Guest post by Steven Goddard
“April comes in like a lion, and stays that way.”
The University Of Colorado in Boulder and nearby Colorado State University are hotbeds of climate science activity. Famous climate names from both sides of the AGW aisle like NCAR, NSIDC, the Pielkes, Bill Gray and Chris Landsea are associated with these universities. Earlier this extended winter WUWT reported on one forecast by a CU geography professor :
University of Colorado-Boulder geography professor Mark Williams said Monday that the resorts should be in fairly good shape the next 25 years, but after that there will be less snowpack – or no snow at all – at the base areas
No doubt that a geography professor would have the correct skill set to be making ski forecasts 25 years in the future, and that 25 years from now the climate will make a radical switch. It appears that Dr. Williams forecast is correct so far, as Colorado is getting lots of snow.
Wolf Creek Ski Area has received more than 11 metres of snow this winter, and has 118 inches of snow on the ground. (That would be 2.9972 metres deep, using the Catlin tape measure.) Unfortunately, people may be unable to get to most of the ski areas because Interstate 70 is shut down – due to too much snow.
Ahead of the current storm, all of the snowtel sites in Colorado were reporting normal snowpack.
| RIVER BASIN | PERCENT OF AVERAGE | ||
| Snow Water | Accum | ||
| GUNNISON RIVER BASIN | 109 | 108 | |
| UPPER COLORADO RIVER BASIN | 112 | 109 | |
| SOUTH PLATTE RIVER BASIN | 98 | 97 | |
| LARAMIE AND NORTH PLATTE RIVER BASINS | 103 | 105 | |
| YAMPA AND WHITE RIVER BASINS | 113 | 109 | |
| ARKANSAS RIVER BASIN | 107 | 99 | |
| UPPER RIO GRANDE BASIN | 104 | 107 | |
| SAN MIGUEL, DOLORES, ANIMAS & SAN JUAN | 95 | 10 | |
One popular AGW theory of convenience is that warming temperatures bring more snow. As can be seen below, this might not be an adequate explanation.
http://www.hprcc.unl.edu/products/maps/acis/hprcc/MonthTDeptHPRCC.png
Of course, weather is not climate and the earth has a 50/50 chance of “tipping” in the future – due to reaching some mythical CO2 threshold.
On a more urgent note, a US Navy researcher from told the Beeb that projections of an ice free Arctic by 2013 may be “too conservative.”
“Our projection of 2013 for the removal of ice in summer is not accounting for the last two minima, in 2005 and 2007,” the researcher from the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, explained to the BBC. “So given that fact, you can argue that may be our projection of 2013 is already too conservative.”
(This California based researcher did not accompany the Catlin expedition on their -40C Arctic camping trip this spring.)
Polar Bear pondering how cap-and-trade may brighten it’s future?
If you want to save the ski industry and the polar bears, you might want to consider sending Al Gore some money – and please quit producing so much of that dangerous pollutant CO2. However, absolutely do not try to apologize to the bears in person. Skiing is much more fun and generally safer than swimming with polar bears, as this woman visiting the Berlin Zoo found out.
PHOTO: WWW.TELEGRAPH.CO.UK
I just don’t know how to get to any ski areas without making lots of CO2.
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Tom P (17:16:21)…
Regarding the putative effect of CO2 on temperatures, Tom said: “There is a strong correlation, though.”
We know there is also a strong correlation between global cooling and the decreasing number of pirates: click.
With all the recent pirate activity around the horn of Africa, global temps have been declining as the number of pirates increases. To quote Tom, “There is a strong correlation.”
As soon as 0bama gets rid of the pirate problem, we can expect global temperatures to begin rising again. In fact, with the recent deaths of four pirates, temps took a little jump, indicating that this robust model has strong predictive powers.
The pirate problem was just a hiccup in the rapid ascent of global warming caused by a minor but very evil trace gas. As we know, global warming causes global cooling.
Unfortunately, the pirate problem just skewed the inexorable global warming rise temporarily. I mean, what GCM could have foreseen the pirate problem? It was an unexpected variable.
I hope I’m making sense.
[/sarc]
“Mike Lorrey (18:08:44) : none of the agw climate models make even the remotest attempt to touch chaotic systems math…”
Speaking of climate models…
“…models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view”
~Antonio Zichichi
http://www.ccsem.infn.it/em/zichichi/short_bio.html
Meanwhile it was 93 degrees today in where I live. Make of that what you will.
Tom P 17:16:21
Well, I’m more impressed with the way the temperature curve follows the oceanic oscillations than it does the CO2 curve. And the temperature swings that I’m talking about that you mention in the last part of your comment are the ones between the Roman Optimum, the MWP, and the LIA. There is no correlation there with CO2 levels, that we know of.
and at 17:32:10 The US temperature levels correlate well with worldwide ones.
timetochooseagain at 17:20:01 Of course I’m not certain. But the evidence of the PDO is pretty good, the oceans, with all their heat content, are cooling, sea level rise is stumbling and ice is accumulating at both poles. I’m also counting on, with even less certainty, the sun not warming the globe like it has in the last century.
=====================================
Tom 17:16:21
Oh, c’mon, look at the underlying trend as shown on the third link at Smokey’s comment at 18:05:59. See those oceanic oscillations around the gradually rising trend? I repeat, where is the CO2 curve in this?
============================================
timetochooseagain at 17:20:01 I also suspect, with very little certainty, that the underlying rising trend from the end of the Little Ice Age, whatever its cause, may be at an end. The sun is acting as if it is contemplating another Grand Minimum. But, as I say, I’ve no proof that a Grand Solar Minimum leads to global cooling. However, the last two times the spots went away, the globe cooled. Chances are it will this time, too.
And the bottom line, as anna v has so eloquently stated, without any response from the true believers here, is that there is not enough certainty that the globe is warming from CO2 to make expensive and lethal policy.
=======================================
Kelson (18:47:00) :
I’ll make of it that it’s 93 today.
Tom P 17:29:32
Can you explain why the graph linked in that comment has TAR projections starting in 1990 and TAR didn’t come out until years afterward?
=====================================
This is a correction to my prior comment at 15:37. I had repeated the previous link instead of furnishing the correct one for the 10,000 year holocene.
Here is the corrected holocene chart.
my bad
This is a correction to my prior comment at 15:37. I had repeated the previous link instead of furnishing the correct one for the 10,000 year holocene.
Here is the corrected Holocene chart.
my bad
Those links of Aurbo show the temperature swings I’m talking about Tom P. They are not correlated with CO2 that we know of, and they have the power to demonstrate the kind of warming we’ve seen in the 20th Century and since the end of the Little Ice Age.
Face it, CO2 is a minor determinant of climate. So small that we’ve not been able to tease out its effect. So stop with the crippling policy changes already.
==========================================
http://www.uah.edu/News/climatebackground.php
So far they have identified 4 different errors in the satellite data, orbital drift, instrument body warming and inter-instrument calibration, orbital decay and made corrections for them.
They are measuring the atmospheres temperature by a specific method (which is still evolving)
At this point all they have established is that they get reasonable agreement between radiosonde temperature measurements and satellite data. They have not established if that data is an appropriate way to measure “the earths temperature”, it is just a method they are using which seems reasonable. Even if it turns out to be a relevant measurement, it only goes back til Nov 1978. So it is in the context of long term climate, a single point of data (one 30 year period).
There are many that think the earths air temperature in not the best way to measure the earths temperature. The oceans heat content is yet another method that is suggested. It also has sensor issues and is a new science, that they are working the bugs out of, and also a relatively young data set.
There is still a great deal of debate on if, or how to compare this snap shot of atmospheric temperature to other proxy data where temperature is “inferred” through indirect means. With out reliable old data, it is impossible to in a statistically significant way measure trends that are very small compared to the noise in the signal.
In short we are perhaps 100-500 years away from having meaningful temperature data that actually means anything as far as climate is concerned. At this point we are simply gathering data. We do not know yet if that data is trustworthy (there may be more issues that show up over time with satellite data for example). It may turn out that the proper measurement is not even being made. It may turn out for example that the most useful temperature is the temperature of the ocean in the center of the major gyres where the water is relatively stagnant. There are 5 of them, and a high resolution measurement of the top 300 meters of ocean in them might be just the number we need to give meaningful modeling of the earths “average temperature” we simply do not know yet where to put the thermometer.
It might turn out that the ideal measurement is the temperature of ground water 30 meters below the surface or some other data that is not even under consideration right now.
When the Wright brothers built their first plane, they had to build a wind tunnel and figure out how to measure aerodynamic lift and then determine through experimentation, what construction features of the air foil were important and then work out methods to apply that information to a real machine. Things like chord length aspect ratio camber of the wing, lift to drag ratio had to be sorted out.
In terms of analyzing the earths climate, we are still building our first wind tunnel, and trying out various measurement methods, and learning their limitations.
Sea level (for the purposes of measuring ocean heat content) is a good example. It is not at all trivial to measure or for that matter define. Is the sea level the level above the center of the earth or the level above a gravitational potential surface?
Do then need to invent a new highly damped tide gauge that averages water level over a time constant of days, weeks or months and who’s geopotential height is monitored by GPS?
The climate models were built around using data from discrete altitudes from radiosondes. Should they be re-written around using satellite data?
The models themselves do lots of manipulation and some would say out right abuse of temperature data, are they even valid? Even if the temperature data is reliable and appropriate if you put it into a flawed model that destroys the data integrity you still get garbage out.
The satellites measure the average air temperature of a parcel of air containing some 50,000 cubic kilometers of atmosphere. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Does it average out noise and help the determination of the state of the climate, or does it lose so much spacial resolution that it makes it impossible to use the data to satisfy highly complex non-linear relationships and produce any useful projections into the future?
If the measurements are too course, then even a perfect model might still be incapable of giving projections of any value, because the calculations would diverge from reality too fast to be useful. What if the proper temperature grid resolution is an order of magnitude less than it needs to be? What if in order to get the calculations to provide useful output you need the satellite data to measure parcels of air that are only 500 cubic kilometers in volume?
Larry
TomP, believe me average global temperature is immeasurable and to try to say that not only can it be measured but to accurate decimal points is nonsense. To then say which way it’s going is fantasy. That is very much in keeping with the whole theory of AGW which is patentley being dismantled day by day.
The temperature graphs of previous eras show clearly CO2 Following temperature and no runaway heating effect. Model your way out of that buddy.
“Tom P (14:29:20) :
However, we now reach the nub of the issue. What might have contributed to this long-term warming, and do the possible causes have the necessary power to produce the warming we have seen over the last century?”
No, the nub of the issue is whether CO2 emissions by humans are about to have catastrophic consequences for the planet. The proposed controls on CO2 emissions assume that yes i) AGW and II) that it’s catastrophic. The available data do not appear to support either i) or II), regardless of any rival theory on the causes of climate cycles.
Since we are on the CO2 topic, I have to state here that unequivocally there exists a temperature/CO2 correlation , except the causality goes : temperature rises, CO2 rises, not vice versa. From the physics of gases in liquids this is inevitable. Add to this the biological cycle, so evident in the Mauna Loa records, and very little lee way is left for reverse causation by eyeballing curves.
CO2 rises mainly because the temperature rises and the biologic sphere rises because of better growing conditions with higher temperatures : superimposed on this is the tiny fraction of human induced increase.
It is good to remind that there is proof in the ice core records, that there exists an over 800 year delay of CO2 rise after temperature starts rising, which shows that an even larger cycle correlation exists, possibly because of large movements of ocean currents as the oceans heat .
Kim, Smokey,
So your explanation for the long-term trend is a linear recovery from the Little Ice Age:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/akasofu_ipcc.jpg
But this just does not match with the past climate:
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/1598/liarebound.png
Compare the dotted lines.
If there really was a linear recovery from the period of the LIA we would all be a lot warmer than we are today – look at the red lines. The LIA can’t be the underlying cause of the long-term temperature trend.
Larry,
“Even if it turns out to be a relevant measurement, it only goes back til Nov 1978.”
And agrees well with ground data and other satellites over that period. If global average temperature data is worthless, why is there such a high level of agreement?
http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/6710/tempcomp.png
Tom P (23:58:40) :
Kim, Smokey,
So your explanation for the long-term trend is a linear recovery from the Little Ice Age:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/akasofu_ipcc.jpg
But this just does not match with the past climate:
http://img8.imageshack.us/img8/1598/liarebound.png
Compare the dotted lines.
If there really was a linear recovery from the period of the LIA we would all be a lot warmer than we are today – look at the red lines. The LIA can’t be the underlying cause of the long-term temperature trend.
The same argument would hold for all the ins and outs of cold/ hot in the holocene optimum
You are stuck on linear approximations. Just like the IPCC where they substitute averages over most turbulent functions, like clouds etc. Linear approximations of a function have a meaning if the function is well behaved. Climate being the end result of several coupled non linear differential equations can in no way be described by perturbative expansions with the first term and linear approximations.
So maybe it is logarithmic, or power 0.00x, or whatever. The trend is the only thing we can really see and we can fit a function for shorthand, not for theory. It is not meaningful to say that ” I assume it is linear and so we should be much warmer than we are” when the equations have not been solved, or the chaotic system addressed with the tools of chaos and complexity. ” It was not CO2 in the holocene variations,and so it is not CO2 out of the LIA” is a more reasonable guesstimate than “it is anthropogenic CO2”.
And again I insist, to require the west to do economic hara kiri because of guesstimates is criminal.
Tom P (13:08:38) :
E.M. Smith,
I’m afraid you still don’t understand fractals.
Tom P, I let the personal comment go the first time. I understand fractals just fine, having studied them a fair bit for what I do for a living. It is you, sirah, who have not a clue. I’m done attempting to teach you. Please enjoy your present status for as long as you wish. From here on out, my comments are aimed at others.
That island had a well-defined volume above sea level
Yes, it does. You just can’t get from that to an average height. Lets say you divide the island into 100 cells. For each cell you know the peak height. One cell has 1/10th of it’s area a km high, the rest is at zero. Your selected cell size says you can not know that it’s only 10% at a km high. Do you average it in as 1 km high? As zero? As 1/2 km? To know that it’s only 10% at a mile high, you need a smaller ruler… Thus the fractional nature of the heights within the space means that you can not know the actual average height without a near infinitely small ruler. Mountains, BTW, erode in a fractal pattern, thus every cell has fractions at different heights.
This is an analog of the sampling of temperatures over a space and over a time. Without knowing the percentage of a cell at that temperature and the percentage of time at that temperature, you can not know the actual average temperature in that cell. The temperature reported is ignorant of reality. Averaging more of these errors together to get a monthly average of your ignorance does not improve the result.
You are assuming that the sample is representative when that is demonstrably false. Pick a cell with a stream full of snow melt, a hot rock in the sun, a pine tree that self regulates leaf temperature, and two people one of them lighting a camp fire and a Stevenson screen near the rocks. What is the average temperature? What will it be in 10 minutes when the fire is going … How do you know? The best you can say is that the air near the Stevenson Screen is a good enough approximation for weather reporting, but it is NOT the average temperature of the cell.
BTW, that scenario is a real one. I dove into the stream and discovered via an immediate headache that the snow was melting just around the bend, unseen, even as we were hot in the sun… 50 F drop in less than a second. My skin flushes just remembering it.
An average temperature is the area under a time series curve for the period of interest and similarly has a well-defined mathematical value.
If only you had an infinite number of samplings in both time and space to know that actual curve. Since you don’t, you have no clue. At best you can get an approximation with significant error bands, especially with all of 2 data points to work with for the whole day for a several hundred square mile area cell …
Say you are in San Francisco. It was 50 degrees at 2am. It rose to 80 degrees for less than an hour as an offshore wind took a bit of inland air over the city, then the inland heat rising started sucking the fog in. You spend the next 24 hours at near 50 degrees. Just what exactly was the shape of that curve? How do you get (80+50)/2 to represent the 1/24 of the day that was actually warm; in a correct manner? You can’t. The temps did not change linearly, nor in a nice sin wave. They changed with the wind… Your average is a broken representation of reality. Yes, the temperature averaged under that curve was bounded at 50 and 80, but you have little clue as to the actual area. To get that integral would take very many more data points, and it would still be an approximation.
As for global temperatures, do you have a problem with Roy Spencer’s satellite UAH temperature series? It’s his temperature anomalies that I’m using for my plots.
ANY temperature series that fails the Nyquist test is defective. I don’t know the sample interval nor the spacial distribution of samples for UAH, but I doubt that it would resolve a stream in the woods nor have planet wide hourly or less data points. Is it usable? Well, a 12,000 mile coastline estimate is usable for the Coast Guard planning an off shore run; but 50,000 to 80,000 mile shore line estimate is more useful for figuring out where to build condo’s or how many folks can stand on the shore and fish… To the best of my knowledge, no one has bothered to figure out what are the best sample sizes for climate models vs weather reports. Our present system was designed for weather reporting…
Or is your position that as there is no way anyone can determine a global average temperature, we can’t even say whether we’re warming or cooling?
These are two different questions. I think it may well be possible to know if we are warming or cooling. Better done, IMHO, by looking at MIN or MAX temperatures separately, not some average of them. Best done with a sampling of about once per hour or more with a spatial distribution of about every 10 miles (as a first estimate) and with no averaging, interpolating, fabricating, or massaging of the data. Then continue that series for about 200 years and you have a good baseline (one Jose cycle plus a bit) but 2000 years would be better ( one Bond Event cycle). But averaging MIN and MAX for sparse data that violates Nyquist in both space and time domains, over a period of 20 to 50 years for most of the data, then averaging THAT over months gives a useless number. A fantasy. (In an ideal world, we would measure heat gain / loss rather than the proxy of temperature; then we would know if we are warming or cooling; but I think that is likely not possible to do at present.)
Basically, I think we can know if a single place is warming or cooling based on MIN and MAX, then we could do a population count of those places to reach some aggregate conclusion; but even that is like asking if the average girl at school is pregnant… There is no average girl and there is not a 51% pregnant. The question is better phrased as: Are the majority of places on the planet showing higher MAX temperatures over time for a very long time period with similarly higher MIN temperatures? (Are the majority of girls in school pregnant?) And the very long time period must allow for all the known long cycle times. That includes the Jose cycle AND the Bond Event cycle. Anything else and all you are doing is being foolish in your conclusions because you do not know your context (you say you are walking up hill, but miss that your hill is just a bump up on a larger down slope of the mountain side you are headed down …)
As a separate issue: Is there a global average temperature, even if we can not know it? I think there is not. There is a global average HEAT but there are so many processes moving that heat about and changing temperatures on such a fine scale that you can not have meaning in the average of temperatures. As a chinook runs down a mountain or water evaporates from a pond: No net heat changed, yet temperatures changed… telling you nothing about warming or cooling in the sense of adding or removing net heat. The global average of temperatures is about as useful as the global average food flavor…
anna v,
“It is good to remind that there is proof in the ice core records, that there exists an over 800 year delay of CO2 rise after temperature starts rising…”
So why have we not seen such a delay this time?
TomP
Instead of coming on to this site to Troll why don’t you use your time better by reading some of the data? Education is enlightening.
Mike Bryant (10:24:53) :
JamesP,
You’re right, AGW is a better belief system… hands down.
You win
I hope that was TIC, Mike..
I’m not sure they aren’t equally implausible, really – certainly both just as dangerous!
Do you think we will get a refund for this when the truth finally emerges..?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7997817.stm
anna v
The linear trend for the LIA recovery came from Smokey, endorsed by kim, not me! I agree there is little physical basis for using such a trend over several centuries, and the trend is not even in the right place based on climate history – please address your comments to them.
“Climate being the end result of several coupled non linear differential equations can in no way be described by perturbative expansions with the first term and linear approximations.”
Just because climate is non-linear as a whole does not mean that it is not perfectly correct to use linear relationships for elements of it. I hope you would agree that using 4.2J/K for the specific heat capacity of the water is a perfectly valid linear term for describing the relationship between the temperature and heat capacity of water.
Climate is nonlinear not because of the nonlinearity of the individual components, but because of the feedback between them.
E.M.Smith,
As you measure the height of a mountain with higher resolution, you get closer and closer to the actual height. The result will converge – it is not fractal.
As you measure a fractal coastline with higher resolution its length increases as you measure it more accurately. It does not converge on an answer.
An average global temperature behaves as the former, not the latter. Its accuracy will improve as more and better sensors are used. You can discuss the accuracy, but not the convergence.
Finally, as I asked Larry earlier, why is there such a level of agreement between the UAH and RSS satellite data together with the HadCRUT and GISS surface data if their measurements are worthless?
http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/6710/tempcomp.png
Tom P (01:26:53) :
anna v,
“It is good to remind that there is proof in the ice core records, that there exists an over 800 year delay of CO2 rise after temperature starts rising…”
So why have we not seen such a delay this time?
Ha.
Someody on this board speculated that since the MWP was 800 years ago the rise in CO2 we are observing is partially due to the mechanism seen in the icecores !
So there, we have the delay, by coincidence it started after we started burning a bit of fuel.