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

Doesn't pass the sniff test

[Xyrus]

It's doubtful their study will hold up to scrutiny. After reading the actual study, they're using a simple climate model to feed a Baeysian statistical model to generate their results, which fails to take into account numerous factors. This seems exceptionally weak, especially since a few years of data can drastically alter the results. For example, if the last ten years had a few strong El Ninos that gave a warming signal stronger than the expected signal, their model could be made to show warming beyond even the worst IPCC projections. And if you applied their methodology to a decade where some slight cooling took place (like the late 60's to early 70's), it would appear that by this time we would be well on our way to an ice age by now. That's an incredibly wide error margin, and more than enough to cast doubts on their results.

Re:Poor summary

[Luckyo]

Tipping point is typically considered to be the point when waters get warm enough for methane emissions increase from sediment becomes self-sustaining. We have significant evidence from excavations that suggests that once methane saturation in the air reaches certain point, it will become a self-sustained and very fast paced acceleration.

This is known because we can assess methane content from excavating ground layers. In other words, we know that this has happened in the past, several times. We also know that sediment contains high amounts of methane that is currently not being released into atmosphere in significant amounts and we know that warming water on top of that sediment will cause these emissions to increase rapidly.

Re:Surprise

[semi-extrinsic]

Because the whales being hunted for "research" are not only endangered, but are being fished on a commercial scale.

That's Japan. It's in Asia, not in Europe, you know. I specifically said "in a well regulated way on a population which is large enough". Try answering the question.

To be specific, the quota for Norwegian whale hunting has been between 500 and 1000 whales per year for the last decades. This is of a species called "common mink whale", estimated global population 184 000 individuals, being cited as "of least concern" on the IUCN Red List for endangered species. That's the same "endangeredness" category as Alaska Moose. Should we stop hunting that as well?

And regarding the temperatures leveling off post-2000, that's fairly easy to find data for (GIYF): here's a plot showing the global temperature anomaly from Hadley data, NOAA data and NASA data. All are roughly flat for the ten years following 2000.

Re:Surprise

[TapeCutter]

Just some nitpicks.
Fourier died in 1830, he predicted the properties of C02 in 1824 while developing spectroscopy.
Tyndal confirmed the prediction by experiment in the 1850's
The first mention of AGW was in 1896 by a guy called Arrhenius, he woefully underestimate the growth in emissions and estimated it would take 3000yrs for CO2 to double.
Arrhenius was largely ignored for 50yrs, it was believed that the spectrum of H2O overlapped and overwhelmed that of CO2. The "problem" during those 50yrs was explaining the ice ages.
In the 1950's work on heat seeking missiles improved spectroscopes to the point it could be shown that the two spectra were interleaved not overlapped.

In 1958 the national academies first warned the US government that CO2 was warming the earth, their confidence in that warning has done nothing but strengthen since that time.