. I then asked them why they thought they hadn't heard about this before now. They couldn't answer that, but it's obviously because this information hasn't fitted in with the current orthodoxy and so has been ignored and hasn't been broadcast.
Mind you, we may yet see a retraction from Paul Hudson, a la Bruce Forsyth, once his bosses get to work on him...
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SmokingDeepThroat
I'm glad to explain post 4 if you faild to get the gist of it.
Do you really think that CRU data shows a 'dip'? If you look critically you will see that all the years after the cherry picked 1998 are as hot or hotter than 1996/1997! I see no dip since these years are still amongst the hottest on record. The levelling off only occurs because 1998 was an exceptional year. Your 'dip' looks like natural variation similar to what occurred around 1960-70.
I'm not sure what the point is by your woodfortrees link. the graph has no trend line but if it did it would confirm warming just as the instrument data does.
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bioPingo1,
Everything you write demonstrates a deep ignorance and confusion about climate science. You've clearly educated yourself from Denier blogs, mixed with a bit of intuitive (Dunning Kruger effect) thinking. Most of your output is factually wrong, long-debunked Denier talking points or false assumptions based on flawed understanding. You really need to read some real science and stop educating yourself from the output of scientific illiterates and oil-funded propagandists.
Here are just a few of the most recent climate reports from credible, scientific sources - read them and you may begin to understand what is happening:
- Copenhagen Synthesis Report, March 2009 - http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport/ + http://climatecongress.ku.dk/newsroom/congress_key_messages/
- Climate change, people and poverty, July 2009 - http://www.oxfam.org.uk/resources/policy/climate_change/downloads/bp130_suffering_science.pdf
- Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States - http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts
- Human activity is changing the world’s oceans in profound and damaging ways. Carbon emissions are now above the ‘worst case’ IPCC scenario. The climate is warming faster than the worst case known from the fossil record, about 56 million years ago. - http://cms.jcu.edu.au/news/JCUPRD_050724
- MIT Forecast for 21st Century Climate - 5.1C median warming by 2100: http://globalchange.mit.edu/pubs/abstract.php?publication_id=990
- Failure to agree a new UN climate deal in December will bring a "global health catastrophe", say 18 of the world's professional medical organisations. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8257766.stm + http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/339/sep15_1/b3672
- Four degrees and beyond: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/news/latest/four-degrees.html
- Climate Science Compendium - http://www.unep.org/compendium2009/ + http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/MUMA-7W88FV?OpenDocument
You wrote "Climate stability is a false hope.". That really demonstrates your ignorance - or is it dishonest intent to create a strawman. No one is calling for action to maintain a 'stable' climate - we're trying to avoid the worst damage possible from a climate that is *rapidly* warming due to massive release of GHGs. That's the whole point - we'd be happy with a climate that naturally fluctuates over the course of millennia - we just want to avoid one that warms +6C in one century because of our actions.
Read some real science and see if you can understand that.
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"we're trying to avoid the worst damage possible from a climate that is *rapidly* warming due to massive release of GHGs"
The temperature data suggests otherwise.
There really is no warming going on, and however much exaggeration you wish to spill, the hard data just does not back you up. No new warming since 1998, and the oceans (the dominant climate feature) now beginning to cool.
Thanks for the links though - it will be as amusing to read those in 2030 as it is now reading how climatologists knew we had an Ice Age on the way in the 70s.
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DavidCOG:
Just listing alarmist web sites says you know nothing of the science (what do medical organisations know of the climate for example?). You can rant about everybody disagreeing with you being a denier, but many of us are scientists who understand the bad science that is passed off as AGW - no evidence, just computer models.
BTW, you do the usual warmist thing by criticising the person without looking at the facts. You say "...one solar scientist Piers Corbyn ... disagrees. - he's not a 'solar scientist', he's an eccentric weatherman who has a 'secret formula' to predict future weather - and his predictions have an accuracy similar to random guesses - but that doesn't stop him trying to sell them to anyone who is gullible enough to buy them. Piers Corbyn". In fact Piers Corbyn is a physicist (I was at University with him, one of the top universities for physics) and he was one of the top students of the year. So criticising him shows your ignorance and is a prime example of you warmists attacking anyone who disagrees with your AGW scam.
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Hooray! And not before time. The BBC record on the global warming story has been pretty lamentable and has been uncritical in its reporting. So am very pleased to see this; it was coming sooner or later because the data is not supporting the IPCC position.
One critical issue is the cooling oceans -which are the mechanism of distributing solar heat around the world from the tropics. Reduced oceanic temperatures therefore = reduced global temperature. This is why the arctic ocean is cooling and the arctic icesheet now expanding. Water holds heat so this process has lagged land and air temperature which peaked some years ago.
The expected atmospheric warm zone-where the CO2 has its warming effect has stubbornly resisted detection..
The sun -having been extremely busy until the late 1990s is now at it's quietist for nearly 90 years. This reduces it's magnetic field so allows in more cosmic rays which seed cloud formation (experiment awaited at CERNE to test the hypothesis). More clouds = higher albedo so reflecting more sunlight
It all suddenly seems so simple; there's no need left to postulate much of a role for CO2 .
By the way can anyone post a referrence to any papers at all that test the null hypothesis that CO2 has caused warming? Have looked for months and don't think even the first brick of the IPCC case was subjected to scientific scrutiny!
The emperor is now naked and looks pretty pathetic.
Be afraid; cold will be much more deadly to more people than one or two degrees of warming.
Maybe now we can rediscover our shared agenda of real help to the world's poor rather than exhibiting our own guilt in such a histrionic and childish manner.
Stand up for real science BBC and look behind the instant headline.
More please -the science is there!
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DavidCOG: You do yourself no favours by calling everybody who disagrees with you a denier, a wingnut or a bunch of nobodies. Readers here can judge for themselves what sort of person you are.
Well I've got news for you. Some of us commenters are physicists who understand the physical processes driving the climate; some of us have PhDs and know how proper science is carried out; some of us have worked with computer models and know how easy it is to put false assumptions into the models to get the desired outcome; some of us can see that there is no evidence for AGW and that there is 4.5 billion years of evidence for natural climate change; some of us can see that AGW is the biggest scientific scam that there has ever been; some of us are sceptics and don't mind being called deniers, because we are sceptical of AGW and deny that humans are having a measurable effect on the climate.
Thank you Paul for putting some balance into the BBC's biased stance on climate change. I hope you don't get sacked for your heresy.
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Well done, Paul for having the courage to speak out.
This comes as music to my ears.
For the last 3 years I have been trying to get answers out of BBC DG Mark Thompson about the blatant BBC bias in reporting climate change.
For the last 3 years I got no-where…that is until I engaged the assistance of my MP, Nick Harvey.
This resulted in my coming by a BBC document in which the amazing statement was made that the BBC Trust and Board of Management had commissioned a report entitled ; “From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel-Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century”, published in June 2007……’
I quote from this report: ‘There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening and that it is at least predominantly man-made… the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus’.
So, if you weren’t singing from the BBC hymn sheet, you weren’t singing at all!
Until now, that is…. hung by their own petard?…..light at the end of the tunnel?
Keep up the good work, Paul...you desrve a knighthood.
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The 'You' post at 8:52 was from Yertizz
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Paul Your article on What Happened to Global Warming is accurate and well balanced. Science is never about certainty. There is always uncertainty attached to science particularly when it is composed primarily of modeling, retrospective studies and unvalidated data sets. Let's face it, official weather temperature measurements from the early part of the 20th century are neither reliable nor valid for the purpose of determining global warming. Conclusions can never be drawn from modeling or respective studies. These approaches are only valid for proposing a hypothesis which must then be tested prospectively. AGW advocates always state their conclusions with certainty which is a bad sign. Their conclusions are not based on prospective studies. As such, by definition, they must admit to the high level of uncertainty that is inherent in these approaches which they never do. They are asking for the snake to bite them and appears that it may well happen. You can not get a drug approved by the government on anything less that well controlled prospective studies that are reproducible. However, this accepted standard of good science is completely ignored by governments when it comes to global warming. Yes, it is true that prospective global warming studies are not practical but it doesn't diminish the point one bit.
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AGW "believers" are such nice people. Slanderers first and foremost with a dash of recidivism as back-up. One by one their arguments are failing. Even the extrapolated ones such as "there are too many people" and "peak energy". It is little wonder they are turning nasty in the face of massive gas/oil finds, human ingenuity in the field of... fields/crops and the increasingly large deviations of projected CO2 based doom from nature's icy reality.
Arguing science with them is utterly pointless. Pearls before swine is the old expression. Been there, done that. All that is left is scorn and ridicule. Not one of their "projections, ifs, buts and maybes, 95% confidence levels and strong beliefs" has come to pass. Not one. Yet their faith is upheld by... well, faith alone it would seem.
Far easier to attack the person and ignore their message. Far easier to "believe" the MOD funded Hadley/CRU unit and the Pentagon (NASA/Giss) and other arms of government such as the Royal Society and all those other "establishments" populated by formerly respected scientists than to wonder why they say what they say and who foots their bills. Far easier to believe the fairy-tale of "a global temperature" than to look at the world empirically. Far easier to concentrate on the WAIS than the continent as a whole, or the Arctic as opposed to total global sea-ice. Simplicity itself to ignore the natives of somewhere such as the Maldives and concentrate on *their* politicians' differing story. Far easier to claim that the "chum club" of peer review is mightier than the lone patent clerk.
Trundling into a bleak future the rickety gravy train is doubtless shaking itself apart but we will all be harmed by the madness of crowds before this episode is over. All of us. Those who saw through this entirely political ruse immediately, those who came to see through it by observing the world and those who pushed the agenda and those who puffed it into existence by instigating it, promulgating it or by wishing to fall into the guilt-trip trap for whatever reason.
Praising the executioners as you are forced into the slaughterhouse is a symptom of how far the game has progressed and the lengths that those who have bought into the dream will go to prevent dissonance from disturbing their religious dream world.
Real Climate and Climate Progress, to name but two collectives with the affront to name their funded houses as if they alone know what's going on, are not the type of place for free discussion of climate related hypothesis. Echo chambers only. Screeching to the choir. No-one has the facts. The IPCC themselves warn against attempting to model a chaotic system before going on to base this entire sham on a collection of them.
That didn't stop the idiots who were given a greater than 50% chance of living through their own birth as direct a result of far higher intellects than theirs' utilizing fossil fuel based technologies for the greater good of their "fellow" men. Men that they now denounce, prancing around on the mother of all parliaments' rooftop and screaming like the children they appear to be that we should not allow their yet-to-be-born offspring and all those current and future children of the 2nd and 3rd world the same benefits.
We are heading for a cold, maybe very cold, couple of decades. That there may soon not be enough electricity to keep us in the comfort to which we have begun to become accustomed, no matter our ability or desire to purchase, is entirely down to the short-sightedness of those who never got anything "right". Stop using (entirely sustainable) paper bags at the supermarket they shrieked and now they shout that there is a continent sized mass of plastic swirling around in the centre of the Pacific. They were as incapable then as they are now of joined up thinking. None need worry about unintended consequences if one's intentions are good. Duh.
That I should have lived so long to see it, with all my teeth and my intellect intact, is also purely due to fossil fuel usage. At least there is a glimmer of hope in the publication of Paul's post on this, the Ministry of Truth's own website.
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Paul, congratulations on giving the fact that there is scientific doubt some much needed air-time at the BBC. The more the science is presented as absolute, and the consensus as complete, the greater the doubts as contradictory evidence accumulates.
Could I suggest four areas that you might wish to comment on:
- The role of urban heat islands, and miscellaneous data corrections, on temperature records. Perhaps seeking to explain to the sceptical why temperatures dating back prior to 1900 need to get changed so frequently? http://www.surfacestations.org/
- Why tree ring growth is believed to be a good proxy for temperature, when common sense says so many other factors will equally – of not more – important? See http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7320
- How statistics are showing the lack of correlation between short-term climate model predictions and reality. http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/current-hypothesis-test-status-further-into-rejection-territory/
- How mathematics demonstrates the futility of trying to undertake long-term climate forecasts, and consequently why everyone should be sceptical of policy based on such ‘guesses’. http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/896/
I consider myself a ‘lukewarmer’. Quite happy to admit that the global temperatures have been increasing in recent years, and perfectly happy with the concept that the one thing they are unlikely to do is remain constant for any extended period. My own doubts surround the emphasis being given to anthropomorphic effects vs. ‘natural’ climatic change. I do not believe that this requires any particular questioning of the body of science explaining how the climate operates, but it does require considerable confidence in data collection methodologies and historical re-creations of temperatures to be able to accurately assess GCM performance and the role that uncertain feedbacks and gains are playing. Unfortunately, for scientific consensus, these foundations of climate science appear more unstable with every (in some case grudging) release of data and methodology. I think that the general population would be concerned if they learned just how much rides on topics such as the role of buckets in sea surface temperatures!
To those who can see no answer but reduction of CO2 confirmed by the absolute certainty of climate science I would merely defer to Albert Einstein who is recalled to have said: "Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods."
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Lurking, I think the public would also be shocked to discover the record of temperatures! Have you looked yourself - I see it's featured on Icecap this week too. Go here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
Go to the map at the bottom of the page. Pick a spot and click. You'll see all the stations listed for that area.
Let's place the forefinger of the lake in Africa (for example). See how many stations out of the list go up to 2009, see how many only started a few decades ago, see how many have dropped out of regular recording! Astonishing! Then do that all over the world (yes, spend all morning!) and you'll be shocked as to how poor it really is.
It's fine to say that you believe temperatures have been increasing (I'm tempted to say that too) but how do we know? Because the records aren't good enough. And as we found out recently about tree rings, we cannot trust either proxy data or those scientists analysing it!
The whole climate change scam is based on poor science, poor methodology, poor recording, some very dodgy 'scientists' and taxation. Until someone can give me some real scientific evidence (and not a link to the IPCC or realclimate) then I cannot believe a single word of it.
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Lazarus. Yes, I can't seem to make my pasting of links work as links. Paste the whole line in
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997/trend
and the trend will reveal itself. It's virtually flat from 1997 to now. The 'dip' I was referring to was in your own link - namely the graph from CRU.
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Purely as an example from my own post I chose the UK
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/findstation.py?datatype=gistemp&data_set=1&name=&world_map.x=366&world_map.y=96
Tuesday morning quiztime - can you see how many of the temperature recording staions go to 2009? And how long ago did they start recording?
Real eye-opening stuff, isn't it? It even amazes me!
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A view from across the pond:
The NASA record of average annual global temperatures is at
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt
The steepest rises in this statistic have occurred since 1979. 1998 and 2008 stand out because 1998 was the hottest year on record until 2005 and 2008 was the coldest year since 1997. The values for 1999 - 2007 are all hotter than those for 1997 and 2008. There were a strong El Nino effect 1997 and a strong La Nina effect in 2007, which drove 1998's temperature up and 2008's down. A least-squares analysis of the NASA data shows the following rates of change of temperature with time and their associated standard deviations (in degrees Celsius per year), for the time intervals noted: (0.0163, 0.002, 1979-2008), (0.011, 0.009, 1998-2008), and (0.030, 0.011, 1999-2007). The three positive rates suggest continued global warming. A preliminary estimate for 2009 suggests that 2009 will hotter than 2008. There is an active El Nino right now, which could make 2010 hotter.
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JayDeeSre. Yes, the problem we'd have with that is that we're principally talking about HadCRUT, not GISS. I mentioned GISS above to highlight how poor the data collection actually is! If you graph the HadCRUT figures for the past 11 years you get a virtually flat line (or try RSS or UAH). Gistemp is 'out there' and doesn't appear to be representative. It may be because they use proxy data from over 1,000 miles away to get their Arctic temps! But then the whole data collection issue is a mess. Poorly sited Stevenson screens, adjusted data, station drop-out, station choice, etc.
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There are many theories, the one that makes the most sense to me is that
1. Solar activity(Sun spots) add slight warmth to the planet
2. Less activity allows more comic rays to penetrate the solar system
3. More cosmic rays cause higher cloud levels on earth
4. Higher cloud levels, reduce heating of planet.
http://www.solarcycle24.com/
We are having the lowest levels of solar activity in at least 100 yrs, oceans cooling, we are at the highest comic ray level in over 50 yrs, things are getting cooler.
BTW this is not a new theory, it has been documented and tested in labs for over 10 yrs, we are now seeing it in action
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Baby, its cold outside
Cold to shatter old records by 10 degrees or more - 11 Oct 09
Record-breaking 17 inches of snow in North Platte, NE - 10 Oct 09
Snow in Nebraska - 10 Oct 09
Freeze warning for Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles - 9 Oct 09
30 To 40 Degrees Below Normal - 9 Oct 09
Record Cold Heading for Omaha - 9 Oct 09
Winter So Soon! Single digits possible - 8 Oct 09
Record breaking cold and wind chills possible over weekend - 8 Oct 09
Low temp records shattered in Alberta - 12 Oct 09
Record lows in B.C. - 10 Oct 09
Even if this was the middle of winter this is extreme - NZ - 6 Oct 09
Hundreds of motorists trapped by snow in New Zealand - 5 Oct 09
Vegas ski resort to open a record seven weeks early
7 Oct 09 - The 2009-2010 season at the Las Vegas Ski & Snowboard
Resort is underway, the earliest the resort has ever been open.
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The BBC needs to decide once and for all whether it is an agency of propaganda or news dissemination. (Inform, educate, entertain).
A huge industry has grown up behind 'Global Warming™ ' (recently re-branded as 'Climate Change™) which is set to get larger based upon a legally enforced deprecation of a very useful exothermic chemical reaction, namely the oxidisation of carbon.
If politicians are to interfere with established economic activity, they should do so based amongst other reasons on established scientific fact. It is important therefore that they are given reliable information even if that information is of necessity equivocal. Such an area is anthropogenic global warming.
Politicians do not read scientific papers because they are scientifically illiterate therefore it is important that secondary sources of information like the BBC report the gist of what serious scientists are saying and they they themselves should hold NO opinion whatsoever.
I do not know whether anthropogenic climate change exists; however I do know that a suspiciously large amount of fake evidence is still in the public domain as a result of the failure of the BBC to do their job, e.g. where are the reports of Steve McIntyre work reported on Climate Audit, which has broken Al Gore's 'hockey stick' and unverified previously 'established' historical records of climate based on paleo-dendro-climatology (tree ring growth).
http://www.climateaudit.org/
The truth is that Climate science is in its infancy and some of the claims made for its scientific rigour and its computer 'models' are bogus. Just because some scientists get upset when this is pointed out does not ant credibility to their case whatsoever.
Please, BBC, just follow the debate and stop trying to lead it because apart from anything else you are making some of your programmes intensely boring as a result of 'product placement' style spillover box-ticking in programmes which have nothing directly to do with climate whatsoever.
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NeilHamp and SmokingDeepThroat: Thanks for the links to my website. Here's the link again.
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/10/nodc-ocean-heat-content-0-700-meters.html
I'd like to make a correction, if I may. You both refer to the data in the post as ocean temperature. It's actually Ocean Heat Content from 0to 700 meters. The data in that post is presented in terms of GJ/m^2 or Gigajoules per square metre, not temperature. If you'd like to discuss peaks in Sea Surface Temperature (SST), I'll suggest you start with my latest monthly SST anomaly update:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/10/september-2009-sst-anomaly-update.html
It uses the NOAA Optimally Interpolated (OI.v2) SST data that's updated weekly at their NOMADS webpage.
Regards
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Interesting statistical weather data can be gleaned from the study of Solar Cycles. I have devised the proprietary Solar Cycle Power Index which was initially published in an E Book, "Global Warming: CO2, SunSpots, or Politics?" in 2001, ISBN 0967227437, Phil N. Baldwin, Jr.
Below are excerpts from this book explaining how the SCPI is constructed from each solar cycle (we are in the 24th. of them as man has measured).
You can observe two key factors in reviewing these three graphs A, B, C {groups of solar cycles shown} One is that the peak activity levels can be quite different from one cycle to the next. A second fact observed is that in some cycles both the peak level attained and how long a generally high level of activity is maintained is very different from some cycles to the next.
The SCPI takes both of these factors into account when generating solar cycle data that is useful in comparison to global temperature changes.
The SCPI is constructed by:
(1) Taking the top (largest) three monthly peaks during a cycle, averaging them and then taking 80% of this value.
(2) Each cycle is roughly a bell curve; the first time a value at least as high as 80% of the 3 top monthly peak values occurs it is marked and the last time such a value is found on the declining side of the cycle is marked as well. Then the sum of the monthly sun spot numbers between these two “spots” is added up. This sum becomes the SCPI for each solar cycle.
Because the impact on the earth from the solar energy is based on both the energy of the maximum peaks but on how long the energy is applied and how high the average energy is during this “peaking period”. As will be shown in Chapter 5, this difference has been dramatic from cycle to cycle over the years.
When the SCPI is plotted over the 23 cycles a tremendous difference is found:
The SPCI was in the approx. range of 900 to 1300 in Cycles 1,6,8 and 14; on the other hand it was in the approx range of 5900 to 6200 in cycles 19 and 21 and still about 4500 in the last Cycle 23.
The correlation to global temperature over the cycles is quite good and the high temperatures of the second half of the 20th century are mirrored by the extreme to which the SCPI reached.
The first fully measured solar cycle (#1) covers the period of 3/1755 through 6/1766. Sun activity was measured earlier, however, as the information below demonstrates.
1645-1715: Sunspots Vanish & The Little Ice Age
Sunspots observations continued in the seventeenth century, with the most active observers being the German Johannes Hevelius (1611-1687) and the French Jesuit Jean Picard (1620-1682). Very few sunspots were observed from about 1645 to 1715, and when they were their presence was noted as a noteworthy event by active astronomers. At that time, a systematic solar observing program was underway under the direction of Jean Dominique Cassini (1625-1712) at the newly founded Observatoire de Paris. Initially Picard and later Philippe La Hire carried out the bulk of the observations. Historical reconstructions of sunspot numbers indicate that the dearth of sunspots is real, rather than the results of a lack of the availability or diligence of observers. A simultaneous decrease in auroral counts further suggest that solar activity was greatly reduced during this time period.
This period is now known as the Maunder Minimum, after the solar astronomer E.W. Maunder, who, following the pioneering historical investigations of Gustav Spörer (1822-1895), was most active and steadfast in investigating the dearth of sunspot sightings by astronomers active in the second half of the seventeenth century. The documented occurrence of exceptionally cold winters throughout Europe during those years may be causally related to reduced solar activity, although this remains a topic of controversy.
During the Maunder Minimum the temperatures in northern Europe had their lowest values for the past 1000 years. Winter temperatures were on average 1 to 2 degrees colder than in later periods. During the so called “Little Ice Age”, access to Greenland was cut off by ice. This covered a period from about 1410 into the 1720s. At the same time, canals in Holland routinely froze solid, glaciers advanced in the Alps, and sea ice increased so much that no open water was present in any direction around Iceland in the late 1600s. It should be noted that the trend of ice build up around Iceland began in the “Little Ice Age” but continued well past what is generally considered this ice age period.
My estimate of the SCPI during this period above would range from approximately ZERO to maybe 100.
There is no doubt that the sun and not man moves the temperatures up and down. Certainly in some locations near cities, man can and has had an impact on "local" temperatures. I did a statistical study of several cities around the globe, locations with at least 100 years of data and I could find only one place where the most recent 5 years were statistically different at the 99% confidence level from the overall data base. This information was included in a White Paper I published and can be found at www.lrnit.com/Andrews.com along with other research information.
Last, my own consulting company funded all of my work and it was done for our interest in the subject and not for any organization.
PhilNB
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It's amazing how much venom a single blog/report can generate.
The abuse and character assination are typical of the warmists. I suggest any posters who call for censorship of this report have no interest in scientific debate. Anybody that argues that any issue in science is over has a complete lack of understanding of the process of science. It is blatently obvious that computer modelling is an extremely crude tool at the moment, the fact they have got the last decade wrong should motivate those concerned to see improvements not shouting to close down the debate.
This is no longer simply a scientific issue it has been taken over by politic, the politics of limits. The momentum is with the warmist because this issue fits perfectly with our cynical, pessimistic, directionless times.
The fanaticism of the alarmist is becoming dangerous. Nothing less than complete censorship of the denier voice is called for. It is not uncommon, as with this article, for calls to deny a platform to those that go against the mainstream. It should be pointed out it is the alarmist who are the true conservatives in the debate. Fear politics, censorship, anti-humanism, Ludditism, ignorant romanticism the greens have got the lot.
Rather than humanity losing sight of our relation with nature we have lost sight of the potential of humanity.
“The world does not have six billion mouths to feed — it has six billion hard-working human beings whose creativity and ingenuity must be unleashed.”
ANGEYO H. KALAMBUKA
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Thanks Paul Hudson for the blog entry.
It's a shame this 'debate' has an 'us' & 'them' atmosphere (1 of the steps to tyranny) - with people being branded 'deniers' (with obvious connotations) - who's denying that climate change hasn't happened?
What is obvious is that this debate has been hijacked, made political and religious (there is even an AGW and anti-AGW priesthood). What is sad is that there has been very little measured scientific debate, with the zeitgeist preferring to be about promoting catastrophism, with claims, spin and press releases that are meant to totally wipe out opposition through creating mass hysteria, moral panic and foster a court of public opinion (de rigueur these days???).
Science has been caught up in this zeitgeist through agenda-led funding, creating vested interests (with obvious fall-outs - see recent 'Hockey Stick' drama and MET Office 'BBQ Summer' own goal).
I hope we are not at an impasse in the GW debate - it is def. not as certain as once thought, I hope the media keeps questioning the certainty - on both sides.
I think the next 1 to 5 years will be fascinating and will bring us all fresh incite on a range of topics:
* Solar Cycle 24 & the Solar Minimum (or new Grand Minimum)
* Global temperatures dropping
* Arctic Ice growing or not
* Ocean Acidification
* CO2 - is it the bad boy we think?
* El Nino & La Nina cycles
* Copenhagen and C&T
* Questions over the validity of the IPCC and MET Office
* Continued fall-out from the 'Hockey Stick' drama
etc...
Oh..and my stance? Well pollution is bad, so reduce it. CO2 s not a pollutant but too much can't be good, can it? AGW, don't know but am influenced more towards (to borrow a phrase) "it's the sun stupid!". Denier - no!!!
Keep on bloggin Paul!!
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I think this just proves that after all the research that has been done on climate change and global warming, perhaps still there is not one study that is comprehensive enough. There are thousands of studies that research small parts of our climate, but contradict each other with claims of how it will effect temperatures globally. They can't all be correct. Then again is it even possible do a completely comprehensive study that takes absolutely every cause and effect of everything that influence climate to make accurate predictions for the coming decades?
All that said, it is essentially an irrelevant argument. Fossil fuels are unsustainable, we have to find other alternatives. So rather that risk the threatening the very existence of humanity because it might not happen, when we have to make the same changes to solve another problem, why don't we do something about it now.
It's one thing to deny the science and effects of global warming, but it is another to deny the simple fact that our society is built on unsustainable resources.
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I guess sometimes I’d just like to see less focus on warming and more focus on CO2 parts-per-million, which has gone from around 318 in 1960 to over 380 today on an exponential growth curve….comparing over 600,000 years of c02 levels from ice cores.
An excellent loose (ok, really loose) metaphor I like is yeast….converting sugar to energy at a break-neck pace until it finally dies in the flood of its own waste. Although we can’t smell C02, it truly is human waste – respiratory excrement. It would be a little difficult if your brain were wired to sense your own respiratory evacuation as poop….and since there is no bacteria involved – no immediate need to sense it. So here we sit – spewing, burning out, industrially cranking out a substance completely invisible to our senses, because we happen to breath at the same address where we eat.
2012 is the 100-year anniversary of the Titanic (sinking). Here is a metaphor: “Can’t see it. It must not be there. Far more important to hold cruising speed! Got a schedule to keep! Even if it were there, this ship is made of steel! Invented by humans. We’re Supermen! We’re invincible! We can do anything….we want….Oops, brain-flatulence. Didn’t see that one coming. Please accept my verbal apology. I will, unfortunately, be unable to otherwise compensate you since the ship sank.”
So is it such a terrible thing to be cautious when massive C02 atmospheric modification is unquestionably human, irrespective of warming? If things do get way out of hand, I just hope we exceed the survival rate of Spaceship Titanic (32%).
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I liked your blog very much and if I chose to explore the subject in more detail have sufficient information to do so.
What has taken me by surprise is the fanaticism, rudeness, hysteria, and intolerance of some bloggers, mostly the 'Warmers'.
As far as I am concerned the jury is still out on a number of issues and more practical (as opposed to modelling) research is needed. Two issues, however, do concern me.
1. The destruction of forests and vegetation worldwide. This reduction in the capacity for natural CO2 absorption is a major concern. In this country alone I am staggered by the number of trees felled and vegetation cleared for roads and building. Check the A46 in Lincs, Leics, Warwicks for example, then multiply that by the number of motorways and main roads.
2. Global warming and carbon are now big business and a source of income for Government, Quangos, Consultants, and ex Presidential candidates. I am going to take a lot of convincing there is no self interest in that lot especially as the only solution so far is to increase taxes!
Well done Paul, and I enjoy your weather forecasts too.
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You state that 1998 was the warmest year on record and I think you are using old data to support this. The news really did not report when NASA went and updated all its climate numbers because of a Y2K bug in the formula they were using to calculate these numbers. If you search the revised numbers out on NASA website you will find that 1934 is the warmest year on record now. Everyone keeps quoting false numbers in the name of science when the truth is out there if you look for it...it is time people looked up true facts and not hype from the media.
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You might also want to draw attention to the studies which have shown that journalists consistently underepresent the scientific evidence relating to Human Induced Climate Change.
As an ex-weather man, you of all people should know that drawing attention to short term climatic results is irrelevant. It's the longer term picture that is important, and on that score there is 20 years of evidence from hundreds of scientists across many disciplines, all showing that global average temperatures are on the rise, and that CO2 and other greehouse house gases are the dominant causative effect.
By all means point out interesting anomalies, but please don't write about them as if they have much scientific validity.
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Perhaps someone can explain to me why, with ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide being pumped out, the temperature graphs go both up and down since around 1850? Surely if CO2 is as bad as it is made out to be the temperature graphs would continually rise and never fall. During my researches I could not find 'proof' that the current warming was driven by CO2, only the very loose correlation that temperatures have been rising since 1850 and so has the amount of CO2 that we produce therefore it must be CO2. My own correlations between the drift of the poles and temperature are much better than any CO2/temperature correlation so why isn't my theory better than the CO2 theory? As I read more scientific papers I notice that there are plenty of other contenders for the temperature increases.
The fact that anyone who opposes the CO2 theories is labelled a “denier” and has their research denied or suppressed is perhaps the most worrying aspect of all. Science is about debate properly conducted, not people throwing accusations about. Prof. Vincent Courtillot, (elected to membership in the French Academy of Sciences, so not an insignificant figure in the world of science) is one of those, who amongst other things, would like to get hold of the base data on which the met office graphs are based, because these are not the original data but data that has been manipulated to account for various factors. Unfortunately that data is now apparently lost for ever so we do not know how valid the graphs really are. He remarked at one scientific gathering that he could not longer give his PhD students any work on climate change that might challenge the IPCC as their careers would be over before they started. This emasculation of scientific debate bodes ill for mankind, for if, as some suspect we are heading for a global cooling period, such as we had in the Maunder Minimum, we may be facing famine across the northern hemisphere in the very near future. If the scientific debate is stifled so that we do not realise we may be heading for famine, then we will be badly prepared and many lives will be sacrificed on the altar of suppressed scientific debate.
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It would be interesting to establish if those who disagree with the author, are actually earning a living, promoting the global warming theory.
Whatever the truth may be, I would like to see the issue of global warming (or not) revisited and proper studies carried out by people who do NOT fit into the following categories.
Paid by the government / work within the government
Journalists
Anyone who earns a living as a result of the "global warming" theory.
Come on, lets see some unbiased data.
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It is interesting to note that the comments generally support the BBC in giving a more balanced view of the climate change issue and that in terms of the quality of the comments the so called 'deniers' are a long way ahead of their rivals. I particulalry enjoyed number 44 - agwbsdotcom - seems to sum the job up pretty well. And I have heard it said many times that all scientists should be skeptical. The AGW hypothesis is nothing more than that - a hypothesis. So anyone who calls himself a scientist should remain skeptical. The fact that so many scientists (and others) who support AGW do so with the passion of a zealot only makes me more skeptical. Climate science seems to have become a belief-based science if that is not a contradiction in terms (oh it is) Anyone that tells you 'the science is settled' or speaks of a 'concensus' clearly has an axe to grind. Keep up the good work Paul.
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I've thought the PDO controlled most of our weather for a few years now. I actually predicted the ice storm we had this past winter(though it was from observations on El Nino/La Nina shifts and our weather patterns afterward) and the cool summer we had here as well. I expect a very cold and snowy winter and a continued cool summer for my region next year. Only time will tell.
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ehrichweiss #66. I agree with you. The Met Office says it will be mild. Piers Corbyn predicts it will be cold. I believe Piers' physics over the Met Office computer.
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Mr. Hudson, this article was a caricature of balanced reporting filled with "arguments" that would have been corrected in seconds on any site which allows direct user-contributions and which read as if pasted in off a denialist blog. It is not a "fact" that 1998 is the warmest year on record - it is one figure from a number of parallel records. Others record 2005 as the warmest year.
Even if this "fact" were unambiguous, moreover, your presentation of it represents uncritical endorsement of the cherry-picking innumeracy typifying the denial industry. One does not evaluate a trend by picking the most recent peak and drawing a line down to the current year. Can you name a single refereed paper that argues that the transient peak of 1998 represents a reversal of trend? Of course you cannot. Anyone boasting even a bog-standard comprehensive mathematics education would not succumb to such a crude analysis. Certainly no climate scientist.
The global temperature features a number of cyclicities and considerable noise. There are going to be occasional peaks and troughs - there have been half a dozen of each since the 1940s. Any year that is not itself a transient peak is going to appear to be part of a declining "trend" if one's search for a "trend" is so crude. All such previous transient peaks have been superimposed on a rising trend, just as is 1998/2005. At the very least one should include a ten-year moving average to give some indication of the real trend in temperature.
If you do not understand enough of trend analysis even to secure the reliability of your impressions with a moving average, how can you possibly aspire to comment on the more intractable regression techniques used by science? You would do better to defer to the IPCC and its overwhelming expertise in this area.
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Spanglerboy - "It is interesting to note that the comments generally support the BBC in giving a more balanced view of the climate change issue and that in terms of the quality of the comments the so called 'deniers' are a long way ahead of their rivals.I particulalry enjoyed number 44 - agwbsdotcom - seems to sum the job up pretty well."
And yet post number 44 contains the following number of data points and inferences drawn from data: Zero. Nul. Nothing. Nought. Not a one. Basically, it is one long complaint about the tone of voice of the scientific rationalists - in other words, an ad hominem appeal to the person over the data.
The nearest it comes to a discussion of causation is to mention the "overpopulation" canard so beloved of the denial industry - and then to say that it is an argument of the rationalist community.
In summary, you seem to be easily impressed.
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ElliotCB:
Defer to the IPCC???? With it's many usage of the word "likely" but complete lack of evidence. You do as so many alarmists do: "appeal to authority", not look for the evidence.
AGW is a hypothesis which has not been tested against the evidence and so remains just a hypothesis.
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PAWB46 - Scientists speak in terms of probabilities. That's how you can tell they are scientists. The IPCC reports actually include definitions of what range of probabilities are referred to when using terms such as "likely". When you hear someone say that it is "likely" that such and such an outcome will be seen then you have some indication that they are trying not to state more than they know. This is the essence of science.
The IPCC report "Climate Change 2007 - The Physical Science Basis: Working Group" is 1009 pages long and consists almost entirely of physical evidence. Just parroting that the evidence is not there does not make it go away. Just claiming that mentioning those who have gathered the evidence is an appeal to authority does not make the evidence go away. If you want evidence, you have to go to those with the expertise to gather and interpret it. It is that simple. Nearly all of them are doing work for the IPCC. Moreover, EVERY SINGLE paper published in professional journals in recent years containing properly-structured analysis of the EVIDENCE has concluded in favour of anthropogenic warming. If you want to claim that anthropogenic warming is merely a "hypothesis" you will need to rule out of admissibility not only all 1009 pages of physical evidence provided by the IPCC but all evidence on climatology for several years full stop.
One further point: authority is not expertise. Mr. Hudson clearly does not grasp the topics of trend analysis which I explicitly referred to, so he should defer to those who do. Such methods are not an alternative to evidence but the very means by which one ascertains what the evidence is saying.
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If you wish to talk about evidence directly and provide your own interpretations, I will not complain. I might again urge you to defer to the IPCC if you, for instance, seem not to understand how to calculate a moving average or extract a trend line. That's simply because they do know these things.
So physical evidence: let us begin with the isotope ratios of atmospheric carbon. Why do the proportions of isotopes of annual additional carbon in the atmosphere closely match the proportions of isotopes in the fossil fuels burned during the corresponding annual periods?
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Climate change or cyclic change will continue to raise passionate debate.
One thing is certain and that is this subject has been firmly grasped by governments, including the UK, as a goose laying the golden egg for raising revenue on a wide scale of loosely related issues! This topic will continue to be promoted by governments through the media. Governments would have us believe pay them or be doomed - but only possibly later rather than sooner? Legend has it a certain king tried to turn back the tide and....mmmh
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dan-diver - "One thing is certain"
I prefer the term "highly probable".
"and that is this subject has been firmly grasped by governments, including the UK, as a goose laying the golden egg for raising revenue on a wide scale of loosely related issues!"
Evidence? It is, I feel, poor form to follow up a complaint about lack of evidence and appeals to authority by posting an appeal to motivation based on no evidence.
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ElliottCB. I've learned something. When temperature goes up, it's because we've burned some fossil fuels. When it goes down, it's 'noise'. Priceless.
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ElliottCB #71
You say 'Scientists speak in terms of probabilities. That's how you can tell they are scientists. The IPCC reports actually include definitions of what range of probabilities are referred to when using terms such as "likely". When you hear someone say that it is "likely" that such and such an outcome will be seen then you have some indication that they are trying not to state more than they know. This is the essence of science.'
When scientists talk of probabilities, that is what comes out of, for example, data analysis (statistics). The IPCC is not using statistics when it uses terms like "likely". If you look at the definitions of their terms, you see that they are based on opinions, not on data or statistics.
The 1009 pages does not provide any evidence to support the hypothesis that AGW is caused by increased CO2. There is plenty of evidence there, but not supporting the hypothesis. In fact the main line of argument seems to be "we cannot explain the warming by natural causes, therefore it must be CO2". That's not science.
If you think the IPCC reports provide the evidence, please show me where it is. Otherwise I will have to continue believing that there is no evidence and it is just opinion wrapped in pseudo-scientific definitions of terms like "likely".
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ElliottCB
”Mr. Hudson, this article was a caricature of balanced reporting filled with "arguments" that would have been corrected in seconds on any site which allows direct user-contributions and which read as if pasted in off a denialist blog.”
This site is a blog which allows user-contributions. That’s the whole point of it.
Do you mean it should have been on Wikipaedia. The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. The United Nations used it to find an image to replace the broken Hockey Stick for the UNEP CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE COMPENDIUM 2009 and then accreditted it to "Hanno 2009", but provided no further reference to this in the document.
Paul did not use any arguments in his report. He provided a platform for the views of other people.
His personal comments were
"the warmest year recorded globally was not last year, or 2007, but 1998. For the last decade we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. What's more, climate models did not forecast it even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise."
and
"One thing's for sure. The debate about what's causing global warming is far from over. Some would say it's hotting up."
Your Quote:
“EVERY SINGLE paper published in professional journals in recent years containing properly-structured analysis of the EVIDENCE has concluded in favour of anthropogenic warming.”
Few people dispute that anthropogenic warming is occuring. It is how much that is the important question.
The real issue is that predictions from highly inaccurate Climate Models are being used as evidence.
that there has not been any observed increase in global warming over the last decade. THe climate models did not forecast this despite the fact that CO2 levels continued to rise. No contentious issue here.
Climate Models would have forecast that for the last decade we have not observed any increase in global temperatures. That how you can tell it's a Climate Model.
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Moderator please delete my post #77.
I will repost with unintended last paragraph removed
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I'm a newcomer to this blog, and so have spent a pleasant hour catching up with the various views of subscribers. I have no qualifications whatsoever to support any input that I may make, but it seems to me that we are rather quick to come to conclusions on global warming based solely on information gained in what, relative to the billions of years since our planet is thought to have been first formed, is merely the last nano second of the Earth's history.
I have read that our island was warm enough during Roman times for vineyards to be a viable proposition in the north, so periods of warmer climate seem to be nothing new. As the Romans for all their other skills were hardly considered experts in heavy industry, Does this not indicate a more natural cause of the Earths temperature fluctuations?
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GrannyannieR. Yes, it does, it's called 'variable ocean currents'.
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Regarding comments 49 and 50, I’m sticking with the GISTemp data set listed at
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.txt
because it includes Arctic data that HadCRUT, UAH, and RSS do not. Surely the Arctic data are sparse, mainly because they are shoreline data, which means that GISTemp data set is probably underestimating the Arctic’s effect on global warming. I have looked at GISTemp and HadCrut data plotted out since 1998, as SmokingDeepThroat suggested, and they are not flat. The reader can examine
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
and
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif
and judge for him- or herself.
The variability in annual average global temperature is shown nicely in the GISTemp figure. The primary cause of the variability is the El Nino southern oscillation. Variations in the solar irradiance are a secondary cause, about 0.18 C (or less, see [Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]) per W/m^2 of variability in the solar irradiance, which itself usually varies by about 1 W/m^2 over its 11-year cycle. The impact of the ESNO is obvious in the high average temperature for 1998, when there was a strong El Nino effect and the solar irradiance was near its average; 2008, when there was a La Nina effect; and now, when there is an El Nino effect competing with an, and apparently dominating, the current extended solar minimum, causing the average temperature to increase. While the ENSO and the variable solar irradiance cause variability in the annual average global temperature, they do not seem to account for the general long-term increase in the annual average global temperature.
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Hadcrut data clearly shows temperatures have levelled off (even fallen) from your graph. So what's all the fuss about Mr Hudson's article? Sound's to me like its hit a raw nerve. Like a previous commenter says, its 'we told you so when temperatures warm'; but when they dont you hide behind this very convenient natural variability/noise line (which means you dont know but you dont want people to know you dont)
And yes Nasa's data is warmer, but why would anyone believe Nasa's data after the fiasco this summer? To chose Nasa's data over Hadley's is cherry picking in the extreme. Talk about double standards.
http://www.agiweb.org/geotimes/aug07/article.html?id=WebExtra081607_2.html
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SmokingDeepThroat - "I've learned something. When temperature goes up, it's because we've burned some fossil fuels. When it goes down, it's 'noise'. Priceless."
How convenient that what you have learned is what you wanted to believe before I had even posted. No, the point of a moving average, or more properly a regression analysis of the data, is to correct for noise WHICHEVER way it goes.
PAWB46 - "When scientists talk of probabilities, that is what comes out of, for example, data analysis (statistics). The IPCC is not using statistics when it uses terms like 'likely'."
And yet the IPCC consists of scientists. So you have just contradicted yourself, haven't you? In fact, it is using a combination of statistics yielded from projections and professional opinions to seek the best possible estimate of causes and outcomes for policy-makers. It speaks of likelihood rather than certainty because that is how scientists think. Whether they are using statistics or not.
"The 1009 pages does not provide any evidence to support the hypothesis that AGW is caused by increased CO2."
Well, as soon as you call it AGW you have more-or-less incorporated the assumption that it is caused by increased CO2. However, assuming that was merely a slip on your part: Of course it does. That entire volume of the report is dedicated to examining nothing else. And yes, the hypothesis is extremely strongly supported by this 1,009-page volume of EVIDENCE. As the report concludes. We have a markedly increased carbon content in the atmosphere which has the isotopic signature of the fossil carbon that we have burned, that carbon is shown to act as a greenhouse gas, all other sources of carbon are ruled out and all other causes for the increasing temperature are ruled out. What more confirmation do you want?
"In fact the main line of argument seems to be 'we cannot explain the warming by natural causes, therefore it must be CO2'. That's not science."
Oh, yes it is. Science works by elimination. You look for things that would refute your hypothesis and if they don't turn up, it is supported. According to the most popular view that is the very demarcation criterion that actually separates science from non-science. Falsification.
"If you think the IPCC reports provide the evidence, please show me where it is."
I believe I showed you yesterday, but here it is again: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm
ADMcLa - "This site is a blog which allows user-contributions."
Not on the page of the original article, and not in the days after it first appeared.
"The United Nations used it to find an image to replace the broken Hockey Stick for the UNEP CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE COMPENDIUM 2009 and then accreditted it to "Hanno 2009", but provided no further reference to this in the document."
Do you have some evidence to support this claim? Note: EVIDENCE. Not a copy of the same claim on a denialist blog.
"Paul did not use any arguments in his report. He provided a platform for the views of other people."
No, he reported them as fact, as your subsequent quotes show. "For the last decade we have not observed any increase in global temperatures" is the presentation as fact of an interpretation. A false interpretation. It is not true. We have not had a warmer year. (Unless you count the fact that according to other records we have and it was 2005.) The trend line is still showing an increase in temperatures - the moving average is still rising. The inability to discern this distinction which Hudson displays by those quotes should make him more cautious about commenting on the subject at all.
"Few people dispute that anthropogenic warming is occuring."
Oh, really? Take a look up-stream on this blog.
"The real issue is that predictions from highly inaccurate Climate Models are being used as evidence."
No, the real issue is that people are prepared to repeat this falsehood as fact. The fact of anthropogenic warming is not established through predictions yielded by models.
"that there has not been any observed increase in global warming over the last decade."
False. There has not been a warmer year than the last peak. This is NOT THE SAME THING. Not even an 'O'-level Statistics student ought to have so crudely flawed a concept of a trend as to fall for this. There will be peaks every ten years or so, even ignoring cyclicities such as ENSO. There always have. The trend is still extractable using statistical methods and we are still seeing it. You can do it yourself with a hand-held calculator just by plotting the ten-year average.
"THe climate models did not forecast this despite the fact that CO2 levels continued to rise."
False. The climate models yield a probability for years showing temperatures deviating from the average for the period. It is a normal distribution - again, very basic statistics. Every ten years or so there will be peak and trough years. This is REALLY, REALLY simple to understand. You get peak years and you get trough years. The recent ones are within the confidence limits of our models. It is NOT getting cooler. It has just been a few years since the last peak. This shows up again and again in the record and it does not invalidate the trend.
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The deleted reference in comment 81 was a short version of Tung, K. K., and C. D. Camp (2008), Solar cycle warming at the Earth’s surface in NCEP and ERA-40 data: A linear discriminant analysis, J. Geophys. Res., 113, D05114, doi:10.1029/2007JD009164. This paper explains the "or less" in comment 81.
Response to comment 82: The web site you furnished has a 2007 article on an error in the estimate of U.S. temperatures. The article states that the trends and numbers for global temperature stayed about the same. Comment 81 is about global temperature. As to the fuss, I'm just answering the question, "Whatever happened to global warming?" It's still around.
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ElliottCB #83:
You say 'And yet the IPCC consists of scientists.' I don't think you understand how the UN and IPCC work. The IPCC consists of bureaucrats (look at the CV of the head of the IPCC). These bureaucrats write political summaries for policymakers. They would be out of a job if they didn't keep producing alarmist junk, because their sole remit is to try and prove AGW, not to investigate how the climate really works.
You are totally wrong about falsification, because ice-core data shows that warming causes CO2 to increase, so the theory of AGW has been falsified. Furthermore, warming has occurred rapidly many times in the past without human causes and we cannot explain the warmings fully because the climate is a little understood system.
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ElliottCB
My Quote
"The United Nations used it to find an image to replace the broken Hockey Stick for the UNEP CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE COMPENDIUM 2009 and then accreditted it to "Hanno 2009", but provided no further reference to this in the document."
Your Reply
“Do you have some evidence to support this claim? Note: EVIDENCE. Not a copy of the same claim on a denialist blog.”
Yes I do. It would have taken anybody 5 minutes on Goggle to find it. The file is a free download from the UNEP website. Curiously it is down at the moment. I wonder why?
It has a Website Under Revision message when you click on the hyperlink for the compendium2009.pdf file. Presumably they also have a Climate Model Under Revision page.
However they wanted everybody in the world to get a copy and it is available on loads of other websites. I got it from
www.indiaenvironmentalportal.org.in
On page five, Figure 1.3 shows a graph with the title “Correlation between temperature and CO2”. Source Hanno 2009
On Wikipaeodia we see an identical graph.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CO2-Temp.png
Source: graph drawn by Hanno using data from different sources
Originally uploaded 6 December 2005
In the References Section, Hanno is not listed.
In the Preface of the Compendium it proudly states
“Climate Change Science Compendium, based on the wealth of peer reviewed
research published by researchers and institutions since 2006.”
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To be honest I found this article disturbing from referencing the work of a geologist who has well known ties to denier groups to the suggestion at the start of 11 years of cooling which is utter nonsense. Given that 2005 is either warmest or second warmest year on record depending on whose data you use and that this decade is clearly the warmest decade in the temperature record or the small fact (not mentioned in the story) that 1998 is now the only year from the 1990s still in the top ten.
Anyone claiming to be a climate reporter should have known using your own Met Services data that 1998 was an anomaly well above the years either side of it in the record and due to the record El Nino that occurred at the time, by some estimates the strongest in the last hundred years.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
This story has caused to lose faith in the BBC as a source of reliable information.
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PAWB46 - "I don't think you understand how the UN and IPCC work."
I don't think you are prepared to hear it. Thousands of scientists report or contribute to the IPCC.
"The IPCC consists of bureaucrats (look at the CV of the head of the IPCC)."
Rajendra Pachauri? The one with the PhD in Industrial Engineering and Economics? Or Dr. Christopher Field, co-chair of Working Group II with a doctorate in ecology? Plenty more where they came from.
Even if the directors of the organisation were not bureaucrats AND scientists, which of course is what you have by definition when you put a scientist in charge of a bureaucracy, the IPCC draws on the work of 2,500 expert reviewers and 800 contributing authors. All scientists in relevant fields.
"These bureaucrats write political summaries for policymakers."
Yes, that is what the IPCC was set up for. To provide a summary of the state of the science for policymakers. That's why you have a bunch of bureaucrats with science doctorates there. What was your point?
"They would be out of a job if they didn't keep producing alarmist junk, because their sole remit is to try and prove AGW, not to investigate how the climate really works."
No, their job is to suppress AGW. The reporting rules of the IPCC were set up to prevent it being able to report any findings in favour of anthropogenic warming that are not agreed to unanimously. It is a testament to the gravity of the situation that even the unanimous conclusion of hundreds of scientists from different fields is fairly severe. Moreover, New Scientist has investigated the reporting and documented systematic watering-down of the severity of the findings once the reports reach the political review stage. The situation is actually worse than the IPCC is saying.
"You are totally wrong about falsification, because ice-core data shows that warming causes CO2 to increase, so the theory of AGW has been falsified."
No, to falsify AW it would be necessary to show that increasing CO2 does not cause warming. (Fairly obviously, I'd have thought.) The question of AW is "what effect does increasing CO2 have", not "what cause has the effect of increasing CO2".
"Furthermore, warming has occurred rapidly many times in the past without human causes and we cannot explain the warmings fully because the climate is a little understood system."
What we need to know, however, is what effect pumping trillions of tonnes of CO2 and equivalents into the atmosphere has. (Nearly a third of atmospheric carbon and two-thirds of reactive nitrogen species, to be specific.) And that is fairly simple to understand and, moreover, the answer is backed up by a huge bulk of evidence. ALL the recent reviewed papers which address it, in fact.
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ADMcLa - "Yes I do. It would have taken anybody 5 minutes on Goggle to find it."
Ah. I think I begin to see your problem.
"The file is a free download from the UNEP website. Curiously it is down at the moment. I wonder why?"
How tragically inconvenient for you. Now, let me take a wild guess here - ALL the links on the sites you found on Google claiming to show this graph at the UN are down at the moment. Right?
"www.indiaenvironmentalportal.org.in"
Right. "Firefox can't find the server at www.indiaenvironmentalportal.org.in." It's a conspiracy, I tell you!
"However they wanted everybody in the world to get a copy and it is available on loads of other websites."
And has it occurred to you, O Great Sleuth, that one of these websites might be Wikipedia? Your claim was that the UN sourced the image from Wikipedia, if you'll remember. (Note that you cannot even claim to know of a reason why the graph is not accurate - just that the UN sourced it from Wiki.) When I challenged you to provide evidence for that assertion, I meant evidence that the UN sourced the image from Wikipedia, not evidence that they are using an identical graph. (Or rather, evidence of a broken link combined with a repeat of the claim that they are using an identical graph.)
Here are a couple of suggestions for you to consider:
1) Despite the wealth of evidence that the graph has been claimed to be in this document, it is not actually in it, hence the complete absence of any such graph except at Wiki.
2) The graph actually was in the document and they are in the process of withdrawing it. Science does actually do that, you know - if a line of evidence is found to be fraudulent it is stricken from the record and repudiated by the journal. I know you are more comfortable with the denialist tactic of pasting the claim into hundreds of blogs to ensure its immortality and then quoting it as fact in perpetuity. Might I invite you to consider though, that this way of doing things actually might be a better way to ensure the veracity of a scientific finding?
"Presumably they also have a Climate Model Under Revision page."
I would hope so. It is science. It is supposed to remain permanently under revision.
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Here are Global empirical reports of record
cold. Possible explanations for what is coming
in the not so distant future? The records of
the Vostok and Greenland ice cores are indisputable.
This cycle of glaciation and the forces required to
initate the process is most likely beyond our means.
Examples:
http://macedoniaonline.eu/content/view/5026/2/
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/01/2586166.htm
http://www.newstalk650.com/story/20090711/19255
http://www.necn.com/Boston/Nation/2009/10/12/Record-cold-grips-parts-of-the/1255357373.html
http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/austria-gets-record-october-snow
http://www.ubalert.com/a/11039#
Reasons?
http://alsystems.algroup.co.uk/warming/index.html
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/solarcycle2.jsp
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/Ice_Age.html
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ElliotCB
My quote
"The file is a free download from the UNEP website. Curiously it is down at the moment. I wonder why?"
Your Reply
“How tragically inconvenient for you. Now, let me take a wild guess here - ALL the links on the sites you found on Google claiming to show this graph at the UN are down at the moment. Right?”
No. What I meant was the compendium2009.pdf cannot be downloaded from the UNEP website or from sites that link to this site. It can be downloaded from other host sites. I agree the link I gave was unfortunately incorrect. The following link currently does work.
[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]
“Your claim was that the UN sourced the image from Wikipedia, if you'll remember. “
“When I challenged you to provide evidence for that assertion, I meant evidence that the UN sourced the image from Wikipedia, not evidence that they are using an identical graph.”
I did provide evidence that the graph was uploaded to Wikipaedia on 6 December 2005 by Hanno. His real name is Dr Hanno Sandvik from Norway. Hanno is his Wikipaedia username, confirming that UNEP used his graph from Wikipaedia. Authors are not referred to by their first name. Note that UNEP got the wrong year for this graph. It should have been Hanno 2005.
“Here are a couple of suggestions for you to consider:
1) Despite the wealth of evidence that the graph has been claimed to be in this document, it is not actually in it, hence the complete absence of any such graph except at Wiki.
2) The graph actually was in the document and they are in the process of withdrawing it. Science does actually do that, you know - if a line of evidence is found to be fraudulent it is stricken from the record and repudiated by the journal. ”
1) If you download the pdf you will see it is in it. Unless you take the view that www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in are part of a conspiracy.
2) I agree. Hanno’s graph replaced the discredited Hockey Stick graph.
My Quote
"Presumably they also have a Climate Model Under Revision page.”
Your Reply
“I would hope so. It is science. It is supposed to remain permanently under revision.”
I thought the Science was settled.
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ElliotCB #68 - "At the very least one should include a ten-year moving average to give some indication of the real trend in temperature."
I have calculated the 10, 20 and 30 year moving average figures for global temperatures (HadCRUT3). Here they are for the last 4 years :
10 YR 20 YR 30 YR
2005 14.372c 14.260c 14.181c
2006 14.402c 14.280c 14.203c
2007 14.406c 14.292c 14.215c
2008 14.386c 14.300c 14.227c
(rounded to 3 decimal places)
That is, the 10 year MA fell in 2008 for the first time since 2000 (actually the largest fall in a single year since 1955) and even the 20 year MA rose only 0.008c. In other words, based on HadCRUT3, global temperatures have fallen over the last 10 years and have increased only slightly over the last 20 years. Yet the proponents of climate change persist in stating that global temperatures are currently increasing.
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QuaesoVeritas
Very interesting calculations.
I doubt whether ElliotCB and some others on this blog will accept your figures.
You will need to publish this and get it peer reviewed.
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Of course, I would be most grateful if ElliotCB or anyone else could take the trouble to repeat my calculations and let me know whether or not they think they are inaccurate.
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QuaesoVeritas. Could you provide the link so that we can repeat your calculations?
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A moving average shows that the warming trend quite clearly hasn't stopped
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/fawcett_11yr_avg.gif
From this excellent page:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Did-global-warming-stop-in-1998.html
For those that believe that "for the last decade we have not observed any increase in global temperatures", take a look at this graph:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/warming_by_decade.png
The noughties were warmer than the nineties, even though the record warm year was in 1998.
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Donald. Oh come on please! What you're doing there is just smoke and mirrors. That pretty little graphic from GISS doesn't show what's going on in the past 10 years. It's stuff like that which gives analysis-presentation a bad name! You could just as well say that the average anomaly during the 90s was 2.215 degrees C, whereas the decade since 1998 is 3.994 degrees C. That's true too, and makes it look as though warming is getting scarey. But it doesn't tell you that an arch has formed when you graph the figures QV gives (just as there's an arch in sea surface temperatures). Of course, even you must know that if you take a line from the last peak then the temp is flattened if you use surface, and falling if you use satellite.
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@ SmokingDeepThroat,
"Taking a line from the last peak" is not science. Ocean temperatures reached a record recently. The satellites show warming. Even John Christy- one of two climate change sceptics in charge of one of the satellite data sets- admits that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4
QV doesn't understand a moving average. You can't have a 10 year moving average for the last four years- a ten year average for the last ten years would give you a figure for 2004/2005. You'd have to wait till 2013 to get a figure for 2008.
This is blog comment science- misinterpretation by people who don't really understand science, but like to play at it. It would be laughed out of a sixth form science class. Global warming didn't stop in 1998- it's just a myth. Even the sceptical scientist Patrick Michaels- responsible for much of the nonsense about global warming slowing down- warns other sceptics in the video above- "It's warming- get over it!"
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Donald. I don't think I've ever said that 'warming stopped in 1998'. Please check. What I tend to say is that the temperature anomaly since has flattened - which it has, or fallen if you look at the satellite data. I DO understand a rolling average (I cannot speak for QV) and that's why I would like his link. You make me laugh when you say "Taking a line from the last peak is not science" as using 10-year periods is EXACTLY what the Met Office does on the link you provided yourself!!!! Only their last line is a 9-year period, not a 10-year one (even though they say it is!).
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20080923c.html
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SmokingDeepThroat - #95
"QuaesoVeritas. Could you provide the link so that we can repeat your calculations?"
Which link ?
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donaldbroatch
“ This decade was warmer than the last one (even with the record warm year in 1998), which was warmer than the one before that, which was warmer than the one before that, which was warmer than the one before that. ”
It depends what global temperature you are referring to. Surface sea temperature, deep ocean temperature, land temperature, low atmosphere, middle atmosphere, high atmosphere etc. And also what data source is used.
“ Maybe this graph will bring it home.
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/wpcontent/uploads/2009/07/warming_by_decade.png “
No. I could show you half a dozen different graphs that show a different trend after 1998. Also note that when using global temperatures as an indicator of climate change, increases in Artic and Antarctic ice have to be factored in.
“ consider the fact that ocean temperatures have hit a new record.
http://climateprogress.org/2009/09/16/second-warmest-august-on-record-and-warmest-june-july-august-for-the-oceans-deepest-solar-minimum/ “
The change in focus from air temperature to ocean temperature to promote AGW was predictable given the sustained decline in global air temperature over recent years.
Your source refers to NOAA ERSST.v3b data, which only covers surface sea temperatures. When the ERSST.v3b dataset was first used in 2008, it included satellite data to supplement the buoy and ship based data. However the satellite data was removed because it was felt it caused a downward bias.
The NOAA OI.v2 data, which is satellite based, and Hadley Centre’s HADSST2 data do not show record temperatures.
Note that reduced winds over the surface of the oceans can give higher sea surface temperatures. The greatest transport of energy out of a body of water is evaporation.
Ocean surface temperatures don’t relate to the heat stored by the world’s oceans. This can only be measured adequately by the Argo buoy network. You will know that this is a global array of 3,000 free-drifting profiling floats that measures the temperature and salinity of the upper 2000 m of the ocean. Argo say that the world’s oceans have shown a slight cooling since they became operational at the end of 2003.
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donaldbroatch - #96
"A moving average shows that the warming trend quite clearly hasn't stopped
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/fawcett_11yr_avg.gif"
The reason this MA of the HadCRUT3 data doesn't show a fall is that it includes the record year of 1998. As soon as 1998 drops out of this MA, it will (probably) show a fall. Why an 11 year MA? It seems to have been chosen to "prove" that temperatures are still rising.
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donaldbroatch - #98.
"QV doesn't understand a moving average. You can't have a 10 year moving average for the last four years- a ten year average for the last ten years would give you a figure for 2004/2005. You'd have to wait till 2013 to get a figure for 2008."
Even if that were true, since according to you that is the most recent 10 year MA we have, it still shows that based on that 10 year MA, global temperatures were no longer rising in 2004/5!
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donaldbroatch - #96
"A moving average shows that the warming trend quite clearly hasn't stopped
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/fawcett_11yr_avg.gif"
Also, having checked the original document, it is clear that the graph was produced in April 2008, i.e. it doesn't included 2008 temperatures, which mine do!
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Correction to my previous post. This is the video that shows John Christy stating that the satellite data he is in charge of shows warming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNbjqSyWdcs
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@ SmokingDeepThroat,
Let's look at what Pat Michaels says on the subject. Here is a man paid by the fossil fuel industry to tell us that the threat from global warming is exaggerated, and to put the most positive spin on the data he can, yet this is what he says:
"Make an argument that you can get killed on and you will kill us all.
If you lose credibility on this issue, then you lose the issue.
What happened, and this is why this argument is so very, very dangerous, is that solar activity and the La Nina we're in now [He was speaking in 2008] have conspired to add up to produce very, very little temperature change in the last couple of years. What's going to happen is, one of these years, that's going to turn around. If you make that argument now, you're going to have a very, very difficult time defending the future.
Global warming is real and the second warming of the 20th century- people have something to do with it. Get over it."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4
Global warming continues even against the backdrop of a record warm year. Eventually even a normal year will topple that record. That's almost certainly going to happen within a very few years.
Anybody arguing that the warming stopped, or slowed down or even reversed, is going to be in for a rude awakening.
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@ QuaesoVeritas wrote:
"Also, having checked the original document, it is clear that the graph was produced in April 2008, i.e. it doesn't included 2008 temperatures, which mine do!"
By my calculation, the next 11 average would be 0.4, so the updated graph would look like this:
http://i36.tinypic.com/4r5hyc.png
Yes, the line has flattened out a bit, but making any sort of claim about global warming from that is not meaningful.
Warming was never predicted to be monotonic.
If the line resumes its upward slope in the next few years (which the Met Office say it will) then the "sceptics" will be left with no credibility (as Pat Michaels points out).
If it stays flat for a decade or so, you might have a case that global warming has stopped.
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donaldbroatch wrote:
@ QuaesoVeritas wrote:
"By my calculation, the next 11 average would be 0.4, so the updated graph would look like this:
http://i36.tinypic.com/4r5hyc.png
Yes, the line has flattened out a bit, but making any sort of claim about global warming from that is not meaningful."
I could only see part of the chart (not sure if it is my fault or not) but I get the gist. However, if you exclude 1998 I am sure that you will get a decline. Actually one reason that the 10 year MA to 2008 shows a fall is the fact that 1998 has dropped out of the figures. (I was waiting for someone to point that out) For the same reason, it will probably rise by the end of 2009 and 2010 because 1999 and 2000 were particularly low, but probably fall again from 2011. That isn't really the issue. All I am saying is that these figures point to a fairly flat series of temperatures over the last decade, whereas the official line is that temperatures are "currently" rising in line with CO2 emissions.
"Warming was never predicted to be monotonic."
Except that we were told that rising CO2 emissions directly cause warming and that is clearly not the case. There must be other (more significant) causes.
"If the line resumes its upward slope in the next few years (which the Met Office say it will) then the "sceptics" will be left with no credibility (as Pat Michaels points out)."
The Met. Office are predicting that "about half" or "at least half" (depending on which web page you read) of the next 6 years will be higher than 1998. Other models suggest that they won't. If the Met. Office predictions are wrong then they will have no credibility. The next 6 years will tell.
"If it stays flat for a decade or so, you might have a case that global warming has stopped."
My guess is that temps. will continue to rise but not at the rate the models predict.
By the way I am not a supporter of the fossil fuel industry or the motor industy. I have never had a car and haven't flown since the 1980's, can you say the same?
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@ QuaesoVeritas,
"All I am saying is that these figures point to a fairly flat series of temperatures over the last decade, whereas the official line is that temperatures are "currently" rising in line with CO2 emissions."
There is warming evident in the last ten years despite the "internal variability" due to La Nina years.
The La Nina of 2008 was warmer than the La Nina of 2001. All years not influenced by La Nina years were consistently warmer than similar years in the previous decade.
Even the low temperatures of the recent La Nina year were within model predictions; temperatures now are warmer and spot on what the models predict.
"Except that we were told that rising CO2 emissions directly cause warming and that is clearly not the case."
If you look at the 40 year trend, it's clear that CO2 is causing warming. Look at a ten year period, and it's less evident, because the internal variability in a ten year period is the same as the warming trend due to CO2.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warming-pause/
"My guess is that temps. will continue to rise but not at the rate the models predict."
Your guess is frankly worthless, as are all the guesses and predictions made in blog, forums and comment sections all over the internet.
Blog science is not good science.
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Regarding comments 92 - 109, why use moving averages when least squares will allow you to use the latest available data and tell you the trend and how good it is? The GISTemp data set cited in comment 49 includes land and air temperatures and includes the warming effect over the Arctic, which I think makes it more comprehensive than other similar data sets. The best shot one would have to establish a declining recent trend in annual average global temperature would be to examine the 11-year trend from 1998 through 2008, for which the least-squares slope is 0.011 C/yr with a standard deviation of 0.009 C/yr, a positive trend with a less-than-50% probability for a negative trend. One can obtain a crude estimate of the recent temperature trend absent the ENSO's effect on the 1998 and 2008 temperatures by examining the 1999-2007 temperatures, which gives a slope of 0.030 C/year with a standard deviation of 0.11 C/yr, indicating that the probability of a negative trend is quite small.
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"If you look at the 40 year trend, it's clear that CO2 is causing warming. ... same as the warming trend due to CO2."
That is probably the 2nd stupidist thing I have read in these blog posts (I read them all). Correlation != Causation.
This gets pointed out time and time again, but morons keep telling us it is so anyway.
One could equally well point to the graphs at Adrians paper at http://www.adriankweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Climate_Change.htm and assert as equally incorrectly (Adrian makes no such assertion) that;
If you look at the 100 year trend, it's clear that drift in the geomagnetic pole position is causing warming.
Adrian's data is far more substantial actually. However I do not hear anyone screaming to de/remagnitize the earth.
Oh... I forgot, we cannot blame ourselves for geomagnetic drift, while trival increased volumes of CO2 (a trace atmospheric gas necessary for life) is something that we can blame ourselves for, ergo, that must be the cause of it all. What a crock. The whole ...CO2 causes AGW and its the priomary cause of climate change... thing is a crock of bad science, politics, money and just altogether way too much Jedeo-Christian guilt combined with the unbelievable arrogance that we, humans, can actually affect the global climate in any rational, relevant or useful way.
Reality check - the earth has been warming since the last ice age, adapt or perish.
Dweeb
ps: Remember when they were going to sprikle coal-dust on the arctic ice to prevent global cooling? Same same only different ...
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DrDweeb,
Leave out the insults.
I wrote: "If you look at the 40 year trend, it's clear that CO2 is causing warming."
You wrote: "Correlation is not causation."
In the absence of any other causation, it's overwhelming circumstantial evidence, as we have evidence for a mechanism of CO2 causation, and evidence of the causation at work.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation-over-the-20th-Century.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-do-we-know-CO2-is-causing-warming.html
It's like finding a man in room holding a smoking gun over a corpse with a bullet hole in it. Witnesses inside and outside swear no one else entered or left the room, and the man's friends and family all state that he owned the gun and bitterly hated the victim.
The police take the man away. It's an open and shut case they say. At that moment, the man's lawyer arrives. "The fact he had the smoking gun in his hand proves nothing, all you have is circumstantial evidence", he says.
I'll correct my statement if you like.
If you look at the 40 year trend, it's clear that there is warming. It's also clear from the evidence that CO2 is the only possible cause.
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Donald. No, that's grossly incorrect. We can argue about 'warming' and whether it's just rebound or business-as-usual, however, it is wrong to say that CO2 is the only possible cause. And you know it Donald!
"Blog science is not good science" So why do you keep giving us links to realclimate?
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QuaesoVeritas. In your post #92/94 you asked ElliottCB to repeat your calculations. Can you give us the link to the data so that we can try?
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SmokingDeepThroat #114.
"QuaesoVeritas. In your post #92/94 you asked ElliottCB to repeat your calculations. Can you give us the link to the data so that we can try?"
Unfortunately there is no single link to the data (as far as I can tell). The Met. Office only seem to publish HadCRUT3 data in the form of "anomalies", i.e. relative to what they call "1961-90 normals", e.g. 2008 was +0.313c compared to 1961-90.
Links to the annual and monthly relative data can be found here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadcrut3.html
However, I have seen the actual average figure for 1961-90 quoted as 14c, so in order to obtain the actual HadCRUT3 figures for individual years, I have had to calculate them by adding the annual anomaly figures to 14c. Unfortunately, the 14c figure is so well hidden on the M.O. web site that I can no longer locate it but I will keep searching.
A further complication is that the temperature rise figures usually quoted by the Met. Office, e.g. a "4c rise by the end of the century", are compared to "pre-industrial levels", which the M.O. define as the average for 1861-90. A lot of people don't know that and assume that the 4c rise is from now. In fact the model predictions published by the M.O. assume a rise of about 0.9c (over pre-industrial levels), in the year 2000, rising to 1c by 2010. In fact, the actual figures were only about 0.53c in 2000 and 0.6c in 2008. So the predictions are already wrong and the M.O. hasn't bothered to change them.
On this morning's Today programme, Lord Stern was quoting figures, 4, 5 or 6c by the end of the century. This wide range of predictions underlines the uncertainties in predictions, which actually range from 2.4c to 6.7c, but strangely the proponents of man made climate change never mention the lower estimates which are equally as likely as the higher ones.
As Joseph Goebbels said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Actually, there is probably very little point in continuing this discussion, since everyone has fixed opinions. I suggest that, if this blog still exists in 6 years, we all come back and see how things have turned out.
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QV. Thanks. Not only that, but this decade hasn't had a major volcanic eruption to lower the temps slightly. Previous decades did, so this decade's temps are skewed by that. It is fair to say that 1998's figure was an 'out-there' one, as it was so high, so any figure to supercede that may show that 'warming is continuing'. The fact that we've now gone 11 years doesn't bode well for the Warmists. The leap from 0.428 (an average of the past 8 years) to 0.547 (which would be a new high) isn't high. In fact it's only 0.12 and it REALLY should be achievable if continued warming is real. On the other thread I made the point that we shouldn't do anything for another five years. If the 1998 record isn't broken by 2013, then I'd say it's warming that is broken.
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SmokingDeepThroat wrote:
"It is wrong to say that CO2 is the only possible cause. And you know it Donald!"
I'm afraid not- which is why Paul Hudson had such a hard time finding a credible scientist to put forward a credible alternative cause. In fact he didn't, coming up only with a weather forecaster who has published *nothing* and a geologist who has published in a non-peer-reviewed, non-science web site, and promptly has his arguments ripped to pieces by other scientists.
There is strong evidence that CO2 caused most of the warming in the latter part of the 20th century. Both observational and experimental, and no credible alternative cause.
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You said "CO2 is the only possible cause". It isn't, you made a mistake. It's entirely possible that CO2 hasn't caused ANY of the small warming observed. Please provide your evidence that "CO2 is the only possible cause". I don't agree with your last paragraph either. Even if you accept that CO2 is causing some warming, again there is NO evidence that it has caused "most" of it. Using the IPCC's figures Pielke made it less than 30%.
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@ SmokingDeepThroat
The conclusion that CO2 caused "most" of the warming in the latter part of the 20th century comes from the IPCC. That's the synthesis of every scientific paper published on the climate and global warming.
In contrast you quote a "sceptic" blogger.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Roger_Pielke_Jr.
Blog science is not real science.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Donald. Please provide your evidence that "CO2 is the only possible cause". Even the IPCC doesn't say that. Do the words, "very likely" and "90%" ring any bells? The IPCC is laughable, anyway, but that's a seperate issue. Please provide your evidence. Thank you.
Oh, and Pielke isn't a sceptic!
"Pielke argues that action is necessary to cut greenhouse gas emissions"
From your own link. He is a scientist though. Try again.
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@ SmokingDeepThroat,
"Donald. Please provide your evidence that "CO2 is the only possible cause"."
Look at the radiative forcings. Which one has increased rapidly over the 20th century, especially the late 20th century?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/images/forcings.gif
http://www.skepticalscience.com/The-CO2-Temperature-correlation-over-the-20th-Century.html
"Oh, and Pielke isn't a sceptic!"
I think you may actually be referring to Pielke Sr. (you didn't actually provide a link.)
Both Pielke Sr. and Jr. are sceptics, despite their protestations. Contrarians might be a better word.
Pielke Sr. is one of those "people who have abandoned science in favour of advocacy, but who consistently fail to admit this shift."
http://www.desmogblog.com/roger-pielke-sr-attacks-messenger-injures-self
While protesting that he admits global warming is real and that we must cut emissions, he attempts to undermine the consensus view on exactly how real, and by how much and when, without any scientific credibility.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/more-bubkes/langswitch_lang/sp/
He is at least a climate scientist and does have peer-reviewed papers to his name, although his conclusions are a minority view, and his papers contested.
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2009/08/pielke-and-matsui-2005-revisited.html
Pielke Jr. is a political scientist and works for a think-tank. Although claiming to respect the science, he also attempts to undermine the consensus view on exactly how real, and by how much and when, without any scientific credibility.
Which is why he "is regularly cited by conservative activists disputing the science on global warming and policies that might mitigate climate change."
In contrast to these two contrarians, there are hundred of climate scientists who have contributed to the IPCC reports.
Like most "sceptics", you reject what you don't want to believe and accept what you want to believe without question.
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I was listening to 5 Live Drive yesterday and was astonished to hear Lord Stern described as "one of the World's leading experts on global warming" during a report on why we should eat less meat. That confirmed to me this blog is but a momentary lapse in the BBC's ongoing effort to convince it's audience the matter of man's responsibility for a warming planet is beyond question. As with many other blogs, both on the BBC's various sites and across the internet, it very clearly isn't.
My main problem with advocates of AGW is how quickly they seek to personally undermine anyone who even dares to question their opinion. Two of the earliest comments call for the removal of the blog and one demands the author lose his job. How does it go again... "No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition..."
There is clearly perfectly valid information to justify a scientist's challenge to the perceived wisdom of attributing a questionable temperature change claim to CO2 levels and to say there isn't reduces a reasoned debate to a pantomime argument. Even from claims and counter-claims of temperature measurement we can see a divergence in method and source, to the extent the very humble layman, such as me, must concede the detail to those who are conversant with it. What I will never concede is the efforts of those who are perhaps even less knowledgeable than me attempting to quell any debate and indulge in personal attacks on anyone who questions them. Those of you who are inclined to do this, contemplate, for a moment, how likely you are to convince the undecided with your tactics.
When challenging someone who was declaring the World's seas would rise by 70m, the true quality of the reasoning behind their argument was established when he dismissed the opinion of an "expert" on the basis he was Australian and a Geologist. More than any graphs, NASA sites or IPCC reports, this told me his was an opinion worth questioning.
Considering the deaths from starvation caused by ill-informed bio-fuel policies, the inefficiencies of wind generation and the eager acquiescence to "green" campaigners, what worries me most about climate change is not what the weather will be in 50 years time, but how much damage will politicians cause to the World's population and economies by their fervour to be seen to be doing something/anything. We have seen in these comments someone attempting to establish the hysteria which has already cost lives and that is simply unacceptable.
There are too many variables influencing the climate, too few reliable methods of measuring these variables and simply not enough historic data to reach any reasonable conclusion for definite long-term trends in the climate from here. From where I sit, which used to be attached to North America and was also, relatively recently, under 2kms of ice, I know things change and there's no point in blaming me or belching cows. How about just accepting that and that a greater challenge for mankind is the exponential growth of the human population?
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Ally Gory. Excellent post. I fear you may well be right about the BBC. They seem to have carried on regardless with the usual nonsense. In fact, a cynic (or a conspiracy theorist) might even think that the post by Paul Hudson was, shall we say, designed? However, I couldn't possibly say that. I see the Met Ofice has retreated on its Arctic position today. And maybe we'll see the BBC trying to wriggle every now and then, but I for one won't be forgetting the journalists and the BBC in general when, in five years, no further temp record has been broken. The truth will out in time.
Donald. You didn't prove CO2 is the ONLY cause, and Pielke isn't a sceptic. Stating (as he has) that he believes that action is necessary to cut greenhouse gas emissions means he IS NOT a sceptic. It doesn't matter how much you like to fluff and bluster, fact is you made two mistakes and you cannot admit them. Fair enough - discussion ended.
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SmokingDeepThroat - #124.
"I see the Met Ofice has retreated on its Arctic position today."
Can you expand on that please? The last thing I saw from the M.O. was the press release of October 15th., which contradicted the Prof. Wadhams predictions but I haven't seen anything since. I have been trying in my modest way to get the BBC to give publicity to the M.O. press release but so far without success.
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QV. Very sorry, someone emailed it to me as a link today, so I thought it was fresh. Oct 15th, in fact. BBC far too busy promoting warming to run with the Met Office backpeddling! No less than SEVEN climate change articles on their web page today! Has Pen Hadow come out with anything funny lately - he's usually good for a laugh. Can't imagine he's too pleased with the Met Office, as he predicted an ice-free Arctic in less than 10 years. Like I said, he's always good for a laugh.
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SmokingDeepThroat #126.
"QV. Very sorry, someone emailed it to me as a link today, so I thought it was fresh. Oct 15th, in fact. BBC far too busy promoting warming to run with the Met Office backpeddling! No less than SEVEN climate change articles on their web page today! Has Pen Hadow come out with anything funny lately - he's usually good for a laugh. Can't imagine he's too pleased with the Met Office, as he predicted an ice-free Arctic in less than 10 years. Like I said, he's always good for a laugh."
No problem. Pen Hadow doesn't have to worry, since I doubt if many people have heard about the press release, due partially to the fact that the M.O. don't actually seem to have sent it to the press and the failure of the BBC to report it. When I emailed the M.O. to ask who they had sent it to, I actually received an email with several links reporting the Prof. Wadhams predictions, so I don't think some at the M.O. even know that they issued the press release. According to David Shukman, neither he or Richard Black were sent copies and apparently they don't have the time to check the web site themselves, which given their roles with the BBC seems strange. Apparently they wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't drawn their attention to it! I also think that the press release was deliberately ambiguous (Mr Shukman interpreted it as bringing forward their prediction of when the Arctic will be ice free in summer from the end of the century) but I pointed out that the press release says: "the first ice-free summer expected to occur between 2060 and 2080.", not that they would be permanently ice free by then. It is clear that the press release is intended to contradict the Prof. Wadhams predictions but it is written in such veiled terms that you have to read between the lines. Anyway, since the BBC has decided to keep it from the public, everyone will still believe the 10-20 year prediction of Prof. Wadhams, rather than the M.O. 50-70 years. This is just typical of the way that pessimistic predictions are given maximum publicity and optimistic ones are erased from public record. The Ministry of Truth has arrived and it is located in the BBC. Any pressure on the BBC to publish the M.O. press release would be greatly appreciated. (I wonder if this will pass the censors?)
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DavidCOG (blog numbers 5 and 14) obviously feels very strongly about this subject and is of the opinion that all 'informed scientific opinion' agrees that global warming is a fact.
1. Has David informed MIT of this as they clearly need to fire Dick Lindzen immediately?!
2. Would he lay the scientific credentials of the authors of the NGPCC 2008 report against those of the warmists without personal attack please?
3. Would he provide a detailed rebuttal against the following issues which many believe are NOT yet cut and dried, please?
i. The correlation of 'warming' since 1990 with a large drop out of RURAL, but not URBAN weather stations - the consistency of data measurement issue.
ii. The extremely strong solar cycles since 1950 vs the less active sun in the earlier years of the 20th century.
iii. The inability of IPCC climate models to predict 'global temperature' for the past 10 years.
iv. The lack of consistent data sources over a 100 year period.
v. The failure of quarterly forecasts from IPCC centres of excellence, most notably the Met Office's forecasts.
vi. A lack of rigorous experimental evidence exists that provides a causal link between carbon dioxide increases and temperature changes.
vii. A lack of understanding of the drivers which modulate postive and negative amplification of energy inputs within the earth's atmosphere.
viii. A loss of key primary data sources at key modelling centres, which causes unease amongst those uncomfortable with the results being promulgated and relied upon for warmist arguments.
This is not an inconsiderable list of uncertainties/gaps in the knowledge/evidence base and there is increasing evidence that modelling scenarios are simply not credible.
Now it is possible that there are new 'supermodels' which are simply not talked about which demonstrate this beyond belief. Given that the taxpayer has likely paid for them somewhere or other, it might be valuable to flag those up.
This entry is written in the spirit of seeking clarification and enlightenment, whichever way the evidence may in the end fall.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Moderators:
Please explain how quoting from post 111 breaks the house rules, but post 111 itself does not.
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I complained about post 111 because I found the language insulting and inappropriate for a BBC site, but received this reply
"Further to your complaint about some of the content on a BBC blog (reference number P26414735), we have decided that it does not contravene the House Rules and are going to leave it on site."
Yet when I have responded to post 111, quoting sections from that post, my posts have been deleted for breaking the house rules.
There are double standards being applied here. If post 111 does not contravene house rules, how does quoting from it?
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This is a re-post of comment No. 129. I have explicitly indicated which sections are quoted from comment No. 111, and removed the insulting language contained in that post.
This is a re-post of comment No. 120 with any words of mine that might have broken the house rules removed.
Moderators please note- sections of this comment are quotes from comment No. 111.
DrDweeb wrote:
****QUOTE****
That is probably the 2nd ********* thing I have read in these blog posts (I read them all). Correlation != Causation.
This gets pointed out time and time again, but ****** keep telling us it is so anyway.
One could equally well point to the graphs at Adrians paper at http://www.adriankweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Climate_Change.htm and assert as equally incorrectly (Adrian makes no such assertion) that;
If you look at the 100 year trend, it's clear that drift in the geomagnetic pole position is causing warming.
Adrian's data is far more substantial actually. However I do not hear anyone screaming to de/remagnitize the earth.
****UNQUOTE****
"Energy & Environment" is not exactly a conventional scientific journal:
"Energy and Environment is not carried in the ISI listing of peer-reviewed journals. Its peer review process has been widely criticised for allowing the publication of substandard papers.[1][2] Numerous climate skeptics and contrarians have published in the journal and these studies have later been quoted by Republican critics of global warming science such as Senator James Inhofe and Congressman Joe Barton.[1] "
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Energy_and_Environment
The paper linked to correlates temperatures with movement of the Earth's magnetic poles, but no mechanism is suggested.
The paper is guilty of exactly the same crime I was: sloppy thinking.
But in the case of CO2 and temperatures, there *is* a mechanism, and there is evidence for the causative effect of CO2 on temperatures.
The data in this paper is "far more substantial"?
No. The paper is nothing but a bogus Correlation = Causation argument.
As you told us
****QUOTE****
Correlation != Causation.
This gets pointed out time and time again, but ****** keep telling us it is so anyway.
****UNQUOTE****
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Not unsurprisingly, you missed the point completely
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
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