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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So, does this mean that the folks at RealClimate will be pushing for governmental action to prepare for the catastrophic effects of cooling? Are they going to send media-ready reports of the estimated number of people who will die in cold weather? Are they going to suggest ways to reduce cold-related injuries? Will there be a laundry list of ways to stay warm while being green? Hmmm?
Thanks, Boudu. I just didn’t want rather innocent bystanders to get swept away in the flood!
-Chip
GlennG, you must be very new to this site. For starters, your notion of a variable Sun causing climate change is interesting. From your research review what would the mechanism be and how much change does it cause? I also didn’t see anything in your post related to oceans. Do you know what the Coriolis is? ENSO? SOI? Trade winds? What have you read about oceanic oscillations and the effects on climate variability? Some of these oscillations take longer than a human lifespan. You don’t mention these weather pattern drivers in your post. If you don’t know anything about them, I would suggest you start at the U of W for peer reviewed articles. They were the first to introduce the PDO after discovering its oscillation being in tandem with salmon cycles.
Stick around. You will read TONS more peer-reviewed scientific articles here than at many other sites.
GlenG:
Welcome aboard, Glen.
This site beats RealClimate hands down, as you can see. That’s because RC is a political site masquerading as a science site. They have a heavy AGW agenda.
This site attracts scientific skeptics who don’t blindly accept the falsified CO2=AGW conjecture. That’s why the people interested in the AGW question voted WattsUpWithThat the Weblog Awards “Best Science” site, trouncing RealClimate by a 10 – 1 margin.
You’ll learn more here than at that alarmists’ echo chamber, because dissenting opinion here is not censored, like it routinely is at RealClimate — and your comments will be seen by lots more people here because of the heavier traffic. Smart move.
Is the Real Climate story new?
The news item below is May 2008.
“The Earth’s temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.
A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming.
However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7376301.stm#map
“”” James (06:29:58) :
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. “””
I can’t discern who said this, whether it was James, or Robert; but I think some adjustments are in order.
I would recommend that anyone interested in climate at all, should equip themselves with a copy of a GOOD normalized black body radiation curve.
While the radiations of interest aren’t strictly black body, we can be sure that the BB curves provide an outer bound for what the real observed radiations are. The best such curve I know of can be found in one of the most standard of all optics text books; “Modern Optical Engineering” by Warren J Smith; who sadly recently departed from us; the most influential Optics instructor of the last 50 years.
The normalized curve has a vertical scale going from zero to one (for W/W_max), and the horizontal axis goes from 0.15 to 50 for L/Lmax, where L is my half baked substitute for Lambda, or wavelength. There is also a logarithmic vertical scale from 1.0 down to 1.0E-5
Maybe I’ll try to photograph it, and send it to Anthony somehow, or I can e-mail it to ChasMod, and he can forward it to Anthony.
You have to become familiar with the proportions of the BB radiation curve.
The most well known fact is that 25% of the total energy is radiated BELOW the peak wavelength, and 75% ABOVE the peak wavelength. That 1:3 ratio is EXTREMELY close; but I have never done the integral myself to satisfy my curiosity as to whether that is exact. I can tell you that I left the University environment believing it was exact; but I can’t prove that. Certainly in climatology terms it is as good as being exact. So why does that matter ?
Well the extreme range of surface temperatures on the planet covers from +60C in the hottest tropic deserts, down to -90C in the highest Antarctic niches like Vostok Station. So that is 183.15 K to 333.15 K.
Wien’s Constant is 2.897756E-3 m.K ; so that places the peak IR emission wavelengths between 8.698 microns at the high temperatures out to 15.822 microns for the coldest tempertaures. OK you don’t need this kind of precision; but if I give you the accurate values, you can round them to whatever feels good to your needs.
But now back to the BBshape. For the linear curve, on the short wavelength side, your are down to 1% of peak at just 0.33, or 1/3 of the peak wavelength; which doesn’t get any shorter than 2.90 microns for the hot deserts. At 1.74 microns or 1/5 of the peak wavelength the emission is donw to 10^-5 level.
So first result is that there are no earth surface emissions below 2.9 microns of any consequence; certainly not down to 0.5 microns, which is the peak of the solar spectrum insolation.
Going up to the long wave side of the curve, effectively half the total emission is below 1.5 times the peak wavel;enght, and half is longer than 1.5X,a nd we are back down to that 1% level at about 6.7 times the peak wavelength, which is 106 microns for the emission at the coldest places. Well there isn’t much radiation at all from those colder places; so if we stop at just 10% of the peak level, that occurs for just 3.5 times the peak wavelength, so 90% is emitted below 3.5 times the peak, and only 10% longer than that, which is about 55 microns for the coldest places.
So realistically earth’s emissions cover the 2.9 to 50 micron range of wavelengths.
If we apply the 6.7 1% factor to the solar spectrum peak of 0.5 micorns, that gives us 3.35 microns; so you can see there is basically no useful infrared from the solar spectrum,beyond the bottom end of the available earth emission in the 3 micron wavelength range. It turns out that three microns, is the boundary between a very prominent water absorption band that absorbs below there, and a water hole above there, and then there is a big water block from 5-8 microns, before you get to the climate window from 8-14 microns, after which both water and CO2 kick in.
The full Planck Law Radiation curve has the form:
W = C1 / L^5 (e^C2 / LT – l) (L = lambda)
C1 and C2 are known as the first and second radiation constants (Fudge factors ??) No way; it happens that we know the EXACT values of those constants.
C1 = 2pi.h.c^2 hwere h is Planck’s constant, and c is the velocity of light, and C2 has the value h.c/k where k is Boltzmann’s constant. This to me is a staggering result; Planck’s law is one of the Crown Jewels of Physics. It has been verified over temperature ranges from close to absolute zero, up to millions of Kelvins. The Microwave background radiation echo of the big bang is simply black body radiation at a temperature of about 3 Kelvins, and you can use Wien’s Displacement Law yourself to calculate the peak of the 3K radiation as being about 966 microns in the mm microwave range.
There are more precious stones hidden in BB radiation Physics; but that will keep.
George
@Glenn Skankey G
“I heard about this site from realclimate.org – which is moderated by some pretty smart climate scientists.”
End of part post
I would prefer the word censored myself but who’s to care.
I am not going to say too many good things about this site otherwise I will probably get snipped for grovelling. I was moderated once by Mr Watts because I said something which was offensive and it was a fair enough snip. I also got a message explining why.
The link below is to a site called Climate4you, I suppose a toysrus of climate data.
The following is a link about Ice conditions in the arctic in The Monthly Weather Review October 10, 1922 where the arctic was Ice free up to 81degrees 29 ‘.
An extract reads:-
Dr. Hoel, who has just returned, reports the location of hitherto unknown coal deposits on the eastern shores of Advent Bay – deposits of vast extent and superior quality……The oceanographic observations have, however, been even more interesting. Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. The expedition all but established a record, sailing as far north as 81Degrees 29’ in ice-free water. This is the farthest north ever reached with modern oceanographic apparatus…..
http://www.climate4you.com/Text/1922%20SvalbardWarming%20MONTHLY%20WEATHER%20REVIEW%20.pdf
I hope you find the article of interest.
One point, I don’t think that the hypothesis of dangerous climate change due to man made CO2 emissions is a hoax, I just think the hypothesis isn’t proven and in fact there is enough emperical evidence alone to show the hypothesis to be false.
Finally, given your background and if you have not read it I would recommend you scroll back to Willis’s analogy.
Regardless of the science and the data, we have to understand that environmentalism has moved beyond recycling to saving the world from all of the ravages of dirty fossil fuels. 30 or 40 years people may wonder where all that warming went as they battle a cooling climate but you will not be able to convince a warmer today that his worldview of the next 50 years is wrong. All you need to do is try and post a dissenting comment at RC to know what I mean.
Thanks
Will
Okay, wait a second. Everyone here has missed something. I always read these kind of pronouncements carefully, with an eye towards the details, and there’s a big one in here that no one has commented on.
Why did he pick the year 2020 for new warming? Apparently there’s no good reason, other than it being a round number. It’s not 20 years after the ’98 El Nino, as that would be 2018. It’s unlikely that he did some phenomenal calculation that said it would take 22 years to “drain off” the heat.
Is there something else that happens in 2020? Something that might affect climate?
That would be 11 years from now, just about the time Solar Cycle 25 should be climbing up out of the minimum. Here we are with Cycle 24 digging at the bottom of the barrel, and temperatures falling since Cycle 23 peaked back in 2002/3.
I’m thinking that the date wasn’t just pulled out of the air, and that they know it has nothing to do with CO2 levels.
Have you noticed that RC has changed the details on their home page?
Where their used to be a quite a long list of contributors, that list has now disappeared. Instead you now have to click on a link “Contributors” and when you get there, there are only five names – Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Caspar Amman, Rasmus Benestad and Raymond Bradley.
Disappeared are Eric Steig, Stefan Rahmstorf, Raymond Pierrehumbert, and a whole lot more names that I can’t remember.
I wonder why luminaries who were once so keen to tie their colours to the RC mast are not now so keen?
George E. Smith (09:12:59) :
“”” 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
Hi George, no, that was me answering Bob Tisdales query about where to find your post on Air – Ocean heat transfer. And a damn fine post it was too.
OLR = Outgoing Longwave Radiation
Now you see why we abbreviate.
By the way, you’ll be interested in Bob’s graphs of Global and nino 3.4 locale OLR. Very informative regarding the dynamic way water vapour controls climate, compared to the steady upward plod of co2.
I’m offering a prize to anyone who can show me the “proven decadal fall in OLR due to the increase of co2” in the global graph
http://i29.tinypic.com/2cn85qe.png – global
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png – nino 3.4
I just had a laugh when I found myself looking at the photo at the top of this thread. I recalled Foinavon’s comment (Whatever happened to him?) about AGW science being full of dynamic and good looking young women. Betthey didn’t hang around long after the show when these luminaries were speaking.
Funny you mention that tallbloke. I could see that photo being used in a textbook on body language on how to spot people who appear to be hiding something.
Click on the “Previous Posts” button at the bottom of the page, which in fact acts like a “more” button. They’re all down there, but now harder to find, due to the recent “upgrade” of the blog software.
Jeff Naujok (11:07:22) : Nice catch. Gives me an idea for a test of the emergency broadcast system-er, I mean, RC’s censoring habits.
Post that on RC, but with out the solar comments and posed as an innocent question: What is the basis for the seemingly arbitrary choice of 2020 as when warm kicks off again?
Maybe you’ll have a better chance of getting through if you add: “Why not sooner?”
Jeff Naujok (11:07:22) :
Okay, wait a second. Everyone here has missed something. I always read these kind of pronouncements carefully, with an eye towards the details, and there’s a big one in here that no one has commented on.
Why did he pick the year 2020 for new warming? Apparently there’s no good reason, other than it being a round number.
The graph shows a horizontal line from the ’98 el nino peak to the one true trend which crosses at 2020. I think. I’m not going back to look again and give RC another visitor click to count.
GlenG, welcome. But I don’t think you’re a scientist. You do not write like one and how you do write, I find illogical and full of what I call “personal relativity”. For example,
“… some pretty smart climate scientists.” What is – “pretty smart”?
“… which may have been an anomaly from El Nino. “ What is – “an anomaly from”?
“… that implied global warming is not currently occurring.” Why should it have & what is “currently”? What time frame?
“…. temperatures have dropped in the last ten years, which is a good thing. “ How’s that a “good thing”? How is it not?
“…. stating that global cooling is now the norm,” Where? And what is “the norm”?
“… would they be consistent enough” What is “consistent enough”?
“…. global warming was possible” Was? Always IS! Never read anyone here that said otherwise.
“…. if the temperature in 2010 is hotter than 1998?” “the temperature” … “is hotter”? Where?
“To get a good idea of a trend,” What is a “good idea”? “of a trend”? Temperature? Globally? Or in general, scientifically speaking?
“…. it helps if you use a very long time frame.” Helps? How? “… very long”? As in measuring the internal temp of a tornado?
“Maybe not thousands of years….” Why not? The longer the better, if it’s accurate.
“…. In some ways,” What ways? “…. that’s the only time span that is of use to people…” Is that scientifically?
“…. as it’s hard to project a hundred years or more into the future.” While I agree, are you as a “scientist” saying it’s easy to project 60 – 80 years into the future? No? How far? 10 years? 1 year?
“…. it’s going to be obvious if it’s happening or not in about 50 years. “ Really? “… about 50 years”? Why 50? Why not 11? Or in 3?
“…. it’s possible that we are adding just enough greenhouse gas into the atmosphere” Anything is theoretically possible, but what do you mean “we”? What if “we” are subtracting more out than “we” are adding in and the “increase” IS ALL “NATURAL”? Prove it’s not.
“…. to possibly move it to an unstable tipping point. “ “possibly”? See above.
“If you doubt that the planet can be easily tipped…” Doubt is what science is ALL about and is the genesis of theories and in paleoclimatology, theories abound! But “easily tipped”? Surely you jest?
“…. in the past greenhouse gas increases” Scientifically, how does atmospheric gas function like a greenhouse?
“…. natural warming from solar variations…” Really? “solar variations”? So, we have our answer!?
“… but if you read objective studies” Scentifically, what is an “objective” study?
*****
“…. greenhouse gases do absorb or block radiative heat” I’m sorry, what kind of “heat” is that? Can ANYONE reading this tell me the temperature of ANY length radiative wave form? Ultraviolet? Infrared? Sound? Visible light?
*****
I saw that same phrase on the Royal Society of England’s web site.
“…. trapping it in the atmosphere.” Permanently?
“So, even if warming is caused naturally, all the greenhouse gas we are adding is probably making it even warmer.” Probably?
“I’m a scientist …” Really?
“…. as to how much direct research they’ve read with their own eyes,” As opposed to someone else eyes? Oh, “…. as opposed to reading something on the internet “
“…. (a fairly bad place to get your information)”? So a peer reviewed study by a group of highly respected scientist (without an agenda) that can be found on this “fairly bad place” is not to be believed simply BECAUSE it’s on this “fairly bad place” ? WOW! THAT’S real scientific observation.
“….. reading in the newspapers …. hearing it on the radio …. types tend to be frighteningly ignorant of basic science)” So to some people whom call themselves “scientist” and bloggers.
“My advice is to read actual studies from unbiased sources” What is “unbiased”? How does one obtain that state of mind?
“… which tend to be the peer-reviewed scientific journals.” But NOT IF THEY ARE ON THE INTERNET? I think one should FIRST study the history of “peer-reviewing” and HOW that process functions in the “scientific” community both historically and currently!
“Read everything you can …..” To “read” is nothing. To “comprehend” and apply the “truth” of what you have read to your life is the only path to success, however you measure it.
“Avoid the political stuff, politicians do not know much.” Hmmm, You’d be surprised.
As for the last 4 sentences –
“People”? … “strongly political”? … “are probably”? … “personal viewpoint”? … “of the world”? …. “get in the way”? … “of the real”? … “measurable”?… “physical data”? WHAT? You have a lot of defining to do.
“Do not let your … get in the way of understanding the basic science.”? Who you talking too?
“Look at … do not take anybody’s word for anything.”? Then you would KNOW absolutely NOTHING! For 99.999% of ALL information that one learns in life comes from others!
“After about a year and thousands of pages…”. Why not “about” 1 minute and 1 page? If it has the data you seek?
I wish I could contribute more here, technically/scientifically and I apologize to all who do, for taking so much space in the above response to GlenG. But “people” I do understand and I hope GlenG stays around and learns, but “know” that if your going to pontificate here there are some of us that will take you to task and ask you to PROVE that which you state.
@Milwaukee Bob
I understand where you are coming from but your response is a bit like one from our Gav’s.
Some American guy called Benjamin Franklin said
“Tart words make no friends; a spoonful or honey will catch more flies than a gallon of vinegar”
Take Care
Stephen Wilde: if I understand you correctly, we agree on everything except the source of the upwards trends – you say solar, I say carbon. Fair enough, there is scope for argument.
I plump for carbon because the effect was predicted 100 years ago, there seems to be well-established physics behind it, and I see the trend correlating with the start of the coal era. For solar, I get the impression the effect is not so well established, I’m not aware of data showing a correlation for 400 years, and I would have also thought that we would be seeing more of a response to the quiet sun than we are.
I’d be interested to explore your hypothesis further, if you care to link to data? Or post it in my blog comments?
Re : KLA (17:10:45) :
” Just wondering aloud .. I work in signal processing…”
Hope you’re still on the thread. I spent a little time this evening, experimenting with the method you described. It works very well for the most part, but ….
I popped a sinusoid into the real part of an FFT input signal. Then, as you describe, multiplied the transformed signal by (jW) to get the transform of the derivative (you refer to “rotation” and “scaling”), and then inverted. I got confirmed a pretty good cosine, as required.
I say “pretty good” because the middle is great, but there is distortion at the ends. This will be the effects of the rectangular window which (as you’ll know) cannot be avoided for a finite data sample. So the time derivative becomes a little problematic at the ends of the series with spectral analysis.
I tried a different window to the input series (smoothed edges) , but the the extremes of the derivative series still look pretty unreliable as it then reflects the “attenuated” input signal at the ends.
If you are thinking about experimenting with temperatures, it might be worhtwhile “packing” a sinusoid into the real part of the input series and test data into the imaginary part. They can be unscrambled later using complex conjugates. The shape of the derivative of the sinusoid will give handy visualisation of what is probably happening to the derivative of the series you are trying to measure.
“Has something like that been done with temperature data?”
Not sure of anything very recent. There was a paper published in JSTOR back in 1976 (Variations in the Earth’s Orbit: Pacemaker of the Ice Ages) which claimed to detect Milankovitch cycles using FFT. There will probably be a lot of experimenting with FFT and other methods out there in the field.
Apart from end effects, I suspect one of the limitations will be a need for low-pass filtering of the temperature data to avoid frequency folding (look at the edges of the spike in 1998). From that point, perhaps the case that further processing by spectral analysis starts to diminish. Just a thought.
Thanks for describing the method.
“”” vibenna (16:01:08) :
Stephen Wilde: if I understand you correctly, we agree on everything except the source of the upwards trends – you say solar, I say carbon. Fair enough, there is scope for argument.
I plump for carbon because the effect was predicted 100 years ago, there seems to be well-established physics behind it, and I see the trend correlating with the start of the coal era. “””
Not so fast vibenna; you’re a bit loose with your terms. What “effect” was predicted 100 years ago that was due to “carbon” ? I’m not aware of any.
There was a prediction somewhere in that time frame that “carbon dioxide” in the atmosphere could absorb surface emitted long wave radiation, which would raise atmospheric temperatures; but I know of nothing predicting a carbon effect.
And the CO2 effect has not panned out since the observed temperature fluctuations don’t in any way follow the measured CO2 changes, and the science shows that if anything, the CO2 changes are a result of the temprature changes, and not the other way round.
So no you are wrong; there is no well established Physics behind what you say. And that is the whole point; it is a much mangled computer program that comes up with these claims; not any measured observations.
How come Roger gets only eleven comments and WUWT? gets 271 on a copy of Roger’s post? Anthony, you have really outdone yourself here!!
Vibenna, you show me your correlation and I will show you mine.
Pamela….
vibenna (16:01:08) :
I suppose you’re referring to Svante Arrhenius, who hypothesized that CO2 would cause global warming in his 1896 paper.
But ten years later Arrhenius reversed himself [can you imagine Al Gore or Michael Mann admitting they were in error?] In his 1906 paper, Arrhenius drastically reduced his climate sensitivity number. We know now that it was still too high, but he was finally going in the right direction.
The central, glaring error in the whole CO2=AGW conjecture is that carbon dioxide [“carbon” to those who get their information from TV and realclimate] causes global warming. Any warming due to CO2 has already happened. Now, CO2 levels are a response to temperature, not a cause of temperature rises. No matter what time scale you use, you can not show that changes in CO2 have ever caused subsequent changes in temperature:
click1
click2
click3
click4 [note the R-squared (non)-correllation]
click5
The facts make clear that almost all the warming possible due to CO2 has already taken place, and more CO2 will not cause any noticeable warming — even if CO2 levels double or triple.
Smokey (19:04:22) :
Blimey Guv,
The cherries were ripe when you went through that orchard, and I see you picked a few.
2 of the plots have no real data behind them and a timscale at years per pixel
1 has a cerrypicked temperature scale
one has a cherry picked time span
On is Christopher Monckton – say no more!
a real scale comparison of CO2 and TSI. Which has the possibility of changing global temperatures?
http://img528.imageshack.us/img528/7777/tsico2realscale.jpg
CO2 is not the only GHG in the equation!
Hu McCulloch (12:36:59) :
trevor (11:35:26) :
Have you noticed that RC has changed the details on their home page?
Where their used to be a quite a long list of contributors, that list has now disappeared. Instead you now have to click on a link “Contributors” and when you get there, there are only five names – Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Caspar Amman, Rasmus Benestad and Raymond Bradley.
Disappeared are Eric Steig, Stefan Rahmstorf, Raymond Pierrehumbert, and a whole lot more names that I can’t remember.
I wonder why luminaries who were once so keen to tie their colours to the RC mast are not now so keen?
Click on the “Previous Posts” button at the bottom of the page, which in fact acts like a “more” button. They’re all down there, but now harder to find, due to the recent “upgrade” of the blog software.
If they’ve finally realised the water coming up past the portholes of the fair ship MV-RC is due to rising sea levels, you have to wonder why they have headed for the bilges.