Norwegian Study: Global Warming Less Severe Than Feared

Numerous news outlets are reporting the findings of a study from the Research Council of Norway — a government agency — which concludes that (in Bloomberg's version) "After the planet's average surface temperature rose through the 1990s, the increase has almost leveled off at the level of 2000, while ocean water temperature has also stabilized." The New York Times' Dot Earth blog offers some reasons to be skeptical of the findings.

Comments

Re:Nature

[HiThere]

I don't think you read, or perhaps understood, what the blogger was saying, *OR* what the original report was saying. They don't appear to be in actual disagreement.

The original paper was reporting on how a particular climate model responded to the data. The blogger was criticizing that class of models. They may well *BOTH* be correct.

Personally, I don't really have an opinion on that particular issue. I'm more focused on different kinds of evidence, and I'm also not a climate scientist. To me it appears that the current evidence indicates that lowball estimation of the amount of climate chage are wrong, basically because the ice has been melting faster than predicted even by most "alarmists". But I'm willing to admit that I have a high degree of uncertainty. Someone who convinced me that they had a reasonable explanation AND that global warming was slowing would be possible. I just haven't encountered any such.

Additionally, I'm well aware that the politicians censored many of the more extreme predictions out of the official report as being too alarming. So I'm dubious about how accurate it's "conservative" predictions are. Some of the excluded predictions have already been shown to be more accurate than the included ones. (Mind you, there's a wide variation. E.g. I don't really expect the sea level to rise by 500 meters.)

Re:Look at the data

[clarkie.mg]

Your first link point to very local data - northern Europe - but your paragraph about it is titled, in bold Global temperature increase data *FACEPALM*
Here is some real data you might want to consider and inspect closely.

Secondly, you point to the fact that, quote, In fact we see the opposite, we see that the CO2 rise *follows* the temperature rise, not precedes it.. Well that is simply not true concerning the contemporary climate events, the temperature rise is extremely well correlated to the human output of co2 in the atmosphere. Now, correlation being not causation, it is possible that another cause - which one, you never say - would make the temperatures rise. However it is extremely unlikely that another natural cause would magically correlate with human activity of the last 200 years.

But maybe you meant the co2 rise of the past climate events ? That must be that, because it's a common meme through the deniers' sphere. It's funny that you fail to reproduce the basic non-scientific mantras of the deniers and you want us to believe that your post is of any significant value. *FACEPALM*

Concerning the delay between temperature rise and concentration of co2 rise in the past warming events, it correctly is of about 800 years on a total warming phase of around 5000 years. However, considering that this means that the present climate event has nothing to do with human output of co2 is a lack of the most basic knowledge of climate science.

Here is how it worked - short version : the earth changes orbit periodically - milankovitch cycles - and the amount of energy received by the earth increases a little bit. This drives global temperature up, 1 or 2 degrees, not more. This, in turn, induces changes in the biosphere : more vegetation in short. Slowly, that vegetation dies and releases co2. The co2, in turn, drives temperature up with the greenhouse gas effect. But much higher than the effects of the initial perturbation, 8 to 12 degrees more ! This is called a feedback. But that doesn't mean that co2 cannot be the initial perturbation if we release enormous quantity of it as is the case in the present climate event.

In fact, the delay in the paleolithic events and the no delay in the present event is another proof by simple logic that the humans are the cause of the imbalance.

Also, this shows how worse the situation can become as past climate changes lasted hundreds or thousands of years when this one would be much shorter. Guess in which case the biosphere adapts better ?

I could go on answering your nonsensical post but i stopped reading after that second paragraph that shows you lack even the most basic knowledge on the subject.

I suggest that you educate yourself, for example with "Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis" Farmer, G. Thomas, Cook, John published by Springer. Then maybe you can tell the world to look at the data.