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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Please our mother Earth, save yourself this way: remove the stupid people who want save you. This people want save only themselves. (sorry for my english)
“Good to see a bit of balance over at Real Climate I say!!
Your “balance” is their butt-covering, back-peddling, head stuck up somewhere refusal to just admit they were wrong.
Wrong.
Period.
“If ya mess up, fess up” would be my advice to the Warmongers . . . bite your bullet now before you do any more damage to the legitimate environmental movement.
I said ‘pull the other one, it’s got bells on!’
Can you hear the bells?
DaveE.
This anthropogenic global warming stuff is looking more and more like a religious cult. When the doomsday doesn’t happen, “just wait a little longer, and oh, by the way, give us all your wealth, present and future, while we recalculate doomsday.”
I keyed in on the comment about the effects of soot in the models perhaps being off. Once again, the output of the models cannot be used as data. Computer model outputs cannot be used for verifying, modifying, or discarding the dozens of laws, theories, and hypotheses mathematically represented in the GCMs. The model outputs cannot distinguish one hypothesis from another, and certainly cannot indicate when entirely new hypotheses need to be developed.
Have the Realclimate chaps seen this ?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jul/13/el-nino-climate-change
The reporter says that the coming El Nino will cause a series of the hottest years in the record over the next few years whereas Realclimate is fast backtracking and saying that natural variability may prevent further warming until 2020.
Looks like chaos in the alarmist camp. No joined up thinking at all.
Anyway if an alarmist reporter is saying that a single forthcoming El Nino can have such a big effect how can they ignore the warming effect of the series of powerful El Ninos from 1975 to 2000. By their own logic any observed warming then would have been El Nino induced and not CO2 induced.
A total collapse of logical thought
“Besides, between now and the next warming cycle we’ll have to deal with the next Ice Age scare. I think its already starting.”
The mammoth, sloth, and saber tooth tiger say, “Sorry, you aren’t following the story line, the Dawn of the Dinosaurs, is next.” 😉
Always good to see facts proving the fiction to be wrong. The serious problem with the BIG lie is that once discovered you’ve no-where to hide :-))
I’m hoping they stick to the excuse that AGW has only been delayed, as if they do they will end up burying themselves. Their is such an obvious flaw in their argument that I can’t believe they haven’t spotted it, but once belief takes over from reason, perhaps this is no surprise.
I wonder if this is all a precursor to what will happen to the ice in the Arctic? At the mo its hard to say. Is it following a 2007 like dip or 2005? I have a feeling there might be a lot more ice than expected (if you believe the 2-year ice stuff) and if so this is possibly going to be the most hilarious September/October for AGW theory on record.
‘Global Warming causes Arctic to freeze over’
But…, but …, it is not peer reviewed, so it cannot be right.
Interesting thing is that the air can’t heat the water. Even if there is a significant gradient, the difference in the specific heat of air (.001J/(cm3*K)) and water (4.8J/(cm3*K)) dictates that no meaningful amount of heat can be transported from air to water. When the gradient is reversed, however, the air temperature can be affected by water. This is seems important because CO2 can only heat the air, and the air can’t heat the water. Water gets all its heat from the sun. The only effect that CO2 can have on the ocean is some sort of feedback that affects clouds. Again, it seems physically impossible for the direct effects of CO2 to have any measurable affect on the ocean, but the ocean does have an effect on the atmosphere, probably much larger than the direct effect of CO2. Is this accurate?
Those flogging the dying horse of AGW are either suffering from Cognitive Dissonance [CD], or they have a political agenda. Those gaming the system for money and status are very much in the minority, since there is not enough of either to go around.
That means most of the die-hard AGW believers suffer from CD. They’ve taken as fact a flimsy hypothesis that has been falsified over and over. They confidently talk about a mythical “tipping point” as if it exists, but they can not identify it; its existence must be taken on faith. Polar bears drowning due to a fraction of a degree of global warming is uncritically assumed based on an iconic picture, without other corroborating evidence.
And the Scientific Method is turned on its head. Skeptics are told to prove that AGW does not exist — when it is up to those promoting AGW to demonstrate, with strong, reproducible and falsifiable evidence, that AGW exists outside of their fevered imaginations and their always-inaccurate computer models.
They are True Believers, as locked into their belief system as any Scientologist. With so much of their ego tied up in their AGW belief, they soon succumb to full-blown CD.
Dr. Festinger explains the process, using as his example an actual group that believed in the imminent arrival of space aliens on a particular date, who would save them from being destroyed with the rest of the world.
The famed social psychologist Leon Festinger, developer of the concept of Cognitive Dissonance, conducted studies of the phenomenon. The psychological model is that their belief system becomes part of their identity, their self, and information at odds with that belief system becomes an attack on the self. This helps explain why such people can be so resistant to information that would otherwise be judged contrary to their beliefs on a rational basis. The following example is based on true events:
Festinger’s book, When Prophecy Fails, tells of a group of doomsday believers who predicted the end of the world on a particular date. Their group would be saved by a deus ex-machina in the form of space aliens in flying saucers. Everyone else was toast.
But when the world didn’t end, and the flying saucers never appeared, the believers became even more convinced that they were right. A few left the group, but most became even louder, and proselytized even more aggressively after the disconfirmation. Eventually, they came to believe that their very goodness was the reason that the aliens decided to save the world. Pointing out the fact that there never were any space aliens only resulted in more argument.
We can expect more strange defenses from AGW believers as evidence continues to mount against catastrophic AGW and runaway global warming. For example, we are now told by those afflicted with CD, in all sincerity, that global warming is causing global cooling. And the few who are cashing in on the scam quietly enable those afflicted by CD by censoring skeptical points of view wherever possible.
Looking at that picture, I now understand.
And after reading what they said, including AND especially – “there are no guarantees to how the climate may respond”, I’m shaking my head and all I can say to those folks over there is – “Here’s your sign.”
@ur momisugly Stacey
Thank you. I hadn’t thought about that one. 🙂 Hmm, now to figure out how to make some cash on acid. Oh, wait; tried that in the ’60’s 😉 Didn’t work out too well. 😀
Shanta (09:52:55) : Global warming’s all a myth, says the Spectator. Read about it on BBC Bloom.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/climatechange/2009/07/anyone_seen_the_front_page.html
I can’t stand Monbiot – but he’s listed points that Plimer has, supposedly, got wrong. Plimer’s book is excellent, but I did find some slapdash writing as well as the mainly excellently, heavily referenced passages. So *some* of Monbiot’s damning list of complaints could have a basis in fact. Some are at the very least contentious, like Monbiot’s claim that the CO2 rise is all (or even mostly) due to us sinners. But I’d like to know exactly what Plimer would answer.
Great to see Spectator giving a clear thumbs-down.
rbateman (11:40:27) :Here your “overshot”
The origin of all, back in 1989:
Back in September 29, 1989 it happened a gap or jump in TSI of 0.47 w/sq.mt. (scafetta paper cited above)
Largest Solar Flare in a Decade Erupts
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1178303.html
After a time lag of eight years..the 97-98 big El Nino.
Google for “September 29, 1989” and you’ll be surprised.
Nogw (10:20:47)
“When water is warmer than the air heat goes out (from water to air) and when water is cooler then air heats water. This is a gradient of energy working both ways”.
No it doesn’t. If water is cooler than air then it cools the air (sea fog, anyone ? ). The energy taken from the air by the water is trivial compared to the amount of energy required to warm a volume of water as much as the same volume of much less dense air.
Furthermore, evaporation is a continuing process caused by density and pressure differentials between water and air so that evaporation actually accelerates when air is warmer than water (especially if the air is dry).
Thus ANY energy taken from the air by cooler water will just go to bringing forward the timing of the change of state of those molecules already on the cusp of changing state. In relation to those molecules the energy required to effect the change of state is less that the latent heat taken from the surrounding environment of water AND air when the change of state occurs.
As a result of the consequent cascade effect bringing forward the timing of the change of state of multitudes of water molecules, the increased evaporation results in an increased net flow of energy from water to air just because the air is warmer than the water.
When the air is cooler than the water, evaporation slows down (especially if the air is humid) because the transfer of energy from water to air is inhibited by the reduced capacity of the air to carry it as water vapour with it’s attendant latent energy but it still occurs continuously.
The transfer of energy from water to air is always in that one direction whether water or air is the warmer. It is part of the one way transmission of solar energy through the Earth system, sun to oceans to air to space (at variable speeds dependant primarily on internal oceanic behaviour, not the composition of the air).
Either way, energy removed from the water becomes latent energy in the air which does not raise the air temperature of the air (it being latent) so the water continues to cool, the air temps come down to the level of the water and the flow of latent energy from surface to space is enhanced via wind, convection and ultimately condensation out at a higher level when that energy is more readily radiated to space.
Thus extra energy in the air from extra GHGs increases the evaporation rate which increases the speed of the hydrological cycle which prevents the extra energy in the air from warming the oceans.
AGW is thus falsified (I think).
Climate models do not reflect this simple truth and the ideas of Tyndall et al whilst correct if taking the air in isolation cannot affect the global equilibrium temperature set by the constantly varying interplay of sun and oceans.
It seems that this El Nino overshoot is quite inconvenient to the AGWiers. They should ask Mann to make it dissapear… if he can make dissapear 150-400 years periods, surely he can make dissapear a little 2 years annomaly. Oh, right… we remember 97/98… too bad.
Steve McIntyre should have real fun with this one.
Ashby Lynch (12:35:06)
Spot on.
The models have apparently been doing a good job of hindcasting and are very close to the current temperature pattern (paraphrasing gavin) so I don’t know why they posted this unscientific guest opinion.
Seriously, there is natural variability that the models do not focus on. There was a big El Nino in 1997-98 and the models undershot the actual temperatures (except for Hansen’s 1988 predictions but the newer models missed under). Then there was a La Nina in 2007 and 2008 and the models are overshooting the actual temperature record now.
The models are never going to be far off because there are several plugs available to them like Aerosols (-0.6C) and 30 year climate system lags like warming in the ocean pipeline (-0.3C) to bring things back into line.
What is definitely not happening is that temperatures are not keeping up with the greenhouse gas warming formulae that the models and the theory are based on.
At some point, they have to go back to the drawing board and have physicists perform some actual experiments on the greenhouse gases so we can rewrite the theories based on empirical evidence instead of just solving for a few theoritical equations.
Is there heat “in the pipeline”?
http://climatesci.org/2009/03/05/is-there-climate-heating-in-the-pipeline/
The answer to the question posted in this weblog “Is There Climate Heating In “The Pipeline”? is NO.
An all-too-transparent exercise in CYA is now replacing the cock-sure predictions of doom. Except for the polarity, it reminds me of the rationalizations of portfolio managers who put their clients’ money into the top of the market.
“…If this hypothesis is correct, the era of consistent record-breaking global mean temperatures will not resume until roughly 2020.”
There have been lots of broken records this year…in the other direction.
Did this Forum just take place as it appears? This is confusing:
http://www.adlerplanetarium.org/climatechange/forums.html
“FORUM 1 HOW MUCH? HOW SOON? HOW DO WE KNOW?
Saturday, February 25, 2006 “
I wouldn’t agree that “uncertainty is a far batter reason for justifying action”.
Even if you estimate chances of model calculations to become true to be at 30%, chances to be wrong are 70%. In the latter case, however we are very likely to be heading into a new ice age and any action would have been not only useless but counterproductive.
CodeTech (10:50:29) :
The block of steel analogy can be replaced with a real-world example: the heat sink on your CPU.
But of course in a real cpu example, the fan speeds up as the cpu gets hotter. All we need to do now is explain how the earths fan got stuck at the higher RPM for 10 years (due to CO2 of course)and build it into the IPCC models and we are away again to fix the fan.