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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Do you suppose they have figured out Waxman-Malarkey will not pass the Senate and they have decided to throw in the towel early?
Just one more hot year and the crooks might have pulled it off.
This is not the first time the “government science” has done a reversal. The same has happened with addiction science. Once the scary research was disproved real research has started to come to the fore. Part of the reason is that some of the committed drug war scientists who were honest recanted based on the fact that effects they were looking for did not appear.
We may be seeing that here.
From here on out I expect that climate science will get honest. Out of necessity.
Another major instance of “backing off” from AGW/Models here
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2009/07/14/global.warming.our.best.guess.likely.wrong
There definitely seems to be a major shift in mainstream and even AGW scientists re AGW happening right now.
So, you’re telling me that I can’t warm the surface of a bowl of water by blowing a stream of hot air over it with an air dryer?
And if the cooling keeps going, and passes the 1990s average… What then will they claim?
George E. Smith @14:12:00 I, too, enjoyed that, George.
I have posted the following on RC as it states it is a ‘test’.
The test is actually to see whether it is censored or not. Given my past record on there it is 95%+ certain it will be.
Lets see!
“TEST
“” Again, as the temperature anomaly associated with this jump dissipates, we hypothesize that the climate system will return to its signal as defined by its pre-1998 behavior in roughly 2020″
Exactly what signal is this then?
Is it this one from when we first got satellite data to the mid 1990s?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1995/trend/plot/uah/from:1979/to:1995
Or is it this one from 1940 upto when the satellite launched in 1979?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1940/to:1979/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1940/to:1979
Which one should we worry about in 2020?
Alan”
Just wondering aloud:
I work in signal processing. One of the frequent tasks is to find “drifts” in time sampled signals. You could also call them “trends”. Basically the direction and speed of a drift can be seen by getting the 1st order derivative of the original signal. What I found to be a good way of doing that is to normalize the signal to zero end points by subtracting a line connecting the end points. Remember the slope of that line.
Then do an FFT on the resulting sample series.
Multiply the FFT vectors with a Gaussian, basically running it through a gaussian filter. Gaussian filters minimize overshoots.
Then rotate the resulting complex frequency vectors of the filtered FFT by 90 degrees counterclockwise.
Scale the resulting frequency vectors with the normalized frequency, starting at zero.
The rotation and scaling results in basically the derivative of each vector.
Do an inverse FFT and add the original line slope to each resulting time point.
Voala, you have the deriviative of the signal, and thus the low pass filtered slope (trend) at each point.
Has something like that been done with temperature data?
All I’ve seen so far uses either FIR filters of various shapes in the time domain, while FFTs were mostly used for spectral analysis.
Eric (16:19:20) : I commend RC for publishing it. However, that does not mean I don’t believe it’s just CYA.
VG (16:27:38) : I still haven’t figured out why the warmists don’t consider clouds to be aerosols.
Ashby Lynch (12:35:06) :
“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. […]”
This assertion probably needs some qualification. It is falsified by the simple fact that ice water (and cold beer) does get warmer when exposed to warmer air. A similar mechanism certainly does transfer energy from the atmosphere to the ocean.
I suspect that the assertion turns on what is meaningful? This requires quantitative analysis. We cannot draw “meaningful” conclusions with thought experiements.
Does this mean that the current period of Global Cooling is now official?
Gaivn Schmidt and Michael Mann could be twins!
“This assertion probably needs some qualification. It is falsified by the simple fact that ice water (and cold beer) does get warmer when exposed to warmer air. A similar mechanism certainly does transfer energy from the atmosphere to the ocean.”
Are you serious?
Warm air over cold ocean gives fog, which blocks solar heating.
I think we can now safely say we have entered the Paul Ehrlich phase of AGW: it will happen in fill-in-the-blank years in the future and if that does not work out, just keep on extending it further. You will still be seen as a serious and visionary scientist because you see gloom and doom and doubt the genius and innovativeness of the human animal.
Robert (17:15:21):
This assertion probably needs some qualification. It is falsified by the simple fact that ice water (and cold beer) does get warmer when exposed to warmer air. A similar mechanism certainly does transfer energy from the atmosphere to the ocean.
What mechanism are your referring to when talking about a mechanism through which the atmosphere transfers heat to the ocean?
One hot year takes 20 years to dissipate into the climate system and will mask any warming for that period of time ? I have a hard time believing that’s possible.
I would like those AGWers, like Flanagan, who post on here, to comment on the famous ‘pipelne’.
We have been told for many years that even if we completely halted our CO2 emissions we would still have many years of warming to come due to the committed heat in the ‘pipeline’.
So has this been falsified or not?
If not can you be specific as to what what natural factors could possibly prevent this?
Of course we now know that CO2 emissions have actually continued at an increasing rate. So these factors now need to be big enough to stop a temperature rise notwithstanding this increased rate.
Oh, of course, we also now now know that temperatures have actually dropped since the start of the 21st century. So what possible natural factors can have caused this amazing situation, to have stopped all the built up heat in the pipeline, to have stopped all the further increases caused by the increasing CO2 and to top it all, to actually cool the planet all during the same period?
Wow!!
Surely you will wish to comment on this previously ‘settled’ science of the pipeline?
If you do not, be assured that after every subsequent post you make in this forum, that I spot, in support of AGW I am going to pose this question to you
Alan
These are dangerous volatile times in the Global Warming Futures market. Expect stock price ramping and crashes.
I beg your pardon, Boudu. How is the president of the Adler Planetarium a weatherman of the Apocalypse?
-Chip Knappenberger
Did some one say Pipeline?
Alan Millar (18:08:43) :
I would like those AGWers, like Flanagan, who post on here, to comment on the famous ‘pipelne’.
I suspect that ‘the pipeline’ is blocked and full of something unmentionable that the AGW mob have been spouting for the last 20 years.
The lead photo shows 4 gentlemen, 2 of whom (Schmidt and Pierrehumbert) are Contributors to Real Climate, where the article in question by guest contributor Kyle Swanson appeared. Pierrehumbert himself posted the article, and therefore presumably agrees substantially with it.
However, the other two, Paul Knappenberger of Adler Planetarium and Wally Broeckner of Columbia may, for all we know, just be posing politely with Schmidt and Pierrehumbert and know nothing about Swanson’s arguments. Knappenberger’s institution hosted the climate conference at which these gentlemen gathered, but he is presumably an astronomer who may or may not have any knowledge of or interest in the issues involved.
Are Knappenberger and Broeckner being carelessly tarred by “guilt by association” here as fellow-traveling “weathermen of the apocalypse”?
Note that one Chip Knappenberger (likely some relation given the number of Knappenbergers in the phone book) raised the same issue above on 7/14 at 18:14:01.
James H.,
Your realtors’ analogy is spot on.
I have had to deal with my young children being worried over the content of school lessons about global warming and told that not believing in global warming is akin to “not believing that man landed on the moon.” We face the prospect of Waxman-Markey devastating our economy for decades to come.
Global warming advocates incessantly put forth predictions that this season or that would be the “hottest ever” which never materialized.
Swanson and Tsonis now are putting forth their fantasy about how we will have a “pause in the warming.” This theory sounds like a way out for global warming proponents to hedge their bets. No dice. This theory and its societal ramifications and consequences is their responsibility.
Don’t worry guys, (King Canute) Obama and fellow follower Rudd will keep temperatures within 2 degrees (?F). So if it gets too cold they can turn on a few more factories. Much easier than messing around with Milanković Cycles, ocean circulation, sunspots and volcanic emissions etc.