UAH Global Temperatures, June 2008 still low "unofficially"

I don’t mind being called a “denier”. I deny that my car exhaust is causing the planet to warm. Maybe I’m insensitive to it, (the sticks and stones thing I guess). Maybe people feel it carries a negative connotation.
I also “get” the climate versus weather thing; (global vs. local, long term vs. short term, etc.) but in my mind they are one in the same. I understand the need to be precise, (I’m an Engineer), but I think that we’ve become………Oh, I can’t think of a good word/phrase…….politically/socially/culturally correct?
“T.V Journalist” is another one, they read the news from a teleprompter and look good….they don’t write anything.
A Janitor is a Janitor, not a “Custodial Technician”.
One of my co-workers suggested we employ “Light Harvesting” the other day…..(opening the window shades).
I always had a problem when they began calling the Moms behind the school lunch counter “Dietary Technicians”. She wasn’t a “Dietary Technician”; it was my friend Phil’s Mom.
They also now call teachers “Educators”.
I also have a problem with “Climatologist” seems like a contrived word. I don’t remember hearing the term until recently.
Please correct me if I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just getting old and irritable.
Great news about the June numbers. Looks like we escaped “Planetary Disaster” for another month or whatever buzzword the liberal press is using these days.
(And if I hear the word “sustainable” one more time I’m going to jump off the roof).

What an astonishingly great set of responses to the post by Ophiuchus. For a true layperson, such as myself (I’m a biologist in background, and an AGW”skeptic”, to say the least as far as the climate goes), they provide the overview that I’ve been seeking for some time now. Y’all have no idea what a marvelous educational opportunity you have given me. At the least, I’ll be better able to keep up with the discussions of this blog. No, I won’t understand them all, but I’m learning!
Distilled down and organized, your reponses should be required reading throughout every secondary school curriculum in place of the AGW propaganda now being circulated.
Thanks to everyone. And – have a great day! ☺

First off, I am pleased to see the number of reasonable responses to my post. From some of the material I had looked through, I surmised that this was a typical nitwit site, but obviously I was wrong — there are some impressive and thoughtful comments here.
I appreciate your resentment of the “denier” label and shall replace it with “skeptic”. However, I’m sure that you’ll be just as quick to resent these labels that have been applied to me:
ilk
global warming religious zealots
moronic
emotional response
“please think”
OK?
Now, on to substance!
Several people made assertions similar to this one:
Nobody on this blog “denies” a temperature increase
Yet the centerpiece of this article is a graph showing that temperatures in the last two years appear to have fallen. So why bother even discussing a point that you purportedly accept? Several other readers explicitly declared that the data does NOT show a temperature increase. Accordingly, I think it should be obvious that in fact SOMEBODY here is denying a temperature increase.
Another logical error is apparent in this comment:
You clearly haven’t been keeping up with the peer reviewed literature. Whenever no warming or cooling is found the authors are at pains to describe it as ‘weather’. I have never seen an instance where warming is ascribed to weather.
This is a standard debater’s trick: avoid discussing what was actually written and instead attack something written by somebody else. I make no claims that extreme events are attributable to global warming. If you have a problem with somebody else making such claims, take it up with them — not me.
Several people nailed me for my goof in which I conflated spatial localization with temporal localization. I blew it. Thanks for correcting me. The point I will stand by is that temporal localization is still inappropriate to discussions of climate change: weather is not climate.
Next, we got into the truly significant question of how much time is needed to establish climate change. One commentator nailed it with the observation that there is no hard dividing line. Rather, the longer the term we are considering, the more we can talk climate, and the shorter the term we are considering, the more we have to talk weather. There is one useful criterion we can apply in considering the relationship between CO2 and climate: the rates of change of the two should be loosely coupled. In a time period in which CO2 changes by an insignificant amount, we should not be looking for significant changes in climate. This suggests to me that we should be looking for changes in time scale of 50 – 100 years. Of this I am certain: looking at changes on the scale of a decade is a waste of time.
Ken Westerman makes some excellent points:
1. Temperature preceeds CO2 rise on long time scales.
2. Temperatures have been considerably warmer than today.
3. CO2 levels have been higher than today.
4. Sunspot activity and temperature correlate well.
20th Century ’til 2008:
1. Temperature and CO2 correlate poorly.
2. Sunspot activity/ENSO correlate decent.
Let me address them directly:
1. Yes, temperatures in the past have preceded CO2 increases. This means that there’s a feedback mechanism whereby increased temperature results in increased CO2. But this does not in any way challenge the well-established physical fact that increased CO2 increases temperature in simple thermodynamic systems. Your point is irrelevant to the question we ask (“Will anthropogenic CO2 increase change global climate significantly?”)
2. Yes, temperatures have been considerably warmer than today. And when that happened, the earth was considerably different, which higher sea levels, very different floral and faunal distributions. Change the earth from where it is today to where it was when temperatures were higher, and a lot of people die. Is that acceptable?
3. See above comment.
4. The relationship of sunspot activity and temperature is only known for a few centuries. More important, the existence of a correlation between sunspot activity and temperature does nothing to question any causal relationship between increased CO2 concentration and global temperature.
And I don’t think your observations about the 20th century are of particular relevance to our central question.
Lastly, I’d like to make my central point about CO2. You folks seem to me to have a big “forest and trees” problem. There’s terabytes of data out there that’s relevant to the entire issue, and I sense that you’re all wandering through that forest, noticing whatever trees pique your interest. There’s nothing wrong with looking at the details, and in fact the devil is often in the details, but there’s a point where you have to step back and look at the big picture, too. After all, it’s the big picture that answers the big question, not the little trees. So let’s get back to basics:
It is absolute, incontrovertible fact that at the second level of approximation, if you increase CO2 content in the atmosphere, then the global temperature will rise (first level is the straight blackbody case). Now, we can have a lot of fun looking at third level approximations, fourth level, fifth level, and so fourth, but the causality gives priority to the higher levels of approximation. The blackbody radiation laws are primary consideration; greenhouse effect gets secondary consideration; and reactions to the greenhouse effect get lower considerations.
Now, here’s the key point that is difficult to understand. Ever heard of Le Chatlier’s Principle? It’s a rather obscure law from chemistry that actually applies to any physical system. It says that, if you add something to a system, it responds in such a way as to reduce the differential created by that change. Loosely speaking, it’s a way of saying that everything is in some way buffered. It’s not an absolute, ironclad law like Newton’s Laws, but it’s a damn good rule of thumb, the kind of thing that you can use in Occam’s Razor considerations.
The mistake that a lot of people make is in failing to appreciate this basic concept. They think that the responses to a stress (such as increases in CO2 concentration) can be larger than the stress itself. That’s possible, but unlikely. The most likely response to a stress is a negative feedback that is smaller than the feedback itself. It is possible to have positive feedback (runaway conditions) but positive feedback is unlikely. It is possible to have negative feedback that equals or even exceeds the magnitude of the stress — but that is unlikely, too. These are truly exotic responses. Far and away the most common response to a stress is a small negative feedback.
So, if we add CO2 to the atmosphere, that’s a stress. The system will respond with some negative feedback — oceans will absorb more CO2 and flora will sequester more CO2. But that negative feedback is certainly smaller than the original stress. There will still be an increase in atmospheric CO2. And that increase will absolutely positively cause an increase in average global temperatures. There will likely be negative feedback to that temperature increase, such as increased cloud formation.
But let’s be straight on this simple point: increasing atmospheric CO2 will absolutely, positively increase average global temperatures. There will probably be plenty of spatial and temporal variations in the effect, but the basic result is simple: increased average global temperatures. The ONLY points that are debatable involve the magnitude of that increase and the spatial and temporal variations. The basic physics is quite clear.
Now, you still have plenty of maneuvering room with this. You can argue that the negative feedback mechanisms are so large as to make the issue of little concern. You can argue that other mechanisms are at work that are larger in overall impact. But you can’t deny the basic physics. Let’s use that as our starting point, OK?

Actually weather IS climate, or rather one day’s weather is one data point in what we call global climate (which really isn’t something we can quantify, since not all places on the face of the planet are created equal.) So Climate is weather over time. So yes, weather is climate. But getting excited about one weather event, as the media and alarmists do when it can be even loosely tied to warming, is pretty silly.
Hansen is even sillier, heck he’s still trying to figure out if a combover is a good idea.

On trend lines…
Anytime you have two or more points of data, you can draw a line through them. But that doesn’t mean you should.
I can draw a line through my height at age 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. But how well will it predict my height at age 10, 20, and 30?
I can draw a line through the temperatures from 8 a.m. through noon. But how well will this line predict the temperature at 11 p.m.?
I can draw a line through the temperatures from the beginning of April till the end of April. And while I may be able to make reasonable predictions for May from this trend line, I’ll be far off when August hits and completely embarrassed in October.
As complicated as climate is, we should all cringe when someone draws a trend line through historical data and then has the audacity to make predictions of future temperatures using it.
Time to write a paper detailing the accuracy of 10y, 20y, 30y, etc. trend lines in predicting temperatures for the next 10, 20, 50, etc. years. I suspect that the farther the trend line is away from being flat, the less accurate its predictions will be and the majority of trend lines with large slopes will be followed up with trend lines having slopes in the opposite direction.

Couple of points and then few questions.
In the past it has been much colder on a global scale.
In the past it has been much warmer on a global scale.
Of the people who are so concerned about warming, have any of these people picked what the appropriate temperature should be? I suspect it would be somewhere between values found at the last ice age, and 1998? And if they have picked such a holy value then how do they account for what has happened in the past with no human influence? And do they really think that now we humans have the power to influence such values on such a global scale? Simple questions. Most important one being: Considering the earth’s long history, and what little influence we have had in this long past, what is the “right” value for temperature.
Perhaps it is publicized some where?

I think the more proper term for me would be global warming heretic rather than global warming denier. After all, a heretic is one who politely but publicly dissents from the (Hansen) dogma.
I certainly hope* for the sake of the people on fixed incomes that depend on oil for heating that the cooling trend does not persist into autumn and winter.
As a livestock grower, my feed prices are increasing every week (and have in fact doubled in price from a year ago). Some of this price increase is due to increased transportation costs and rapidly increasing costs to the farmers. Some of it is due to increasing demand for foodstocks for biofuel. I know what an early winter is going to mean to the beleagured farmers in the midwest in terms of limiting an already short commodity and how it will also translate to increased prices in the grocery store.
The blame for the fuel shortages I place directly on an increasingly incompetent Congress that prefers posturing prettily for the press rather than doing what is best for the country. They have been helped mightily by Hansen and his data diddling who gets lots of money to produce warming results while shouting about how he is being repressed, as well as the spectacle of Al Gore who flies around the world promulgating that the world is going to end while simultaneously selling indulgences to the faithful.
In the meantime, when electrical capacity is strained to its limit, we have government forcing power producers to use less efficient resources that will cost far more, produce less power, and denying power plants the permits for producing cost efficient electricity.
These increased prices due to both grain shortages and transportation cost increases are uncomfortable for people residing in a rich country. They’re not going to be so pleasant for people residing in a poor country. They’re also going to mean that our elderly are going to be deciding between warmth, food, and medications. This global warming religion is going to be responsible for starvation, but I can only assume that is their goal.
*Hoping doesn’t do much to notify people that they need to prepare just in case the cooling trend continues into the fall and winter.

Anthony: “Nobody on this blog “denies” a temperature increase, but we are skeptical about the causes.”
Dear Anthony, that’s actually incorrect. I, for one, certainly deny an oversimplistic phrase “temperature increase”. Temperature is increasing or decreasing depending on the endpoints – or time scale – we choose. There is no universal “temperature increase”.
Since the Big Bang, the temperature has been dropping in the Universe from the Planck temperature (maximum temperature that makes physically sense) to 2.7 K. 😉
On Earth, it’s been increasing and decreasing many times in all kinds of chaotic and periodic patterns. In the last few thousands of years, it’s been mostly decreasing. In the last 300 years, it’s been increasing but in the last 10 years, it’s been increasing on one hemisphere and slightly decreasing on the other, at least if we look at the mid troposphere which we should do if we talk about the hypothetical greenhouse effect.
I use the word “skeptic” because it is common but I actually don’t think it is accurate for myself because a “skeptic” linguistically means that someone is “uncertain” whether some big statement is correct. I am pretty certain it is not correct. There is no simple and universal phenomenon that would justify a new term such as “global warming”. It is not just about the causes, it is also about the very existence of a certain trend and certainly about the existence of such a trend in the future.
So please feel free to count me as a denier or whatever.

Ophiuchus: Ignoring some of the mud that has been stirred up, I don’t think you’ll find many, if any, here that deny the basic radiation physics. You’ve precisely identified where there is room for discussion, and what Anthony’s blog is largely about: It is precisely around the sign and magnitude of the feedback term, and the level of natural variation (e.g. solar, PDO), alternate human effects (e.g. land-use changes, soot) and measurement issues (UHI, adjustment algorithms) which could have caused the apparently greater-than-basic-physics warming roughly 1960-1998.
I’ll admit we do sometimes behave like weather geeks and seize on every month’s new data point, but I think that’s more impatience than misunderstanding. The key point is that this period of flatness is reducing the long-term trend to at most that predicted by the simple physics (1’C/century), demonstrating that 1998 was a blip, and making the more extreme predictions less and less likely as time goes by.
On the subject of labels, rather than ‘denier’ or ‘skeptic’ I’d prefer to simply be called ‘curious’. Which of the meanings you ascribe to that is up to you…
Best wishes
Paul

Ophiuchus writes:
“The ideal climate is the one we have right now”
Can you elaborate on what you mean by now? Do you mean today, this week, this month, year, decade, century…. etc… Understand that no matter which way it goes there could be consequences (and benefits). However change in temperature has gone both ways in the past without human influence… no? Hasn’t C02 done the same? So what’s to say with everything we could, (or should not do), it will make a difference in the long run and be worth investing (or not investing in).

Ophiuchus’ comments remind me of a discussion I saw during the OJ Simpson trial where a lawyer laid out ten cups on a table and said each cup represented a fact. He went on to say that lawyers on one side would only highlight three or four cups where lawyers for the other side would highlight the others.
This is a common practice in the climate debate. Believers in Anthropogenic Global Warming, such as Ophiuchus, will highlight that the globe is, on average, warmer in the last half of the satellite record than in the first half of the satellite record. They will always attribute recent warming to increasing atmospheric CO2, but always fail to mention other facts.
The first half of the satellite record contains cooling related to the erruptions of El Chichon in the early 80’s and Pinatubo in the early 90’s despite El Ninos that occurred at the same time. The warming in the last half of the satellite record is related to a string of El Nino’s with no volcanoes to counter the warming. So of course a smoothed graph of temperatures will show warming.
I suggest that Ophiuchus lay out all of the facts when presenting climate data or face the question: Who is the denier now?

Flowers4Stalin:
That’s the spirit! I continue to be as impressed by some of our up-and-coming generation as I am embarrassed by my PC generation of layabouts and ignoramuses.
“We’ll re-make the world as it ought to be.” Fatuous nonsense, ‘Nietzsche for Idiots’.