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.
=====================================
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 @ 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! 😉
I predict cooling for 25-30 years, ala the PDO/ENSO cycle. But I also predict that either the CO2-AGW true-believers will not admit that CO2 is not causing warming, even when the glaciers are at the Chicago city limits–or they will blame the cooling on CO2.
@ Simon Abingdon
Oh yes, I read that open letter from Viscount Monckton of Brenchley at American Thinker.
I sent it along to others.
It was so brilliant and so touching in its unabashed love and concern for America.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/10/an_open_letter_from_the_viscou_1.html
Well, on the decadal scale climate is largely determined by the various external forcings, and assuming the net forcings continue to be dominated by GHGs, an extremely safe assumption indeed, and given the committed climate change already in the pipeline it is hard to see anything other than an increasing warming trend. In terms of hard numbers, I expect the next El Nino to occur sometime before 2011 and that it will drive the global average temperature for the year in which it occurs to the highest level in recent centuries, probably for millenia. Looking forward, I have confidence in the IPCC mean projection of +0.2C / decade for the next few decades, driven by GHG forcing with shorter lulls and periods of faster warming caused by unforced variability, ENSO, volcanoes etc – this being the pattern we have seen for the last few decades. The trend beyond that largely depends on global economic growth, which is a lot harder to predict,and the extent to which we manage to decouple this from our carbon emissions. JP. .
I predict that in 20 years time, the climate will be be different in some way from today…
REPLY: I think we have a winner! That is about as much as anyone can accurately say. – Anthony
Ooops! Now with hyperlinks …
Well, on the decadal scale climate is largely determined by the various external forcings, and assuming the net forcings continue to be dominated by GHGs, an extremely safe assumption indeed, and given the committed climate change already in the pipeline it is hard to see anything other than an increasing warming trend. In terms of hard numbers, I expect the next El Nino to occur sometime before 2011 and that it will drive the global average temperature for the year in which it occurs to the highest level in recent centuries, probably for millenia. Looking forward, I have confidence in the IPCC mean projection of +0.2C / decade for the next few decades, driven by GHG forcing with shorter lulls and periods of faster warming caused by unforced variability, ENSO, volcanoes etc – this being the pattern we have seen for the last few decades. The trend beyond that largely depends on global economic growth, which is a lot harder to predict,and the extent to which we manage to decouple this from our carbon emissions.
JP.
Bob and Anthony,
I don’t think you should be encouraging this.
Keith (3rd comment) is right. And it’s good to see so many joke and spoof responses.
The viewpoint of the intelligent skeptic is that the future climate cannot be predicted.
Most proper scientists are well aware of this, but unfortunately the IPCC and most ‘climate scientists’ still haven’t got it. The irony is that it was a climate scientist (well, meteorologist) Ed Lorenz who first showed this.
I can choose the stick?
Certainly, I want the J.
But: If someone read http://www.surfacestations.org
And ask. How is it possible? with these stations to obtain measures of 0,001 K?
The answer: it is simply statistical magic.
If you remove the magic of the statistical result will be a long-term plan.
The satellite measures are more real. (Apparently). Only as of 1979.
If I understood something. The temperature of the Earth is (290 +/- 10) K. and humanity survived (+ / – 5,000,000 years)
In the context: I agree with Allan said, “Let’s hear what you believe, not just what you do not believe.”
“Weather-climate signals have become significant, and the global circulation has evolved to exhibiting a strong La-Nina behavior.” Ed Berry, NWS SOO (commenting on his – unofficial – website).
http://weatherclimatelink.blogspot.com/
Cold-phase PDO + re-strengthening La Nina support a cold northern hemisphere winter 2008 – 2009.
Effects of very low solar activity are unproven and remain to be seen.
Unusually cold weather WILL, certainly, be widely blamed on the sun, but a causal link will remain nearly impossible to prove.
Neither is there is any generally-accepted method of forecasting longer-term weather. Official predictions beyond about 7 days are given in terms of “above average,” “below average,” or “equal chances.”
I expect a colder than normal winter this year, and being based on specific atmospheric and ocean patterns, one which will have certain specific features, especially those associated with negative, cold-phase AO & NAO (Arctic Oscillation & North Atlantic Oscillation). Some graphics here
http://www.intellicast.com/Community/Content.aspx?a=127
(note especially – FRIGID over the eastern US, the UK and northern Europe).
Solar variations may drive climate variations. There is still no dependable method of predicting solar variations, so it follows that there would be no dependable method of predicting solar-driven climate variations.
After spending many years in their warm phases, decadal to multi-decadal patterns have switched to their cold phases, and may remain there for many years. This is by no means assured.
I think its good for all of us if – modest – cooling continues for several years. That would encourage development of energy generation that actually achieves a goal, for example, actually keeping us warm at a reasonable price, instead of just giving us a warm ‘green’ feeling at an outrageous price…
…and, if we’re very lucky, will encourage the development of food production and distribution which is resilient in conditions of adverse climate.
Otherwise, I fear we may end up going “Green” in a very big way, a very soylent way.
Paul Shanahan (14:27:05) :
I predict that in 20 years time, the climate will be be different in some way from today…
REPLY: I think we have a winner! That is about as much as anyone can accurately say. – Anthony
Unless it’s the same as today’s. How can you decide a winner? I cry foul, I say.
A thread after my own heart. Folly or not, prediction is what actuaries do. Why should letting a little thing like unpredictability in temperatures stand in the way of making a projection?
My methodology is based on actuarial papers, in looking at temperature as a series of values driven by constantly shifting parameters. Correlation is assumed to be driven by 132 months of historical measures.
There are 6 weighting schemes derived as follows:
(1) rolling 60, 120, 180, 240, 300, and 360 month slopes are calculated
(2) The incremental first differences of these rolling slopes are determined
(3) the incremental second differences of these rolling slopes are determined
(4) using solver, optimal weights are determined to apply against the preceding 132 second differences in order to predict the next subsequent second difference, which can then be used to determine the predicted anomaly. The optimum weights are determined by the sum of least squares of the projected anomalies versus actual.
(5) In addition, a straight weighting of actual anomalies is calculated to project the next anomaly, using optimal weights.
(6) Finally, the seven projected anomalies are optimally weighted to determine how much weight to give to each individual method, again determined via least squares.
(7) After all the sets of weights are determined, projected values can be determined. Under the theory that the estimate for the next period is the best estimate, that estimate can then be used to project subsequent anomalies. This can continue for as long as desired. Obviously, the further out one projects, the less accurate it is likely to be. But short-term results have actually been fairly good, in my opinion.
The results of that method are shown here:
http://digitaldiatribes.wordpress.com/2008/10/21/october-2008-update-on-global-temperature-ncdc/
I list the projected anomalies through 2009 by month, and provide a chart through January 2018.
If I extend this to 2030, I get anomalies around -2 degrees Celsius. But the projections do seem to start breaking down at some point, so I don’t trust the long-term. But I’ll keep tweaking to see if I can figure out improvements that help make out long-term improvements.
Joe Tritz
The Idiot
It uses NCDC anomalies, for no particular reason.
PaulM: My answer is “pfft.” (respectfully, of course…)
There’s no harm in a fun little game of prediction. As long as you’re not claiming that you know with such confidence what is going to happen that you start proposing governmental policy changes or whatever, I personally get a kick out of seeing how close I can get with such things.
Who cares if I’m wrong? Certainly not me.
Sometimes it’s good to not take yourself too seriously and wring your hands about the negative potential of a seemingly futile exercise. Just put a model together and have some fun, dagnabbit! Life’s too short.
I really apologize for the three posts in a row, but I also just wanted to apologize for the bandwidth hog of my charts on the link I provided. I am hopefully going to get time to work on that and speed things up tonight.
JP; I will take that bet. How much you want to wager?
Id say current cooling PDO with predominance of cooling La Ninas over next 20 -30 years – probably drop of 0.5-1 d celcius. Loss of heat/increase of cloud cover due to sun inactivity with solar minimum 2009 and 2 low cycles after – probable drop of temps 0.5 -1 d c. If we get significant volcanism which is more likely during cooling cycles add another 0.5 -1 d c drop. All up drop of 1.5 – 3d c possible on average, however some areas will cool more than others as typical with ENSO trends.
PaulM (14:33:02) :
Bob and Anthony,
” I don’t think you should be encouraging this.
Keith (3rd comment) is right. And it’s good to see so many joke and spoof responses.
The viewpoint of the intelligent skeptic is that the future climate cannot be predicted.”
Is that another “consensus?”
Rhetorical question. Obviously, it is not another “consensus.” You speak for yourself alone.
You have not been appointed the spokesperson for “the intelligent skeptic,” nor is your opinion anything but your opinion, whether you invoke “the intelligent skeptic,” “the scientific community,” or even, “all us smart people.”
“Most proper scientists are well aware of this,”
omg.
AND you determine which scientists are “proper?” Are you by any chance that guy who’s been appointed (anointed?) the next president?
” but unfortunately the IPCC and most ‘climate scientists’ still haven’t got it. The irony is that it was a climate scientist (well, meteorologist) Ed Lorenz who first showed this.”
The late Edward Norton Lorenz neither “showed” or claimed to “show” any such thing.
Work on becoming a better spokesperson for your own opinion before you presume to speak for others.
My predictions:
Cooling until 2030, based on the PDO switching to its la Nina mode and the Sun dimming after high activities in the past 5 decades. Extrapolation based on a sinus curve with about 60 year periods time-synced with the PDO and amplitude-synced with UAH with volcanoes cooling removed. Temperatures and precipitations in the 2030’s will be similar to temperature in the 1970s.
Climate is all cycles so linear extrapolations are useless at best, misleading at worse.
I created 36 spaghetti graph models. When I threw them against the wall, every single one of them fell to the floor. I take this as robust proof that temperatures are falling.
I predict that in 20 years
I will be enjoying my retirement
The sun will rise in the east and set in the west later that day
There will be a flood somewhere in the world (maybe more than one)
There will be a drought or two somewhere else in the world
There will be a tropical storm brewing up somewhere in the world
A glacier somewhere will shed some ice and another glacier somewher else will gain some ice
There will ice at both the Arctic and Antarctic
We will still be complaining about MSM bias on some issue or other
The internet will need a new means of management due to the amount of traffic on it
Al Gores seaside mansion in California will still be above water
I will be enjoying a glass of red wine produced from my small vineyard as I watch the sun set.
Cooling should continue for a minimum of 5 years. If the sun becomes more active tomorrow, it will take at least 5 years for the oceans to warm. Hopefully, the cooling continues long enough to extinguish this CO2 nonsense. A green earth requires CO2. 1200 parts per million would be a great start.
Speaking of 20 years… In 1988 Bill Moyers aired a series of interviews on PBS with the late philosopher Joseph Campbell, whose famous saying was “Follow Your Bliss.”
There is a brewing company in Ft. Collins, Colorado, The New Belgian Brewing Co., maker of Fat Tire beer and other brands, whose corporate saying is “Follow Your Folly.”
Reading these blogs, following along, is blissful and definitely not folly.
This blog and all the comments are great reading. They stimulate my thinking and fantasizing — a non-scientist who has had more than enough of Discovery Channel and its ilk. I can’t do the math that everyone else on this blog adores, but I can read fun articles. I wonder where the next few decades fit into long-term climate change, e.g., the earth transversing an “arm” of the milky way (lots of cosmic rays, therefore, more cloud cover and more cooling); or modern milankovich cycles of 26,000, 21,000, 41,000 years meeting at certain critical points — perhaps one might occur in the next few decades. If I am reading correctly, I think we are moving away from the sun on the eliptical orbit. Would this have anything to do with cooling in the near future, even though the oceans seem to tell the tale. I read one prediction by “Hank” that I thoroughly enjoyed.
“The polar temperatures have been falling already for a few thousands of years, depending how we decide to measure it….Probably the trend will continue. Anytime between this year (2008) and several thousand years from now, we should expect temperatures to plummet….”
I think I read on this blog: “A warm planet is a happy planet”. I’m ready to welcome all the help that CO2 of the modern industrial world can give us for a comfy environment. I thank Anthony and everyone else for one of the most enjoyable places on the internet.
It will be partly to mostly cloudy with a 50% chance of decreasing temperature. Overnight lows will be lower and afternoon highs will be higher than the overnight lows. Chance of precipitation is about 40%. Now let’s look at our extended forcast, we’ve got some real nice climate in store for the upcoming half of the century followed by climate change as we head into the later decades. Details at 11:00
Don B,
Fat Tire beer is great, but I hate how their brewery (soccer) team always beats my team.
Looks like UAH October LT temperatures are going to be well below last year.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
The UAH link didn’t work. This one should do better.
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/amsutemps.html
Yep -the Viscount certainly continues to deliver value for money, and is adroit at keeping his media profile at a high level. but does nobody find it a little odd that that the most rational and lucid voice in the world today in opposition to the global warming alarmists has no scientific training and has never published a single academic journal article?
Let us look at the clearest and most penetrating debunking of global warming theory ever written with a properly sceptical eye, and examine only those claims for which Monckton cites support from the literature. Incidentally, he gives no reference list, as would be helpful, so errors may creep in.
Monckton:During each of the last four interglacial periods over the past half-million years, temperature was 5 to 8 °F warmer than the present (Petit et al., 1999).
(Petit et al., 1999). is this paper . It does indeed find warmer temperatures, in the Antarctic anyway ,in previous interglacials, but links these to higher CO2 levels, as they conclude … Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record. Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.
Take aim at foot…FIRE!
Monckton At both Poles, it was warmer only half a century ago than it is today. For temperatures in the Arctic, see Soon et al. (2004). For the Antarctic, see Doran et al. (2002).
Soon is of course, Willie Soon but I am unable to find anything he published in 2004 on Arctic temperatures. Maybe the reference is to this press release. but it hardly qualifies as published science. For the NOAA view of the Arctic see here …
Doran et al did indeed find net Antarctic cooling, but was swiftly rebutted by Turner et al. who found ‘an inappropriate extrapolation of station data across large, data-sparse areas of the Antarctic.’
Monkton: During the Grand Maximum, the Sun was more active, and for longer, than during almost any previous similar period in the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005; and see Usoskin et al., 2003; and Hathaway, 2004)
No doubt. But here are Sami Solanki’s thoughts…I am not a denier of global warming produced by an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. Already at present the overwhelming source of global warming is due to manmade greenhouse gases and their influence will continue to grow in the future as their concentration increases Ooops!
Monckton: A symposium of the International Astronomical Union [2004] concluded that it is the Sun that was chiefly responsible for the warming of the late 20th century.
I think this is a reference to the conclusions of a single author Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, who believes we should Look to Mars for the truth on global warming
Monckton: From 1700-1998, temperature rose at a near-uniform rate of about 1 °F per century [Akasofu, 2008].
This is Syun-Ichi Akasofu. The reference cannot be to a peer reviewed paper on climate science because Akasofu has not written any. The actual rate is anything but uniform.
Monckton: A recent survey (Schulte, 2008) of 539 peer-reviewed scientific papers published since January 2004 and selected at random using the search term “global climate change” reveals that not a single paper provides any evidence whatsoever that “time is short” or that “the dangers are great”.
Schulte is a consultant endrochrinologist. Schulte 2008 appeared in Energy and Environment. available in a total of 26 libraries worldwide.
Monckton: Professor Bhat reports that most of the glaciers have been receding at a uniform rate since 1880 at the latest. Some of them had begun receding even before this date. His analysis is confirmed on a global scale by Robinson, Robinson & Soon (2007), who report that since 1880 mountain glaciers have receded worldwide at a near-uniform rate, with no appreciable acceleration in the second half of the 20th century,
Robinson & Robinson are (presumably) Arthur and Zachary Robinson, father and son team who run the OISM. I did not bother searching for the ‘paper’ as neither has any qualifications in climate science. Indeed Monckton appears to be relying for climate science on a guy who issued a bogus scientific paper and his son, whose degree is in vetinary science.
And that, apart from a large amount of unsupported hand-waving, is that. Were I an AGW sceptic I would feel profoundly depressed that the Viscount is apparently as good as it gets.
Cooler, 30-year trend, based on multidecadal oceanic/atmospheric oscillations (and possible solar minimum). Any uniform atmospheric metric. No, I don’t like extrapolations as things tend to be cyclic and thus not well adapted to cycles.
Harry G: The sun rises in the east and sets in the west only twice a year.
Demesure: sinus curve?
Monckton is not a scientist, but he is a mathematician. He’s also an official IPCC reviewer (thus is a co-Nobel prizewinner) and has turned up at least one significant error that the IPCC has accepted.
Whatever we say as a prediction, there is only two ways of proving it as it unfolds. Either buy, calibrate, and properly maintain your own weather station, or advocate that we switch to satellite data only. Anything else and we are just pissing in the wind.
I predict we’ll be wishing it was warmer like the good old global warmers promised. Lief Svalgaard will be re-employed shovelling snow for people stuck in New Hampshire. All the best, Ed
The best predictor of the future is the past.
In the past 60 years, my analysis says global warming from increased GHGs has been 0.08C per decade or +0.16C over the next 20 years. There is no forecast that shows there will be any change in the level of increasing GHGs so I will stay with the 0.08C per decade.
The analysis also shows a change in global temperatures of 0.15 times the anomaly in the El Nino region 3.4 (or an increase of 0.5C in global temps for the biggest El Ninos such as the 1997-98 El Nino which saw sea surface temperatures increase by 2.8C – a huge number).
Considering the forecast over 20 years is for a slight cooling or closer to average conditions in the PDO and El Ninos versus the 1986 to 2006 period where there were many major El Nino events – i would just predict average conditions or no change from today’s temps from the PDO.
So, +0.16C for me.
Obama wins. Al Gore becomes global warming czar. Pelosi drives “climate legislation” through as one of Congress’ first acts. By year end the Democrats take credit for global cooling.
Within 10 years much of Europe and America are having serious energy shortages and experience major brain drain to countries which still show signs of intelligent life.
Many smart people who fancy themselves the best climate modelers on earth can’t get it right, in my opinion. I could do no better because the science is simply not “there” yet.
Though I have developed some simplistic models, all I feel comfortable saying is that temperature will continue to be cyclic on a decade and longer scale (not to mention annually). I think solar or solar system cycles of some sort will turn out to be a significant factor on both decade and century scales. Anthropogenic CO2 may or may not be a significant century scale factor.
If it does get hotter over the next two centuries, I seriously doubt it will become catastrophic for humanity. If it gets colder, that could easily become catastrophic for humanity. Globally, we can adapt to heat more readily than cold.
I think the trend over the few thousand years is much colder to devastatingly colder (barring the deliberate intervention of humankind) — because it seems we’re nearing the end of an interglacial.
John Philip,
I appreciate your candor in following the IPCC models concerning CO2 forcings and AGW. However, in Feb 2007 the IPCC already had problems as global temperature trends were somewhat incorrect. It appears much of the trend analysis of the 2007 SPM was incorrect.
Your highlighting of the next El Nino event is correct. The strength and duration of the next El Nino will tell us a lot about what to expect in the coming decade at the very least. Allegedly we are now in a regime that should be dominated by La Ninas. If the next El Nino is weak and short lived, all bets are off concerning AGW. As Bob Tisdale has stated in earlier posts, the PDO is more a reflection of long term ENSO trends than anything else. The last El Nino event of 2006 was rather weak, but if you believe GISS, Hadley, and NOAA, 2006 was one of the warmest years of the last century.
While the IPCC doesn’t entirely ignore ENSO, it does put it at a lower level than say, CO2 forcings.The 2007 IPCC AR could be rendered useless as early as 2010. We are the early stages of the so-called negative PDO, and if La Ninas continue to dominate the Pacific through 2040, the predictions of .2 deg warming per decade will long forgotten.
Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record.
John Philip,
The first thing they teach freshmen geology students is that warmer sea water has lower CO2 solubilities. Thus when the ocean warms up, more CO2 gets outgassed to the atmosphere. Odd that many “climate scientists” are missing this important piece of information.
If CO2 had driven historical temperature increases, then the warmer water would have outgassed more CO2 – which would in turn have caused warmer temperatures and the climate would have warmed irreversibly.
120,000 years ago all greenhouse gases had high concentrations, temperatures were high, albedo was low, and the earth plunged into an ice age. Many climate scientists will tell you that this couldn’t have happened.
What is your global average temperature prediction…
– warming or cooling?
– for how many years?
– on what technical basis?
I see 30 years of cooling with the PDO as the primary driver in large part because the Pacific Ocean is so big. AMO is next, then GHG, solar-related issues as a sizable unknown. I like Svensmark’s hypothesis, but I can’t refute Leif’s skepticism.
– for the dataset provided (UAH Global anomaly) how would you extrapolate, if at all – linear, polynomial, or ???
Clearly I go for cyclic, but I see more of a sawtooth pattern over the full PDO cycle plus a linear rise that may stretch back to the Little Ice Age and is likely to continue. A sawtooth is readily converted through a Fourier transform to a simple set of fundamental frequencies.
– 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?
Over a short enough time frame, any curve can be approximated with a straight line. We don’t have good data over several PDO (and related) cycles, so it can be hard to project those ahead. Straight lines are easy to compute, trivial to project, and make a decent first step for short projections. Straight line projections are degenerate form of a polynomial, and the higher or order of the polynomial, the more quickly the projection turns to fantasy and impossibility.
Linear extrapolation is especially bad at inflection points, e.g. the change between positive and negative PDO, and that’s one problem with demonstrating recent cooling.
I have no idea what it will take for the AGW movement to collapse, but it will happen during a cold winter.
I also predict that 50 years from people will look back at these first couple of decades of this century and realize we were in the middle of the Golden Era of Climatology.
Pamela Gray (17:22:40) :
…….”Anything else and we are just pissing in the wind.”
strange …
I would like to know your prediction?
(sorry for my bad english)
Edward Morgan (17:38:53) :
I could’ve used him last year! 130 inches of snowfall total, 52.5″ just in December, 39″ was the deepest snowcover, 2565 “Snow Depth Days” (sum of daily snow depths), all new records in my 10 years of data and likely more than any season of the last 100.
http://wermenh.com/sdd/ne-0708.html
http://wermenh.com/wx/winter_0708.html
Oh – I expect colder and less more this season. More snow south.
I take a geologic time-scale view of climate and consider a warm globe as an earth dominated by tropical temperatures for quite (quite!) a few millions of years. A cold globe is pretty much an ice ball for many millions of years. The earth has seen both conditions more than once. To me, geologic time-scale climate change is the transition between ice ball and a global tropical state.
The changes of the past five million years or so I consider to be global weather, in geological time. We have two dominant weather conditions consisting of around 100k years of glaciation and nice little warmups of around 10-30k years where the glaciers take a break.
From my viewpoint, I think the geologic global weather is driven by the position of the continental plates which affects where and how the water on earth absorbs sunlight and also affects how oceans currents circulate the sun’s captured energy.
Humankind just hasn’t had much of an effect on climate or weather as I’ve described it above.
So… when I start considering climate and weather as the short-timers on earth (we, the human race) tend to view things, a few degrees – heck! several degrees – of change are just nano-weather anomolies as we head towards either another period of glaciation or an interglacial. (The odd volcano or asteroid hit just prolongs cool periods we encounter on our way to one or the other of the geologic weather events.)
Patience. I know ya’ll will just have to wait around ’til the continents drift back together to see that I’m right, but when they do, you’ll come ’round to my way of thinking. That, or the human race will have been toast for a hundred million years and, shucks! we’ll miss it.
What the Heck! Let’s have a go.
Generalized statements. North America only!
Temps from here to next solar minimum .2 degrees above 1979 – 1998 trendline. Because:
PDO phase is retaining heat from past warm phases, lag in effect.
Less cooling from cloud cover, as in 1930ish, and less vegetative cooling.
Temps in following solar phase:
.3 below trendline.
Extended PDO amplified. Cloud cover increased.
Temps in tertiary solar phase:
.5 degrees below trendline
Extended PDO, volcanic disturbance. Buy grain futures.
The “curve”? It ain’t linear.
A multi-layered sinusoid:
a short (70-odd year) sine wave of about 4/10 of one degree amplitude;
plus,
a longer (400-odd year) cosine wave of about 2/10 of one degree;
plus,
a longer (1000-odd year) sine wave of about 4/10 of one degree.
Our current very slight warming trend from 1890 through 1995 is from the longer oscillation, the 1890-1935 positive trend, followed by the 1935 – 1970 decrease and then the 1970 – 1995 increase, followed by the 1995 – 2008+ (flat spot, then decrease) are from the short period cycle.
Prediction? (Well, at least it will be better than Hansen, Gore, Obama, and Mann.)
Continued decline through about 2010 (when Solar cycle 24 “finally” begins increasing cosmic ray shielding); then a period of flat and slightly increasing temps through about 2018, then a sloping decline again between 2018 and 2022 between Cycle 24 (a low period) and Cycle 25 (an even lower average period), then a bump at the high point of Cycle 25’s final arrival (much later than Hathway and NASA are now claiming), then a decline until Cycle 26.
Temp’s won’t get as high as now (1995-2005 averages) until 2035 – 2040 time frame.
But the short range cycling temperatures are on an upslope (we still need about 4/10 of one degree increase until the previous 100,000 year cycles are met. (And this increase until that high point will look like AGW increases.)
Until the next ice age (which is already 2000 years overdue) shows up.
Okay, I am hot, hot, hot! As in madder than a wet hen!!! The NOAA NWS predicted 30 degrees F as the low last night near Lostine where I ranch. Well guess what???!?!?!? It fell to 18 degrees F! We are getting damned close to freezing pipe temps and they are still stuck on predictions that are completely out of whack with what the weather is out the door. It makes me SICK! This is not a Service (which what the S is supposed to stand for)! It is more like National Weather S***T!!!! Sorry Anthony about the cussing, but in rural areas, we need some semblance of accuracy, not WAG’s, from the National Weather Serv…, sorry I just can’t say that word.
Although there are many interesting “opinions” posted, I will side with:
Diatribical Idiot (15:00:56) : at -2 C in 2030.
Like his model or not, at least he is plugging in real data to come up with a statistically supportable hypothesis – an hypothesis that is probably every bit as valid as those sophisticated computer simulations used by the IPCC et al.
The interesting thing to me about this approach is the implicit assumption that there are real, cyclical forcing mechanisms out there – whether we understand them or not. The method doesn’t try to quantify or identify the mechanisms, but just addresses them statistically.
This is a much smarter approach than might first appear. Few would deny that the climate system is very complex & poorly understood (in terms of long term drivers, feedbacks etc). This approach takes all of that out of the equation.
BTW / OT – 1st snows here in the western suburbs of Denver today. Up to 18″ at Loveland & A-Basin ski areas in the mtns. Only 0.1″ at the house (elev 6060) , but winter is on the way !
More musings;
Can across an interesting piece of info today “during El Ninos (1998 was a super El Nino) heat flows out of the ocean and into the air”. If this is the case then if an El Nino coincides with a PDO shift to cooling phase which coincides with low solar output (minimum, or extended minimum as we are having) then the cooling effects would be amplified and not only would the oceans be cooling but also receiving less heat, meaning faster and more extended cooling.
As the oceans drive the climate then this would mean the concurrent existence of all three drives a stronger cooling force that is not able to revert until the sun comes out of its slumber, increases TSI and reduces cloud cover. In the meantime we get a domino effect of increased cooling in the oceans and the atmosphere, growing polar icecaps, increased snowfall etc.
Until the sun becomes strong enough to revert this signal (not looking likely at the moment) we stay in a cooling cycle.
I wrote:
Oh – I expect colder and less more this season. More snow south.
I meant to write:
Oh – I expect colder and less snow this season. More snow south.
Pamela Gray (19:10:02) :
Pam, calm down, cool down. Just open the door. Next time towel off or you’ll catch a chill.
Tomorrow, telephone the NWS http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/pdt/ says the phone number is (541) 276-7832. Talk to them about flat basin and radiational cooling and wind-blocking mountains. They’ll probably point out that forecasting radiational cooling is tough and that people nearby you may have been much warmer. (You should call neighbors first, also the Enterprise airport.)
If you aren’t careful, you’ll wind up as the official Co-op weather observer there. Just don’t put the MMTS too close to a structure! 🙂 Aim for logging highs and lows for a month to compare to NWS forecasts and maybe they’ll learn something.
My guess is as follows:
2007 to 2037 Flat over the period with a UAH anomaly of 0.3C
2037 to 2067 Increase of 0.4C over the period up to anomaly of 0.7C
2067 to 2097 Flat – anomaly of 0.7C
This is based on a general warming of 0.7C per century and an Ocean Current (PDO, AMO, ENSO, etc) cycle of 60 years which offsets the general warming on its 30-year down leg and doubles the rate of warming on its 30-year upleg. Individual monthly anomalies will vary from this trend due to ENSO events with about +0.7C for a the rare strong El Nino, +0.4C for a moderate El Nino, and +0.1C for a weak El Nino and the inverse for strong, moderate and weak La Ninas. These temperature fluctuations will follow the ENSO peaks and valleys by 3 to 4 months. The occasional major volcanic eruption will temporarily dampen these temperatures.
This is just a continuation of recent climate history. The last 60-year Ocean Current cycle ended in 2007. Temperatures were flat for the 1947 to 1977 period and increased by 0.4C from 1977 to 2007 and the monthly temperatures oscillated around the trend due to ENSO events and major volcanic eruptions. The current anomaly is slightly below the trend due to the recent La Nina.
The future?
I’ll get back to you on that…
Rocky Mountain News is celebrating its 150th anniversary by publishing a series of fictional accounts based on events of a given decade. The only restriction on the stories are their length and they must mention Larimer Street at least once in the story. Larimer Street was the main street of Denver at its start, became a skid-row from the 40s to the 60s and is now rehabilitated.
The last story is the winner of a contest open to all readers. Same size and content restriction and also must be based sometime in the future.
My entry to the contest is set in the year 2058 and is entitled “Goldgrinder”. It won’t be selected as the winner, but what a coincidence (for our purposes) as there is an element of prediction regarding the climate of the next fifty years.
Here are the first two pages:
Late afternoon fog muffled the hammer blows of the pile driver down at the REI store by Confluence Park. Mark was accompanied by the echoes of the levee construction as he walked down Larimer Street. When the ice dam up in the South Platte Canyon finally gave way during the heavy thunderstorms of the spring of 2056, some remote cameras caught the images of the wall of water as it left its birthplace along Sheep Mountain. The one day fall of 22 inches of rain above the dam finished the job of the explosives team in minutes. Three days of record spring runoff backed up by the dam joined in with the deluge and swept downstream. Chatfield Reservoir did hold, but a twenty foot wave swirled around the spill way, taking out 2 miles of 470.
Downstream, it was a repeat of the June 1965 flood. The Globeville Artist Colony was running a multimedia exhibit in the Denver Art Museum. “Angry Waters” was very popular with visitors and locals alike. It looked like there was going to be enough money raised to rebuild their studios on the old Red Ball Motor Freight location off Ringsby Court.
Mark paused at Governor Hickenlooper Park. When he was little, this was one of Mark’s favorite spots. He loved to play on the random fountain; he and his brother trying to outsmart the nozzles scattered through the play area. When the park was first proposed, some wanted a statue of the governor in the middle. At the discovery of how upset Governor Hickenlooper was about the proposed expenditure, everyone settled on a plaque. Mark always wondered why his dad laughed at the inscription every time he read it:
Chuckling himself, Mark moved on towards his destination, Princeton’s.
Just past the park, a small crowd was gathered around the MSNBC media center. The HD holograph was displaying a six foot diameter image of the sun. A 3D ring of lettering rotating underneath the sun read: “First sunspot in over 50 years.” And there it was, in the upper latitudes, in the northern hemisphere of the sun, the fifth sunspot of the 24th cycle. Mark’s earpiece was picking up the interview of a solar physicist up at Boulder.
His attention and reception of the local broadcast faded as the bas relief image of the mountain inspiring Princeton’s name came into view. Someone was leaving and the warm light flowing from the pub cast long shadows on the cast metal sign swinging in front. Mark caught the door just before it closed, leaving the chilling news, fog and echoes behind.
Enterprise shares many of the physical features of Lostine, more so than the town of Wallowa on the other side. At least the temps have been similar. My little cheapass temp probe nearly matches the Enterprise airport station for night time temps (my equally cheapass attempt at calibrating a $5.00 instrument). So I am guessing that the recorded low I will see on the probe when I get there will be 18 to 20 degrees F. So when I said 18 degrees near the ranch, I was using the airport station, so I won’t need to call them. However, the central complaint remains a fact. The forecasted lows in NE Oregon made by the NWS have been 10 to 15 degrees higher than the actual temps night after night after night. Yesterday the forecasted low for Pendleton was 35. This morning it was 24 degrees F. You would think that after the second night, or third night, or 4 fourth night, someone would be changing those forecasts downward. Are they just predicting 35 so that they will eventually be right?
So now I have to call into question record events. Some of them are just too outside the realm of possibility. Long Creek is in NE Oregon (you know, where there was so much frost on the pumpkin that folks are scrambling for recipes for fried green pumpkin. I submit the following record breaker from NOAA archives for a HIGH temp, recorded at 8:40 in the morning, Oct. 18, 2008, in an area of the country that is very similar to and not too far away from the surrounding foothill high deserts of Pendleton. On that same day, I was checking my computer at the ranch at around the same time wondering if we would be getting snow.
Record Report
000
SXUS76 KPDT 181542
RERPDT
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PENDLETON OR
840 AM PDT SAT OCT 18 2008
…NEW DAILY RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE FOR OCTOBER 18TH…
NOTE: STATIONS MARKED WITH * INDICATE THAT THE STATION REPORTS ONCE
PER DAY. FOR CONSISTENCY…THESE VALUES ARE CONSIDERED TO HAVE
OCCURRED ON THE DAY THE OBSERVATION WAS TAKEN BUT MAY HAVE ACTUALLY
OCCURRED (ESPECIALLY FOR MAX TEMPERATURE) ON THE PREVIOUS DAY.
STATION PREVIOUS NEW RECORDS
RECORD/YEAR RECORD BEGAN
*LONG CREEK, OR 78 / 2003 78 (TIED) 1957
Let’s see, the next ice age is due. By the ice core plots, we’ve already past the peak temperature and are on our way down. The next Gleissberg Cycle is due, so there’s at least a Maunder Minimum right there. Oh, and the Yellowstone hot spot is due to erupt any time now too, and that could flood the northwest with lava. Oh, oh, and those coastal volcanoes are still active, so Seattle is going to be wiped out. And LA gets the Big One it’s been waiting for. What else? Oh yes, Earth’s magnetic reversal is due too. I don’t know about the big asteroid, but it’s been a while. All in all, it’s all downhill from here.
But seriously, people have been predicting the end for a long time, and that’s not a good bet. If you are going to predict the end, make it for your kids’ or your grandkids’ generation. Even better, if you want to be right that is, is to avoid betting on the extremes. The safest bet of all would be the status quo, if you want to be close to right and you’re not sure if it’s going up or down. The funny thing is, the temperature is not likely to be the same in 20 years — but we will still be arguing whether it went up or down!
I’d just like to mention some human factors other than CO2, since they are so neglected: land use changes, atmospheric pollution and aerosols.
I say the cooling will continue until the ‘bird flu’ wipes the earth of us parasites.
No official predictions… well, maybe one.
You’ve got me wondering if (when) that red 2008 “sea ice extent” line will intersect with the 20 – year average (black) line. I hope you’ll keep posting those graphs – and I’ll wager a dollar that the two lines cross before mid-November. If anybody has already placed this bet, sorry – I haven’t had time to read the whole thread.
Also, along these lines, since we’re near the end of the year, I think it’s appropriate to start thinking of New Year’s resolutions, especially with regard to climate. Specifically, I think some of the… shall we say, “difficult” people (you know who you are) consider in a spirit of contrition some of the weather events they have been causing, and suggest ways in which they intend to do better next year. I, personally, intend to eat more beans, but then I have purchased the credits to do so.
Norm, bird flu is just yet another exagerated post-modern scare. Less bloated than AGW but bloated anyway.
The bigger the threat, the more money will flow for reseach, commitees, newspapers…
John Philip says: “Were I an AGW sceptic I would feel profoundly depressed”.
Were I pro-AGW I would also feel profoundly depressed, because we´re about to wreck the economy as a result.
Monckton is not a scientist, but he is a mathematician. He’s also an official IPCC reviewer (thus is a co-Nobel prizewinner)
Well, he has made a lot of money from his mathematical puzzle, perhaps you could provide a list of his other mathematical qualifications/publications?
You do know how one becomes an IPCC Expert Reviewer, I assume?
-2.5°C by 2020!
Some powerful cycles appear to be aligning to deliver a vicious deep freeze.
– Solar cycles
– Ocean cycles – PDO, AMO, etc.
– and the 100K year ice-age cycle
There are some things to keep in mind:
1. Climate does not change gradually.
2. Climate changes abruptly, without warning.
3. Temperatures over the last 2 million years have been colder than today’s 95+% of the time.
4. Warm, like today, is in fact highly unusual.
5. Our current interglacial has been abnormally long.
6. Interglacial are more often much briefer, short-lived spikes.
6. Thus, the climate dice are not in our favour!
Ice ages have occurred right ON SCHEDULE for the last 3 million years.
And if you examine the interglacial temperature peaks, i.e the brief optimums between the cold intervals, you’ll see our modern optimum is indeed prolonged. More often the interglacials are just brief spikes that suddenly nosedive back into prolonged deep-freezes. Now the sun is going to sleep, and the oceans are reversing to boot!
My prediction is we’ve started a nasty cold period that will make the 1960s look balmy. We’re about to get caught with our pants down.
And a few molecules of CO2 is not going to change it.
John Philip, I have quoted you out of context. Sorry. My post should have said:
“With reference to Viscount Monckton’s essay, John Philip says “Were I an AGW sceptic I would feel profoundly depressed”.
Were I pro-AGW I would also feel profoundly depressed, because we’re about to wreck the econmy as a result.”
I reckon we soon won’t need all this. The next task of our UK government “Minister for Climate Change and Energy” will be to repeal the laws of thermodynamics so that the climate will be controlled by a large black rotary knob in the minister’s office. Then we will have certainty.
I suspect at the same time they will lay plans for the repeal of the law of gravity to coincide with the arrival of the space ship coming to rescue them, so they can float up to meet it.
I am merely dabbling, and am prone to noting correlations without understanding the mechanics (if there are any) involved, but I feel the Pacific will remain cool as the Atlantic remains relatively warm, for the final decade of the warm AMO. This will create a boundary between cold and warm up the east coast of the USA and over to Europe. Depending on how this boundary shifts north and south, winters may be snowy or rainy in the East USA and Europe, but the general trend over the next decade will be to have more storms than usual. World temperatures will show a slight decline.
Dr. Bill Gray noted many correlations, and requested funding so that we might better understand the mechanics involved, however the funding was denied, as Gore channeled funding to Hansen. Consequently we have developed computer models, and much theory, but it all seems useless if the models don’t include certain mechanics, which remain undiscovered and misunderstood.
A number of correlations seem counter-intuitive; warming causes cooling, and cooling causes warming.
For example, there seems to be a correlation between warming and melting in the North Atlantic and cooling off the coast of Peru. This may or may not involve pulses in the deep sea thermohaline circulation. Research would expand our knowledge. That is what Dr. Gray wanted. He has been dismissed by many as an outspoken crack-pot. Instead we are stuck with models which may lack a vital factor, and are therefore basically useless.
I actually think the models lack a great many vital factors. There is more to learn than we already have learned. We still are basically blundering in the dark, as we attempt to fathom what is vast and wonderful.
We should be more humble, and open to new ideas. Hansen’s main problem is he isn’t humble, and therefore he is likely to be humbled against his will, by a thing called Reality.
It is my opinion that over the next three decades temperatures in at least the Northern hemisphere will continue to decline. The combination of diminshed solar activity, PDO and AMO cycles all converging in a cool phase, have the potential to produce some potentially challenging times in the near future for humanity.
I predict that the weather will continueto cycle between warming and cooling as it always has done . The sun and earth interactions will govern the cycles. The next sun cycle may be short , about 10 years and with a magnitude equal to # 23 or slightly higher
Next 5 years -cool
period 5-10 years -warm
period 10-20 years- cool
In 20 years we will have the same climate as today and the current global warming hype will be looked back at as one of the low points in science.
Since climate is by its nature variable I predict that the future climate will be variable like the present so the climate isn’t going to change because the climate is always changing so nothing about the changeability will change. So we can look forward to climate change. Just as we always have.
I just looked into the Long Creek, Oregon registered weather device and it has an out-of-compliance warning attached to it. It appears that it needs calibration.
http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/C2286
I predict that within 5 years every prediction or belief set out here will have been overturned as a result of real world observations from our much improved technologies.
I remain of the view, however, that overall, solar variations with oceanic oscillations will prove to be the overwhelming control system for atmospheric temperature for most of the time.
We do not yet know how those parameters develop and change over time so I expect many surprises. Bob’s continuing work with the oceans is likely to prove very useful when more oceanic monitoring devices become available.
I am quite sure that atmospheric GHGs will prove to be an irrelevance in the face of other natural processes.
I hope that we do not have a large minimum like a Dalton or Maunder. I expect more of the same as what we have had. Since I made my model
http://users.vianet.ca/paulak2r/AGW/ , I have come to appreciate that the added solar intensity for the sixty years from around 1940 to 2000 has reduced. I expect the global temperatures to increase by about 0.3 C from the 1990 average value to the 2110 average value (averaged over 30 years).
John M Reynolds
Sorry but I don’t have a crystal ball. If I could predict the future I would have shorted the stock market in January and would now be sitting in a tropical place sipping rum drinks with little umbrellas in them. Instead I’m sitting here in Michigan …shivering.
I feel your pain, dude. I was sipping my Margarita on the patio of beach side bar this afternoon, watching the surf pound the beach and shivering in the 75-degree cold.
My predictions ….
If it gets warmer, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If it gets colder, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If it gets drier, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If it gets wetter, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If the Arctic ice pack grows, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If the Arctic ice pack shrinks, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
Predictions for Britain.
The return of Dickensian style winters – White Christmases, skating on the Thames and ice fairs. The return of 1970’s economic conditions – 3 day weeks, frequent and prolonged power cuts and long queues at petrol pumps. The return of the annual cull of the elderly as thousands freeze to death in their own homes.
Timespan – beginning in 5-10 years and lasting for 20-30 years.
Predictions for science.
When people realise the enormity of the scam perpetrated upon them in the name of “scientific consensus” then science will have a long long way to go to win back public support. The cause of science will have been set back approximately 200 years.
Predictions for the IPCC.
Ignominy.
Predictions for James Hansen and Al Gore.
Comfortable retirement and complete obscurity.
Long term predictions.
There will be another ice age and the people who live through that will wonder why we moaned about a very slight warming back in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
From John Philip way up there…(Petit et al., 1999). is this paper . It does indeed find warmer temperatures, in the Antarctic anyway ,in previous interglacials, but links these to higher CO2 levels, as they conclude … Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record. Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.
Take aim at foot…FIRE!….”
John Philip, you make the same error that Al Gore does. We all know ‘that warmer temperatures are linked to higher CO2.
But the allegation of the IPCC, and Al Gore is that THE CO2 CAUSES THE WARMER TEMPERATURES.
Not so; THE WARMER TEMPERATURES CAUSE THE HIGHER CO2; but they are still linked as Petit et al said.
And we know for darn sure that warmer temperatures cause higher CO2 because the global warmists claim that as a feedback mechanism; CO2 is less soluble in warme water; ergo, ocean warming causes outgassing CO2.
The secret is: the thing that happens first is the CAUSE (warmer temperatures) and the thing that happens last is the EFFECT (CO2 outgassing)
John Philip
Qualifications are worth zero beside abilities. Monckton is able to think, to do maths, to apply his mind to every detail of complex physics when he smells corruption in the wind, and to draw on ancient layers of our culture to appeal to the highest in people to wake up because we cannot afford to let science become corrupted. And even if his science was bad, which it is not, his rhetoric and logic deserve applause and support. If physics professors accept his validity, so should you by your own criteria.
But this is what convinced me that Monckton’s ability was sterling and true. Last year he wrote a piece in the Telegraph which mathematician Gavin Schmidt shredded in “Cuckoo Science”. AGW’ers know Schmidt’s piece but fail to realize… Monckton has answered every single line of Schmidt (and without the discourtesy Schmidt applied). If Schmidt could have demolished Monckton’s answer, he would have done so; he would not have passed up on such an opportunity. That he did not do so, tells me he could not.
At a conference in the early 1990s, I heard Bill Gray make two predictions: The first was that there would soon be a sudden shift to much more active Atlantic Hurricane Seasons, and 2) That if the average global temperature did not start to cool in the early 21st century he would jump off one of the Rocky Mountains out his back door, if he was still around. Both of these predictions where based on pattern recognition and turned out to be 100% accurate.
Bill Gray was vilified for political reasons (as Caleb mentioned above concerning Hanson and Gore), but the scientific excuse for his public humiliation was the fact that he could not ‘model’ the patterns he was recognizing. Mathematicians will tell you that you will have more predictive success if you try to recognize the patterns in a chaotic, nonlinear system than if you try to model the system based on initial and forecast inputs. In other words, they tell us that Bill Gray’s method of prediction will be more accurate than the IPCC’s. Reality is demostrating this most effectively.
In the spirit of Bill Gray, I recognize the ocean cycles of the PDO and the AMO as being dominate and predictable. The solar influence is less predictable but seems to be producing trends that last for a few hundred years, and that the warming trend may have just peaked at the end of the 20th century. CO2 emissions will likely increase, but the warming impact will be on the order of 0.02 to 0.03 degrees C per decade, based on a climate sensitivity deduced from recognizing the natural cycles and subtracting their influence from the warming of the 20th century.
The net result will be a cooling of about a half a degree C until 2038, followed by a warming of about 0.2 to 0.3 degrees C through 2068, then another cool down of about a half a degree through the end of the century. In other words, the net warming of the 20th century will be cancelled by the cooling of the 21st century. Without human CO2 emissions, the cooling of the 21st century would likely be 50% greater, with temperatures approaching the coolness of the early 1800s.
Major volcanic eruptions could produce significant short term cooling, but unless they are really huge, they should not have a significant impact on the overall trend. Given the current natural cycles, I do not see any hope for warmer temperatures, which is a shame. There is no question that a modest warming through the 21st century would be great for the biosphere and humans in particular. Too bad it is not going to happen!
I broadly agree with Jim but feel that the potential for larger and/or more rapid temperature changes has been understated.
Warming tends to be slow because the increasing warmth from the oceans has to get ever greater to continue overcoming the enhanced heat flow from atmosphere to space caused by the increased surface/space temperature differential.
Cooling can be much quicker because the reduction of heat flow from the oceans is added to the previously created enhanced heat flow from atmosphere to space.
With warming the planetary temperaure is being pushed uphill. With cooling it is being pushed downhill.
Lucy – A rather more plausible interpretation is that Monckton’s article was scientific gobbledygook designed to fool the unwary and when Schmidt dissected his nonsense, Monckton replied with more gobbledlygook repeating many of the same errors. I can understand Schmidt’s reluctance to get into a protracted back-and-forth with such an individual.
Let us look at how this works: regarding Monckton’s latest piece in the APS forum, estimating climate sensitivity and ‘proving’ the IPCC have got it wrong. When determining the temperature trend Monkton divides the measured values by 2. Because:
If McKitrick (2007) (G,H) is correct that temperature since 1980 has risen at only half of the observed rate, ….
This is a reference to McKitrick and Michaels, (J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S09) which based on a statistical correlation analysis claimed that land temperature anomalies may be overestimated by a factor of two. The paper is disputed, but more importantly it was for land measurements only. Monckton uses it as an excuse to divide the whole global trend by 2, when in fact it would support a reduction of 30% of this amount, this being the fraction of the globe that is land.
So the calculation is BS, Monkton relies on the casual reader not checking his references. The most basic peer-review would have spotted this error, and indeed it is error number E28 in this list of 125 similar errors from APS member Arthur Smith. I am not aware that Monckton has ‘rebutted’ this analysis.
I am not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek, however in the open letter to McCain he describes himself … His contribution to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 – the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise – earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate.
There was indeed an arithmetical error in a table, but others had already notified the IPCC with rather less fuss before the Viscount’s letter arrived. He is entitled to describe himself as an IPCC Expert Reviewer but then if I were to comment on an IPCC report, so would I.
JP
PS I took a look at your ‘primer’, can you point me to the details of the Gallup poll of AGU and AMS members that found that only 17% agree that human activites affect the climate?
Thanks.
Stephen Wilde (02:07:21), that is an interesting idea. The only problem is the warmings and coolings for the past 400,000 years about the same rate according to the Vostok data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
The slope on each side of each spike is quite steep.
John M Reynolds
@John Philip
But here are Sami Solanki’s thoughts…’I am not a denier of global warming produced by an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. Already at present the overwhelming source of global warming is due to manmade greenhouse gases and their influence will continue to grow in the future as their concentration increases’. Ooops!
I find this an intriguing comment, since I have found it at the end of many current papers – most recently on the topic of Polar Bear numbers. I recall reading a paper in which all the data indicated that Polar Bears had a high, stable population, and there was no hint of any problem.
Then, after the conclusion, a short paragraph on ‘Future Trends’ was added. This paragraph had no data, but stated that IF global warming continued, and IF Polar Bears’ habitat was affected, this would obviously put Polar Bears at risk.
This addendum had no basis in the field data, and was obviously inserted to:
a) indicate that the researcher was ‘not a denier’
b) enable the paper to be used to support an opposite conclusion to the data, should that be desired.
May I suggest that Sami Solanki’s thoughts are part of the same pattern? Like the Eastern Block show trials, it seems that you have to declare you have the correct faith before you are allowed to have your paper considered or published. The similarities with Galilieo are striking – you may say that the Earth moves in your paper, so long as you include a disclaimer that of course the Church is right when it says the Earth is the static centre of creation!
You might also wish to consider Dr Ian Jolliffe’s comments about the hockey-stick, which I am sure you are aware of. He indicates that this work (on which a major plank of the AGW hypothesis rests) is incorrect. But at the same time, he says that he is sure that global warming exists.
“I am by no means a climate change denier. My strong impressive is that the evidence rests on much much more than the hockey stick. It therefore seems crazy that the MBH hockey stick has been given such prominence and that a group of influential climate scientists have doggedly defended a piece of dubious statistics….”
I Jolliffe
In the same breath he has attacked, and then reiterated his defence of, AGW. This is classic doublethink.
When the hockey stick went down in flames, AGW supporters world-wide made similar statements to Ian Jolliffe’s “My strong impression is that the evidence rests on much much more than the hockey stick.”
So what is this “much much more evidence” that they are talking about? It is the notion of a very strong positive water vapor feedback for which there is actually no real-world, physical evidence! It is pure speculation! Their ‘much much more evidence’ contains no evidence what so ever! And on this we are supposed willingly increase the suffering of every man, women and child on the planet!! It is madness of the highest order!
Dodgy – Seems to me you have identified a major weakness in the contrarian position, that is, you have to assume that thousands of scientists are reporting their findings and opinions in bad faith. Solanki is a solar expert and his opinions are informed by his research, which indicates that solar forcing is a minor player, at best, in the modren warming.
In fact Jolliffe describes himself as sceptical about the Hockey Stick, he does not say it is incorrect. From the same source: It is possible that there are good reasons for decentred PCA to be the technique of choice for some types of analyses and that it has some virtues that I have so far failed to grasp, but I remain sceptical.
It is not doublethink to be sceptical about a single strand of evidence for a proposition while finding the rest of the evidence compelling, which is Jolliffe’s stated position.
Jim It is the notion of a very strong positive water vapor feedback for which there is actually no real-world, physical evidence! It is pure speculation!
See this paper in Nature. From the abstract:
We identify a significant global-scale increase in
surface specific humidity that is attributable mainly to human
influence. Specific humidity is found to have increased in response
to rising temperatures, with relative humidity remaining approximately
constant.
Higher specific humidity = more water vapour. As we are repeatedly reminded water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas, so more water vapour …
jmrSudbury (04:44:55) :
Stephen Wilde (02:07:21), that is an interesting idea. The only problem is the warmings and coolings for the past 400,000 years about the same rate according to the Vostok data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
The slope on each side of each spike is quite steep.
John M Reynolds
I think the Vostock evidence would be too coarse to show such an effect. It would only be the early stages of cooling that would be steepest on a decadal basis. Once the earlier warming peak had gone from the atmosphere the process would be more sedate (all other things being equal).
Cooling continues into the next decade. By 2011, on average, we are back where we were in the early 1800s. The global food crises continues to worsen. The amount of viable ag land in Eurasia, particularly the interior, shrinks dramatically. As happened during the period 350 – 800 AD, this places migration and conquest pressure on the great powers who live there, especially Russia and China. They mount a general offensive, resulting in additional cooling due to the effects of WMDs used to smash Western and pro Western strategic military assets. The new Dark Age begins.
James Hansen visits China and is torn apart by desperate citizenry as part of their food and energy riots.
The Post article contained a 6th order polynomial trendline that many objected to – but what other choice would have been better?
This polynomial demonstrates that all global warming has disappeared (measured in the LT from 1979 when the satellites were first launched to end August 2008), a valid point made by the writer.
The recent PDO shift to cooling supports the view that global cooling will occur for another ~30 years, with some interruptions. Low-order polynomials barely show any cooling.
The 6th order poynomial obviously relates to 666, the Mark of the Beast at the End of Days.
The 6th order polynomial, when extrapoliated, intersects the critical 1 degree F cooling line on December 21, 2012 – End of Days on the Mayan Calender.
Planetary alignments that occur only once in millenia will happen on this fateful End of Days…
Does anyone need clearer proof than this?
Before anyone distributes the above nonsense to others and starts a new kool-aid cult, please recognize satire when you see it.
Regards, Allan 🙂
Nope, because there are enough “people” out there who would actually believe that crap.
Right Jeff.
Just like politicians and bureaucrats believed the bogus Mann Hockey Stick.
Does it bother anyone else that both US Presidential Candidates believe that humanmade global warming is a dangerous problem, so trillions of scarce dollars must be wasted to fight it?
Must we always be governed by scoundrels and imbeciles?
My prediction: Gradual warming for the next century, not to exceed an additional +0.4 degr. C. by 2100.
1. Because the extant trend line follows the base-line logarithmic function of CO2 warming (NASA/GISS data). The natural trend line is a slowly leveling upward temperature trend. This trend can be observed since the early 1900’s.
2. The rate of CO2 increase is slowly diverging ahead of the rate of increase in air temperatures (Hadley CRUT). This clear trend has shown itself since 1980. That is for every additional unit of CO2 added to the atmosphere air temperatures increase at a slower rate, again reflecting the logarithmic effects of CO2.
Toward that end, I also predict gradual, ever so slight, cooling for the next 20 – 30 years based on the elusive but compelling correlation of solar heliomagnetic output to terrestrial climate. Whether and how exactly space weather influences terrestrial weather appears to be edging toward the effects of progressive ionizing cosmic ray and UV radiation.
To clarify your prediction leebert (03:22;56)
“Gradual warming for the next century, not to exceed an additional +0.4 degrees C by 2100.”
Please refer to the LT plot included in the National Post article at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/20/national-post-thirty-years-of-warmer-temperatures-go-poof/#more-3739
The current LT anomaly is hovering around 0.0C now, having reached 0.4C at certain times in ~2003-2006. So are you saying global temperature in year 2100 will be not significantly warmer than 2003-2006?
No much material for scary headlines there, unless it is misrepresented, as was the current global warming “crisis”. The current warming “crisis” could be more correctly rewritten as “mild cyclical global warming since ~1979, peaking at ~0.4C in ~2003-2006, fully reversed by 2008; expected cooling of unknown degree for the next 30 years”.
Headline: “Warming Crisis Vanishes; Cooling Crisis Next?”
Subheading: “Palin says Told ya so! Obama, McCain and America in the Dark.”
Obama’s plan to declare CO2 a dangerous substance under the Clean Air Act should pretty well finish off the ailing American economy. Can we really kill the economy through stupid extreme-green measures? “Yes We Can!”
Note to Moderator – could you please edit my latest post, 4th paragraph:
“mild cyclical average global warming since ~1979, peaking at ~0.4C in ~2003-2006, fully reversed by 2008; expected cooling of unknown degree”
Please delete word “average”.
Also, could you spell-correct my 20:52:10 post – here is a corrected version:
The Post article contained a 6th order polynomial trendline that many objected to – but what other choice would have been better?
This polynomial demonstrates that all global warming has disappeared (measured in the LT from 1979 when the satellites were first launched to end August 2008), a valid point made by the writer.
The recent PDO shift to cooling supports the view that global cooling will occur for another ~30 years, with some interruptions. Low-order polynomials barely show any cooling.
The 6th order polynomial obviously relates to 666, the Mark of the Beast at the End of Days.
The 6th order polynomial, when extrapolated, intersects the critical 1 degree F cooling line on December 21, 2012 – End of Days on the Mayan Calendar.
Planetary alignments that occur only once in millennia will happen on this fateful End of Days…
Does anyone need clearer proof than this?
Before anyone distributes the above nonsense to others and starts a new kool-aid cult, please recognize satire when you see it.
Thank you, Allan
Allan,
My prediction is a very casual one, not very serious… it’s based on 20-yr weighted averages as compared to the baseline logarithmic warming function of CO2 as a greenhouse (sans water vapor “feedbacks”):
http://i32.tinypic.com/28h3dqh.jpg
Hadley CRUT temperatures plotted against CO2 levels. Note how the two trend lines start to diverge in the 1970’s – temperature is less and less correlated to CO2 levels, which is to be expected. This is because additional CO2 introduced to the atmosphere has less and less warming effect.
http://i27.tinypic.com/25fuk8w.jpg
Likewise, CO2 has an anticipated modest warming effect and has tracked consistently with actual temperatures except during the warmer 1990’s. But the IPCC projected climate sensitivity to CO2 predicts temperature trends rising exponentially any time now
see also:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-is-greenhouse-effect-logarithmic.html http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/07/the-60-second-c.html
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/HANSEN_AND_CONGRESS.jpg
Hi Allan,
Also, without getting into particulars about which perturbation in the myriad causes (AMO, PDO, solar output) is causing which amount of temperature change, I do indeed acknowledge that there has been a long-standing temperature plateau of at least the past 9 years, if not 11, and that a potential zero trend may be in the offing going back even further.
Some of the fundamentals in climatology are still being rewritten. The presumably closed case of how much warming soot causes in both ice & air is being reopened with new evidence and models showing a far larger effect from both industrial and agricultural sources, contributing constantly to temperature anomalies. The beauty of soot – a real pollutant – is that it can be readily mitigated at modest cost, its pernicious air- and ice-heating effects ameliorated with the added benefits of curtailing lung-damaging soot and mitigating mercury and arsenic fallout as well, and its mitigation would buy additional time against any tangibly serious risk posed by other greenhouse agents (not to say the risk is serious, just a matter of a provisional ounce of precaution that bears no other unnecessary overheads).
The matter of solar climate affecting terrestrial climate comes with a long-standing, well-correlated record, but lacking a clear causal link. Dr. Leif Svalgaard has explicated in Tony’s forum, exhaustively, that direct insolation cannot alone explain the clear & apparent trend correlation between sun spots & climate, leaving us with the less direct – and perhaps functionally buffered – influence of heliomagnetism upon cosmic rays. We are witnessing a contemporary cessation of global warming at the same time that SC#24 is already shaping up to be atypically and specifically weak in magnetic output (as opposed to SC#19 that evinced a low sunspot minimum but demonstrated a strong magnetic field that appears to have ushered in a strong maximum).
And finally, we have greenhouse gases which may never be fully exculpated, but perhaps have been aspersed more than their due. In my first reply to you I showed two rather quickly hashed charts that demonstrate what even the so-called “skeptics” in climatology agree is fundamental physics: CO2 causes *some* warming. The $1T question is about water vapor feedback, that the principle that warmer air inheres more-humid air, and humid air is necessarily being even warmer on a global scale and applicable into the entire Earth system. The models predicting this feedback effect suffers from a lack of indisputable evidence, and the ongoing temperature plateau being the biggest null torpedoing holes into the hull of the predictions we’re risking dangerous AGW.
So to address the thrust of your question, should a presidential candidate commit to combating greenhouse gases, my answer is “No.” In the current fiscal & financial climate I don’t see much being done any sitting Congress or President, but the whole issue is steering me away from any candidate who holds up CO2 as some environmental cause celebre.
As it stands half of Europe is in near rebellion against the EU’s climate policies b/c of the inherent economic costs and loss of competitiveness, so it’d be quite atypical for the USA to join a dwindling cause that suffers from shoddy science. Just because Al Gore and his ilk have sunk $5.3b into a carbon credits doesn’t mean that the Obamanites aren’t poised to sell the entire scheme short on margin.
Renewables energy sources sound nice – and gosh knows the world will ultimately benefit from them – but all claims to the contrary the question of whether they’re economically viable continues to rear its ugly head. The current generation of windmills still suffer from poor reliability and economies of scale while photovoltaics are poised to finally become cost-effective against their problematic failure rate (MTBF is still too short against ROE). No Apollo crash program will work against these issues, although unlike fusion energy, the solutions may actually be just around the corner. Two important improvements in both wind & solar power come from two small firms – flodesign with their jet engine-like cowling windmill and nanosolar with their spray-on production machine prototype. But these two new technologies still need to proven and deployed before anyone can declare we have an affordable solution and nations start really subsidizing full rollouts.
HI Leebert,
Good comments, much appreciated, thank you.
The biggest problem I see with wind power is the “substitution capacity”, the percentage of conventional power generation that can be permanently retired when new wind power is put into service. The number is typically less than 10%. The best report I’ve found on this subject is:
E.On Netz Wind Power Report 2005, Germany
http://www.eon-netz.com/EONNETZ_eng.jsp
Simply, the wind often does not blow when we need the peak power – so we need a same-size conventional power station over the hill, spinning and ready to take over when the wind dies… …the fact that wind power varies as the cube power of the wind speed is a further problem – power variations in the grid due to wind speed can cause serious grid upsets, even shutdowns.
Just one such blackout in a cold winter could have devastating results – for a preview, look up a sampling of the mortality stats during the Ontario-Quebec Ice Storm of a decade ago.
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/99vol25/dr2517ea.html
Regards, Allan
“for the dataset provided (UAH Global anomaly) how would you extrapolate, if at all – linear, polynomial”
This should be split into two issues.
1. How best to present a trend in this non-linear cyclic data?
2. If permissible, is extrapolation wise?
In answer to 2.) extrapolation without ancillary discussion as to the cause and likely future conditions is daft, i.e., carrying the trend forward, regardless of presentation, without reason.
I believe the trend is best presented by a third order polynomial as its performance at the endpoints is relatively conservative, if not linear. It can also be used to side-step the ‘base period’ impasse encountered with a linear presentation.
Note the 1998 El Nino was preceded by 1996 solar minimum and followed immediately by La Nina giving back most of the gains.
La Nina 2008 aborted El Nino 2007 and accompanies an extra year of solar minimum. Going forward we will immediately lose heat to the average with returning La Nina conditions. The next opportunity for a significant El Nino to restore lost heat would be approximately 2015. Prior that we will have virtually lost the heat gained in the “unprecedented warming” of the Twentieth Century, i.e., another 0.3 degrees C or more.
Cooling will persist simply because of the 60% prevalence for La Ninas thru 2035. The current increased albedo will not dissipate during that period even if it does temporarily drop below current levels. Therefore today’s global average temps will not be exceeded during that period.
Solar cycles seem to occur in sets, be they quartets, quintets or otherwise, rising to peaks or subsiding in troughs. By the Waldemeier effect as well as by comparing the daily data of the 23 minimum with that of the current minimum we can be relatively certain 24 will be much weaker than 23 and 25 likely weaker still.
So nothing stands in the way of cooling.