This is a small bombshell. I’ve been telling readers about UHI since this blog started. One notable example that I demonstrated by actual measurement is Reno, NV:
Click for larger image
The IPCC reports have minimized the effects of UHI on climate for quite some time.
From Warwick Hughes:
The IPCC drew that conclusion from the Jones et al 1990 Letter to Nature which examined temperature data from regions in Eastern Australia, Western USSR and Eastern China, to conclude that “In none of the three regions studied is there any indication of significant urban influence..” That has led to the IPCC claim that for decades, urban warming is less than 0.05 per century.
A paper in JGR that slipped by last fall without much notice (but know now thanks to Warwick Hughes) is one from Phil Jones, the director of the Hadley Climate Center in the UK. The pager is titled: Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China
In it, Jones identifies an urban warming signal in China of 0.1 degrees C per decade. Or, if you prefer, 1 degree C per century. Not negligible by any means. Here is the abstract:
Global surface temperature trends, based on land and marine data, show warming of about 0.8°C over the last 100 years. This rate of warming is sometimes questioned because of the existence of well-known Urban Heat Islands (UHIs). We show examples of the UHIs at London and Vienna, where city center sites are warmer than surrounding rural locations. Both of these UHIs however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time. In the main part of the paper, for China, we compare a new homogenized station data set with gridded temperature products and attempt to assess possible urban influences using sea surface temperature (SST) data sets for the area east of the Chinese mainland. We show that all the land-based data sets for China agree exceptionally well and that their residual warming compared to the SST series since 1951 is relatively small compared to the large-scale warming. Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1°C decade−1 over the period 1951–2004, with true climatic warming accounting for 0.81°C over this period.
Even though Jones tries to minimize the UHI effect elsewhere, saying the UHI trends don’t contribute to warming in London and Vienna, what is notable about the paper is that Jones has been minimizing the UHI issues for years and now does an about face on China. And even more notable is that Jones result are directly at odds with another researcher at Hadley, Dr. David Parker.
It seems that Parker is looking more and more foolish with his attempts to make UHI “disappear” To back that up, the National Weather Service includes the UHI factor in one of it’s training course ( NOAA Professional Competency Unit 6 ) using Reno, NV.
In the PUC6 they were also kind enough to provide a photo essay of their own as well as a graph. You can click the aerial photo to get a Google Earth interactive view of the area. The ASOS USHCN station is right between the runways.
This is NOAA’s graph showing the changes to the official climate record when they made station moves:
Source for 24a and 24b: NOAA Internal Training manual, 2004-2007
What is striking about this is that here we have NOAA documenting the effects of an “urban heat bubble” something that Parker 2003 et al say “doesn’t exist“, plus we have inclusion a site with known issues, held up as a bad example for training the operational folks, being used in a case study for the new USHCN2 system.
So if NOAA trains for UHI placement, and Hadley’s Dr. Jones admits it is real and quantifies it, I’m comfortable in saying that Parker’s claims of UHI being negligible are pure rubbish.
Its all about location, location, location. And climate monitoring stations that are poorly sited and that have been overrun by urban growth clearly don’t give a pure signal for assesment of long term climate trends. This puts a real kink in the validity of the surface temperature data in GISS and HadCRUT and could go a long way towards explaining the divergence between satellite and surface temperatures in recent years.
Ignoring for this discussion that there are proofs that the heat content of the earth has not much to do with global average temperature as it is measured either by satellite or by earth instrurments, I have a basic question:
Why is the human population and its effects on the climate to be treated as separate from the total planet?
I agree that earth instruments should be consistently sited as far as distances from sources of heat and shade, but I expect the towns to be in the measure as well as forests and dunes.
That the human population will have an effect on the temperature and its increase does not mean that it is not part of nature.
Think of a planet interspersed by innumerable termite mounds, forests, seas and deserts. If explorers measured a global temperature by satellite would they start correcting for the termite mounds?( they generate heat) Or would they treat the planet as a whole?
It is a different request to demand accurate temperatures an agreed distance from sources and sinks, and another to ignore sources and sinks on the effect on an average.
We might as well correct for forests, they are also living things that change the weather.
That a misguided scientific community decided a priori that any rise in temperature is due to CO2 rise does not mean that there is not a rise in temperature from a number of other human activities. All are within “nature” as it exists at the moment on this planet, and real scientists should be trying to untangle these.
DJ (16:51:28) :
Science debates don’t play out in the media. They play out in science journals. A media debate is designed to influences minds and policy assisted by media norms which give people the false impression that the “sceptics” have science to offer.
DJ – Examples of Sceptical Science can easily be found at http://www.drroyspencer.com/ as a start… and there are many others in the actual scientific literature.
For example Dr Spencer is finding it difficult to get his Satellite data showing negative feedback for water vapour into the current “Scientific Debate” in the journals – it seems to have something to do with the unwillingness of peer reviewers to deal with contrary hard evidence.
What do you say to that?
I agree that earth instruments should be consistently sited as far as distances from sources of heat and shade, but I expect the towns to be in the measure as well as forests and dunes.
Yes. But only in the correct proportions.
c. 3% of the land surface is urbanized/suburbanized. Yet 9% of USHCN surface stations are urban and 17% are suburban.
Matt Bennett (21:11:21) :
My my,
This little hot-bed of [snip] is hilarious. Don’t you guys realise that REAL climatologists have long since thought of, quantified, refined and included the (very small) discrepancies due to UHI effects?
So Matt,
Is UN IPCC Scientist Dr. Steven M. Japar, a PhD atmospheric chemist who was part of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Second (1995) and Third (2001) Assessment Reports, and has authored 83 peer-reviewed publications and in the areas of climate change, atmospheric chemistry, air pollutions and vehicle emissions, challenged the IPCC’s climate claims.
“Temperature measurements show that the [climate model-predicted mid-troposphere] hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them!” Japar told the minority staff on the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 7, 2009.
A real Climatologist?
REF: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=10fe77b0-802a-23ad-4df1-fc38ed4f85e3&Issue_id=
What do you say to that?
I say you are English or something vaguely similar as you do not put an abbreviation mark after “Dr” and spell “skeptic” with a “c”.
How about in Siberia?
Ah, yes, the GHCN Thought Criminals. I’d just love to survey those!
Matt Bennett (21:11:21) :
No, the wonderful global surface averages that have been so carefully compiled over the decades, in combination with ever-improving proxies for the past are the best we have to go on and are highly valuable at that.
Please check the many references to GISS, Hansen, and the surface station data on this site before asserting that “wonderful global surface averages that have been so carefully compiled over the decades”
Please check the many references to Mann, Hockey Stick and “The Team” at http://www.climateaudit.org/ before asserting “with ever-improving proxies for the past are the best we have to go on and are highly valuable at that”
Could you please provide links to actual hard, independently verifiable, evidence that,
[1] Man Made Emissions of CO2 will Cause Global Warming,
[2] That Global Warming will be Harmful.
[3] That Climate Change by Natural Variation does not account for current climatic trends.
[4] That the proposed mitigations of CAP and TRADE will avert the harm of Global Warming.
and
[5] That the costs of CAP and TRADE to the community will, in fact, be less than the costs of not acting.
Computer Models do not qualify as Hard, Independently Verifiable Evidence.
If you are unable to provide the above links, please admit your inability to Reason from Evidence.
Graeme Rodaughan (15:36:55) : DJ (12:38:08) :
Graeme I applaud your efforts to try educate some who post here, but I fear that in this case the adage “None so blind as he who will not see” applies.
Richard,
I applaud your obvious willingness to remain open-minded about topics, am relieved at your endorsement of the wealth of evidence behind evolution and am in no doubt that your children will be forever indebted to you for such a sound and well-rounded rearing. I mean that.
That aside, I fail to see how you’ve fallen for this one. As DJ clearly points out – the ONLY debate is that through the literature. The rest is blogs, sound bites, opinions and heresay and I’m really genuinely surprised that you have not intuited this. There IS no real doubt about AGW among those that matter, the people who’s job it is to assess climate – that’s who I mean by REAL climatologists. Not geologists, not astronomers, not physicists and not bakers, though no doubt they’ve all got their part to play. I don’t see any other topic where, for example a cardiologist will try to wax lyrical about the difficiencies in out understanding of a new type of structural architecture. (Most) people just know better than to roam outside their area of expertise and expect to be taken seriously.
ANYTHING (and I mean anything) that may affect various climate forcings will have been at least considered if not carefully quantified and accounted for long since by climatologists. They’re not stupid and of course have considered all manner of potential arbitraters and indicators of our global climate. Give them credit. You’ve been hoodwinked by various interests into believing that there still exists any real doubt about man’s devastating effects on the planet’s temperature regulation. That’s why I commented re creationism – it is a VERY similar style of ‘argument’ that ~snip~ use and is startling for its utter lack of contributive substance. Just like ID proponents need to appeal directly to the public, so too denialists must expound theories on the net and in books because anyone who’s serious about their science knows how to pick apart what they proffer. And don’t give me the ‘conspiracy’ among referees line – great science stands and falls on its substance, something that is utterly lacking in the denial of our CO2 induced creeping time-bomb.
Bob wrote:
Isnt the UHI a transient effect?
One day open field, 1 year later surrounded by houses. 10 years later surrounded by houses. 11 years later surrounded by more houses. etc.
In this scenario there should be 2 step increases in temp. There is unlikely to be a steady rise as most show!
Indeed, the situation is not so simple. There is a station set in the very center of Prague (over 1 million people) at the former Jesuite college (Klementinum) that has record over 200 years. It is not used in the world statistics, but it’s readings are homogenized for historical purposes with the nearby rural stations. There was a study that has shown an increase in UHI effect until 60’s, but further development (although slowed down) did not influence it anymore.
Matt, not many here dispute the fact that there has been some warming over the 20th Century. I think this has been exaggerated by heat-sink-due-to-microsite-violation, but for a heating trend to be exaggerated, there has to be a real heating trend to exaggerate in the first place.
That’s the “obvious” part. All well and good.
But for heaven’s sake, the adjusted (I would argue maladjusted) trend is under 0.8C for the 20th century, and we have kicked off the current century with a decade of mild cooling.
Yet the IPCC insists it’s gonna be, on average, 3.5C warmer (as high as 6C warmer) by 2100. All on account of speculated positive feedback loops–which have since been shown by the Aqua Satellite to have been coming back negative.
Yeah, we had a 20-year warming stint, prior, but the “big six” multidecadal cycles all flipped from cold to warm phase during that time. And now they are just beginning to flop back to cold phase.
Not only that, but the Sun may (possibly) be lining up for a Grand Minimum.
So I don’t think that a recently unprecedented step change to blast furnace is even evident, far less obvious. Why do you think it is obvious?
And it’s not as if environmental scientists–or demographers–have an unblemished record of prediction, either, looking back to the heyday of the Club of Rome and the Population Bomb.
So before we go tossing a third or more of world growth in the dumper (to depressingly small CO2 reductions), and with no tipping point even vaguely evident (except maybe to cooling), don’t you think the issue deserves a bit more examination?
Now that you’re here, why not take a gander at the other pov? We won’t bite you (at least not very hard). Quien sabe, we might even win you over (and you wouldn’t be the first).
Heck, it’s not completely out of the cards, you’ll win us over–all scientific questions admitting falsifiability.
Graeme,
If you are going to assert that the hockey stick is somehow fatally flawed (as an accurate representation of the past 1000 years or so) then I’m not going to waste time with you. It is one of THE most scrutinised scientific products in history and has withstood all criticism. As a test of its validity, any attempt that has been made to reconstruct recent past temps (on a global scale) ends up looking almost identical- you don’t even need to take Mann’s word for it.
I could just as easily link to 100 pages of robust rebuttal of you points (carefully laid out so even you could understand them) over at RealClimate and at least it would be coming from scientists themselves. But really, who wants to get into a ‘my linking’s quicker than yours’ battle anyway, for that’s all these things ever amount to. I will attempt to answer your specific points above when I’m not here at work, but for a start, who ever said cap and trade was the best solution? Where did I say that? It’s the science behind the validity of AGW that I’m trying to pin [snip] down on. And if you don’t believe it’s happening in the first place, what’s the need for measures to combat it? It must be fun living in the heady world of [snip]
Answer me this: where does all the extra heat go that is trapped by the undeniable rise in CO2 concentrations confirmed by the Keeling Curve and dictated by 19th century physics?
evanmjones,
There has NOT been any 21st century cooling, no matter how much you repeat that fallacy – none.
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2006/04/warming-stopped-in-1998.php
I have certainly looked hard at your POV (mainly between about 1999 and 2003) and come to the conclusion that it is totally untenable. It takes quite some time to come to grips with all the facets of this huge problem and I will always stand ready to adjust my thinking and change my mind on the basis of contradictory evidence but that is exactly what we lack. In fact, if anything, many parameters are now tracking worst case scenario or worse as outlined by the conservative IPCC 2007 report. This really concerns me.
The Sun has been intensively studied with respect to all this and there is only ever a weak correlation and not a very predictable one at that. The fact remains, one can’t get the observed warming using any combination of known natural forcings in the absence of man-made CO2. Says it all, no?
Matt Bennett:
Tsk tsk Matt. Take a look at this:
All four global datasets.
It is well to bear in mind that it stands but indeed falls quite often. It wasn’t long ago at all that stress and spicy foods were the cause of ulcers and anyone who said otherwise was quite obviously a lunatic gibbering about utter nonsense. Perhaps a bit of a red herring of course, however what I mean to convey is not that science must be wrong now simply because it has been wrong before, but rather that claims of scientific certainty and dismissal of opposing views are not sufficient to impress me in and of themselves, because I realize paradigms are subject to shifts. I believe in evolution because I see convincing evidence; I am agnostic about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming because I do not. Once I’m satisfied that the required positive feedback mechanism has been observed in the real world, I will become as convinced as anyone, but in the meantime I’m not going to hand over most of my hard-earned income for the right to exist simply because certain people think that something might be possible.
DJ (13:51:43) wrote:
“Neil, perhaps you might tells us how large the UHI island effect must be to explain global warming given earth’s geography. I look forward to your response.”
The skeptical position isn’t that global warming can be explained away entirely by UHI, but rather that the steepness of the warming trend (and thus of alarmist projections of future warming) has been exaggerated by not comparing apples to apples. I.e., increasing urbanization around many station sites (or their relocation to more urban areas) has led to their reporting temperatures that are warmer than they would have been otherwise.
“the ocean floor (or near to it) is not just some static entity that is necessarily representative of the globe as a whole.”
And I believe it is the very BEST analog of the globe as a whole. So we can agree to disagree. Surface temperatures can very greatly. They are subjective in that they undergo various “adjustments” and moving a measuring location only a few feet can measure and entirely different micro-climate.
Climate varies on a scale of centuries, not years. And while there will be considerable lag in deep ocean temperatures, that is where the heat is. The amount of heat in the surface layer of the atmosphere is negligible compared to what is in the deep ocean. Average surface air temperatures can fluctuate a degree or more over the course of a few decades and reflect no actual global climate change, they are simply a normal cyclical variation.
Any changes in land measurements over a course of less than 60 years is “noise”. You really need a 60 year period to determine “average” or “normal” temperatures, not the 10 years we currently use. Normal natural variation seems to go in roughly 60 year cycles and so you need at least that long to capture an entire cycle.
Any changes that happen on a 10 or 20 year scale are simply blips. Here we are now not very far from the average from 1900 to 2000. If you go to NCDC, plot the latest 12 month period, you will find that we are, over the past 12 months, only fractions of a degree over the “average” temperature of the last 100 years. In other words … no climate change.
But if you want to measure the heat in the system, you need to go where the heat is stored … and that is deep in the ocean. Not on land and certainly not in the air.
If “earth” is warming at 1 degree per century, you will certainly see it there.
Matt Bennett (23:03:02) :
“…There IS no real doubt about AGW among those that matter, the people who’s job it is to assess climate – that’s who I mean by REAL climatologists. …ANYTHING (and I mean anything) that may affect various climate forcings will have been at least considered if not carefully quantified and accounted for long since by climatologists. They’re not stupid and of course have considered all manner of potential arbitraters and indicators of our global climate. Give them credit…”
———————————————-
when somebody asks to give endless credit to “real” climatolgists, peer review and settled science, I just have a look at the history of the number one scare graphics published in the number one journal and massively promoted by the IPCC, al gore and the BBC.
from the wegman and north reports:
“…The climate science community seemed unable to either refute McIntyre’s claims or accept them. The situation was ripe for a third-party review of the types that we and Dr. North’s NRC panel have done.
While the work of Michael Mann and colleagues presents what appears to be compelling evidence of global temperature change, the criticisms of McIntyre and McKitrick, as well as those of other authors mentioned are indeed valid.
“Where we have commonality, I believe our report and the [NAS] panel essentially agree. We believe that our discussion together with the discussion from the NRC report should take the ‘centering’ issue off the table. [Mann’s] decentred methodology is simply incorrect mathematics …. I am baffled by the claim that the incorrect method doesn’t matter because the answer is correct anyway.
Method Wrong + Answer Correct = Bad Science.
The papers of Mann et al. in themselves are written in a confusing manner, making it difficult for the reader to discern the actual methodology and what uncertainty is actually associated with these reconstructions.
It is not clear that Dr. Mann and his associates even realized that their methodology was faulty at the time of writing the [Mann] paper.
We found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling.
Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.
[The] fact that their paper fit some policy agendas has greatly enhanced their paper’s visibility… The ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of temperature graphic dramatically illustrated the global warming issue and was adopted by the IPCC and many governments as the poster graphic. The graphics’ prominence together with the fact that it is based on incorrect use of [principal components analysis] puts Dr. Mann and his co-authors in a difficult face-saving position.
We have been to Michael Mann’s University of Virginia website and downloaded the materials there. Unfortunately, we did not find adequate material to reproduce the MBH98 materials. We have been able to reproduce the results of McIntyre and McKitrick
Generally speaking, the paleoclimatology community has not recognized the validity of the [McIntyre and McKitrick] papers and has tended dismiss their results as being developed by biased amateurs. The paleoclimatology community seems to be tightly coupled as indicated by our social network analysis, has rallied around the [Mann] position, and has issued an extensive series of alternative assessments most of which appear to support the conclusions of MBH98/99… Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not be as independent as they might appear on the surface.
It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent.
Based on the literature we have reviewed, there is no overarching consensus on [Mann’s work]. As analyzed in our social network, there is a tightly knit group of individuals who passionately believe in their thesis. However, our perception is that this group has a self-reinforcing feedback mechanism and, moreover, the work has been sufficiently politicized that they can hardly reassess their public positions without losing credibility.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2322
People like Warwick Hughes and I have emailed or written to P Jones since the early 1990s. Some of the verbatim record has already appeared on blogs. There are several issues and a few more noted here in passing.
1. In constructing an average climate for a country, the effect of selective choice of cities and towns can be huge. We pointed out to Jones that he had chosen large cities and towns for his seminal Australian calculations, while rejecting many rural sites. When asked for the records, he replied that they had been lost or that he could not obtain them. Warwick could.
2. It is hard to determine in retrospect when UHI started for a city. My “feel” (and it is only a feel) is that Melbourne where I live was about maxed out for UHI at its main weather station by around 1900. Thus, there could be some truth to Jones’ claim that London and Vienna UHI is now insignificant. It might be insignificant in the sense that it has levelled out since 1900 and that a change is now hard to discern. However, this overlooks the scientific requirement that an allowance for error should be deducted and to my knowledge, it has not always been.
3. The reports sent by authorities such as the Australian Bureau of Meteorology to assembly lines such as GISS and CRU/Hadley can contain “raw” data or “adjusted” data. The Australian BOM advised me last year that they sent out raw data as a commercial product. It is NOT raw data, it has been homogenised to a degree that is hard to reconstruct. Then, the BOM emailed to me that they have no control over what is done to the data when passed to others. It is entirely possible that the GISS and Hadley-type people apply adjustments to data that have already had adjustments which might or might not be for the same effect.
4. It is very hard to define a truly rural site and even harder to use it to correct a nearby urban UHI site. There is not enough known about the processes that link the sites to do more than a crude weighted distance correction. But 2 sites a few km apart, both considered rural, can correlate quite poorly on a daily basis, even monthly. (Like the ends of Vegas airport)
5. Something strange is going on with some surface temperatures. In some localities, in the last 40 years or so, seaside weather stations have been recording negligible temperature trends, while inland sites say 200 km or more inland, have been showing sharp increasing trends. It is possible that this effect has operated in the Antarctic, with most of the stations around the perimeter not being easily relatable to inland sites. At this stage it is my guess that the change to thermistor sensors in some countries is suspect. Some of them need to be replaced each 2 years, but I am not sure that this is always done. A candidate compounding factor might be dust or frost accumulation on the sensor.
6. There have been many studies where temperatures have been taken more or less simultaneously at many points in and around a city. It has been done for Melbourne. The BIG problem is that it is difficult to obtain the raw results of such studies; they are seldom published voluntarity to the sound of trumpets. It would not surprise me to find that Melbourne central has a +5 deg C UHI effect compared to truly rural comparison sites, averaged over a year.
7. As mercury thermometers and daily readings have been replaced by one-minute thermistors, it is possible to do filtering of spikes that might have affected thermometers. In any case, the transition from thermometer era to thermistor era would be expected to show a discontinuity, because experiments have been done that do show discontinuities. However, it appears that subjective, smoothing splicing has been done over the transition period so that the curves look unaffected. However, place yourself philosophically in the shoes of the climate scientist who finds (for argument) that thermistors routinely report a degree cooler than thermometers after de-spiking. You can make an announcement that all past data are suspect or wrong, or you can gently slide the transition into place over a number of years. Is this one reason why the global temperature is reported as either static or falling in the last decade, depending on the author? Then of course, it has to be aligned with satellite data.
Enough. Someone above asked what there was in it for Jones to make his UHI statement about China. The probable reason is that most people with an interest already knew. Besides, after a number of visits to West China in the eraly 1990s, I would disbelieve a temperature record in any case. I saw a lot of carnage that was done in the Cultural Revolution and spoke to people who had been through it. Did science function normally and calmly? Not on your nelly, mate. But that is another story.
re evanmjones (20:46:31) : 19_03_09
http://mls.jpl.nasa.gov/joe/Waters_1975.pdf
Satellite data was compared with thermometer data in the early years. I do not know how much of this calibration data, if any, is still used.
If you want to see the UHI, look here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/
Try comparing Phoenix with rural surroundings or Vienna with Bratislava airport.
Matt Bennett
The fact remains, one can’t get the observed warming using any combination of known natural forcings in the absence of man-made CO2. Says it all, no?”
No it doesn’t say it all. Is this is a fact? Or your wishing it was? I think most people who regularly post at WUWT would suggest that natural climate variability is responsible for any warming that has been recorded in the late 20th century, along with the slight cooling so far this decade, with some contribution from land use changes, and a significantly smaller effect by CO2 than that posited by the IPCC. Your position seems to be that because you can’t identify what natural mechanisms may be causing the warming then it must be good old CO2. That looks more like a leap of faith.
This is all very beautful. All these eloquent comments to and fro of the sciences investigating climate change/global warming. Wonderful prose, almost poetic, but only fully understood by the scientific community. To everyone else on this planet, it is as it is – just talk. All science is pure hypothesis – an interpretation of measurement. As such it is always subject to influence, be it factual (hypothesis), political, financial, fashionable or subliminal. The majority of people in all walks of life, (including the scientific community) subscribe to general trends of opinion as a basis for forming their own opinion, subject to said influences. As beautiful as it is, scientechno speak is frustratingly useless to the general public at large. innit! Know what I mean? Givis th lowdown, the bottom line, in language my children understand.
Rather OTT I’m afraid but in case you haven’t seen it, there is now official recognition in the UK that global warming belief is effectively a religious belief.
“In the landmark ruling Tim Nicholson was told he could use employment law to argue that he was discriminated against because of his views on the environment.
The head of the tribunal ruled that those views amounted to a philosophical belief under the Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations, 2003, according to The Independent”
Obviously the intent is to punish those naughty people who did not accept his religion, even when he became an outright bore about it, but this “recognition” is treating the belief as something other than a matter of science, which is inherently debatable.
Matt Bennett:
There is no reason to be concerned. This evidence directly contradicts the IPCC:
click1
click2
click3
click4
click5
Faced with solid contradictory evidence, it is you who are the true believer in the repeatedly falsified catastrophic AGW/CO2 hypothesis. Why is that?
There is no dispute that a very small amount of warming is attributable to human activity. But it is so tiny that, as you can see in the graphs above, it is overwhelmed by many other factors.
If that were not so, then rising carbon dioxide levels would cause global temperatures to rise. Which as everyone can see, is not occurring.
Face it, Mr. Bennett, the climate is not acting as the IPCC and the rest of the alarmist contingent desperately wants it to act: click
The planet is still naturally emerging from the last Ice Age, when Canada and the north midwestern U.S. was buried under a mile of ice. But for political, financial and personal reasons, certain people need to blame human activity for the climate’s natural long-term trend line: click
The long accepted theory of natural climate variability has been challenged by the new AGW/CO2 global warming hypothesis. That new hypothesis has failed to falsify natural variability, which remains well within normal historical parameters. The AGW/CO2 hypothesis fails, because it must explain reality better than the accepted theory, and it has not done so.
I have read your words, and it is clear that they are words without the necessary corroborating evidence that something other than natural variability explains the climate. If you are actually ready, as you say, to adjust your thinking and change your mind, then given the very strong evidence provided, it will be interesting to see if you have the character to adjust your thinking.
The alternative is to step up to the plate and falsify the long accepted theory of natural climate variability. If you can do that credibly, you will be the first to do so, and I will sit up straight and pay attention.
Matt Bennett (23:54:22) :
Answer me this: where does all the extra heat go that is trapped by the undeniable rise in CO2 concentrations confirmed by the Keeling Curve and dictated by 19th century physics?
If you could understand scientific terms, you would know there is no extra heat, just heat trapped/delayed for a while according to the equations of thermodynamics on its way to outer space.
I also remind you that 19th century physics is outdated. Was outdated from the introduction of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century. Nineteenth century physics would say there are no atoms, for example. The behavior of CO2 in the atmosphere was a hypothesis which cannot explain the observed temperature rise without unphysical ( i.e. negated by data) feedbacks with water vapor that the IPCC models have assumed.
Matt Bennett (00:05:03) :
The fact remains, one can’t get the observed warming using any combination of known natural forcings in the absence of man-made CO2. Says it all, no?
No.
There exist models that explain the warming without recourse to catastrophic CO2. It is obvious that you have not read the thread below this one:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/16/synchronized-chaos-and-climate-change/ that does describe the temperature rise without recourse to CO2, just by the circulating currents of oceans and atmosphere.
“So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.”
So you are dogmatic, but you are also wrong.