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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Sounds like clutching at straws to me – This seems to be demonstrating a belief that the minimum roughness smoothing reflects reality, and next year’s measured values will really be the same as the linear trend including 1998 would project. Where is their physical model to back up this concoction? What drives the lost heat to be stored up where we can’t see it all ready for El Nino to throw it out at us? Did 1998 borrow from before or after on the curve, and why?
How does the energy to drive an overshoot get sucked out of the ether?
mick (08:53:52) :
The dwarf looks cheerful.
Leave him alone – he allowed my comment to be posted at RC.
So what would happen if there were to be another 1997/8 type El Niño event, say in 2019. How much colder would the planet become due to that warming ?
“there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond”.
Tell it to Gore and Hansen.
“Regardless, it’s important to note that we are not talking about global cooling, just a pause in warming. ”
A pause?
UAH data since June 2001. Copy. Paste. Tappety-tap. Add trendline. Tappety-tap….
Er… That’s not a pause, its a ski slope.
But I’m just cherry-picking data of course…
If they think anyone will have anything but scorn for them in 20 years they’re deluding themselves. Future historians will look back on this era a mixture of pity and contempt, and I won’t be surprised if my great-grandkids see that same photo in their high school sociology textbooks, at the beginning of the chapter on mass delusions.
Besides, between now and the next warming cycle we’ll have to deal with the next Ice Age scare. I think its already starting.
“overshot”???
I never knew that heat exchange had momentum. Must have missed that in my fizix course.
Overshoot is also common just before the steep fall into a serious cold period.
Talk about back pedalling – and what if it’s not a dozen years but more than 30 years of cooling? With a negative PDO and the AMO slowly cooling, those models are looking rather sillier than usual about now.
So where does CO2 now rank in importance when compared to all the other things we do which are also pokes at complex non linear dynamic systems of the world in which we live?
Nice picture – so that’s what Marxists look like these days!
I’ve asked RC if we can have a guest post from Tsonis – he seems to have a slightly different view from Swanson:
Now the question is how has warming slowed and how much influence does human activity have?
“But if we don’t understand what is natural, I don’t think we can say much about what the humans are doing. So our interest is to understand — first the natural variability of climate — and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,” Tsonis said.
Tsonis said he thinks the current trend of steady or even cooling earth temps may last a couple of decades or until the next climate shift occurs.
http://www.wisn.com/weather/18935841/detail.html
Ray (08:54:14) :
How can ONE year of a warmer El Nino packed so much energy that it wouwld take 20 years of constant cooling to “get rid” of the heat? If that was the case, what would have been the actual global temperature that year?
Not that much heat escaped that year anyway. Look at Bob Tisdale’s OLR graph for the Nino 3.4 area:
http://i25.tinypic.com/2035ed.png
mick (08:53:52) :
The dwarf looks cheerful.
“All dwarfs are by nature dutiful, serious, literate, obedient and thoughtful people whose only minor failing is a tendency, after one drink of koolaid, to rush at enemies screaming “Arrrrrrgh!” and axing their legs off at the knee.”
But then also about discworld dwarves: “All dwarfs have beards and wear up to twelve layers of clothing. Gender is more or less optional.”
Damn you Terry, its almost too perfect.
Exactly. Take a look at any religious armageddon site. They’ve been “predicting” things for thousands of years, and none of them have come true. Why should it be any different now?
Rotfl, I’m going to start using this, if you don’t mind.
Well, this is most interesting. For years they’ve been warning us that there is more warming “in the pipeline”. Now, they’re saying that because of extra warming in 1998, there’s more cooling in the pipeline … say what?
To see why this is nonsense, suppose we have a block of steel. We have a small fire under it, so it is steadily warming. Then suppose we hit it with a hot blast from a blowtorch, so it has “effectively overshot” the underlying warming.
If that is the case, it will cool from the peak of the overshoot … but because the small fire is under it, it will not cool beyond the level of the underlying warming. In fact, it will never fall below the underlying trend. Instead, it will pick up the underlying trend as soon as the steel cools to the level of the original trend. The fire under the steel is adding energy no matter what the temperature of the steel is, so it will not go cooler than that.
In other words, their claim doesn’t make sense. It’s a great claim that lets them push out the date of the expected warming … but it simply won’t work that way.
I encourage them to try it with a block of steel, and see how well it works out. As long as the underlying warming continues, it cannot fall below that trend.
w.
This is the usual exit-strategy of the Doomsayers:
At the moment it’s not exactly how we predicted it, but in twenty years, it will happen like we’ve told it.
This worked very well with the ozon-hole hoax, why shouldn’t work it now.
“Peter (08:20:01) :
Why is it that professors of French origin so often look like contestants in a game of who can look the most ridiculous?”
Prière de nous envoyer votre propre autoportrait pour que nous puissions vous juger dans ce concours de beauté.
= Please post your own self-portrait and let us see how you fare in the beauty contest.
I wonder how this post passed the snippers
Amazing.
There’s no more reliability in this new 2020 concept than any of the weaker parts of AGW movement.
This appears to be leading towards the ultimate default for people who are wrong.
Fabricate a scenario where there’s no definitive way to prove them wrong until
everyone involved on both sides is dead.
How special.
Government accountability at it’s best.
What an epic waste of time and resources.
Or crime of the century.
Three points
1. It’s not Gavin its a guest post
2. It’s a sensible paper which should be commended for its balance rather than accusing a web site of backpedalling and worse
3. Overall the paper is consistent with a lukewarmer position.
Good to see a bit of balance over at Real Climate I say!!
They “hypothesize that the established pre-1998 trend is the true forced warming signal,” ??? Don’t the models “prove” this? Why the need to hypothesize?? That’s too funny!
tallbloke (09:22:48) :
I understand that some of that heat got trapped, obviously. But certainly, it would not take 20 years of cooling to return to pre-overshooting-El Nino.
So they are saying that they can’t be proven wrong until 2020? And until then the debate remains closed? No matter what the facts are until then? So they get to save face (and cash grant checks at the liquor store) until they retire?
It makes perfect sense to me.
However, this apparent impulsive behavior explicitly highlights the fact that humanity is poking a complex, nonlinear system…
Yes. We call it “the Economy.”
Laugh a lot. This post by tamino at RC is a perfect demonstration of why and how this lunacy will continue till we’re all dead.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/
tamino says:
13 July 2009 at 7:31 PM
Re: #91 (Alex)
I agree that there’s tremendous room for improvement in how climate science is communicated to the public. RealClimate is top-notch, but doesn’t reach enough people to counter the very effective propaganda campaign attempting to deny the reality, human origin, and danger of global warming.
I’m especially vexed by the perception by so many that there’s “proof” that “global warming has stopped.” This is based on faulty statistics (often by those who should know better, hence are not just mistaken but dishonest) and the truly silly, but pervasive, idea that global warming means every year should be hotter than the one before it. Anyone who reads my blog knows I work very hard to dispel these myths, but a lot remains to be done to communicate these sometimes not-so-simple truths to the voting public.
In fact, perhaps Al Gore did a better job of it than the scientific community. But much of his efforts are negated by the mean-spiritied, dishonest, but effective character assassination aimed at him. Despicable, yes — but also effective propaganda.
On topic: I’ve posted a comment on this post:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/warming-interrupted/