By GISS data 2009 was tied for the 2nd warmest year on record and baring a major volcanic eruption 2010 is poised to become the warmest year on record due to the El Nino we're in right now and the solar cycle ramping up on top of the global warming carrier signal.
What if we could dehumidify the atmosphere at a fraction of the cost of controlling CO2? Why would that not be a more appropriate avenue?
One problem with that approach is that it does nothing to address the problem of ocean acidification which could end up being a bigger problem than actual global warming in the long run.
Phil Jones of East Anglia did not say there has been no warming for 15 years. What he said was the observed warming was just under the level of statistical significance. Statistical significance in this case means 95% confidence that the observed warming could not be due to randomness. So instead maybe their confidence is only 93%. On the other hand when you look at the NASA/GISS dataset the observed warming has been statistically significant, in other words 95% or better. The difference between the two datasets is the GISS covers the polar regions better than the CRU data.
Well, we can agree on something, there are none so blind as those who will not see. For people on your side of the argument to believe that climate scientists are engaged in some vast conspiracy to falsify their science boggles the mind. Such a conspiracy would have had to start in the 1950s or 1960s and to think it would have held together that long with essentially 0 defections out of the tens of thousands of scientists is absurd. I'm still waiting for someone to show in scientifically rigorous way why the current science is wrong.
BTW, I've never seen Al Gore's movie or read his books. I don't care that much about what he says.
The CRU emails show nothing more than scientists being snarky about what they perceive to be political attacks on their work. I see nothing in them to indicate mangling data to fit a preconceived outcome.
Cap and trade is simply a market based solution to reducing carbon emissions. Personally I prefer a carbon tax as a simpler more direct approach to the problem. What you don't appreciate is what it will cost if the scientists are right and we don't take action. We could lose our civilization.
The amount of CO2 "conservation" necessary is to reduce net human emissions of it to zero. It's going to take 40 or 50 years to get there but the longest journey starts with the first step. Over the next decade the need for action will become obvious to all but the most obstinate people and stronger actions will be enacted.
Climate science is in its teenage years IMHO. We've got the basics figured out but there's a lot of refining to do.
Right now China is spending more than the US on renewable energy projects and green technology. We're buying the turbines for a major wind project in Texas from them. They are poised to become the world leader in clean energy technology.
Well, the actual raw data isn't very useful without normalization. It's not enough to just say the data was "massaged". You have to show why the adjustments that were made are inappropriate in order to discredit it.
Climate science in most of its aspects is well beyond infancy. The fundamentals are well established and we're working on details now. One definition of pollution is too much of something where you don't want it. You need oxygen to breath but 100% oxygen at 1 atmosphere of pressure would make you sick you pretty quickly.
As far as "economy wrecking" goes, most studies I've seen say at most the economy takes a 1-2% hit to respond to climate change. People still get paid for their work and products still get bought. They're just for different things than what we're doing now. If the climate scientist's projections are anywhere close to accurate and we don't respond to the challenge it will be far more economy wrecking and could bring down our civilization.
Phil Jones gave a scientific answer to the question. In this case "statistically significant" means a 95% confidence level in the assertion. The Hadley/CRU data that Jones uses showed warming just under that confidence level, like 93%, so it can't be called statistically significant by definition.
If you look at the NASA/GISS data which does a better job of accounting for the polar regions the warming during the period in question was statistically significant.
Although there may be some regular pollution issues with burning dung it is not an issue as far as global warming. The CO2 produced by burning dung was CO2 that was already in the carbon cycle and in the atmosphere a short time before. It was absorbed by the plants the cattle ate before producing the dung.
Give us the programs and data so any high school science student can run the programs and get your results...
Yeah, any high school science student with access to one of the larger supercomputers in the world. The big climate models, the General Circulation Models, run for days or weeks on them to produce one simulation run.
Mike, you have the same problem lots of people have with the time frame of the changes. Sea level is rising at about 3 mm per year right now. Back in 1950 it was more like 1.5 mm per year. Right now the projections are we may see around 1 meter of sea level rise by 2100. 1 meter is enough to flood 1/3 of Florida. In 90 years that's an average of around 11 mm per year but of course it starts slow and speeds up toward the end so we're seeing 3 mm now, by 2090 it might be 25 mm per year. Even in a decade a rate of 3 mm/year (0.12 inches/year) might be pretty hard to detect with the Mark I eyeball but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
The reason AGW an issue right now even though it's happening so slowly (on human times scales, it's very rapid in geologic time scales) is that even if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow temperatures would continue to rise for at least 50 years. That's because the oceans act as a temperature buffer and it takes time for them to catch up with the forcing. Did you know that the top 10 feet of the oceans contain the same amount of heat energy as is contained in the entire atmosphere. So until ocean temperatures catch up the atmosphere is cooler than the amount of forcing would indicate.
Actually surfacestations.org has done a service to the climate community by helping identify the quality of various weather stations. A recent scientific study used surfacestations.org's list of good and poorly sited stations and found that the poorly sited stations actually had a slight cooling bias compared to the well sited stations.
Part of the reason for this is that even if the station is sited in a UHI in climate science we're as much interested in how the temperature is changing over time what the absolute temperature is. Even if a station gives elevated readings of the absolute temperature if the rate of change tracks with the rate of change in well sited stations it's still useful information.
I think the main point of the article was that more snow is not a sign there is no global warming. Besides, from a climate perspective you have to combine the snowfalls from a period of years to tell whether there is actually more snow or just some more extreme precipitation events.
Globally it was not colder this year than last. It's been warming since 2007. Perversely the continental US east of the Rockies has been somewhat colder this past year but that's only about 1% of the Earth's surface. While DC has been getting the cold weather lately they've been recording some 50+ degrees F highs in Greenland, pretty unusual for this time of year.
Statistically significant in this case means (somewhat arbitrarily) there is a 95% or better chance there has been actual warming during the period and it's not just noise. If the confidence level is only 90% then it's not statistically significant but I still wouldn't bet against it.
Jones was only one of many lead scientists in the IPCC. The data he's referring to is the Hadley/CRU data. In the NASA/GISS data the temperature trend is statistically significant.
Your problem with AGW predictions is that you're using the wrong time frame. 5 years of data is merely noise in the time frames of climate research. You have to think in terms of at least 20 or 30 years to be able to filter out the noise of natural variability from the long term trends. Most AGW predictions are made with those sorts of time frames in mind. So you're never going to get your "accurate prediction of temperature changes over the next 5 years without any error," because of the noise.
The third leg of that stool that brings the A into AGW is we know the increase in CO2 is due to Anthropogenic (human) sources.
And a minor nitpick. That the Earths temperature is going up every year isn't necessarily obvious to land dwellers because sometimes the general atmospheric temperatures can be down even though the total energy in the system has gone up. Heat can be transferred between the atmosphere and the surface, particularly water surfaces. Did you know the top 10 feet of the oceans holds as much heat energy as the entire atmosphere? This is also a zone that is well mixed due to wind turbulence. It's pretty easy to transfer a significant amount of heat between them under the right conditions.
The El Nino cycle that started last year and will probably peter out in April/May has transferred a lot of heat to the atmosphere. This means 2010 has a better than 50% chance of being the new record warmest year (barring a major volcanic eruption).
Who is it who is claiming "the science is settled", "the debate is over", etc?
Unless someone comes up with something as revolutionary as Copernicus did with orbital mechanics the fundamentals of climate science and the effects of CO2 are nearly as settled as they can be as scientific theory. What isn't settled is a lot of details, some fairly important, which will lead to further refinement of the theory as they are investigated.
A true climate model would never predict weather, especially on a year to year scale. They are not designed to do that and it's probably impossible except on the most general terms anyway. What they project* is that if things keep going the way they are going then the 30 year trend line for average global temperature will be at some value and the slope of the trend line will be at some value with error bars denoting the 95% confidence range. The way they are used filters out the high frequency noise of natural variability and cyclical things such as ENSO and solar variation.
The person you are replying to never said the models predicted the snow pattern for this year so you're just setting up a strawman to knock down with your post. What real scientists will say on the subject would be something like "We expect global warming will likely cause a 3% increase in the average intensity of hurricanes over the next 2 decades." Then after 20 years you can compile the statistics and see how they did.
*The reason I use the word project rather than predict is that certain inputs into the model are not predictable. For instance we can't know exactly how the level of CO2 will change in the future because we don't know how we will respond to the threat. So they set up various realistic scenarios and feed those into the models. Scenarios would include such things as BAU (Business As Usual) with increasing releases and levels of atmospheric CO2 or a reduction of CO2 releases as nations start implementing laws to restrict CO2 releases. One scenario they usually run is keeping CO2 levels constant.
The Antarctic ice sheet has not increased in size. The area covered by sea ice has increased some. You should learn the difference between ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice. I have no doubt that the IPCC AR4 report noted the increase in Antarctic sea ice.
The reason climate models are useful is that we observe that ice is dropping in some areas and gaining in other areas and we ask ourselves why. The insights gained from that study are incorporated into the models improving them for future use. It's an ongoing process.
My question is what falling temperatures are you talking about? There is no evidence that temperatures are falling. A 2006 study found you get more snowstorms during warmer years than you do during colder years. See http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1552454&cid=31165324 for details.
To clarify even further Antarctic sea ice has increased in area but ice shelves and ice sheets have receded some. Recent measurements by the GRACE gravity sensing satellites show Antarctica is losing ice mass overall even though some areas are gaining. The increase in sea ice is partially due to the ozone hole over the continent. The lack of ozone (another greenhouse gas) causes cooling over the continent which strengthens the circumpolar winds isolating Antarctica even more from the rest of the world. Ergo more sea ice.
PS (not you wizardforce but others reading this) If you don't know the difference between sea ice, ice shelves and ice sheets educate yourself. Wikipedia is your friend.
Climate science is a broad subject that incorporates a number of fields. For instance meteorology, geology and physical oceanography among others. But the core climate scientists who write the GCMs are physicists who study radiative transfer and expand their knowledge base into those other fields to capture the information they offer. Physics is a very statistically oriented field.
Very little if any original data has been lost. It's stored in individual national weather archives and by the scientists who did the original research. Some processed data has been discarded although I'm sure if they had any idea at the time what a brouhaha would come of it they would have kept it.
And natural sinks absorb 98.8% of the CO2 that is emitted into the air. It's that extra 1.2% that it doesn't absorb that's the problem. You should read up on the Carbon Cycle. You'd find that the oceans absorb more CO2 than plants. Also, some plants do better under increased CO2, others do worse. For instance rice can lose up to 30% of its protein under high CO2 conditions.
CO2 is a positive feedback. Coming out of ice ages changes in the Earths orbit caused warming to start but the CO2 released because of the warming served as a positive feedback that caused the interglacial periods to be warmer than they otherwise would have been without the effect. The science doesn't work without CO2 considered no matter where you look in the Earths history.
I don't know why you would expect wild swings in the proxy records. Do you think positive feedback always results in a runaway situation? No. Each increment in CO2 level in the atmosphere warms a bit less than the previous increment so it eventually peters out.
You should know that China is investing in renewable and green energy big time (while admittedly still building coal plants, but probably not too much longer). The way things are going they are going to eat our lunch in that field.
A detailed study was done of “the relationships of the storm frequencies to seasonal temperature and precipitation conditions” for the years “1901–2000 using data from 1222 stations across the United States.” The 2006 study, Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States [PDF] (Chagnon et al., 2006) found we get more snow storms in warmer years:
Results for the November–December period showed that most of the United States had experienced 61%– 80% of the storms in warmer-than-normal years. Assessment of the January–February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%–80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years. In the March–April season 61%–80% of all snowstorms in the central and southern United States had occurred in warmer-than-normal years. Thus, these comparative results reveal that a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901–2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.
Slashdot Mirror
By GISS data 2009 was tied for the 2nd warmest year on record and baring a major volcanic eruption 2010 is poised to become the warmest year on record due to the El Nino we're in right now and the solar cycle ramping up on top of the global warming carrier signal.
What if we could dehumidify the atmosphere at a fraction of the cost of controlling CO2? Why would that not be a more appropriate avenue?
One problem with that approach is that it does nothing to address the problem of ocean acidification which could end up being a bigger problem than actual global warming in the long run.
Phil Jones of East Anglia did not say there has been no warming for 15 years. What he said was the observed warming was just under the level of statistical significance. Statistical significance in this case means 95% confidence that the observed warming could not be due to randomness. So instead maybe their confidence is only 93%. On the other hand when you look at the NASA/GISS dataset the observed warming has been statistically significant, in other words 95% or better. The difference between the two datasets is the GISS covers the polar regions better than the CRU data.
Well, we can agree on something, there are none so blind as those who will not see. For people on your side of the argument to believe that climate scientists are engaged in some vast conspiracy to falsify their science boggles the mind. Such a conspiracy would have had to start in the 1950s or 1960s and to think it would have held together that long with essentially 0 defections out of the tens of thousands of scientists is absurd. I'm still waiting for someone to show in scientifically rigorous way why the current science is wrong.
BTW, I've never seen Al Gore's movie or read his books. I don't care that much about what he says.
The CRU emails show nothing more than scientists being snarky about what they perceive to be political attacks on their work. I see nothing in them to indicate mangling data to fit a preconceived outcome.
Cap and trade is simply a market based solution to reducing carbon emissions. Personally I prefer a carbon tax as a simpler more direct approach to the problem. What you don't appreciate is what it will cost if the scientists are right and we don't take action. We could lose our civilization.
The amount of CO2 "conservation" necessary is to reduce net human emissions of it to zero. It's going to take 40 or 50 years to get there but the longest journey starts with the first step. Over the next decade the need for action will become obvious to all but the most obstinate people and stronger actions will be enacted.
Climate science is in its teenage years IMHO. We've got the basics figured out but there's a lot of refining to do.
Right now China is spending more than the US on renewable energy projects and green technology. We're buying the turbines for a major wind project in Texas from them. They are poised to become the world leader in clean energy technology.
Well, the actual raw data isn't very useful without normalization. It's not enough to just say the data was "massaged". You have to show why the adjustments that were made are inappropriate in order to discredit it.
Climate science in most of its aspects is well beyond infancy. The fundamentals are well established and we're working on details now. One definition of pollution is too much of something where you don't want it. You need oxygen to breath but 100% oxygen at 1 atmosphere of pressure would make you sick you pretty quickly.
As far as "economy wrecking" goes, most studies I've seen say at most the economy takes a 1-2% hit to respond to climate change. People still get paid for their work and products still get bought. They're just for different things than what we're doing now. If the climate scientist's projections are anywhere close to accurate and we don't respond to the challenge it will be far more economy wrecking and could bring down our civilization.
Phil Jones gave a scientific answer to the question. In this case "statistically significant" means a 95% confidence level in the assertion. The Hadley/CRU data that Jones uses showed warming just under that confidence level, like 93%, so it can't be called statistically significant by definition.
If you look at the NASA/GISS data which does a better job of accounting for the polar regions the warming during the period in question was statistically significant.
Although there may be some regular pollution issues with burning dung it is not an issue as far as global warming. The CO2 produced by burning dung was CO2 that was already in the carbon cycle and in the atmosphere a short time before. It was absorbed by the plants the cattle ate before producing the dung.
Give us the programs and data so any high school science student can run the programs and get your results...
Yeah, any high school science student with access to one of the larger supercomputers in the world. The big climate models, the General Circulation Models, run for days or weeks on them to produce one simulation run.
Mike, you have the same problem lots of people have with the time frame of the changes. Sea level is rising at about 3 mm per year right now. Back in 1950 it was more like 1.5 mm per year. Right now the projections are we may see around 1 meter of sea level rise by 2100. 1 meter is enough to flood 1/3 of Florida. In 90 years that's an average of around 11 mm per year but of course it starts slow and speeds up toward the end so we're seeing 3 mm now, by 2090 it might be 25 mm per year. Even in a decade a rate of 3 mm/year (0.12 inches/year) might be pretty hard to detect with the Mark I eyeball but that doesn't mean it's not happening.
The reason AGW an issue right now even though it's happening so slowly (on human times scales, it's very rapid in geologic time scales) is that even if we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow temperatures would continue to rise for at least 50 years. That's because the oceans act as a temperature buffer and it takes time for them to catch up with the forcing. Did you know that the top 10 feet of the oceans contain the same amount of heat energy as is contained in the entire atmosphere. So until ocean temperatures catch up the atmosphere is cooler than the amount of forcing would indicate.
daveime,
Actually surfacestations.org has done a service to the climate community by helping identify the quality of various weather stations. A recent scientific study used surfacestations.org's list of good and poorly sited stations and found that the poorly sited stations actually had a slight cooling bias compared to the well sited stations.
Part of the reason for this is that even if the station is sited in a UHI in climate science we're as much interested in how the temperature is changing over time what the absolute temperature is. Even if a station gives elevated readings of the absolute temperature if the rate of change tracks with the rate of change in well sited stations it's still useful information.
sigh! sigh!
I think the main point of the article was that more snow is not a sign there is no global warming. Besides, from a climate perspective you have to combine the snowfalls from a period of years to tell whether there is actually more snow or just some more extreme precipitation events.
Globally it was not colder this year than last. It's been warming since 2007. Perversely the continental US east of the Rockies has been somewhat colder this past year but that's only about 1% of the Earth's surface. While DC has been getting the cold weather lately they've been recording some 50+ degrees F highs in Greenland, pretty unusual for this time of year.
Statistically significant in this case means (somewhat arbitrarily) there is a 95% or better chance there has been actual warming during the period and it's not just noise. If the confidence level is only 90% then it's not statistically significant but I still wouldn't bet against it.
Jones was only one of many lead scientists in the IPCC. The data he's referring to is the Hadley/CRU data. In the NASA/GISS data the temperature trend is statistically significant.
Your problem with AGW predictions is that you're using the wrong time frame. 5 years of data is merely noise in the time frames of climate research. You have to think in terms of at least 20 or 30 years to be able to filter out the noise of natural variability from the long term trends. Most AGW predictions are made with those sorts of time frames in mind. So you're never going to get your "accurate prediction of temperature changes over the next 5 years without any error," because of the noise.
The third leg of that stool that brings the A into AGW is we know the increase in CO2 is due to Anthropogenic (human) sources.
And a minor nitpick. That the Earths temperature is going up every year isn't necessarily obvious to land dwellers because sometimes the general atmospheric temperatures can be down even though the total energy in the system has gone up. Heat can be transferred between the atmosphere and the surface, particularly water surfaces. Did you know the top 10 feet of the oceans holds as much heat energy as the entire atmosphere? This is also a zone that is well mixed due to wind turbulence. It's pretty easy to transfer a significant amount of heat between them under the right conditions.
The El Nino cycle that started last year and will probably peter out in April/May has transferred a lot of heat to the atmosphere. This means 2010 has a better than 50% chance of being the new record warmest year (barring a major volcanic eruption).
Who is it who is claiming "the science is settled", "the debate is over", etc?
Unless someone comes up with something as revolutionary as Copernicus did with orbital mechanics the fundamentals of climate science and the effects of CO2 are nearly as settled as they can be as scientific theory. What isn't settled is a lot of details, some fairly important, which will lead to further refinement of the theory as they are investigated.
A true climate model would never predict weather, especially on a year to year scale. They are not designed to do that and it's probably impossible except on the most general terms anyway. What they project* is that if things keep going the way they are going then the 30 year trend line for average global temperature will be at some value and the slope of the trend line will be at some value with error bars denoting the 95% confidence range. The way they are used filters out the high frequency noise of natural variability and cyclical things such as ENSO and solar variation.
The person you are replying to never said the models predicted the snow pattern for this year so you're just setting up a strawman to knock down with your post. What real scientists will say on the subject would be something like "We expect global warming will likely cause a 3% increase in the average intensity of hurricanes over the next 2 decades." Then after 20 years you can compile the statistics and see how they did.
*The reason I use the word project rather than predict is that certain inputs into the model are not predictable. For instance we can't know exactly how the level of CO2 will change in the future because we don't know how we will respond to the threat. So they set up various realistic scenarios and feed those into the models. Scenarios would include such things as BAU (Business As Usual) with increasing releases and levels of atmospheric CO2 or a reduction of CO2 releases as nations start implementing laws to restrict CO2 releases. One scenario they usually run is keeping CO2 levels constant.
The Antarctic ice sheet has not increased in size. The area covered by sea ice has increased some. You should learn the difference between ice sheets, ice shelves and sea ice. I have no doubt that the IPCC AR4 report noted the increase in Antarctic sea ice.
The reason climate models are useful is that we observe that ice is dropping in some areas and gaining in other areas and we ask ourselves why. The insights gained from that study are incorporated into the models improving them for future use. It's an ongoing process.
My question is what falling temperatures are you talking about? There is no evidence that temperatures are falling. A 2006 study found you get more snowstorms during warmer years than you do during colder years. See http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1552454&cid=31165324 for details.
To clarify even further Antarctic sea ice has increased in area but ice shelves and ice sheets have receded some. Recent measurements by the GRACE gravity sensing satellites show Antarctica is losing ice mass overall even though some areas are gaining. The increase in sea ice is partially due to the ozone hole over the continent. The lack of ozone (another greenhouse gas) causes cooling over the continent which strengthens the circumpolar winds isolating Antarctica even more from the rest of the world. Ergo more sea ice.
PS (not you wizardforce but others reading this) If you don't know the difference between sea ice, ice shelves and ice sheets educate yourself. Wikipedia is your friend.
Climate science is a broad subject that incorporates a number of fields. For instance meteorology, geology and physical oceanography among others. But the core climate scientists who write the GCMs are physicists who study radiative transfer and expand their knowledge base into those other fields to capture the information they offer. Physics is a very statistically oriented field.
Very little if any original data has been lost. It's stored in individual national weather archives and by the scientists who did the original research. Some processed data has been discarded although I'm sure if they had any idea at the time what a brouhaha would come of it they would have kept it.
And natural sinks absorb 98.8% of the CO2 that is emitted into the air. It's that extra 1.2% that it doesn't absorb that's the problem. You should read up on the Carbon Cycle. You'd find that the oceans absorb more CO2 than plants. Also, some plants do better under increased CO2, others do worse. For instance rice can lose up to 30% of its protein under high CO2 conditions.
CO2 is a positive feedback. Coming out of ice ages changes in the Earths orbit caused warming to start but the CO2 released because of the warming served as a positive feedback that caused the interglacial periods to be warmer than they otherwise would have been without the effect. The science doesn't work without CO2 considered no matter where you look in the Earths history.
I don't know why you would expect wild swings in the proxy records. Do you think positive feedback always results in a runaway situation? No. Each increment in CO2 level in the atmosphere warms a bit less than the previous increment so it eventually peters out.
You should know that China is investing in renewable and green energy big time (while admittedly still building coal plants, but probably not too much longer). The way things are going they are going to eat our lunch in that field.
A detailed study was done of “the relationships of the storm frequencies to seasonal temperature and precipitation conditions” for the years “1901–2000 using data from 1222 stations across the United States.” The 2006 study, Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States [PDF] (Chagnon et al., 2006) found we get more snow storms in warmer years:
Results for the November–December period showed that most of the United States had experienced 61%– 80% of the storms in warmer-than-normal years. Assessment of the January–February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%–80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years. In the March–April season 61%–80% of all snowstorms in the central and southern United States had occurred in warmer-than-normal years. Thus, these comparative results reveal that a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901–2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.