Thanks

Also note that in conjunction with the Northern Hemisphere showing the highest rate of warming, it was the southern hemisphere that primarily drove the decrease in temperature in the 1945-1978 period. What’s even more interesting is that the initial cooling occurred very rapidly where the SH temperature dropped from 0.022 to -0.379 in just 2 years (HADCRUT3-1944 to 1946). I guess that must have been all the coal fired power plants they built in Tahiti at that time!

You stated “Yes, Hurricane Katrina was “unprecedented”. The storm itself was not unprecedented. If I’m not mistaken it was a Category 3 storm by the time it hit New Orleans. Hardly a Hurricane Andrew. Katrina was less about the weather and more about inept government. Inept in suitably maintaining/enhancing the dike infrastructure supposedly protecting New Orelans and inept in the subsequent emergency response.

REPLY: “…it was a Category 3 storm by the time it hit New Orleans.” That is correct. While off the coast, it was CAT 5, as it made it closer, it weakened. By the time it made landfall it was CAT 3. But it oft gets told in reports to be CAT 5 when it made landfall. Be vigilant in correcting this point.

You and Steve let Hadley off the hook too easily! As I noted in the related comments on climate audit, the smoothed annual curve is also accompanied by an unsmoothed annual curve. Both these curves were affected by this change. When I started monitoring these HADCRUT graphs at this time last year, a sudden spike up was apparent due to the El Nino at the time and the use of a year to date average for the current year alongside the full year average for prior years. Knowing the forecast for a transition to La Nina, I expected the spike to fade through the year as they averaged in the future colder monthly temperatures. It did. I was also curious to see what Hadley would do when low temperatures drove the spike down at the beginning of 2008. I wasn’t disappointed. The Ministry of Truth suddenly noticed an “error” because it didn’t like the picture that was now painted!

Roger, I just had a quick look at an online transcript of a 2005 interview with Kerry Emmanuel re hurricanes and GW. And yes, he says “If you look at the Atlantic, it’s perfectly fair to say that both the increase in ocean temperature in the last couple of decades and the upswing in hurricane activity is mostly natural. If there’s a global warming signal in that, it’s very hard to see.”

Another problem is that humans rarely live longer than a century or so. Who remembers the Galveston hurricane of 1900? Or the the worst storm ever reported to have hit England, which was in 1703? I think that’s why people overuse the word “unprecedented”. Yes, Hurricane Katrina was “unprecedented” – for those people who experienced it.

They write on page 62:
” The aerosols are produced mainly where industrial activity is highest. Therefore, the northern hemissphere should warm more slowly than the southern hemisphere, since the sulphates produced there would reflect some sunlight, reduce incoming energy, and thereby offset part of the calculated greenhouse warming. But observations show exactly the opposite – the highest rate of warming in the most recent 25 years had occurred at northern mid latitudes, just where the most aerosols are emitted.”

Alex,
Re your points 1 and 2. Note the slope of the warming prior to the cooling that started in the mid-40’s. It is at least as steep as the warming prior to 2000. If that rate of warming could occur “naturally” who/what is to say the warming of the late 20th Century wasn’t natural (i.e., recovery from the LIA)?

Mike

1) The well-documented cooling trend from (roughly) 1940s up to 1970s. AGW theorists blame man-made aerosols for the cooling; so – 1900s to 1940s: industrialisation: increase in CO2: increase in sulphates and other aerosols: increased warming; then – 1940s to 1970s: industrialisation: increased CO2: increase in sulphates and other aerosols: cooling. I don’t find the aerosol argument particularly convincing; maybe there is historical evidence for a lack of cooling aerosols in the early 20th century, but I’m not currently aware of any. If aerosols failed to mask warming in the 1930s, why did they fail to mask warming in the 1960s, when the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was higher?

2) Again, the mid-20th century cooling trend. A graph showing the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and its warm/cool phases, seems to match the warming-cooling-warming pattern more closely than the ever-climbing CO2 count. Maybe the PDO is not the whole story, but it certainly appears to be a better fit.

3) The Little Ice Age: AGW theorists downplay it, but there is evidence from the Southern Hemisphere, e.g. from Peru and New Zealand, which suggests that the LIA could have been a global, not just a local, phenomenon.

4) Ditto, the Medieval Warm Period. AGW theorists downplay the MWP, but there is some evidence (vineyards in northern England, silver mines in the Alps, coral records from Barbados and Tahiti) which suggests warmer temperatures (at least in Europe) than now, and possibly higher sea levels.

5) Hurricanes, storm surges etc. Gore, et al, blame global warming. On the other hand, changes in land use would account for the increase in damage. More people, more houses on flood plains, the draining of protective wetlands, etc. Also the hurricane record shows no big recent rise in strong hurricanes. 1900 and 1926 had truly devastating hurricanes, 2006 and 2007 didn’t.

6) Ditto, animal and plant extinctions. Likely general cause: more people, changes in land use, rather than global warming.

7) The AGW scare resembles earlier scares in the media which have not panned out, such as SARS and Y2K. Also resembles any number of wrong predictions by environmentalists such as Paul Ehrlich: Quote: “I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

8) The AGW movement has a quasi-religious aspect that I find suspect in itself. My take on this is that it is based partly on white middle-class guilt, i.e. that the prosperity of the west is based on a pseudo-scientific version of original sin (but there is redemption, of course, through lowering CO2 emissions.) I don’t buy into it.

Well, I could go on. Even for those of us who haven’t done science or maths since our schooldays, AGW looks flimsy. Even those of us who have difficulties crunching the numbers and working through the technicalities can still see through the bad journalism, the hype, the faulty reasoning, the bias and the sheer emotionalism of AGW. In that respect, websites and blogs like this one provide a very welcome breath of fresh (and cool!) air.

Jack,
Thanks.
Posting these papers would be great.
About a year ago I started reading up on global warming, and so I’m still in the process of learning the basics. I wish I had found this website
earlier.

Sure. Here it is: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.365.jpg

It is ahead of last year at this time by about 1 million square kilometers.