Climate Models -vs- Climate Reality: diverging or just a dip?

15 04 2009

Here’s something really interesting:  two comparisons between model ensembles and  3 well known global climate metrics plotted together. The interesting part is what happens in the near present. While the climate models and climate measurements start out in sync in 1979, they don’t stay that way as we approach the present.

Here are the trends from 1979-”Year” for HadCrut, NOAA, GISSTemp compared to the trend based on 16 AOCGMs models driven by volcanic forcings:

Figure 1: Trends since 1979.

Figure 1: Trends since 1979 ending in ‘Year’.

A second graph showing 20 year trends is more pronounced. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 180 Comments »

Categories : climate data, climate_change, modeling

Why Third Year Arctic Ice Will Increase Next Year

15 04 2009

Guest post by Steven Goddard

In spite of the excess global sea ice area and the freezing Catlin crew, AGW proponents have recently ramped up the rhetoric about “melting ice caps.”  This has been based on a couple of points.

1.  In the southern hemisphere, cracks appeared in a 200 metre thick ice shelf, as seen below.

http://www.ogleearth.com/wissm.jpg

The ice cracked, not melted – but that minor detail didn’t stop nearly every major news outlet in the world from hinting at the fiery and imminent end to the planet.

2.  At the other pole, NSIDC released an interesting statistic that Arctic ice “older than two years” reached a record low this winter.

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 115 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, sea ice

Update: Sun and Ice

15 04 2009


By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM

The sun remains in a deep slumber.

image

Today we are 15 days into April without a sunspot and with 603 sunspotless day this cycle minimum, 92 already this year.  2009 at this rate, is likely to enter the top 10 years the last century along with 2007 (9th) and 2008 (2nd) this summer.

image

Click for larger image

If it stays quiet the rest of this month, the minimum can be no earlier than November 2008, at least a 12.5 year cycle length. I believe January 2009 is a better shot to be the solar minimum as sunspot number would have to be below 0.5 in June 2008 to prevent the running mean (13 month) from blipping up then. April needs only to stay below 3.2 and May 3.4 to get us to January. This would be very like cycles 1 to 4 in the late 1700s and early 1800s, preceding the Dalton Minimum. That was a cold era, the age of Dickens and the children playing in the snow in London, much like this past winter. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 310 Comments »

Categories : sea ice, solar

Sir John Maddox (1925-2009)

15 04 2009

Sir John Maddox

Sir John Maddox

Story here

John Maddox, a former editor of the journal Nature, who attended
yesterday’s meeting, said the sceptics might have a point. He did not
dispute that carbon dioxide emissions could drive global warming, but said: “The IPCC is monolithic and complacent, and it is conceivable that they are exaggerating the speed of change.”
–David Adam, The Guardian, 25 January 2005


Comments : 30 Comments »

Categories : Announcements

The oceans as a calorimeter and solar amplification

15 04 2009

For those who don’t know, a calorimeter is a device to measure heat capacity. There is an entire science called calorimetry devoted to this measurement. Scottish physician and scientist Joseph Black, who was the first to recognize the distinction between heat and temperature, is claimed to be founder of calorimetry. Interestingly, Black studied properties of Carbon Dioxide. One of his experiments involved placing a flame and mice into the carbon dioxide. Because both entities died, Black concluded that the air was not breathable. He named it ‘fixed air’ – Anthony

Reposted from Sciencebits by Professor Nir J. Shaviv, Racah Institute of Physics

I few months ago, I had a paper accepted in the Journal of Geophysical Research. Since its repercussions are particularly interesting for the general public, I decided to write about it. I would have written earlier, but as I wrote before, I have been quite busy. I now have time, sitting in my hotel in Lijiang (Yunnan, China).

Lijiang Scene

A scene in Lijiang near my hotel, where most of this post was written. More pics here.

A calorimeter is a device which measures the amount of heat given off in a chemical or physical reaction. It turns out that one can use the Earth’s oceans as one giant calorimeter to measure the amount of heat Earth absorbs and reemits every solar cycle. Two questions probably pop in your mind,
a) Why is this interesting?
and,
b) How do you do so?
Let me answer.

One of the raging debates in the climate community relates to the question of whether there is any mechanism amplifying solar activity. That is, are the solar synchronized climatic variations that we see (e.g., take a look at fig. 1 here) due to changes of just the solar irradiance, or, are they due to some effect which amplifies the solar-climate link. In particular, is there an amplification of some non-thermal component of the sun? (e.g., UV, solar magnetic field, solar wind or others which have much larger variations than the 0.1% variations of the solar irradiance). This question has interesting repercussions to the question of global warming, which is why the debate is so fierce. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 147 Comments »

Categories : Science, oceans, solar

Rommulan Sudden Acceleration

15 04 2009

I found this article well researched and clearly written, so I thought I’d repost it here for all to enjoy. Warren Meyers was one of the first volunteers for the surfacestations.org project and we share blog content semi-regularly. This is a rebuttal to Joe Romm’s (of Climate Progress) claim of a 15°F AGW induced temperature rise by 2100. – Anthony

acceleration

Sudden Acceleration

Reposted from Climate Skeptic, by Warren Meyers
April 14, 2009, 11:42 pm

For several years, there was an absolute spate of lawsuits charging sudden acceleration of a motor vehicle — you probably saw such a story:  Some person claims they hardly touched the accelerator and the car leaped ahead at enormous speed and crashed into the house or the dog or telephone pole or whatever.  Many folks have been skeptical that cars were really subject to such positive feedback effects where small taps on the accelerator led to enormous speeds, particularly when almost all the plaintiffs in these cases turned out to be over 70 years old.  It seemed that a rational society might consider other causes than unexplained positive feedback, but there was too much money on the line to do so.

Many of you know that I consider questions around positive feedback in the climate system to be the key issue in global warming, the one that separates a nuisance from a catastrophe.  Is the Earth’s climate similar to most other complex, long-term stable natural systems in that it is dominated by negative feedback effects that tend to damp perturbations?  Or is the Earth’s climate an exception to most other physical processes, is it in fact dominated by positive feedback effects that, like the sudden acceleration in grandma’s car, apparently rockets the car forward into the house with only the lightest tap of the accelerator? Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 88 Comments »

Categories : climate_change