We still need to study nature’s contribution to trend
Published Saturday, September 27, 2008, Fairbanks AK News-Miner
Recent studies by the Hadley Climate Research Center (UK), the Japan Meteorological Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the University of East Anglia (UK) and the University of Alabama Huntsville show clearly that the rising trend of global average temperature stopped in 2000-2001. Further, NASA data shows that warming in the southern hemisphere has stopped, and that ocean temperatures also have stopped rising.
The global average temperature had been rising until about 2000-2001. The International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and many scientists hypothesize rising temperatures were mostly caused by the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide (CO2), and they predicted further temperature increases after 2000. It was natural to assume that CO2 was responsible for the rise, because CO2 molecules in the atmosphere tend to reflect back the infrared radiation to the ground, preventing cooling (the greenhouse effect) and also because CO2 concentrations have been rapidly increasing since 1946. But, this hypothesis on the cause of global warming is just one of several.
Unfortunately, many scientists appear to forget that weather and climate also are controlled by nature, as we witness weather changes every day and climate changes in longer terms. During the last several years, I have suggested that it is important to identify the natural effects and subtract them from the temperature changes. Only then can we be sure of the man-made contributions. This suggestion brought me the dubious honor of being designated “Alaska’s most famous climate change skeptic.”
The stopping of the rise in global average temperature after 2000-2001 indicates that the hypothesis and prediction made by the IPCC need serious revision. I have been suggesting during the last several years that there are at least two natural components that cause long-term climate changes.
The first is the recovery (namely, warming) from the Little Ice Age, which occurred approximately 1800-1850. The other is what we call the multi-decadal oscillation. In the recent past, this component had a positive gradient (warming) from 1910 to 1940, a negative gradient (cooling — many Fairbanksans remember the very cold winters in the 1960s) from 1940 to 1975, and then again a positive gradient (warming — many Fairbanksans have enjoyed the comfortable winters of the last few decades or so) from 1975 to about 2000. The multi-decadal oscillation peaked around 2000, and a negative trend began at that time.
The second component has a large amplitude and can overwhelm the first, and I believe that this is the reason for the stopping of the temperature rise. Since CO2 has only a positive effect, the new trend indicates that natural changes are greater than the CO2 effect, as I have stated during the last several years.
Future changes in global temperature depend on the combination of both the recovery from the Little Ice Age (positive) and the multi-decadal oscillation (both positive and negative). We have an urgent need to learn more about these natural changes to aid us in predicting future changes.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu is a former director of the Geophysical Institute and the International Arctic Research Center, both on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
In a word, yes. Most probably have careers to consider and have seen what happens when you don’t toe the consensus line. I don’t believe in conspiracy theories for the most part, but we’re talking facts here. People have lost their jobs and funding if they express skepticism about the “consensus”. Which is why we’re mostly hearing from tenured professors and retired scientists.
John Philip (05:48:07) :
Late for work, quick comment. [Oops – it looks like I didn’t send it.] The AMS and NAS position statements were brought up at a Public Listening Session held by New Hampshire’s Climate Change Task Force.
Joe D’Aleo was there, and I knew he was going to have some sharp words about the AMS statement. He was on the board that came up with that, and the statement was passed over the objections of many board members. When the membership heard about it, many of them were equally upset. Several of them are TV mets who have to maintain their membership because their “Seal of Approval” is important to have.
Umm, I don’t have his name handy at the moment, but one of Joe’s associates was there and he was on the NAS board at the time and reported very similar stuff. All completely consistent with Lindzen’s paper which I heard about a week or two later.
So, make hay with their pronouncements while you can. One or two cold winters will destroy the reputations of both organizations. Along with crops, heating budgets, and various other collateral damage.
John Philip (08:00:52) :
We have a mean of the same point in time of several model runs using human-specified dithers vs a mean over 10 years of observations. If it makes you happy, let the problem disappear.
I thought you understood the 2008 data wasn’t for the whole year. Models produce forecasts, observations don’t. Some people say the La Nina is making a comeback, that’s typical of the the cool PDO. So, if you don’t like the 2008 partial year data, and regression to the mean is a valid point, let’s just table the discussion until January when we’ll have a new year’s datum.
This simply is not credible work.
If you wanted to graph the effect of a partial year’s data, what you do? One thing you could do is take the mean over the 6 months before and after the sample, though the first and last six months need special processing or can be skipped.
Would you consider http://woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1990/plot/uah/from:1990/mean:12/plot/uah/from:1990/mean:120 credible? I’ve plotted monthly UAH data since 1990 with raw, 12 month and 120 month means. The first two show a fall off, the latter does too, but it’s too early. The latter squashes out the 1998 “hottest year on record,” leaving virtually no trace of it. (You can see why Anna V noted “Moving averages are deadly” – it killed 1998!)
Hi all,
There are several posters here who favour the AGW position, could one of you please do me the favour of doing the following.
1. Make a definitive testable prediction, that if it does not come to pass would categorically break the hypothesis that man made emissions of CO2 are causing a dangerous level of global warming. I.e like “If CO2 reaches 550 ppm and average global temperatures are cooler than the current values, then hypothesis “AGW” must be false”…
2. If you are unable to make such a testable (and falsifiable) prediction, could you please explain how the hypothesis that man made emissions of CO2 are causing a dangerous level of global warming qualifies as science.
3. Could you also explain why computer models of climate should be trusted to the extent that our societies (western civilisation – no one else seems to be listening to AGW or doing anything…) should radically alter our energy sources at great expense and hardship to most of the (especially the poor) members of our societies and arguably to the detriment of the developing world.
Thanks.
I have asked these questions several times in different forms and never get an answer.
Cheers G
Bobby Lane (22:25:59) :
Thank you very much for the reference to the paper written by Richard S. Lindzen.
It is one of the most disturbing things I have ever read. It confirms some of my worst fears about what is going on in ‘science’ today.
You are correct; it is a must read.
It is worth giving the following link here, of a simple model for the climate of the earth.
http://junkscience.com/Greenhouse/Earth_temp.html
“So, what value is a simple model like this? After all, GCMs have dozens, hundreds of tweakable parameters so what is the value of this simplistic thing? Actually, its very simplicity is part of its value. You will note when adjusting the available parameters you can happily freeze or cook the planet without need of a multitude of knobs to twist (just drop planetary albedo to 0.2 (20%) to turn the whole planet tropical, increase it to 0.4 (40%) to create an ice age).”
In particular it is useful in the argument of whether the bars in the IPCC report are error bars or estimates.
If you change the albedo from the one that gives 15C , 0.310,
to o.300, a 3% change, the temperature calculates to 16.04C
This means that if the error on the albedo is 3% ( a conservative estimate as far as I am concerned) the error on the temperature is 1.0C, i.e. all over the chart of temperatures, making any predictions/projections meaningless.
And this is only one of the very many parameters in the models that give the IPCC spaghetti graphs.
Graeme , Roger pielke has asked the very same question of the Real Climate heroes. They refuse to put any testable conditions on their climate models. In fact they claim there can be no testable cases that will invalidate them. It is even laughable that oc/decade falls within their models.
There have been a few comments (not only in this thread) from those concerned about AGW that they would begin to wonder if trends stopped for 15 years. Over the decades that I have followed AGW, one consistent fingerprint for CO2/GHG-induced global warming was atmospheric temperatures: stratosphere cooling while troposphere warmed, and troposphere warming faster than surface temperature. Would any advocate for action on AGW cease their advocacy if the stratosphere stopped its cooling for 15 years, if the troposphere was cooler than it was 15 years earlier, AND if for 15 years measured surface temperatures had a higher trend than the tropospheric temperatures?
One more not-a-climatologist-but-knows-better-than-them type scientists. Retired, so he’s never really got a handle on them newfangdangled scientific methods using climate modelling – you know, actually trying to follow where the energy goes, where all those complicated atmospheric processes take it and what it does along the way -much preferring the good old fashioned look at this graph look at that graph, and how can we make them appear to match method. People here like that. Thinks it’s something else than GHG’s. Even better. His science career centered on sun interactions with polar atmosphere. Hey, we have a winner here. Or do we?
So does he think it’s mostly the sun? No. So he’s in disagreement with lots of the commenters here. Are the it’s-the-sun-stupid crowd calling him stupid and ripping his it’s-not-the-sun stance apart? No. As long as he doesn’t put it down to human GHG’s he can be held up as more right than those who do?
And Warmers get accused of picking and choosing!
Still, he’s slightly more credible than the it’s-been-cooling-since-1998 crowd, even if he actually appears to read the graphs the same way. Has he too failed to spot the major flaw in the it’s-been-cooling-since-1998 claim? That it relies on the hottest year ever (if you don’t count 2005 or think the hottest year in the US is the same as the hottest year in the world) to show anything like cooling? Assign 1998 a neutral value and hey, looks like it’s still warming. Make 1998 a really hot one like it was, and through the magic of pseudo-logic you get cooling “trend”. How does adding a hot spike into the middle of a warming trend magically turn it into a cooling trend? It sure isn’t because it’s really cooling. Hot plus hot equals cooling? Wake up guys – that just ain’t how it works. E&E might be happy with that but you ain’t gonna fool a real peer reviewed scientific journal with that little shell game.
I want to claim back 1998 as evidence of global warming. Using it as “proof” of cooling may be very amusing but it leaves your credibility in shreds. Hot plus hot equal hotter, not cooler. When people tell you otherwise you don’t need credential or webcites to tell you they are wrong.
Think that cooling is real, it’s clear and strong? Try the Year After 1998 Challenge. After the 1998-99 cooling “trend”, what happened? Has it been cooling since1999?
A real trend doesn’t need a single hot year to prove it’s cooling, right? 1999 ought to an easy bar for clear cooling to limbo under – 6th hottest year of last century after all. Slipped to 13th since then. Go figure. Still one of the top 15 hot years on record. So dodge all the controversy, and those cherry picking accusations and ditch 1998. If you are a climate change skeptic you can’t tell me you like seeing that hot spike – good evidence of warming by the way – sticking out like a sore thumb. You don’t really want to rely on the hottest year to prove it’s cooling, do you? Be brave. Ditch 1998 and measure your cooling trend from 1999. If it’s real it will be clearly revealled.
Check out the perfectly good graph of Global temps here. Complain to them at GISS if you really think they are wrong and you aren’t worried they’ll laugh.
Check out the year Coolers don’t want to talk about.
Reply – Both 1998 and 1999 are outliers and are bad dates from which to measure any trend. I like 2001 myself using the RSS data:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2001/plot/rss/from:2001/trend
We will always comeback to the how long makes a trend debate – 10, 20, 30 years?
The really clue is the discontinuity from 2007 to 2008 and is worth keeping an eye on for further developments. – Dee Norris
Thank you very much for the reference to the paper written by Richard S. Lindzen.
It is one of the most disturbing things I have ever read. It confirms some of my worst fears about what is going on in ’science’ today.
I agree. It is in many ways a remarkable document. In the spirit of scepticism that this forum so admires, I examined some of the evidence that Dr. Lindzen presents to support his thesis. Of course I ignored the hearsay and I skipped over the claims of published studies being distorted – If Dr Lindzen has hard evidence to support these he should comment in the journals that published the papers. There’s a lot of opinion here, but how much hard evidence?
Climate Science is being infiltrated by unqualified environmentalists
For example, the primary spokesman for the American Meteorological Society in Washington is Anthony Socci who is neither an elected official of the AMS nor a contributor to climate science. Rather, he is a former staffer for Al Gore .
Pure ad hominem and therefore unconvincing. No evidence is presented that Socci has ever behaved improperly. Pure guilt by association
John Firor long served as administrative director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. This position was purely administrative, and Firor did not claim any scientific credentials in the atmospheric sciences at the time I was on the staff of NCAR. However, I noticed that beginning in the 1980’s, Firor was frequently speaking on the dangers of global warming as an expert from NCAR. When Firor died last November, his obituary noted that he had also been Board Chairman at Environmental Defense
In Lindzen’s universe it appears membership of an organisation concerned about the environment is incompatible with being a scientist …
The UK Meteorological Office also has a board, and its chairman, Robert Napier, was previously the Chief Executive for World Wildlife Fund
See? Being the ex-leader of a wildlife group apparently disqualifies you from running the Met Office. Just wierd.
Bill Hare, a lawyer and Campaign Director for Greenpeace, frequently speaks as a ‘scientist’ representing the Potsdam Institute, Germany’s main global warming research center.
Dr Bill Hare is actually described by Potsdam as a ‘visiting scientist’. He has published on Environmental Science in the journal Climatic Change
http://www.springerlink.com/content/g5861615714m7381/
http://www.springerlink.com/content/2185481704614445/
The case of Michael Oppenheimer is noteworthy in this regard. With few contributions to climate science , and none to the physics of climate, Oppenheimer became the Barbara Streisand Scientist at Environmental Defense6. He was subsequently appointed to a professorship at Princeton University, and is now, regularly, referred to as a prominent climate scientist by Oprah (a popular television hostess), NPR (National Public Radio), etc. To be sure, Oppenheimer did coauthor an early absurdly alarmist volume (Oppenheimer and Robert Boyle, 1990: Dead Heat, The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect), and he has served as a lead author with the IPCC
Jealousy can really burn you up. Last year Oppenheimer published On the sensitivity of radiative forcing from biomass burning aerosols and ozone to emission location in GRL, adding to his 100-odd other papers.
The making of academic appointments to global warming alarmists is hardly a unique occurrence. Nor is the making of political appointments to lobbyists from the oil industry. Philip Cooney, a lawyer and lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute was appointed by the Bush Administration as chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality despite a complete lack of scientific qualifications. I could cite many more (to copy Lindzen’s style). This document is meant to be an objective analysis of the politicisation of climate science yes? Where is the outrage at the corruption of the discipline by bogus and oily science? Where is the balance?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
The situation with America’s National Academy of Science is somewhat more complicated. … The vetting procedure is generally rigorous, but for over 20 years, there was a Temporary Nominating Group for the Global Environment to provide a back door for the election of candidates who were environmental activists, bypassing the conventional vetting procedure
There are currently TNGs for Physical and Mathematical Sciences; Biological Sciences; Engineering and Applied Sciences; Biomedical Sciences; Behavioral and Social Sciences; and Applied Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. That’s a lot of back doors. Candidates so nominated must still pass the usual ballot. Judge for yourself if ‘back door’ is a fair description of the process http://www.pnas.org/content/102/21/7405.full
Oreskes’ 2004 review of the literature is dismissed thus As far as Oreskes’ claim goes, it is clearly absurd. A more carefully done study revealed a different picture (Schulte, 2007).
Ho Ho. Oreskes is a historian of science and published in Science, Schulte is a consultant endocrinologist and published in Energy and Environment.
Perhaps the most extraordinary example of this phenomenon (the posthumous alteration of skeptical positions ) involves a paper by Singer, Starr, and Revelle (1991). In this paper, it was concluded that we knew too little about climate to implement any drastic measures. Revelle, it may be recalled, was the professor that Gore credits with introducing him to the horrors of CO2 induced warming. There followed an intense effort led by a research associate at Harvard, Justin Lancaster, in coordination with Gore staffers, to have Revelle’s name posthumously removed from the published paper.
At the very least Lindzen should acknowledge that this is controversial. Lancaster asserts that Revelle was not an author of the piece (not really a ‘paper’) and that Singer silenced him with a libel suit. Revelle’s secretary and students contradict Singer’s version of events and Revelle’s family assert that he remained concerned about GW right up until his death. Elsewhere Singer is demonstrably willing and able to fabricate evidence.
http://home.att.net/~espi/Cosmos_myth.html
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2007/04/if-richard-lindzen-shows-up-at-your.html
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1024842.html
Silencing the sceptics
Occasionally, prominent individual scientists do publicly express skepticism. The means for silencing them are fairly straightforward.
Will Happer, director of research at the Department of Energy (and a professor of physics at Princeton University) was simply fired from his government position after expressing doubts about environmental issues in general. His case is described in Happer (2003).
Happer 2003 turns out to be a chapter in a book published by the Hoover Institute ($295,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998). The same book carries Singer’s version of the Revelle story. Happer was a political appointee and his departure coincided with a change of Government.
So it goes. In total, I counted the following examples of what Lindzen would have us believe:
Unqualified or inappropriate people in academic positions : 5
Studies ‘distorted’ to meet the consensus : 6
Sceptics ‘silenced’ : 3 (Happer plus two cowed by ‘angry letters’ apparently).
with question marks over many of even this meagre number. The ‘paper’ was presented at this closed doors forum http://www.euresis.org/it/Dettaglio_Eventi.aspx?id=27 with 13 participants. Apparently one aim was ‘Friendship Among Peoples’.
This article will receive a receptive, if unsceptical, audience on WUWT, however to convince the wider public, not to mention the scientific community Dr Lindzen needs to try a lot harder. The proceedings of the symposium will be published next year, I predict this ‘paper’ will have sunk without trace long before then.
JP.
REPLY: Oreskes had and continues to have an agenda. I watched a video of one of her lectures, was unimpressed with the research, and clearly she is biased. The criticisms of her work are warranted. But thanks for pointing out that Lindzen needs help in getting his paper further noticed. I’ll see to helping with that. -Anthony
Old construction worker says:
You are quoting results from two papers here, one from a group at Hadley and one from another group. In both cases, they are attempting to extend the use of climate models in ways that they have not been used before (i.e., to predict short-term trends using specifically initialized initial conditions). This is an admirable thing to try to do, but it is also fraught with potential difficulties and the rest of the scientific community is yet confident that they have done this correctly. In fact, the Keenlyside paper claiming there will be no significant warming until about 2015 has been greated by quite a bit of skepticism by the scientists over at RealClimate: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/05/the-global-cooling-bet-part-2/langswitch_lang/in
Time will tell.
“is yet confident” should read “is not yet confident” in my previous post.
REPLY: Oreskes had and continues to have an agenda. …
ROFL! Pot meet Kettle, Kettle, this is Pot.
The criticisms of her work are warranted.
So where are the credible rebuttals? Are you relying on Benny? http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/10/peiser_admits_he_was_97_wrong.php
REPLY: No I’m not relying on Benny. I’m not relying on you either. – Anthony
John Philips says:
And, to be even more specific, it is strange that when Smokey has (multiple times) posted a link to a little pie chart that supposedly reflects the response to a question in a poll by the Gallup organization of climate scientists on climate change, noone but I seemed to question this chart even though
(1) This poll result was cited only by linking to the pie chart that provided absolutely no context other than it was supposedly a result from a Gallup poll of climate scientists.
(2) It turned out that the poll was in fact taken 17 years ago.
(3) The result shown in that the pie chart still didn’t seem to correspond to any actual result from that poll…and in fact seemed to be in contradiction, or at least not very well aligned, with the results from that poll.
By contrast, John has provided us with the full article from a reputable polling firm of a poll that they did earlier this year. This article contains considerable details about the poll. I am not saying that the poll is perfect or that it wouldn’t be nice to know a few more details about the methodology or the exact list of questions asked, but it is so far above what Smokey provided that it seems incredible to me that the same “skeptics” who populate this site and saw fit not to question that completely out-dated and, as near as I can tell, essentially fabricated result are now so unwilling to consider the results of this poll. The skepticism expressed by commenters here often seems to be very situational.
Joel Shore (19:54:18) :
Joel Shore (19:54:18) :
” it seems incredible to me that the same “skeptics” who populate this site and saw fit not to question that completely out-dated and, as near as I can tell, essentially fabricated result are now so unwilling to consider the results of this poll. The skepticism expressed by commenters here often seems to be very situational.”
I am sceptical, as all true scientists should be, and I did observed that the way the questions were framed I also would be in the “humans influence climate” count.
My basic skepticism is of the role of anthropogenic CO2, otherwise I agree with people who say that humans have changed the climate: urbanization, irrigation, forest burning, agriculture, pollution of the atmosphere and sea etc affect everything, from rainfall to temperatures. CO2 is third fiddle in this orchestra, in my opinion, but the question was not about CO2, at least as it was posted here.
Dee, yes we could argue about how many years to make a climate trend. The trend over the previous 10 years, including that 1998 hot spike at the beginning (according to rss msu) is plus 0.169 degrees per decade. So even with 1998 included rss msu shows a warming trend. It’ll show even stronger in 2009. With a five year trend line, sure it’s going down. So what? That’s happened before. Didn’t last long. Hardly a dimple on a 30yr (warming) trend line (which rss msu doesn’t do yet).
You have nothing but speculation to support expectations this is more than another dimple. It’s post-LIA thawing and Multidecadal oscillation. No, it’s a shortage of sunspots. It’s anything but GHG’s and no evidence required? Not very convincing.
So it’s still a warming trend – since 1998, the hottest (unless you count 2005 or you think the US is the whole globe) year on record. And that isn’t even a contradiction.
@Ken Fabos:
I never said I have proof that this is more than a dimple nor is that why I am a skeptic of AGW. I am a skeptic that mankind is able to influence the global climate because no one has presented any convincing evidence that the 20th century warm period is anything but a natural cycle.
For example, If you inspect the temperature record from Hadley, you would discover that during each PDO transition to cooling, there is a spike in temperature followed by a small oscillating signal before the temperature plunges. The PDO transition in mid-40s is a little hard to see, but the prior change in the 1880 is pretty clear.
Why has only the northern hemisphere warmed? Why has only the surface warmed and not the upper troposphere?
The list of questions goes on and on and had been repeatedly debated on this blog under a number of posts.
Personally, I think a warming world is a good place, civilizations flourish, the biosphere expands. But I just don’t see humanity as the root cause to the modern warming. The science of AGW is too full of holes for me.
The speculation as you put it, is how science happens in the real world. Scientists observe the world and hypothesize why it acts as it does. They then test their hypothesis in some manner. If the hypothesis holds, they test it more and other scientists try to falsify it. What you see as random speculation, I see as science in action.
There are a lot of hypothesizes attempting to explain the last forty years of warming, some competing, some complementary. To falsify any of them, one does not have to have a replacement hypothesis, one merely has to show the hypothesis does not fit the observed behavior.
BTW, since you seem to be fascinated by trends, the much ‘adjusted’ GISS also shows cooling since 2001.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:2001/plot/gistemp/from:2001/trend
as does Hadley –
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/trend
Trends are nice, I pick one date, you pick another. You get your trend, I get mine. However trends are NOT forecasts and since the present GCMs are not doing such a hot job, the future is anything but plain to see.
I am perfectly happy to wait to see what the next 6 or 7 years bring. I pray I am soundly mistaking, but my gut (and therefore unreliable) instinct is that we all are headed into a prolonged cooling period. Ultimately, the truth will out.
Best of luck to you.
Couple links for y’all …
Syun-Ichi Akasofu is in the news again …
“Two other contrarian scholars were cited (in Sarah Palin’s polar bears study) . One was Syun-Ichi Akasofu, formerly director of the International Arctic Research Centre, in Alaska, who argues that climate change could be a hangover from the little ice age. He is a founding director of the Heartland Institute, a thinktank that has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998″
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/oct/01/sarahpalin.climatechange
And a climate modeller discusses Dr Lindzen’s paper …
As is often the case with people who are too sure of themselves, he turns out guilty of some of the things he accuses his opponents of. He politicizes and conspiratorializes rather than simply addressing the problem dispassionately. His personal characterization of other scientists is grossly excessive in at least one occasion. I am inclined to extrapolate that his understanding of specific events is similarly skewed. …
Likely this paper will be a Palinesque effort, energizing the “base” who have preconceived notions along these lines, and having little effect elsewhere. It’s a shame. We do need to rethink how science is done. This sort of injured and injurious argumentation will do little to advance that prospect.
http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/2008/09/lindzen-diatribe.html
Ken Fabos (03:33:19) :
Can you be more explicit in how you got that 0.169 figure? Please refer to http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998/mean:12/plot/rss/from:1998/trend/plot/rss/from:2003/trend
I’ve plotted:
Monthly RSS data since 1998
Ditto, smoothed with a 12 month average
The 10 year trend line
The 5 year trend line for the last five years.
Both trend lines are going down.
Please, please, please, back up claims like 0.169 with references, you must have that at your finger tips, it takes a huge amount of time for each of the readers here to verify it.
John Philip (05:24:34) :
Please, does it give you pleasure to hear of the billions given to AGW inclined institutes?
What is
“$676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998″ “, 67.000 a year, but peanuts? Not even a shoe shine for Gore.
Syun-Ichi Akasofu is in the news again …
“Two other contrarian scholars were cited (in Sarah Palin’s polar bears study) . One was Syun-Ichi Akasofu, formerly director of the International Arctic Research Centre, in Alaska, who argues that climate change could be a hangover from the little ice age. He is a founding director of the Heartland Institute, a thinktank that has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998″
Thank goodness he’s not associated with a group like Greenpeace. Or Environmental Media Services, the group that funds Realclimate. Frankly, I’m rather tired of criticism like this. On one hand, people accuse the oil companies of not supporting basic research, then they complain when one sends some money to Heartland, which has many sponsors and many projects. Are you suggesting that Akasofu has received $67,650 over the last 10 years from Exxon-Mobil? If not, exactly what influence does Exxon-Mobil have over Akasofu?
The way things are going, the only scientists you’ll have any respect for who have contrarian positions are those who are retired and have no income stream. Oops – retired to you means past their prime and should be put out to pasture.
Graeme –
1. Make a definitive testable prediction, that if it does not come to pass would categorically break the hypothesis that man made emissions of CO2 are causing a dangerous level of global warming. I.e like If CO2 reaches 550 ppm and average global temperatures are cooler than the current values, then hypothesis AGW must be false.
Check out the post ‘You bet’ on Tamino’s site. It specifies how long the current flattish trend must continue for it to be statistically significant and hence falsify the existence of an external forcing.
3. Could you also explain why computer models of climate should be trusted to the extent that our societies (western civilisation – no one else seems to be listening to AGW or doing anything) should radically alter our energy sources at great expense and hardship to most of the (especially the poor) members of our societies and arguably to the detriment of the developing world.
It is a fallacy that the AGW concern requires computer climate models at all. Here are the main elements of the ‘theory’, just considering CO2 for a moment …
1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, whose radiative forcing potential is understood with reasonable certainty.
2. Atmospheric CO2 has significantly increased as a result of human activity and will continue to do so.
3. The equilibrium global temperature increases approximately 3C for every doubling of the CO2 concentration.
If these three simple points are true, then Houston – we have a problem. 1 and 2 are trivial to verify. There are multiple lines of evidence that indicate 3 is correct. Simulations from models is one but these are confirmed by empirical paleoclimate studies of past forcings and response that involve no modelling, e.g. we can estimate the climate forcing effect of a large volcanic eruption and measure the effect on the planetary temperature and so estimate climate sensitivity. See this study
http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/GRL_sensitivity.pdf
Re : Syun-Ichi Akasofu
Actually it was Directorship of the Heartland Institute that I found interesting, I wonder why the original piece did not mention it when listing Syun-Ichi Akasofu’s credentials? At the start of the thread I puzzled over Akasofu citing an apparently nonexistent study by the Hadley showing a flat trend and the Hadley themselves asserting that anyone making this case had their head in the sand. Seems to me being a Director of the Heartless Institute, an ExxonMobil project that earlier this year organised a climate sceptic’s conference, goes some way to explaining this apparent contradiction ….
BTW The conference concluded with a ‘Manhattan Declaration’ on climate, which since March has attracted over 1,000 signatories from the global public. If you are stuck for something to do check out the list of ‘citizen endorsers’ and do a search for the word ‘coal’ 😉
http://www.climatescienceinternational.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37&Itemid=54
Re Naomi Oreskes. I see Naomi, who is a Professor at UCSD, was promoted to Provost of the Sixth College in July. Not bad for a source of unreliable research. Of course she is biased – as a member of the History of Science Association she is biased in favour of the science.
http://www.ametsoc.org/atmospolicy/documents/Chapter4.pdf
JP
PS Ric W, please do not misrepresent me. I explicitly wrote: I did not mean to imply that retired=decrepit
“Seems to me being a Director of the Heartless Institute, an ExxonMobil project that earlier this year organised a climate sceptic’s conference, goes some way to explaining this apparent contradiction ….”
Why not go all the way to explain this observation of yours. Going part way is only an example of spreading vicious rumor, innuendo, ad hom. Has ExxonMobil been caught and convicted of fraud or something?
However it seems Syun-Ichi Akasofu goes all the way, for example in his letter to the IPCC earlier this year, attempting to *correct* information:
http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results.html?artId=22790
Apologies, I must have misread the TLT channel’s 0.169 degrees per decade as for the most recent decade rather than over the 79- 08 of RSS MSU data, so a ten year trend from 1998 is still down. From 1999 when this year is over it’s going to show warming and I don’t agree 1999 is a strong outlier. Or that 10 years is a too long period. It looks to me that 2008 (still not over) could be more of an outlier. ENSO and all that stuff- but perhaps the cooling claim looks better if you provide less rather than more information? So ignore ENSO. LIA, MDO, sure, but not ENSO? Picking and choosing to suit (create?) your preferred result? It will need a few more years of clearly dropping global temps to be more than a blip on the global warming trend.
I have to say I’m dreading the next el Nino. Believe me, I won’t cheer when warming makes it existence clearly felt then. Where I live is strongly effected and not in a good way. Let’s see how much cooling after that rather than after a la Nina.
BTW, using satellite data in isolation tends to be (to use an arctic but still inappropriate metaphor) like arguing over the shape of the tip whilst ignoring the iceberg. And your preferred site for looking at trends allows for no comparisons of trends over fixed periods of time – comparing a 10 yr trend with a 7yr trend can only be misleading.