Slashdot Mirror
Nature: Global Temperatures Are a Falling Trend
New submitter sosume writes "An article in Nature shows that temperatures in Roman times were actually higher than current temperatures. A team lead by Dr. Esper of the University of Mainz has researched tree rings and concluded that over the past 2,000 years, the forcing is up to four times as large as the 1.6W/m^2 net anthropogenic forcing since 1750 using evidence based on maximum latewood density data from northern Scandinavia, indicating that this cooling trend was stronger (0.31C per 1,000 years, ±0.03C) than previously reported, and demonstrated that this signature is missing in published tree-ring proxy records."
this should be good!
"Global Temperatures Were a Falling Trend."
The long term graphs in TFA show a long term decline, but they all still kick up sharply at the end when we get to the industrial age.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Look, Tree Ring data as a proxy for temperature is complete bullshit. It's very, very, VERY loosely correlated. It was bullshit when Global Warming Alarmists used it, and it's still bullshit when Global Warming... well I guess 'denialists' isn't quite right, but... moderatives?
Anyway, point being, tree ring data as a proxy for temperature is effectively worthless.
Inconvenient.. it means we can feel good about ourselves and continue polluting.
snark- Now I can continue raping the planet and dumping all kinds of crap into the atmosphere and not worry about that global warming nonsense. And the corn failure in the USA - no biggie. And the retreating glaciers? whatevs. /snark
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Yeah, you can ask anybody who studied antique history. We all know that the romans grew wine in England. How do people think they managed to do that? Of course it was warmer back then than nowadays.
And then in the 1750's we had a very cold period where we can deduce from paintings that the East Sea was often frozen shut in the winter.
Is this really news to anybody?
Temperatures were lower than in Roman and medieval times, and falling... until the recent warming kicked in.
This is yet another hockey stick. I can't see how the Register is turning it into anti-AGW propaganda. Read the Nature article, not the Register.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
If you counted rings in a cross-section of Kim Kardashian's butt - then I'd believe that
How much sunlight/cloudcover was there during the Roman era? How much rainfall? Those things would impact how a tree grows more than temperature.
Anyways, this is just another scam to prevent people from doing anything about the current levels of pollution which are way too high. What will the expenditure of time and money on this project do to improve air quality today?
And it's not like whole cities can be moved because the environment around them has changed due to fires, droughts, sea level rising, coral reef destruction, or brown clouds of pollution. Only the rich people can get out and move to cooler places, so they aren't really interested in things as long as their lifestyle isn't impacted.
Clearly whoever did this study is a racist.
close, it's 'Nazis'. They call them 'warming deniers' and try to draw inferences to 'holocaust deniers' who are typically neonazis.
It doesn't even fit in to a neat logical fallacy category since those generally deal with strategies above the playground level. Fine, racist nazis, then.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I'm not saying they're wrong, but before we declare that global warming is all a leftist conspiracy, let's let some other experts comment on their findings. Remember those neutrinos that went faster than the speed of light?
Everyone has heard about the fall of the Roman Empire due to carbon credits. Where do you think Atlantis came from? Those polluting chariots.
(PS> I really hate the word 'carbon' used to refer to CO2. Carbon is somewhat different.......).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Grats, slashdot for the misleading title. It is not like it was unknown that there has been a cooling trend on a 1000-year timescale. It may have been stronger than previously thought. This paper estimates it at -0.32 K/ka - Mann 2008 had it at -2.something K/ka. It was to be expected that the denialist would latch onto some cherry picked sentences - business as usual.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
A team lead by dr Esper of the University of Mainz has researched tree rings and concluded that over the past 2,000 years
That's odd, according to the image from the paper the trend in question is from 138 BC–AD 1900. Of course, after reading the Guardian article, it's clear that the only papers in Nature worth this "reporter's" time are those that confirm his professional opinion on the state of global temperatures. Tell me, why exactly didn't they construct a trend from 138 BC–AD 2012? Was that 1900-2012 range more difficult to acquire for some hilarious reason? I mean, the data is in the graph right there.
You can select special time ranges, you can select windows and you can look at millions of years of data and say that temperatures right now are no big deal. But when you start to look at the rate of change (even in the paper's graph linked above) and you notice recently we're starting to approach rates that are increasingly less frequent in the historical record, I think it's okay to start to talk about what could be causing it. I mean now we're talking about the last two thousand years and yeah, that's an acceptable window but if we never swing back down below to average it out, at what point are you going to admit that the theory of C02 affecting global average temperatures has some weight to it? Trust me, if we increase by 2 degrees Celsius, you can increase this window back five millennium and say "Hey, they used to have temperatures warmer than we do now." It's entirely possible to endlessly play this game by moving the goal posts. But I don't think the Earth is going to be able to adapt as well as humans do to rapid change. I guess the only thing that can convince people is time and repercussions that actually inconvenience humans.
My work here is dung.
... more Pirates!
Global warming wasn't an issue then.
They in no way deny that human activity has affected the climate, they simply assert that changes in the Earth's orbit have caused more significant changes.
Palm trees and 8
Did you even read the paper?
"if you were standing in the forest, you could be hit by a falling tree. therefore, because we cut down this tree and killed that guy standing over there, we're not responsible, because getting killed by falling trees happens naturally"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Global warming is a misleading term, global climate change is a more accurate.
We do know that CO2 increases do have an effect on the earth's temperature. This isn't even controversial.
I think I understand what you are saying though, that perhaps when predicting hundreds of years into the future, natural effects might be larger than other considerations.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I took that temperature graph and converted it to an audio file and it played "turn me on, dead man"...
That wasn't the point of the paper. You interpret it as flamebait because you believe that it presents an argument against AGW. It does no such thing, but you have revealed your own bias.
Do not pick and choose words or results from scientific papers. The scientists who published this paper are part of the X who agree that CO2 emissions are warming the planet.
Palm trees and 8
Apparently reading is hard, it includes temperatures since the industrial revolution. The data, is in the paper. Did you read the paper? And oddly, they seem to mirror the MEP. Well isn't that odd, and yet there's still a downward trend. over the period. Couldn't be that we still don't have a full understanding of everything. Now jokingly, this must have been all those early humans driving cars, and pumping out electronics 2000 years ago. This is just a delayed reaction.
Om, nomnomnom...
Another in a long list of inflammatory and inaccurate articles from secondary sources.
Like yesterday's baloney about Obama's executive order.
The first thing you should learn as a thinking adult is to read the primary source. In this case the Nature article.
That graph is a typical double bottom - hitting resistance twice - and now trend's up - who knows how high it will go.
Burning carbs accumulated in ? Billion of years in 1 1/2 centuries are great fundamentals to get to unknown heights - only boiling point is the limit. Let's go for it!
If you get in the market now, you can make it for good!
Assuming that the data is actually accurate, the question that interests me is why was it higher? Does it disprove Global Warming? Probably not because of the fact that it doesn't mention the upturn since the industrial revolution. But if humans spewing CO2 wasn't the reason temperatures were high in the time of the romans, what was the reason and why do we think that it isn't the cause now?
Once they eliminate all of the other, non-tree-based lines of evidence, this should finally bust the myth of Northern Scandinavian Warming wide open!
sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
There are plenty of legitimate concerns over the increase in CO2 levels. In fact, just doing a quick search, it's easy to see that CO2 is affecting the pH of the ocean:
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH", Nature 425:365, 2003
K. Caldeira and M. E. Wickett, "Ocean model predictions of chemistry changes from carbon dioxide emissions to the atmosphere and ocean", J. Geophys. Res. 110:C09S04, 2005
J. C. Orr, et al., "Anthropogenic ocean acidification over the 21st century and its impact on calcifying organisms", Nature 437: 681-686, 2005
C. L. Sabine, et al., "The oceanic sink for anthropogenic CO2", Science 305:367-371, 2004
H. O. Portner, "Climate change affects marine fishes through the oxygen limitation of thermal tolerance", Science 315:95-97, 2007
H. O. Portner, "Climate change and temperature dependent biogeography: Oxygen limitation and thermal tolerance in animals", Naturwissenschaften 88:137-146, 2001
R. A. Feely, et al., "Impact of anthropogenic CO2 on the CaCO3 system in oceans", Science 305:362-366, 2004
which, in turn, has a number of devastating consequences for marine life, among other things:
Y. Shirayama and H. Thorton, "Effect of increased atmospheric CO2 on shallow water marine benthos", J. Geophys. Res. 110: C09S08, 2005
S. Widdicombe and H. R. Needham, "Impact of CO2-induced seawater acidification on the burrowing activity of Nereis virens and sediment nutrient flux", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 341: 111-122, 2007
H. L. Wood, et al., "Ocean acidification may increase calcification rates, but at a cost", Proc. Royal. Soc. B-Biol. Sci. 275: 1767-1773, 2008
M. D. Iglesias-Rodriguez, et al., "Phytoplankton calcification in a high-CO2 world", Science 320: 336-340, 2008
S. Collins and G. Bell, "Phenotypic consequences of 1000 generations of selection at elevated CO2 in green alga", Nature 431: 566-569, 2004
M. A. Gutowska, et al., "Growth and calcification in the cephalopod Sepia officinalis under elevated sewater pCO2", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 737: 303-309, 2008
S. Dupont, et al., "Near-future level of CO2-driven ocean acidification radically effects larval survival and development in the brittlestar Ophiothrix fragilis", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 285-294, 2008.
A. J. Anderson, et al., "Life on the margin: Implications of ocean acidification on Mg-calcite, high latitude and cold-water marine calcifers", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 265-273, 2008
W. M. Balch and V. J. Fabry, "Ocean acidification: Documenting its impact on calcifying phytoplankton at basin scales", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 239-247, 2008
J. A. Berge, et al., "Effects of increased sea water concentrations of CO2 on growth of the bivalve Mytilus edulis", L. Chemosphere 62: 681-687
T. F. Cooper, et al., "Declining coral calcification in massive Porites in two nearshore regions of the northern Great Barrier Reef", Glob. Change Biol. 144: 529-538, 2008
F. Gazeua, et al., "Impact of elevated CO2 on shellfish calcification", Geophys. Res. Lett. 34: L07603, 2007
K. R. Hinga, "Effects of pH on coastal phytoplankton", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 283: 281-300, 2002
O. Hoegh-Guldberg, et al., "Coral reefs under rapid climate change and ocean acidification", Science 318: 1737-1742, 2007
P. L. Jokiel, et al., "Ocean acidification and calcifying reef organisms: A mesocosm investigation", Coral Reefs 27: 473-483, 2008
H. Kurihara, "Effects of CO2-driven acidification on the early development stages of invertebrates", Mar. Ecol. Prog. Ser. 373: 275-284, 2008
S. I. Siikavuopio, et al., "Effects of carbon dioxide exposure on feed intake and gonad growth in green sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis", J. Aquac. 266: 97-101, 2007
H. Kurihara, et al., "Effects of raised CO2 concentration on the egg production rate and early development of two marine copepods (Acartia steueri and Acartia erythraea)", Mar. Pollut. Bull. 49: 721-727, 2004
H. Kurihara, et al., "Effects of increased seawater pCO2 on early development of the oyster Crassostrea gigas", Aquat. Biol. 1: 91-98, 2007
H. Kurihara, et al., "Sub-leath effects of elevated concentration of CO2 on planktonic copepods and sea urchins", J. Oceanogr. 60: 743-750, 2004
Yeah, everyone knows that God was smart enough to create the Earth with a feature to counteract the effect of a few billion people burning stuff all day long.
Look how sensitive the clergy is when their religion is challenged.
If global temperatures are going up because of normal or man made reasons, things will most certainly change in the future (and not for the better). Yes, emissions need to be reduced and other measures taken. But as long as below-sea-level cities and sea-level cities continue to be built and supported by tax dollars don't expect the warnings to be taken seriously. Who has their head in the sand (government) if they did not evacuate the New Orleans area after Katrina, and are spending big money to rebuild it. No permanent habitation should have been allowed in the flooded area. All predictions say that sea-levels will rise in the future.
Real Climate has a much more interesting take on the paper:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/07/tree-rings-and-climate-some-recent-developments/
Finding the weak points in various temperature proxies and using that knowledge to improve the overall accuracy of the temperature record is a good thing, and a normal part of the scientific process. Sensationalist reporting of the type The Register engages in just serves to inflame the debate without adding anything useful to the discussion.
Honestly; its something of all times and ages. Last century the nuclear tests performed by the US and Sovjets caused a great deal of concern. And don't laugh but a lot of phenomena were actually explained as "probably being caused by nuclear testing". You can look it up if you want to; just make sure to pick up material dating from the 80's and 90's instead of recent material covering previous phenomena.
The tests are over and surprise; surprise; things shifted to global warming. Sometimes the /exact same/ phenomena which used to be caused by "nuclear tests" were now (after careful research of course) caused by global warming.
Here's a prediction: between now and ten years we'll have a new international doom scenario which is the explanation for many nasty side-effects such as temperature changes and such. Heavy investments are required to investigate and taxes will need to be raised so that the government can do something about it.
And eventually we'll move onto the next doom scenario.
That makes no sense. Why would neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust? Surely they would see it as a singularly inspirational event?
You are not spewing the dogmatically correct litany of facts.
He was talking about the article, not the paper. There's a difference.
I don't really care about the average temperature or the height of the seas, as long as they stay the same. What I do care about is sudden, definite climate changes occurring around the world. Modern humans have concentrated themselves in a number of relatively small areas, based on the (unconscious) assumption that those areas are and will remain habitable. If an area, say California, suddenly becomes arid, the regional impact would be enormous. And if that happens to a number of regions around the world, given that there are too many of us as it is, the consequences could be dire.
IT was hot this summer! GLOBAL WARMING!!!!
Yes global warming is real, but most of the nimrods are running around claiming that the Heat wave was proof of it. I got so sick of trying to explain it that I started saying, "yes, and it's going to go up another 4 degrees every month, you had better start selling your Florida property before others find out! Minnesota is the new florida buy land near fargo!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
He did. It's called extinction.
I'm not saying it's a good idea, but you will never convince me that paying a carbon tax somehow makes my ice cream melt slower. Stop trying to demean people and stop trying to take their money and maybe they will listen. Climate Evangelists don't want people to listen, they want them to obey.
"In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash"
Yes before there were holocaust deniers, we had another word for denial. Linguists are still searching for the lost ancestor of denial, so that finally a person may be a denier of anything without being associated with nazis. People born before WW2 have all mysteriously lost their memory of the word and it has never appeared in print, so there is little hope.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
No, that's only in your mind. Foolish people who deny the obvious are always called deniers. Evolution deniers are the obvious example at the moment.
This retarded press release was written by someone that can't even GRASP the science, or purpose, of the published paper. Please, for the love of god, stop posting science topics on /. based on what some ingrate with a word processor posts up to some off-beat web periodical with a political agenda. The "graph" given by the press release article doesn't even appear in the paper and is missing a lot of annotations and descriptions necessary to properly evaluate the data. Important things. Like a Y-axis. And the method used to develop the data- surprise, most of it's modeled/reconstructed. Which is FINE if you grasp what they were trying to do with this publication.
And before I jump into the paper can we clearly define what journal an article is published in? Saying "Nature" is misleading. It's "Nature: Climate Change". Not similar, at all.
The paper is a methods paper. It's outlining a very interesting way to get at fine-resolution temperature fluctuations on a not-so-far-back time scale. Additionally, the moving average rise in temperature isn't suggesting it was HOTTER back then than now (as this submission and the press release indicate) but that instead our ESTIMATES of how hot it was are off.. SLIGHTLY. How far off? Here, let me copy primary literature for you. I hear that's good journalistic practice.
"...These findings together with the trends revealed in long-term CGCM runs suggest that large-scale summer temperatures were some tenths of a degree Celsius warmer during Roman times than previously thought. It has been demonstrated4 that prominent, but shorter term climatic episodes, including the Medieval Warm Period and subsequent Little Ice Age, were influenced by solar output and (grouped) volcanic activity changes, and that the extent of warmth during medieval times varies considerably in space. Regression-based calculations over only the past millennium (including the twentieth century) are thus problematic as they effectively provide estimates of these forcings that typically act on shorter timescales. Accurate estimation of orbitally forced temperature signals in high-resolution proxy records therefore requires time series that extend beyond the Medieval Warm Period and preferably reach the past 2,000 years or longer6. Further uncertainty on estimating the effect of missing orbital signatures on hemispheric reconstructions is related to the spatial patterns of JJA orbital forcing and associated CGCM temperature trends. First, the simulated temperature trends, indicating substantial weakening of insolation signals towards the tropics, can at present be assessed in only two CGCMs (refs 7, 8). More long-term runs with GCMs to validate these hemispheric patterns are required. Whereas the large-scale patterns of temperature trends seem rather similar among the CGCMs, the magnitude of orbitally forced trends varies considerably among the simulations. Additional uncertainty stems from the weight of tree-ring data and varying seasonality of reconstructed temperatures in the large-scale compilations. Although some of the reconstructions are solely composed of tree-ring data, others include a multitude of proxies (including precipitation-sensitive time series) and may even include non-summer temperature signals. Some of these issues are difficult to tackle, as the weighting of individual proxies in several large-scale reconstructions is poorly quantified. The results presented here, however, indicate that a thorough assessment of the impact of potentially omitted orbital signatures is required as most large-scale temperature reconstructions include long-term tree-ring data from high-latitude environments. Further well-replicated MXD-based reconstructions are needed to better constrain the orbital forcing of millennial scale temperature trends and estimate the consequences to the ongoing evaluation of recent warming in a long-term context."
I wish I could just copy past the whole article into peoples brains and make them understand the difference between science and sensationalism.
There is a difference, in that they are different, but the article doesn't say anything about this study disproving AGW, only that it disproves the assertion that it is now hotter than it has ever been in the last X,000+ years.
in 3.. 2...
The fact that climate change took place centuries or even millennia ago doesn't prove that it was not caused by people. Humans have been doing things to affect the climate for a long time.
Charles C. Mann, in his excellent book 1493, discusses a theory that the "Little Ice Age" (a period of cooler than usual temperatures from roughly 1550-1800) was the result of the Columbian Exchange. Basically, the Native Americans had populated large portions of the New World, and in so doing had cleared most of the forest lands. After Columbus and his successors arrived, the Native Americans died at an insane rate from European diseases, and new forests grew across vast swathes of the Americas. This in turn resulted in far lower CO2 levels and consequently lower temperatures.
Did you even read the paper?
Almost nobody on either side reads the papers. There are a handfull of people in the world qualified and dedicated to the issue. For everybody else it really is nothing more than "my priest is better than yours".
99.9% of the people you meet who affirm AGW are just doing so because of herd mentality. Ditto for deniers.
FWIW, I myself am skeptical of AGW; but I'm also cognizant of the fact that my beliefs prove NOTHING. I'm not as strongly opinionated as some people. I'm open to the idea of AGW; I'm just not convinced. Just as in religion though, labeling oneself as an atheist has more appeal than being an agnostic. Attending GOP functions and lambasting liberal-leaning scientists funded by grant money from Democratic old money is politic. What you think when quietly reflecting over a cup of coffee is closer to the truth; but nobody knows it except you. Raise your hand if you ever sat in chruch wondering if God even exists.
Anyway, of course nobody reads the paper. Even most of the priests don't read the paper. They just recite the liturgy.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
It's like comparing the pollution in rivers today with a polluted river some time thousands of years ago. Then saying "Hay, I found pollution in a river 3,000 years ago, so I guess Humans are not responsible for the pollution today!" Just because some event occurred some time in the past, doesn't mean it correlates with today! Just look around you, we already cut down more than 1/3 of the world's trees, what kind of affect do you think that's going to have?
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
It's not that they're not the right kind of scientists. It's that they don't use logical argument. They try to force the facts to fit their hypothesis, rather than developing a hypothesis based on the facts, and anything that doesn't support their argument gets thrown out, discounted as unimportant.
This article is an excellent example.
"If it is the case that actually the climate has often been warmer without any significant CO2 emissions having taken place - suggesting that CO2 emissions simply aren't that important - the case for huge efforts to cut those emissions largely disappears."
This is a really tempting argument to accept: Temperatures were higher before, and CO2 didn't have anything to do with it, so CO2 must not have anything to do with high temperatures.
But that's a logical fallacy. It's presuming that there can be only one cause of temperature fluctuations, something we know isn't true. Proximity to the sun, cloud cover, makeup of the atmosphere (or lack thereof), etc...
This is just a different version of the tired argument of "it happened before without human intervention, so this has nothing to do with us." Extinctions also happened before without human intervention. That doesn't mean that we weren't directly responsible for the extinction of passenger pigeons.
News isn't about facts anymore. News is about (1) entertainment, and (2) agenda. Objective facts left the party a long time ago.
When Al Gore and other politicians start saying 'the time for discussion is over' on such a complex subject, technically-trained people know that the time for discussion and study is just starting. This article summarizes an interesting study that points to warmer temperatures in roman times. Archaeological studies also support this. For example, many of the seaports that those Romans used are now far inland thanks to a lower sea level due to cooling temperatures. AGW believers minds are firmly closed to any idea that does not include imminent peril from 'hockey-stick' warming. The reality is that the support for AGW caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rests on very crude computer models of the global climate that will probably be the subject of horse laughs 50 years into the future.
It is based only on Scandinavia which is less than 0.3% of the area of the world or 0.8% of all earths landmass...
It should be common knowledge that local weather cannot be extrapolated to world weather. To use this report to calculate global weather is for sure bad science, despite the finding for Scandinavia being interesting!
Before attempting to extrapolate to the world, we need to add samples from other regions too, it should not be difficult to get the same type of samples from trees from different placen in Canada, and countries of the former Soviet Union, but we do likely need samples from the southern hemispare and tropical areas too to be able to extrapolate the temprature for the world.
Bla bla bla who wants to hear more "experts" and their leftist "science." This article casts some doubt on small parts of global warming theory. It's a leftist conspiracy. Done deal.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
NPG (Nature.com) is a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, a global publishing group founded in the United Kingdom in 1843. Macmillan is itself owned by German-based, family run company Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH. "To defend its leading position in the profitable market for business information Holtzbrinck partnered with long-term American affiliate Dow Jones & Company to plan a new weekly business title. In 1994 Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt and Dow Jones had taken over German business news agency Vereinigte Wirtschaftsdienste (VWD) and Czech publisher Economia. Since November 1995 the two companies had coordinated their strategies and cooperated in marketing of advertising and their electronic databases Genios and Dow Jones News Retrieval. In June 1999 Holtzbrinck and Dow Jones announced a strategic alliance and swapped shares of their business newspapers. Holtzbrinck assumed 49 percent of the Wall Street Journal Europe, while Dow Jones received 22 percent of Handelsblatt. While Holtzbrinck's goal was to open up new European markets to the Handelsblatt, Dow Jones aimed at broadening the German readership for the Wall Street Journal Europe. While both periodicals were expected to stay independent, an intensification of the exchange of content, and cooperation in ad sales and distribution was planned." (Taken from http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/verlagsgruppe-georg-von-holtzbrinck-gmbh-history/) Dow Jones is a News Corporation company.(http://www.newscorp.com/operations/publishing.html) Conservative connection in THREE MOVES. P.S.The U.S. DOJ has officially filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple as well as publishers Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster for price fixing.
1. Russians
2. Shipping companies
3. Oil companies
Ice on the Arctic Ocean is decreasing. Which is why in recent times Russians are grumbling more about territorial rights of their northern borders, shipping companies are planning to make use of the fabled "Northern Passage," and oil companies doing more exploratory work in the Arctic Ocean.
There was a time when these items were moot because of so much ice it didn't make any difference what is at top of the world. With less ice pack, these people are taking interest. Alrighty, why is Arctic melting? Call it global warming or not, if that ice significantly decreases there ***will*** be major climate changes. Particularly the Atlantic Ocean convection flow (or whatever it's called) that provides warm air over England and western Europe. Note that London is about same latitude as Calgary but because of this ocean flow which provides warm air trending, UK and region doesn't have tons of snow every winter.
mfwright@batnet.com
I've never understood how people can't seem to understand that what happens to the 30 gallons of gas they put into the truck every week. You put in ~ 25 lbs of stuff on Monday and it's magically gone the next Monday. What do they think happens to all of that? Of course that ~25lbs of stuff goes into the air and then what?
You don't have to choose sides right off the bat, I just wish there was a recognition of the fact we are putting a lot of stuff into the atmostphere and its likley going to have some result. Even it was something 'nice' like oxygen, putting that much stuff out there is likely going to do . But no one cares to put 2+2 together. More fun to make it politcal football...
There are some climate change models that Gulf Stream could change or stop. Then Europe would cool despite the rest of the world growing warmer. Some of this may be happening already.
Maybe this paper has nothing to do with AGW?
What are you talking about? From the paper itself:
The forcing is substantial over the past 2,000 years, up to four times as large as the 1.6Wm2 net anthropogenic forcing since 1750 (ref. 4), but the trend varies considerably over time, space and with season5. Using numerous high-latitude proxy records, slow orbital changes have recently been shown6 to gradually force boreal summer temperature cooling over the common era.
That's the second sentence of the summary. How can it not be about AGW when it talks about this having an effect opposite of "net anthropogenic forcing since 1750"? Did you even read the paper?
Or are you saying AGW is nothing but goalseeking, and any data point that lessons the potential impact, or lessens the fear of a global apocalypse is thus unwelcome?
No, I did not say that. This paper looks legitimate and should be published and was published. It is interesting. My problem was that they seemed to have cherry picked a date range and then The Guardian took that and ran with it. In my opinion they flat out misinterpreted what the paper was saying. And here is the biggest problem I have with the article, the fact that they say "the last 2,000 years" when they really mean the period between 138 BC–AD 1900. I am attacking factual inaccuracies and bad reporting. Oh and you think I brought up AGW? How about this from the article:
Needless to say, prominent alarmist scientists and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not taken this view ...
And you're attacking me for bringing AGW into this? AGW isn't about goalseeking, it's about getting an accurate estimate on how much effect we are having on our environment. It isn't unwelcome if it's true and this paper is true. Whether this is pro or anti AGW doesn't make factual inaccuracies any less problematic in science reporting!
My work here is dung.
Did you even read the paper?
Noooooo! Cutting down trees exacerbates the problem! STOP reading the paper!!!
Here's my understanding of their reasoning.
Motivation:
- Insolation changes and CO2 ecosystem feedbacks have been identified as the main causes of climate variability for the past million years (by citation).
- However, global climate models are either too short to or don't attempt to integrate longer-term or low-frequency insolation changes, which might mean they're mis-estimating temperatures and temperature changes.
- and while tree ring records should be affected and are important and widespread, a suitable long-term record that accounts for insolation changes hasn't been developed.
- so, let's make one...
Methods:
- measures tree ring width in Scandinavia for the past 2k years among ~580 trees, both living and dead.
- fits a regression model between the tree ring width and "instrumental" measurements back to 1812, so that an observed tree ring width for a given year can be used to compute a temperature for that year, with some statistically measured error.
- extrapolates temperatures before 1812 using the observed tree ring widths as inputs to the temperature regression model
- derives a trend on these temperatures that shows a small, slow cooling for the past 2k years *in Scandinavia*.
Analysis:
- notes that this slow downward trend/signature is missing from global published models
- deduces that global temperature estimates for previous eras may then be *underestimated*, which implies that they could have been warmer and so today may not be as relatively warm as short-term models indicate.
However, they don't offer a reason how/why Scandinavian temperature trends should track global trends, or alternatively establish how/why orbital forcing should be accounted into global models? These both seem like reasonable expectations, and it seems the reasonable next step is to reproduce this project for other forrest areas to see if it holds.
"The problem is that this isn't relevant to the social issue of global warming, and many "skeptics" will claim that it is relevant"
Thanks for clearing this up. I was confused for a bit because I thought the data showed that this blips in temperature happen for few hundred years for reasons out of the control of man.
But now I see the that its more a social issue. Thanks for eliminating my confusion.
It's an old thing, well known to those who actually know their stuff:
We're basically entering an ice age right now. So it should be much colder than it even is now.
But with global warming, we're mitigating the trend, holding it up artificially.
The problem is, that we’re very soon not only overcoming the ice age, but shooting way above that in a nearly vertical upwards curve.
You can see that nicely in all the temperature charts.
(And 2000 years is nothing in geological terms.)
My kingdom for a modpoint today. The AGW issue is so emotional that discussion of data becomes impossible. No, it's worse: even the fact that there IS data to discuss is an implied attack on one position or the other.
My take on the entire thing is it's good for us to work on being more responsible, environmentally. We can and should find ways to be more efficient, cleaner, and self-sustaining, and make an aggregate profit while doing so. Sometimes it's the right thing to make a change to the way we do things, and the data is just the initial catalyst.
We've made these types of sweeping changes before, so it's not like a precedent hasn't been set. It really shouldn't be devastatingly hard to do it now. We've built interstates, we've waged wars, we've made amendments to our constitution, we've just recently enacted a game-changing healthcare bill (I'm not arguing the merits either way, just stating a big, hairy change). None of these things grind our economy to a halt; in fact, there is usually a TON of money to be made during times of change.
We don't need doom and gloom pronouncements in support of or economical arguments against these changes. We should do it because it's going to help our society in the long run.
Solar insolation changes, resulting from long-term oscillations of orbital configurations1, are an important driver of Holocene climate2,3. The forcing is substantial over the past 2,000 years, up to four times as large as the 1.6 W m2 net anthropogenic forcing since 1750 (ref. 4), but the trend varies considerably over time, space and with season5. Using numerous high-latitude proxy records, slow orbital changes have recently been shown6 to gradually force boreal summer temperature cooling over the common era. Here, we present new evidence based on maximum latewood density data from northern Scandinavia, indicating that this cooling trend was stronger (0.31 C per 1,000 years, ±0.03 C) than previously reported, and demonstrate that this signature is missing in published tree-ring proxy records. The long-term trend now revealed in maximum latewood density data is in line with coupled general circulation models7,8 indicating albedo-driven feedback mechanisms and substantial summer cooling over the past two millennia in northern boreal and Arctic latitudes. These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, suggest that large-scale near- surface air-temperature reconstructions9–13 relying on tree- ring data may underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times.
Yes, I am personally of the opinion that the whole thing is doubly moot, because without expanded use of nuclear, particularly LFTR technology, we will hit peak oil and see emitted hydrocarbons decline precipitously. The only thing that stands in the way of LFTR technology is the current nuclear establishment in Washington, and the idea that nuclear==bad. That attitude may slow down US development, but the Chinese are already working on building their first LFTRs, and they will be selling them to us before long--IF we don't piss them off first.
Sad that we should be at their mercy because of our own foolishness.
I'm tired of temperature this and temperature that. The oceans are more important to the earths ecosystem and directly to human survival and food supply than any of Algores darkest land based fantasies.
While idiots turn science into a political argument shells are litteraly being dissolved off the backs of this planets poor little sea creatures thanks to increasing rise in ocean PH.
Take your fucking tree rings and shove them up your assholes... It does not matter. None of this shit even matters.
Read RealClimate's coverage.
Basically, there was some growing problem (no pun intended) with tree-ring based temperature studies, and this study helps figure out how to take into account those problems, and a probably cause.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Exactly.
I think George Carlin provided the best articulation of this point of view:
"The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas."
Maybe the spike in medieval times could explain some of the Vinland Sagas?
The vikings described finding grape vines and land where the ground didn't freeze during the winter in some part of North America. However, there's no archaeological evidence to indicate that they went far enough South (i.e. based on modern climate) to find such an area.
Wait. I thought the increased sunspot activity was responsible for the heat waves, storms, wildfires and droughts. C'mon deniers make up your mind. Meanwhile King Arthur cuts off another limb.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
We need to stop fighting "change" for the sake of fighting "change". The only thing that has been constant in the history of our planet from snowball earth to tropical conditions in the polar regions is that things "change". We need to stop fighting global warming / cooling / climate change and move away from the greatest red herring in history. Change can and will happen again, the concept of "normal" is a manufactured human concept that exists only because we are good at tracking things. Normal is a relative term.
We need to get back to basics and focus on things like pollution, living sustainably, recycling, improving technology and doing things like calling out Apple for dropping out of Epeat. You want to make a real environmental difference? Forget about carbon and focus on making a hybrid garbage truck that is affordable, have a Manhattan project for Thorium reactors, shut down coal power plants, focus on practical things like standardization of chargers for cell phones and putting teeth into standards like epeat.
Isn't this pretty much known? I was told throughout history classes in Swedish grade school and high school that the Scandinavian climate was much warmer during the bronze age and early iron age than it is today. Obviously there must have been a cooling trend somewhere inbetween.
There are so many people who start from the premise that there is no problem. Why does it take anything more than common sense to determine that it is bad for the planet to burn, in a year, many billions of tons of coal and many billions of barrels of oil?
I'd bet that most climate evangelists would be more than happy if people would simply use common sense & agree that there is a problem - with the expectation that agreeing that there is a problem would allow the focus to shift to solving it.
Carbon tax, or whatever, isn't going to make your ice cream melt slower today. Unfortunately, too many people jump from that point to ignoring/denying the problem, then burn some more stuff to make the air around their ice cream colder. Then, their great, great grandchildren can burn even more stuff to keep their ice cream cold.
Who cares if Global warming is true or not.
We ARE polluting.
We ARE using up fossil fuels faster than new ones are being created.
We ARE messing up geopolitics because of the location of scarce resources.
So what difference does it make?
The only possible solution is to move away from fossil fuels and on to something cleaner.
Who cares is CO2 is a 'pollutant' or not?
The arsenic, uranium, lead, and all the other known poisons that go up in the air along with it are, POISON.
The emissions from coal plants and tail pipes kill actual humans. There is no doubt about that and no one argues otherwise.
Lock yourself in a garage with your car running... It's called suicide.
Have a few billion cars in a mostly closed system called Earth... Then it is all of the sudden a big 'unproven' this and 'more research that'.
I call Bull Shit. It is poison, we should put less poison in the air and water than we do now. That simple.
No, most neonazis grew up in a world where mass murder is an unquestionable evil, a crime against humanity, something that only psychopaths would willingly organize. Most neonazis talk a big game about how Jews have too much power and how black people/gypsies/whatever are ruining our country, but they do not know what Nazism was. Most neonazis have no idea that the Nazis meant disease in the literal sense, and that the holocaust was viewed by the Nazis as a way to protect their race from a disease. Most neonazis have no idea what the Nazi movement was, they only know that it involved the sort of racism they support (blaming Jews, gypsies, and black people for everything). Ironically, many neonazis extend their hatred to Catholics as well.
Marching millions people into industrial-scale death camps? Shooting people on public streets? Forced, non-consensual, secret sterilization? People who just want to wave the swastika around because they think it is the symbol of racism cannot bring themselves to believe that the real Nazis were capable of such psychopathic acts, since that requires them to accept that the real Nazis were psychopaths (and that they are waving around the flag and symbol of those psychopaths). It is easier for them to just convince themselves that it is part of some Jewish conspiracy to discredit the Germans and to extract money from the USA for Israel.
Palm trees and 8
You interpret it as flamebait because you believe that it presents an argument against AGW.
No. He interprets the news article as flamebait probably based on these lines from it:
IPCC has got it all wrong, say boffins ...
Needless to say, prominent alarmist scientists and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not taken this view ...
The author of the news article calls the scientists who comes up with a study he likes 'boffins', and the other scientists (who are also doing sound science) who he disagrees with 'alarmist'.
... but you have revealed your own bias.
Indeed.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Oblig...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FFgVayrWjs
I ate my sig.
Did you? That reference -- which is provided to give context to the overall significance of measurements of orbital forcing (e.g., why is it that anyone should care about what this paper is about) -- is the only reference to AGW in the paper.
Its not at all about AGW one way or the other (except in that its about methodology in climate science which might eventually have some impact on studies that actually do directly relate to AGW.)
"Oolons
Did Lewis read the same paper?
Thanks to the link below I got to read the actual paper - the standard of reporting on this issue is atrocious. The paper looked at tree data from a small area of Scandinavia. Also pointing out that they have experienced a lot less warming in recent years than other northern areas.... Hmm do you think that may be true 1000's of years ago - it could have been warmer or cooler than the global average we don't know. So for CLIMATE in Lewis's article read WEATHER, i.e. Local effects for which it is extremely inaccurate to extrapolate to the world. Glad my knee jerk feeling that this was a daft extrapolation has been verified by the paper."
and
Anonymous Coward
Paper says:
"These findings, together with the missing orbital signature in published dendrochronological records, *suggest* that large-scale near-surface air-temperature reconstructions9, 10, 11, 12, 13 relying on tree-ring data *may* underestimate pre-instrumental temperatures including warmth during Medieval and Roman times."
Lewis says:
"CLIMATE WAS HOTTER IN ROMAN, MEDIEVAL TIMES THAN NOW: STUDY"
flame on...
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
The trend line in the Register article is down. Unfortunately the line is only extended up to about 200 years ago, The last little blip of data is left out of the trend line, and would be the blade of a hockey stick, if taken by itself, or would negate the claimed downward trend if included in the rest of the data used to calculate the line.
I'll try to read the Nature article too, because this is hokey schtick
The Nature Publishing Group owns many journals, of varying reputation and impact factor. I have nothing against Nature Climate Change, but it is a journal devoted entirely to climate science, where as the journal Nature is one of the premiere all-science journals.
There are two articles linked in TFS. I think you have misinterpreted GP as referring to the first linked article (the Nature: Climate Change research letter) when it was actually referring to the second linked article (the Register piece subtitled "IPCC has got it all wrong, say boffins".)
It should have been obvious that GP was referring to the Register piece for two main reasons:
1. It referred to "the article" conveniently ignoring recent anthropogenic warming, which the Nature: Climate Change research letter mentions, for context, in its second sentence, but the Register piece doesn't mention at all.
2. As you yourself mention, it interprets "the article" as presenting an argument against AGW, which the Register piece does, but the Nature: Climate Change research letter does not.
False equivalency.
Sorry, but the two are not equal, and no, I've never noticed that people label themselves as an atheist because it has more appeal, I've found that they prefer the agnostic label.
Was this article translated??
It seems to use a ton of jargon, acronyms, and references/citing.
It lacks many Joe-reader explanations. I have to look-up three words in every sentence.
I cannot tell if this article was written by the people who performed the study, or if the author just combined a bunch of data.
It looks more like the Yahoo News articles with a bunch of almost-relevant AP quotes.
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
Either it is the long-term climatic change that the IPCC and others have been warning about, or it isn't. You say "a few years of drought" - that isn't long-term climate at all, but short-term weather patterns. Anyway, the US east of the Rockies (which I'll bet is where you are) is yammering about hot temperatures and drought being signs of global warming. Meanwhile, lots of the rest of the planet is having a cool, rainy summer. Your local weather is exactly that: local, and short term.
I am definitely a skeptic. There is no question that CO2 contributes to a greenhouse effect, however, there is no evidence (and never has been) that this triggers large positive feedback cycles. It has all been based on computer models, and most of the predictions of those models have been wrong.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Don't let the 'boffin' bit get to you.
I mean, feel free to let it get to you, but at least a few UK newspapers (rags?) use 'boffin' for almost any scientist.
Some of the "science" stories I get from my google news app are UK based and I see it all the time.
I used to find it annoying and now I...well, I still find it annoying...
I did like the one that referred to some archaeologists looking for dinosaur fossils as "bone-bothering boffins". That was sorta good.
Seriously, though, UK folks. Whats with boffin? I've always wanted to ask, and this is my first opportunity.
It was a mistake of me to think Katrina was "bad" on the scale of natural disasters. Millions drowned is not unreasonable.
Age of our race: ~150 thousand years (plus or minus)
Total reliable empirical data (i.e., direct observation of meteorological phenomena and events): ~150 years
Yes, it is true that we have garnered a great deal more data from archaeological and other sources, but that data is imprecise (with regards to actual weather conditions) and subject to analysis and debate. Yes, analysis of this extended weather data reveals trends. The first trend to jump right out is that our planet's environment is an incredibly complex mechanism - it has changed radically several times in the history of the planet. We don't even understand its current day-to-day operation completely; many highly intelligent and reputable scientists provide theories and predictions based on the aforementioned data, and this is a very good thing.
Why do people (including the presumably intelligent crowd here) insist on thinking of these as facts? They're theories. When I was young, the prevailing theory was that we were entering an ice age. Now, the CW is that we're heading for a runaway greehouse effect. Both are valid theories. Let me know when one makes sufficient accurate predictions to be considered a reliable theory.
Oh and by the way - we ought to reduce as much as possible our impact on the global ecology (i.e., cut pollution). You don't need a theory for that - common sense should do nicely, I would think?
The burden of proof is on the persons making alarmist statement when they have been wrong so many times before, and showing multiple clear signs of fraud. The Piltdown Mann, Hansen, Lonnie and a long list.
Following the link, and clicking on "Get More From This Author" yields the following articles:
Being a skinny is much more unhealthy than being fat – new study
Antarctic ice shelves not melting at all, new field data show
Amount of meat we eat will barely affect future climate change
FATTIES are DESTROYING THE WORLD, scream mad professors
10m years ago there was less CO2 - but the Earth was WARMER
1930s photos show Greenland glaciers retreating faster than today
The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate
Only global poverty can save the planet, insists WWF - and the ESA!
That is just page one. See for yourself: http://search.theregister.co.uk/?author=Lewis%20Page
If nukes were cheaper, you'd easily be demonstrated to be wrong.
It's still possible that standardized, mass produced nukes will fuel a hungry world, but either China and India have to fix their QA/QC or we learn to earn at lower costs. Also we have to come up with bulletproof security plans and a closed fuel cycle (waste cycle).
The issue is not global warming. It really is not relevant. It has been much hotter in the past (and live thrived with an explosion of diversity) and it has been much colder in the past (near and distant, try the mini-ice ages of the last few centuries on for size). The reality is cooling is more of a problem than warming.
But most of all, people, especially city people, don't like change. They have a hard time adapting because they're locked down in a bad spot. So they whine about it.
What they need to do is stop complaining about global warming and start doing something about real problems like war, toxic pollution and such which are real threats.
Most of all, have more children and teach them. They are the hope for our species. There is a disaster headed our way, likely a space object, that will wipe out most life on this planet, including you. That will set humanity back a bit, or kill it off entirely. This keeps happening. Our best chance is to develop the technology to let us get off this rock and colonize other planets and even outside our solar system so we can survive. With us we'll undoubtedly take other species. We are their hope.
Now, go have sex.
I for one welcome our Norse Tree Gods, and the great trick they and Loki have played on gullible fools who forget that the Little Ice Age was quite a bit AFTER Roman Times.
Now, I see a frozen pine spar I'd like to get to know better ...
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You can't just look at the change in one variable and ignore any changes in others to come to a prediction on one the of the most complex systems known to man?
I expect the melting glaciers to re-grow any day now, then, once they hear they are not supposed to melt.
Whatever you choose to call them, it is clear that there are a group of people who like to style themselves "skeptics" who reject the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists--a consensus that has been reviewed and endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences (along with nearly every elite professional scientific society in the world). It is also clear that this "skeptic" point of view has been supported by an extremely well-funded public relations campaign backed by individuals and organizations who have a financial interest in sales of fossil fuels.
A distinguishing feature of this kind of "skeptic" is that their "skepticism" is notably one-sided.
For example, a genuine scientific skeptic will read the scientific literature on historical climate reconstruction and will reach the following conclusions: Reconstructing global temperatures prior to actual temperature recording is difficult, and relies on the use of "proxies," which are indirect methods of estimating temperature. These are subject to a variety of errors and artifacts, and global coverage is spotty. In addition, there is limited information regarding factors driving temperature, such as atmospheric CO2 and energy output of the sun. This is an active area of research and quite interesting, but does not really shed a great deal of light on modern global warming, which has unambiguously been demonstrated to be the result of increased atmospheric CO2.
On the other hand, the "skeptic" will reject the great mass of climate reconstructions (generally with ad hominem remarks about climate scientists or scientists in general), but will accept as gospel truth a just-published article that yields divergent results suggesting that temperatures in the past might have been higher than previous estimates. Similarly, the "skeptic" will enthusiastically embrace the "evidence" of third-hand accounts of medieval agricultural practices in northern europe as indicating that there was a warm period during medieval times--and conclude (in a bizarre jump of logic) that if medieval times were warm for some reason that (with our very limited information about climate drivers of the time) we don't understand, that we don't have to worry about the fact that we are currently seeing exactly the type of temperature increases that are predicted as a consequence of the CO2 that we are adding to the atmosphere.
Of course, a real scientist will have a very different reaction: We don't know if there was some unexplained process that warmed things up during medieval times--there isn't enough information to figure out for sure that that really happened, or if it did, what the cause was. But what if it did? That's even more disturbing. We know what the modern warming is due to--it's due to increased CO2. What if there is some other process that could produce a comparable warming in the absence of increased energy from the sun (because we've measured that, and we know it's not increasing)? Wow, that's really scary! What if that unknown process were to suddenly kick in on top of CO2? The projected warming from CO2 is bad enough, but add in some warming from some other unknown mechanism on top of that, and we could have a real catastrophe! This makes controlling CO2 even more important than I thought!
The proxies the scientists used were Northern Scandinavian Maximum Latewood Density proxies. To extrapolate their graph to the whole globe is quite a stretch.
Climate evangelists? You mean the ones that believe that nature will take care of the problem for us and nothing short of killing of the human race is worth concern anyway?
That seems odd, I can quantify the effect, but not measure it? The effect is exactly 10.5 quinteds, but I lost my quinted meter so I can't measure it?
That makes no sense. Why would neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust? Surely they would see it as a singularly inspirational event?
But if they admit that publicly than the non-NAZI's backlash will make a PR nightmare and destroy any possibility of a repeat; which is why skeptic find the term denier so offensive on so many levels, the associations to holocaust deniers which has racist implications and implies that like the holocaust denier the skeptics are lying for nefarious purposes. "Oh no boy we don't mean no offense, we just call all ya'll niggers around here" sure you don't.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
We do know that CO2 increases do have an effect on the earth's temperature. This isn't even controversial.
So basicaly we know that doubling the atmospheric CO2 will increase the temperature at least 1 degree, it might be 1.5 - 4.5, no one really knows because all of the other feedbacks are subject to emerging research, which is science speak for "our guesses are getting better". Even at that, because the effect is logarithmic the effect is diminishing.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Quoting RealClimate in the GW debate is about as even-handed as quoting Hitler on the Jewish Question. They're Hansen's students, and vitriolic in their hatred of anyone who questions their data or conclusions. Posters of contrary data sets get banned there almost immediately.
What are you quoting
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There is already a strong case that the burning of fossil fuels may cause harm to people in the future, through famine or flood. By the time we know for certain the damage will be done. Continuing to use fossil fuels to maintain a luxurious lifestyle is therefore reckless, if not immoral. Drinking and driving is also reckless. Not because you WILL hurt someone but because you MIGHT hurt someone.
We all make choices about how much energy we consume. So we can all contribute by reducing our consumption or by paying more for renewables. To me it's simply wrong to do otherwise.
one data point is not a trend. There ar emany reason for no green house incread and decreas in data.
The trend is temperature are rising on top of 'normal' cycles.
This person clearly doesn't understand trends, or global warming for that matter.
IT's a rant using scare words. Look at hos chart, it's laughable. At the period of man caused green house global warming,. note the sharp increase?
No one, regardless of your "position" should use this article is evidences.
haha. the red dash stop right where is should rise sharply.
The only thing that data(from the actual report, not the dumb ass article) Is that the temperature in going up when natural cycles are cooling.
IN the paper, it shows a clear increase in the 1876-2006 chart. one the writer leaves out.
It's even more data the supports Man Made global warming. However the article is so bad, I would never link to it even if it supported my belief that I have the worlds largest penis.
Set aside the "debate". Put that away. This article is BAD. don't link to it as evidence because you will be destroyed by any rational thinking person. Read the paper, and if you understand it use it to form and argument.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In 2100, if some of the worst things predicted happen, people may well look back on the global warming deniers with the same disdain most of us look upon Nazi's and holocaust deniers with now.
The signal to noise ratio around here seems to be pretty low, as often happens with these global warming posts.
I just want to point out some of the actual content of the Nature Climate Change article (not the ridiculous Register article).
What was actually recorded/measured?
The proxy record in question is an estimate of summer temperature within a part of Scandinavia for the past ~2000 years. This is no small feat. But, it is important to recognize this (1) not a global temperature record, and not even a 'hemispheric' land record [which would involve aggregating far more data]. (2) it is also not an annual mean temperature record.
So right off the bat you know that saying ANYTHING AT ALL about changes in global mean, annual mean temperature (which lies at the heart of climate science) is going to involve a lot of conjecture and hand-waving. So go ahead and skip over 90% of the posts in response to this article and probably most of the internet, since they do not have much to do with this article.
Do these data provide a challenge to either prior data or model results?
With respect to data, please see the prior point. One regional, seasonal temperature series, however good, and however important, is not enough to overturn itself a suite of other data. It simply adds an interesting nuance and fills in some data gaps.
With respect to implications for modeling the future, note that the article explicitly states that this Scandinavian summer warmth is predicted by models. These are the same models we use to the predict the future. Thus this study is a vindication of coupled (ocean+atmosphere) models to accurately reproduce the regional pattern of climate change to well established (orbital variations) forcings.
One note on the magnitude of the 'forcing'. There is a bit of misleading language in the article and I see it echoed in posts here with regards to the magnitude of orbital forcing. There is NO ANNUAL MEAN/GLOBAL MEAN radiative forcing at the top of the atmosphere introduced by obliquity and precession (the orbital bands changing here). The forcing is entirely regional (i.e. at that latitude) and seasonal (more radiation in summer exactly cancelled by less in winter). It bears little resemblance to the forcing due to CO2 which does have a strong presence even in global and annual mean. The orbital forcing important for this problem is akin to holding a blowtorch to the mid-to-high latitude regions preferentially in summer. There is no surprise that it warms things. It tells us little about global temperatures or the global relationship between radiative forcing and temperature response.
Claims that reducing our greenhouse gas emissions will "beggar the industrialised world" are nothing more than financial fearmongering.
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
Constantinople, Rome, Pompeii, Atlantis, Beijing..
You are sorely mistaken if you think people building many coastal cities is only a "modern" trend.
According to your scenario, you have the inexorable Austin Powers Global Warming steamroller bearing down on the hapless Bangladeshi guard. No way can he can get out of the path. He must perish.
careful.. you're comparing "warming" to "warm".
It's like comparing stopping to stopped. The time you take to stop has a lot more to do with the condition you are in when stopped.
Never mind the facts, what does Al Gore say ?
Really?
Now, given the long and vibrant history of the denialist machine (see Tobacco, done by the same people denying CO2's effects now), that means you can't believe the deniers are right.
Hansen's 1988 model was right (it gets a 3.4C per doubling of CO2 rather than the 3.2C per doubling that would have put it right on the dot), but the lies the deniers entered into to "prove" Hansen was wrong are yet another example of how they and you have been wrong many times before.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
"In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history. But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t even stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.
Does this mean that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas? No.
Does it mean that it isn’t warming? No.
Does it mean that we shouldn’t develop clean, efficient technology that gets its energy elsewhere than burning fossil fuels? Of course not. We should do all those things for many reasons — but there’s plenty of time to do them the right way, by developing nanotech. (There’s plenty of money, too, but it’s all going to climate science at the moment. :-) ) And that will be a very good thing to have done if we do fall back into an ice age, believe me.
For climate science it means that the Hockey Team climatologists’ insistence that human-emitted CO2 is the only thing that could account for the recent warming trend is probably poppycock."
This article suffers from misrepresentation of facts, possibly from a misunderstanding of basic definitions. Here are some definitions (with some context).
1) Anthroprogenic climate change: Human generated. This does not include sun spots or volcanoes. The sun is the biggest warming factor (duh). It is not anthropogenic. Orbital forcing (discussed in the original Nature Climate Change paper) is not anthropogenic. The paper is irrelevant to anthropogenic climate effects.
2) Global: Refers to the whole world. A measurement in Scandinavia is not equivalent to an averaged measurement of the world. It can be used as part of a larger data set.
3) Climate change: This is very similar to global warming, though it is a more precise term. The earth has been warmer or cooler at different times. Anthropogenic CO2 creates climate change with a net warming (this is a proven fact, not a hypothesis under debate). Some areas may feel a cooling effect, while others warm. The RATE of climate change is also important. Species can adapt over the span of 10,000 or a million years. Forests can move north or south over a thousand years. A fast rate of change (hotter or cooler) causes extinctions. (It was really hot when the dinosaurs were here, it was suddenly cooler, and then mammals took over after a mass extinction).
4) The "hockey stick graph": This is the Keeling curve. It is a measurement of CO2. It is Not a measurement of warming, as the article suggests. It shows an anthropogenically derived increase in global CO2 concentrations. Don't believe that it's from humans? Keeling's son is now measuring the rate at which we burn up O2.
5) hefty: This article calls Nature Climate Change a hefty journal. How is a medium impact magazine hefty? How is a 3 page paper hefty?
6) Seriously undermined: This article says that the IPCC report is seriously undermined by measurements in Antarctica. And then it provides a reference! Yay! oh wait. The guy who wrote the cited article is Lewis Page. Isn't that the guy who wrote this article? If you want to seriously (not jokingly) undermine something, don't quote your own opinion page.
My suggestion? Lewis Page: resign. Get a different job. Where reading, writing, and an understanding of science aren't required skills.
It is too bad they called the issue of carbon pollution global warming. If they would have just called it carbon pollution, then there would not have been any room for disssent, as it is so obvious. From there, one can argue the specific effects of carbon pollution from destroying the coral reefs to global warming.
The paper in Nature gives a trend line that runs from 138BC to 1900AD. This shows a decrease in temperature of 0.3 degrees centigrade over 2000 years. Post 1900 the temperature has increased by 0.6 degrees in 100 years. This is entirely consistent with global warming as a consequence of the industrial revolution/increased human population that became significant post 1900. It is a good paper and in no way supports the arguments of the sceptics. The paper does not show a post 1900AD decrease in temperature.
In the bible it rained for 40 days and 40 nights, and it was called a catastrophe. In Sweden we call it summer.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
I think it's funny that the same type of data that deniers have used to trash the hockey stick graph for years (tree ring data) is now suddenly accepted when the results are to their liking. Keep in mind that the data used in the hockey stick graph (tree ring and other) was from all over the world, while this study only uses data from one location: northern Scandanavia. No matter how accurate this data is, it is not a record of global trends, it is a record of northern Scandanavian trends. I know it's difficult for skeptics and deniers to understand the difference, but it is very important.
Let's try an example with the messenger in question. What consequences have you heard of from Monckton declaring he has a cure for AIDS and then failing to deliver? How about calling Jewish teenagers Nazis and all the rest? He's still listened to and he has no professional reputation to lose. He still gets his million+ dollar speaking tours, which is more than any Nobel prize winner in science gets.
He is suffering consequences of claiming to be a member of the British House of Lords but ultimately that will probably be a fine that is much smaller than his income.
When people are deliberately spreading misinformation and making money for it you cannot ignore their past form and motives and just pretend their message is valid without being a complete sucker.
It goes back to the fact that shoddy science has been going on, probably to scam money as well as in some cases to promote a political agenda. For whatever reason, Mann and company succeeded in stripping out whatever weak signal of temperature by a selection process that left random noise before the instrumental temperature record. Average random noise together from the remaining samples and it averages out to essentially zero, losing the medieval warming period and the little ice age. Combine that with a total ignoring of albedo variation, primarily caused by cloud cover and atmospheric factors and youve got the perfect storm ready made for the catastrophe industry to peddle.
The tip off key there was the general insistance on man-made albedo variation hype due to land use changes. Surface albedo only contributes about twenty percent of the total albedo and 70% of the surface is water which contributes significantly less than that.
It is unlikely that the sun has varied much in intensity because albedo variation accomplishes virtually the same effect and it does vary over time in a very dramatic fashion compared to solar variation and compared to the paltry ghg contributions of the last few hundred years.
We're looking at one study by one scientist in one location. The rest of the world (land and water) has been showing an increase in temp for decades and this year is no exception. One location could easily have a hotter temp in the past for decades, but world wide is a different story.
In a little over a century man has released the CO2 that took nature many millions, (hundreds of millions) of years to accumulate/sequester. I think we are approaching CO2 levels that were last seen over a million years ago. Remember that it only takes a few more degrees temp rise that what is predicted in another century to release the Methane on the continental shelves. There are areas in the arctic just off the shore of NE RUSSIA where it's already boiling to the surface over large areas. Methane is far more effective as a green house gas than CO2 and there is more of it stored as Methane Hydrate than all the oil, coal, and gas we've pumped out of the ground since the start of the industrial revolution.
Now all the deniers are going to think this supports what the voices in their heads are telling them!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Why are you recycling this story? The author of the study has publicly stated that the article took the results of his study out of context. Which is typical for GW deniers.
Global temperatures go up and down. Right now they are going up. We've build agraculture, infrastructure, and cities based on the climate of the past few hundred years. The cost of doing something about global warming is high. The cost of doing nothing is higher.