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.
So now I have to call into question record events. Some of them are just too outside the realm of possibility. Long Creek is in NE Oregon (you know, where there was so much frost on the pumpkin that folks are scrambling for recipes for fried green pumpkin. I submit the following record breaker from NOAA archives for a HIGH temp, recorded at 8:40 in the morning, Oct. 18, 2008, in an area of the country that is very similar to and not too far away from the surrounding foothill high deserts of Pendleton. On that same day, I was checking my computer at the ranch at around the same time wondering if we would be getting snow.
Record Report
000
SXUS76 KPDT 181542
RERPDT
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE PENDLETON OR
840 AM PDT SAT OCT 18 2008
…NEW DAILY RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURE FOR OCTOBER 18TH…
NOTE: STATIONS MARKED WITH * INDICATE THAT THE STATION REPORTS ONCE
PER DAY. FOR CONSISTENCY…THESE VALUES ARE CONSIDERED TO HAVE
OCCURRED ON THE DAY THE OBSERVATION WAS TAKEN BUT MAY HAVE ACTUALLY
OCCURRED (ESPECIALLY FOR MAX TEMPERATURE) ON THE PREVIOUS DAY.
STATION PREVIOUS NEW RECORDS
RECORD/YEAR RECORD BEGAN
*LONG CREEK, OR 78 / 2003 78 (TIED) 1957
Let’s see, the next ice age is due. By the ice core plots, we’ve already past the peak temperature and are on our way down. The next Gleissberg Cycle is due, so there’s at least a Maunder Minimum right there. Oh, and the Yellowstone hot spot is due to erupt any time now too, and that could flood the northwest with lava. Oh, oh, and those coastal volcanoes are still active, so Seattle is going to be wiped out. And LA gets the Big One it’s been waiting for. What else? Oh yes, Earth’s magnetic reversal is due too. I don’t know about the big asteroid, but it’s been a while. All in all, it’s all downhill from here.
But seriously, people have been predicting the end for a long time, and that’s not a good bet. If you are going to predict the end, make it for your kids’ or your grandkids’ generation. Even better, if you want to be right that is, is to avoid betting on the extremes. The safest bet of all would be the status quo, if you want to be close to right and you’re not sure if it’s going up or down. The funny thing is, the temperature is not likely to be the same in 20 years — but we will still be arguing whether it went up or down!
I’d just like to mention some human factors other than CO2, since they are so neglected: land use changes, atmospheric pollution and aerosols.
I say the cooling will continue until the ‘bird flu’ wipes the earth of us parasites.
No official predictions… well, maybe one.
You’ve got me wondering if (when) that red 2008 “sea ice extent” line will intersect with the 20 – year average (black) line. I hope you’ll keep posting those graphs – and I’ll wager a dollar that the two lines cross before mid-November. If anybody has already placed this bet, sorry – I haven’t had time to read the whole thread.
Also, along these lines, since we’re near the end of the year, I think it’s appropriate to start thinking of New Year’s resolutions, especially with regard to climate. Specifically, I think some of the… shall we say, “difficult” people (you know who you are) consider in a spirit of contrition some of the weather events they have been causing, and suggest ways in which they intend to do better next year. I, personally, intend to eat more beans, but then I have purchased the credits to do so.
Norm, bird flu is just yet another exagerated post-modern scare. Less bloated than AGW but bloated anyway.
The bigger the threat, the more money will flow for reseach, commitees, newspapers…
John Philip says: “Were I an AGW sceptic I would feel profoundly depressed”.
Were I pro-AGW I would also feel profoundly depressed, because we´re about to wreck the economy as a result.
Monckton is not a scientist, but he is a mathematician. He’s also an official IPCC reviewer (thus is a co-Nobel prizewinner)
Well, he has made a lot of money from his mathematical puzzle, perhaps you could provide a list of his other mathematical qualifications/publications?
You do know how one becomes an IPCC Expert Reviewer, I assume?
-2.5°C by 2020!
Some powerful cycles appear to be aligning to deliver a vicious deep freeze.
– Solar cycles
– Ocean cycles – PDO, AMO, etc.
– and the 100K year ice-age cycle
There are some things to keep in mind:
1. Climate does not change gradually.
2. Climate changes abruptly, without warning.
3. Temperatures over the last 2 million years have been colder than today’s 95+% of the time.
4. Warm, like today, is in fact highly unusual.
5. Our current interglacial has been abnormally long.
6. Interglacial are more often much briefer, short-lived spikes.
6. Thus, the climate dice are not in our favour!
Ice ages have occurred right ON SCHEDULE for the last 3 million years.
And if you examine the interglacial temperature peaks, i.e the brief optimums between the cold intervals, you’ll see our modern optimum is indeed prolonged. More often the interglacials are just brief spikes that suddenly nosedive back into prolonged deep-freezes. Now the sun is going to sleep, and the oceans are reversing to boot!
My prediction is we’ve started a nasty cold period that will make the 1960s look balmy. We’re about to get caught with our pants down.
And a few molecules of CO2 is not going to change it.
John Philip, I have quoted you out of context. Sorry. My post should have said:
“With reference to Viscount Monckton’s essay, John Philip says “Were I an AGW sceptic I would feel profoundly depressed”.
Were I pro-AGW I would also feel profoundly depressed, because we’re about to wreck the econmy as a result.”
I reckon we soon won’t need all this. The next task of our UK government “Minister for Climate Change and Energy” will be to repeal the laws of thermodynamics so that the climate will be controlled by a large black rotary knob in the minister’s office. Then we will have certainty.
I suspect at the same time they will lay plans for the repeal of the law of gravity to coincide with the arrival of the space ship coming to rescue them, so they can float up to meet it.
I am merely dabbling, and am prone to noting correlations without understanding the mechanics (if there are any) involved, but I feel the Pacific will remain cool as the Atlantic remains relatively warm, for the final decade of the warm AMO. This will create a boundary between cold and warm up the east coast of the USA and over to Europe. Depending on how this boundary shifts north and south, winters may be snowy or rainy in the East USA and Europe, but the general trend over the next decade will be to have more storms than usual. World temperatures will show a slight decline.
Dr. Bill Gray noted many correlations, and requested funding so that we might better understand the mechanics involved, however the funding was denied, as Gore channeled funding to Hansen. Consequently we have developed computer models, and much theory, but it all seems useless if the models don’t include certain mechanics, which remain undiscovered and misunderstood.
A number of correlations seem counter-intuitive; warming causes cooling, and cooling causes warming.
For example, there seems to be a correlation between warming and melting in the North Atlantic and cooling off the coast of Peru. This may or may not involve pulses in the deep sea thermohaline circulation. Research would expand our knowledge. That is what Dr. Gray wanted. He has been dismissed by many as an outspoken crack-pot. Instead we are stuck with models which may lack a vital factor, and are therefore basically useless.
I actually think the models lack a great many vital factors. There is more to learn than we already have learned. We still are basically blundering in the dark, as we attempt to fathom what is vast and wonderful.
We should be more humble, and open to new ideas. Hansen’s main problem is he isn’t humble, and therefore he is likely to be humbled against his will, by a thing called Reality.
It is my opinion that over the next three decades temperatures in at least the Northern hemisphere will continue to decline. The combination of diminshed solar activity, PDO and AMO cycles all converging in a cool phase, have the potential to produce some potentially challenging times in the near future for humanity.
I predict that the weather will continueto cycle between warming and cooling as it always has done . The sun and earth interactions will govern the cycles. The next sun cycle may be short , about 10 years and with a magnitude equal to # 23 or slightly higher
Next 5 years -cool
period 5-10 years -warm
period 10-20 years- cool
In 20 years we will have the same climate as today and the current global warming hype will be looked back at as one of the low points in science.
Since climate is by its nature variable I predict that the future climate will be variable like the present so the climate isn’t going to change because the climate is always changing so nothing about the changeability will change. So we can look forward to climate change. Just as we always have.
I just looked into the Long Creek, Oregon registered weather device and it has an out-of-compliance warning attached to it. It appears that it needs calibration.
http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/C2286
I predict that within 5 years every prediction or belief set out here will have been overturned as a result of real world observations from our much improved technologies.
I remain of the view, however, that overall, solar variations with oceanic oscillations will prove to be the overwhelming control system for atmospheric temperature for most of the time.
We do not yet know how those parameters develop and change over time so I expect many surprises. Bob’s continuing work with the oceans is likely to prove very useful when more oceanic monitoring devices become available.
I am quite sure that atmospheric GHGs will prove to be an irrelevance in the face of other natural processes.
I hope that we do not have a large minimum like a Dalton or Maunder. I expect more of the same as what we have had. Since I made my model
http://users.vianet.ca/paulak2r/AGW/ , I have come to appreciate that the added solar intensity for the sixty years from around 1940 to 2000 has reduced. I expect the global temperatures to increase by about 0.3 C from the 1990 average value to the 2110 average value (averaged over 30 years).
John M Reynolds
Sorry but I don’t have a crystal ball. If I could predict the future I would have shorted the stock market in January and would now be sitting in a tropical place sipping rum drinks with little umbrellas in them. Instead I’m sitting here in Michigan …shivering.
I feel your pain, dude. I was sipping my Margarita on the patio of beach side bar this afternoon, watching the surf pound the beach and shivering in the 75-degree cold.
My predictions ….
If it gets warmer, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If it gets colder, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If it gets drier, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If it gets wetter, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If the Arctic ice pack grows, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
If the Arctic ice pack shrinks, the AGW supporters will say “we told you so”
Predictions for Britain.
The return of Dickensian style winters – White Christmases, skating on the Thames and ice fairs. The return of 1970’s economic conditions – 3 day weeks, frequent and prolonged power cuts and long queues at petrol pumps. The return of the annual cull of the elderly as thousands freeze to death in their own homes.
Timespan – beginning in 5-10 years and lasting for 20-30 years.
Predictions for science.
When people realise the enormity of the scam perpetrated upon them in the name of “scientific consensus” then science will have a long long way to go to win back public support. The cause of science will have been set back approximately 200 years.
Predictions for the IPCC.
Ignominy.
Predictions for James Hansen and Al Gore.
Comfortable retirement and complete obscurity.
Long term predictions.
There will be another ice age and the people who live through that will wonder why we moaned about a very slight warming back in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
From John Philip way up there…(Petit et al., 1999). is this paper . It does indeed find warmer temperatures, in the Antarctic anyway ,in previous interglacials, but links these to higher CO2 levels, as they conclude … Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane correlate well with Antarctic air-temperature throughout the record. Present-day atmospheric burdens of these two important greenhouse gases seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.
Take aim at foot…FIRE!….”
John Philip, you make the same error that Al Gore does. We all know ‘that warmer temperatures are linked to higher CO2.
But the allegation of the IPCC, and Al Gore is that THE CO2 CAUSES THE WARMER TEMPERATURES.
Not so; THE WARMER TEMPERATURES CAUSE THE HIGHER CO2; but they are still linked as Petit et al said.
And we know for darn sure that warmer temperatures cause higher CO2 because the global warmists claim that as a feedback mechanism; CO2 is less soluble in warme water; ergo, ocean warming causes outgassing CO2.
The secret is: the thing that happens first is the CAUSE (warmer temperatures) and the thing that happens last is the EFFECT (CO2 outgassing)
John Philip
Qualifications are worth zero beside abilities. Monckton is able to think, to do maths, to apply his mind to every detail of complex physics when he smells corruption in the wind, and to draw on ancient layers of our culture to appeal to the highest in people to wake up because we cannot afford to let science become corrupted. And even if his science was bad, which it is not, his rhetoric and logic deserve applause and support. If physics professors accept his validity, so should you by your own criteria.
But this is what convinced me that Monckton’s ability was sterling and true. Last year he wrote a piece in the Telegraph which mathematician Gavin Schmidt shredded in “Cuckoo Science”. AGW’ers know Schmidt’s piece but fail to realize… Monckton has answered every single line of Schmidt (and without the discourtesy Schmidt applied). If Schmidt could have demolished Monckton’s answer, he would have done so; he would not have passed up on such an opportunity. That he did not do so, tells me he could not.
At a conference in the early 1990s, I heard Bill Gray make two predictions: The first was that there would soon be a sudden shift to much more active Atlantic Hurricane Seasons, and 2) That if the average global temperature did not start to cool in the early 21st century he would jump off one of the Rocky Mountains out his back door, if he was still around. Both of these predictions where based on pattern recognition and turned out to be 100% accurate.
Bill Gray was vilified for political reasons (as Caleb mentioned above concerning Hanson and Gore), but the scientific excuse for his public humiliation was the fact that he could not ‘model’ the patterns he was recognizing. Mathematicians will tell you that you will have more predictive success if you try to recognize the patterns in a chaotic, nonlinear system than if you try to model the system based on initial and forecast inputs. In other words, they tell us that Bill Gray’s method of prediction will be more accurate than the IPCC’s. Reality is demostrating this most effectively.
In the spirit of Bill Gray, I recognize the ocean cycles of the PDO and the AMO as being dominate and predictable. The solar influence is less predictable but seems to be producing trends that last for a few hundred years, and that the warming trend may have just peaked at the end of the 20th century. CO2 emissions will likely increase, but the warming impact will be on the order of 0.02 to 0.03 degrees C per decade, based on a climate sensitivity deduced from recognizing the natural cycles and subtracting their influence from the warming of the 20th century.
The net result will be a cooling of about a half a degree C until 2038, followed by a warming of about 0.2 to 0.3 degrees C through 2068, then another cool down of about a half a degree through the end of the century. In other words, the net warming of the 20th century will be cancelled by the cooling of the 21st century. Without human CO2 emissions, the cooling of the 21st century would likely be 50% greater, with temperatures approaching the coolness of the early 1800s.
Major volcanic eruptions could produce significant short term cooling, but unless they are really huge, they should not have a significant impact on the overall trend. Given the current natural cycles, I do not see any hope for warmer temperatures, which is a shame. There is no question that a modest warming through the 21st century would be great for the biosphere and humans in particular. Too bad it is not going to happen!
I broadly agree with Jim but feel that the potential for larger and/or more rapid temperature changes has been understated.
Warming tends to be slow because the increasing warmth from the oceans has to get ever greater to continue overcoming the enhanced heat flow from atmosphere to space caused by the increased surface/space temperature differential.
Cooling can be much quicker because the reduction of heat flow from the oceans is added to the previously created enhanced heat flow from atmosphere to space.
With warming the planetary temperaure is being pushed uphill. With cooling it is being pushed downhill.
Lucy – A rather more plausible interpretation is that Monckton’s article was scientific gobbledygook designed to fool the unwary and when Schmidt dissected his nonsense, Monckton replied with more gobbledlygook repeating many of the same errors. I can understand Schmidt’s reluctance to get into a protracted back-and-forth with such an individual.
Let us look at how this works: regarding Monckton’s latest piece in the APS forum, estimating climate sensitivity and ‘proving’ the IPCC have got it wrong. When determining the temperature trend Monkton divides the measured values by 2. Because:
If McKitrick (2007) (G,H) is correct that temperature since 1980 has risen at only half of the observed rate, ….
This is a reference to McKitrick and Michaels, (J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S09) which based on a statistical correlation analysis claimed that land temperature anomalies may be overestimated by a factor of two. The paper is disputed, but more importantly it was for land measurements only. Monckton uses it as an excuse to divide the whole global trend by 2, when in fact it would support a reduction of 30% of this amount, this being the fraction of the globe that is land.
So the calculation is BS, Monkton relies on the casual reader not checking his references. The most basic peer-review would have spotted this error, and indeed it is error number E28 in this list of 125 similar errors from APS member Arthur Smith. I am not aware that Monckton has ‘rebutted’ this analysis.
I am not sure if this is tongue-in-cheek, however in the open letter to McCain he describes himself … His contribution to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 – the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise – earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate.
There was indeed an arithmetical error in a table, but others had already notified the IPCC with rather less fuss before the Viscount’s letter arrived. He is entitled to describe himself as an IPCC Expert Reviewer but then if I were to comment on an IPCC report, so would I.
JP
PS I took a look at your ‘primer’, can you point me to the details of the Gallup poll of AGU and AMS members that found that only 17% agree that human activites affect the climate?
Thanks.