"65% of Americans give priority to developing alternative energy sources"
Too bad those 65% don't vote for what they want, apparently.
The fact is nearly 3 million more people voted for the losing candidate who would have been more supportive of alternative energy than did for the winning candidate so maybe they did but the vagaries of the Electoral College defeated them.
I often wonder how accurate their temperature monitoring is. Are their thermometers better accuracy than.01C? What is their drift? Anyone who knows about metrology knows you need at least 10x the accuracy of your measurements to put the errors down in the noise a bit. They're talking about hundredths of a degree, are they really calibrated that accurately down to millidegrees? I doubt it.
When you're averaging a large number of measurements it's reasonable to have a much higher precision than the precision of the individual measurement itself. The clearest example of this I know of is baseball batting averages. A batter either gets a hit or an out, that is an integer 1 or a 0. But batting averages are typically expressed to 3 decimal places (thousandths).
Click here to see the uncorrected data graphed alongside the main corrected analyses (source: Berkeley Earth via Ars Technica).
Hopefully this makes it abundantly clear that the raw data still shows an obvious warming trend even before known problems are removed. It also shows how little difference the corrections have actually made, particularly in the last 75 years.
Not only that but the corrections before about 1940 actually raised the temperature which reduces the overall warming trend. That kind of counters the people that claim the adjustments always increase the warming trend.
(Dec 2007) This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."
I suppose you can argue that that since he used the word "could" rather than "shall", it make his statements null and void. But they sure sounded scary at the time.
Did you notice the qualifier "At this rate"? It was more of a comment on the substantial drop in the sea ice minimum in 2007 as it was a prediction of the future. But coincidentally 2012 does happen to be the record year for sea ice minimum.
But sea level has been rising for hundreds if not thousands of years - pretty much with the same trend throughout.
Your bullshit detector failed to work on your own bullshit. Sea level had been very stable over the last several thousand years varying up and down by less than 3 inches over that time period. In the last 150 years though there has been 8 inches of SLR and the rate of rise has increased being about 1.4 mm/year in the early 20th century but over 3 mm/year in the past 25 years.
There's nothing pristine about the historical data. In the case of sea surface temperatures they first used wooden buckets thrown over the side then hauled to the deck to have a thermometer stuck in it, then they switched to canvas buckets that have some issues with evaporative cooling. Then they started using engine cooling water intake ports, those have a problem of producing slightly warm readings due to their proximity to the engine room. Nowadays we have buoys and Argo floats. Since each of those methods produces its own biases you have to do something to bring them together for a complete record.
The upshot is that without human greenhouse emissions there would be a slight cooling trend.
My beef with the climate change people is the attitude of omniscience about a complex topic that nobody actually understands.
How do you know nobody understands? It's true that the climate system is very complex and I'll admit that nobody completely understands it but that's not the same as having no understanding at all. In studying an area of science you generally start off with the big things. For climate the big things are the energy coming in from the Sun, the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that keep the planet warmer than it would otherwise be and the geophysical state of the Earth*. After that you start getting into details that just modify things without changing the general direction. I think we have a pretty good handle on the big things and a lot of the more important details. Usually if you're studying something and you're missing something important it will show up as a hole in your work. I'm not aware of any such holes in climate science.
* The geophysical state of the Earth includes things like the amount of water on the surface, the location of continents and mountain ranges, the topology of the ocean basins and a myriad of other things. It generally doesn't change fast enough to be a significant factor on century time scales but a supervolcano eruption or asteroid strike can change things rather suddenly.
Actually, the logical conclusion of your argument is somewhat different: some of us are going to be screwed.
I believe many of us will do quite well out of global warming. If you make your money out of a portfolio of financial investments, regular rebalancing of that portfolio means your exposure to the downside of change is limited.
Of course that presumes that the effects of climate change don't cause our civilization including the financial system to collapse. Civilizations have collapsed before due to climate change and just because our current civilization is global doesn't mean it can't happen to us.
The point is more that no model is accurate- ever. NONE of our scientific models are accurate with respect to reality, certainly not climateology.
So are you claiming because climate models aren't up to your standards of accuracy we should just ignore them? Do you know of anything else that is more accurate than current climate models? They're not perfect but they're better than anything else we have.
Of course depending on slope along the shore vertical centimeters can translate into horizontal meters.
And don't dismiss rapid sea level rise. It has happened in the past. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to go into rapid collapse (something that can't be ruled out) it could mean a meter or more of SLR in a matter of a decade or two. Yes the rise wouldn't be so fast that you can't walk away from it but it could be faster than we could rebuild the infrastructure that it affects.
BOOM ! how can you say that these NATURAL effects are justification for the IPCC's AGW hypothesis which is ANTHROPOGENIC. Do you even think before you guys post ?
You lost me there. There are many things that affect climate both natural and anthropogenic. How can you make sense of climate without looking at all of them?
I understand the scientific method just fine thank you. The results of climate model runs are contingent on the real world more or less matching the parameterizations they do ahead of time before they know what will actually happen. How can scientists know ahead of time what will happen with solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, the ENSO cycle and even the actual change in greenhouse gas forcing? It is perfectly reasonable to rerun the model using what actually happened to those things to test the model.
I don't see how Stokes' third graph says anything about models. Maybe you can enlighten me.
3) The first graph in Appendix A should surprise every CAGW alarmist, because it completely destroys your narrative.
Three things: That graph only covers the USA, less than 3% of the Earth's surface.
I'm not sure that the number of 100 degree days is particularly meaningful in the context of global warming. Since more warming is occurring overnight and in winter than in summer it's certainly possible that warming is occurring without increasing the number of 100 degree days.
I'd like to see Christy's method of selecting those 982 stations.
His criticism don't change the fact that the models are WRONG by a whopping FACTOR of 3.
Climate observations remain well within the 95% uncertainty range of most climate models. If you think they should be more accurate than that I think your criteria for judging models needs to be revised.
It was the super El Nino of 2016. This is already ending and it looks like severe La Nina may be building, which is why Greenland is putting on ice at a record rate (fourth graphic on the following page):
Here's a discussion of current ENSO conditions. It looks like there are currently some weak La Nina conditions but that's expected to end and ENSO neutral conditions will persist through the spring.
I've read the Groenland page in detail. I agree that this year so far is way above average in surface mass balance. But it's only one year. Neither you nor anybody else has any idea at this point what is means in the long run. It may be the start of a trend or it may be just a part of natural variability. We'll have to wait and see. In the context of climate you just make a fool of yourself emphasising such a short period.
In short, the models were WRONG.
In short your criteria for judging the models is wrong. How can you predict ahead of time the strength of solar cycles? How can you predict ahead of time volcanic eruptions? How can you predict ahead of time the cycle of El Nino/La Nina? The answer is you can't. All you can give a climate model is a realistic scenario for those things based on past behavior.
Rerunning the models with actual behavior of those things is a check on how good the model is. They don't change the model, just the input to more accurately reflect what happened in the real world for things they couldn't predict ahead of time. How can you possibly think that they should be able to know ahead of time exactly what would happen?
And you would be wrong. Perhaps you shouldn't skim next time.
You go all political again at the end. I can find plenty of analyses that show it will be far more costly to ignore AGW than to do something about it. I guess the way things are going people who are younger than me will find out how bad it gets.
I'm familiar with John Christy and was aware of his testimony before the House Science, Space & Technology committee. I skimmed through the PDF and didn't find anything that surprised me. I don't hold Christy in very high regard based on past performance.
Here is a critique of the graphs Christy used by Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt basically said Christy's graph were inconsistent, misleading and slanted toward making the difference between models and satellite observations appear greater than they actually are.
I will also note that in 2016 after Christy's testimony that both major satellite records, UAH and RSS set new all time records for high temperatures reducing the discrepancy between models and satellite observations.
Also, it should be noted that the real world forcing turned out to be less than that used in the models which caused a warm bias in the model output. Quoting Gavin Schmidt:
In work we did on the surface temperatures in CMIP5 and the real world, it became apparent that the forcings used in the models, particularly the solar and volcanic trends after 2000, imparted a warm bias in the models (up to 0.1C or so in the ensemble by 2012), which combined with the specific sequence of ENSO variability, explained most of the model-obs discrepancy in GMST.
Rerunning the models with the actual forcings that occurred rather than the expected forcings that were fed into them ahead of time reduces the model-observation discrepancy by quite a bit.
One other thing, Christy's graph of satellite observations and radiosonde (balloon) observations only go to 2005 but since about 2000 there has been considerable divergence between satellite observations and radiosonde observations. This appears to be because of uncorrected for drift in the satellites orbit. Why didn't Christy plot the radiosonde data up to say 2014? My answer would be because it undermines his argument about tropospheric temperature trends.
We agree, nothing of a timescale less than 20 years is significant. What is very significant is that the underlying trend started around 150 years ago - well before the IPCC's AGW could have been the initiator of the change. What is absolutely fascinating is that the IPCC claims that this underlying trend went for 100 years naturally and then 'suddenly' switched off the natural cause and switched entirely to a 100% human-caused effect. I don't believe in magic, but apparently the IPCC do as this is their official position, all warming since 1950 is human-induced. Why do you believe in this magic ? what switched the century of natural warming off and instantaneously changed it to human warming? you support the IPCC so surely you know what this miraculous mechanism is, right?
There was a pretty substantial increase in the sun's radiation in the first half of the 20th century. That had something (but not everything) to do with the warming. Since then the sun's radiation has been slowly declining. The rise in temperature didn't really get going until around 1900. By that time CO2 was above where it was in 1800 so that had some effect as well. The slope of the temperature trend is significantly steeper after about 1975 than it was earlier in the 20th century.
The Little Ice Age is correlated with solar magnetic variability. This is beyond dispute.
Correlation is not causation. Show me some causative link that connects the two. Vague notions about cloud cover aren't enough for me.
Your team wants to destroy the First World and all halt progress (technology requires energy abundance),...
There's no reason we can't have energy abundance with renewable energy. The Sun puts more energy on the surface of the Earth in less than 12 hours than humans use in a whole year. It's just a matter of building enough of it. It took us a while to build out the current fossil fuel technology too.
Let me guess, they never told you the projected temperature change if all the IPCC's wishes were fulfilled, did they?
The point isn't to reduce temperatures but to stop the rise. I don't know where you get your 0.4 number but temperatures will undoubtedly rise more than that before we manage to stop CO2 from rising.
You're really going off the rails there with your 'rich cronyists' and UN apparatchiks remark. What does that have to do with climate science?
In your reference to Arctic ice melting did you notice the words "at this rate" and "could". I realize that you don't deal well with scientific uncertainty but they just said it was a possibility, not that it would happen. Folks like you who ignore the qualifications that scientists put on their statements just can't handle that subtlety I guess.
As far as the glaciers melting, so what? It's not surprising that glaciers were melting in the early part of the 20th century due to warming. They probably had a bit of a rebound in the 1950s and 1960s as there was some cooling due to the pollution we were dumping into the atmosphere. Once we started limiting that pollution the warming trend came back with a vengeance.
The point was, if the IPCC AGW CO2-centric claims are correct then this cannot happen. especially so early in the winter season. (referring to snowfall in the Sahara)
Why not? The IPCC is quite conservative in its projections and I'd be surprised if you could find anything in their report that supports that statement.
Greenland has put on a RECORD amount of ice and the ice is MUCH higher than usual for this time of year. MUCH MUCH HIGHER!
Again so what? It's one year in the record. If it continues next year and for several years after that you might have something. Right now all you have is short term noise.
Did you notice this line in the text of the Danish site? "The calving loss is greate
Nobody has ever said that it is only man who is causing climate change
Actually the tsunami of climate change bollocks in the media and on most websites 24/7 implies precisely that. Nobody talks about natural variation at all.
Chapter 8 of the Working Group I report in the most recent IPCC report is titled: "Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing" so it addresses natural causes of climate change as well as anthropogenic. You think nobody is talking about natural variation just because you haven't bothered to check to see if they have. But the scientists know you can't understand anthropogenic climate change if you don't at the same time understand natural climate change. Ignoring it would give you an incomplete picture making it harder to square your expectations with observations.
How many scientists would still be employed in these studies if they were saying that the climate would change even if we never pumped a molecule of co2 into the atmosphere? why has global warming morphed into climate change?
How many climate scientists are currently employed? That of course depends on exactly how you define "climate scientist" but in the core areas of climate science I doubt the number is more than a few tens of thousands at best. Regardless of AGW or not don't you think we'd be studying the climate anyway? Or should we just fire all of the climate scientists and take what happens in the climate without the foresight that climate science affords us?
If "global warming" morphed into "climate change" then how did the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change come to get its name in 1988? How did Gilbert Plass publish his paper "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change" in 1956? Both terms have been around for a while.
Pedant here. SPF has to do with blocking ultraviolet light and it's the ozone layer that blocks most of the UV light for us. I don't think the magnetic field of the Earth has any effect on ozone or the ozone layer.
I came here expecting some whack-a-doodle to blame global warming on this weakening of the magnetic field. (And I wasn't disappointed as it comes up further down in the comments.)
As far as "doom" goes there is little or no evidence in the geologic record that shows anything unusual happens during a magnetic polarity switch. No mass die-offs, no evidence of unusual volcanic or seismic activity, no evidence of unusual changes in climate. Pretty much the only evidence we have for magnetic polarity shifts are in the basalts and other volcanic rocks laid down on either side of a shift. Other than possibly an small increase in cancer rates it's pretty much a nonevent.
In looking at the graphs you cite I see several "precipitous" drops in temperature of similar magnitude and steepness. Maybe the most recent one is the fastest but I can't tell without downloading and analyzing the numbers but it doesn't stand out to the point where it's obvious. What is obvious is the positive temperature trend during the period of record. If you think you can tell anything about climatic temperature trends over a less than about 20 year period you're wrong.
Solar magnetic variability. LOL. When you first brought it up a few years ago I looked into it some but I didn't find that it held water very well. I'm not saying it's impossible but the hypothesis is going to have to have better evidence for it than it has now. And it has to be fleshed out to the point where it does at least as good a job as current climate theory does in explaining the results we see in the climate.
Well you've never heard me say snow is a thing of the past. The only reasonable way to measure changes in snowfall is to observe how it changes over a period of decades. Maybe the last snowfall before the one 37 years ago was only 25 years before that, and the previous one was only 20 years before that. I made those numbers up for the sake of example. I don't know the real numbers but I know that snow has fallen on the Sahara before so it's not shocking that it did this year. As far as Greenland, it is melting. This time of year the mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet is generally positive because of colder temperatures and more snow but the melting and calving of ice in the summer loses more ice than it gains over the winter (there might be an occasional year where that is not true but it would be rare). The GRACE satellites measure changes in gravity and they tell us that Greenland is losing mass year over year so the net change in ice on Greenland is negative despite periods in the fall and winter when it isn't.
All you need to understand anthropogenic global warming is the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that absorbs photons in certain infrared frequencies and that the primary cause of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is humans. At this high a level everything else is just details.
Last year was very warm due to 'super El Nino' conditions. El Nino occurs every 4 years or so, and is then followed by La Nina conditions which are usually very cold.
The El Nino of 2015/2016 wasn't quite as strong as the El Nino of 1997/1998 and yet the temperatures in 2016 blew the 1998 temperatures out of the water. So there's something going on besides El Nino. I was going to take issue with El Nino's occurring every 4 years but that's may be about average. They can occur as often as two years in a row or have a 6 or 8 year gap between them. Also El Nino is not automatically followed by La Nina. There have been some La Nina like conditions in the later part of 2016 but they haven't been strong or long lasting enough for most of the people who call the ENSO stages to call this a La Nina.
As far as snow in the Sahara and more ice than normal on Greenland you are confusing weather and year to year variability with climate.
Slashdot Mirror
"65% of Americans give priority to developing alternative energy sources"
Too bad those 65% don't vote for what they want, apparently.
The fact is nearly 3 million more people voted for the losing candidate who would have been more supportive of alternative energy than did for the winning candidate so maybe they did but the vagaries of the Electoral College defeated them.
If they're talking about a monthly anomaly then it's the average for the whole month that they're talking about, the highest of any individual days.
Is it losing that much energy or is the energy just going someplace else like into the oceans?
I often wonder how accurate their temperature monitoring is. Are their thermometers better accuracy than .01C? What is their drift?
Anyone who knows about metrology knows you need at least 10x the accuracy of your measurements to put the errors down in the noise a bit.
They're talking about hundredths of a degree, are they really calibrated that accurately down to millidegrees? I doubt it.
When you're averaging a large number of measurements it's reasonable to have a much higher precision than the precision of the individual measurement itself. The clearest example of this I know of is baseball batting averages. A batter either gets a hit or an out, that is an integer 1 or a 0. But batting averages are typically expressed to 3 decimal places (thousandths).
Click here to see the uncorrected data graphed alongside the main corrected analyses (source: Berkeley Earth via Ars Technica).
Hopefully this makes it abundantly clear that the raw data still shows an obvious warming trend even before known problems are removed. It also shows how little difference the corrections have actually made, particularly in the last 75 years.
Not only that but the corrections before about 1940 actually raised the temperature which reduces the overall warming trend. That kind of counters the people that claim the adjustments always increase the warming trend.
(Dec 2007) This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."
http://news.nationalgeographic...
I suppose you can argue that that since he used the word "could" rather than "shall", it make his statements null and void. But they sure sounded scary at the time.
Did you notice the qualifier "At this rate"? It was more of a comment on the substantial drop in the sea ice minimum in 2007 as it was a prediction of the future. But coincidentally 2012 does happen to be the record year for sea ice minimum.
But we're still branded as "deniers" becuase we take strong issue with is the proposed "solutions".
If you don't like the solutions propose some of your own. Just don't dismiss the science out of hand because you don't like the implications.
But sea level has been rising for hundreds if not thousands of years - pretty much with the same trend throughout.
Your bullshit detector failed to work on your own bullshit. Sea level had been very stable over the last several thousand years varying up and down by less than 3 inches over that time period. In the last 150 years though there has been 8 inches of SLR and the rate of rise has increased being about 1.4 mm/year in the early 20th century but over 3 mm/year in the past 25 years.
There's nothing pristine about the historical data. In the case of sea surface temperatures they first used wooden buckets thrown over the side then hauled to the deck to have a thermometer stuck in it, then they switched to canvas buckets that have some issues with evaporative cooling. Then they started using engine cooling water intake ports, those have a problem of producing slightly warm readings due to their proximity to the engine room. Nowadays we have buoys and Argo floats. Since each of those methods produces its own biases you have to do something to bring them together for a complete record.
1) How big is the effect of human greenhouse emissions compared to natural temperature variation?
The latest IPCC report has a whole chapter on that:
Chater 8: Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing (PDF)
The upshot is that without human greenhouse emissions there would be a slight cooling trend.
My beef with the climate change people is the attitude of omniscience about a complex topic that nobody actually understands.
How do you know nobody understands? It's true that the climate system is very complex and I'll admit that nobody completely understands it but that's not the same as having no understanding at all. In studying an area of science you generally start off with the big things. For climate the big things are the energy coming in from the Sun, the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that keep the planet warmer than it would otherwise be and the geophysical state of the Earth*. After that you start getting into details that just modify things without changing the general direction. I think we have a pretty good handle on the big things and a lot of the more important details. Usually if you're studying something and you're missing something important it will show up as a hole in your work. I'm not aware of any such holes in climate science.
* The geophysical state of the Earth includes things like the amount of water on the surface, the location of continents and mountain ranges, the topology of the ocean basins and a myriad of other things. It generally doesn't change fast enough to be a significant factor on century time scales but a supervolcano eruption or asteroid strike can change things rather suddenly.
The greenhouse effect is correlation, not cause.
But there is a very good causal link between the two. The radiative absorption spectrum of CO2.
Last time CO2 was at 400 ppm sea levels were over 20 meters (70 feet) higher than they are now. Just sayin'.
Sadly, I think we're screwed.
Actually, the logical conclusion of your argument is somewhat different: some of us are going to be screwed.
I believe many of us will do quite well out of global warming. If you make your money out of a portfolio of financial investments, regular rebalancing of that portfolio means your exposure to the downside of change is limited.
Of course that presumes that the effects of climate change don't cause our civilization including the financial system to collapse. Civilizations have collapsed before due to climate change and just because our current civilization is global doesn't mean it can't happen to us.
The point is more that no model is accurate- ever. NONE of our scientific models are accurate with respect to reality, certainly not climateology.
So are you claiming because climate models aren't up to your standards of accuracy we should just ignore them? Do you know of anything else that is more accurate than current climate models? They're not perfect but they're better than anything else we have.
Of course depending on slope along the shore vertical centimeters can translate into horizontal meters.
And don't dismiss rapid sea level rise. It has happened in the past. If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet were to go into rapid collapse (something that can't be ruled out) it could mean a meter or more of SLR in a matter of a decade or two. Yes the rise wouldn't be so fast that you can't walk away from it but it could be faster than we could rebuild the infrastructure that it affects.
BOOM ! how can you say that these NATURAL effects are justification for the IPCC's AGW hypothesis which is ANTHROPOGENIC. Do you even think before you guys post ?
You lost me there. There are many things that affect climate both natural and anthropogenic. How can you make sense of climate without looking at all of them?
I understand the scientific method just fine thank you. The results of climate model runs are contingent on the real world more or less matching the parameterizations they do ahead of time before they know what will actually happen. How can scientists know ahead of time what will happen with solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, the ENSO cycle and even the actual change in greenhouse gas forcing? It is perfectly reasonable to rerun the model using what actually happened to those things to test the model.
I don't see how Stokes' third graph says anything about models. Maybe you can enlighten me.
3) The first graph in Appendix A should surprise every CAGW alarmist, because it completely destroys your narrative.
Three things:
That graph only covers the USA, less than 3% of the Earth's surface.
I'm not sure that the number of 100 degree days is particularly meaningful in the context of global warming. Since more warming is occurring overnight and in winter than in summer it's certainly possible that warming is occurring without increasing the number of 100 degree days.
I'd like to see Christy's method of selecting those 982 stations.
His criticism don't change the fact that the models are WRONG by a whopping FACTOR of 3.
Climate observations remain well within the 95% uncertainty range of most climate models. If you think they should be more accurate than that I think your criteria for judging models needs to be revised.
It was the super El Nino of 2016. This is already ending and it looks like severe La Nina may be building, which is why Greenland is putting on ice at a record rate (fourth graphic on the following page):
Here's a discussion of current ENSO conditions. It looks like there are currently some weak La Nina conditions but that's expected to end and ENSO neutral conditions will persist through the spring.
I've read the Groenland page in detail. I agree that this year so far is way above average in surface mass balance. But it's only one year. Neither you nor anybody else has any idea at this point what is means in the long run. It may be the start of a trend or it may be just a part of natural variability. We'll have to wait and see. In the context of climate you just make a fool of yourself emphasising such a short period.
In short, the models were WRONG.
In short your criteria for judging the models is wrong. How can you predict ahead of time the strength of solar cycles? How can you predict ahead of time volcanic eruptions? How can you predict ahead of time the cycle of El Nino/La Nina? The answer is you can't. All you can give a climate model is a realistic scenario for those things based on past behavior.
Rerunning the models with actual behavior of those things is a check on how good the model is. They don't change the model, just the input to more accurately reflect what happened in the real world for things they couldn't predict ahead of time. How can you possibly think that they should be able to know ahead of time exactly what would happen?
And you would be wrong. Perhaps you shouldn't skim next time.
I read that part around Christy's radiosonde graph in detail before I brought it up with you. That graph does indeed end in 2005. In this blog post Tamino (statistician Grant Foster) compares satellite to radiosonde out to about 2015. The second graph clearly shows the divergence of radiosonde (RATPAC) data to UAH and RSS satellite date after about 2006. Christy had access to that data so why didn't he show it.
You go all political again at the end. I can find plenty of analyses that show it will be far more costly to ignore AGW than to do something about it. I guess the way things are going people who are younger than me will find out how bad it gets.
I'm familiar with John Christy and was aware of his testimony before the House Science, Space & Technology committee. I skimmed through the PDF and didn't find anything that surprised me. I don't hold Christy in very high regard based on past performance.
Here is a critique of the graphs Christy used by Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt basically said Christy's graph were inconsistent, misleading and slanted toward making the difference between models and satellite observations appear greater than they actually are.
I will also note that in 2016 after Christy's testimony that both major satellite records, UAH and RSS set new all time records for high temperatures reducing the discrepancy between models and satellite observations.
Also, it should be noted that the real world forcing turned out to be less than that used in the models which caused a warm bias in the model output. Quoting Gavin Schmidt:
In work we did on the surface temperatures in CMIP5 and the real world, it became apparent that the forcings used in the models, particularly the solar and volcanic trends after 2000, imparted a warm bias in the models (up to 0.1C or so in the ensemble by 2012), which combined with the specific sequence of ENSO variability, explained most of the model-obs discrepancy in GMST.
Rerunning the models with the actual forcings that occurred rather than the expected forcings that were fed into them ahead of time reduces the model-observation discrepancy by quite a bit.
One other thing, Christy's graph of satellite observations and radiosonde (balloon) observations only go to 2005 but since about 2000 there has been considerable divergence between satellite observations and radiosonde observations. This appears to be because of uncorrected for drift in the satellites orbit. Why didn't Christy plot the radiosonde data up to say 2014? My answer would be because it undermines his argument about tropospheric temperature trends.
We agree, nothing of a timescale less than 20 years is significant. What is very significant is that the underlying trend started around 150 years ago - well before the IPCC's AGW could have been the initiator of the change. What is absolutely fascinating is that the IPCC claims that this underlying trend went for 100 years naturally and then 'suddenly' switched off the natural cause and switched entirely to a 100% human-caused effect. I don't believe in magic, but apparently the IPCC do as this is their official position, all warming since 1950 is human-induced. Why do you believe in this magic ? what switched the century of natural warming off and instantaneously changed it to human warming? you support the IPCC so surely you know what this miraculous mechanism is, right?
There was a pretty substantial increase in the sun's radiation in the first half of the 20th century. That had something (but not everything) to do with the warming. Since then the sun's radiation has been slowly declining. The rise in temperature didn't really get going until around 1900. By that time CO2 was above where it was in 1800 so that had some effect as well. The slope of the temperature trend is significantly steeper after about 1975 than it was earlier in the 20th century.
The Little Ice Age is correlated with solar magnetic variability. This is beyond dispute.
Correlation is not causation. Show me some causative link that connects the two. Vague notions about cloud cover aren't enough for me.
Your team wants to destroy the First World and all halt progress (technology requires energy abundance), ...
There's no reason we can't have energy abundance with renewable energy. The Sun puts more energy on the surface of the Earth in less than 12 hours than humans use in a whole year. It's just a matter of building enough of it. It took us a while to build out the current fossil fuel technology too.
Let me guess, they never told you the projected temperature change if all the IPCC's wishes were fulfilled, did they?
The point isn't to reduce temperatures but to stop the rise. I don't know where you get your 0.4 number but temperatures will undoubtedly rise more than that before we manage to stop CO2 from rising.
You're really going off the rails there with your 'rich cronyists' and UN apparatchiks remark. What does that have to do with climate science?
In your reference to Arctic ice melting did you notice the words "at this rate" and "could". I realize that you don't deal well with scientific uncertainty but they just said it was a possibility, not that it would happen. Folks like you who ignore the qualifications that scientists put on their statements just can't handle that subtlety I guess.
As far as the glaciers melting, so what? It's not surprising that glaciers were melting in the early part of the 20th century due to warming. They probably had a bit of a rebound in the 1950s and 1960s as there was some cooling due to the pollution we were dumping into the atmosphere. Once we started limiting that pollution the warming trend came back with a vengeance.
The point was, if the IPCC AGW CO2-centric claims are correct then this cannot happen. especially so early in the winter season. (referring to snowfall in the Sahara)
Why not? The IPCC is quite conservative in its projections and I'd be surprised if you could find anything in their report that supports that statement.
Greenland has put on a RECORD amount of ice and the ice is MUCH higher than usual for this time of year. MUCH MUCH HIGHER!
Again so what? It's one year in the record. If it continues next year and for several years after that you might have something. Right now all you have is short term noise.
Did you notice this line in the text of the Danish site? " The calving loss is greate
Actually the tsunami of climate change bollocks in the media and on most websites 24/7 implies precisely that. Nobody talks about natural variation at all.
Chapter 8 of the Working Group I report in the most recent IPCC report is titled: "Anthropogenic and Natural Radiative Forcing" so it addresses natural causes of climate change as well as anthropogenic. You think nobody is talking about natural variation just because you haven't bothered to check to see if they have. But the scientists know you can't understand anthropogenic climate change if you don't at the same time understand natural climate change. Ignoring it would give you an incomplete picture making it harder to square your expectations with observations.
How many scientists would still be employed in these studies if they were saying that the climate would change even if we never pumped a molecule of co2 into the atmosphere? why has global warming morphed into climate change?
How many climate scientists are currently employed? That of course depends on exactly how you define "climate scientist" but in the core areas of climate science I doubt the number is more than a few tens of thousands at best. Regardless of AGW or not don't you think we'd be studying the climate anyway? Or should we just fire all of the climate scientists and take what happens in the climate without the foresight that climate science affords us?
If "global warming" morphed into "climate change" then how did the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change come to get its name in 1988? How did Gilbert Plass publish his paper "The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change" in 1956? Both terms have been around for a while.
Pedant here. SPF has to do with blocking ultraviolet light and it's the ozone layer that blocks most of the UV light for us. I don't think the magnetic field of the Earth has any effect on ozone or the ozone layer.
I came here expecting some whack-a-doodle to blame global warming on this weakening of the magnetic field. (And I wasn't disappointed as it comes up further down in the comments.)
As far as "doom" goes there is little or no evidence in the geologic record that shows anything unusual happens during a magnetic polarity switch. No mass die-offs, no evidence of unusual volcanic or seismic activity, no evidence of unusual changes in climate. Pretty much the only evidence we have for magnetic polarity shifts are in the basalts and other volcanic rocks laid down on either side of a shift. Other than possibly an small increase in cancer rates it's pretty much a nonevent.
In looking at the graphs you cite I see several "precipitous" drops in temperature of similar magnitude and steepness. Maybe the most recent one is the fastest but I can't tell without downloading and analyzing the numbers but it doesn't stand out to the point where it's obvious. What is obvious is the positive temperature trend during the period of record. If you think you can tell anything about climatic temperature trends over a less than about 20 year period you're wrong.
Solar magnetic variability. LOL. When you first brought it up a few years ago I looked into it some but I didn't find that it held water very well. I'm not saying it's impossible but the hypothesis is going to have to have better evidence for it than it has now. And it has to be fleshed out to the point where it does at least as good a job as current climate theory does in explaining the results we see in the climate.
Well you've never heard me say snow is a thing of the past. The only reasonable way to measure changes in snowfall is to observe how it changes over a period of decades. Maybe the last snowfall before the one 37 years ago was only 25 years before that, and the previous one was only 20 years before that. I made those numbers up for the sake of example. I don't know the real numbers but I know that snow has fallen on the Sahara before so it's not shocking that it did this year. As far as Greenland, it is melting. This time of year the mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet is generally positive because of colder temperatures and more snow but the melting and calving of ice in the summer loses more ice than it gains over the winter (there might be an occasional year where that is not true but it would be rare). The GRACE satellites measure changes in gravity and they tell us that Greenland is losing mass year over year so the net change in ice on Greenland is negative despite periods in the fall and winter when it isn't.
All you need to understand anthropogenic global warming is the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas that absorbs photons in certain infrared frequencies and that the primary cause of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is humans. At this high a level everything else is just details.
Last year was very warm due to 'super El Nino' conditions. El Nino occurs every 4 years or so, and is then followed by La Nina conditions which are usually very cold.
The El Nino of 2015/2016 wasn't quite as strong as the El Nino of 1997/1998 and yet the temperatures in 2016 blew the 1998 temperatures out of the water. So there's something going on besides El Nino. I was going to take issue with El Nino's occurring every 4 years but that's may be about average. They can occur as often as two years in a row or have a 6 or 8 year gap between them. Also El Nino is not automatically followed by La Nina. There have been some La Nina like conditions in the later part of 2016 but they haven't been strong or long lasting enough for most of the people who call the ENSO stages to call this a La Nina.
As far as snow in the Sahara and more ice than normal on Greenland you are confusing weather and year to year variability with climate.