Guest post by Bob Tisdale
Near the current end of the thread titled National Post: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof Allan asked, “What is your global average temperature prediction for the next several decades?” There were a few responses, including Allan’s. I sent an email to Anthony, letting him know I believed it would make a fun thread. He agreed and asked me to write up a starter post to get the ball rolling.
So, here’s Allan’s original group of questions:
What is your global average temperature prediction for the next several decades?
– warming or cooling?
– for how many years?
– on what technical basis?
– for the dataset provided (UAH Global anomaly) how would you extrapolate, if at all – linear, polynomial, or ???
– does anyone believe that a linear extrapolation is valid? If yes, how do you reconcile with the cyclical nature of the PDO and global avg. temperatures?
Let’s hear what you believe, not just what you don’t believe.
Thanks, Allan
I didn’t want to repost the comments of the others without their okay. If they wish, they can add them and identify themselves, or you can go back to the thread and see who they were. Here’s my response, edited with the correction already included:
Allan: I’ll join in the predictions, but I’ll use the slow cycle in the Southern Ocean SST anomalies as my base.
Cooling for 50 to 60 years, counteracting most if not all of the warming over the last 60 years. There will be amplification then dampening of the cooling due to Thermohaline Circulation/Meridional Overturning Circulation in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. They’ll run in synch at first, but then the cycles will counteract one another. The intermittent positive step changes resulting from large El Nino events (82/83 and 97/98 magnitude) will disappear, since the additional heat supplied to the equatorial Pacific by the Southern Ocean and the THC/MOC in the North Pacific has been dissipated. They’ll be replaced by larger and more frequent La Ninas.
We’ll check back here on this thread in 20 years, see how we’re doing.
My prognostication is based on too many hours spent looking at graphs of sea surface temperature, many of which I post at my blog: http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/
So, as Allan said, “Let’s hear what you believe, not just what you don’t believe.” There are no right or wrong answers. Twenty to fifty years from now some of you will be able to claim you predicted what happened.
The graph of the Southern Ocean SST anomalies is this data set smoothed with a 12-month running-average filter:
ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/ersst/pdo/aravg.mon.ocean.90S.60S.asc
The selection page for it and other data sets (land only, ocean only, and land-ocean combined, all at various latitude bands) is here. Don’t let the PDO suffix worry you. There’s lots more there:
ftp://eclipse.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/ersst/pdo
The discussion page:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/sst/ersstv3.php
I predict that one of the following will occur:
A. Major comet or asteroid strike, devastating the planet and destroying all human and animal life, rendering any climate shift irrelevant.
B. An eruption of a super-volcano, devastating the planet and destroying all human and animal life, rendering any climate shift irrelevant.
C. A global outbreak of nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons, devastating the planet and destroying all human and animal life, rendering any climate shift irrelevant.
Or maybe I should just spend less time watching Discovery Channel….
New word of the week: Disasterphile
If there’s anything I learned from this whole AGW thing, it’s that, it’s absurd to try to predict the weather years from now with ANY certainty.
I’ll play this game. Start with Don Easterbrook’s projection of cooling for the next 30 years from normal cyclical influences he details:
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~dbunny/research/global/215.pdf
Add in (or rather subtract) cooling from weaker solar cycles, and we have cooling to 2040 of 1.5 degrees C. (This hunch might be as good as my football picks.)
Cooling over the next 20 years. Maybe longer, but we’re going to recheck this in only 20 years. 🙂
Forgot the primary reasons: Solar activity low 11-22 years, PDO cool 20-30 years.
Suggestion for a separate article: Estimates on when the IPCC’s warming estimates will be accepted as failures.
Anthony, I suppose this is basically OT, but maybe you could stretch a point (or create a suitable thread)?
I’ve never been really sure whether Monckton’s background (and his APS piece in particular) made him look foolish or not, but when it comes to dealing with AGW from a policy-making perspective, this looks to me compelling reading. (It disappeared off the bottom of icecap after only two days and perhaps may not therefore have caught the attention of the blogosphere at large).
His “essay” (and their introduction to it) is copied from the pro-environmentalist “SOS Forests” (just a random choice). The original source was the American Thinker of 18 October.
I quote:
In one of the greatest essays of our day and age, the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley has warned Senator John McCain that his (McCain’s) “climate change” policies present a terrible threat to the economies of the U.S. and the entire world.
Lord Monckton is more than a global warming skeptic; he is the most rational and lucid voice in the world today in opposition to the global warming alarmists. His essay, posted today in the American Thinker, is the clearest and most penetrating debunking of global warming theory ever written. More than that, Lord Monkton presents the case that addressing this non-problem by crippling the economy of the U.S. will thrust the entire world into a darkness of deprivation and authoritarianism unmatched in human history.
John McCain has adopted Gore-ism. Barack Obama has, as well. We cannot survive either man as President, and yet we have no other choices. This country is hurtling toward a terrible catastrophe.
Please read Lord Monckton’s letter. You deserve to know what hit you. Some excerpts:
An open letter from The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to Senator John McCain about Climate Science and Policy
By The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, American Thinker, October 18, 2008
Part 1 [here]
Part 2 [here]
Part 3 [here]
Part 4 [here]
Dear Senator McCain, Sir,
YOU CHOSE a visit to a wind-farm in early summer 2008 to devote an entire campaign speech to the reassertion of your belief in the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change – a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, but is now scientifically discredited.
With every respect, there is no rational basis for your declared intention that your great nation should inflict upon her own working people and upon the starving masses of the Third World the extravagantly-pointless, climatically-irrelevant, strategically-fatal economic wounds that the arrogant advocates of atmospheric alarmism admit they aim to achieve.
Britain and the United States, like England and Scotland on the first page of Macaulay’s splendid History of England, are bound to one another by “indissoluble bonds of interest and affection”. Here in this little archipelago from which your Pilgrim Fathers sailed, we have a love-love relationship with what Walt Whitman called your “athletic democracy”. You came to our aid – to the aid of the world – when Britain had stood alone against the mad menace of Hitler. Your fearless forces and ours fight shoulder to shoulder today on freedom’s far frontiers. The shortest but most heartfelt of our daily prayers has just three words: “God bless America!” For these reasons – of emotion as much as of economics, of affection as much as of interest – it matters to us that the United States should thrive and prosper. We cannot endure to see her fail, not only because if she fails the world fails, but also because, as the philosopher George Santayana once said of the British Empire and might well now have said of our sole superpower, “the world never had sweeter masters.” If the United States, by the ignorance and carelessness of her classe politique, mesmerized by the climate bugaboo, casts away the vigorous and yet benign economic hegemony that she has exercised almost since the Founding Fathers first breathed life into her enduring Constitution, it will not be a gentle, tolerant, all-embracing, radically-democratic nation that takes up the leadership of the world.
It will be a radically-tyrannical dictatorship – perhaps the brutal gerontocracy of Communist China, or the ruthless plutocracy of supposedly ex-Communist Russia, or the crude, mediaeval theocracy of rampant Islam, or even the contemptible, fumbling, sclerotic, atheistic-humanist bureaucracy of the emerging European oligarchy that has stealthily stolen away the once-paradigmatic democracy of our Mother of Parliaments from elected hands here to unelected hands elsewhere. For government of the people, by the people and for the people is still a rarity today, and it may yet perish from the earth if America, its exemplar, destroys herself in the specious name of “Saving The Planet”.
more »
I should have left a link for his whole polemic. Here it is: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/an_open_letter_from_the_viscou_1.html
I predict another 20 years of cooling as per below website:
http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/al-gore-cartoon/
We are cooling, folks. For how long even kim doesn’t know.
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I’ll take a fuzzy generational approach:
My mom, as a schoolchild, experienced the HOT dust bowl years on the Great Plains in the 1930’s.
Myself, as a schoolchild, experienced the COOL years of the 1960’s. Talk was of the coming ice age.
My son, who is currently a schoolchild, is experiencing the current WARM period. Talk is of catastrophic global warming.
My grandchild, as a schoolchild, will experience the COOL years of the 2040’s. Talk will be of the coming ice age.
My great grandchild, as a schoolchild, will experience a WARM period in the 2080’s. Talk will be of natural variation with a modest CO2 forcing.
So there you have it. I predict that climate science will have figured out climate forcing feedback loops, or the lack thereof, in about 70 years.
AJ
Cooling for 50 to 60 years using the solar approach, after looking at the Maunder. I will admit that there is no known reason why the temperatures went down during the Maunder but they did.
Hmm crystal ball out. I predict that temps will continue to cool for about 3 -5 more years and then continue to warm with cooldown periods at the same rates they have been since the last ice age. The global warming agenda will be crushed and be as funny in 5 years as the disastrous ice age theories of the 70’s are now as more and more people realize that the Earth has a “mind” of her own. Natural disasters will occur every year, just like they do every year and it may take well up to the next 100 years before they can be predicted with any certainty.
Ralph Couey (12:26:49) :
hehe Ralph:) You definitely need to stop watching the discovery channel for a while:) I know! You can come research magnetic pole reversal with me.
As for our politicians.. well I have sort of lost hope there. In addition to the info on McCain above, Obama said in the debate he might tap Al Gore for advice, I might not be quoting exactly.. I was howling in disbelief at the time and couldn’t really hear what he was saying after Al’s name popped out of his mouth. My only glimmer of hope left is that many politicians will tell you what they think you want to hear to get elected and go off and do something completely different once they are. We shall see.
Cooling for the next 33 to 37 years. There is a 90 year cycle that begain to on 2002 and the low piont of that cycle will end on 2043 +/- 3 years.
Here’s mine, global monthly temperature with prediction intervals:
http://signals.auditblogs.com/files/2008/08/gmt_pred.png
http://signals.auditblogs.com/files/2008/08/gmt_pred.txt
originally published here
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3361#comment-292113 , August 27th,
2008
CO2 effect should kill this prediction quite rapidly.
To save some time for those of you who are looking for additional discussions on SST, (I’ve had more hits on my blog in the last hour than I normally do in a day), the introduction to and index of my posts on SST are here:
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2008/06/smith-and-reynolds-sst-posts.html
There’s no pro or con AGW talk in those threads, just discussions of SST data sets, 40+ posts so far.
This is off topic, but I just have to share it:
CLASSIC COGNIZANT DISSONANCE
A friend of mine believes that global temperatures are still rising. When asked how he knows, he replied, “Thousands of scientists say so.” I then told him about the Chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, and Secretary of the WMO, Michel Jarraud, both of whom acknowledge that warming has stopped since 1998. That did not change his mind. So I asked him if the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) agreed with Pacharui and Jarraud, would that change his mind. No, it would not. I then asked him if the scientists he says believe the warming continues, should they contact the IPCC, WMO and NAS to inform them they are wrong. He said yes. …Oi vey
Well here’s where I go sit in the bleachers and plead total ignorance.
I’m not equipped with either the raw data, and smooth access to same, nor the knowledge of what data it is that I need, and how to use it to predict climate.
When I look at any of the big 4; GISStemp, HADCrut, RSS, and UAH, in alphabetical order, what I see looks like 1/f “noise”. Now it is noise in the sense that it’s future value at any point on any time scale seems quite unpredictable; but for any past epoch, I consider it to be signal, in the sense that I believe the purveyors of each of those graphs are respectable honest scientists, and are using a consistent algorithm, and raw data (each)acquired as well as can be expected. So I don’t think they are all crooks, and I don’t know ANY of them, to say any of them are.
So I believe their past history is reasonably accurate, except they are all different because they are all measuring different data, and employing different algorithms to arrive at computations of different functions.
But I only believe in those guys up to their last measured data point.
The next time they run their algorithm on their next input of raw data, no-one can predict what value it will spit out; and sometimes it will go up, and sometimes it will go down. Now how is that for a definitive prediction.
I described it as looking like 1/f noise, in the sense that the amplitudes of cyclic changes tend to increase, the longer the time scale of that cycle. Of course, I haven’t done a spectral analysis, to see what the actual frequency spectrum is, and to see if it truly is 1/f.
Now enough people have done some clever filter analyses to show that there are some truly cyclic components, mostly related to the solar sunspot cycles and multiples of those.
Now I have no idea whatsoever; quantitatively, determines the time scale of those solar cycles. What physics is driving that phenomenon, to set the 11 year sunspot/22 year magnetic cycle. If anybody does have a explanation for that (maybe Dr Willie Soon), I’m mighty curious to hear about it.
And as I explained, I don’t know what drives the ENSO or PDO physics either, but do acknowledge there is a cycle.
I think because of the sleepy sun, and the varying solar shockwave blanket, that we appear to be in for a downward movement for maybe 30 years or so, but as to where we will be on this date any year in the future I have no clue; and the only thing that I truly believe is that nobody else does either.
George; being pedantically vague !
Drat.
All the good predictions have been made @ur momisugly Don B (12:38:21) and AJ (13:08:16). Though I think that, even with greater data, there will still be fashionably chic climate movements — new ice age around mid-century or global warming a century or so from now.
My guess is that we will continue to cool unless a volcano stuffs things up!
I believe in a world where temperature is driven by cloud albedo,
Cloud albedo is driven by specific humidity in troposphere,
humidity is driven by rainfall intensity determined by stratospheric temp or humidity.
Volcanoes are one of the main drivers of the stratosphere (and cause the earth to warm due to a boom and bust effect on humidity there long term) so we cant predict the future. also size location and type (steam to SO2 ratio) could have differing effects. If solar, PDO, humans alter stratosphere then that will have effect too. loss of arctic ice will drive up humidity in troposphere and cause cooling.
Cheers
My forecast?
For the next 20 years, I forecast that the nights will be……(wait for it)….
….dark, followed by scattered light, towards dawn.
With apologies to the late, great, George Carlin.
My prediction:
Within 10 years, modest increases in CO2 concentration will be seen as a net positive.
Global average temperature prediction for the next several decades:
– warming or cooling? No warming. Stays level at best, drops 2deg C in next ~5~ years at worst.
– for how many years? No new warming cycles until 35 to 50 years from now.
– on what technical basis? Svensmark’s theory of cloud seeding by cosmic rays applied with long-term forecasts of solar activity.
– for the dataset provided (UAH Global anomaly) how would you extrapolate, if at all – linear, polynomial, or ???
Trend lines usefully document the past, but are of no help in predicting the future.
– does anyone believe that a linear extrapolation is valid? Not me.
Ralph Couey (12:26:49) :
“I predict that one of the following will occur:
A. Major comet or asteroid strike, devastating the planet and destroying all human and animal life, rendering any climate shift irrelevant.
B. An eruption of a super-volcano, devastating the planet and destroying all human and animal life, rendering any climate shift irrelevant.
C. A global outbreak of nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons, devastating the planet and destroying all human and animal life, rendering any climate shift irrelevant.”
And all this will happen in 2012! 😉