Reposted in its entirety from Climate Science
By Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. University of Colorado
There was an interesting news article in the Guardian on December 6 2008 by James Randerson titled Explainer: Coolest year since 2000
The article reads
“This year is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released next week by the Met Office. The global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07.
The relatively chilly temperatures compared with recent years are not evidence that global warming is slowing, say climate scientists at the Met Office. “Absolutely not,” said Dr Peter Stott, the manager of understanding and attributing climate change at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre. “If we are going to understand climate change we need to look at long-term trends.”
Prof Myles Allen at Oxford University, who runs the climateprediction.net website, said he feared climate sceptics would overinterpret the figure: “You can bet your life there will be a lot of fuss about what a cold year it is. Actually no, it’s not been that cold a year, but the human memory is not very long. We are used to warm years.”
The Met Office had predicted 2008 would be cooler than recent years due to a La Niña event, characterised by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean – the mirror image of the El Niño climate cycle.
Allen was presenting the data on this year’s global average temperature at the Appleton Space Conference at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Didcot, yesterday. The 14.3C figure is based on data from January to October. When the Met Office makes its formal announcement next week they will incorporate data from November. “[The figure] will differ from it, but it won’t differ massively,” said Stott.
Assuming the final figure is close to 14.3C then 2008 will be the 10th hottest year on record. Hottest was 1998, followed by 2005, 2003 and 2002.
In March a team of climate scientists at Kiel University predicted that natural variation would mask the 0.3C warming predicted by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change over the next decade.”
Lets do a reality check.
The statement that “The relatively chilly temperatures compared with recent years are not evidence that global warming is slowing” mixes up regional and global temperatures changes. Also, there has been no global warming in the last 4 years (at least; e.g. see). Global warming has stopped for the last few years.
The statement that “In March a team of climate scientists at Kiel University predicted that natural variation would mask the 0.3C warming predicted by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change over the next decade” is scientifically incorrect. Heating cannot be ”masked”.
As given in the examples below, the news releases provided by the UK Met Office make for interesting reading and show the complexity and difficulty of skillful season climate prediction.
Thus why should there be any confidence in the forecasts regarding climate change in the longer term?
Examples of UK Met Office News releases
1. For example, on April 11 2007, they wrote in a news release “Met Office forecast for Summer 2007″ [to their credit, they do have a readily accessible archive]
“The Met Office forecast of global mean temperature for 2007, issued on 4 January 2007 in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, stated that 2007 is likely to be the warmest ever year on record going back to 1850, beating the current record set in 1998.”
This did not occur.
2. On April 3 2008 they wrote in a news release “A typical British summer”
“The coming summer is expected to be a ‘typical British summer’, according to long-range forecasts issued today. Summer temperatures across the UK are more likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or above average for the three months of summer.”
On August 29 2008 they published a news release titled “Wet summer could end with a bang” where they write
“The return to unsettled weather will mark the end of the meteorological summer which has been one of the wettest on record across the UK.”
I suppose that rainfall “near or above average” fits what actually occurred but this is hardly a particularly precise or useful forecast.
3. On September 25 2008 they wrote in a news release “Trend of mild winters continues”
“The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.”
They qualified this news release with the article on November 25 2008 titled “A cold start to winter” where they wrote
“The latest update to the Met Office winter forecast suggests that although the coming winter will have temperatures near or above average, it is very likely that December will be colder than normal.”
Now, in addition to a news release on December 9 2008 they published an article ”El Niño gives colder European winters”, which states
Sarah Ineson, climate research scientist at the Met Office says: “We have shown evidence of an active stratospheric role in the transition to cold conditions in northern Europe and mild conditions in southern Europe in late winter during El Niño years”.
The message in th UK Met Office press releases is that, since their is such poor skill with seasonal weather prediction, multi-decadal climate prediction must be a much less precise and accurate science than we have heard promoted by the IPCC and in the climate change press releases given out by the UK Met Office and others.
“This statement is completely meaningless. Over periods of a few years, weather noise completely dominates the forcing due to CO2. You cannot measure global warming over a ‘few years’, so to claim that it has stopped is ludicrous. It’s like saying an oak tree has stopped growing because you couldn’t measure a change in its height over the course of a week.”
So ok, lets measure over 30 years. No wait, lets measure over 200 years, or 500 years, or 1,000 years or, lets say for the sake of argument, 4.6b years. What do you see?
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/temperature/4600Myr.jpg
I don’t know, but something isn’t right! It seems to be very cold. Whoops.
“given we know the greenhouse effect influences the climate on this planet”
PeteM:
Exactly what do “we” (i.e. you) KNOW about how how CO2 (most of greenhouse effect is water vapor) influences the climate on this planet? Please elucidate…
Humans can live anywhere, including underwater and on the Moon for short periods of time. Yet a 1 degree change in average temperature is supposed to cause the total collapse of civilization and extinction of Mankind!
Now that’s a daft idea, as well as a-historical and irrationally paranoid. The fact is that there is nothing troubling about global warming, if it were happening, although it isn’t. And that fact really needs more discussion.
The average Alarmist believes crops will fail and Humanity will starve to death if global temperatures rise. That is completely daft, too. Food crops are grown from the Equator to Siberia and everywhere in between, across truly significant climatic zones. We would have vast crop surpluses on this planet except for the truth that farmers do not get paid for food nobody wants, and so they only grow as much as is desired (as in paid for) by the market.
The average Alarmist believes that sea levels will rise and drown entire cities, although sea level rise has been a few inches per century, and has all but stopped since 2005, and cities, indeed all our entire built environments, are far more dynamic than that.
And on and on. There is not one substantial argument presented that cooler is better than warmer, at least not one that cannot be easily refuted.
The panic is a chimera. There is nothing to panic about. The Alarmist rant is paranoia for paranoia’s sake. It is not so much a religion as an indulgence in hysteria, a predilection for shock, like a fondness for horror movies.
Time to turn that movie off, get out of the theater of smoke and mirrors, depart the Fun House, and sober up. Warmer IS better.
PeteM (13:18:13) :
Oh dear oh dear .. still the same orthodox views that global warming can’t be anything to do with humans on this site (or it isn’t happening due to fossile fuels).
Why is it that the global warmers always use the cheapest of rhetorical devices? Paint the views espoused here as “orthodox” to suggest that the The Orthodox Church of Global Warming is somehow “unorthodox”; therefore appealing to the younger, more impressionable power-station wreckers and Greenpeace canon fodder.
I suggest, Petem, crawl back to Poznan. You clearly don’t like it here.
Let’s narrow it down. How about if we start with an engineering-quality explanation of the relationship between CO2 and increased temperature, such as the IPCC “doubling of CO2 = 2.5C global temperature increase”.
Petem
Nature is a great indicator of what is happening — look at the tree line and advance of species towards the poles . The trend is very clear ….
So, the tree line is advancing AGAIN, maybe it will get back to where it should be. Maybe Canada will be able to produce two crops of wheat a year. That will feed billions.
Thing is, Petem, no-one here denies the planet may have gotten a little warmer since the Little Ice Age; and jolly good job too. CO2 is not pollution; it is plant food. The more the merrier.
A warm planet is a happy planet!
Now, back to your potato juice.
PeteM said: Quote,
“I agree that the case for AGW or MMGW is not water tight but neither is that case for the opposite In fact I don’t expect complex systems to ever have this level of absoluteness – and its unscientific and naive to assume so . However that doesn’t mean no predictions or estimates are possible.
The predictions is … more CO2 means higher temperatures which means more trouble ( not more benefit)” end of Quote.
Response:
1. There is NO evidence, I repeat NO evidence that CO2 means higher temperatures.
This despite 100 billion of good American Dollars spend to get the proof on the table.
2. There is a “Peer Reviewed” scientific report published which really makes sense:
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/12/03/rethinking-observed-warming/
3. Predictions? We still have to acquire the ability to produce a correct weather forecast for a period of one week.
The respected representatives of the UN IPCC have been playing with computer models and came up with a climate forecast predicting dangerous Global Warming, melting ice caps and rising sea levels and the message that humanity must act quickly otherwise it will be to late!!!!!!
Maybe you could consider the idea that the people who came up with this horrifying scenario have a different agenda? Maybe they have a political agenda?
This fact alone is a reason to be a skeptical!
Until today ZERO and I repeat ZERO of the IPCC predictions have been accurate.
1. There is NO proof of rising temps as CO2 rises.
The truth is that despite rising CO2 levels temperature is decreasing!
2. There is no proof that the ice caps are melting on such a scale that it causes a rise of sea levels!
The last five years show that the sea level is decreasing! see graph at: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/09/21-spotless-days-and-solar-magnetic-field-still-in-a-funk/
So you tell me why?
Why should humanity be forced to shut down it’s energy infra strucure?
Why should we double or even triple the price of energy because we are forced to use silly windmills that still are in need of conventional back up?
Why should we be forced to invest billions of dollars to solve a non existing problem?
Why should we accept further government regulations that limit our mobility and freedom?
Why should we accept that our food chain is taxed and food is used to produce bio fuels while we know this will cause misery and starvation on the African Continent?
Do you know that in Haiti people are selling “mud cakes” because they can not afford to buy basic food rations anymore because an extremely bright light got the idea to convert corn into car fuel?
If you ask for a balanced opinion on AGW, deliver us with the hard evidence that makes it necessary to close down our economies and return to the dark ages.
PK, Here in Ottawa, Capital iof Canada, it’s going to be -20C entigrade tonight,… and it’s not even winter. Most of December has been cold; we are taunted with a “forecast” of an above zero Monday … and rain!
I’ve been here 26 years and this is the coldest December I can Remember. But, hey, that’s just ione data point.
“” Richard Sharpe (15:35:16) :
George E Smith said:
By the way; I thought that the orthodox view; the “science is settled” view, the IPCC/AlGore/JamesHansen?MichaelMann view, was that man (ie Homo sapiens sapiens) was entirely responsible for 90% of man made global warming.
Maybe that is supposed to be 90% responsible for all of man made global warming?
</blockquote?
I think they say that they are 90% certain that human activity (production of CO2 and other “greenhouse” gases, along with land-use etc) is responsible for global warming.
“”
Richard; I could cite you instances; well at least one, where credible scientists were more than “90% cer”tain” that a particular science thesis was correct; yet it turned out to be as phony as a three dollar bill. I probably did cite one already somewhere on this site)
The data was considerably better than 90%; much better even than 99.9% certain, yet is was still wrong. Well actually the theoretical prediction agreed with the best measured experimental data to better than one part in 10^8. Is that close enough to absolute certainty for you? And yes the theory was quite wrong; completely false.
To me “90% certain” means uncertain. To be certain, you need to have more than a correlation coefficient better than 0.5. It would actually help if you have a cause and effect physical relationship between the correlated data sets.
After all it is not out of reason to have two phenomena, which are independently caused by a third. It would be unusual to not have any correlation between the first two phenomena; even an extremely high correlation coefficient, and yet absolutely no causative relationship whatsoever.
And for anyone who thinks our climate condition on this planet is precarious, the extremes of surface temperature present simultaneously on any northern midummer day, could be as high as 150 degrees C from coldest to hottest (and maybe more). And we have actual physical official weather station temperature records to support that claim; well they run from about -128F to +136F official, with anecdotal claims outside that range. And no, those two records did not occur on the same day; but they very well could have.
And based on a clever argument by Galileo, in his “Dialog on The Two World Systems.” Every possible temperature between those extremes would exist somewhere on the planet simultaneously. And nearly all of those places actually have people living there. So spare me the 1-3 deg C scare mongering; it doesn’t mean a darn thing in the general scheme of things.
And if your Playstation video game models could get rid of that 3:1 fudge factor that is always present in MMGW GCM models, I would be slightly more impressed. I’d be even more impressed, if they actually modelled any real planet that is of great interest to us.
And I don’t use big words like AGW when little words will do.
And as for CO2 and other GHGs being hazardous to humans; well the missing GHG called H2O is infinitely more hazardous to humans that all of those others put together. I don’t recommend living on the slopes of active volcanoes though.
H
Here is a CO2 article from Tim Ball based on Jaworowski’s and Beck’s papers.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/6855
But we trust Mr. Chu already knows that the Bush Administration has devoted some $43.3 billion to climate-specific science
perhaps the climate army might enjoy some biological funding too?
There has been some discussion here about ironclad proof about things.
For example, ironclad proof of AGW.
Can I suggest a more modest goal?
How about ironclad proof of past temperature measures?
For example, just how cold, or warm, was 1934?
It appears some have been running around adjusting all the temperatures of the past. How do they do that? How do they know the temperatures need to be adjusted? And if the corrections are more correct than the actual thermometers doing the measures, why not do away entirely with the thermometers?
I would like some corrections of data in other realms, now that we are on the subject.
For example, I would like the prices of my investments to be adjusted sharply upward. After all, if there is anything that needs to be ‘corrected’ it is the dismal state of my investments.
Can’t someone in the government make those simple adjustments? They’re adjusting the temperatures of the past, why not my investments?
I don’t want to be selfish. Why not adjust everyone’s portfolio? Wouldn’t that solve the current economic crisis? Everyone would feel richer and start spending.
Pete M
please look up the heat capacity ( at constant pressure and at constant volume, if you wish) for the following gases
nitrogen, oxygen, co2.
then multiply by the mole fraction in the atmosphere.
afterward come back and tell me what you have learned about co2 relative to nitrogen and oxygen.
And by the way after you read some feedback papers, please show me a laboratory which has substantiated the equations
Off Topic:
ICE STORM
http://www.seablogger.com/?p=12405
Pete M:
“I agree that the case for AGW or MMGW is not water tight but neither is that case for the opposite In fact I don’t expect complex systems to ever have this level of absoluteness – and its unscientific and naive to assume so . However that doesn’t mean no predictions or estimates are possible.
The predictions is … more CO2 means higher temperatures which means more trouble (not more benefit).”
I concur with the first paragraph, but take the principle a bit further. I disagree with the second statement as far as the consequences of warming. Starting with the latter, there is utterly no evidence that a warmer climate will be, on balance, more detrimental than either the present climate or a cooler climate. As an example, consider the oft-cited warning of increased hurricane intensity from a warmer climate. Most of this nonsense is based on the premise that warmer ocean temperatures feed hurricanes. This is only partially true, however. What feeds hurricanes is the temperature differential between the sea surface and the air above the hurricane. This should be intuitive – think of it as voltage or pressure differentials that cause energy transfers, i.e. each must be measured by reference another pressure, temperature, etc. Because a hurricane is essentially a heat engine that feeds on a vertical temperature gradient, an excellent case could be made that CO2 warming would decrease hurricane activity because temperatures aloft should increase more than sea temperatures, if global warming theory is correct. (I know that measurements show more surface temperature warming than troposphere warming, but to me that seems to indicate that CO2 is not what is warming the surface). As another example, it’s conceivable that a warmer average climate could ameliorate the incidence of droughts rather than make them more severe, because of a faster hydrological cycle due to the air being able to hold more water.
To my mind (except for sea level increases), every dire projection of an evil consequence of global warming has a counterbalancing good consequence of global CO2 warming, and even with sea level increases, we don’t know the rate of increase and the ability to adapt to it. This is because there is no empirical way of measuring the relative probability of consequence X vs the corresponding worse benefit Y to any assumed increase in average temperature. All the “bad consequences” are simply the results of simulated computer runs (and don’t think that it escapes notice that every one of these projections is something awful, which to me suggests that the outcome is rigged). A computer does nothing more than what it is told to do. If a computer “projects” or “predicts” more droughts from global warming, that says nothing more than that it was programmed to show that result. Until you rigorously test those projections (not possible) the computer simulations should be given no weight – particularly when the simulation is of something so immensely complex as the Earth’s climate.
Now let’s deal with your first assertion. I think that, not only is there substantial uncertainty in the existing global warning forecasts (both of warming and consequences) but that there is utterly no hope of reducing that uncertainty. If, for example, we find that a decade from now, temperatures are warmer, you still won’t have any real evidence that those temperatures weren’t primarily a result of a natural trend towards an interglatial maximum, and you won’t be able to quantify the contribution of CO2. This is because there is no way of collecting the necessary evidence. It’s conceivable that you could then find out whether the increased temperatures are better or worse, drought or hurricane-wise, etc. But again, you won’t know whether to blame CO2.
Here’s a hypothetical. Would you pay, say $100 for a lottery in which, if you win, some undetermined positive or negative event will be changed in your life, but you will never know for sure whether or not you’d won, what event had been changed, and whether it had been for the better or worse. I think you would be a fool to pay even $1 for that. The whole premise of acting rationally in the face of uncertain knowledge presupposes not only that you can quantify relative risks entering into the decision, but that at some future time you will have an indication of whether or not your choice was correct. If neither of these things are present, you should never give up anything tangible.
PeteM
I’m not asking for censorship – I’m asking for a balance of articles and a balance of comments . At the moment this site is a repository of anti-MMGW views.
In that case, I would suggest you start your own blog and then you could have just what you want on it – whether you have any readers is another matter though. For the rest of us, I think we can say we are quite happy with the variety of subject matter that Anthony puts forward on this site.
PeteM (13:18:13) :
(b) Raising non sequitur arguments like global poverty , human progress , changes in past epochs
Hmmm. Bringing poverty to the globe via carbon restriction is a non-sequitur? Don’t worry about the fact that every scrap of steel made on the planet depends on coal / coke… Don’t worry about the fact that 1/2 the electricity comes from coal. Go buy a bike and become a vegetarian. (Oops. The bike takes aluminum that takes electricity from coal and the veggies need nitrogen fertilizers made from natural gas…)
And changes in past epochs don’t matter? Please explain: a) Bond Events. b) Why they don’t matter any more. Can’t? I thought so.
Side Bar: My paranoid moment centers on the notion that we might be entering a Bond Event. We are within the window and no sun spots is worrying..
(c) Dodgy/misleading psuedo scientific arguments like record ice increase , glaciers advancing , failure to understand the meaning of hottest
So record ice increase and glaciers advancing are pseudo science? Amazing. So if we enter a new little ice age (as the sun seems to be hinting) the record ice and glaciers will not matter? And ‘hottest’ would be very easy to understand if GISS would publish the raw data and not some processed temperature fantasy.
All across the world there is evidence that it is GLOBALLY getting warmer . ( that also includes areas outside of North America)
Uh huh… More coolaid? It is very clear that we’ve rolled over an inflection point into cooling. Watch the snows this year. Next year will be worse. Globally.
They have a specific agenda of avoidance of facing the reality of what is happening .
This is just precious. Look out the window! If anyone is avoiding reality its the AGW folks who have trouble with the idea that record snows and cold are not important.
Nature is a great indicator of what is happening — look at the tree line and advance of species towards the poles . The trend is very clear ….
And look at the Ice Man and other human artifacts from under the melted glaciers. It was WARMER in the past, or those folks and their kit could not have gotten under the ice. Nothing is out of the normal band. There is a 1500 year climate cycle that you are ignoring, among others. Explain: Medieval Optimum, Roman Optimum, Holocene Optimum, …
There are many other possible effects from increasing the level of atmospheric CO2 (effect on oceans , unknown effect on bio-organisms , etc)
Possible? All those paranoid fantasies just itching for a place to land… The biosphere has had much higher levels of CO2 in the past, inside the evolutionary time of most genera on the planet, and everything did just fine. It’s common for folks to work in 1000 ppm CO2 in greenhouses and nobody even notices (except the plants that grow better). Please, keep the paranoid fantasies and ‘possibilities’ out of it.
And for those worried about econnomic impacts .. what is so awful about a world where[…]
the poor of the world are kept in poverty, the economic prosperity of the 1st world countries is destroyed, and we devolve into tribal warfare and the destruction of the remaining wild spaces in a futile bid for survival.
Look, it’s pretty clear that modernity and an advanced technological lifestyle are the keys to reduced population growth, preservation of wild spaces, and reduced pollution. The idea that living some green back to the earth fantasy is better is just that, a fantasy.
THE thing that lets the world advance is energy consumption, largely from fossil fuels. Shut that down and you shut down the economy. Shut down the economy and the third world dies. Horridly.
Don’t think so? Look at the resource wars throughout history. We can feed, clothe, and entertain everyone thanks to lots of fossil fuels. It would take decades to change that. Get back to me in 20 years…
K says:
I agree with your assessment of Chu (although technically he was chosen for Secretary of Energy, not science advisor, but the energy department does oversee a fairly healthy chunk of the federal science spending).
However, as Ed Scott pointed out, there is every reason to believe that Dr. Chu, like most scientists, is concerned about AGW. In fact, he is one of the councillors of the Copenhagen Climate Council. You may want to believe that AGW is being pushed by politicians and that most scientists don’t believe it … But, in fact, I think the so-called “skeptics” are less prominent in the scientific community than they are in the political realm.
jeez (13:32:46) :
Can I play too? All my answers have New Hampshire dependencies.
1) No answer, just comments.
It’s tough to move a treeline up, as something needs to make new soil first. Fires that burned so hot a century ago that soil micro life got fried are still treeless (e.g. Monadnock, Cardigan [we bought property on its flank], Firescrew [next to Cardigan, so named for the flames coming off the mountaintop]). I don’t know of any examples of the conifer/deciduous line moving uphill either, but history is less than 500 years here.
2) A couple (you wanted one, so I lose?)
Opossums (America’s only marsupial) have spread their range northward, so we now have some around Concord NH. I’m not aware of specific counts.
Cardinals (very pretty bright red (male) bird) have also moved north, or so I’ve heard. The Audubon society might have records of that. A pair of Cardinals hang around my home, I haven’t seen any further north, but Cardinals like open space and there are lots of woods up north.
And a negative example: There are three hills or mountains named Rattlesnake, at least one has documented records of Timber Rattlesnakes on it, but the more recent report is many decades ago. In general, New Hampshire sucks when it comes to snakes. Northeast Ohio was much better. We had many Cardinals an possums in Ohio, so maybe we’ll have a home for Timber rattlers during the next positive PDO.
3) There’s lots of room in clean air for CO2. Less room for NOx, SO2, etc.
Stevo, can you show what the C02 concentration was then? Back up what you say. It has been claimed “dubious” by those with an agenda. There is a lot of evidence that clearly shows Co2 levels throughout history, which, at times, was far higher than today. Evidence without smear, please and thank you.
“I think they say that they [IPCC scientists] are 90% certain that human activity (production of CO2 and other “greenhouse” gases, along with land-use etc) is responsible for global warming.”
This assertion always kills me every time it’s brought up. It actually refers to the statement in the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers, which attributes a 90% confidence level to the statement that CO2 is responsible for “most” of the measured warming. What isn’t stated is the decidedly unscientific basis for the 90% figure, which is the result of basically an opinion poll of the few scientists that contributed to the relevant sections of the IPCC report.
The quantitative contribution of CO2 to temperature is one of the few critical questions pertaining to the global warming issue. Yet, that question can only be answered via an entirely subjective opinion of scientists. None of these scientists have objectively demonstrated any particular skill in eyeballing temperature trends and correctly associating causation to those trends. They’re not to be faulted for this, it’s just that there is no way of indepedently verifying any quantitative attributions of causation. James Hansen, for example, can’t say “I attributed, as an expert, the downwards temperature trend from 1955 – 1979 to diminished solar radiation amplified by the following feedback factors, and sure enough, measurements we took in 1983 confirmed that this attribution was correct.”
What they are to be faulted for is thinking that their subjective opinions are relevant. This is what vexes me about all this “science is settled” garbage. It’s easy to make bold statements about your confidence in a particular result when you know that there will never come a day of reckoning when you will be proven right or wrong. These statements are just thrown out to be absorbed by the uncritical.
I’ll say one more thing that gets me riled up. I have read various articles quoting scientists (PhD’s no less) making extrordinary flaws in logic. One PhD said that the advancing glaciers on Shasta was evidence of global warming, on the basis that climate models predicted local areas of increased precipitation. This is utterly non-sensical. If there was no warming, or even cooling for that matter, would this PhD expect that the glaciers on Shasta would not then advance? I could understand it if he cautioned that the advance shouldn’t be interpreted as evidence refuting global warming – but the guy actually said that it was “evidence of” global warming.
More common is the assertion (paraphrased) that “our knowledge of this climate system has improved dramatically over the last 10 years, therefore, we are highly confident in our predictions of x temperature rise and/or our attribution of the measured climate change to variable y.” In fact, I think that there was a question and answer session with a scientist posted on this site a while back with an Arctic researcher who basically made this statement in response to a question about how you could attribute Arctic climate change to global changes rather than local factors.
This reasoning, however, is backwards. Human understanding of nature and of physical laws can only be objectively measured by the practical accomplishments to which that knowledge has been applied. Ask how well we understand electromagnetics, and you can’t really quantitatively answer it because you don’t know how much there is yet to be discovered, or what all the limitations of your knowledge are. You can, however, say that we understand it well enough to design and build transmission grids spanning the entire country, or to make reliable EM circuits, etc. Similarly, you express your understanding of weather by saying , we understand it well enough to reliably predict temperature and precipitation three to five days in advance, but not well enough to predict it 10 days in advance. In other words, it’s what you do with your knowledge that is the objective benchmark of your understanding. You never assume your level of understanding so as to infer the reliabilty of an application of that knowledge.
PeteM (13:44:16) :
I don’t expect anyone to be able to predict a specific short term weather event ( ie snow on the Alps) any more that I can predict which part of a pan of water on a stove will boil first .
Um, it’s the bottom that boils first. No problem…
The issue of global warming is the average effect over a reasonable point time .
One is tempted to pick up the thread that it’s the integral, not the average… but I won’t 😉
The “reasonable period of time” is about 3000 years, not 200. Again: How is this time any different in climate from: The Medieval Optimum, the Roman Optimum, the Holocene Optimum, … Answer: It’s slightly cooler now…
(c) CO2 is released by burning of fossil fuels from amongst othjer power stations and cars . Combustion of these fuels are know to increase incidence of lung relasted diseased like asthma . Cleaner air is a by product of not burning fossile fuels so this is not a non-sequitur .
Um, yes, it is a non-sequitur . Modern coal plant scrubs the particulates out. Similarly, modern Diesel engines trap the particulate matter and reacts it away. Nothing about a modern, technological, burning of fossil fuels causes asthma. Now open burning of wood in 3rd world kitchens DOES cause asthma and blindness. Maybe we can get them nice clean natural gas stoves or nuclear powered electric ovens so they can keep their eyesight… The CO2 does nothing to health.
Ron de Haan (17:56:19) :
> Off Topic:
> ICE STORM
> http://www.seablogger.com/?p=12405
No offense meant, but that’s gotta be the lamest excuse of a site covering the Great Ice Storm of 2008. 19 years before I was in the Great Ice Storm of 1998 (hey, that one was in January). Try boston.com, wmur.com, or Google News.
Ice storms are really lousy things to try to relate to climate. The really bad ones depend on a set of conditions that are fairly difficult to achieve, but conditions that aren’t influenced by climate.
Basically you need a blocking high over the region, preferably one with cold air draining into the region from further north. Next you need a stationary front that allows gulf air to be forced up and over the cold air. That produces rain, the cold air converts it to supercooled rain and/or sleet, and if the water feed can bring a couple inches of rain, enough will freeze in part of the area to make a royal mess. There are some very strange effects due to how the cold air flows around valleys or is blocked by ridges.
I lucked out in 2008 (but got clobbered in 1998 when I lived north and 500′ above Plymouth NH). This storm has knocked out power for half of NH’s population, and I think damage was as bad in interior Massachusetts and mid-Maine. It’ll be really cold tomorrow night, but a warm up begins Sunday which will help work crews.
My power was off from 0015 to 1050, and cable internet down until 1730 or so. No damage to the house or power lines, insignificant damage to trees.
RW
“Temperature variations are highly predictable on some time scales and highly unpredictable on others.”
As I think you mean this, it’s an unsubstantiated conculsion. Temperature variations a few days in advance may well be highly predictable. The weatherman, for example, probably knows what the temperatures are going to look like for the next 72-96 hours. After that, predictions of temperature are not accurate at all.
This isn’t what you probably meant, however. If you meant that average annual local or global temperatures, measured over a very long interval for example, get back into the highly predictable range, I’d ask that you put forth the proof of this. Show where someone has made a prediction of future temperatures over that specified time scale and that the prediction subsequently turned out to be accurate.
Some great reading tonight !! Beats the (snip) out of television any day!!! Thanks to all, and especially to Mr. Watt’s and the moderators. Thanks also to Les Johnson who has related a Chinookism that I have not heard, but will certainly re-tell !! PeteM , you have helped me to reaffirm my position, even thought that was probably not your intention, …….