OK, so my art is a bit tongue in cheek. But it does fit the disaster theme of the topic.
This op-ed piece in the Herald Sun is interesting, because it touches on many of the points covered here on WUWT. This is the first time I’ve seen all these collected in one article in a major newspaper. Andrew Bolt routinely uses material from WUWT, and this is the first time I’ve been able to reciprocate. There are some truly unique points raised by Bolt that are indigenous to Australia that we haven’t discussed here, but they are valid for discussion nonetheless. In cases where we have covered a point on WUWT, I’ve made a footnote link [in brackets] – Anthony
From Andrew Bolt, The Herald Sun
Global Warming Alarmists Out in the Cold
April 29, 2009 12:00am
IT’S snowing in April. Ice is spreading in Antarctica. The Great Barrier Reef is as healthy as ever.
And that’s just the news of the past week. Truly, it never rains but it pours – and all over our global warming alarmists.
Time’s up for this absurd scaremongering. The fears are being contradicted by the facts, and more so by the week.
Doubt it? Then here’s a test.
Name just three clear signs the planet is warming as the alarmists claim it should. Just three. Chances are your “proofs” are in fact on my list of 10 Top Myths about global warming.And if your “proofs” indeed turn out to be false, don’t get angry with me.
Just ask yourself: Why do you still believe that man is heating the planet to hell? What evidence do you have?
So let’s see if facts matter more to you than faith, and observations more than predictions.
MYTH 1
THE WORLD IS WARMING
Wrong. It is true the world did warm between 1975 and 1998, but even Professor David Karoly, one of our leading alarmists, admitted this week “temperatures have dropped” since – “both in surface temperatures and in atmospheric temperatures measured from satellites”. In fact, the fall in temperatures from just 2002 has already wiped out a quarter of the warming our planet experienced last century. (Check data from Britain’s Hadley Centre, NASA’s Aqua satellite and the US National Climatic Data Centre.)
Some experts, such as Karoly, claim this proves nothing and the world will soon start warming again. Others, such as Professor Ian Plimer of Adelaide University, point out that so many years of cooling already contradict the theory that man’s rapidly increasing gases must drive up temperatures ever faster.
But that’s all theory. The question I’ve asked is: What signs can you actually see of the man-made warming that the alarmists predicted?
[ Ian Plimer, Temperature trends]
MYTH 2
THE POLAR CAPS ARE MELTING
Wrong. The British Antarctic Survey, working with NASA, last week confirmed ice around Antarctica has grown 100,000 sq km each decade for the past 30 years.
Long-term monitoring by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports the same: southern hemisphere ice has been expanding for decades.
As for the Arctic, wrong again.
The Arctic ice cap shrank badly two summers ago after years of steady decline, but has since largely recovered. Satellite data from NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Centre this week shows the Arctic hasn’t had this much April ice for at least seven years.
Norway’s Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre says the ice is now within the standard deviation range for 1979 to 2007.
[Antarctic Ice Growth, Arctic Ice Recovery ]
MYTH 3
WE’VE NEVER HAD SUCH A BAD DROUGHT
Wrong. A study released this month by the University of NSW Climate Change Research Centre confirms not only that we’ve had worse droughts, but this Big Dry is not caused by “global warming”, whether man-made or not.
As the university’s press release says: “The causes of southeastern Australia’s longest, most severe and damaging droughts have been discovered, with the surprise finding that they originate far away in the Indian Ocean.
“A team of Australian scientists has detailed for the first time how a phenomenon known as the Indian Ocean Dipole – a variable and irregular cycle of warming and cooling of ocean water – dictates whether moisture-bearing winds are carried across the southern half of Australia.”
MYTH 4
OUR CITIES HAVE NEVER BEEN HOTTER
Wrong. The alleged “record” temperature Melbourne set in January – 46.4 degrees – was in fact topped by the 47.2 degrees the city recorded in 1851. (See the Argus newspaper of February 8, 1851.)
And here’s another curious thing: Despite all this warming we’re alleged to have caused, Victoria’s highest temperature on record remains the 50.7 degrees that hit Mildura 103 years ago.
South Australia’s hottest day is still the 50.7 degrees Oodnadatta suffered 37 years ago. NSW’s high is still the 50 degrees recorded 70 years ago.
What’s more, not one of the world’s seven continents has set a record high temperature since 1974. Europe’s high remains the 50 degrees measured in Spain 128 years ago, before the invention of the first true car.
MYTH 5
THE SEAS ARE GETTING HOTTER
Wrong. If anything, the seas are getting colder. For five years, a network of 3175 automated bathythermographs has been deployed in the oceans by the Argo program, a collaboration between 50 agencies from 26 countries.
Warming believer Josh Willis, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, reluctantly concluded: “There has been a very slight cooling . . .”
MYTH 6
THE SEAS ARE RISING
Wrong. For almost three years, the seas have stopped rising, according to the Jason-1 satellite mission monitored by the University of Colorado.
That said, the seas have risen steadily and slowly for the past 10,000 years through natural warming, and will almost certainly resume soon.
But there is little sign of any accelerated rises, even off Tuvalu or the Maldives, islands often said to be most threatened with drowning.
Professor Nils-Axel Moerner, one of the world’s most famous experts on sea levels, has studied the Maldives in particular and concluded there has been no net rise there for 1250 years.
Venice is still above water.
[Sea Level in the Maldives, Sea Level satellite data]
MYTH 7
CYCLONES ARE GETTING WORSE
Wrong. Ryan Maue of Florida State University recently measured the frequency, intensity and duration of all hurricanes and cyclones to compile an Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index.
His findings? The energy index is at its lowest level for more than 30 years.
The World Meteorological Organisation, in its latest statement on cyclones, said it was impossible to say if they were affected by man’s gases: “Though there is evidence both for and against the existence of a detectable anthropogenic signal in the tropical cyclone climate record to date, no firm conclusion can be made on this point.”
[Ryan Maue and Hurricane energy, Hurricane landfall trends]
MYTH 8
THE GREAT BARRIER REEF IS DYING
Wrong. Yes, in 1999, Professor Ove Hoegh-Gulberg, our leading reef alarmist and administrator of more than $30 million in warming grants, did claim the reef was threatened by warming, and much had turned white.
But he then had to admit it had made a “surprising” recovery.
Yes, in 2006 he again warned high temperatures meant “between 30 and 40 per cent of coral on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef could die within a month”.
But he later admitted this bleaching had “minimal impact”. Yes, in 2007 he again warned that temperature changes of the kind caused by global warming were bleaching the reef.
But this month fellow Queensland University researchers admitted in a study that reef coral had once more made a “spectacular recovery”, with “abundant corals re-established in a single year”. The reef is blooming.
MYTH 9
OUR SNOW SEASONS ARE SHORTER
Wrong. Poor snow falls in 2003 set off a rash of headlines predicting warming doom. The CSIRO typically fed the hysteria by claiming global warming would strip resorts of up to a quarter of their snow by 2018.
Yet the past two years have been bumper seasons for Victoria’s snow resorts, and this year could be just as good, with snow already falling in NSW and Victoria this past week.
[New low temp record at Australian ski resort this year]
MYTH 10
TSUNAMIS AND OTHER DISASTERS ARE GETTING WORSE
Are you insane? Tsunamis are in fact caused by earthquakes. Yet there was World Vision boss Tim Costello last week, claiming that Asia was a “region, thanks to climate change, that has far more cyclones, tsunamis, droughts”.
Wrong, wrong and wrong, Tim. But what do facts matter now to a warming evangelist when the cause is so just?
And so any disaster is now blamed on man-made warming the way they once were on Satan. See for yourself on www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm the full list, including kidney stones, volcanic eruptions, lousy wine, insomnia, bad tempers, Vampire moths and bubonic plagues. Nothing is too far-fetched to be seized upon by carpetbaggers and wild preachers as signs of a warming we can’t actually see.
Not for nothing are polar bears the perfect symbol of this faith – bears said to be threatened by warming, when their numbers have in fact increased.
Bottom line: fewer people now die from extreme weather events, whether cyclones, floods or blinding heatwaves.
Read that in a study by Indur Goklany, who represented the US at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: “There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.”
[Going down – death rates due to extreme weather events]
So stop this crazy panic.
First step: check again your list of the signs you thought you saw of global warming. How many are true? What do you think, and why do you think it?
Yes, the world may resume warming in one year or 100. But it hasn’t been warming as the alarmists said it must if man were to blame, and certainly not as the media breathlessly keeps claiming.
Best we all just settle down, then, and wait for the proof — the real proof. After all, panicking over invisible things is so undignified, don’t you think?
George,
I don’t know exactly what your point is. Everybody in the field understands that water vapor is an important greenhouse gas in its own right that is in fact responsible for the majority of the natural greenhouse effect. There is absolutely no disagreement about that.
The point, however, is what determines the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. And, the answer is that it is mainly determined by the temperature and that it is not significantly affected by the amount of water vapor that humans emit into the atmosphere…at least for the rates at which we can currently emit it.
If you are going to critique the standard scientific understanding in a field, it is important to first understand what it is. You seem to continually go off on tangents that suggest that you really do not have a good understanding of what the scientists are actually saying…and thus you debate strawmen.
Smokey, you say CO2=AGW is disproved. That is quite different from saying not proven, and is the essence of what I am saying.
The AGW model output has most warming coming in later decades, so small changes are to be expected. Plus what they are claiming is not that all warming comes from CO2, but rather that CO2 adds to the ‘natural’ temperature. So planetary temperature is caused by sun, volcanos, aerosols, oceans, AND CO2. You can’t just put up a chart of 8 years of rising CO2 and falling temperatures and say, see, your theory is disproved.
Let’s suppose for a moment that because of CO2 concentrations, temperature increases by .2C per decade not accelerating but in a linear fashion. Then because of the sun, we have a .4C dropoff in temperatures. Then the total would show us .2C lower temperatures, yet nothing is proven wrong. The physics of CO2 causing higher temperatures is accepted by far many more people than ‘alarmists’. Now if the sun goes back to normal over the next ten years, you would see an increase of .6C in one decade.
It could be the theory of a large temperature increase is flawed. But without feedbacks, a first order increase of 1.2C is pretty well accepted. Now if there were negative feedbacks to go with that then the overall warming may be negligible as you say. To just put up some charts and then say ‘the theory is false’ is not a serious attempt at understanding things.
anna v says:
Yes, the point is that he has misapplied it because, in essence, he has failed to notice that the atmosphere (like us) is held up by the earth. (I.e., in our case, we have a normal force pushing up on us from the earth; for the case of the atmosphere, it is more like a boundary condition.) I think that you are correct that there is a way to use the virial theorem in a general enough form that it applies in this case … and I believe the correct general from was worked out by Neal J. King in a discussion on the ClimateAudit bb. (Here’s a link into the middle of the long discussion: http://www.climateaudit.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=161&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=770 and here is a link to a letter he sent to Miskolczi discussing it: http://landshape.org/stats/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/m_questions-4.pdf ). However, if you simply assume as Miskolczi seems to that the kinetic energy has a magnitude of twice the gravitational potential energy, it doesn’t make sense and you don’t even come close to what is empirically-observed.
MikeN,
That was a well thought out post. I haven’t completely made up my mind on the effect CO2 has, but it is probably much lower than what the IPCC assumes.
You say, “You can’t just put up a chart of 8 years of rising CO2 and falling temperatures and say, see, your theory is disproved.”
Yes, I can. Prior to about 2002 warmists assumed across the board that CO2 was driving temperatures higher. Then, when temps started declining and CO2 kept rising, the goal posts were moved [as usual], and there was “heat in the pipeline” [there wasn’t, it turns out]. And “the models say that global warming will cause global cooling.” Gradually “global warming” morphed into “climate change.” And so on.
Given those facts, if CO2 contributes to temperature, it can’t be very significant, can it? No. Otherwise, global temps would still be rising. That being the case, there is no rationale for charging ahead and spending $trillions on what is very likely a minor temperature increase — or possibly no increase at all. See TonyB’s post @12:45:04. He asks some important questions.
Finally, CO2=AGW isn’t a theory. It is a hypothesis that has been on increasingly shaky ground for the last 6 – 7 years. The theory is natural climate variability, in which the planet’s temperature fluctuates above and below a gradually rising trend line. The planet has been warming naturally from previous ice ages. CO2 may drive some of the warming; the question is: does it really? And if so, how much?
The IPCC has been forced to ratchet down its estimate of climate sensitivity in every successive assessment report. IMHO it is still too high, and should be at least halved again. And if it is lowered even one more time, the argument that there is a critical need to spend any money on “combating climate change” will be hard to argue.
There are many other needs that come before shoveling money into special interest pockets because of a putative 1°C± change toward a more balmy, pleasant climate. Sanitation, malaria, AIDS; the list is long and the money is finite.
Never forget that the IPCC is composed of 100% political appointees who have their marching orders, and that the UN’s primary goal is to extract as much money as possible from the West, and in particular the U.S. The scare over CO2 and global warming is in their tool box, along with a complicit media and a scientifically ignorant president and Congress.
And where is their hard evidence? Aside from GCMs, there is little real world evidence that there is a problem. With the planet cooling, we have time to learn more before we take action that is probably completely unwarranted, and which diverts money from other more legitimate and critical needs.
TonyB says:
Good to hear from you again. First, I am not sure exactly where you have gotten the 6.2 C number from. (Actually, I now see that it appears to be the upper bound in the paper of Hegerl et al.) The IPCC AR4 report concludes that the equilibrium climate sensitivity for doubling CO2 is likely to be in the range of 2 to 4.5 C with a most likely value of around 3 C. It is not something that can be simply calculated from first principles; rather, it is based on looking at the observational evidence as summarized in Section 9.6 of the report (available here: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/ar4-wg1.htm ).
Further credence to this range of values comes from the fact that the climate models incorporating all that we understand about the current physics of climate comes up with a similar range. (Of course, these models are not independent of the observational data, since the observational data has been used in helping to build and test the models…although the models are mechanistic models [some processes are modeled quite rigorously using the basic physical laws and others that are not as well understood or that occur on smaller length scales than the model resolution are parametrized]; they are not empirical models fitting the data.)
Limiting ourselves to the Holocene, i.e., the last ~10000 years or so after we emerged from the ice age, I would make the following comments:
(1) It is not clear the extent to which the climate changes that did occur involved much significant global change in temperature. In particular, while there is still considerable debate about whether Northern Hemisphere variations in temperature were as small over the last 1000 years or so as Mann et al found, almost all…if not all… of the well-accepted reconstructions do seem to agree that the late twentieth century was likely the warmest such period over that time for the Northern Hemisphere. (The data for the Southern Hemisphere are still too sparse to come to any conclusion.)
(2) What changes in global temperature did occur are likely explainable in terms of small variations in solar forcing, variations in the frequency of large volcanic eruptions (large enough to inject a significant amount of material into the stratosphere), and some variations in CO2 levels (which have been pretty steady, but not completely…I think they have varied about +-10ppm about the ~280ppm value).
(3) The uncertain nature of the proxy reconstructions of both the temperatures and the forcings (e.g., solar variations) makes it difficult to give a more definitive answer. [Of course, it is possible that someone better versed in studying climate change during the Holocene would also be able to be somewhat more definitive.]
Smokey says:
This whole historical summary is manifestly untrue. You can look at individual climate runs published prior to 2002 that show that noise is dominant over shorter timescales and thus that the resulting climate can have a negative trend over periods of several years. Heck, you can even see that in Hansen’s Scenario A (a scenario that assumed steadily increasing greenhouse gases and no volcanic eruption, and thus a monotonically increasing forcing) published back in the late 1980s using a considerably more primitive climate model.
Again, that is like saying, “We have weeks here in Rochester in the spring where the temperature trend is negative. Hence, that ‘seasonal cycle’ that all those alarmist climatologists talk about can’t be very significant.”
Where is your evidence of this? I believe that the estimate from the 1st thru 3rd was that it was likely 1.5 to 4.5 C (although I am not absolutely sure for the first). In the 4th report, they actually raised the lower end to say that it was likely between 2 and 4.5 C.
I think a shorter summary would be: Remember that I am paranoid.
Finally, the whole argument that uncertainty justifies inaction is sort of strange anyway. Most people do not wait until they are sure their house will burn down before they buy fire insurance. Decisions are made in light of less than absolute certainty all the time. The best way to make such a decision is in a way that gives maximum flexibility and produces the “least regrets” considering the estimated probabilities of different scenarios occurring. I don’t think that any serious analysis that has been done in this way has concluded that the correct decision is to do nothing.
The consenus is that the world is flat. “Do not go near the edge, there are monsters!!!!”
Heck, even the American Petroleum Institute won’t publicly support the “do nothing” idea or the idea that AGW is not a serious matter anymore: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/opinion/l05climate.html
That is how far behind the times some of the arguments here are!
Joel Shore (14:15:53) :
That is how far behind the times some of the arguments here are!
No, that’s how myopic you are. What the API supports or does not support is yet another argument from authority. It doesn’t matter who actually agrees (or disagrees) with you, Joel, something you just.don’t.get.
Mark
Joel Shore:
We can really learn new things on the intertubes. All this time I thought that gravity pulled us down. Now I find out that a ‘normal force’ from the Earth pushes us up!
And: “Finally, the whole argument that uncertainty justifies
inaction is sort of strange anyway.”Fixed.
Joel Shore (14:12:35) :
You can look at individual climate runs published prior to 2002 that show that noise is dominant over shorter timescales and thus that the resulting climate can have a negative trend over periods of several years.
Tell me, Joel, what is your model for this so-called “noise?” Can you distinguish between “noise” and “signal” in your plots? How? If you can’t, the claim “noise is dominant” is meaningless. Try again.
Mark
Joel
Thanks for your reply-I always enjoy your thoughtful posts-in a different league to poor RW.
I note that to explain past climate drivers -in the absence of enhanced co2 to do the job-you require the temperature variations to be limited, so therefore implying that you side with Michael Mann,
We have had these historical discussions before and you have admitted you are weak on history. If you saw sufficient evidence that demonstrated that past temperatures were at times greater than today, would that make you query your belief in AGW?
tonyb
Global warming used to have stopped in 1998. Amusing to see that’s now shifted to 2002. I predict that in 2015, global warming will have stopped in 2009.
Joel 14:15:53
Heh, that’s amusing. You link to a letter to the Editor that is responding to an article that has been corrected. Also, it is disingenuous of you to claim that industry has the cutting edge arguments. You should know that so many companies have ‘gone green’ in order to appeal to the public. They are actually behind the cutting edge arguments, which are increasingly showing that CO2’s role in climate has been exaggerated. “How far behind the times”, indeed. You are pretty amusing.
=================================================
RW 16:23:05
Look at the curve of temperature. It really peaked around 2003-2005. It’s just that lines can be drawn from either 1998 or 2002 to the present and show a negative slope. So I’ve always claimed we’ve been cooling since around 2005. The Argos buoys show that, too, and the oceans tell the story most compellingly.
========================================
Smokey (14:30:06) :
Joel Shore:
“…the atmosphere (like us) is held up by the earth. (I.e., in our case, we have a normal force pushing up on us from the earth…”
We can really learn new things on the intertubes. All this time I thought that gravity pulled us down. Now I find out that a ‘normal force’ from the Earth pushes us up!
Something Sir Isaac Newton revealed quite some time ago! It’s expressed in his Third Law: “To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
(1) Rapid species extinction
(2) A sheet of ice the size of New York City falling into the Antarctic Ocean
(3) Unprecedented amount of hurricanes and tornadoes
(4) San Francisco…93 degrees in April
armedevolution:
(1): 90%+ of all species that ever existed are extinct. Believe it or not, almost all of these extinction events preceded the SUV.
(2): This happens routinely, and is a function of precipitation at higher altitudes. Besides, it’s still cooling at the S.P.: click
(3): Wrong a third time: click
(4): Weather ≠ climate.
But nice try, and thanx for playing! Vanna has some wonderful parting gifts for you on your way out.
Smokey (19:07:31) Re: #2, how about the sheet of ice the size of Texas that grew in the Antarctic Sea. Playing the Vanna card was brilliant. Looks like you, George, kim et al have faced quite the onslaught here in the past two days, keep fighting the good fight you guys.
kim: the pattern is very clear. The date at which global warming is claimed to have ‘stopped’ constantly shifts forward. The game is always that you’re pretending that internal variability doesn’t exist.
And you say it ‘stopped’ in 2005? Would you tell us what trend, and what errors on that trend, you’ve calculated for global temperatures since 2005?
Phil.,
I was just razzing Joel for the way he explained gravity. He’s always so serious. I was gonna say something about ‘there is no gravity, the world sucks’, but I resisted. Until now.
Mike Bryant: “Why stop in 2006… not obscuring the trend are we?”
Not as far as I know. The graph I linked to happened to be handy. More importantly, the relevant trend is the long term. But if you’re unhappy with my previous graph, here is a link to another that looks more recent:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/guide/bigpicture/fact2.html
Tony B: “Joel and Brendan
Nice to see you both back over here-you certainly enliven the place and keep everyone on their toes!”
Thanks for the kind words, Tony B. I am a mere layman, so will allow Joel to respond with his usual cogent arguments.
RW
My post to Joel was phrased in such a way that it seemed to be rude about you, which was not the intention. What I meant was that you play in different games-Joel deals with the physics whereby you tend to make references to what we would consider dubious ‘facts’ straight out of the ‘How to deal with a climate sceptics'[ pantheon. No offence intended. Its good to get alternative views. It’s a shame different views aren’t treated as tolerantly at say Real climate as they generally are here.
Similar question to you as I posed to Joel. Do you believe the re writing of history- as per the work of Michael Mann- supercedes the previously settled science as erxpressed by an overwheming consensus of historians? This believed that the world has been at times -in mans recorded history- very much warmer and very much cooler than at present. Did the MWP and LIA exist?
Tonyb
Brendan,
Thanks for the effort of the newer graph. Looking forward to many temperature discussions over the rest of the year. The temp graph here was only updated recently at my insistence:
http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/keyIndicators/index.cfm#GlobalTemperature
One year does not a trend make, but it MIGHT be the beginning of something,
Mike