Der Spiegel Online: stagnating temperatures a puzzle

20 11 2009

Stagnating Temperatures

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

By Gerald Traufetter


 

ddp

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year. Read the rest of this entry »






Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

19 11 2009

UPDATE: Response from CRU in interview with another website, see end of this post.

The details on this are still sketchy, we’ll probably never know what went on. But it appears that University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit has been hacked and many many files have been released by the hacker or person unknown.

UPDATED: Original image was for Met Office – corrected This image source: www.cru.uea.ac.uk

I’m currently traveling and writing this from an airport, but here is what I know so far: Read the rest of this entry »





NOAA: new ocean database spans to 1800

19 11 2009

Bill Illis and Bob Tisdale will likely make use of this. h/t to WUWT reader Chris D.

NOAA Releases Expanded World Ocean Database

Large wave breaking over bow of NOAA ship.

Large wave breaking over bow of NOAA ship.

High resolution (Credit: NOAA)

NOAA today released the World Ocean Database 2009, the largest, most comprehensive collection of scientific information about the oceans with records dating as far back as 1800. This product is part of the climate services provided by NOAA.

The 2009 database, updated from the 2005 edition, is significantly larger providing approximately 9.1 million temperature profiles and 3.5 million salinity reports.  The 2009 database also captures 29 categories of scientific information from the oceans, including oxygen levels and chemical tracers, plus information on gases and isotopes that can be used to trace the movement of ocean currents. Read the rest of this entry »





The Climate Skeptics Party launch 4 television ads in Australia

19 11 2009

This is likely to cause a bit of a stir. Michael  from the Climate Skeptics Party in Australia writes in Tips and Notes:

The TCS ad campaign hit the airwaves last night in Australia. I thought you might be interested and post them on your website.

Here are the other TV advertisements: Read the rest of this entry »





Not finding any, Gore airbrushes in hurricanes for his new book

19 11 2009

Al Gore’s new book had a problem – no big hurricanes since Katrina to put in the book to look “threatening” to the USA. Any imagined link between hurricanes and global warming has evaporated.

Solution: the artists airbrush.

Ryan Maue, hurricane expert from the University of Florida writes:

Anthony,

Not a lot of hurricanes here

The cover opens and closes half and half — so you only see one hurricane…as in the press release photo or the one on  Amazon.

But this is the real picture sequence from the book which I looked at Borders today and took cell-phone pictures, original (before the retouching by some “artist”) Note all of the Arctic ice and the size of the Florida Peninsula…

and the final product: Read the rest of this entry »





CO2 and ocean uptake – maybe slowing

18 11 2009

While this article makes a strong case, looking at SST and CO2 can also be revealing:

http://icecap.us/images/uploads/ENDERSBEE.JPG

A review of this WUWT post might also be instructive: A look at human CO2 emissions -vs- ocean absorption

From Columbia University: Oceans’ Uptake of Manmade Carbon May be Slowing

First Year-by-Year Study, 1765-2008, Shows Proportion Declining

Carbon released by fossil fuel burning (black) continues to accumulate in the air (red), oceans (blue), and  land (green).  The oceans take up roughly a quarter of manmade CO2, but evidence suggests they are now taking up a smaller proportion.(Click on image to view larger version)
Carbon released by fossil fuel burning (black) continues to accumulate in the air (red), oceans (blue), and land (green). The oceans take up roughly a quarter of manmade CO2, but evidence suggests they are now taking up a smaller proportion.
Credit: Samar Khatiwala, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The oceans play a key role in regulating climate, absorbing more than a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans put into the air. Now, the first year-by-year accounting of this mechanism during the industrial era suggests the oceans are struggling to keep up with rising emissions—a finding with potentially wide implications for future climate. The study appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, and is expanded upon in a separate website.

The researchers estimate that the oceans last year took up a record 2.3 billion tons of CO₂ produced from burning of fossil fuels. But with overall emissions growing rapidly, the proportion of fossil-fuel emissions absorbed by the oceans since 2000 may have declined by as much as 10%. Read the rest of this entry »





Wall Street Journal on McIntyre: Global warming’s most dangerous apostate

18 11 2009

The Wall Street Journal

Revenge of the Climate Laymen

 

Global warming’s most dangerous apostate speaks out about the state of climate change science.

File:Edward Armitage - Julian the Apostate presiding at a conference of sectarian - 1875.jpg

Julian the Apostate presiding at a conference of sectarian - by Edward Armitage - image from Wikimedia

By ANNE JOLIS

Barack Obama conceded over the weekend that no successor to the Kyoto Protocol would be signed in Copenhagen next month. With that out of the way, it may be too much to hope that the climate change movement take a moment to reflect on the state of the science that is supposedly driving us toward a carbon-neutral future.

But should a moment for self-reflection arise, campaigners against climate change could do worse than take a look at the work of Stephen McIntyre, who has emerged as one of the climate change gang’s Most Dangerous Apostates. The reason for this distinction? He checked the facts.

The retired Canadian businessman, whose self-described “auditing” a few years ago prompted a Congressional review of climate science, has once again thrown EnviroLand into a tailspin. In September, he revealed that a famous graph using tree rings to show unprecedented 20th century warming relies on thin data. Since its publication in 2000, University of East Anglia professor Keith Briffa’s much-celebrated image has made star appearances everywhere from U.N. policy papers to activists’ posters. Like other so-called “hockey stick” temperature graphs, it’s an easy sell—one look and it seems Gadzooks! We’re burning ourselves up!

“It was the belle of the ball,” Mr. McIntyre told me on a recent phone call from Ontario. “Its dance card was full.”

Read the rest of this entry »





Greening your mileage with better tires

18 11 2009

Here’s technology doing something useful. Who wouldn’t like tires with better mileage? It comes from a new chemical additive, shown below. I chuckled when I saw the chemical structure, which itself looks like a tire tread:

Of course, before rushing out to buy new BF Greenrich radials, just making sure your tires are properly inflated will net you a similar mileage improvement.

From Eurekalert and ACS: Developing ‘green’ tires that boost mileage and cut carbon dioxide emissions

PERFORMANCE: Chemical makers are developing additives to make tires more fuel efficient, safer, and longer lasting. Lanxess

 

PERFORMANCE Chemical makers are developing additives to make tires more fuel efficient, safer, and longer lasting.

A new generation of “green” automobile tires that can boost fuel efficiency without sacrificing safety and durability is rolling their way through the research pipeline. The new tires could help add an extra mile or two per gallon to a car’s fuel economy. That’s the topic of the cover story of the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News, (C&EN) ACS’ weekly newsmagazine. Read the rest of this entry »





Climate Craziness of the Week: What’s more idiotic than holding a cylinder of CO2 for a photo op in the snow? – Calling it “art”.

18 11 2009

People email me stuff. Sometimes its just too bizarre to ignore. We have another person on an “expedition” with a camera and artistic license to foist upon the world:

click for the video

 

From Francesca Galeazzi of the disko.bay expedition, whatever the hell that is:

This morning I walked across the fresh snow with a gas cylinder in my arms, containing 6kg of CO2. I took it across the unspoiled snow field of the Jakobshavn Fjord until I found what, to my eyes, was a wonderful place.

From a little hill I could see massive icebergs impassably floating by, some of them breaking up from time to time with a loud bang. The sea below was deep grey, which made the icebergs stand up in all their beauty and fragility. The sky was a merge of pale grey and cerulean with a yellow glow just behind the skyline. Lichen and small berry plants could be felt under the powdery snow as I walked by. I thought this is perfect!

I walked to the top of the small hill, I put the cylinder down, got on my knees and opened the valve. The CO2 came out violently, freezing the air around the nozzle and producing an unpleasant whistle. When I lowered the cylinder towards the ground, the snow blow off all around me under the pressure of the air jet, almost to signify the melting of the Arctic ice shelf because of the Carbon emissions generated somewhere else. Read the rest of this entry »





CO2 still going up, but temperature not following the same trend

17 11 2009

Here’s the latest global temperature plot from UAH:

UAH_LT_1979_thru_Oct_09

From Dr. Roy Spencer - click to enlarge

From Eurekalert: Human emissions rise 2 percent despite global financial crisis

IMAGE: Human emissions rise 2 percent despite the global financial crisis.

Click here for more information.

Despite the economic effects of the global financial crisis (GFC), carbon dioxide emissions from human activities rose 2 per cent in 2008 to an all-time high of 1.3 tonnes of carbon per capita per year, according to a paper published today in Nature Geoscience.

The paper – by scientists from the internationally respected climate research group, the Global Carbon Project (GCP) – says rising emissions from fossil fuels last year were caused mainly by increased use of coal but there were minor decreases in emissions from oil and deforestation.

“The current growth in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is closely linked to growth in Gross Domestic Product (GDP),” said one of the paper’s lead authors, CSIRO’s Dr Mike Raupach.

“CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion are estimated to have increased 41 per cent above 1990 levels with emissions continuing to track close to the worst-case scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“There will be a small downturn in emissions because of the GFC, but anthropogenic emissions growth will resume when the economy recovers unless the global effort to reduce emissions from human activity is accelerated.” Read the rest of this entry »





AMS TV weathercaster survey on climate raises eyebrows

17 11 2009

From Alabamawx.com by Bill Murray

A survey of weathercasters’ feelings on global warming was published in this month’s edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. It had some interesting findings. There were 121 respondents. 94% of the respondents had at least one of the three major seals.

Television meteorologists are the official scientists for most television stations. The overwhelming majority felt comfortable in that role for their stations. The majority agreed that the role of discussing climate change did fall to them.

The eyebrow raising responses: Read the rest of this entry »





The Steel Greenhouse

17 11 2009

Guest post by Willis Eschenbach
There is a lot of misinformation floating around the web about the greenhouse effect works. It is variously described as a “blanket” that keeps the Earth warm, or a “mirror” that reflects part of the heat back to Earth, or “a pane of glass” that somehow keeps energy from escaping. It is none of these things.

A planetary “greenhouse” is a curiosity, a trick of nature. It works solely because although a sphere only has one side, a shell has two sides. The trick has nothing to do with greenhouse gases. It does not require an atmosphere. In fact, a greenhouse can be built entirely of steel. A thought experiment shows how a steel greenhouse would work.


Before we start, however, a digression regarding temperature. The radiation emitted by a blackbody varies with the fourth power of the temperature. As a result, for a blackbody, we can measure the temperature in units of radiation, which are watts per square metre (W/m2). For objects with a temperatures found on the the Earth, this radiation is in the range called “longwave” or “infrared” radiation. See the Appendix for the formula which relates temperature to radiation. Read the rest of this entry »





Gore has no clue – a few million degrees here and there and pretty soon we’re talking about real temperature

16 11 2009

This is mind blowing ignorance on the part of Al Gore. Gore in an 11/12/09 interview on NBC’s tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, speaking on geothermal energy, champion of slide show science, can’t even get the temperature of earth’s mantle right, claiming “several million degrees” at “2 kilometers or so down”.  Oh, and the “crust of the earth is hot” too.

Screencap of Gore on The Tonight Show 11/12/09

Temperature of the sun’s corona: 1–2 million kelvin

Temperature of the sun’s photosphere:  6,000 kelvin

Temperature of the Earths mantle, more than “2 kilometers or so down”: between 500 °C to 900 °C (773 to 1173 kelvin)

Watching Gore make a complete scientific idiot of himself on national TV: priceless

Don’t believe me? Watch the video from NBC below: Read the rest of this entry »





Monckton climate change video goes viral

16 11 2009

Video of Lord Monckton Warning of Copenhagen Climate Treaty Exceeds 3.5 Million Views in a Single Month

http://i43.tinypic.com/xm3btj.jpgLord Monckton giving a presentation – photo by Derek Warnecke

 

Minneapolis – A video of Lord Christopher Monckton warning of the impending Copenhagen climate treaty has received over 3.5 million views in 30 days, according to Minnesota Majority, the organization responsible for posting the original 4-minute excerpt of Monckton’s speech.  The organization says that its original clip, together with the 100+ cloned versions that now exist on YouTube, in total exceeded 3.5 million views as of November 15, 2009.  The video clip made Minnesota Majority the #1 most viewed Non-Profit & Activism channel in the month of October on YouTube.

[ Note: Also I have a link to the draft Copenhagen Climate Change Treaty here Monckton’s Powerpoint presentation used at that speech is available in PDF format here (warning large download 17.5 MB) - Anthony]

See the video below. Read the rest of this entry »





Hall of record ratios

16 11 2009

A Critique of the October 2009 NCAR Study Regarding Record Maximum to Minimum Ratios

Guest post by Bruce Hall, Hall of Record

This is a critique of the October 2009 NCAR publication regarding increasing ratio of new daily maximum temperatures to new daily minimum temperatures.

The NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research] study titled “The relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S.” was published October 19, 2009.

“Abstract

The current observed value of the ratio of daily record high maximum temperatures to record low minimum temperatures averaged across the U.S. is about two to one. This is because records that were declining uniformly earlier in the 20th century following a decay proportional to 1/n (n being the number of years since the beginning of record keeping) have been declining less slowly for record highs than record lows since the late 1970s. Model simulations of U.S. 20th century climate show a greater ratio of about four to one due to more uniform warming across the U.S. than in observations. Following an A1B emission scenario for the 21st century, the U.S. ratio of record high maximum to record low minimum temperatures is projected to continue to increase, with ratios of about 20 to 1 by mid-century, and roughly 50 to 1 by the end of the century.”

The following is a graphic representation of the study from the UCAR website: Read the rest of this entry »





Why NCAR’s Meehl paper on high/low temperature records is bunk

16 11 2009

One wonders why the story of a new paper covered on WUWT:  NCAR: Number of record highs beat record lows – if you believe the quality of data from the weather stations did not include the 1930’s and 1940’s and earlier, conspicuously missing from the NCAR graphic below:

temps

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Source NCAR

From: “The relative increase of record high maximum temperatures compared to record low minimum temperatures in the U.S.”Authors: Gerald A. Meehl, Claudia Tebaldi, Guy Walton, David Easterling, and Larry McDaniel Publication: Geophysical Research Letters (in press)

The answer: those decades are inconvenient to the conclusion Meehl makes from a cherrypicked portion of the US data. There were many many temperature records during this period. For example, Richard Alan Keen writes in email:

My book, Skywatch West, covers the weather and climate of the 11 western states, plus Alaska, plus 6 western Canadian provincs and territories.

The chapter on temperature extremes includes a chart of the occurrences (by decade) of the all-time extreme temperatures for each of the 18 states, provinces, and territories (a total of 36 records in all).

Some fun statistics from this are:

  • Of the all-time record maximum temperatures, 10 occurred before 1940 (the first six decades), and 8 after (the second six decades).
  • For record minimum temperatures, the reverse is true: 8 records before 1940, 10 afterwards.
  • Half of the records – 8 maximum and 10 minimum, a total of 18 – occurred during the middle three decades of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s, and of these nearly a third of the total (10) were during the 1930’s alone.
  • No records occurred in the 2000’s up to the publication date of the book (2004).  Since then Arizona’s record maximum was tied, but not broken, in 2007.

cheers, Rich

Here is his graphic: Read the rest of this entry »





More on the record high-low temperature debacle

15 11 2009

U.S. Record Temperatures—A Closer Look

From World Climate Report:

high-low-thermometerA new paper that is soon to appear in the journal Geophysical Research Letters finds that across the U.S. daily record high temperatures are being set at about twice the frequency of daily record low temperatures and that this ratio—number of record highs to the number of record lows, has been growing larger over the past 50 years.

The popular press seems to be particularly taken with this finding, although headline proclamations fail to disclose important details of the actual findings reported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Gerald Meehl and colleagues.

Although you can hardly blame the press, because the NCAR press release did much to lead them down this muddy path.

Meehl et al. find that the reason more daily maximum temperature records are being set than daily minimum temperatures records is because there are fewer than expected daily lows records being set, not because there are more daily high records than expected. Read the rest of this entry »





Northern Sierra Trees Falsify Claim of ‘Unprecedented’ Global Warming

15 11 2009

Guest post by Larry Fields

The last Ice Age razed all of the coniferous forests in Finland. After the ice sheet retreated, trees from elsewhere–like the Scots Pine–gradually colonized the vacant niches. On a smaller scale, the same thing happened in many high mountains of the Earth’s temperate regions, including the Sierra Nevada Range of California. We can learn a thing or two about climate history from Alpine dendrology.

Round Top Lake, at 9340 feet elevation in the Northern Sierra near Carson Pass, is my favorite place for informal climate history research. Whitebark Pine trees grow in tight clumps around the North half of the lake.

Other high altitude conifers–like Lodgepole Pine, Mountain Hemlock, and Red Fir–also grow in the Carson Pass area. But Whitebark Pines can grow at slightly high elevations than these other trees.

At Round Top Lake, the Whitebark Pines in any given group are nearly identical genetically, since they reproduce asexually. New tree trunks grow outward from an existing root system. This is called suckering. The seeds that do sprout can’t endure the harsh Winters at that altitude. Walking 100  yards downhill from the lake on the main trail, one can see Whitebark Pines that have grown in a more normal way.

Naturalist Jeffrey P. Schaffer mentioned Round Top Lake in the 1989 edition of his book, The Tahoe Sierra: A Natural History Guide to the 106 Hikes in the Northern Sierra. Here’s a link to a review of a more recent book by Schaffer.
http://www.amazon.com/Tahoe-Sierra-Natural-History-Northern/dp/0899972209
Read the rest of this entry »





The Delayer in Chief? – Obama backs Copenhagen postponement

15 11 2009

I always have to chuckle when somebody uses the phrase denier/delayer to label somebody for even the slightest transgression on climate /action/justice/activism/alarmism/pick a word.

Briefly, this appeared on Google News:

copenhagen_tatters

click for full screen cap

That was the original title of the piece. Somebody must have complained, because it didn’t last long: Look what The Guardian changed the title to: Read the rest of this entry »





Winds of change – Gore gets booed – maybe they shouldn’t have billed him as “president of the planet”

15 11 2009

From Wikipedia - Al Gore in 2007

PalmBeachPost.com

Gore’s presentation on climate change draws 800 as 200 protestors gather outside

By George Bennett Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

 

Confused Palm Beach County voters helped thwart Al Gore’s 2000 bid to become president of the United States, but he was introduced as “president of the planet” when he returned here Saturday night to deliver an environmental lecture.

The former vice president spoke on climate change at the Mizner Park Amphitheater to a crowd of about 800. More than 200 protesters gathered across the street from the event, and their boos and chants could be heard inside the amphitheater as Gore began his presentation.

Gore lost Florida, and the White House, by 537 votes to George W. Bush in a 2000 as many Palm Beach County Democrats said they mistakenly voted for conservative Pat Buchanan because they were confused by the county’s “butterfly ballot” design.

After losing the presidential race, Gore became arguably the world’s most famous advocate for curbing carbon emissions, gaining eco-celebrity status with the film An Inconvenient Truth and winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

“It’s an interesting twist of fate here in our own backyard that former Vice President Al Gore has taken on a new platform and is now a catalyst for world change,” said Marci Zaroff, an “eco-entrepeneur” who introduced Gore.

“So, in essence, he’s president of the people. He’s president of the planet. And the work that he’s doing is more important than any other work that could possibly be done.” Read the rest of this entry »