Behave yourselves.
Just remember that some comments with links might end up in the spam filter and may take some time before I notice them.
Behave yourselves.
Just remember that some comments with links might end up in the spam filter and may take some time before I notice them.
How ’bout those temperatures?
getting funnier and funnier to me…..if the next 12 months bring the same as the last 12 months, we will be facing global cooling for sure.
While we talk of the cool spring here in the US, Drudge Report has links up for:
———————————
SUMMER BLAST SET FOR EAST: 110F HEAT INDEX FOR DC …
…NYC HOTTEST IN YEARS
Temp Map…
———————————
Seriously. What temperatuer do we have to cool to in order for it to be obvious to anyone that CO2 is not the big bad boogeyman that Al/IPCC/Schimdt/Hansen have tried very very hard to make it to be?
Anyone know if La Nina is forecast to make a return this fall/winter?
Someone posted that JunkScience is down. Seems to work now, although the blog is kaput. Perhaps I missed something.
I note in the latest issue of Popular Science (maybe popular, questionable science) that Japan wants to revive the Solar Power satellite, to reduce the need for coal-fired power plants. Good grief. I thought this died a well deserved death in the early 80’s.
Apart from costing an arm & leg to launch, beaming 1 GW down from up there is about as dammfool a thing ever attemped. Even with a huge receiving antenna (10km x 20km) the power density at the center exceeds the Federal microwave exposure standards by at least 100x. And I seriously doubt they can find a frequency that nothing in the atmosphere will absorb.
If there was a futures market in stupidity…
I hate to admit this, but I just found out that the Maunder Minimum refers to sunspot activity not temperature. On another front, I have been wondering what effect urbanization has on local humidity and rainfall. Florida has a lot of low, grassy land that becomes temporarily wet and marshy following one of our frequent downpours at this time of the year. The next day that rainfall sits exposed to the sun where it evaporates back into the atmosphere creating new clouds which will then produce rain again later in the day. In areas where that are built up perhaps this doesn’t happen anymore because the rainfall is engineered to run off through storm drains and culverts into deep ponds and the Gulf of Mexico. I would think that the total surface area of water available for evaporation is significantly reduced so that the cycle is not self sustaining in these areas. Now there is a whole lot of open, undeveloped land throughout our State so it really shouldn’t effect most rural areas however we have had less than normal official rainfall for many years running. Since most official rain stations are probably located in and around cities, especially at airports and television stations, is it possible that the official announced numbers are lower due to less rain in the immediate area of those gauges?
REPLY: The Little Ice Age (LIA) concided with the Maunder Minimum, and that was all about temperature.
Huh? What is this all about? Did I cross the line again? I shouldn’t have linked to Global Warming Girls Gone Wild?
This link is to the register (UK) article which purports to show the divergence between NASA, RSS and University Alabama Huntsville temperatures.
Has any other source picked up on this or would anyone care to comment on the data or the article?
Thank you!
Link for above comment (oops).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/goddard_nasa_thermometer/print.html
Not funny. The high temp today here near Concord NH was 93.4F. I don’t like 90+ heat. (Dew point is 68F, adding insult to injury.) As long as we’re recording anecdotal observations, we should note hot weather too.
And the Hi/Lo temps since May’s high temp are:
+————+———+———+
| dt | hi_temp | lo_temp |
+————+———+———+
| 2008-05-27 | 85.1 | 52.0 |
| 2008-05-28 | 66.8 | 43.2 |
| 2008-05-29 | 78.3 | 35.6 |
| 2008-05-30 | 80.3 | 50.8 |
| 2008-05-31 | 73.7 | 55.0 |
| 2008-06-01 | 77.6 | 56.7 |
| 2008-06-02 | 77.4 | 51.0 |
| 2008-06-03 | 81.6 | 49.1 |
| 2008-06-04 | 63.2 | 56.6 |
| 2008-06-05 | 63.4 | 55.6 |
| 2008-06-06 | 59.3 | 55.4 |
+————+———+———+
So 93 is a bit of a shock. The last few days had an east wind blowing low clouds inland from the coast. The sort of clouds predicted by Svensmark’s Cosmic Ray hypothesis, I should think, but should look into a bit more.
Oddly enough where I live, Richmond, VA, we’re going through a huge hot heat wave. I think tomorrow we may break a record that was set in 1899.
Hey, it was THIS hot over a century ago too?
Hmmmmmm.
Two questions …
1. I’ve read that the global warming theories do not adequately explain the global temp increase since the 1970’s. Is there an alternative hypothesis, other than AGW?
2. There is a large amount of wasted heat from combustion processes. Typical recip engines run well less than 30% efficiency; the rest is exhausted to the atmosphere. Even nuclear power plants dump a lot of waste heat into the atmosphere. Has anyone run the numbers; how much GW might be do to the mere (inefficient) use of energy?
Here in Southern Montana, it is only 50 degrees at 8:30 pm. But at least our trees finally leafed out. Go figure.
Tom in Florida, the official rainfall at the Jacksonville airport this week was something like @ur momisugly 1 and 3/4″; however, I got nothin’. Just the nature of the afternoon seabreeze interacting with the inland heat.
As for dry or wet conditions in Florida, that has a lot to do with whether we’re in a La Nina or El Nino, and whether the AMO is in a warm phase or cool phase. While it’s been awhile since the water was 5 or more feet deep in some of my pastures, it will happen again. Now, though, there are people who have built houses in the low lying areas around here that used to be covered with trees because everybody knew that it flooded.
Should global warming cause more rainfall or less? ( assuming that it is warming)
My answer is more rainfall. Higher temperatures should cause more evaporation from the oceans. That will increase the total amount of water in the atmosphere but eventually it will reach a new equilibrium. From then on its the old adage; what goes up must come down. So more evaporation will result in more rainfall worldwide. We don’t know where it will come down, but worldwide rainfall should increase.
What do you think?
No need for an alternative. The most reliable temperature records (satellite and balloon) indicate any warming which might have occurred is completely within natural variability. Also, any warming certainly isn’t global, since many locales have cooled during this time.
Where is the Drudge Report these days on recent events such as low sunspot activity, lowest global temp readings of the decade, NASA manipulation of historical data, biases from poorly located temperature sensors, the return of ice in the Arctic, etc. etc.?
I read recently that liberals by and large take what they hear on the news to be facts while conservatives tend to be more skeptical.
In my opinion, there is not going to be any objective debate on the matter of AGW vs. NGW (naturally occuring global warming) until the issues that Anthony Watts and others are raising enter the mainstream media. Liberals hate Drudge, but at least they read it.
BTW, I am very pleased to see that this blog site is rapidly gaining readership. I suggest that we forward it to all of our liberal friends and co-workers so they at the least become aware that there are valid & logical concerns with the AGW “information” that is being distributed by the liberal mainstream media outlets.
Btw, I am making diner and drink bets with my liberal pals that it will be colder one year from today than it is now, based on any of the variance reports other than NASA’s.
Old Bob, there’s a couple of alternate scenarios that are plausible.
One is: The planet has been warming at around 1 degree C per century since the “Little Ice Age” of the 1700s. There’s a couple of large cyclical weather patterns (La Nina, El Nino, PDO etc.) that can lead to relative increases or decreases. So adding a ‘hot cycle’ on top of the original 1C/c gets to the observed 2C/c pace. And when things switch to cooling instead of warming, you’re subtracting the cyclical portion from the underlying 1C/c trend and get something like 0C/c. Which is what we’ve had for, say, ten years.
Another possibility involves sunspots. There isn’t a good mechanism postulated – the ‘Total Solar Irradiance’ doesn’t seem to track sunspots closely enough or strongly enough to be quite right. But we have a long record of sunspot observations, and the periods of extremely low sunspots correspond with the periods of extremely low temperatures quite well. (We don’t have excellent temperature records, but we do have extensive records of crop failures and the like.) This theory is also somewhat bolstered by observations of ‘global warming’ on Mars, Jupiter, and Pluto earlier this decade. But the actual output of the sun has only fluctuated very slightly.
The first satellite measurements of temperature were in the late 1970s, which just happens to coincide with a cold period in the weather cycles. So our best (most regular, most consistent, best calibrated, least obfuscated) temperature measurements were able to see the dramatic temperature increase across the 1980-2000 time period. Models were developed during that time – and the correlation with carbon dioxide emissions was decided to be causation. The models haven’t really predicted the trend of the last eight years though. The models aren’t ‘completely disproven’, they could just be unlucky at the moment. It takes either more time, or a sharper deviation to do that. And if there’s an underlying ‘warming trend’ that isn’t anthropomorphic, you’ll basically be unable to separate that without another couple of complete cycles. That’s thirty more years or so. So… now what.
bsneath asked: Where is the Drudge Report these days on…
I don’t know how Matt Drudge decides what makes the cut for his page. Once in a while, I used to listen to a Sunday night show he had on the radio. He seemed like a reasonable guy. But, I guess with news sites and needed clicks for ad revenues, the sensational stuff keeps the traffic count up.
My contribution to what is going on outside.
http://www.snowbird.com/ski_board/snowreport.php
MattN: El Nino forecast is here, updated yesterday:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/people/wwang/cfs_fcst/images/nino34SSTMon.gif
Looks like the ensemble mean has the NINO3.4 temperature rising just above the threshold (0.5degC) of an El Nino from August till October.
Japan wants to revive the Solar Power satellite
It would make one heck of a space death ray.
Tom in Florida,
The reduction in evaporation (and transpiration) due to urban runoff is probably small compared to the increase in evaporation due to irrigation. About 35% of all the worlds crop land is irrigated. In addition, urban irrigation is widespread in hot dry climates such as Australia.
Just another piece of anecdotal. Here, in SW France, we have had our wettest and coldest spring /summer in living memory. Living memory here is a long time. My neighbours age from 60 to 91 years old. In eastern France they have had a prolonged period of temperatures in the low 80’s. This would normally be the other way round.
The big concern is that the last time we had similar weather, but no as bad as now, was in the 50’s when winter were much more severe than in recent years.
By the way, PDO remains very negative (may 2008 at -1.9, april 2008 at 1.9). I believe it is some time since 2 months remained at a low level.
Tennet Naumer a blogger at DotEarth is trying to tell me Rossby Waves are used by GISS Temp to fix the lack of station coverage:
Surface station coverage in 1978:
http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/ghcn_giss_250km_anom04_1978_1978_1951_1980.gif
Surface station coverage in 2008:
http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/ghcn_giss_250km_anom04_2008_2008_1951_1980.gif
“You also do not understand the methodology of the way GISS calculates surface temperature using the mathematics of Rossby waves — a very sound methodology, as it agrees quite well with other temperature sources.
Go back to school.
— Posted by Tenney Naumer ”
I thought Rossby waves apply in a linear system and not a chaotic one. Any comments or references on this?
MattN and Bob Tisdale,
I’ve been visiting that CFS site for around a year, and they alter their long-term-outlook pretty dramatically on a regular basis. Not that many months ago they forecast the La Nina to sink to record lows, and persist through the summer. Before that they under-estimated the strength of the La Nina greatly, and before that they over-estimated the strength of the last, weak El Nino. So I’d say they have some glitches to work out of that model.
The site is at
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
It has good data from the past. Also a comparison of the CFS model with others. Currently the CFS is the highest estimate for the strength of the rebound from the La Nina. Other models differ, and quite a few have the rebound stay in neutral territory.
I’ll bet my nickel that the La Nina returns, but more weakly, in the fall. If you look at the data from the early 1950’s you can see times when the La Nina weakened during the summer, but re-strengthened during the fall. I’m guessing we are in a roughly similar time-period, with the PDO turning negative, and the AMO warm cycle starting to erode back to cool. Of course, the lack of sunspots throws a wrench into the works. You can’t use the past as a analog if history refuses to repeat itself.