Guest post by Bob Tisdale
Near the current end of the thread titled National Post: Thirty years of warmer temperatures go poof Allan asked, “What is your global average temperature prediction for the next several decades?” There were a few responses, including Allan’s. I sent an email to Anthony, letting him know I believed it would make a fun thread. He agreed and asked me to write up a starter post to get the ball rolling.
So, here’s Allan’s original group of questions:
What is your global average temperature prediction for the next several decades?
– warming or cooling?
– for how many years?
– on what technical basis?
– for the dataset provided (UAH Global anomaly) how would you extrapolate, if at all – linear, polynomial, or ???
– does anyone believe that a linear extrapolation is valid? If yes, how do you reconcile with the cyclical nature of the PDO and global avg. temperatures?
Let’s hear what you believe, not just what you don’t believe.
Thanks, Allan
I didn’t want to repost the comments of the others without their okay. If they wish, they can add them and identify themselves, or you can go back to the thread and see who they were. Here’s my response, edited with the correction already included:
Allan: I’ll join in the predictions, but I’ll use the slow cycle in the Southern Ocean SST anomalies as my base.
Cooling for 50 to 60 years, counteracting most if not all of the warming over the last 60 years. There will be amplification then dampening of the cooling due to Thermohaline Circulation/Meridional Overturning Circulation in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. They’ll run in synch at first, but then the cycles will counteract one another. The intermittent positive step changes resulting from large El Nino events (82/83 and 97/98 magnitude) will disappear, since the additional heat supplied to the equatorial Pacific by the Southern Ocean and the THC/MOC in the North Pacific has been dissipated. They’ll be replaced by larger and more frequent La Ninas.
We’ll check back here on this thread in 20 years, see how we’re doing.
My prognostication is based on too many hours spent looking at graphs of sea surface temperature, many of which I post at my blog: http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/
So, as Allan said, “Let’s hear what you believe, not just what you don’t believe.” There are no right or wrong answers. Twenty to fifty years from now some of you will be able to claim you predicted what happened.
Cooler, 30-year trend, based on multidecadal oceanic/atmospheric oscillations (and possible solar minimum). Any uniform atmospheric metric. No, I don’t like extrapolations as things tend to be cyclic and thus not well adapted to cycles.
Harry G: The sun rises in the east and sets in the west only twice a year.
Demesure: sinus curve?
Monckton is not a scientist, but he is a mathematician. He’s also an official IPCC reviewer (thus is a co-Nobel prizewinner) and has turned up at least one significant error that the IPCC has accepted.
Whatever we say as a prediction, there is only two ways of proving it as it unfolds. Either buy, calibrate, and properly maintain your own weather station, or advocate that we switch to satellite data only. Anything else and we are just pissing in the wind.
I predict we’ll be wishing it was warmer like the good old global warmers promised. Lief Svalgaard will be re-employed shovelling snow for people stuck in New Hampshire. All the best, Ed
The best predictor of the future is the past.
In the past 60 years, my analysis says global warming from increased GHGs has been 0.08C per decade or +0.16C over the next 20 years. There is no forecast that shows there will be any change in the level of increasing GHGs so I will stay with the 0.08C per decade.
The analysis also shows a change in global temperatures of 0.15 times the anomaly in the El Nino region 3.4 (or an increase of 0.5C in global temps for the biggest El Ninos such as the 1997-98 El Nino which saw sea surface temperatures increase by 2.8C – a huge number).
Considering the forecast over 20 years is for a slight cooling or closer to average conditions in the PDO and El Ninos versus the 1986 to 2006 period where there were many major El Nino events – i would just predict average conditions or no change from today’s temps from the PDO.
So, +0.16C for me.
Obama wins. Al Gore becomes global warming czar. Pelosi drives “climate legislation” through as one of Congress’ first acts. By year end the Democrats take credit for global cooling.
Within 10 years much of Europe and America are having serious energy shortages and experience major brain drain to countries which still show signs of intelligent life.
Many smart people who fancy themselves the best climate modelers on earth can’t get it right, in my opinion. I could do no better because the science is simply not “there” yet.
Though I have developed some simplistic models, all I feel comfortable saying is that temperature will continue to be cyclic on a decade and longer scale (not to mention annually). I think solar or solar system cycles of some sort will turn out to be a significant factor on both decade and century scales. Anthropogenic CO2 may or may not be a significant century scale factor.
If it does get hotter over the next two centuries, I seriously doubt it will become catastrophic for humanity. If it gets colder, that could easily become catastrophic for humanity. Globally, we can adapt to heat more readily than cold.
I think the trend over the few thousand years is much colder to devastatingly colder (barring the deliberate intervention of humankind) — because it seems we’re nearing the end of an interglacial.
John Philip,
I appreciate your candor in following the IPCC models concerning CO2 forcings and AGW. However, in Feb 2007 the IPCC already had problems as global temperature trends were somewhat incorrect. It appears much of the trend analysis of the 2007 SPM was incorrect.
Your highlighting of the next El Nino event is correct. The strength and duration of the next El Nino will tell us a lot about what to expect in the coming decade at the very least. Allegedly we are now in a regime that should be dominated by La Ninas. If the next El Nino is weak and short lived, all bets are off concerning AGW. As Bob Tisdale has stated in earlier posts, the PDO is more a reflection of long term ENSO trends than anything else. The last El Nino event of 2006 was rather weak, but if you believe GISS, Hadley, and NOAA, 2006 was one of the warmest years of the last century.
While the IPCC doesn’t entirely ignore ENSO, it does put it at a lower level than say, CO2 forcings.The 2007 IPCC AR could be rendered useless as early as 2010. We are the early stages of the so-called negative PDO, and if La Ninas continue to dominate the Pacific through 2040, the predictions of .2 deg warming per decade will long forgotten.
Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record.
John Philip,
The first thing they teach freshmen geology students is that warmer sea water has lower CO2 solubilities. Thus when the ocean warms up, more CO2 gets outgassed to the atmosphere. Odd that many “climate scientists” are missing this important piece of information.
If CO2 had driven historical temperature increases, then the warmer water would have outgassed more CO2 – which would in turn have caused warmer temperatures and the climate would have warmed irreversibly.
120,000 years ago all greenhouse gases had high concentrations, temperatures were high, albedo was low, and the earth plunged into an ice age. Many climate scientists will tell you that this couldn’t have happened.
What is your global average temperature prediction…
– warming or cooling?
– for how many years?
– on what technical basis?
I see 30 years of cooling with the PDO as the primary driver in large part because the Pacific Ocean is so big. AMO is next, then GHG, solar-related issues as a sizable unknown. I like Svensmark’s hypothesis, but I can’t refute Leif’s skepticism.
– for the dataset provided (UAH Global anomaly) how would you extrapolate, if at all – linear, polynomial, or ???
Clearly I go for cyclic, but I see more of a sawtooth pattern over the full PDO cycle plus a linear rise that may stretch back to the Little Ice Age and is likely to continue. A sawtooth is readily converted through a Fourier transform to a simple set of fundamental frequencies.
– does anyone believe that a linear extrapolation is valid? If yes, how do you reconcile with the cyclical nature of the PDO and global avg. temperatures?
Over a short enough time frame, any curve can be approximated with a straight line. We don’t have good data over several PDO (and related) cycles, so it can be hard to project those ahead. Straight lines are easy to compute, trivial to project, and make a decent first step for short projections. Straight line projections are degenerate form of a polynomial, and the higher or order of the polynomial, the more quickly the projection turns to fantasy and impossibility.
Linear extrapolation is especially bad at inflection points, e.g. the change between positive and negative PDO, and that’s one problem with demonstrating recent cooling.
I have no idea what it will take for the AGW movement to collapse, but it will happen during a cold winter.
I also predict that 50 years from people will look back at these first couple of decades of this century and realize we were in the middle of the Golden Era of Climatology.
Pamela Gray (17:22:40) :
…….”Anything else and we are just pissing in the wind.”
strange …
I would like to know your prediction?
(sorry for my bad english)
Edward Morgan (17:38:53) :
I could’ve used him last year! 130 inches of snowfall total, 52.5″ just in December, 39″ was the deepest snowcover, 2565 “Snow Depth Days” (sum of daily snow depths), all new records in my 10 years of data and likely more than any season of the last 100.
http://wermenh.com/sdd/ne-0708.html
http://wermenh.com/wx/winter_0708.html
Oh – I expect colder and less more this season. More snow south.
I take a geologic time-scale view of climate and consider a warm globe as an earth dominated by tropical temperatures for quite (quite!) a few millions of years. A cold globe is pretty much an ice ball for many millions of years. The earth has seen both conditions more than once. To me, geologic time-scale climate change is the transition between ice ball and a global tropical state.
The changes of the past five million years or so I consider to be global weather, in geological time. We have two dominant weather conditions consisting of around 100k years of glaciation and nice little warmups of around 10-30k years where the glaciers take a break.
From my viewpoint, I think the geologic global weather is driven by the position of the continental plates which affects where and how the water on earth absorbs sunlight and also affects how oceans currents circulate the sun’s captured energy.
Humankind just hasn’t had much of an effect on climate or weather as I’ve described it above.
So… when I start considering climate and weather as the short-timers on earth (we, the human race) tend to view things, a few degrees – heck! several degrees – of change are just nano-weather anomolies as we head towards either another period of glaciation or an interglacial. (The odd volcano or asteroid hit just prolongs cool periods we encounter on our way to one or the other of the geologic weather events.)
Patience. I know ya’ll will just have to wait around ’til the continents drift back together to see that I’m right, but when they do, you’ll come ’round to my way of thinking. That, or the human race will have been toast for a hundred million years and, shucks! we’ll miss it.
What the Heck! Let’s have a go.
Generalized statements. North America only!
Temps from here to next solar minimum .2 degrees above 1979 – 1998 trendline. Because:
PDO phase is retaining heat from past warm phases, lag in effect.
Less cooling from cloud cover, as in 1930ish, and less vegetative cooling.
Temps in following solar phase:
.3 below trendline.
Extended PDO amplified. Cloud cover increased.
Temps in tertiary solar phase:
.5 degrees below trendline
Extended PDO, volcanic disturbance. Buy grain futures.
The “curve”? It ain’t linear.
A multi-layered sinusoid:
a short (70-odd year) sine wave of about 4/10 of one degree amplitude;
plus,
a longer (400-odd year) cosine wave of about 2/10 of one degree;
plus,
a longer (1000-odd year) sine wave of about 4/10 of one degree.
Our current very slight warming trend from 1890 through 1995 is from the longer oscillation, the 1890-1935 positive trend, followed by the 1935 – 1970 decrease and then the 1970 – 1995 increase, followed by the 1995 – 2008+ (flat spot, then decrease) are from the short period cycle.
Prediction? (Well, at least it will be better than Hansen, Gore, Obama, and Mann.)
Continued decline through about 2010 (when Solar cycle 24 “finally” begins increasing cosmic ray shielding); then a period of flat and slightly increasing temps through about 2018, then a sloping decline again between 2018 and 2022 between Cycle 24 (a low period) and Cycle 25 (an even lower average period), then a bump at the high point of Cycle 25’s final arrival (much later than Hathway and NASA are now claiming), then a decline until Cycle 26.
Temp’s won’t get as high as now (1995-2005 averages) until 2035 – 2040 time frame.
But the short range cycling temperatures are on an upslope (we still need about 4/10 of one degree increase until the previous 100,000 year cycles are met. (And this increase until that high point will look like AGW increases.)
Until the next ice age (which is already 2000 years overdue) shows up.
Okay, I am hot, hot, hot! As in madder than a wet hen!!! The NOAA NWS predicted 30 degrees F as the low last night near Lostine where I ranch. Well guess what???!?!?!? It fell to 18 degrees F! We are getting damned close to freezing pipe temps and they are still stuck on predictions that are completely out of whack with what the weather is out the door. It makes me SICK! This is not a Service (which what the S is supposed to stand for)! It is more like National Weather S***T!!!! Sorry Anthony about the cussing, but in rural areas, we need some semblance of accuracy, not WAG’s, from the National Weather Serv…, sorry I just can’t say that word.
Although there are many interesting “opinions” posted, I will side with:
Diatribical Idiot (15:00:56) : at -2 C in 2030.
Like his model or not, at least he is plugging in real data to come up with a statistically supportable hypothesis – an hypothesis that is probably every bit as valid as those sophisticated computer simulations used by the IPCC et al.
The interesting thing to me about this approach is the implicit assumption that there are real, cyclical forcing mechanisms out there – whether we understand them or not. The method doesn’t try to quantify or identify the mechanisms, but just addresses them statistically.
This is a much smarter approach than might first appear. Few would deny that the climate system is very complex & poorly understood (in terms of long term drivers, feedbacks etc). This approach takes all of that out of the equation.
BTW / OT – 1st snows here in the western suburbs of Denver today. Up to 18″ at Loveland & A-Basin ski areas in the mtns. Only 0.1″ at the house (elev 6060) , but winter is on the way !
More musings;
Can across an interesting piece of info today “during El Ninos (1998 was a super El Nino) heat flows out of the ocean and into the air”. If this is the case then if an El Nino coincides with a PDO shift to cooling phase which coincides with low solar output (minimum, or extended minimum as we are having) then the cooling effects would be amplified and not only would the oceans be cooling but also receiving less heat, meaning faster and more extended cooling.
As the oceans drive the climate then this would mean the concurrent existence of all three drives a stronger cooling force that is not able to revert until the sun comes out of its slumber, increases TSI and reduces cloud cover. In the meantime we get a domino effect of increased cooling in the oceans and the atmosphere, growing polar icecaps, increased snowfall etc.
Until the sun becomes strong enough to revert this signal (not looking likely at the moment) we stay in a cooling cycle.
I wrote:
Oh – I expect colder and less more this season. More snow south.
I meant to write:
Oh – I expect colder and less snow this season. More snow south.
Pamela Gray (19:10:02) :
Pam, calm down, cool down. Just open the door. Next time towel off or you’ll catch a chill.
Tomorrow, telephone the NWS http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/pdt/ says the phone number is (541) 276-7832. Talk to them about flat basin and radiational cooling and wind-blocking mountains. They’ll probably point out that forecasting radiational cooling is tough and that people nearby you may have been much warmer. (You should call neighbors first, also the Enterprise airport.)
If you aren’t careful, you’ll wind up as the official Co-op weather observer there. Just don’t put the MMTS too close to a structure! 🙂 Aim for logging highs and lows for a month to compare to NWS forecasts and maybe they’ll learn something.
My guess is as follows:
2007 to 2037 Flat over the period with a UAH anomaly of 0.3C
2037 to 2067 Increase of 0.4C over the period up to anomaly of 0.7C
2067 to 2097 Flat – anomaly of 0.7C
This is based on a general warming of 0.7C per century and an Ocean Current (PDO, AMO, ENSO, etc) cycle of 60 years which offsets the general warming on its 30-year down leg and doubles the rate of warming on its 30-year upleg. Individual monthly anomalies will vary from this trend due to ENSO events with about +0.7C for a the rare strong El Nino, +0.4C for a moderate El Nino, and +0.1C for a weak El Nino and the inverse for strong, moderate and weak La Ninas. These temperature fluctuations will follow the ENSO peaks and valleys by 3 to 4 months. The occasional major volcanic eruption will temporarily dampen these temperatures.
This is just a continuation of recent climate history. The last 60-year Ocean Current cycle ended in 2007. Temperatures were flat for the 1947 to 1977 period and increased by 0.4C from 1977 to 2007 and the monthly temperatures oscillated around the trend due to ENSO events and major volcanic eruptions. The current anomaly is slightly below the trend due to the recent La Nina.
The future?
I’ll get back to you on that…
Rocky Mountain News is celebrating its 150th anniversary by publishing a series of fictional accounts based on events of a given decade. The only restriction on the stories are their length and they must mention Larimer Street at least once in the story. Larimer Street was the main street of Denver at its start, became a skid-row from the 40s to the 60s and is now rehabilitated.
The last story is the winner of a contest open to all readers. Same size and content restriction and also must be based sometime in the future.
My entry to the contest is set in the year 2058 and is entitled “Goldgrinder”. It won’t be selected as the winner, but what a coincidence (for our purposes) as there is an element of prediction regarding the climate of the next fifty years.
Here are the first two pages:
Late afternoon fog muffled the hammer blows of the pile driver down at the REI store by Confluence Park. Mark was accompanied by the echoes of the levee construction as he walked down Larimer Street. When the ice dam up in the South Platte Canyon finally gave way during the heavy thunderstorms of the spring of 2056, some remote cameras caught the images of the wall of water as it left its birthplace along Sheep Mountain. The one day fall of 22 inches of rain above the dam finished the job of the explosives team in minutes. Three days of record spring runoff backed up by the dam joined in with the deluge and swept downstream. Chatfield Reservoir did hold, but a twenty foot wave swirled around the spill way, taking out 2 miles of 470.
Downstream, it was a repeat of the June 1965 flood. The Globeville Artist Colony was running a multimedia exhibit in the Denver Art Museum. “Angry Waters” was very popular with visitors and locals alike. It looked like there was going to be enough money raised to rebuild their studios on the old Red Ball Motor Freight location off Ringsby Court.
Mark paused at Governor Hickenlooper Park. When he was little, this was one of Mark’s favorite spots. He loved to play on the random fountain; he and his brother trying to outsmart the nozzles scattered through the play area. When the park was first proposed, some wanted a statue of the governor in the middle. At the discovery of how upset Governor Hickenlooper was about the proposed expenditure, everyone settled on a plaque. Mark always wondered why his dad laughed at the inscription every time he read it:
Chuckling himself, Mark moved on towards his destination, Princeton’s.
Just past the park, a small crowd was gathered around the MSNBC media center. The HD holograph was displaying a six foot diameter image of the sun. A 3D ring of lettering rotating underneath the sun read: “First sunspot in over 50 years.” And there it was, in the upper latitudes, in the northern hemisphere of the sun, the fifth sunspot of the 24th cycle. Mark’s earpiece was picking up the interview of a solar physicist up at Boulder.
His attention and reception of the local broadcast faded as the bas relief image of the mountain inspiring Princeton’s name came into view. Someone was leaving and the warm light flowing from the pub cast long shadows on the cast metal sign swinging in front. Mark caught the door just before it closed, leaving the chilling news, fog and echoes behind.
Enterprise shares many of the physical features of Lostine, more so than the town of Wallowa on the other side. At least the temps have been similar. My little cheapass temp probe nearly matches the Enterprise airport station for night time temps (my equally cheapass attempt at calibrating a $5.00 instrument). So I am guessing that the recorded low I will see on the probe when I get there will be 18 to 20 degrees F. So when I said 18 degrees near the ranch, I was using the airport station, so I won’t need to call them. However, the central complaint remains a fact. The forecasted lows in NE Oregon made by the NWS have been 10 to 15 degrees higher than the actual temps night after night after night. Yesterday the forecasted low for Pendleton was 35. This morning it was 24 degrees F. You would think that after the second night, or third night, or 4 fourth night, someone would be changing those forecasts downward. Are they just predicting 35 so that they will eventually be right?