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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Here’s the old list:
* Caspar Ammann
* David Archer
* Eric Steig
* Gavin Schmidt
* Michael Mann
* Rasmus Benestad
* Ray Bradley
* Ray Pierrehumbert
* Stefan Rahmstorf
* Thibault de Garidel
* William Connolley
William Connolley, hah! I wonder what his new vocation will be once policing wikipedias gorebull wombling pages becomes a thnkless task.
Smokey – yes (to the first part anyway). George E. Smith – what smokey said. Smokey, I’m really interested in your claim about diminishing responsiveness – care to post some more links on that so I can dig a bit?
My confidence in AGW partly comes from the prediction 100 years ago, and partly from the current majority climate science view about the physics of warming. I don’t overrate the consensus though. I work a lot with time series in the social sciences, and historical fitting in unbelievably hard. You get over-fitting, omitted variable bias (specification error), failure to account for non-sampling error, you name it. If you added up your degrees of freedom genuinely (including all the analyst decisions, as well as the obvious parameters) they would be very low. There is only one person in the world in my field that automatically I trust to get this stuff right. For the rest, fancy models run the risk of being just … fancy models.
However, I rate the 100 year old prediction highly. I’m a Popperian: show me the predictions. Show me the explanations. Show me that one set of hypotheses has more explanatory power than another set. That’s why I was a skeptic, but recanted once I realized warming could be stepped, and there was a mechanism that could explain the stepping.
Pamela – if you’ll come behind the bike sheds with me, I’ll show you my British Coal Production figures as a proxy for the start of the modern carbon emission. And compare them with my 150 year long Hadcrut temperature data set http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/. Looks like the temperature turning point roughly coincides with peak British coal production. More than coincidence? You be the judge.
Sorry, those British coal production figures are a bit shy. Here they are again;
http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file40592.xls
vibenna (02:54:01) :
So you are a ‘social scientist’ are you? Well, OK. I guess that qualifies you as a ‘climate scientist’ as well.
vibenna (02:54:01) :
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/
Jolly hockey sticks again I’m afraid.
bill (21:53:56)
Then surely the goron crowd is regretting that they’ve hung their hat pretty much exclusively on CO2, now that it’s clear that CO2 has only a minuscule effect. As we can see, the tiny effect of CO2 is overwhelmed by many other effects.
As I believe I originally made clear, I provided several graphs in order to avoid the usual claim that only a short time scale was used. Lacking any other argument, you say it’s a ‘cherry picked’ time span anyway — when I provided several charts with different time scales. So if that’s all you’ve got, you really haven’t got anything except your newest strawman argument, TSI. That wasn’t in the discussion, was it? Good job setting up Mr. Strawman and knocking him down. You invented your new argument and took it on. Bravo, sport!
Finally, you’re getting to be a parody of the typical goron response when you casually dismiss Christopher Monckton with a wave of your hand and the comment, “…Christopher Monckton – say no more!” Pure ad hominem; no substance whatever.
I understand, bill. When you can not refute Monckton’s reasonable argument, then ad homs are all you’ve got left. Recall that Monckton kicked Schmidt’s butt in their last debate. Maybe Gavin would have done better if he’d told the audience, “Christopher Monckton – say no more!” [Hmm-m-m. Maybe he should have tried it – he couldn’t have done much worse.]
Ad hominems are the default position of the climate alarmists.
vibenna (2:54:01),
The diminishing effect of CO2 has been discussed many times on WUWT. Being new here [and apparently fairly new to the subject], you need to get up to speed. There’s probably no better way than to make WUWT your home page. The chart I provided shows the reason that, despite the steady increase in CO2, the planet isn’t warming in response. All of the CO2 warming has already taken place. Even doubling CO2 from here would only cause a negligible effect, so small that it would not even be measurable and hardly worth spending any more money on, much less $trilions. [The AGW scam is costing other, much more deserving sciences a cut of the action. The AGW crowd is hogging $billions at their expense. Malaria eradication, childhood vaccination programs, medical studies — they all lose their share of the grant budget because AGW grants have shouldered them all out of the public trough. Grant money that should have gone to deserving programs goes instead to promoters of the AGW scam. It’s really amazing that other scientists meekly put up with it.]
Carbon dioxide has been demonized by the climate alarmists. But if CO2 is harmful in any way, please tell me exactly how? Let’s compare your CO2 answer with H2O.
CO2 and H2O are both beneficial, and essential to life. In the concentrations we’re discussing, both are completely harmless.
If you believe otherwise, show me. I’m a skeptic.
Re Jordan (16:35:21) :
Thanks for trying it out.
Your suggestion of superimposing a known wave to estimate end effects is a good one. It seems to me that for example superimposing a triangle wave would be a good way to go, as the differential of that would be a nice, easy to remove rectangle, and it contains frequencies predictably decreasing throughout the spectrum.
I know about the pesky end effects. I threw the FFT method out there because it allows to better estimate artifacts of filtering than the usual FIR methods IMHO.
I suggested a Gaussian filter as lowpass, because its transformation invariant and therefore minimizes artifacts.
Jimmy Haigh: that is neither an argument, nor evidence. Nor does it relate to my claims.
Smokey: Go on, gimme a link. As for harmfulness – climate change will bw disruptive. Humanity will adapt, but the adaption might be very unpleasant to existing societies. As unpleasant as, say, the Normal invasion of England was for the Anglo-Saxons, or the invasions of Poland in 1939. That’s my view, but it is argument from analogy only.
vibenna (14:33:30) :
“As for harmfulness – climate change will bw [sic] disruptive. Humanity will adapt, but the adaption might be very unpleasant to existing societies. ”
Now – I agree with all of that.
But you lose the plot with: “As unpleasant as, say, the Normal [sic] invasion of England was for the Anglo-Saxons, or the invasions [sic] of Poland in 1939. That’s my view, but it is argument from analogy only.”
I don’t see how you can compare climatic changes with one country invading another. Doesn’t work. Real science is a lot more complex than social science.
Gosh! Scientists discover that they aren’t divinely inspired and everything they predict isn’t the absolute truth! What a surprise! (Is there a smiley for *sarcastic smirk*?)
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. 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?
vibenna – have not heard of the Little Ice Age (LIA), Maunder Minimum, Dalton Minimum.
One could reasonably argue that natural warming over the last 160 years has allowed for the flowering of our current civilization, by supporting improved agricultural yields that liberated enough people to allow for the industrial revolution to occur, which than produced a positive feedback on agricultural production to produce a runaway “civilizing” effect.
So we are just warming up out of a nasty LIA cold spell. Lets hope that the current warming continues, for everyones benefit.
Unfortunately the Suns gone quiet.
Jimmy Haigh (18:56:09) :
I don’t see how you can compare climatic changes with one country invading another. Doesn’t work. Real science is a lot more complex than social science.
Invasions and climate are closely linked. The sack of Rome by the Visigoths came about because of a cold snap in the C4th. Ditto the invasion of Britain by Jutes and Saxons around the same time. They pushed a lot of Brit’s over to what became Brittany in northern France. They Joined forces with the Normans in 1066 to go and reclaim their birthright.
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