Study Links Pacific Coastal Warming To Changing Winds

tranquilidad writes: In a paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, two authors ascribe the majority of northeast pacific coastal warming to natural atmospheric circulation and not to anthropogenic forcing. In AP's reporting, Ken Caldeira, an atmospheric scientist with the Carnegie Institution for Science, says the paper's authors, "...have not established the causes of these atmospheric pressure variations. Thus, claims that the observed temperature increases are due primarily to 'natural' processes are suspect and premature, at best." The paper's authors, on the other hand, state, "...clearly, there are other factors stronger than the greenhouse forcing that is affecting...temperatures," and that there is a "surprising degree to which the winds can explain all the wiggles in the temperature curve."

Comments

Re:"Belief" is not part of the scientific method

[bunratty]

That's not the reasoning behind the statement that the greenhouse effect warms the Earth. There are calculations and predictions behind it. If you predict the temperature of the Earth without the greenhouse effect, you get far colder temperatures than we observe. When you add in the greenhouse effect, you do get the observed temperatures. That's the scientific method -- hypothesis, prediction, and observation. Arrhenius even used this reasoning to predict in the 1800s that burning fossil fuels would cause warming. Hypothesis, prediction, and observation. You know, actual science.

Re:Most rational people never believe in AGW

[radtea]

It's like claiming at your murder trial that someone's death was natural, so therefore humans can't cause other humans to die.

While this isn't a bad way to put the Denialist reaction to this paper, it is worth pointing out that these guys have done more than produce one number: they have also produced predictions for regional variation that a) match the data and b) can't be replicated by a global forcing model. Since a critical component of the evidence for ACC is the regional variation of the predicted warming, this should at least give one pause.

Of course, letting it give one pause would be a disaster for members of the Warmist religion, whose mantra "The Science Is Settled" implies that any modification to the conclusion "almost all warming observed everywhere is the result of ACC" is equivalent to "the Denialists were right after all!"

This is nonsense, of course: the Denialists are wrong. Doubling the CO2 levels in the Earth's atmosphere are almost certainly increasing the effective insolation by about 1.6 W/m^2, which will likely have appreciable consequences on the climate.

However, how those consequences work themselves out is an extremely uncertain business, and no competent computational physicist puts nearly the trust in our unphysical climate models that Warmists do. This paper is a good example of how science (as opposed to politics and religion, which is what most of the public debate about ACC amounts to) works: they have squeezed a plausible hypothesis (that regional changes around the Pacific are explicable by global forcing) and found it questionable.

I expect we'll see a lot of work in the next decade on the interaction of natural variations and anthropogenic forcings, with Warmists continually playing a game of catch-up and Denialists continually repeating that the manifest uncertainty in our conclusions proves that "humans can't possibly have doubled the CO2 level" (or something like that... why Denialists believe humans can't have a global impact is beyond me.)

This is the damage to science done by Warmists: by claiming something that is not just false but actively anti-science ("the science is settled") they have encouraged their equally ignorant opponents to disbelieve science when it is working exactly as one would like it to.