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Cause of Global Warming 'Hiatus' Found Deep In the Atlantic
vinces99 writes with news about a study that may account for a slowdown in air temperature rises. Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth's surface. More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. The study is published in Science. Subsurface ocean warming explains why global average air temperatures have flatlined since 1999, despite greenhouse gases trapping more solar heat at the Earth's surface. "Every week there's a new explanation of the hiatus," said corresponding author Ka-Kit Tung, a UW professor of applied mathematics and adjunct faculty member in atmospheric sciences. "Many of the earlier papers had necessarily focused on symptoms at the surface of the Earth, where we see many different and related phenomena. We looked at observations in the ocean to try to find the underlying cause." What they found is that a slow-moving current in the Atlantic, which carries heat between the two poles, sped up earlier this century to draw heat down almost a mile (1,500 meters). Most previous studies focused on shorter-term variability or particles that could block incoming sunlight, but they could not explain the massive amount of heat missing for more than a decade.
Sweet, I can't wait for next week's alternate explanation!
Go ahead "consensus" troll mods - do your worst to bury every skeptic questioning sketchy science on this story. Then go look in the mirror and call yourself a rational scientist.
Debunk this latest what? Latest gloss over to cover up horrible weather models. I seriously wish my full time job was debunking Anthropomorphic global climate change piggybackers
This is a common tactic I see on Slashdot: "How can Slashdot be praising x when they usually say y?"
The folks claiming that the "hiatus" is a denier hoax are not necessarily the same folks who published this paper.
Furthermore, the argument is not that "hiatus" is a denier hoax - any fool can see temperature readings have been flat in most measured areas. The counter-argument is typically that the Earth is really big and that surface measurements alone do not necessarily represent the amount of heat absorbed by the atmosphere. Where all of that heat has been going was where the speculation has been, with the usual supposition being "the ocean" or "the poles".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I nether believe in global warming nor do I deny that it could be happening. I am simply interested in the science put forward and am open to adjusting my hypothesis based on the observed and tested results.
With that out of the way, the fact that some scientists are saying that there is no actual "Hiatus" and producing numbers to back up there claims while others are examining the temperature data and looking for new systems and processes that explain the changes they are seeing worries me. It tells me that some in the scientific community have abandon the scientific method and are attempting to make the data fit the hypothesis they have. Don't get me wrong, this happens far more often in science than most believe. However, in such a hot political topic one must be vigilant and make sure that the politics does not overshadow the truth we learn through science.
Ether way you look at it, the discovery of a new process within the chaotic system of the atmosphere simply adds more data to the mix and allows us to better understand the processes.
Yet the climate buffoons ignore the oceans in their models.
OK, I am down on climate models, because they have poor accuracy, but come on, they don't ignore the oceans in their models. Check it out on Wikipedia at least before writing something.
You might be able to say that their handling of the oceans is incorrect, and if you have a good reason, such a post would be interesting, but scientists definitely aren't ignoring the oceans in their models, I don't even know why you would think that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
please link to an example of "sketchy science" that has been proved wrong by more solid, peer-reviewed science.
I know you're just smacking down a troll, but climate models have been over-estimating warming for years, as demonstrated by this science.
That's not to say that climate models are bad science, they are good science investigating the nature of the earth; but people who put too much faith in them without evidence were performing bad science.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sweet, I can't wait for next week's alternate explanation!
Go ahead "consensus" troll mods - do your worst to bury every skeptic questioning sketchy science on this story. Then go look in the mirror and call yourself a rational scientist.
Science is about skepticism. Even climatologists that support the theory of man influenced climate change are constantly questioning the data, and looking at alternate conjectures. The very article referenced explicitly states that many of the theories that were presented to explain why global surface temperatures in the last decade did not track the apparent heat load global warming induced were inadequate, and the subject of further inquiry like the research cited. That's how Science works. But Science doesn't discover all the facts instantly and doesn't advance in convenient textbook chapters. It isn't skepticism that tries to characterize Science as just a bunch of random guesses, one after the other. That's just ignorance of Science. Science works by incremental and sometimes studdering progress forward. There are lots of things we know with certainty. We know carbon dioxide traps heat in Earth's lower atmosphere. We know human activities have dramatically increased the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. The net result is an increased amount of heat absorbed by the Earth. What precisely happens to that heat in all of the complex thermal systems on Earth is still not well understood. But that doesn't mean the core principles are just random guesses. We're still discovering how 19th century chemistry works, but no one thinks that new chemistry discoveries mean chemistry is left-wing conspiracy.
The history of scientific progress looks no different for any other subject than it looks for 21st century climatology. Our understanding of gravity, of the germ theory of infectious disease, of quantum mechanics all followed similar discovery and learning curves. The only difference is that general relativity and Schroedinger's equation aren't subjects politicians can effectively argue about.
I think a lot of people, even some actual scientists, do not understand the role of skepticism in Science. There's a difference between scientific skepticism and peanut gallery skepticism. Scientific skepticism is healthy. When a scientist is skeptical of prevailing theories and conducts intellectually honest research aimed at probing that skepticism, that's always valuable. Science isn't a poll: if a scientific theory is correct, it will survive skeptical research. If its wrong, it will eventually be contradicted by the evidence. But when someone with no understanding of the facts or the research misinterprets the natural skepticism that is at the heart of scientific discovery by filtering it through their own "common sense" then they don't understand why science is successful overall, and really ought to shut up about it.
The real denialists are, and always have been, the ones who think science is never to be questioned.
You are more the zealot than anyone who ever came out of Bob Roberts U.
It will be nice a decade or two hence when it is undeniable just how far you have allowed yourself to be duped (well actually it is the case now, but even you will admit it in 20 years).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Scientists can speculate and debate as much as they want whether it's getting warmer or colder. The issue with the global warming debate is the political demands to translate the science into specific actions, often by scientists who have no qualifications in economics or politics.
Scientists can speculate and debate as much as they want whether it's getting warmer or colder. The issue with the global warming debate is the political demands to translate the science into specific actions,
So you want to keep performing scientific research, but not use that research to inform our actions? That's... genius.
often by scientists who have no qualifications in economics or politics.
Oh yeah, that's a real problem with a lot of political systems; too many scientists making policy and not enough career politicians and business lobbyists. Haw haw haw.
The "hiatus" isn't what people think - " this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth's surface"
Note that the average temp is still rising even if more slowly than expected. But the entire planet doesn't warm or cool all at once.
During that "hiatus" the loss of ice cover, especially in the Arctic has been tremendous and that's noteworthy for 2 reasons.
The first is that the number of temperature monitoring stations in the Arctic is very poor. The other is that it takes a LOT of heat to melt ice - turning it to water at zero deg requires as much as raising room temp water to the boiling point.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Your linked study really just shows what everyone could already see - the climate models are missing something. This of course isn't a surprise; they're missing lots of things, many of which are called out in the study (ENSO, AMO, volcanic activity, unexpected stratospheric aerosol variation or solar variation, etc). There's a lot of details we can't predict, but climate models are still useful even when we know they're incomplete, just like every other kind of model.
Still, I appreciate the link, even if (as you say) it doesn't invalidate any "sketchy science".
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
A lot of people dont understand the difference between healthy scepticism and outright denial.
Sceptics analyse the evidence behind conclusions and express their concerns. When concerns are valid, the conclusions are re-examined and if need be, changes are made, experiments are re-run with these new factors in mind.
A person in denial looks for evidence to support their point of view. They dont examine the evidence, they only look for skerricks and soundbites that support their ideas, they dont add to the scientific process at all. The problem is that denial loves to hide in and pretend that it's proper scepticism because this gives denial legitimacy. The worse part is, they will attempt to take evidence out of context to support their ideas.
Scepticism is an important part of verification in science, in science you're not meant to believe anything. However denial means believing in your idea regardless of any and all the evidence arrayed against it. Pretty much the antithesis of scientific scepticism.
Put simply (TL;DR)
Scepticism says: the climate change model is incorrect, we need to change the model.
Denial says: the climate change model is incorrect, therefore climate change is wrong LA LA LA LA LA I cant hear you.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If this paper were to turn out to be correct, current climate models are useless and will need to be completely reworked.
No model, in any branch of science or engineering, is complete and perfect; that doesn't mean they're useless.
I'm curious to see which fundamental assumptions made by current models you believe to be contradicted by this paper. To me it looks like they're simply pointing out a deep-ocean cycle that could soak up heat from the surface - not unlike the well-known ENSO, PDO and AMO cycles, which most models don't attempt to predict. Unless you think that "incomplete" means "fundamentally assumes that no other factors can exist"?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
>Scientists in general and especially climate scientists and the IPCC, need to stay out of the public/political debate
yeah, let's leave the important decissions to lawyers and economists, and not to scientists and engineers. Now THAT would lead to a great society !
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
google global warming hiatus ipcc
http://www.motherjones.com/env...
http://washington.cbslocal.com...
http://www.weather.com/news/sc...
http://articles.latimes.com/20...
http://www.theguardian.com/env...
http://www.climatecentral.org/...
Since 2000 there's been an unusual number of La Nina years.
We don't have enough observations to ever begin to know what is "usual" in the first place.
Under normal circumstances, this should have produced a noticeably cool period, similar to the 1940s and 1890s. Instead the decade was still the warmest on record.
Even the longest records we have may well be a few orders of magnitude too short to be of much use here. That's before even considering issues of accuracy, when can even apply to records being currently collected.
If this study is right then there will come a point when climate models are underestimating the warming again. The mechanism of this heat absorption is cyclical and eventually it will reverse leaving more heat in the atmosphere leading to rapid warming again. It's difficult if not impossible to put that into climate models partially because it's impossible (with our current knowledge) to know the timing of the switches in the cycle so models tend to just use the average which means sometimes their above the average and sometimes they're below.
The abstract:
A vacillating global heat sink at intermediate ocean depths is associated with different climate regimes of surface warming under anthropogenic forcing: The latter part of the 20th century saw rapid global warming as more heat stayed near the surface. In the 21st century, surface warming slowed as more heat moved into deeper oceans. In situ and reanalyzed data are used to trace the pathways of ocean heat uptake. In addition to the shallow La Niña–like patterns in the Pacific that were the previous focus, we found that the slowdown is mainly caused by heat transported to deeper layers in the Atlantic and the Southern oceans, initiated by a recurrent salinity anomaly in the subpolar North Atlantic. Cooling periods associated with the latter deeper heat-sequestration mechanism historically lasted 20 to 35 years.
The question climate science deniers need to ask themselves is "If all of this heat is going into the ocean why hasn't it actually cooled rather than temperatures just sort of plateauing?" If all that heat is disappearing into the ocean and we're not actually cooling that means heat is still building up.
Still useful... for what? that's the question.
If we're going to move to alternative energy, population control, costing in environmental damage as part of the economy, global justice, etc., climate models don't seem useful for that anymore. They are useful, but not useful enough for that application, still too wide an area of uncertainty. Nobody said the models had to be perfect, just fit for purpose.
It doesn't mean climate models are useless at all. The phenomenon absorbing the heat that this paper studies is cyclical with 20-35 years between more and less absorption periods. That's difficult to model because it's probably impossible to predict the exact timing of the cyclical changes. One way to model that is it just take the long term average of heat absorption and accept that sometimes the model will over predict the warming and sometimes it will under predict the warming but the long term average will be about right. The findings of the paper don't contradict the fundamental assumptions of climate models but it may point the way to improvements in modeling the ocean portion of the models.
The moment someone asks for "peer-reviewed" rebuttal is the moment I know they either don't know what they are talking about or they are vicious liars. You can't have "peer-review" standard in the situation in which the whole field is accused of fraud. We don't ask for peer-review of drug dealing charges by other drug dealers. In this situation the field has to stand up to a higher standard than peer-review. It has to withstand the critical review. The field is accused of being incestuous (in the sense of being self-selecting by rejecting everyone who is not a fawning supporter). This self-selecting membership makes peer-review irrelevant. You get to pick your peers. You don't get to pick who is qualified to be your critics.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.