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
Pamela Gray,
Have you not heard of the Maunder and Dalton Minimums??
“Pamela Gray (06:43:49) :
Our stable orbital pattern around the Sun does not produce enough variation in what we get from the Sun to change anything.”
Pamela – you know not what you speak. It is well known that the orbital pattern does change substantially. It runs on a 10,000 year cycle.
The mendacity of these people knows no bounds. According to the author, heating is “mostly” due to man and permanent while “cooling” is due to nature’s treachery and only temporary. Talk about covering your behind! The “thirty year” figure is also interesting. Since sunspot cycle # 25 had already been predicted to be a duster and cycle # 24 has surprised the sun cycle experts by looking more and more like a duster also, I think A MINIMUM of thirty years of cooling is in order and we’d better hope another Little Ice Age is not in the making. I imagine this guy knows all about low-level cloud effects and suspects the sunspot/cosmic ray/cloud formation relationship is very direct and quickly manifested. Pop a good volcanic eruption into the equation somewhere along the way and Dr. Hansen gets ridden out of town on a rail while the Nobel Prize committee hides out in a dark pub.
Jennifer Marohasy has posted a new paper from Michael Hammer about the role of GHGs in the planetary energy budget.
This analysis derives a partial global energy budget based on an analysis of the observed atmospheric lapse rate, and basic laws of spectroscopy, which is at considerable variance with the K&T findings. The differences have significant implications for the greenhouse mechanism and suggest that the concept of an equivalent radiation altitude has no meaning.
It also suggests that the amount of positive feedback attributed to water vapour by these global circulation models is impossible and thus that the temperature rise postulated from the predicted increase in carbon dioxide concentration is greatly exaggerated.
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/03/radical-new-hypothesis-on-the-effect-of-greenhouse-gases/
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.
But, but, but…the NOAA understands and predicts changes in our Earth’s climate!
The problem with NOAA’s thinking as well as that of the UK Met Office (they said something similar a few years back) is that thier models didn’t predict this “slowing” of AGW. Now it is dubbed natural variation, as if that can explain things. It is if they want AGW to return -not a very scientific approach (can anyone say faith?).
The AGW alarmism that many at NOAA, NASA, and Hadley have participated in has created 2 serious problems for them: a)A public expectation that all seasons at all times will be dangerously warm and b)that any cooling, even a month or 2, is out of the question. The science is settled, let’s move on. Any dissenting opinion was met with snarls of anger and visciousness.
So now we have had 2 years of rather mildly cool weather in the NH and everyone is scrambling. I’m sure that the Alarmists are hoping that the El Nino event, which sure to come late this year, will at least slow if not reverse current trends.
Jørgen F. (04:16:41)
There’s a much simpler explanation:
the stick
Wanna see cooler heads at NOAA? Try this: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/essay_hanna.html
Now this is a level-headed balanced analysis of Greenland’s mass balance. Check out figure 1.
“Greenland ice sheet precipitation, surface meltwater runoff and surface mass balance (SMB = solid precipitation minus evaporation minus runoff) series for 1958-2006, recalibrated and updated from Hanna et al. (2005). Note significantly increasing precipitation and runoff trends but negligible SMB change. ”
Did you catch that? There is negligible SMB (sheet mass balance) change over that time period (49 years).
Do you see the correlation of runoff to precipitation amounts? Imagine that. More precip = more discharge. Stunner…
That’s quite a bit different than what we’re told daily by the main-strem media, isn’t it?
Bernie (06:43:30)
I have not yet read the full article. This is about the broken hockey stick. I just posted the abstract to the article which is discussed above by
Jørgen F. (04:16:41) :
and
John A (02:55:16) :
Okey the link goes like this:
In the end, it’s always, rapid heating will start again! Like they know anything more than anyone else knows. My thoughts, we are in for some years of normal cycle cooling. I was a senior in HS when the last ice age was coming. LOL
Sea surface temperatures are still below normal in the central Pacific.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/EPS/SST/data/anomp.3.2.2009.gif
It seems to me that a potentially big part of the equation is totally ignored. I refer to the “solar wind”. The wind is a stream of, overwhelmingly, protons and electrons. Electrons travel about 39 times the speed of the protons (square root of 1840, the mass ratio). This constitutes an electric current. The earth has a ferrite core about 2000 miles in diameter. It is rotating. Looks like a generator to me. Maybe the temperature of the core is not caused by radioactive elements. Since measurements date back only to 1959 (Russian Luna I) we have no way to determine much about its variability. Perhaps sun spots might be a proxy.
Like yesterday’s snow storm for the AGW rally this is cosmic justice. To explain the recent cooling (and I suspect 20 years more), they are now forced give extra weight to climate factors like natural variation or solar.
And every time they use such explanations to explain the cooling,they open the door to the truth, that the converse must also be true: that those same factors could have also caused the recent warming.
Leon Brozyna (05:24:38) :
“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.”
I agree as long one can view these primitive tribal witch doctors as the tribe’s (society’s) elites who have figured out how to funnel all that tribe’s resources and affluence to themselves. Unfortunately, the tribe is now global with their own corporations and organizations and a lot of high-paying jobs. The next question is how much authority does the U.N. have over the U.S. with regard to “climate”, green energy, and cap-and-trade. We who have supported science, conservation, and wise use of land and water are waking up somewhat late to see how we have been gamed.
Is NOAA coming around to natural variability? It is too hard to divine, given their weird statement.
Pamela Gray:
It is just as much a mistake to say “it’s the sun, stupid,” as it is for you to say “it’s the oceans, stupid”. Yes, of course the oceans have a huge effect, at times counteracting the sun’s effects, and at other times compounding it.
You might try studying the paleoclimatological record a bit to give you a better perspective.
Sorry, but C02’s effect on climate is minimal.
Jari:
Sorry. I didn’t mean my comment to be anything but a statement as to the content of the paper. I did not assume that you were or were not endorsing it. It simply seemed to me that Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick definitively demonstrated that the Hockey Stick(HS) is due to the inclusion of a distinctive subset of tree ring data. It would be interesting to see how their work is referenced in this paper. The type of statistical reconstruction the authors indicate I see as problematic because I would have been skeptical of their results if they had claimed that they had demonstrated that the HS was not broken.
So does this mean that “The Science is Unsettled”?
Steven Goddard (06:35:50) :
“The esteemed Dr. Hansen (who spent the day yesterday freezing with a bunch of Hippies) has reportedly forecast that 2009 or 2010 may be the hottest year on record”
Perhaps he has been informed that your next NH summer will be short but very hot summer (PDO and La Nina cold waters = less evaporation). So they will probably have a short GW campaigning.
A fraction?
.99 is a fraction.
But since there is no no more proof that the .01 can be caused by human CO2 emissions than there was that all of it was human warming we’re still stuck on stupid.
What’s next is the enfolding of massive redirecting of propaganda that says allof the policies are needed anyway. Never mind AGW, that will be a plus, but we need to do these things anyway.
Peak sanity and all.
Where is the warmth? Another day of 20 degrees below normal here in Ky. Dear Mr. Hasen, send us some warming!
I think this is what is known as “hedging your bets.”
David Archibald (04:31:05) :
Meanwhile, the Oulu neutron count continues to climb and the F 10.7 radio flux falls as the Earth moves away from the Sun (my mistake on a previous post).
In the current climate of misinformation, we should, at least, not spread any. Here is Oulu: http://www.leif.org/research/oulu.png
and here is Thule http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu//realtime/thule.html
Thule is so close to the magnetic pole that it is the most sensitive to the low-energy cosmic rays that are modulated most by solar activity. Clearly both stations show that the decline has begin months ago.
F10.7 is also on the rise, so solar minimum is past, also months ago.
Anthony Watt is currently being insulted by alarmists at the bottom of George Monbiot’s current column. They’re not able to provide any sound science though, just insults
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/mar/03/climate-change-poles
Bruce Cobb (08:39:36) :
It is just as much a mistake to say “it’s the sun, stupid,” as it is for you to say “it’s the oceans, stupid”.
Yes, of course the oceans have a huge effect, at times counteracting the sun’s tiny effects, and at other times compounding it.
The issue is that the mistakes are not equal, as one effect [guess which one] is much bigger than the other.