UAH: Global Temperature Dives in May

And June isn’t looking much warmer here in my part of California. We might hit “normal” temps for this time of year two days this week, if we are lucky. The long range forecast doesn’t show us going much above “normal” until the 11th.

And the trend 1979-present has finally dropped to 0.13. Yay.

At least we are lucky with the weather here in Sweden. For 5 days we have had temperatures around 25-30 degrees. And the forecast tells us that it will continue. We have even had warmer weather here in stockholm than Barcelona in Spain :D. The monhly anormaly since january is like +1,5 C.
LOCAL warming anyone?

This is a disaster for the world …. scientific community.

Politically I’m already speculating for the next 2 years. The UAH results will certainly spook Gore and the AGW activists. They’ve run out of time, and know they’ll have to move super fast to install their new regime.
1. Obama will win by a land slide in November.
2. The Democrats will also gain seat in both houses.
3. Gore will get a key energy and environmental post in Obama’s Admin.
4. Obama will sign Kyoto immediately after innauguration
5. He will do the same for carbon cap and trade.
6. An El Nino will pop up next year.
7. Temps will rebound.
8. UAH, RSS will be defunded
9. FoxNews will pull a Scott McClellan
10. GISS and HadCrut will release alarming warming data in 2009 and 2010.
11. But by the next election period in 2010, global temps will have in reality plummeted another 0.5°C, inflation will be near double digit, and unemployment will be rising rapidly.

Stuff We All Get
Also interpreted as Soft Ware and Gifts–still tradeshow usage
Although I always insisted on Stuff We All Get in arguments.

Coldest May since 1992. 4th coldest on record since measurements began in 1979.
Just sayin’….

And yet the AGWarmiots will soldier on bravely, with a trembly voice, saying “the warming is currently on hiatus, having gone into hiding deep in the oceans”. The warming trend is still there, they will say (and are saying), just is being masked by a short-term natural (gasp!) variation. Then, they will point to any and all “extreme” weather, and say, “see, this is unprecedented, and is the result of the hidden man-made GW.” And, they’ll add, “when the warming does resume, it will do so with a vengeance so we need to stop all this C02 pollution now, before it’s too late.” AGW religion is resilient, if nothing else.

I’m making a SWAG that the GISS from Dr Hansen will show record warming.

Well there is an inconvienient truth!
Looking at that graph, I am sure glad that I don’t have to plot a trend line. I realy don’t think there is any long term trend. There seems to be a short term, or begining of a long term downward trend at the end.

Does this mean that Al Gore’s “Earth Fever” has finally broke?

The lower middle of Oregon and the adjacent upper middle slice of California has a frost advisory out for Thursday with temps dropping into the low 30’s. A large area of low ground could experience crop kill. brrrrrr!

Coldest month since January 2000.
REPLY: By my recoking it looks like January 1999 -Anthony

Colleagues in Minnesota have told me the ice on the lakes was 4 feet thick last winter. This was unusually thick – they needed extensions on their ice augers to go ice fishing.

The high tomorrow in Denver is forecast to be 54 F. This will blow away the record high minimum of 65 F for the date. In fact the latest seasonal date with a record high minimum of 54 for Denver in NOAA’s records dating back to the 1800’s is May 10, almost a month ago.
NOAA May Records:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/bou/include/showProduct.php?product=mayn.txt&parentdir=cli
NOAA June Records:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/bou/include/showProduct.php?product=junn.txt&parentdir=cli

The May result was expected if you have followed the daily UAH temperatures at different altitudes at UAH’s website.
June seems to start even colder than May. If there aren’t a strong recovery like last year, June might end up even colder than May.
Btw, haven’t La Nina faded away mostly now and should just have a minor effect on temperatures?
As it have been said before on this blog: The next 2-3 years will be very interesting for climatologists and solar scientists.

This is certainly reflected by May temps in the Midwest. I play in a Monday morning senior golf league that began on April 28th with a 7:30 AM temperature of 35 degrees. The following Monday, May 5th it was 43 with a 25-30 mph wind out of the Northwest. On May 12th it was also in the low 40’s, and the following Monday back in the high 30’s again. By my calculation, the average Monday morning temperature from April 28th until June 2nd was 47. Even on May 26th, when it was 66 at tee time, it had dropped to the mid 50’s by the time we finished.

Mann et al Correction to SST
http://i26.tinypic.com/2wh16ip.jpg

I am 56 years old, lived through the great freeze in the UK in 62/63, moved to the Southern Hemisphere in 1975 and have experienced climate shifts ever since. There is nothing unusual with the weather now (even as I experience La Nina rain and cold battering the window). What is alarming, but almost predictable over about a 30-40 year cycle, is the drift to totalitarianism and anti-scientific rationalism (Prussian militarism, Nazism/Communism, Cutural Revolution). This time it’s driven by the huge, unaccountable bureaucracies of the UN and EU, captured by socialist/green extremism, and driving a mindless media. We have an enormous socio/political problem on our hands. How can we tackle this?

I mention data such as those published by UAH to our AGW folks in central NC (we have them by the carload), and they just snort.
Although the first part of June is reported to be typically warm here in the Piedmont of North Carolina, note that this week, we’re running near record high temperatures (high 90s). Go figure regional differences…
Thanks, Anthony, for a great blog!

Hi,
Anthony, the thing I find most interesting is that even during the January when the Earth is closest to the sun (90w/m2) we still had a dramatic decrease in temperature. This being said I am close to post a barycentric comparison to solar. wait for some software at the moment.

Actually, only the Northern Hemisphere now has a significant trend over the past 29 years.
Also, Philip B., if you look at the data, there seems to be no such thing as a lag between tropical warming and NH warming. They go hand in hand, and, contrary to what I thought, temperature excursions are larger in the tropics. Maybe Anthony can comment.
REPLY: The northern hemispshere has the lions share of weather stations and population growth.
As my surfacestations.org project has pointed out, weather stations proximity to population growth, artificial heats sources has increased dramatically. – Anthony

Lennart,
Since Solar Cycle length is not uniform (Cycle 23 is over 12 years and still going, Cycle 21 10.4, Cycle 22 9.6) I do not see how you can use the same month in a particular year as the same point in solar cycles, clearly it isn’t.
I don’t see any evidence for your claim the Cycle 24 will ‘probably’ be strong. In fact, the opposite may be true since most of the time the cycle following an elongated solar cycle is weak.
Nor can you pinpoint the peak of Cycle 24 (which hasn’t started and is 2 years over due) or Cycle 25 at this time.

Bill: Sorry, that should say September 1986, I miswrote. The data point is correct though, it’s from September 1986. May 2008 may in fact not be the minima, the solar cycle hasn’t turned yet.
“I don’t see any evidence for your claim the Cycle 24 will ‘probably’ be strong.”
No, but this is what NASA and other solar scientists claim. But maybe their science is “alarmist” too? 🙂

masstexodus:
Ice went out about 3 weeks late up here. This week we have clouds and showers forecast with our third excursion into the 80’s on Sat. Last June was hot and dry, but then our local climate changed back to late 40’s and early 50’s weather (or so I’m led to believe). We had freezes up north 2 or 3 times last week.
Minnesota the way we remember it: 9 months of winter, followed by 3 months of rough sledding.

Lennart
This is part of the statement released by NOAA

In light of the expected long interval until the onset of Cycle 24, the Prediction Panel has been unable to resolve a sufficient number of questions to reach a single, consensus prediction for the amplitude of the cycle. The deliberations of the panel supported two possible peak amplitudes for the smoothed International Sunspot Number (Ri): Ri = 140 ±20 and Ri = 90 ±10. Important questions to be resolved in the year following solar minimum will lead to a consensus decision by the panel.
The panel agrees solar maximum will occur near October, 2011 for the large cycle (Ri=140) case and August, 2012 for the small cycle (Ri=90) prediction.

As you can see they don’t appear to be able to agree between themselves what cycle 24 will be like.

Bill,
For your information, since January and I also feels that it might be stronger. I also agree the following Solar Cycle might be longer and recent trends indicates that for Solar Flares, we should expect an even stronger Flare for solar cycle 24. As for why the cycle is longer, i think that the next solar polarity switch ought to occur at roughly equal period. But still i could be wrong.

Re: Lennart
It is true that global temps were lower at their lowest points during the last two minimums…however, keep in mind that the May 2008 12 month mean does not reflect the low point of this cycle yet. Assuming for argument’s sake that temperature’s rise slowly from here on out and solar cycle 24 gets going soon, the lowest 12 month mean will likely come in 3-5 months. It will be significantly lower than the .116 where we sit now. Consider that January, February, March, April and now may were all colder than that.
If the Jan-May average continues for another couple months, the 12 month mean is just about guaranteed to fall near 0. There, in my opinion, is a very good chance it could fall lower than it did in 1996.

The last Hansen publication I saw used uncorrected land data that had been debunked in 2005. He must have gotten his degree with partial credit.

@rex
The picture is right. I live in north Germany and it has been warm. The German media, which are universal in their AGW belief, have been pretty much saying the whole world has been gettin warmer.
But Germans returning from their vacations in Spain are astonished that it has been so cold in Spain.

Pierre,
Well, you know because Al said, “The planet has a fever”, therefore it must.
Still, I am in agreement with Dr Pielke, who maintains that the best metric for ‘global climate change’ is not atmospheric temperature at 6′ altitude, but Ocean Heat Content. Argos shows a slight cooling of the oceans since 2003, hence no global warming since that time.

Basil,
I wish I could share your optimism, but Obama will be a shoe in. McCain is just old mouldy bread – and aint got a snowball’s chance in global-warming hell. To keep my last post short, I actually left out the scariest real possibility, and it’s a real one:
*** The dissident US media (i.e. Talk Radio, Skeptic blogs and FoxNews) are in for some real rough times in 09 ***
How do I know this? The Left Wing of the Democrats have been coordinating and acting in concert with the European Socialists and Greens.
The media here have been taken over by greeny elitists and are universal in their AGW belief – there’s no dissenting media here.
Public opinion in Germany for example is universal when it comes to AGW. The Democrat Left in the States envy the media domination here in Europe, and see the success just by looking at European public opinion. They will surely move to replicate it.
Good examples of the power of the indoctrinating media here:
1. A huge number of Europeans believe that the moon-landing was very likely staged in Hollywood, and never really happened.
2. The same is true about the US government masterminding 9/11.
3. 90+% of Germans believe in a looming climate catastrophe.
4. The media here has already made Obama into a Messiah-like star.
The citizens here have not been more misled since the days of Adolph Hitler and Josef Goebbels. Was there any mention here of the latest satellite data? Of course not.
Such media power is surely admired by left wing socialists intent on driving a radical tax and control agenda. I know many here will think I’m way off on this – but you’ll see.
There’s only one problem with their scheme though, and you hit it smack on the head. These socialists are surely going to overreach bigtime, and then there’s going to be a huge economic and public backlash.
Already we are seeing a MONSTER IFLATION CYCLE beginning to take hold…all due to needlessy high energy costs.
Inflation is like toothpaste – once it’s out of the tube, it’s real hard to put it back in. And as you have alluded to, Carter was beaten by double digit inflation and unemployment.
I see sunny days ahead, but only after a really bad Category 4 storm.

For your information, a NASA sponsored workshop on “Solar variability, Earth’s Climate and the Space Environment” is being held right (1-6 June) now at Montana State University. For the program: http://solar.physics.montana.edu/SVECSE2008/science_program.html

Not one to argue politics too much, but as an Illinois native I don’t see Obama winning. Key states like Florida and West Virginia don’t seem to like him.
In Peoria, IL, May 2008 was a whopping 8.34 F (4.63 C) colder than May 2007. The soil is still too cold and damp to sow Green Beans.

Obama. Heh. Half of HIllary supporters said they’d vote for McCain if Obama was nominee. That’s a quarter of Dem voters. Another chunk may simply stay home or write in Nadir (sic).
It makes me laugh to see all these *huge* “Obama/Hope” posters around town here in Austin. Texas hasn’t voted for a Dem for the presidency since LBJ in ’64. McCain would have to be caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy for Obama to win Texas. Make me think Dems don’t understand state-by-state winner-takes-all, they carry on as though they live in a pure democracy.

Lennart
Why does it matter if you are comparing temperatures at different parts of the solar cycle? Warmists would have you believe that the sun has nothing to do with climate change and, when it does, it is only Total Solar Irradiance that matters not sun spots!

Terry S + Bill (about the cycle predictions): And your point is?
Jared: “keep in mind that the May 2008 12 month mean does not reflect the low point of this cycle yet”
I didn’t look at the lowest temperature of these cycles, but at the temperatures at the solar cycle minimum. Which we for all intents and purposes are at now. New new cycle may not have started, but solar activity is about as low as it can be expected to go.
You are all, how you say, “clasping at straws”, to try to pretend that global warming isn’t happening. It’s kinda silly, it’s obviously happening. How much and how serious can be debated, but claiming that it isn’t happening requires serious amounts of fact-ignoring. 🙂

What all this means to me is that weather variations are normal and will not respond to charts, graphs and SWAGs. But it also suggests rather strongly that “as CO2 rises, temperature rises” is false. Acording to algorean science, the continuing rise in CO2 should continue to raise Earth’s temperature accordingly. Since it has not it looks like Big Al is wrong again. So what else is new?

If you don’t like fossil fuels, “don’t use them”. I never remember being forced to use any energy source. If you believe that your computer is destroying this planet, then you have the moral obligation to turn it off, and quit using it. This has become more about regulating someone elses access to energy at market prices, than it is about the health of the planet.
I for one, don’t believe any of that AGW crap, and recognize it as a “power-grab” complete with straw man bad-guy, that needs to be defeated. The slogan for AGW should be: “Just give me a global quasi-government panel of regulators, and I will save you from the phantom menace”.
I also believe the best judge of power sources, is the well-informed consumer. If there are alternative sources that have a superior cost-benefit to the end-user, those sources will prevail. If you don’t like any of the sources, boycott the utilities and do it yourself, or do without.
As far as Obama for Prez., he is an attractive candidate, weighed down by the Dumbocratic legacy. The Dems are 2 for the last 7 elections, and those 2 that they won, were both assisted by Ross Parrot, dividing the non-urban voting block. The media will report it as a slam-dunk win, right up until he loses.

No need to SWAG GISS; Hansen’ll do that for you again and again and again until the data matches his models. From the way they keep tweaking the historical record, it looks like he’s got his folks very well trained.

When I was in the Army, we made WAGs = Wild Ass Guesses.
If we really knew what we were doing, we made SWAGs = Sophisticated Wild Ass Guesses. Then I went to grad school.

Chris:

Would it be wrong to say that soot, despite its capacity for dimming, contributes to warming due to ground cover, whereas sulfates contribute to cooling due to its dimming capacity, particularly at higher altitudes.? If true, the combination of US and Europe reducing sulfate emissions and China contributing soot (but not particularly sulfates by using low sulfur coal) could cause the 90’s warming trend.

There’s a great deal of confusion over how aerosols behave depending upon latitude, type, mix, altitude, etc.
In the Indian Ocean and around the entire Pacific basin, including in the American Pacific NW in springtime, soot & sulfates heat the middle troposphere more than they dim the surface (cooling it).

When I suggested over at RC that climate models ought to show sensitivity to changes in aerosol assumptions (i.e., high sulfate, low sulfate, high soot, low soot, etc.), I could never get a straight answer from them.

That’s b/c it’s a big blank spot, and all they really should admit is that they don’t know.

Of course, to do so would expose the models as being highly sensitive to the various net forcings that are conjured up to predict a sensible temperature trend for the last 50 years. In other words, their forcings are not independent of one another. If one is out of whack, the other forcings have to be adjusted to compensate. Again, the modelers could make the forcings independent of one another, but if they did, they would have temperature trends pointing in all directions. As long as global temperatures are going up, it’s easy for them to claim that factors other than CO2 don’t matter much. But, once you have oscillating temps, like the 1940-1970 cooling trend and possibly the 2002-onwards trend, it’s going to get harder for them to justify their rigged forcings.

Indeed. Even Ramanathan and Carmichael have conceded that since the data for aerosols are lacking from the 1970’s, it is only an assumption that aerosols had a net cooling effect. Again, it may have varied by type, color, spin, strangeness, charm, who knows?
So in the case of criticisms of the skeptic “Hoax” movie (sorry I forget its name) when it covers aerosols … those criticisms are just as speculative as any skeptic factoids pulled out of the air. Ramanathan himself has conceded it could go either way.

Instead of implementing cap and trade, how much cheaper would it be to install particulate collection devices on all of China’s power plants? Probably 100 times cheaper!

That’s the whole gig.
Let’s just say if the odds are low that society can quick mitigate CO2 emissions within a time window against whatever risk is posed from “climate change,” then not only is soot abatement cheaper (and doable), but to ignore it and go about screaming only about CO2 is grossly inconsistent. The activists are acting like they can just snap their Luddite fingers & make it so.
Frankly I think the activists would rather keep the polar bears as CO2 poster children than admit that soot even exists. If they believe that CO2 is a big threat, and they know the data on soot (which EDF does, I know that from reading their blog), and they then avoid mention of soot for fear of diluting the CO2 message and just hope that soot mitigation will follow along, they would then be intentionally playing a game of brinksmanship.
IMO either that belies a willingness to use the bears as game pieces, or it’s really not a crisis. Another possibility is that they’re afraid that aerosols, once abated, will reveal a far softer CO2 warming signal.
Either way soot is the carbon that shall not be named.
Since China’s the biggest emitter of soot & aerosols right now, and the Asian Brown Cloud is what led to Ramanathan’s discovery, then once again, we’re stuck on a political dilemma. This one’s easier to solve, though, you’re right. But if CO2’s not the threat and soot turns out to be the pernicious dark horse that falsely implicated CO2 more than its due, then they won’t have a way to foist their last great effort to bring globo-soc onto the world & the USA down from hegemon (like we’d be better off with a “sinohegemon” trading card instead).
So again, soot is the carbon that shall not be named.

Gotta admit, measurements of ocean temperature or energy should yield a better quality than surface, especially land based measurements.
A, it represents the most surface area
B, it is a more homogeneous fluid
C, it is much less suceptable to human influence

Re: Soot and particulates
It’s puzzled me for a while that particulates seem to cause cooling in India and warming in China.
http://www.amazon.com/Temperature-trends-twentieth-century-India/dp/B000RR7WWU
I think the answer lies in the fact India gets a monsoon but is dry for most of the year and China gets snow.
Anyway, the point is that soot and particulates can warm or cool at any given location depending on other factors. To ascribe a global effect is just wrong, unless you have first determined the local and regional effects. And I am quite sure no one has done this.

Skeptic’s theory: Rising temps cause increased CO2.
Falling temps should decrease CO2.
What is the lag time?
Does the CO2 curve show any leveling off?
I’d love to hear the explanations from Hansen, Gore, et.al., if CO2 starts decreasing.

Global cooling is still climate change- that is the buzzphrase used by our environmentalists. So either way you cannot make an argument. It looks people look for perfection from nature, and hell I know that nature disappoints.
Carbon credits and footprints are going to rob our country of growth and more importantly take our effort away from reducing real pollutants like fertilizers, all the chemicals used in manufacturing, mercury from coal fired plants and CFL bulbs alike, NOX and methane.

Here’s what the sunspot number looked like during the 1988/89 event – http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/solar/satallite_vs_spots.gif

David,
Why not just make it 0.5?
We’ll see where we end up, but your original 0.1-0.2 is only 0.5-1 deg century. That’s about the long term trend since the 19th century, which indicates little acceleration and does not seem to be “catastrophic” to me. To get to 2 deg/century, you’d have to find a way to bump it up to 0.4, so I figure the 0.5 should give you a cushion.

Too funny Jeff.
I read on the net that Gore and Hansen are on suicide watch.

David,
Your the one that was pickin’ La Nina’s. Weren’t you the one that wanted to focus on 1988? Why start in 1979? You mentioned the surface record, tell me what the trend is since 1950. How about since 1925? 1900? Pick a year, any year. Just make sure you don’t start at the end of the last cool phase of the PDO.

The professor: “Doesn’t the fact that you are citing solar cycles suggest that AGW is not the catastrophe that some are positing?”
Eh, no. Solar cycles have a short-term impact on climate no matter how hot the planet is. Even if the planet would get so hot that the polar caps melted, global temperatures at solar minima would still be colder than at solar maxima.
The point is that when the temperature rises, skeptics come with all sorta of arguments of why it’s not relevant. One being: “It’s just the solar cycle”. But ever time it drops, then that is somehow a real change showing that global warming isn’t happening. That sort of argumentation is pseudo-science best contained in sunday-school.
“There seems to be little evidence that human beings are contributing much — if at all — to global temperature variations.”
First of all, if humans are contributing to it or not is really besides the point. It’s a problem no matter what. Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.
Tom: “But it also suggests rather strongly that “as CO2 rises, temperature rises” is false. Acording to algorean science, the continuing rise in CO2 should continue to raise Earth’s temperature accordingly. Since it has not it looks like Big Al is wrong again. So what else is new?”
But it HAS risen. Or are you taking a relative fall as proof that there is no absolute rise? With that logic, every winter is proof Al Gore is wrong, because temperature falls compared to the summer. Climate doesn’t quote work like that. 🙂
Walter Dnes: “And I can pull up solar cycle predictions to argue the other way.”
Please, go ahead. The rest of us can talk about something that is relevant for the topic.
Terry S: “The clear implication from what you say is that the current weakness in the solar cycle is enough to mask any effect of increasing CO2 and in order to do that its impact must be at least the same as CO2.”
No, what I’m saying is that the warming will hopefully not be as problematic during cycle 25 as it otherwise would have been.
“I’d be willing to bet that as little as 6 months ago you would have claimed that the solar cycle had no effect whatsoever on climate.”
How much do you want to bet?
“Its good to see that we are changing some minds.”
No, you are not. You are just clasping at pseudo-scientific straws in an attempt to to take the issue seriously.

In order to fit the definition of ‘global warming’…mustn’t global temperatures increase consistantly forever and ever from here to infinity?
As a so called ‘denier’, I don’t claim future cooling or warming. I could care less about prognostication…it seems rather pointless. This is why, as a meteorology graduate, I giggle at climate models.
Our ego’s help in rationalizing that which we exert no control (the earth, the universe), but they grant us hubris in conculsions.
And since it’s ‘all about the data’…what has happened so far is most important. Trends are nice, too. But since 1998…where is the ‘global warming’ trend?
Even with warming…it would be much more beneficial than enormous cooling. Why? Plants would thrive, growing seasons extended, ocean travel widened through the Arctic. Definitely not all bad! Yes, sea level rise wouldn’t be all that nice…polar bears would have to move south or face suicide. But this is all hypothetical!
Even some of my ex professors whom get massive funding for claiming future warming…for their climate ‘ego-driven’ models….cannot see into the foggy future.
We must let go of the need for absolute certainty and absolute ego fulfilment. We must learn to accept things for how they will naturally swing…it’s how the Earth works. And how it is affected by the Sun, and how things other than humans influence it.
May 2008 seems to continue a downward trend. Wouldn’t it be nice if it continued? Our brains are overactive with fantasy, aren’t they! Too disapprove of IPCC/NASA/NDCP predictions? To see if another Maunder minimum happens? To see ski season extended for 9 months out of the year in the Northern Rockies? To see world wide disaster and famine because of cold global temperatures as a backlash at human ‘hubris’?! Heh. May be not. May be so. Or may be the opposite? Time will tell…but even if I could…I wouldn’t want to look into a crystal ball showing the future.
It is more interesting to let it happen.
As a AGW denier…this is what I believe.
Ken Westerman
Meteorology B.S. University of Utah 2007

Secondly, the evidence is overwhelming, if you just dare look at it.
I have looked at it, in considerably more detail than most. I have yet to see any persuasive evidence that CO2 is responsible for significant warming in the last 100 years. This is despite billions of dollars being spent trying to find such evidence.
I understand science and how repeatable data that can only be explained by a certain theory is persuasive evidence that the theory is correct.
I too believed AGW was real, just exaggerated for political and other purposes. Having looked the evidence, I now think now think any CO2 greenhouse effect (from the increases over the last 50 to 100 years) is so small that we can’t detect it. That is why there is no persuasive evidence.
When you confront the AGWers with the shakiness of their evidence, invariably they retreat to ‘but its the only way we can explain the warming that has occurred.’
Which is why the discussions come down to, is the warming real and can the warming be explained by other causes. Because if CO2 isn’t causing significant or even measurable warming, then either the warming isn’t real or it has some other cause (or causes).

Lennart,
relevant to the topic is that AGW “THEORY” requires a couple of specific things to happen. These are things the MODELS PREDICT. In other words, for their physics to be correct, and the models relevant, these things MUST happen.
One is that the upper troposphere in the tropics is supposed to warm faster than surface temp. It is barely warming, no where near surface rate.
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html
Another part of the theory is that the ocean is supposed to be storing heat that will be the buffer to keep things warm during solar minima and other inconvenient periods. The Argo project data found no extra heat down to 2000 meters. In fact, it recorded a very minor COOLING!!
Until recently they claimed both Arctic and Antarctic would warm and start melting. While the Arctic has melted very nicely for various reasons the Antarctic has been very stable and has above average sea ice and Ice Pack!!
As has been mentioned previously, the only consistent warming has been in the Northern Hemisphere where most of the temperature record has been contaminated by over reliance on stations in UHI’s and questionable adjustments..
So, when scientists find that the data disagrees with the theory they typically adjust, change, or throw out the theory. When AGW types find data disagrees with the theory, they adjust, change, or throw out the data.
Let me put this another way. For AGW to be happening, CO2, and other so-called Greenhouse Gases must be causing EXTRA heat to be retained in the earth environment. That means that if all the heat radiates and can’t be found there is no DANGEROUS AGW. Since 2003, during the highest temps on modern record, the oceans did NOT warm. Now that the air is cooling off AND the oceans are not warming, where is the extra heat that proves the AGW theory?? There is some data from below 2000 meters and it does not show any extra heat either.
Here is a cool tool that lets you drill down through the ocean depths to see the temps. It is at annual, but, you can look through it month by month also with the arrow controls at the top:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/OC5/WOA05F/woa05f.pl
Here is a site that has extensive links to published papers on paleo data showing the Medieval Warming Period was warmer than now AND global.
http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/mwpp.php
Their home page has links to effects of elevated CO2 on plant life also.

That sort of argumentation is pseudo-science best contained in sunday-school….much like man global warming catastrophic predictions based on computer models that can’t predict chaotic systems, but none the less are taken as gospel?
Face the fact, dropping temperatures are in direct contradiction to the IPCC’s calculations of radiative forcing. “Greenhouse” gases are supposed to have the strongest positive forcing of all, and the sun’s not even close according to their charts. CO2 has gone way up, since ~2000 temperatures have stabilized and in the last year have gone down.
How would the IPCC explain that? With a computer model?

Lenny appears to be confusing absolute temp from winter to spring or cycle to cycle with what is actually measured in the charts we all use. The charts look at deviation from whatever “zero” is picked and then averaged over time, comparing same month to same month, year by year, change from the initial average (which keeps changing). It isn’t comparing winter to spring. The latest drop in May compares just May to May to May, etc. Mays’ are getting colder. Aprils’ are getting colder.
Re: his argument that CO2 warming is masked by cycle cooling is a simplistic view of climate change that smacks of one rearranging his prejudices, not thinking or reasoning scientifically. However, It IS a classic debate technique and I give him 4 marks. As to whether or not his side’s theory proves correct, here is a tip just in case the other side of the debate is correct: Pendleton Woolen Mills blankets are TOASTY warm and well worth the price.

Lennart says:
“First of all, if humans are contributing to it or not is really besides the point.”
Well, there you have it! We should therefore not try to “control” the climate by imposing the silly “cap and trade” nonsense. I’m glad the warm-mongers and I can agree on something…

I wish the major newspapers would cover this news. This is the first time I am hearing about this. Shouldn’t the UAH study have been in the front page everywhere? It is not being alarmist to report the facts..

Lennart:
“The point is that when the temperature rises, skeptics come with all sorta of arguments of why it’s not relevant. One being: “It’s just the solar cycle”. But ever time it drops, then that is somehow a real change showing that global warming isn’t happening.
Actually I think the skeptics point is that the warming and cooling is not PRIMARILY driven, if at all, by AGW / CO2. “When it warms it’s just the solar cycle” [not CO2 driven AGW]. “But everY time it drops [while CO2 levels are still rising therefore nature over AGW CO2].
Skeptic blogs might watch the temperature a little too closely when temps are falling [as does the Warmist media when it rises] but their message is consistent, nature over man made (or Mann made?).
Now, if you want to point to an inconsistent message try these
1) “Global Warming Catostrophe” was changed to “Climate Change Catastrophe”.
2) “Hurricane / storm FREQUENCY is being increased due to global warming” to “Hurricane / storm SEVERITY is being increased due to global warming.”
3) “Ocean temperatures are the single most important measurement global temperatures”. “The ARGOS cooling since 2003 is interesting but doesnt impact the GCM’s.” “The SST bucket/inlet bias does impact the historical temperature records, but the land date is more important anyway.”
4) “GCM’s show us that temperatures will CONTINUE TO RISE throughout the 21st century” to “a 15 – 20 year leveling off or cooling is consistent with the GCM’s. “After all, we didnt say the temperture rise would be monotonic” though as an engineer I kind of thought that’s what runaway positive feedback is in the first place.
Ludicrous.

Lennart:
I think I see. You believe that the 11-year +/- solar cycles have a significant impact on global temperature, but that the long-term trend toward increased solar activity does not. Presumably you would say that the earth quickly reaches equilibrium temperature for any given level of solar activity, so that a series of relatively strong solar cycles has no cumulative impact, it just makes for increased variability around the underlying trend. Are those fair statements?

Lennart:
John, an AGW climatologist, has his own blog & site much like RC, and he tackles all the skeptic arguments with aplomb.
I asked him about TSI, he told me point blank: The sun’s avg. output has decreased by about 0.33 W/m-2, easing Earth’s temperatures by -0.1 degrC over a 17 year period, and essentially masking greenhouse gases by the same amount.
Now, I’m a skeptic to the extent I think it has yet to be proven CO2’s warming effects are being buried in the seas & enhanced via water vapor, so I am OK with asserting that a dimming sun would mask GHG effects.
Barring there being a huge dangerous backlog of heat in the seas heretofore undiscovered OR some emergent factor that’d enhance water vapor feedbacks, please consider this:
If “natural variations” and a slightly lower TSI are all that’s required to mask the effects of man made GHG and those “masking” agents themselves have a minor effect, then the man-made GHG (I’ll just refer to MM-GHG as GHG from hereon for convention) effect is mild as well.
Or of both those factors are large, they could be temporarily masking a *large* GHG effect.
However, if we accept Dr. Svalgaard’s point that a large drop in TSI-effective is unlikely (and assuming TSI serves as a decent proxy for composite solar influence) then that’s one factor that can’t only contribute a minor masking effect.
That leaves us with “natural variations” (which Roger Pielke has described as a misnomer).
If natural variations are large & noisy, and only temporarily offset GHG effects then we have a problem.
Obviously GHG have helped bring the average up. But what if something else is going on, such as GHG not only adding extra amplitude on the peaks and bringing the average up, but also possibly even extra lows in the troughs as excess heat is offloaded more dramatically by a system that may want to tend toward thermal stability. The average might go up just a small bit, but the anomaly swings (up and down) would become more pronounced. A moodier system may not be a healthier one, but it’s not necessarily portentous of catastrophe.
And then there’s the other question of how long are we to accept that natural variations are still just variations and not long-term climate, as with the sun?

Does anyone else have a problem with the first 100 years of data (i.e., 1860 to 1940) in HadCRUT?
Does anyone know how bootstrapping can provide a “Global” “Average” temperature using thermometer data from less than 16% of the globe? (as is the case for the year 1860)
Is anyone else concerned with comparing a “Global” “Average” temperature which does NOT include data from Central Africa in year X to a “Global” “Average” which DOES include data from Central Africa in year X+1?
Is anyone else concerned that bootstrapping is only reliable when applied to Normally Distributed data — which Global temperatures clearely are not?

I’m not any sort of scientist, but just a lay person. The thing I keep coming back to is that as of now, its been warm for a few years and the media is hyping Global Warming. In the 70’s, it was cold for a few years and the media hyped Global Cooling and the coming of the Next Ice Age. In the 30’s it was warm for a few years and if you go back and look at the papers, they hyped a Global Warming crisis. And, if you go back all the way to the papers in the 1880’s, it was cold for a few years in a row, and they talked about the coming of a new Ice Age too!
In a few years, it will be cold for a few years in a row and the same people telling us about the Global Warming Crisis will be telling us we are all doomed to the coming of a new Ice Age.

david,
See link below where May anomalies are compared by latitude:
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/UAHMSUMAY.jpg
As you can see, the difference between May of this year and other cool May’s is NH anomalies. May of this year had very low anomalies for Tropics and SH, but slightly warmer for NH (when compared to the cooler May’s). This is where aerosols fit in. 85% of all aerosols are in the NH. Lower sulfate emissions in NA/Europe and higher soot emissions in China are the reason why NH anomalies are consistently higher now – not CO2. Plot the SG anomalies for the past 30 years (satellite data). The trend is flat.
Also, why would you believe the temperature trends prior to satellite-derived data? That is the very definition of wishful thinking. Also, if you are going argue against a 10-yr trend by suggesting a 30-yr or 100-yr trend, why stop at that? How about a 1000 or 2000 yr trend? Reconcile this fact: 2008 ytd temperature is roughly the same as it was in 1940 (Hadcrut data). I will be more specific when the latest Hadcrut data is out.

Anna v: “A mild warming of the lower temperatures in the northern hemisphere of a degree or two ( which is where the warming comes from) will be beneficial to agriculture and even by IPCC numbers will not raise sea levels more than 50cm. Humanity is adapting daily and weakly to much larger variations. So a mild warming is not a problem.”
Well, “mild” could be defined as “not being problematic”, so yes. 🙂 But I don’t think most climatologists are of the opinion that one or two degrees is “mild”. 🙂
“The evidence is not overwhelming that the warming is due to anthropogenic CO2.”
Possibly not, but so far we have in this thread yet to agree on if the arming even exists, and that’s what is discussed now. Lets keep on track for that topic for a while.
“All we need is 100 years grace to have lots of energy from fusion reactors”
Oh, yeah, that would be nice. But how much do temperature have to go up until you agree that we’re not gonna get that?
Philip_B: “I have yet to see any persuasive evidence that CO2 is responsible for significant warming in the last 100 years. ”
See above.
Kuhnkat: “These are things the MODELS PREDICT. In other words, for their physics to be correct, and the models relevant, these things MUST happen.”
No, for global warming to happen, the globe needs to get warmer, long term. Again, this discussion hasn’t gotten to any theories yet. The post claims that because the temperature has been dropping, there is no global warming. We haven’t gotten further than that in the discussion yet.
Bob B:
“go look at the 700Kyr ice core record. The very small temperature rise is a tiny tiny blip on the record.”
What kind of screwed logic is that? With that sort of reasoning the last ice age wan’t really an ice age, because compared to the temperatures during “snowball earth” 700 miljon years ago it was just “a blip”. It’s completely irrelevant if temperatures was higher hundreds of thousands years ago. This is NOW.
“Second, the beginning of 2008 is about “average” global temps”
Read my previous answers.
Pamela Gray:
You talki about some “Lenny”. As I can find no Lenny in the discussion, I suspect she meant me, but found my name to complicated. Please accept my excuses if you isn’t talking about me at all. However, if you DO talk about me, then you could stop doing that, and talk TO me instead.
“Lenny appears to be confusing absolute temp from winter to spring or cycle to cycle with what is actually measured in the charts we all use.”
I nether do not appear to do this. Try again.
“The charts look at deviation from whatever “zero” is picked and then averaged over time, comparing same month to same month, year by year, change from the initial average (which keeps changing).”
Since we are talking about 12 month averages, I.e YEARLY averages, it doesn’t matter if each deviation for each month is relative to the monthly average or any other point. It would end up being the same anyway, since it’s a 12 month average. And one of my main point here is that not even that can be used to say of it’s getting warmer or colder, since some of the cycles that affect climate, like the solar cycle, are several years long.
Bruce Cobb: “then adaptation is all we need to be concerned with, not idiotically trying to reduce the completely beneficial gas C02.”
No, you see, even if the temperature increase isn’t primarily caused by humans, that doesn’t suddenly make greenhouse gases non-greenhouse gases. And it doens’t make the temperature increase benign. And it doesn’t make adaptation any easier or any better. An increase in temperature i an increase in temperature, no matter what caused it.
Dan: “Ludicrous.”
If you say so. But calling it that will no make it go away.
For your other comments, see my answers to others above.
Morgan: “You believe that…”
No, I don’t. Don’t try to guess what I believe, you will be wrong. Read what I write, and answer/criticise that. Do not start criticising beliefs which I have not expressed.
There. Now you know. So, try answering again, and you probably will come with a much better answer. 🙂
Jeff: “If you insist on focusing only on the last 30 years, then you’ve started your own sunday school.”
Why? How come the warming that has happened the last 30 years doesn’t count in your opinion?
skepticsglobalwarming: “All this while carbon dioxide emissions continue to climb. So either carbon dioxide emissions have no relation to temperature or carbon dioxide lags temperature.”
OR, the temperature measurements are in fact correct, and temperature HAS risen.

US temp data from the NOAA is in their database, but not updated on their website and it still shows the summary for April 2008 (as of 06/05/08 at 1:30 pm EST).
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html
However if you put in the Month as May, it will calculate and give the results for May 08.
It comes up with these results for May 2008.
Average temp 60.30 F
Ranks as 35th coldest May out of 114 years (80th Warmest)
-.85 Fdegrees below average (1895-2008 base) of 61.15
This is -5.11 F below the hottest May on record which is 1934.

Wattsupwiththat is mentioned in this Register article about the discrepancy between GISS and, well…everyone else: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/goddard_nasa_thermometer/print.html

GISS is so hard to guess because it has so very little contact with reality.

No, you see, even if the temperature increase isn’t primarily caused by humans, that doesn’t suddenly make greenhouse gases non-greenhouse gases. And it doens’t make the temperature increase benign. And it doesn’t make adaptation any easier or any better. An increase in temperature i an increase in temperature, no matter what caused it.
My my, Len, you do like to prattle on about nothing whatsoever, exposing your complete ignorance, in the true style of Bimbolopithicus Climatensis. The issue is with C02, whose warming effect is relatively small, and decreases further as C02 levels increase. Further, man’s contribution of C02 is only about 3%, making his warming contribution via the burning of fossil fuels negligible. There is, in fact, absolutely nothing man can do about climate change except to adapt, and if you think adapting to warming is hard, try adapting to cooling. It is idiotic to think that a cooling climate, which is almost a certainty at this point is preferable to a warming one.

Wahhhh, I want my global warming!
Seriously folks, I’m freezing my butt off up here (in New England) I want it to be warm!

David, it depends on how you define the starting and ending points:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2008/no-statistically-significant-warming-since-2000/
Certainly since 2002 there has been a clear decline in the Earth’s temps even before the recent El Nino

re: David
All of the temperature metrics show the recent cooling to some degree or another, not just UAH. And GISS is the only metric that shows warming in the past 10 years.
Also, if you are saying all of the recent cooling is due to ENSO, consider this…
2002-07 featured 3 El Ninos and no La Ninas. Also, if AGW is ongoing, how is this most recent Nina (not as strong as the previous one in 1999-2000) dropping global temps just as low (if not lower) as that one? Shouldn’t the effect be less, since ENSO just “masks” AGW?

I don’t believe one should use the UAH 0.13C per decade trend line. It should be discarded.
The May 2008 anomaly 0f -0.18C is lower the December 1978 anomaly when the satellite measurements began.
In essence, the Excel-generated regression line producing a 0.13C trend is just an artefact. Data points that are shaped like a half circle will also produce a positive trend line when one should just say “the trend is a half circle. It went up, now it has come down.”
Of course, some of the recent decline is likely La Nina produced and, thus, a temporary variation in the general trend. But we are nearing 30 years of NO net change in temperatures at all which is not a trend at all in my mind.

Global cooling? We cannot make too many conclusions from one cold May. I don’t think this signifies a trend in our global climate, other than the one involving a greater set of abnormalities. C’mon, is anyone going to take this one fact as evidence we have nothing to worry about when it comes to driving Hummers et al?

Nativecoach:
Did you not read many of the comments here? We aren’t talking about one month of cooling…all of 2008 has been cool. And the trend for the past 10 years globally has been flat or slight cooling. Until that trend changes, the evidence indicates that global warming has stopped…for whatever reason.

“We are not being given a straight story by the environmental activists, they are bent upon galvanizing a herd of people into a huge gov’t controlled society that redistributes wealth. That’s not environmentalism, that’s socialism.” leebert
The wealth distribution currently seems to be from the middle class to the very wealthy via fractional reserve banking, so some resentment of the rich is in order.
Until we have an honest banking system we are in danger of even more socialism.
some great quotes about banking:
http://www.barefootsworld.net/banking-fed-quotes.html

Oops. Sorry. That last one should read
In the Waikato, New Zealand, the highest temp in May 2007 was 22 C. In May 2008 the highest temp was 18.5 C.

Len, Lenny, or Lennart:
You can call me Pam, Pammy, Pamela, Pamela Sue, Strawberry Shortcake, Lil Red, Mrs. Gray, Miss Makin, Liberal Lil, Teach, bookish, stubborn, “campaigner to fight alcohol abuse and save the beer”, Cancer Lip (no thanks to the sun), Graydancer, Excommunicated Catholic, or just plain ol’ Farmer Gray. For me, I am beginning too warm up two Len.
So Len, I’m confused. Do you believe that warming is caused by CO2 and cooling is caused by the sun? Jez askin cuz I’m wonderin how you wood modul that.

Looks like you got an Instalanche today. Please keep up the good work, word is getting out. The more people learn, the more they question the conventional wisdom.
I’ll bet June is another record setting month for blog traffic.

WRT “masking” of AGW by natural events (Solar, ENSO / PDO):
If these cycles are strong enough to negate the effects of CO2 – even when we would have gotten warming with zero emissions after 2000, yet we have increased emissions since then – then we must consider the possibility that attribution studies may have seriously underestimated the contribution of natural variations, and adjust our estimates of CO2 forcing downwards. After all, if the negative (cool) phases of these cycles can pull several degrees C out of temperatures, is it not likely the positive (warm) phases add a similar amount?

Pamela Gray,
Is it discreet
to say you “fleet”?
No wonder you fly,
so would I!

Jeff said: We know sea levels were higher during the Roman Warm Period, ask some ancient historians. We know most glacial retreat occurred before 1950, ask some glaciologists.

Phillip_B said: I’m going to call you on both these statements.
Sea levels were substantially lower in Roman times. We know this from historical records. For example a Roman map shows a substantial island between England and France. We know this island was inundated by the sea around 1100.

And I heard references from many historians stating the opposite, buildings which were originally built near the shore are now hundreds of feet from the shore. I guess we both need to find some references.

While have we good records for some glaciers going back 70 to a 100 years, we have little to no data on many others. Even today we can not say with any certainty whether overall glacial mass is increasing or decreasing.

And the data we do have show that the majority of modern glacial retreat occurred before 1950. So how’s that calling me on it?

As a complete newbie (despite my username which I use in many forums) I have a question in relation to the GISS figures.
I have plotted two maps from the GISS/NASA website for April with a 250km radius with and without the Hadreyn Ocean figures and there is a significant difference in the apparent overall global anomaly. When GISS publish their global temperature anomaly does this take into account the Ocean figures or does it just use the GISS measurements. Also do they make any attempt to fill the large areas where they have no data (Africa, Greenland, Northern Canada for example)
REPLY: See these articles by my friend John Goetz, they should shed a lot of light on the issue:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2964
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3094
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3100

Lennart in response to my post: ” But it HAS risen. Or are you taking a relative fall as proof that there is no absolute rise? ”
When I posted,“as CO2 rises, temperature rises” that is directly from the guru of gobbledygok himself, Algore. I didn’t say it, he did. And as every honest person admits, he flipped the graph from Co2 follows temp to temp follows Co2 in order to match his claims. I also qualified my next statement with ” Acording to algorean science” and yes, according to Big Al’s “theory” rise in CO2 should continue to raise Earth’s temperature accordingly. No ups and downs, only a claimed direct temperature response to CO2 increase. He said it, not me. And finally, you said,
“With that logic, every winter is proof Al Gore is wrong, because temperature falls compared to the summer. Climate doesn’t quite work like that. ”
Exactly, this point has been made often in response to the “tipping points” scare. Climate doesn’t quite work like that is exactly correct. Thank you for the verification, welcome to our side of the debate.

This is so much fun for an avid weather freak like me!
Leif provided a GREAT source for looking at current cosmic ray data as well as time scaled data:
http://cosmicrays.oulu.fi/
We already have ozone data and maps as well as water vapor data and maps. Plus temp data and maps.
Would it be possible to layer these maps on a day to day basis? Temp combined with water vapor/cloud stuff combined with ozone maps? The theory is that cosmic rays, which are hitting earth in an onslaught during minimums, destroy ozone, allowing ray particle penetration into lower atmospheric levels thus more effectively seeding through ionization which creates cloud cover and temp changes. I wonder how it affects the jet stream. From there pressure changes set up warm and cold fronts. That would be a cool map.
Could it be that solar forcing is far more active during minimums than at any other time? And planet reflective heating is active during maximums? Maybe we should be looking at two models.

“Public school teachers have not caused global warming, 9/11, high gas prices, or your ingrown toenail. Nor did we put the sun to sleep”
Pam,
Actually, I blame fractional reserve banking for those things.
AND
Don’t worry or be blue;
they’ll always be work
for someone like you.
Even AFTER we destroy the government school system and sow salt on the ground. Oh, and you’ll get a raise too. Perhaps a bonus if the administrators can be sold for body parts:)

Oh darn. NOW what will the fear-mongers cook up for us?

Brian D.:
You are correct of course, I misreported a tribal report of two weeks, not three, for the Central MN lake of my acquaintence. The sample size of one may shock but awe was not my end goal.

Wichita!
I thought y’all might be amused by a local annual average temperature model I developed for Wichita, KS. I like the Wichita data because it has no missing points in the time series, which starts in the late 19th century – pretty amazing.
I’m still searching for a rough mathematical definition of the construct “average global temperature.” Here I was positing that surface temperature follows a multifractal distribution, so that increasing the number of stations contributing data actually *increases* the variance of the measurement. I think the hypothesis is roughly worked out using station data from Canada for the month of April.
Fractal Properties of ST data
Enjoyed reading the posts here – science will prevail, it always does. Even though progress is being delayed by the current Stalinization of climate research for the benefit of the Inner Party.

In the Cascades we have record snowpack. But don’t tell that to the liberals – they do not deal with reality very well.

er….Dennis…I am a liberal…and life long resident of Oregon.

Bob B: “troll”
Yeah, very creative. Do you have any actual criticism to anything I says, or any questions of what I said? What is it you don’t understand?
Leebert: “dangerous AGW”
Tom in Florida: “Al Gore”
You guys are still trying to change the topic I see. Well, I’m not gonna. I don’t fall for that kind of cheap debating tricks. You are only fooling yourselves, but nobody else.
Pamela Gray: “Do you believe that warming is caused by CO2 and cooling is caused by the sun? Jez askin cuz I’m wonderin how you wood modul that.”
Answer: No.
—————-
A reminder: The blog post to which we are commenting is trying to claim that global warming is not happening, because global temperatures on the short-term scale has been sinking. I’m trying to explain that this is bogus reasoning.
Since everybody now seems to want to switch topics, my question is: Is there still somebody who does *not* understand why that kind of reasoning is incorrect?

True, it’s just what the earliest comments say. My bad.
“No.”
So, then we agree. Global warming is happening.

Lennart,
Are you suggesting that Global Warming is proven by a 19-year (not 20-30) period during which temperatures rose by 0.134 degrees Celsius (0.24 degree Fahrenheit)?

Lennart,
Are YOU the only person who does not understand why that reasoning is incorrect?
(HINT: It’s the same “global temperatures on a short term scale” reasoning that YOU are were rightfully dismissive of)

When we are 50% short of the amount of food we need is that based on 1980’s starving in Ethopia, the famines in Turkey during WWII or just based on regular type, common starving?

Credible evidence of warming over more than a century would convince me of a warming trend.
Once such trend is established, nothing short of showing that the warming is unprecedented in scale and scope would convince me that such a trend is anything other than natural variation attributable to any of a multitude of causes.
Temperature data prior to 1940 is not statistically reliable.

David:
“Credible evidence of warming over more than a century would convince me of a warming trend.”
Practical then that you dismiss all that older than 50 years.
“Once such trend is established, nothing short of showing that the warming is unprecedented in scale and scope would convince me that such a trend is anything other than natural variation attributable to any of a multitude of causes.”
The word “natural” is meaningless. If humans caused it, it is still natural, as we are a part of nature. The word “natural” here is used by you to convincce yourself that your arguments are meaningful. They aren’t. They warming is happening and it has the same effects no matter how “natural” it is. That it is “natural” does not make it good.