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.
Stephen Wilde (02:07:21), that is an interesting idea. The only problem is the warmings and coolings for the past 400,000 years about the same rate according to the Vostok data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
The slope on each side of each spike is quite steep.
John M Reynolds
@John Philip
But here are Sami Solanki’s thoughts…’I am not a denier of global warming produced by an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases. Already at present the overwhelming source of global warming is due to manmade greenhouse gases and their influence will continue to grow in the future as their concentration increases’. Ooops!
I find this an intriguing comment, since I have found it at the end of many current papers – most recently on the topic of Polar Bear numbers. I recall reading a paper in which all the data indicated that Polar Bears had a high, stable population, and there was no hint of any problem.
Then, after the conclusion, a short paragraph on ‘Future Trends’ was added. This paragraph had no data, but stated that IF global warming continued, and IF Polar Bears’ habitat was affected, this would obviously put Polar Bears at risk.
This addendum had no basis in the field data, and was obviously inserted to:
a) indicate that the researcher was ‘not a denier’
b) enable the paper to be used to support an opposite conclusion to the data, should that be desired.
May I suggest that Sami Solanki’s thoughts are part of the same pattern? Like the Eastern Block show trials, it seems that you have to declare you have the correct faith before you are allowed to have your paper considered or published. The similarities with Galilieo are striking – you may say that the Earth moves in your paper, so long as you include a disclaimer that of course the Church is right when it says the Earth is the static centre of creation!
You might also wish to consider Dr Ian Jolliffe’s comments about the hockey-stick, which I am sure you are aware of. He indicates that this work (on which a major plank of the AGW hypothesis rests) is incorrect. But at the same time, he says that he is sure that global warming exists.
“I am by no means a climate change denier. My strong impressive is that the evidence rests on much much more than the hockey stick. It therefore seems crazy that the MBH hockey stick has been given such prominence and that a group of influential climate scientists have doggedly defended a piece of dubious statistics….”
I Jolliffe
In the same breath he has attacked, and then reiterated his defence of, AGW. This is classic doublethink.
When the hockey stick went down in flames, AGW supporters world-wide made similar statements to Ian Jolliffe’s “My strong impression is that the evidence rests on much much more than the hockey stick.”
So what is this “much much more evidence” that they are talking about? It is the notion of a very strong positive water vapor feedback for which there is actually no real-world, physical evidence! It is pure speculation! Their ‘much much more evidence’ contains no evidence what so ever! And on this we are supposed willingly increase the suffering of every man, women and child on the planet!! It is madness of the highest order!
Dodgy – Seems to me you have identified a major weakness in the contrarian position, that is, you have to assume that thousands of scientists are reporting their findings and opinions in bad faith. Solanki is a solar expert and his opinions are informed by his research, which indicates that solar forcing is a minor player, at best, in the modren warming.
In fact Jolliffe describes himself as sceptical about the Hockey Stick, he does not say it is incorrect. From the same source: It is possible that there are good reasons for decentred PCA to be the technique of choice for some types of analyses and that it has some virtues that I have so far failed to grasp, but I remain sceptical.
It is not doublethink to be sceptical about a single strand of evidence for a proposition while finding the rest of the evidence compelling, which is Jolliffe’s stated position.
Jim It is the notion of a very strong positive water vapor feedback for which there is actually no real-world, physical evidence! It is pure speculation!
See this paper in Nature. From the abstract:
We identify a significant global-scale increase in
surface specific humidity that is attributable mainly to human
influence. Specific humidity is found to have increased in response
to rising temperatures, with relative humidity remaining approximately
constant.
Higher specific humidity = more water vapour. As we are repeatedly reminded water vapour is a powerful greenhouse gas, so more water vapour …
jmrSudbury (04:44:55) :
Stephen Wilde (02:07:21), that is an interesting idea. The only problem is the warmings and coolings for the past 400,000 years about the same rate according to the Vostok data:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Co2-temperature-plot.svg
The slope on each side of each spike is quite steep.
John M Reynolds
I think the Vostock evidence would be too coarse to show such an effect. It would only be the early stages of cooling that would be steepest on a decadal basis. Once the earlier warming peak had gone from the atmosphere the process would be more sedate (all other things being equal).
Cooling continues into the next decade. By 2011, on average, we are back where we were in the early 1800s. The global food crises continues to worsen. The amount of viable ag land in Eurasia, particularly the interior, shrinks dramatically. As happened during the period 350 – 800 AD, this places migration and conquest pressure on the great powers who live there, especially Russia and China. They mount a general offensive, resulting in additional cooling due to the effects of WMDs used to smash Western and pro Western strategic military assets. The new Dark Age begins.
James Hansen visits China and is torn apart by desperate citizenry as part of their food and energy riots.
The Post article contained a 6th order polynomial trendline that many objected to – but what other choice would have been better?
This polynomial demonstrates that all global warming has disappeared (measured in the LT from 1979 when the satellites were first launched to end August 2008), a valid point made by the writer.
The recent PDO shift to cooling supports the view that global cooling will occur for another ~30 years, with some interruptions. Low-order polynomials barely show any cooling.
The 6th order poynomial obviously relates to 666, the Mark of the Beast at the End of Days.
The 6th order polynomial, when extrapoliated, intersects the critical 1 degree F cooling line on December 21, 2012 – End of Days on the Mayan Calender.
Planetary alignments that occur only once in millenia will happen on this fateful End of Days…
Does anyone need clearer proof than this?
Before anyone distributes the above nonsense to others and starts a new kool-aid cult, please recognize satire when you see it.
Regards, Allan 🙂
Nope, because there are enough “people” out there who would actually believe that crap.
Right Jeff.
Just like politicians and bureaucrats believed the bogus Mann Hockey Stick.
Does it bother anyone else that both US Presidential Candidates believe that humanmade global warming is a dangerous problem, so trillions of scarce dollars must be wasted to fight it?
Must we always be governed by scoundrels and imbeciles?
My prediction: Gradual warming for the next century, not to exceed an additional +0.4 degr. C. by 2100.
1. Because the extant trend line follows the base-line logarithmic function of CO2 warming (NASA/GISS data). The natural trend line is a slowly leveling upward temperature trend. This trend can be observed since the early 1900’s.
2. The rate of CO2 increase is slowly diverging ahead of the rate of increase in air temperatures (Hadley CRUT). This clear trend has shown itself since 1980. That is for every additional unit of CO2 added to the atmosphere air temperatures increase at a slower rate, again reflecting the logarithmic effects of CO2.
Toward that end, I also predict gradual, ever so slight, cooling for the next 20 – 30 years based on the elusive but compelling correlation of solar heliomagnetic output to terrestrial climate. Whether and how exactly space weather influences terrestrial weather appears to be edging toward the effects of progressive ionizing cosmic ray and UV radiation.
To clarify your prediction leebert (03:22;56)
“Gradual warming for the next century, not to exceed an additional +0.4 degrees C by 2100.”
Please refer to the LT plot included in the National Post article at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/10/20/national-post-thirty-years-of-warmer-temperatures-go-poof/#more-3739
The current LT anomaly is hovering around 0.0C now, having reached 0.4C at certain times in ~2003-2006. So are you saying global temperature in year 2100 will be not significantly warmer than 2003-2006?
No much material for scary headlines there, unless it is misrepresented, as was the current global warming “crisis”. The current warming “crisis” could be more correctly rewritten as “mild cyclical global warming since ~1979, peaking at ~0.4C in ~2003-2006, fully reversed by 2008; expected cooling of unknown degree for the next 30 years”.
Headline: “Warming Crisis Vanishes; Cooling Crisis Next?”
Subheading: “Palin says Told ya so! Obama, McCain and America in the Dark.”
Obama’s plan to declare CO2 a dangerous substance under the Clean Air Act should pretty well finish off the ailing American economy. Can we really kill the economy through stupid extreme-green measures? “Yes We Can!”
Note to Moderator – could you please edit my latest post, 4th paragraph:
“mild cyclical average global warming since ~1979, peaking at ~0.4C in ~2003-2006, fully reversed by 2008; expected cooling of unknown degree”
Please delete word “average”.
Also, could you spell-correct my 20:52:10 post – here is a corrected version:
The Post article contained a 6th order polynomial trendline that many objected to – but what other choice would have been better?
This polynomial demonstrates that all global warming has disappeared (measured in the LT from 1979 when the satellites were first launched to end August 2008), a valid point made by the writer.
The recent PDO shift to cooling supports the view that global cooling will occur for another ~30 years, with some interruptions. Low-order polynomials barely show any cooling.
The 6th order polynomial obviously relates to 666, the Mark of the Beast at the End of Days.
The 6th order polynomial, when extrapolated, intersects the critical 1 degree F cooling line on December 21, 2012 – End of Days on the Mayan Calendar.
Planetary alignments that occur only once in millennia will happen on this fateful End of Days…
Does anyone need clearer proof than this?
Before anyone distributes the above nonsense to others and starts a new kool-aid cult, please recognize satire when you see it.
Thank you, Allan
Allan,
My prediction is a very casual one, not very serious… it’s based on 20-yr weighted averages as compared to the baseline logarithmic warming function of CO2 as a greenhouse (sans water vapor “feedbacks”):
http://i32.tinypic.com/28h3dqh.jpg
Hadley CRUT temperatures plotted against CO2 levels. Note how the two trend lines start to diverge in the 1970’s – temperature is less and less correlated to CO2 levels, which is to be expected. This is because additional CO2 introduced to the atmosphere has less and less warming effect.
http://i27.tinypic.com/25fuk8w.jpg
Likewise, CO2 has an anticipated modest warming effect and has tracked consistently with actual temperatures except during the warmer 1990’s. But the IPCC projected climate sensitivity to CO2 predicts temperature trends rising exponentially any time now
see also:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-is-greenhouse-effect-logarithmic.html http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/07/the-60-second-c.html
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/HANSEN_AND_CONGRESS.jpg
Hi Allan,
Also, without getting into particulars about which perturbation in the myriad causes (AMO, PDO, solar output) is causing which amount of temperature change, I do indeed acknowledge that there has been a long-standing temperature plateau of at least the past 9 years, if not 11, and that a potential zero trend may be in the offing going back even further.
Some of the fundamentals in climatology are still being rewritten. The presumably closed case of how much warming soot causes in both ice & air is being reopened with new evidence and models showing a far larger effect from both industrial and agricultural sources, contributing constantly to temperature anomalies. The beauty of soot – a real pollutant – is that it can be readily mitigated at modest cost, its pernicious air- and ice-heating effects ameliorated with the added benefits of curtailing lung-damaging soot and mitigating mercury and arsenic fallout as well, and its mitigation would buy additional time against any tangibly serious risk posed by other greenhouse agents (not to say the risk is serious, just a matter of a provisional ounce of precaution that bears no other unnecessary overheads).
The matter of solar climate affecting terrestrial climate comes with a long-standing, well-correlated record, but lacking a clear causal link. Dr. Leif Svalgaard has explicated in Tony’s forum, exhaustively, that direct insolation cannot alone explain the clear & apparent trend correlation between sun spots & climate, leaving us with the less direct – and perhaps functionally buffered – influence of heliomagnetism upon cosmic rays. We are witnessing a contemporary cessation of global warming at the same time that SC#24 is already shaping up to be atypically and specifically weak in magnetic output (as opposed to SC#19 that evinced a low sunspot minimum but demonstrated a strong magnetic field that appears to have ushered in a strong maximum).
And finally, we have greenhouse gases which may never be fully exculpated, but perhaps have been aspersed more than their due. In my first reply to you I showed two rather quickly hashed charts that demonstrate what even the so-called “skeptics” in climatology agree is fundamental physics: CO2 causes *some* warming. The $1T question is about water vapor feedback, that the principle that warmer air inheres more-humid air, and humid air is necessarily being even warmer on a global scale and applicable into the entire Earth system. The models predicting this feedback effect suffers from a lack of indisputable evidence, and the ongoing temperature plateau being the biggest null torpedoing holes into the hull of the predictions we’re risking dangerous AGW.
So to address the thrust of your question, should a presidential candidate commit to combating greenhouse gases, my answer is “No.” In the current fiscal & financial climate I don’t see much being done any sitting Congress or President, but the whole issue is steering me away from any candidate who holds up CO2 as some environmental cause celebre.
As it stands half of Europe is in near rebellion against the EU’s climate policies b/c of the inherent economic costs and loss of competitiveness, so it’d be quite atypical for the USA to join a dwindling cause that suffers from shoddy science. Just because Al Gore and his ilk have sunk $5.3b into a carbon credits doesn’t mean that the Obamanites aren’t poised to sell the entire scheme short on margin.
Renewables energy sources sound nice – and gosh knows the world will ultimately benefit from them – but all claims to the contrary the question of whether they’re economically viable continues to rear its ugly head. The current generation of windmills still suffer from poor reliability and economies of scale while photovoltaics are poised to finally become cost-effective against their problematic failure rate (MTBF is still too short against ROE). No Apollo crash program will work against these issues, although unlike fusion energy, the solutions may actually be just around the corner. Two important improvements in both wind & solar power come from two small firms – flodesign with their jet engine-like cowling windmill and nanosolar with their spray-on production machine prototype. But these two new technologies still need to proven and deployed before anyone can declare we have an affordable solution and nations start really subsidizing full rollouts.
HI Leebert,
Good comments, much appreciated, thank you.
The biggest problem I see with wind power is the “substitution capacity”, the percentage of conventional power generation that can be permanently retired when new wind power is put into service. The number is typically less than 10%. The best report I’ve found on this subject is:
E.On Netz Wind Power Report 2005, Germany
http://www.eon-netz.com/EONNETZ_eng.jsp
Simply, the wind often does not blow when we need the peak power – so we need a same-size conventional power station over the hill, spinning and ready to take over when the wind dies… …the fact that wind power varies as the cube power of the wind speed is a further problem – power variations in the grid due to wind speed can cause serious grid upsets, even shutdowns.
Just one such blackout in a cold winter could have devastating results – for a preview, look up a sampling of the mortality stats during the Ontario-Quebec Ice Storm of a decade ago.
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/99vol25/dr2517ea.html
Regards, Allan
“for the dataset provided (UAH Global anomaly) how would you extrapolate, if at all – linear, polynomial”
This should be split into two issues.
1. How best to present a trend in this non-linear cyclic data?
2. If permissible, is extrapolation wise?
In answer to 2.) extrapolation without ancillary discussion as to the cause and likely future conditions is daft, i.e., carrying the trend forward, regardless of presentation, without reason.
I believe the trend is best presented by a third order polynomial as its performance at the endpoints is relatively conservative, if not linear. It can also be used to side-step the ‘base period’ impasse encountered with a linear presentation.
Note the 1998 El Nino was preceded by 1996 solar minimum and followed immediately by La Nina giving back most of the gains.
La Nina 2008 aborted El Nino 2007 and accompanies an extra year of solar minimum. Going forward we will immediately lose heat to the average with returning La Nina conditions. The next opportunity for a significant El Nino to restore lost heat would be approximately 2015. Prior that we will have virtually lost the heat gained in the “unprecedented warming” of the Twentieth Century, i.e., another 0.3 degrees C or more.
Cooling will persist simply because of the 60% prevalence for La Ninas thru 2035. The current increased albedo will not dissipate during that period even if it does temporarily drop below current levels. Therefore today’s global average temps will not be exceeded during that period.
Solar cycles seem to occur in sets, be they quartets, quintets or otherwise, rising to peaks or subsiding in troughs. By the Waldemeier effect as well as by comparing the daily data of the 23 minimum with that of the current minimum we can be relatively certain 24 will be much weaker than 23 and 25 likely weaker still.
So nothing stands in the way of cooling.