“Mike I would say that is a fair statement; except that most of the radiation that comes from the sun would not be in the IR.”

Well I certainly wasn’t insinuating that it was.

What I believe it overlooked by modelers is that UV that is not reflected by concrete makes the concrete hotter and re-emit IR but much of the UV that is not reflected by plant leaves is converted into chemical energy – NOT re-emitted as IR. (Thus a partial explanation of the “UHI effect”.) So… doesn’t it stand to ponder that because more CO2 causes most plants to convert UV energy into chemical energy at a higher rate, that more CO2 it also therefore a negative feedback to temperature especially in the tropics in addition to convection per Dr. Lindzen?

It has to be true. Though I do not have a clue how much, it ain’t in any climate model I’ve ever heard of.

I find this amusing. A tale of woe and disaster from the runaway heat wave in the UK causing drastic failure that can not be mitigated… sheep dropping like flies from the heat… Why amusing?

Because I grew up in farm country in one of the most productive places on the planet, regularly attending the county fair in August to tour the animal barns (including cattle, sheep, pigs, etc.) When it was regularly 110 F in the shade (and there aint no shade…)

Now if you hit over about 105 F for long times it’s a good idea to swap over to heat tolerant breeds like the brahman breeds, but my Dad ran a standard brown / white beef breed with no ‘issues’ and the hotter it got the more the pasture and grains grew. Oh, it it’s a good idea to shear the sheep at the start of summer. (You know, last time I looked they grew a lot of sheep in Australia out in the way hot… I remember driving past a lot of them on a very hot day)

Cereal yields and quality were good. The protein content of grain rose, which was good for bread-making wheat but not for malting barley. The harvest was large and early, allowing farmers to make a cost saving with fewer working days and less grain drying,…

Yup. More food more easily. Oh, and it’s OK to malt high protein barley, but if it really bothers you, just constrain the nitrogen fertilizer a little.

Cattle enterprises suffered because of a shortage of grass and forage, although upland forage for beef was less restricted. Many areas could only take one silage cut, and grass production in the driest areas dropped by 20-30%. Maize yields were down by 30%, and other feeds such as potatoes were in short supply. All this resulted in food supply problems over the winter, with farmers buying in feed or selling off animals.

Sounds more like a drought / planning problem than a heat problem. Plant more dry tolerant varieties and move on. As a one time fluke, you got caught unprepared; longer term this is very manageable. (I remember my Mom saying that she was going to visit home in England during July in the hope of finding the sunny day that year ;-) She got rained on the whole time… An English drought is when the frogs don’t drown… BTW, burmuda grass is highly productive in heat and we always had clover / vetch growing like crazy in the summer. At most you need to slightly change what you plant to take advantage of increased heat, if you get any.

One beneficial effect of the summer was that, although hay and forage prices were high, cereals had produced a lot of good quality straw, which some farmers used to supplement rations.

OK, maybe it’s a language issue, but where I grew up it was “straw” when it was loose and it was “hay” when it was bailed, but more specifically straw was the stem of a grass. So I’m having trouble with the idea that hay was having problems but straw wasn’t… Maybe you had a particular kind of hay in mind, like Alfalfa, that doesn’t have a straw since it’s not a grass?

Pigs and poultry both responded to the heat by reducing feed intake. This resulted in lower slaughter weights for pigs and reduced egglaying, low broiler growth rates and increased mortality in poultry.

Unless you have the wimpiest pigs and sheep on the planet, this is just silly. I’ve slopped pigs on a friends pig farm in Illinois one summer and Dad raised them on the farm in Iowa as a kid. Summer in either one is not exactly cool. Again, unless you were over 100F every single day for 30+ days with many days in the 110 F range, you are not talking heat… Iowa is rather well know for producing a lot of pork products… I can’t imagine England ever coming close to an Iowa summer. But for real heat, let’s talk Texas. There is a wonderful part of Texas called “The Hill Country”. About 5 years ago I drove across it in July. Darned Hot. 100 something and not much cooler at night (unlike California). Stopped a couple of times to admire the goat herds and once or twice to look at some fine cattle.

Based on your description of Dire Straights all of the American Heartland, our most productive farming on the planet, is on the verge of sterility and animals are prostrate and wasting away…

Now go to equatorial countries where agriculture is already heat stressed what will happen there?

You mean places like Brazil, the rising star of global agriculture with record yields of sugar cane and a growing force in the global soybean industry?(since they have enough heat to really crank out the production!) I expect them to record continuing record production of sugar, beans, grains, cattle, etc. They have some fine cattle and great beef steak (for darned cheap prices!) Though they did have snow in southern Brazil this last year, a bit of a surprise…

Some places will be better off others will go under leading to forced migration polewards. Politics will not allow this.

Pardon me, but your silliness is showing… There is a large and persistent migration happening, but it’s from North to South. Loads of folks have turned Phoenix into a major metropolitan region. BTW, Phoenix is an example of where heat does limit production. During the peak of summer when it hits 120+ there are some crops you can’t grow. So you end up with only a 9 month growing season for some crops. I’ll let that soak in a minute.

OK, so that’s your limit case. If you presently don’t have a 9 month growing season due to cold winters, you gradually move through ever longer growing seasons until you reach the 12 months of California. Then, and only then as you reach 120 degrees F, you will compress your growing season back to 9 months for cool season crops. But in exchange for this you get to have all the citrus, strawberries, sweet corn, soybeans, nopalitos (nopales – cactus pads, it’s a TexMex CaliMex, Mexican thing…) tepary beans, black eyed peas, collards, etc you could ever want. Oh, and sugar cane if you have the water. The Phoenix area production in it’s two major growing seasons exceeds that of most areas in their seasons.

Heat grows more food, not less. It moves when you grow them. Period.

It lets you choose to grow cold season crops in the winter (like kale, cabbage, peas, etc.) and heat tolerant in the summer for year round production. You just can’t do that under 4 feet of snow or at minus C or F in winter.

So until the entire planet is as hot as the center of one of the hottest deserts in North America, we get more production not less.

If you would like to test this for yourself, get a “planting calendar” for Fairbanks Alaska ( peak temp 60F to 70F some years for a couple of months maybe) and for Phoenix. Then plan you garden, orchard, and pasturing. Figure out the degree-day needs of each species and variety you will grow. Then show your work.

You will find that in Alaska, it’s a race to get 60 day crops to mature (though the 24 hour sun helps) and things like 120 day corn (maize) are just not possible. For Phoenix it’s ‘anything goes’ but you may need to limit your cold season crops to around December and not plant some things in June July August (time for the hot plants instead: Tomato, Peppers, tepary beans, letting early season beans and corn dry for dry grains, canning nopales, harvesting citrus etc.)

Which is easier to live with? 60 days of maybe growing a few varieties of fast foods or year round production with a bit of care to avoid peas and kale in summer? Now you know why folks move to Phoenix from Boise…

BTW, TWC is reporting Colorado getting “pounded with this one” at Vale with new snow and a late skii season… I’m looking forward to an early skii resort report from New Zealand too…

It sort of reminds me of how computer simulations were run regarding ice melting on Mars and they concluded “that the planet’s albedo-induced warming may be responsible for as much as 60 percent of that loss.”

“May be” and “as much as 60%” is an awful lot of wiggle room.

Steven M.
Lexington MA

any explanation to that?

(to be honest I didn’t look for a counter example)

I think you misunderstood my question #1. I mean the temperature measurements of the 30-40s, which were hotter then today, have been adjusted downward. This makes all the difference between having a trend and no trend …

I found a link to a blink comparator to show what i mean — http://zapruder.nl/images/uploads/screenhunter3qk7.gif

And I assume you were not able to find a counter-example (where adjustments went against the trend). When we are dealing with a signal buried in noise and all adjustments go one-way, well .. that seems unlikely, to put it mildly :-) .

I think we are at an impasse. I respect your position; its logically and you have done your research and I concede might be correct, however I remain skeptical. There is a LOT of room for skepticism as the above graph shows just one piece of. If there was a strong and obvious ‘unadjusted’ signal … there would be no argument … but we to have succumbed to arguing over noise.

Cheers to you and thank you for your respectful and intelligent debate.

1st Assessment Report (1990) – Our judgement is that: global mean surface air temperature has increased by 0.3 to 0.6 oC over the last 100 years…;

2nd Assesment Report (1995) -
Global mean surface air temperature has increased by between about 0.3 and 0.6°C since the late 19th century; the additional data available since 1990 and the reanalyses since then have not significantly changed this range of estimated increase.

3rd Assement Report 2001 – The global average surface temperature has increased over the 20th century by about 0.6°C;

4th Assesment Report (2007) The 100-year linear trend
(1906-2005) of 0.74 [0.56 to 0.92]°C1 is larger than the corresponding
trend of 0.6 [0.4 to 0.8]°C (1901-2000)

Those all seem pretty consistent to me given the temperature has risen 1988- 2005 (the cutoffs for AR1 to AR4) by a fraction under 0.4 deg C (from the woods for trees plot)

Just out of curiosity let me ask you a couple questions:
1.) Do you think adjusting past temperatures downward is valid? I haven’t bookmarked one, but many people have done blink comparators that show how the hot 30s were reduced .. making a wavy graph look more like a straight line.
2.) Do you have a counter-example of corrections going the other direction? It seems every time there is a correction recent temperature are moved up, past temperature are moved down. Does this seem reasonable to you?

Thanks for your detailed response

As for the satellite ‘adjustment’ there is no mystery to this – one of the corrections in the UAH analysis (related to the drift in crossing times at the equator) had the wrong sign and this is acknowledged by Christy / Spencer.

I still find it hard to believe that 3 independent groups (GISS, HADcru and NSDC) would end up with temperature reconstructions that are essentially identical, coupled with the work that John V did at climate audit reconstructing the US temperature from the only good stations using a totally different method from GISS again should end up essentially identical.

Again – from my woodsfortrees plot, rss, hadcru and giss are showing just a shade under 0.5 deg C change in the satellite era – most of the change has happened in the satellite era

Totally take the point that a lot of this is finding a signal in noisy data.

As for adjustments – I can see that when a theory disagrees with measurements they will try and find a source for that disagreement, whether that be a change to the model (eg Hansen’s early GCM s ended up with a climate sensitivity of 4 Deg C – the current GISS model, I think, has a climate sensitivity of 2.7 Deg C) or checking if there is something wrong with the observations (e.g. the ocean cooling that was not cooling)

“Cosmic rays and clouds, Europe will finance a research project to discover causes of global warming.”

2.3M euro will be spent to research correlation between solar radiation, clouds and global temperature change.

(i.e : EU start to have doubt on the famous AGW, a start to give credit to other theory)

You can find the Italian article here : http://meteolive.leonardo.it/meteolive-notizia-25185-raggi_cosmici_e_nuvole,_lue_finanzia_il_progetto_di_ricerca_per_scoprire_le_cause_del_global_warming.html

It’s in Italian, if you need a complete translation let me know

Regards

Paolo

Maybe there has been warming, maybe there hasn’t. I’m skeptical because I can’t believe in data that is only being adjusted one-way and doesn’t take into account UHI (Anthony’s own passion for surface station evaluation shows UHI is real and has a huge effect, beyond any reasonably doubt) Given that, finding room to fit a measly 0.7C temperature rise through these kinds of error mechanisms would seem rather easy.

On a completely different note and something I have been thinking about … how are temperatures averaged? I believe that it is a simple average … which is obviously plain wrong. Temperature average should be the 4th root of the average of the 4th power of temperature, because outward thermal radiation is proportional to the 4th power of temperature. NOT doing it this way means that if temperatures around the world became flatter (i.e. distributed more towards the poles and reduced at the equator) then this would ‘look’ like an increase in average temperature when it is really just a change in the distribution of energy and the total energy remains unchanged. Not too even get into taking specific heat values into account and so on. How can we trust a system to come up with an average temperature that doesn’t know how to properly average temperature?

By your logic the surface data would have been adjusted to match the satellites,

Actually, by his logic the satellite data would be adjusted to be a closer match to the surface… which was what happened.

Mark

Yet when the satellite data was first produced there was a very large discrepancy with the surface data. By your logic the surface data would have been adjusted to match the satellites, in fact that was not done, however errors were subsequently found in the satellite data and the discrepancy reduced.