One of the best things about WUWT is the number of eyes and minds at work, multiplying the efforts. This is interesting. Now that the 1998 El Nino is disappearing off the 10 year scale, things are looking a bit different
From “crosspatch” in comments:
NCDC now has December 2008 in the database. Annual North American temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78(F)/decade or 7.8(F)per century. At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades. If you can get the graphic, the heavy black like is the average over the century 1901 to 2000.
Here is the graphic from their automated graphics generator linked to their database:
Source: National Climatic Data Center
While the link he provided is only a result, I’m sure he’ll share the method in comments to this post.
UPDATE: He has indeed, see below. Try your own hand at it. The trend will likely flatten a bit with the removal of 1998 from the 10 year set. Of course you could pick any number of scales/periods and get different results. The point being made here is that the last 10 years hasn’t met with some model expectations.
Also I have corrected in the text the reference to Centigrade when it was actually Fahrenheit, note the (F). NCDC being an arm of the US government operates on the English unit system whereas most other organizations use metric, and thus Centigrade. I’ve made the mistake myself, so has NASA, who famously lost a Mars probe when they botched orbit entry calculations by use of Metric and English units on different science teams.
UPDATE2: Some folks are erroneously thinking that this graph above represents a global trend, it does not. Read on.
It represents US data from NCDC. Also there has been the usual complaint that “10 years isn’t long enough to determine any useful trend”. Perhaps, but when NASA’s James Hansen went before congress in 1988 to declare a “crisis in the making”, there had only been about 10 years of positive trend data since the PDO flip in 1978. It seemed adequate then:
In the graph above, note that the GISS station data does follow the Hansen C scenario, but that we are currently well below it.
Yes we really do need longer data periods to determine climate trends, 30 years is the climatic standard, but you can also learn useful information from examining shorter trends and regional trends.
To generate the graphic I made:
Leave the “Data Type” field at “Mean Temperature”
Select “Annual” from the “Period” field pull down
Select “1998″ as “First Year To Display”
and click the blue “Submit” oval at the below the data entry form.
“I supose that there might be a way to design a system using positive feedback, but I have not seen one in my career used in a long lived system.”
Regenerative receivers was one application where the signal was fed back in phase from the plate to the grid. One had to be careful, though, because operating it was touchy and it could break out into oscillation with ear-splitting results. The first electronic project I ever built from scratch was a single tube regenerative receiver.
Hmmm, Cryosphere is getting there … but still has missing data:
http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=01&fd=05&fy=2008&sm=01&sd=04&sy=2009
AK, Glenn, crosspatch- The CO2 lifetime was measured by many researchers in the 50’s thru the 70’s to be around 5-7 years. Climate science then redefined atmospheric lifetime to require sequestration of emitted CO2, but never applied this modified definition to water vapor. If you do, then as Glenn says, the lifetime of water vapor is essentially infinite (although you could argue that water frozen in the Antarctic can be sequestered for a long time).
Here is my biggest beef about CO2 graphs. The CO2 graphs that demonstrate the stairway to heaven do not include sinks or areas that do not have CO2 in such concentrations. The AIRS data, as soon as it gets going, should show that measuring CO2 close to land is not an accurate measure of global CO2. Based on where the measuring instruments are, the data will be biased. It would be like putting measuring devices only in the path of the jet stream and then saying that the entire Earth has this degree of high altitude wind circling the globe. But that is not so. The jet stream concentrates itself in certain areas and steers clear of other areas around the globe. There are fluctuations in the jet stream and sometimes it disappears where it once was. It also has longer term cycles of strength and weakness. But we only know that because we measured where the jet stream wasn’t as well as where it was. I wish they would do the same for CO2. Or would get the information to us sooner. I hate waiting for the damned pot to boil.
Had a tough day. Turned around for me after reading this evenings WUWT posts !! Thanks to all. I’m with you robodog !! Crosspatch laying the smackdown !! Mike Bryant, too !! Pamela Grey, Ed Scott, Codetech, great stuff one and all !! I heard the sound of David Suzuki falling out of a treehouse, …
obodog (19:59:29) :
As an EE, I have designed control loops. These loops typicly use negative feedback to force a return to a set point. The set point can move about, but feed back is a design requirment. I supose that there might be a way to design a system using positive feedback, but I have not seen one in my career used in a long lived system.
“Never seen an oscillator?”
REPLY: I’ve seen, and designed, many. They are stable state devices. The more stable the oscillator, the better. – Anthony
Without positive feedback?
REPLY: IT depends on the oscillator type.
Smokey,
Gavin Schmidt et al 2005
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/servlets/purl/881407-xk2Sdg/881407.PDF
“Tropospheric warming is a robust feature of climate model simulations driven
by historical increases in greenhouse gases (1–3). Maximum warming is predicted
to occur in the middle and upper tropical troposphere.”
Of course since observations don’t agree with the models, the observations must be erroneous 🙂
Pamela Gray (21:30:24) :
There are some lovely CO2 plots provided by Ferdinand in http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Forum/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=670#670
I have a running dispute with him on the same point:
You ( Ferdinand) are arguing for gettting beautiful uncontaminated stabilized data for CO2.
I am talking of getting the real content of CO2 in the atmosphere, from the dirty nitty gritty, the way we are getting temperatures, because that is the measure that changes climate: total heat content and total CO2 content.
His last three plots particularly demonstrate how high local CO2 goes on a daily basis. Way over 380ppm, which makes one wonder of the zillion corrections used to get total CO2 atmosphere content from Mauna Loa type “reflections”.
AIRS cannot go below 5000 meters, and the plots they give are at 10000 meters. A new satellite will be launched, OCO?, which will be measuring ground level sources and sinks.
To sit up on a mountain and guestimate the total content of CO2 in the atmosphere is not very productive, imho, except of lovely local graphs.
crosspatch
“I supose that there might be a way to design a system using positive feedback, but I have not seen one in my career used in a long lived system.”
————————————————
An excellent example of positive feedback, is the feedback from the microphone, through the aamplifier, out the speaker system and to the microphone. A real attention getter
REPLY: FWIW, the Ice Ages are triggered by positive feedback. The Milankovic cycles alone aren’t enough, even in conjunction. Feedback via increased albedo is a necessary ingredient. ~ Evan
REPLY: I’ve seen, and designed, many. They are stable state devices. The more stable the oscillator, the better. – Anthony
Without positive feedback?
REPLY: IT depends on the oscillator type.
————————————————————
By definition, oscillators require positive feedback.
ak (19:28:11) :
what we are seeing with the 10 years leading up to 2007 (positive trend) and up to 2008 (this blog post – negative trend) has been observed before but doesn’t, by itself, hold any weight on what temps will be doing 5, 10, 50 years from now.
<<>>> the temps from 1970 / 2000 “doesn’t hold any weight on what temps will be doing 5, 10, 50 years from now.”
well put!!!!
WOW! You have got to be kidding me! All this time I have been under the impression that these models were “actual” computer models. You know, neural networks, OOP, complex relational models, that kind of thing. This is Fortran for crying out loud! And extremely poorly written I might add. I have glanced through their code, and as a computer science veteran of more than 27 years (in the “real” world), developing various models and advanced application architectures, I can tell you first hand that this stuff is absolute garbage!
Wow, this completely blows any inkling of faith that I had in these things. I am truly shocked! If I wrote crap like that, I would be fired!
Mike Bryant: “Respect your mother. The Earth controls her own destiny. Take care of your family and your neighbourhood…”
And tell Momma to start baking those apple pies. Mm-mmm. Nothing like home-cooking to keep your man on the porch.
This is frankly a ridiculous statement. You hark on about cherrypicking then pick one of the few years that support your ‘argument’. Why not use the trend map from 1950 to 2008? http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/trendmaps.cgi?variable=tmean®ion=aus&season=0112&period=1950
Brilliant, how to make a straw-man argument of the straw-man argument!
“lanecounty (15:07:51) :
We finally got smart, and quit logging, because a forest that isn’t logged is worth millions in carbon sequestration. You have not been paying for this service, and it’s not free. Pay up.”
Not just forests but grass land too
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=carbon-cowboys
Wall st and london city needs something new to trade to get their bonuses, city center apartments, country houses for the weekend and super cars are not cheap you know we cant expect these people to live on a simple wage. Its a new bubble and lets just hope it bursts before it costs us all too much.
“Yeah, why should we worry about details like statistical significance? It is much more fun just to find (cherrypick) data that fits our preconceptions regardless of such boring issues and then use it to validate our preconceptions.”
Yes, but for the MOST fun, try adjusting and manipulating the data to validate preconceived ideas. Just ask Big Jim! 🙂
anna v:
whilst I know about the sunspot polarity flip it didn’t occur to me that is why the AP has a different period, thank you.
I wonder, does this mean solar and earth magnetic polarities alternately add and subtract, leading to variation is some temperature control side effect via an external property such as an asymetric comic ray flux?
Ed Scott (00:24:30) :
Or a phase shift or other delay, though one could readily argue that’s
one way to transform negative feedback to a positive feedback.
Financial systems include positive feedbacks – in a contracting economy people spend less, factories cut back on production and lay off people, who spend less. Governments tend to have positive feedbacks and are more successful than private enterprise in maintaining an exponential growth rate.
Jeff (00:47:37) :
Jeff,
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. For your amusement, check out gistemp here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/sources/
In fact, I encourage everyone interested in GISS software standards to download the gistemp source code and attempt to make any sense of it. This, by the way, is the code that is used to generate the historical surface temperature data that the models are compared to…
Mary Hinge (02:13:05) :
This is frankly a ridiculous statement. You hark on about cherrypicking then pick one of the few years that support your ‘argument’. Why not use the trend map from 1950 to 2008? http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/silo/reg/cli_chg/trendmaps.cgi?variable=tmean®ion=aus&season=0112&period=1950
I went to your link. Talk about cherrypicking (and perhaps a bit of hypocrisy). The graphic uses the baseline from 1961-1990 for anomalies.
Ed Scott (00:24:30) :
REPLY: I’ve seen, and designed, many. They are stable state devices. The more stable the oscillator, the better. – Anthony
Without positive feedback?
REPLY: IT depends on the oscillator type.
————————————————————
By definition, oscillators require positive feedback.
Exactly my point but the poster (an EE) claimed “I supose that there might be a way to design a system using positive feedback, but I have not seen one in my career used in a long lived system.”
Jeff (00:47:37) :
It’s actually better than I expected. It’s not a commercial product, it’s research. While I share your dislike of Fortran and haven’t written a Fortran program since about 1970, I have worked in the Unix kernel side of a small supercomputer company. I was amazed at the changes to the language with vector and array operators. During the development of Fortran-90, one popular quote was “I am not certain what the language for scientific and engineering computation will look like by the 21st century, but I am sure it will be called Fortran.” Bascially, a lot of scientific modeling involves working with huge multi-dimensional arrays, and Fortran and APL are the only languages I know of with constructs for dealing with them efficiently.
Unfortunately, ModelE doesn’t use any of those neat constructs, at least from my “extensive” 5-minute review. Being Fortran-90, it doesn’t use any of the object-oriented extensions in Fortran 95 or Fortran 2000.
This is an interesting page I found while hunting down that quote, see http://www.physics.ucla.edu/icnsp/Html/norton/norton.htm for some notes on Fortran 77, Fortran 90, OOP in Fortran 90. It also has some notes on compile and execution times between F90 and C++. The latter are important – that’s why there are still computers that take up thousands of square feet.
So, please don’t criticize Fortran, anyone in the supercomputer field knows it will be around for another 50 years.
Criticizing physical scientists for their inability to write modern code is fairer game, but I’m sure that at budget time, a choice between hiring software engineers to produce well-designed code versus hiring more physical scientists will likely go with the scientists. Perhaps Al Gore could direct some of the $300 million for climate PR on supporting science.
I’m sure if I had to work with ModelE for a couple days I’d be a lot more bitter, and the scientists would avoid me at the lunch table, so I’m better off working on OS-level code and Python for everything else.
Perhaps you could head up an open-source project to write a new climate model.
Mary Hinge
“…how to make a straw-man argument of the straw-man argument!”
—————————————-
Glad you appreciate the humor.
Tilo,
“By definition, oscillators require positive feedback.”
Well, sort of. Unless your oscillator is a free running multivibrator and you divide it down to the desired frequency and then filter out the harmonics to get all the sharp edges off of it. It is basically how synthesizers worked. There are newer ones now where you basically don’t need to divide anything. You just change a number in a register that is your count value that you use as a delay in “flipping” state to adjust the frequency.
But these days you don’t have as much need for conventional oscillators if you have adequate cash to substitute. You can run RF directly into a DSP chip and do all your demodulation with software. At least that was the state of the art in the late 1980’s. I haven’t worked with such things in years, though.