Guest Post by Steven Goddard
It appears that global cooling recognition may be starting to make headway in the scientific community. We have this Discovery/MSNBC article about a NOAA scientist titled “Warming might be on hold, study finds”
“It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
And Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years.
Here’s the complete story from The Discovery Channel via MSNBC:
For those who have endured this winter’s frigid temperatures and today’s heavy snowstorm in the Northeast, the concept of global warming may seem, well, almost wishful.But climate is known to be variable – a cold winter, or a few strung together doesn’t mean the planet is cooling. Still, according to a new study, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.
Earth’s climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.
“This is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee said. “Cooling events since then had firm causes, like eruptions or large-magnitude La Ninas. This current cooling doesn’t have one.”
Instead, Swanson and colleague Anastasios Tsonis think a series of climate processes have aligned, conspiring to chill the climate. In 1997 and 1998, the tropical Pacific Ocean warmed rapidly in what Swanson called a “super El Nino event.” It sent a shock wave through the oceans and atmosphere, jarring their circulation patterns into unison.
How does this square with temperature records from 2005-2007, by some measurements among the warmest years on record? When added up with the other four years since 2001, Swanson said the overall trend is flat, even though temperatures should have gone up by 0.2 degrees Centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.
The discrepancy gets to the heart of one of the toughest problems in climate science – identifying the difference between natural variability (like the occasional March snow storm) from human-induced change.
But just what’s causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun’s energy than usual back out into space.
“It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970’s was due to a free variation in climate,” Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. “Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again.”
Swanson thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it’s just a hiccup, and that humans’ penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.
“When the climate kicks back out of this state, we’ll have explosive warming,” Swanson said. “Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive.”
© 2009 Discovery Channel
That is strange. We hear from highly respected authorities that we were in a period of “unprecedented warming.” How can it be both warming and cooling at the same time? Maybe those DC protesters didn’t need to stand out in the cold and try to shut down their primary source of energy today.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
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2005 and 2007 were amongst the warmest ever recorded? I don’t remember seeing those records. Where are they?
Please note the bottom paragraph re funding. Not sure if this has since been solved – perhaps not, since the work would not support AGW.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=755
Douglas Hoyt:
July 22nd, 2006 at 10:37 am
Re #328
“Are you the same D.V. Hoyt who wrote the three referenced papers?” Yes.
“Can you please briefly describe the pyrheliometric technique, and how the historic data samples are obtained?”
The technique uses pyrheliometers to look at the sun on clear days. Measurements are made at air mass 5, 4, 3, and 2. The ratios 4/5, 3/4, and 2/3 are found and averaged. The number gives a relative measure of atmospheric transmission and is insensitive to water vapor amount, ozone, solar extraterrestrial irradiance changes, etc. It is also insensitive to any changes in the calibration of the instruments. The ratioing minimizes the spurious responses leaving only the responses to aerosols.
I have data for about 30 locations worldwide going back to the turn of the century. Preliminary analysis shows no trend anywhere, except maybe Japan. There is no funding to do complete checks.
I orignally posted this on another thread, but it belongs here much better as it is specifically to do with natural variability. It demonstrated not only natural variabilty throughout our history but various luminaries- such as Charles Keeling- recognised that. The post-suitably revised-is as follows;
There follows a link to a very good article by Charles Keeling writing about ‘1800 year old oceanic tides’ being more responsible for natural warming than man made co2. I will revert to it again in a moment, but Mr Keeling made a reference to the drought of ancient Akkad.
As a historian who –like Charles Keeling- believe that climatically we have been this way before (numerous times) and nothing is ‘unprecedented’ I thought readers might enjoy the curse of Akkad.
The civilisation of Akkad-2000bc. Lines taken from the curse of Akkad
For the first time since cities were built and founded,
The great agricultural tracts produced no grain,
The inundated tracts produced no fish,
The irrigated orchards produced neither syrup nor wine,
The gathered clouds did not rain, the masgurum did not grow.
At that time, one shekel’s worth of oil was only one-half quart,
One shekel’s worth of grain was only one-half quart. . . .
These sold at such prices in the markets of all the cities!
He who slept on the roof, died on the roof,
He who slept in the house, had no burial,
People were flailing at themselves from hunger.
This legend was just a small part of a very long thread of mine over on CA demonstrating that climatically we have always had natural variability. This theme was also taken up by another well known author as follows;
“from ancient civilisations through Bronze age cultures, Greeks Roman, all flourished in times of benign climate and perished when climate turned against them.
Yet the historical climate records of the western hemisphere suggests that around AD 950 temperatures increased and the climate changed at precisely the same time as the Mayan collapse far to the north. Leif Eriksson sailed through the Labrador sea between the new settlement of his father Eric the red in Greenland and North America, becoming the first European to set foot on what we called Vinland. This began the global climate shift known as the mediaeval warm epoch …it clearly seems to have been a shift in the global climate pattern recorded in North America by the first Europeans there. Up until around 900 the north Atlantic sea routes from Scandinavia and Iceland to the new communities in Greenland had been completely frozen over and impassable and at the end of the warm epoch, around 1300, temperature began to fall and sea ice again blocked the routes. After the warming epoch temperatures fell again at the beginning of the 14th century.”
Who makes these learned comments? None other than Al Gore in his rather good book ‘Earth in the Balance’ dating from 1992. His numerous climactic references demonstrate the earth has been warmer than present at various times, for example during the MWP. It’s a shame Dr Mann didn’t read it or talk to Al before concocting his hockey stick.
This is the link to Charles Keelings theory about a 1800 year tidal cycle forcing being responsible for the natural warming we experience-barely one word about co2. Having read his autobiography I don’t think his heart was really in that theory was it-nor was Nick Revelles.
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/3814.full.pdf+html
I will finish with a poem by Shelley that seems to sum up that civilisations come and go due to natural variabilty in our climate–posted for no other reason than that it is very evocative of the subject matter posted above.
I would be interested in thoughts about Keelings study, and about past warming episodes, which amply illustrate our own era represents nothing new in earths long history of climatic change-and all achieved without man made added co2.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—”Ozymandias,” Percy Bysshe Shelley
Tonyb
schnurrp (04:26:04) :
In fact not, the overall emissions af SO2 (which give the cooling effect as incoming light reflecting drops) stayed nearly the same with huge decreases in Europe and to a lesser extent in the US, while the SE Asian emissions show a huge increase, thus more or less leveling off. And as the SE particulate emissions are not white, but more brownish it is even questionable if these add to the warming or the cooling. See:
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/08/brown_clouds.php
I have the impression that aerosols were used as scapegoat to adjust the climate models for the 1945-1975 cooler period, which may have to do with the same “problem” the models have now: natural variability (caused by natural cycles of the oceans, solar,…).
B Kerr (03:35:51) :
. . . This week we had “Space Sunshield”. Doctor Roger Angle, yes that was his name, wants to place lenses into space and these lenses will reflect/refract the suns rays. The lenses will be placed in a special point in space, a bit mysterious, where the sun and earth’s gravity will cancel one another out. (I think they meant a Lagrange point. But then again, I was not sure if they knew that there was more than one L-point. ) . . . The program had a Physicist, an expert, who explained that the lenses would be fired into space using a “coil gun”. As luck would have it one of Dr. Angle’s neighbours has a coil gun. Guess you guys in the States all have coil guns.
Only some of us have coil guns. And they can have my coil gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
Lenses or mirrors? Mirrors would be better, as we could move them from L1 shading to L4&5 reflecting when the the Interglacial ends.
Aron (01:23:22) :
. . . Think about the time when the pharaohs ruled Ancient Egypt and temperatures were warmer than today. It used to be more humid in those days. Egyptian literature and murals tell us they lived on a fertile land composed of black mud and that they had to travel out to the desert. Today cooler temperatures have lowered albedo and the desert has swallowed Giza and Cairo. They used to have proper seasonal rains too, the Sphinx itself shows us erosion from rainfall.
The Sphinx’s erosion is on the body and the pit walls surrounding it, but not on the head, which is too small, suggesting that it was recarved by the earliest pharaohs from a larger, eroded pre-dynastic head. The most likely source for water erosion would be the rainy climate following the last ice age, which was thousands of years before the pharaohs. The Egypt of recorded history has always been dry, with everyone living within a couple miles of the Nile.
With the imminent cooling and likely death of the CO2 cap and trade farce, may I be the first to suggest the alternative way of milking the population. History might repeat itself with the sun as the new enemy of the state.
<>
Get your bricks ready!
Whoops!, forgot about the tags.
In 1696 in the reign of William III another form of taxation came into force this was known as the “Window Tax” and would last until 1851.
The tax would be paid on a house of more than six windows. Unfortunately none of these records appeared to have survived, one way for a person to by pass the tax was to brick up one or two windows over the stated six, even today on some of the older houses the bricked up windows are still there.
Any predictions for Feb 09 temp data? I folow daily temps on AMSU-A and it looks like last month was significantly warmer than Feb 08. It should come in just under Feb 07.
Trust us, they are saying, we know what we’re talking about. Sorry, but I just don’t see much of a change in the core AGW dogma, just a slight decrease in the alarmism. They still believe the warming will be back, even if it takes 30 years, and it will be back with a vengeance. Meanwhile, are not the oceans still acidifying? Is not the arctic ice still vanishing at an alarming rate? Have we not already altered our climate such that we will continue to see the entire gamut of climate-related disasters including floods, drought, fires, tornadoes, and hurricanes?
Or, are those things now “on hold” too?
This all seems more a desperate attempt to keep cognitive dissonance at bay than anything else. A “fraction” of the warming was due to “a free variation”, eh? Just more weasel words.
I’ll admit, it’s fun to see them try to spin things to keep the whole AGW fraud rolling along. Lying is hard. Soon the previous lies catch up to you, and you have to tell more lies to cover yourself. I guess they are counting on two things: peoples’ memories not being so good, and their attention being diverted elsewhere – our dismal, and continually declining worldwide economies.
Can someone point me to the time series for the GISS annual graph? I took a quick look at the site but only found graphs not data. I know so many people who pay little attention but look at a graph like that and think it’s really warming a great deal. Here in Canada, we live and think in a temperature range of roughly -30C to +30C. The y axis on that graph is dying for a bit of rescaling. Say I use the 60C we operate in. Might flatten the curve a bit?
I realize this is sinking to the warmers level, but this is, in the end, about the perception of people who spend 5 minutes on the topic.
So how many more Epicycles need to be added to AGW, before people realise it’s completely ad-hoc, and has no predictive power?
A little bit about Epicycles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deferent_and_epicycle#Epicycles_on_epicycles
We’ve gone from the science is settled, there is a consensus, there will be catastrophic out of control global warming; to there will be a decade of steady or slightly cooling temperatures before the forced warming resumes; to we might see cooling for up to 30 years.
And, to top it all off, “But just what’s causing the cooling is a mystery.”
You think?!!
I’m surprised they’ve gone so far as to admit to any mystery. After all, having spent so much money on climate research they may be endangering further funding by admitting that they’re clueless.
After spending billions of dollars promoting research into climate change, this is what I think of the state of the ‘science’:
They sound like a horde of primitive tribal witch doctors, spending their time attempting to divine the future through a careful analysis of chicken entrails.
http://www.physorg.com/news154621784.html
2008 Was Earth’s Coolest Year Since 2000
Given our expectation that the next El Niño will begin this year or in 2010, it still seems likely that a new global surface air temperature record will be set within the next one to two years, despite the moderate cooling effect of reduced solar irradiance,” said James Hansen, director of GISS. The Sun is just passing through solar minimum, the low point in its 10- to 12-year cycle of electromagnetic activity, when it transmits its lowest amount of radiant energy toward Earth.
Headline should be
2008 Coldest Year of the Millenium, Hansen Blames the Sun
schnurrp: You are probably correct, I lived in Hong Kong and at this time of the year we had pollution so thick it blanked out the Sun, I was told that this blanket of pollution spread across the far east and into India.
As for the notion that we are seeing a break in the global warming and that it will return with a vengeance, I would enjoin you to read Copernicus’ address to the Vatican on the earth rotating around the Sun and not being the centre of the Universe. it was couched in a remarkably similar way. I suppose Copernicus wanted to keep his freedom and Dr. Swanson just wants to keep his job.
In 30 years a whole new generation will have grown up and gotten Ph.D.s in climatology and solar physics and various earth sciences and math and statistics and etc. Likewise a whole new generation of journalists and politicians will be struggling to make a name for themselves by challenging orthodoxy.
Humanity’s natural tendency is to think that how things have been going within their recent memory is how things have always been and how they will continue to be. If they grew up during a 30-year long “hiccup”, they’re not going to think of it as a hiccup at all, and they’re going to study in light of the trends they remember, which in their case will be global cooling.
And the scientists among them are going to devote their efforts to answering the kinds of questions left unanswered in the article:
“What’s causing the cooling is a mystery.” Eh? Sounds like a Ph.D. dissertation topic to me.
“The current cooling doesn’t have a cause.” So the laws of nature are suspended now, are they? That’s got to be worth pursuing.
The heat is hidden somewhere? What, did it all slink into some undersea cave to lick its wounds and prepare for the day when it can come roaring back out and once again threaten the earth with longer growing seasons and milder winters?
In 30 years time we’ll have a huge amount of knowledge about the environment and about the earth’s warming and cooling cycles, thanks in part (I admit) to the instruments we’re putting in the sky today to measure it more accurately, and the techniques we’re developing to assess the data more thoroughly. The next generation will have a lot more data to work with, and if the skeptics continue to do their part, they’ll have a lot better statistical techniques with which to analyze that data.
By then those kids who were out there protesting in the snow yesterday will be grandparents. They’re going to have a LOT of explaining to do when their kids and grandkids get hold of those videos.
This is beginning to sound like the arrival of controlled fusion for energy production. It’s always 30y away…
So far this year, mixed messages from Vicky Pope at the Hadley Centre and now Isaac Held at NOAA. Very interesting, and I wonder if we will see similar statements emerge from other sources (NASA? CSIRO?) as 2009 progresses. How will this impact on Copenhagen in December, and Kyoto 2, I wonder?
Ceolfrith – thanks for the Douglas Adams quote!
Could it be air pollution from a rapidly industrializing China and India?
I wouldn’t think so – at least the official aerosol explanation was that it was sulphur aerosols (white ones) which reflected sun, whereas the Indian and Chinese industrialization (together with small local sources) manifests itself as a brown cloud.
“But just what’s causing the cooling is a mystery. Sinking water currents in the north Atlantic Ocean could be sucking heat down into the depths. Or an overabundance of tropical clouds may be reflecting more of the sun’s energy than usual back out into space.”
What a weak and pathetic clutching at straws – absolutely pathetic. What about the Sun!? What about the PDO (which the GCMs do not reproduce)!? What about the fact that the climate is rife with negative feedbacks, not positive ones as the models claim. What about the 100 other discrepancies in the house of cards that is AGW.
Looks to me like they don’t understand the climate as well as the IPCC claim after all. Unfortunately, our new administration appears to have accepted the propaganda from these shrills hook line and sinker.
Watch what happens when we attempt to meet heating demand in the Winters ahead from wind and solar…
Someone should send the Gore Youth Troopers AKA The GreenShirts, around to “have a word” with Dr. Swanson.
This current natural trend has no natural cause?
It’s a miracle! Praise the Lord and pass the icecream! Seriously though. They can’t explain the warming, except they allege with CO2. Now they can’t explain the cooling…at all. And despite all of this “we-don’t-know-why-ism” one Swanson, representative of the breed of warmists, is dead certain that when the climatalogical nap-time is over that “we’ll have explosive warming.” After 30 years of cooling huh? How convenient. Does anyone know why we bother paying these people?
It comes to mind that’s just about the time the PDO will reverse itself and enter its warm phase, as I am sure plenty have pointed out in comments. Yet despite the powerful effect of this entirely natural and well known shift in oceanic water temperatures in the largest body of water on the planet, climate change just has to be man-made. No doubts about it from them. Being a Christian, this reminds me of a favorite Bible verse: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1, NASB).
Welcome to the church of Holy Climate Change.
schnurrp (04:26:04) :
Could it be air pollution from a rapidly industrializing China and India? This may explain a similar “pause in warming” during 1940-1975 after which the industrialized nations cleaned up their act with increased solar radiation resulting.
Here.
Schnurrp,
The cool period between 1942 and 1975 was caused by a negative PDO and AMO.
CO2 (which is no airpolution) has nothing to do with it.
Charlie (03:59:14) :
“The global cooling we are experiencing is caused by a lack of sun spot activity…”
Maybe, but as far as we know at this moment the recent cooling is caused by a negative PDO in combination with an El Ninjo.
Ah yes, A. Tsonis and Synchronized Chaos.
http://www.uwm.edu/~kravtsov/downloads/GRL-Tsonis.pdf
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2007/2007GL030288.shtml
We find that in those cases where the
11 synchronous state was followed by a steady increase in the coupling strength between the
12 indices, the synchronous state was destroyed, after which a new climate state emerged.
13 These shifts are associated with significant changes in global temperature trend and in
14 ENSO variability. The latest such event is known as the great climate shift of the 1970s.
schnurrp (04:26:04) :
Could it be air pollution from a rapidly industrializing China and India? This may explain a similar “pause in warming” during 1940-1975 after which the industrialized nations cleaned up their act with increased solar radiation resulting.
That would be a convenient “out” for warmists wouldn’t it? So, when it warms, it’s GHG’s (funny how the new mantra is now GHG’s, not just C02), and when it cools, it’s due to air pollution.
Unfortunately it completely ignores soot or black carbon and its atmospheric warming effects, as well as the decreased albedo it causes particularly in the NH when it gets deposited on snow and ice.