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Global Warming Since 1997 Underestimated By Half
Layzej writes "A new paper shows that global temperature rise of the past 15 years has been greatly underestimated. The reason is that the weather station network covers only about 85% of the planet. Satellite data shows that the parts of the Earth that are not covered by the surface station network, especially the Arctic, have warmed exceptionally fast over the last 15 years. Most temperature reconstructions simply omit any region not covered. A temperature reconstruction developed by NASA somewhat addresses the gaps by filling in missing data using temperatures from the nearest available observations. Now Kevin Cowtan (University of York) and Robert Way (University of Ottawa) have developed a new method to fill the data gaps using satellite data. The researchers describe their methods and findings in this YouTube video. 'The most important part of our work was testing the skill of each of these approaches in reconstructing unobserved temperatures. To do this we took the observed data and further reduced the coverage by setting aside some of the observations. We then reconstructed the global temperatures using each method in turn. Finally, we compared the reconstructed temperatures to the observed temperatures where they are available... While infilling works well over the oceans, the hybrid model works particularly well at restoring temperatures in the vicinity of the unobserved regions.' The authors note that 'While short term trends are generally treated with a suitable level of caution by specialists in the field, they feature significantly in the public discourse on climate change.'"
Clearly they have a cooling effect.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The first link in the summary links to the paper published by the Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society.. The youtube video makes the science accessible to the layman.
Japan is rejecting its existing CO2 commitments, Australia is rejecting existing and new CO2 laws, and we're seeing rejections of carbon trading systems in Europe.
So what is the point?
The only reason we have such intense political conflict over the issue is that it is used to justify taxes, restrictions, and various other regulations.
Well... Those aren't going to be happening any time soon indifferent to the science.
The economy is terrible.
People already feel over taxed.
Any further taxes, restrictions, or regulations along these lines won't be accepted.
So why are you guys still trying so hard? For now at least... its over. Its done.
AGW may be the doom of humanity and we might all be living under water while Kevin Costner drinks his own pee while shooting "smokers" in their mad max oil tanker.... But that won't change the fact that people will vote these regulations down.
So... if you're interested in doing anything besides spinning your wheels uselessly... figure out another way to contribute to a solution besides unpopular heavy handed government restrictions.
I say that with the full knowledge that about a dozen people are about to tell me that that is the only thing that will work. Well, no it won't because it won't be accepted and therefore won't work. So if that is all we've got then there is no solution. If people won't accept it... then it won't work. Unless you want to try an Eco-dictatorship where you just shoot people that disagree. Have fun with that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Regardless of which side of the warming debate you're on, hearing reports that a climate projection was off by half doesn't instill confidence that scientists really understand what's going on.
*FACEPALM*
I understand not reading the story. This is Slashdot after all. But not reading the summary? Come on man. There's a link to paper right at the start of the summary. The youtube vid was to explain it to the average Joe, not for passing a scientific review.
~X~
No no no. You don't understand. *this* time we got it right.
The method used works well over the oceans - is that where they omitted data and the used the prediction method? But it works "particularly well" where we have no actual data to validate it...
Fail.
Cowtan and Way circumvent both problems by using an established geostatistical interpolation method called kriging – but they do not apply it to the temperature data itself (which would be similar to what GISS does), but to the difference between satellite and ground data. So they produce a hybrid temperature field. This consists of the surface data where they exist. But in the data gaps, it consists of satellite data that have been converted to near-surface temperatures, where the difference between the two is determined by a kriging interpolation from the edges. As this is redone for each new month, a possible drift of the satellite data is no longer an issue.
Prerequisite for success is, of course, that this difference is sufficiently smooth, i.e. has no strong small-scale structure. This can be tested on artificially generated data gaps, in places where one knows the actual surface temperature values but holds them back in the calculation. Cowtan and Way perform extensive validation tests, which demonstrate that their hybrid method provides significantly better results than a normal interpolation on the surface data as done by GISS.
The only thing in TFS is that they cover 85% of the globe, where does the "half" come from?
From the paper, which actually found 2.5 times as much warming by leveraging satellite data as the CRUtemp does by ignoring the unobserved region. The paper shows that the Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet. This is not an unexpected finding: see polar amplification
One model predicts global warming. A second model guesses at the surface temperature in places where there are no thermometers and finds warming. The second model confirms the first.
And this is science.
Between the jellyfish blooms and this...things are looking much worse all the sudden. I'm not even getting into the various "superstorms" yet.
A risky idea that might get us out of this is to dump lots of money into a "manhattan project" for fusion power and photovoltaics. Advances in those fields could solve global warming quite easily.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You be trolling ma'am. You toss off an overstated, inflammatory reply - that's trolling.
Yes, it's also factually incorrect. But that's life.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
If a doctor tells me I have cancer, and then later tells me it's progressing twice as fast as originally thought, of course that causes me to lose confidence in doctors and thus ignore anything they have to say. Instead, I'll go listen to the homeopathy providers who keep telling me that doctors don't know what they're talking about, and aren't always telling me that I'm going to die. After all, doctors are only interested in making money.
Wait, there's a debate about whether or not the climate is warming? That's news to me. There's certainly a debate about exactly how quickly it's rising, which is something the scientists have not expressed certainty about. But the fact that the planet is warming as well as the question of the main cause very well studied, well demonstrated and not heavily debated among scientists.
Science really isn't about confidence. It's about evidence. If holding the line, even when you know you're wrong, is what makes people feel confident, it's no wonder they turn to religion. But I'm personally thankful that at least one discipline isn't afraid to publish results that contradict earlier findings, if that's where the evidence leads.
As someone who understands this process, findings like this lend tremendous credibility to the scientific community, and yes, boost my confidence in the work they're doing and the integrity of the published results. It's what makes science the best method we know of for understanding reality.
Look, I am fed up with this. Just turned 40 last Sunday. Have pictures from all the 40 birthdays. All the way through the 70-ties and half 80-ies I am on ski - 50 cm or more snow, winter is in full swing. Late 80-ties and early 90-ties - cold but not freezing. After that it became ridiculously hot until last Sunday when the absolute record was set - it was 23 (I repeat 23 degrees!!!). And BTW, this 20-23 degrees lasted for 4 weeks in total (mid-October -mid November). Utterly ridiculous and unheard off.
Since 10 years the fruit trees in our garden do not bear fruit because it is too hot in January and February, so they start blossoming too early. Then a few frosts in March and they are gone. 17 degrees Celsius in mid-February (for a week or longer)? In my country where this is the coldest month? WTF?!?
Say what you will about anecdotes, I don't give a damn. My experience is unambiguous. The Earth is warming.
I admit, it's a bit off topic, but it is something that has bugged me for ages and I still didn't find an answer, so please, maybe someone can shed some light on it:
Why is there a "controversy" about Global Warming, and why is there none about "Terrorism"?
Global Warming may or may not happen. Ok. I don't want to discuss what kind of "proof" one side or the other may have, let's just say it may or may not happen. Likewise, terrorism. There may or may not be terrorist attacks on some parts of "our" (with varying definitions of "our") soil. Again, I don't want to discuss whether or not they would happen.
The point now is: We try to do anything in our power to prevent terrorist attacks, while at the same time we argue whether or not we should do anything to prevent Global Warming. My question is: From a risk management point of view, shouldn't it be the other way 'round?
Both are classic examples of Risk Management problems. Risk and cost to mitigate vs. reward/damage contained. It's the usual 2x2 matrix. On X, we have "do nothing" and "do something", on Y we have "nothing happens" and "something happens" (ok, very simplified, but you get the idea). So, in case of terrorism, that would net us:
We don't do anything and nothing happens: Pre-9/11 situation, no cost, perfect situation
We do prepare and nothing happens: Possibly the current situation, high cost and no damage
We prepare and an attack happens: Also the possibly current situation, high cost but with good damage control, leading to no/little damage
We don't prepare and an attack happens: Worst case scenario, no cost to prepare but high damages, possibly costing thousands of lives.
When you do the same matrix for Global Warming, it looks quite similar, though with a teeny-tiny little twist at the end:
We don't do anything and nothing happens: Current situation and best case future scenario
We do prepare and nothing happens: High cost, potential change in our lifestyle for no gain.
We prepare and an attack happens: Also high cost, but climate changes can be mitigated to the point where only little/no damage has to be suffered.
We don't prepare and an attack happens: Worst case scenario, with millions on coastlines being dead or homeless, with out of control storms and the weather from hell.
The thing I have problems with now is: The former can, worst case, cost a few thousand lives with maybe a building or two gone. The latter can literally cost millions of lives with coastal areas becoming uninhabitable for decades, if not forever, with storms causing damages in the billions and unforeseeable effects to agriculture and nature (and of course tourism, but I guess that's the least of our concerns then). And we're not talking about some brown bodies being killed, that could well be millions of AMERICANS dead, so the usual "Anyone outside the US doesn't count as human to the US" won't apply.
Yet we pump billions into the defense against terrorism, but we keep bickering on whether or not Global Warming may or may not happen. Anyone able to explain the sense in that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Climate Scientists are not Statisticians
But petroleum engineers are?
Uhh, is it me or do folks really not know how to read basic charts? Yes, the temperature changes due to cycling glacial periods are real. They are also spread out across vast chunks of time; the rate of these cyclic background climate changes are very, very, very slow.
Not guilty, your Honor! Death is a natural cycle; he was dying before I ever met him! The bullets I shot into him had nothing to do with it.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
At some point it's going to be obvious to even US Republican Senators that climate change is going to economically effect their tiny little world and they might try to do something about it.
It's already obvious to the Pentagon, but everybody knows that place is full of pinko, tree-hugging, industry hating, enviro-whackos.
Here are 17 years of the current measurements: NASA GISS VS CRUTemp. NASA GISS uses the nearest available station to fill in gaps. CRUTemp just drops any region not covered. It doesn't look like "no warming" on either of them. Not sure where you got that.
Advocates? You mean there was more than one of them?
This revisionist bullshit to fool the kiddies is disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourself. Apart from one published paper global cooling was a "world of tomorrow!" newspaper fluff thing and there was less of it in the newspapers than bigfoot sightings.
Sigh, +4 Insightful.
Are you a climatologist? Your keep making these accusations without any references, citations... What exactly makes you so sure the experts are wrong?
On the one hand we have these publically funded (and therefore to some extent accountable) scientists saying that, yes, there is very likely an enormous problem. On the other hand we have privately funded "thinktanks" like Heartland and some flaky websites saying, variously (and sometimes simultaneously)
-- AGW is not happening.
-- AGW may be happening but there's nothing we can do about it.
-- AGW is happening but we should not try to do anything about it because the suggested courses of action are just Marxist plots to sap and impurify our precious bodily bodily fluids.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Why do you think the IPCC no longer uses the Hockey-stick graph?
They don't use Mann's original hockey stick graph from 1998 any more because it's 15 years old and numerous other newer reconstructions have been done since then. But if you take a look at Chapter 5 - "Information from Paleoclimate Archives" of the IPCC AR5 - WG I report you'll find that figures 5.7 & 5.8 still look remarkably like the original hockey stick graph. So they've got newer versions of it.
Another idiot who doesn't understand the difference between weather and climate and the effects of natural variability.
I thought Slashdot was the place for rational individuals. Instead many of the posters are simply in denial what's happening. Of course AGW is being exploited, but the change is still real, and the humans have changed the Earth's atmosphere and the capacity to react to such sudden changes. What's happening now on the global scale is a natural feedback for the historically sudden input by one species and its technology.
If you still don't find that logical - taking into account simple physical phenomena known for over 100 years (and direct observations) - imagine this:
Alien race starts to pour greenhouse gases into the Earth's atmosphere. Who do you think is guilty of the resulting warming? What if the alien race starts to chop trees and rain forests, and - gasp - what if they actually maintain billion head cattle population (responsible of major chunk of the greenhouse gas emissions)?
The cattle population for example would be at its natural level if we stopped feeding it, letting the cattle to find its own food.
It's amazing how denial can work, isn't it? It's natural however - the first phase of confronting something uneasy - but it's still there on the path to understanding, so don't worry you are well on your way.
The authors note that 'While short term trends are generally treated with a suitable level of caution by specialists in the field, they feature significantly in the public discourse on climate change.'
Which is a nice way of saying that the results of this data is to be taken with a grain of salt. But they acknowledge that the general public will probably grab them and run of in some direction or other, screaming nonsense.
Have gnu, will travel.
It was autumn, and the Indians on the remote reservation asked their new Chief if the winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was an Indian Chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets, and when he looked at the sky, he couldn't tell what the weather was going to be. Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he replied to his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect wood to be prepared. But also being a practical leader, after several days he got an idea. He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, "Is the coming winter going to be cold?" "It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold indeed," the meteorologist at the weather service responded. So the Chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more wood in order to be prepared. One week later he called the National Weather Service again. "Is it going to be a very cold winter?" "Yes," the man at National Weather Service again replied, "it's going to be a very cold winter." The Chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of wood they could find. Two weeks later he called the National Weather Service again. "Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?" "Absolutely," the man replied. "It's going to be one of the coldest winters ever." "How can you be so sure?" the Chief asked. The weather man replied, "The Indians are collecting wood like crazy."
If the warming projections decrease, then that is a very serious problem with their science.
If the warming projections increase, then that is a very serious problem with their science.
If the warming projections do not change, then that is a very serious problem with their science.
That's how it works for you Jane Q, whether you admit it or not. The fundamental principle is that AGW is wrong, you are right, and your mind finds the "logic" to fit.
There are people who think the earth is less than 10000 years old. I work with one of them. He has an explanation for everything, but he doesn't understand what he's talking about. Who am I to point out the finer details of radiometric dating, when he will not listen, because if he's not right about the young earth thing, then his web of belief will fall to bits.
My question to you is this: are you capable of learning something about climate science?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
How is it that EVERY SINGLE WEEK there is some new story about how AGW is WAY worse than we thought.
You want to know why no one gives a shit about AGW? This is why? You can only tell me my life is over tomorrow for so many days before I realize you're talking out your ass ... even if I'm a stupid moron.
EVERY FUCKING THING THAT HAPPENS IS CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING ...
And no one gives a shit because common sense tells us that we should be dead by now ... well, 20 or 30 years ago, according to these guys and their 'OMG WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT'.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Jane, the Dunning Kruger effect is referring to you. That is you.
What this video to learn about how people like you think about whether it is warming or not.
If. You. Dare.
It's not that you disagree with people, but that you are incapable of processing information. like the above video. I'm sure it will make no sense to you, but typical people will laugh and shake their head.
An ideologue as the ability to look at a black wall and call it white. That is you.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
There has been warming.
This video explains the source of the confusion.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
In most cases I would agree. The problem here is that, if the vast majority of climatologists are even remotely on the right track, we do not have the luxury of "sitting back" until things settle down.
I guess for me it boils down to this: if there is a nonzero probability X that future generations will suffer devastating consequences of our pollution, we should do everything we can to mitigate that. This is true even for small X because the scale of consequences are potentially very large.
But more to the point, even though you are right that this science is new, I put more value on the statements of experts in the field, rather than some random person on the Interwebs who, for all I know, just refuses to take it seriously because the implications might inconvenience her slightly.
The energy captured in coal, gas and oil is the result of many millions of years of sunshine. I just can't reasonably expect there to be no significant effects to our releasing that in a matter of a few decades.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
Careful, some might accuse you of crisis mongering.
Yes, and others stand accused of crisis whitewashing. What is your point?
Vague declarations of doom are not a rational basis on which to surrender all of one's economic freedom and much of one's standard of living.
I wouldn't call the IPCC reports "vague declarations of doom". They are quite concrete declarations of doom. There is a bit of a spectrum of options between fingers-in-ears and surrendering all economic freedom (whatever that means) and standard of living -- unless perhaps you're Koch, BP, and so on.
Some people just can't stop looking for a Messiah, a Prophet to simultaneously fill them with fear and then promise to deliver them from that fear.
You invoke an image of some sectarian cult. This is not an accurate description of the position of a large majority of climate scientists. Sure, it is a relatively young field. But that's still better, warts and all, than no science. Not to mention the anti-science punted by vested interests.
Gosh, thanks. That must be why the other ships call me Meatfucker -- GCU Grey Area (Eccentric)
| And, really, it's right to be quite skeptical of any scientist who argues that "my theory wasn't wrong, 15 years of data was all wrong". That's an extraordinary claim.
Indeed, but that's not the claim.
And it's quite right be be skeptical of any internet poster who is "skeptical" of results which are disliked who doesn't really understand where they came from but is smug about their skepticism.
Closer to actual facts:
a) there are no calibrated ground-based stations in the Arctic because there is no ground in the Arctic.
b) the physics of increased greenhouse effect predicts larger effects in polar regions. (This also distinguishes global warming from enhanced greenhouse from global warming from increased solar output).
c) global warming is, of course global
d) combine (b) and (c) and you recognize that accurate quantification of global warming requires good evaluation of polar temperatures.
e) previous temperature reconstructions used simple extrapolation or ignored Arctic regions with no data.
f) authors propose new technique to assimilate data from multiple sources like satellites to improve coverage
g) authors calibrate/validate technique where good data were known
h) authors run the method and apply to Arctic regions with authentic missing data
i) results show substantial warming larger than estimates previously used in (e).
j) results with substantial warming in Arctic are more consistent with estimates using first-principles physics of greenhouse effects and what mainstream climate scientists have been predicting since 1992 or so.
next up:
k) scientists doing improved data processing showing closer correspondence to physics get accused of being shrill anti-capitalist nazis or the like.
Remember the previously skeptical Berkeley statistics professor---a favorite of the usual "skeptical" right-wing deception machine---who was convinced that the climatologists were doing their data analysis wrong and showing excessive global warming. And he & students got the underlying data sets and worked for years. And they found that the climatologists had the right answer all along (in fact their own estimates of warming were a touch higher than the climatologists).