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In early September, I began noticing a string of news stories about scientists rejecting the orthodoxy on global warming. Actually, it was more like a string of guest columns and long letters to the editor since it is hard for skeptical scientists to get published in the cabal of climate journals now controlled by the Great Sanhedrin of the environmental movement.
Still, the number of climate change skeptics is growing rapidly. Because a funny thing is happening to global temperatures — they’re going down, not up.
On the same day (Sept. 5) that areas of southern Brazil were recording one of their latest winter snowfalls ever and entering what turned out to be their coldest September in a century, Brazilian meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart explained that extreme cold or snowfall events in his country have always been tied to “a negative PDO” or Pacific Decadal Oscillation. Positive PDOs — El Ninos — produce above-average temperatures in South America while negative ones — La Ninas — produce below average ones.
Dr. Hackbart also pointed out that periods of solar inactivity known as “solar minimums” magnify cold spells on his continent. So, given that August was the first month since 1913 in which no sunspot activity was recorded — none — and during which solar winds were at a 50-year low, he was not surprised that Brazilians were suffering (for them) a brutal cold snap. “This is no coincidence,” he said as he scoffed at the notion that manmade carbon emissions had more impact than the sun and oceans on global climate.
Also in September, American Craig Loehle, a scientist who conducts computer modelling on global climate change, confirmed his earlier findings that the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago did in fact exist and was even warmer than 20th-century temperatures.
Prior to the past decade of climate hysteria and Kyoto hype, the MWP was a given in the scientific community. Several hundred studies of tree rings, lake and ocean floor sediment, ice cores and early written records of weather — even harvest totals and censuses –confirmed that the period from 800 AD to 1300 AD was unusually warm, particularly in Northern Europe.
But in order to prove the climate scaremongers’ claim that 20th-century warming had been dangerous and unprecedented — a result of human, not natural factors — the MWP had to be made to disappear. So studies such as Michael Mann’s “hockey stick,” in which there is no MWP and global temperatures rise gradually until they jump up in the industrial age, have been adopted by the UN as proof that recent climate change necessitates a reordering of human economies and societies.
Dr. Loehle’s work helps end this deception.
Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, says, “It’s practically a slam dunk that we are in for about 30 years of global cooling,” as the sun enters a particularly inactive phase. His examination of warming and cooling trends over the past four centuries shows an “almost exact correlation” between climate fluctuations and solar energy received on Earth, while showing almost “no correlation at all with CO2.”
An analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing, Michael J. Myers of Hilton Head, S. C., declared, “Man-made global warming is junk science,” explaining that worldwide manmade CO2 emission each year “equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration … This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.”
Other international scientists have called the manmade warming theory a “hoax,” a “fraud” and simply “not credible.”
While not stooping to such name-calling, weather-satellite scientists David Douglass of the University of Rochester and John Christy of the University of Alabama at Huntsville nonetheless dealt the True Believers a devastating blow last month.
For nearly 30 years, Professor Christy has been in charge of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily around the globe. In a paper co-written with Dr. Douglass, he concludes that while manmade emissions may be having a slight impact, “variations in global temperatures since 1978 … cannot be attributed to carbon dioxide.”
Moreover, while the chart below was not produced by Douglass and Christy, it was produced using their data and it clearly shows that in the past four years — the period corresponding to reduced solar activity — all of the rise in global temperatures since 1979 has disappeared.
It may be that more global warming doubters are surfacing because there just isn’t any global warming.
(posted on a tip from TCO aka ASDF)
It’s not a fraud. It’s a specific, quasi predictive metric. There are various ways to represent leading indicators. Such indicators are not absolute crystal balls, but can be indicative. Anyone who is not at least somewhat disturbed by this leading indicator may not fully comprehend how to use such an indicator for maximum benefit.
Marcus:(13:32:43) :
“Mr. Myers of Hilton Head seems to have some problems with basic math.”
Does it not strike you as rather unlikely that an analytical chemist who works in spectroscopy and atmospheric sensing should have a problem with basic math?
Total atmospheric CO2 is around 0.0387%. Using basic math, it can be deduced that Mr Myers is using a figure of 4.35% for mankind’s contribution, a figure which does not seem unreasonable.
4.35% of 0.0387% is, indeed, 0.0168%.
Mary Hinge,
Lonnie Thompson????????????
“There’s not much in climate science that annoys me more than the sniveling acquiescence of government bureaucrats in Lonnie Thompson’s flouting of data archiving policies. To his credit, Thompson has collected unique data. To his shame, Thompson has failed to archive data collected as long as 20 years ago. This would be bad enough if the versions were consistent in all publications on Dunde. But Thompson seems to have tinkered with his results over the years so that there has been an accumulation of inconsistent versions, compromising any ability to properly use this unique data. Needless to say, mere compromising of the data hasn’t stopped climate scientists from using Thompson data.”
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2686
Please. Don’t quote Lonnie Thompson. It wastes our time.
CO2 will be declared a dangerous pollutant , dangerous to whom or what? OK, so cxan we then assume all politicians will stop exhaling?
The sun will rule, the politicians just do what they do, lie. Pay more in taxes so government can pretend to control the weather. The perfect tax scheme.
Mary Hinge,
“Regional”. What does the Hockey say about warming in the USA being regional only?
“Much of the Earth has warmed over the last half-century, but the eastern half of the United States has shown a cooling trend. NASA-funded research indicates cooler temperatures in the eastern U.S. are caused by an increase in sun-shielding clouds produced by warmer ocean temperatures in the Pacific.
Eastern U.S. temperatures have displayed a cooling trend of 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade,”
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast18jan_1.htm
Anthony,
I want to volunteer my time to survey some of the weather stations in Texas. Please email me and I would like to tell you where I can help.
Thanks!
Let’s face it. The graph clearly shows no increase in temp from 1979 to 2000, then a few years increase to maybe 0.3 degrees above baseline, then the last few years dropping back to baseline. No trend here, only a question of why there is no trend of global temps increasing.
“So they ignore the effect of the oceans and heat uptake.”
All right, I’m lost, what in blazes are you talking about? AGW ignores the oceans as near as I’m able to divine. 30% of TSI is reflected, of the remaining 70%, only half reaches the surface. We are down to 35%.
None of the OLR returns to heat the surface. What is so impregnable about AGW?
@Nick
4.35% of 0.0387% is, indeed, 0.0168%.
Please type that into your calculator and see if you are right or wrong and assert whether the percentage you actually need to arrive at 0.0168% still doesn’t sound unreasonable.
Btw I disagree with your interpretation of the words of Dr. Myers, the article clearly quotes him as saying:
“equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration
He is clearly talking about the CO2 only, not the nitrogen, oxygen and other gases.
Anyone else has a better guess about how Dr. Myers got to this 0.0168% figure?
I agree with Leif. The trend-line in that graph misrepresents the data pretty egregiously. Anyone who is honest about science should reject that graph without hesitation.
–t
evanjones: “I’d lay long odds it’s an Excel polynomial trendline.”
I should have thought of that. Good guess, but see below.
Gary Gulrud: “I wish we could settle on something like a 3rd order polynomial for these global temps as they are cyclic.”
Using a polynomial fit on time series data is just plain wrong. Unless you happen to like things that go to plus or minus infinity. A third order polynomial is not cyclic.
whatsupwiththat: “I agree that in this case, the endpoint smoothing is overestimated in the trend line. I’ve seen examples of this before. This may be an artifact of the graphing program used.
Perhaps an inquiry there will help us figure out what program was used.”
Take a look at the graph, down at the bottom where it gives credit. Google shows that Andrew Barr is an illustrator, and it seems he is not a technical illustrator. I suspect that the graphing program used is Adobe Illustrator, and that he drew a nice looking spline by eye. We can cut him some slack, since he probably doesn’t know that his artist’s impression is scientifically wrong. He also may not realize that to draw any line is a political minefield.
Evan I’d lay long odds it’s an Excel polynomial trendline.
It does indeed closely resemble the 4th order polynomial. R-squared an unimpressive 0.35.
Ok, simply googling ‘0.0168 CO2’ does a miracle. I found this article.
First of all he quotes the total CO2 emissions as being 3.2 gigatons of CO2 per year. But it is 30 gigatons, ten times as much.
Then he states that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is 19 trillion tons. Now where does that come from? According to all sources I can find, the amount is 3 trillion tons.
So Dr. Myers is correct on the math, but his numbers are wrong.
Too bad we can’t get the graph to start around 1900. It might give a better overall picture of the ups and downs of temp.
“This is no coincidence” Said:Dr Hackbart
fact: Snow in Brazil
http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Calen9/NieveGaucha.html
fact: minimum solar activity. (sunspot)
fact: PDO negative phase.
fact: ENSO up date (10/20/2008)
Niño 4…………..-0.1ºC
Niño 3.4………. -0.2ºC
Niño 3…………… 0.0ºC
Niño1+2 ………-0.2ºC
You can not call it fraud.
If you do not know, correlate, the minimum solar activity, with temperatures on Earth.
I understand.
But the word fraud, is very harsh, to qualify, which is not of your understanding.
This is no coincidence.
Here’s a rhetorical question. Look at the UAH temperature anomaly data graphed here. Notice that it’s a series of jumps up or down; there is very little stay-the-same. It’s very jagged. But everyone wants to make it a continuously differentiable trend curve! Why? Have you noticed that people like straight lines and perfect circles and other simple geometric shapes, but nature does not. Most of the shapes in nature are fractal-like. Smoothing hides the shorter-term trends instead of explaining them. Dismissing the shorter-term trends as “weather, not climate” is making an assumption that there is such a distinction. Maybe climate is just the sum of many small random-walk like events.
Here is a phony end point. The Had-Crut trend shows temperatures curving upwards on the right side of the graph, when they should be curving downwards.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/climon/data/themi/g17.htm
If we know all of the forces acting or that will act on a given mass, then we can predict with certainity the future as to the direction the mass will go, and its rate of acceleration. We don’t begin to know all of the forces which cause change to the temperature of the Earth, and we aren’t going to be knowing anytime soon.
But if you are willing to believe “trends”, then why not get rich doing so? Just go to Las Vegas. Stand near the roulette wheel, and keep track of the color of the slot into which the ball lands. When 8 of the last 10 times the ball landed in a red slot, there obviously is a “trend to red”, so bet large the next roll will land in a red slot. The casino owners will welcome you with open arms.
What is being done right now is nothing more than extrapolation, and extrapolations are worse than usless. This isn’t a “trend”, it is history and nothing more, and to extrapolate it is a huge error.
Nick (15:31:24): First, Mr. Myers did specifically cite an increase in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration, not a percentage increase in the atmosphere overall: “equals about 0.0168% of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration … This results in a 0.00064% increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number.”
(and 4.35% of .0387% is actually .00168%, if you want to check your own basic math)
Additionally, we can find problems with his second number. A 2 ppm change in CO2 concentration is about 0.028 W/m2 (=5.35*ln(CO2/CO2o)). Total (natural) GHG forcing is 150 W/m2. 0.028/150 = 0.018%, or about 30 times the % absorption increase he cited.
And when you think about it, these numbers can add up pretty quickly: at 2 ppm/year, we’ll hit a doubling of CO2 from preindustrial (that is from 275 to 550) sometime late this century (sooner, if India and China and the developing world keep increasing emissions or ocean heating and stratification reduce carbon uptake). That’s 3.7 W/m2, which is like turning the sun up by 1.5% – before any feedbacks from water vapor, increases in other greenhouse gases, black carbon effects, permafrost melting, ice retreat, etc. And a Sun that’s 1.5% brighter sounds like a lot to me…
(and in this area, after correcting more than one eminent scientist on their basic math, it doesn’t strike me at all unlikely that Mr. Myers could get his math wrong. I don’t know why, but climate change seems to attract otherwise intelligent people from out of field who want to disprove the IPCC but who make basic, fundamental errors all the time in their back-of-the-envelope calculations)
And, in fact, I found Mr. Myers’ original article: http://www.islandpacket.com/opinion/letters/story/620301.html
“Carbon dioxide emissions worldwide each year total 3.2 billion tons. That equals about 0.0168 percent of the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration of about 19 trillion tons. This results in a 0.00064 percent increase in the absorption of the sun’s radiation. This is an insignificantly small number. The yearly increase is many orders of magnitude smaller than the standard deviation errors for CO2 concentration measurement.”
So, let’s see: he is wrong about fossil CO2 emissions by a factor of more than 2 (or more than 7 if he is talking about GtCO2 and not GtC). Then his 19 trillion tons is a factor of 21 times larger than the actual atmospheric CO2 mass of 880 GtC (or 7 times larger than the atmospheric mass of 3000 GtCO2, if you prefer that unit). And then he claims we can’t measure the yearly increase despite Mauna Loa records showing that yes, we pretty clearly can.
So, Nick, would you like to revise your opinion of whether an analytical chemist can make basic errors? And perhaps we might wonder at the author of the original article and his ability to discern total junk from real science?
wattsupwiththat (12:47:00) :
“Fraud” might be too harsh. That usually applies when there is an intent to deceive.
First, I had ‘fraud’ between quotes, downplaying the deception a bit, but will maintain that Joe The Plummer would not know about the subtlety of smoothing programs and so would be deceived. And I would also maintain based on the rest of the piece that that was intentional as the piece has a message to deliver.
Patrick Henry (12:49:45) :
No matter how you look at the trend line, temperatures are no higher now than they were 30 years ago. The important point is that the IPCC predictions were wrong, and that attempts to defend those predictions “are a fraud.”
One does not combat bad science with even worse science. If one does so, who is committing the greater fraud. I’m reminded of Al Gore [reportedly] saying that a bit of lying is ok if it helps get the message across.
Robert Bateman (13:15:39) :
I agree with Leif’s conclusions.
Leon Brozyna (14:46:29) :
That global trendline is very nice but its end part is suspect
presenting suspect graphs is fraud, if you know it and ‘fraud’ if you don’t know it, but want to peddle your own agenda.
SteveSadlov (15:15:22) :
It’s not a fraud. It’s a specific, quasi predictive metric. There are various ways to represent leading indicators. Such indicators are not absolute crystal balls, but can be indicative. Anyone who is not at least somewhat disturbed by this leading indicator may not fully comprehend how to use such an indicator for maximum benefit.
As a scientist I’m not disturbed by the suspect part of the curve as I know it does not represent a real prediction, and I do indeed not fully comprehend how to use such a phony ‘indicator’ for maximum benefit. That is called ‘integrity’.
Tim G (16:13:25) :
I agree with Leif. The trend-line in that graph misrepresents the data pretty egregiously. Anyone who is honest about science should reject that graph without hesitation.
Leif “will maintain that Joe The Plummer would not know about the subtlety of smoothing programs and so would be deceived. ”
That’s only if Joe doesn’t read this blog, Leif.
Mike the Plumber
I have found the following calculation on the web site:
http://www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com/calcs.html
THE NUMBERS ABOUT CARBON DIOXIDE IN OUR ATMOSPHERE
Here are the calculations, based on information obtained directly from the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, Holland (KNMI).
Mass (air) = 4 pi R^2 * P/g, where
R=earth radius=6,371,000 m; P=surface pressure=101,300 Pa; g=acceleration due to gravity=9.8 m/s^2
Thus, Mass (air) = 5.3 x 10^18 kg = 5,300,000 Gigatons
Mass (CO2 = mass (air)*ratio (CO2/air)*mol. mass (CO2)/mol. mass (air), where
ratio (CO2/air)=380 ppm=380 parts CO2 per 1 million parts of air
molecular mass (CO2)=44 kg/kmol – molecular mass (air)=28.8 kg/kmol
Thus, Mass (CO2)=3 x 10^15 kg=3,000 Gigatons
Man-made emissions of CO2 are estimated at 110ppm, which is 28.95% of the total CO2
and that equals 868 Gigatons = 0.0164% by mass of the total atmosphere.
A Gigaton is a 1,000 million tons and 1 ton is 1,000kg, equal to 2,240lbs. Carbon Dioxide Graphic
SO . . . IF THE UK WAS TO COLLECTIVELY “SAVE” 1 BILLION TONS . . . (quite impossible)
THAT’S EXACTLY 0.0333% OF THE TOTAL CO2 . . . and all the Government wants to save so far is about 100 million tons – a mere 0.00333% . . . . Every little helps, but surely you can see that this is way beyond being ridiculous?! Think of the words wind, against and . . . surely you can see that?!
Once again I have to remind those who are looking at graphs in terms of trends over many years that farmers don’t have many years to play with trends and predictions. They have close knowledge, passed down from farmer to child, and then child to grandchild, that trends give us the opportunity to plant what will survive without too many lost crops that results in crying in our beer. Looking at that graph, there is a real possibility that warm weather crops and orchards could be in for some hard times and to hedge the bet, farmers better plant some cold weather crops. That is what was done in the Pendleton area. And we had a nice crop of peas this spring that helped overcome the devastating crop of green, frozen-on-the-vine pumpkins. However, during the warming trend, peas were generally put on the back burner. Smart move, them farmers.
Leif, you do not consider persistence? That is not to be discounted. Should the current trend continue for a few more years, then the leading indicator will have been somewhat correct, if not in absolute value, in sign of dT/dt.