Left to Right: Dr. Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Dr. Paul Knappenberger (President of the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum), Dr. Wally Broecker (Columbia University), and Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert (University of Chicago) pose for a photo after the first of the Global Climate Change forum. Forum I was held at the Adler Planetarium.
From Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog.
Two Decades of No Warming, Consistent With . . .
Over at Real Climate they are busy giving climate skeptics reason to cheer:
We hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal, and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño. This overshoot is in the process of radiatively dissipating, and the climate will return to its earlier defined, greenhouse gas-forced warming signal. If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.
Imagine, twenty-two or more years (1998 to ~2020) of no new global temperature record. What would that do to the debate?
Real Climate does say something very smart in the piece (emphasis added):
Nature (with hopefully some constructive input from humans) will decide the global warming question based upon climate sensitivity, net radiative forcing, and oceanic storage of heat, not on the type of multi-decadal time scale variability we are discussing here. However, this apparent impulsive behavior explicitly highlights the fact that humanity is poking a complex, nonlinear system with GHG forcing – and that there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond.
As I’ve argued many times, uncertainty is a far batter reason for justifying action than overhyped claims to certainty, or worse, claims that any possible behavior of the climate system is somehow “consistent with” expectations. Policy makers and the public can handle uncertainty, its the nonsense they have trouble with.
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Much Ado about CO2
(Twenty years or what you will)
Remember last week our Gav was in the UK, maybe the article is a cod and when our Gav returns he’ll sort them out and put these young whippersnappers back in their place?
He will show us all, that honest debate and contrary views are allowed on the greatest scientific web site ever created.
Aren’t you people lucky that we have given you the works of William Shakespeare and those of our Gav.
@Willis and Codetech
Great analogy’s so forgive me for my pathetic attempt at joining in:
1 Apply a constant tension to a steel rod. Load 1
2 Strain occurs at a linear rate
3 Increase the tension Load 2
4 Strain increases in direct proportion to the increase in load
5 Remove load 2
6 The bar stops extending even with load 1 applied 😉
7 Twenty years later the bar starts extending again :-]
A miracle!
This is relevant here as well as on another thread:
The article says this :
“A climate that is highly sensitive to radiative forcing (i.e., responds very strongly to increasing greenhouse gas forcing) by definition will be unable to quickly dissipate global mean temperature anomalies arising from either purely natural dynamical processes or stochastic radiative forcing, and hence will have significant internal variability. The opposite also holds.”
I wholly concur but what do we see ?
Despite huge changes in the rate of energy emission from the oceans and consequent attempts by the oceans to change global humidity the hydrological cycle keeps global humidity almost stable by altering the speed of it’s activity through adjustments of the sizes and positions of all the main circulation systems.
The climate is therefore seen to be highly INsensitive to attempts at forcing by huge changes in the primary greenhouse gas.
Applying the same logic it must also be highly INsensitive to attempts at forcing caused by extra CO2.
The same mechanism would apply in both cases but to deal with CO2 the necessary adjustments would be too small to measure in the face of natural variability because the real forcing agent is the oceans and not the air.
It seems to me climate may not be getting warmer, but it definitely getting worse.
Realising that global warming was a stepped process is what caused me to recant my skepticism on 8 February 2009. Here’s what I said then: doesn’t seem so different now.
http://vibenna.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/global-warming-a-skeptic-recants-part-two/
The nice thing was, I got roundly abused by both skeptics and warmists, so I felt I was definitely on to something.
I think the decision to only quote part of the article has led to some confusion as to what it is trying to say. Particularly in regards to “this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.”
The article is saying that the average global temperatures will continue to rise at the pre-1998 rate of 0.3 deg C per 10 years. If you extrapolate the trend line from 1979-1997 the average temperature will not reach the 1998 high until 2020. This is contradictory to the ‘hockey stick’ graph which shows the rate of warming to increase whereas they argue the warming rate is constant.
What they do not say is that there is any cooling trend. They have average global temperature rising from around 1950 to 2020 at a constant ~0.13 deg C per 10 years.
They also are not saying 1998 will be the hottest year until 2020. If there hypothesis is correct then in fact the 1998 record should be broken a few times before then.
Apolgoies “pre-1998 rate of 0.3 deg C per 10 years” should be ~0.13 deg C, the 0.3 deg C is the ‘hockey stick”.
[i]Because Global Climate Change Alarmists believe that like a greenhouse CO2 traps heat and thereby warms the planet, they feel justified in calling CO2 a Greenhouse Gas. By the same token, they could equally as well call CO2 an “Igloo Gas”. After all, like a greenhouse an igloo helps keep its interior warm.[/i]
The reason it’s called a greenhouse gas because much like the glass in a greenhouse it lets the heat in but stops it all from leaving again. The igloo stops heat getting in or out and is more like clouds in that respect.
“and that the climate system effectively overshot this signal in response to the 1997/98 El Niño.”
Where did the energie fro this overshoot come from? Since it couldn’t come from earth (which would necessarily mean cooling in another part of the planet), it must have come from outer space.
I understood the general theory held that IR radiation emitted from the sun was at a wavelength allowing it to penetrate the earth;s atmosphere, but the reflected (re-radiated) IR wavelengths at the generic (?) earth’s temperature (from all objects = water surface, ground, asphalt and conrete, and atmosphere ?) was at the right length to be absorbed and re-re-emitted from the greenhouse gasses such as water vapor (98%) and CO2 (1%).
True?
cacklinrose (20:29:08) :
So… are we all gonna die in the next 50 years or not? I’m tired of this emotional roller coaster.
—
No, no. You are mindlessly worried, m’ dear rose.
Only SOME of us are going to die in the next 50 fifty years.
(The rest of us will probably die in the next fifty years after that.)
Stephen and George,
Thanks for your discussions. I appreciate you both taking the time to keep the science straight on the thread.
It appears that the models are highly complex, and are forced to use some numbers for which science does not have a definitive answer (unlike the heat capacity). It would be interesting to see a single representative model run twice. The first time with the “conservative” number for each factor for which science does not have a definitive answer, and the second time with the most reasonable number on the opposite side of the range. Then compare the results.
I like beautiful blogs!
You made me smile Robert. Being a bear of very little brain I tend to look for the bottom line: Is this gonna kill me immediately and painfully, or do I still have time to make a run to The Target for some endcap sales?
vibenna (03:43:40)
I don’t think the ’stepping’ is helpful either way as regards the question whether the cause of any background warming is anthropogenic or not.
Whatever the cause of a slow cooling or of a slow warming the PDO phase shifts will superimpose a stepped appearance.
You have ignored the gradual 400 year increase in solar activity which is a plausible candidate for the observed background trend.
That is why the current quiet sun is so interesting. If it continues we will be better able to try and decide whether it is the sun after all which provides the basic background trend.
The importance of the PDO phase shifts is not that they create warming or cooling over longer time periods. They clearly do not, being dependent on the solar input to the oceans. The importance of them is that they can explain the observed size of global air temperature shifts despite the smallness of solar variation from one cycle to another or from the top to bottom of a single cycle.
Therefore combining PDO and other oceanic phase shifts with a background solar induced trend one no longer sees anything unnatural in observations to date and CO2 need not be implicated.
Robert A Cook PE (05:09:10) :
Yep. The IR emitted from the earth is a range 0.5-30 micrometers. H2O and CO2 are some of the greenhouse gases but they don’t absorb at the same frequencies. H2O will absorb and re-emit radiation which would have got past all the CO2 and visa-versa.
OMG, OMG, OMG,
If I grow a beard, I would look exactly like Gavin.
I prefer Khakis over jeans, though.
Justin Sane (22:59:18) :
“Of the 385 ppm of CO2 contained in the atmosphere, how much is naturally there as a baseline to our added CO2?”
Nobody knows – is the honest, short answer. And to make it into the devil it isn’t, enough junk science in the form of false physics and propaganda has been foisted onto the world population to make Joseph Goebbels proud! And just in case you’re not real clear as to who Joe is and what his primary function was –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels
Check out paragraph 3 – “…… the “Big Lie” technique of propaganda, which is based on the principle that a lie, if audacious enough and repeated enough times, will be believed by the masses.”
Any resemblance to current officials and their communication methods is, of course, purely coincidental…….. ROFL
But I digress… As for the density of CO2 in the atmosphere, the ONLY “place” a higher PMM of CO2 has been BRANDED as the evil twin of the Joker is inside of a few computers, which contrary to mass belief really DO NOT have any inherent intelligence and their resultant output(s) have only a passing resemblance to the real world. So, what’s ours and what’s natural is technically irrelevant. BTW, those models/computers have to assume that CO2 is a “well mixed” gas, other wise they DO NOT work.
That said, to ascertain the answer to your very valid question, you would first have to define what “naturally” produces CO2 (for example, do we include in that category OUR breath? it is pretty “natural” for 6 billion+ of us to exhale, etc.), then what “naturally” absorbs CO2 (For example, would you include planted by humans food crops?) then you would have to accurately measure the in and out of each……
and therein lies a Nobel Prize, so good luck with that.
Then once you’ve got your base line….. ok George and Stephen, i’ll stop now….
tallbloke: You wrote, “as we know from George E smith, the air doesn’t warm the ocean…”
I searched for a while but couldn’t find a source for this part of your comment. Got one?
Andrew,
“Clearly the deniers and the alarmists are engaged in a cabal to distract us with whether AGW is a threat or not so that we miss their plan to steal the Hope Diamond. ”
Congratulations, you sleuthed out the master plan that Dad and I carefully came up with years ago. Darn. Now I’ll turn may attention away from nonsensical global warming ideas and onto some other distracting issue…like maybe health care. :^)
-Chip
Okay, peeps, I think this has become very simple!!
It’s ALL water vapor! El Nino releases a LOT of water vapor into the atmosphere which blocks OLR which raises the temps. The water vapor dissipates through natural processes. Quickly at first, then more slowly. OLR recovers.
CO2 is nothing special. It’s merely the equivalent of about 100 PPM of water vapor added to the atmosphere. The general ball park of water vapor is, what, 14,400 ppm. This is miniscule. The variations in water vapor due to ENSO is larger than the additional CO2.
Willis, Tisdale? Anyone estimate the amount of water vapor added in 1998? How much removed during the last big la Nina?
No wonder they can’t find the CO2 signature, it’s lost in the much larger water vapor signal variations!
Beware! Now that they have a new “explanation” for the drop in temperatures that seems “consistent” with global warming, they will be yapping about how the cooler weather confirms their dire predictions about global warming in the future.
You can never win with conspiracy theorists. Every piece of evidence just confirms the theory.
Bob Tisdale (06:59:21) :
tallbloke: You wrote, “as we know from George E smith, the air doesn’t warm the ocean…”
I searched for a while but couldn’t find a source for this part of your comment. Got one?
Hi Bob, here you go.
George E. Smith (14:12:00) :
It has since occurred to me that one reason for a fall in OLR could be that the oceans emitted less heat for a while. Less wind to churn things up when it turned colder after the end of the el nino maybe?
“”” George E. Smith (14:12:00) :
It has since occurred to me that one reason for a fall in OLR could be that the oceans emitted less heat for a while. Less wind to churn things up when it turned colder after the end of the el nino maybe? “””
Just to avoid confusion; this statement is not anything I have said; for one thing I have no idea what means OLR; I am not up on all this texting code, and prefer to write in ordinary English; well at least as close to the American form of it, that I can constrain myself to use.
I have a hard time here discerning what people are abstracting from other posts; and what is their own contribution; but anyway, I didn’t say that.
I’m sure I did say thaqt the air “doesn’t warm the ocean”, and I do hope there is nobody reading this blog who believes I meant that the heat transfer from air to ocean is precisely zero; just that it is miniscule compared to what the sun is pouring into the oceans, or what the oceans are transporting back to the atmosphere.
George
“I beg your pardon, Boudu. How is the president of the Adler Planetarium a weatherman of the Apocalypse?
-Chip Knappenberger”
My apologies Chip, apparently I sometimes let preconceptions cloud my appreciation of the truth, even when it is staring me in the face !
I heard about this site from realclimate.org – which is moderated by some pretty smart climate scientists. I read the same article about the spike in temperature in 1998, which may have been an anomaly from El Nino. However, there’s nothing in the article I could see that implied global warming is not currently occurring. I’m aware that temperatures have dropped in the last ten years, which is a good thing. I’m a little curious if people who are stating that global cooling is now the norm, would they be consistent enough to say that global warming was possible, if the temperature in 2010 is hotter than 1998?
To get a good idea of a trend, it helps if you use a very long time frame. Maybe not thousands of years, just the average lifetime of a human, about 60-80 years. In some ways, that’s the only time span that is of use to people, as it’s hard to project a hundred years or more into the future.
A lot of debate about global warming is a moot point, because it’s going to be obvious if it’s happening or not in about 50 years. The concern I have is that right now, it’s possible that we are adding just enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere to possibly move it to an unstable tipping point. If you doubt that the planet can be easily tipped into an ice age or very warm age, read up on paleoclimatology.
If you think greenhouse gases do not cause warming, fair enough, in the past greenhouse gas increases have probably followed natural warming from solar variations, but if you read objective studies, you would also find out that carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases do absorb or block radiative heat from the earth, trapping it in the atmosphere. So, even if warming is caused naturally, all the greenhouse gas we are adding is probably making it even warmer.
I’m a scientist with training in hazardous material technology, so I freely admit I’m not an expert on climate. However, I have also studied climate change science since 1978, long before it became fashionable. I’ve read literally hundreds of studies and thousands of pages of direct research from what I believe are fairly objective scientists. For the commenters who think global warming is a hoax, I’m a little curious as to how much direct research they’ve read with their own eyes, as opposed to reading something on the internet (a fairly bad place to get your information), reading in the newspapers (some journalists print everything they are told), or hearing it on the radio or television (journalists, talk-show hosts, and media types tend to be frighteningly ignorant of basic science). My advice is to read actual studies from unbiased sources, which tend to be the peer-reviewed scientific journals. Read everything you can on climate science. Avoid the political stuff, politicians do not know much. People who are strongly political are probably letting their personal viewpoint of the world get in the way of the real, measurable, physical data. Do not let your personal ideology (liberal, conservative, etc.) get in the way of understanding the basic science. Look at the hard, measurable data, do not take anybody’s word for anything. After about a year and thousands of pages later, you will be able to make an informed opinion.