Last updated at 7:21 PM on 13th October 2009
In the freezing foothills of Montana, a distinctly bitter blast of revolution hangs in the air.
And while the residents of the icy city of Missoula can stave off the -10C chill with thermals and fires, there may be no easy remedy for the wintry snap’s repercussions.
The temperature has shattered a 36-year record. Further into the heartlands of America, the city of Billings registered -12C on Sunday, breaking the 1959 barrier of -5C.
Closer to home, Austria is today seeing its earliest snowfall in history with 30 to 40 centimetres already predicted in the mountains.
Such dramatic falls in temperatures provide superficial evidence for those who doubt that the world is threatened by climate change.
But most pertinent of all, of course, are the growing volume of statistics.
According to the National Climatic Data Centre, Earth’s hottest recorded year was 1998.
If you put the same question to NASA, scientists will say it was 1934, followed by 1998. The next three runner-ups are 1921, 2006 and 1931.
Which all blows a rather large hole in the argument that the earth is hurtling towards an inescapable heat death prompted by man’s abuse of the environment.
Indeed, some experts believe we should forget global warming and turn our attention to an entirely differently phenomenon – global cooling.
The evidence for both remains inconclusive, which is unlikely to help the legions of world leaders meeting in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new climate change deal.
There is no doubt the amount of man-made carbon dioxide, the gas believed to be responsible for heating up the planet, has increased phenomenally over the last 100 years.
For the final few decades of the 20th century and as the atmosphere’s composition changed, scientists recorded the planet was warming rapidly and made a positive correlation between the two.
But then something went wrong. Rather then continuing to soar, the Earth’s temperature appeared to stabilise, smashing all conventional predictions.
The development seemed to support the view of climate change cynics who claimed global warming was simply a natural cycle and not caused by man.
Some doubters believe that the increase was actually down to the amount of energy from the Sun, which provides 98 per cent of the Earth’s warmth.
Sun or sea? The importance of the ocean’s cooling and warming cycles are now under serious consideration as a key factor in global temperatures
Previously, the fluctuating amount of radiation given out by the sun was thought to play a large role in the climate.
But Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, who was part of the team to win the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change, studied solar output – the heat leaving the sun’s surface – and cosmic ray intensity over the last 40 years, and compared those figures with global average surface temperature.
He told the BBC: ‘Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity.’
Scientists have intensified the search for alternative explanations
Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University believes the key to the connumdrum may be the temperature of the world’s seas.
Figures show the Pacific Ocean has been cooling over the last few years, and Easterbrook’s research shows a correlation between this and global temperatures.
He says the oceans have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically, known as Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).
And after a 30-year heating cycle in the 1980s and 1990s, pushing temperatures above average, we are now moving into a cooler period.
Professor Easterbrook said: ‘In the last few years [the Pacific Ocean] has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.
‘The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.’
In Alberta, Canada (above), temperatures dropped to -16C on Monday, breaking the day’s previous record, from 1928, by about three degrees
His figures show that the global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.
Mojib Latif, a member of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), stressed the impact of the ocean currents in the North Atlantic – a phenomenon called the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation.
He believes we may be in a period of cooling – but that it will be temporary before global warming reasserts itself.
He said the NAO may have been responsible for some of the rapid rise in temperatures of the last three decades.
‘But how much? The jury is still out,’ he said.
So is the sun really going down on global warming?
The Met Office is not convinced.
They incorporate solar and oceanic cycles into their models, and they say that – even if there are periods of slower warming, or temporary cooling, the long-term trend in global temperatures is still on the up.
h/t to a jones
Read the article at the Daily Mail here
3X2: You listed my statement, “Pacific Ocean SST anomalies have taken a recent upswing, pretty much eliminating any thought that it’s been cooling,” then asked, “Bob, isn’t surface energy in the oceans energy that is entering atmosphere and so leaving?”
I’m not sure what you’re driving at. Wouldn’t SST also include energy being input (shortwave and longwave radiation), upwelling of waters from lower levels, changes in evaporation due to variations in surface winds, etc.?
RR Kampen,
Your speculations on Greenland are riddled with misinformation. I suggest you get up to speed on the topic if you’re going to comment on it. Here’s a good place to start:
http://climate4you.com
Click on the climate history tab in the left column.
I understand exactly why the alarmist crowd is so desperate to undermine the history of Greenland. They must keep the hokey stick alive, which requires that no natural climate change can ever be admitted.
Smokey, that is no place to start except maybe for kids (whom you will have to tell the graph above is for the Greenland ice sheet only).
The article notes nothing about agriculture on Greenland. Actually it gives virtually no info about Greenland at all.
Of course, the article DOES show the hockeystick (simply because it exists) -> http://climate4you.com/images/GlobalMAATvs1961-1991since1850.gif
There are a number of fine Dutch wines today and wine industry is strongly on the increase in our country. This is in locations that are cooler than SW-Britain up to 53 degrees North. But warm enough and more lucrative than other agriculture nowadays. Prize winner example http://www.vanflevolandsebodem.nl/index.cfm?pid=1373 .
As talk about an ‘alarmist crowd’ is entirely off topic, I cannot answer you on that.
RR Kampen:
“As talk about an ‘alarmist crowd’ is entirely off topic, I cannot answer you on that.”
It is exactly on topic. The topic is climate skepticism. The other side of that coin is climate alarmism. You should take it easy on that ‘prize winning’ Dutch wine.
To repeat my comment above:
“I understand exactly why the alarmist crowd is so desperate to undermine the history of Greenland. They must keep the hokey stick alive, which requires that no natural climate change can ever be admitted.”
And of course the hokey stick I referred to is Michael Mann’s debunked fabrication. The fact that natural global warming has taken place does not prove that human activity is the cause.
Trying to re-frame the argument to show that natural climate change is caused by humans is a scientifically baseless claim. If human activity caused the most recent warming cycle, provide the raw data backing up that conjecture.
Smokey, can you find where I alluded to the ‘A’ in AGW in previous posts?
You concede the fact of the ‘hockey stick’. Okay. As to the cause of this figure, I think it can only be that ‘A’ and you don’t.
Raw data?
1. It is getting warmer. This warmth is superposed on existing cycles and this warming is accelarating, slowly blotting out the significance of those cycles.
2. There’s a sound physics theory on what CO2 does with certain radiation.
3. The only principal driver of world temperature that is changing with sufficient amplitude and velocity, is the concentration of a couple of GHG’s of which CO2 is the main.
You believe this set of data is coincidence (there is simply no other ‘theory’ you can come up with!). Well, as a realist, I don’t. When I’ve seen enough swallows, I call it summer. Even if a day may still be spoilt by rain.
RR Kampen:
Thank you for showing that you have zero data to back up your AGW conjecture. But don’t feel too bad about it, no one else has data measuring AGW either.
Your “sound physics theory” is not data. And speculating that the ‘only principal driver’ of temperature is CO2 is ridiculous. As CO2 has been steadily increasing, the planet’s temperature has been flat to declining. You are still trying to blame a tiny trace gas for global warming that isn’t even happening.
Face it, the CO2=AGW conjecture isn’t based on empirical data. Without real world data, skeptics will continue to question the increasingly absurd claim that natural warming is a result of changes in a tiny trace gas.
Alarmists have the burden of showing, through empirical measurements, that CO2 is causing [currently non-existent] global warming. So far, they have failed.
Smokey, I can’t prove Pi is irrational to some people either. Let me rephrase this. What kind of empirical evidence would you suggest?
So how would you prove empirically that more CO2 gives a temperature rise? Problem being you can’t SEE a radiation balance… If that is your argument – you can’t SEE it – then I hope you trust your computer, as it functions on the basis of a lot of physics you can’t see.
Hey, this really is like physics! You have a theory, you have phenomena behaving according to that theory, you call these phenomena ’empirical evidence’, well, and that’s it. Never was a theory relying on emperical evidence ever proved mathematically! This means you can never know there is no planet whose gravitation operates horizontally over the surface. And that is true. So, Smokey, no-one will ever be able to prove the AGW-hypothesis. And no-one will ever be able to disprove it. I mean, mathematically. See Popper for a reference.
RR Kampen,
Albert Einstein proposed a hypothesis. It was confirmed repeatedly with empirical measurements. But now you admit that AGW will never be proved or disproved empirically.
That confirms the fact that AGW is simply a conjecture, not a hypothesis. Alarmists claim that AGW exists, but they can’t provide data based evidence. They can not measure AGW. But based on their belief system, they say we should raise taxes sky high, and spend $Trillions on something that they can’t show even exists.
That situation demonstrates the value of skepticism in the scientific method. All skeptics are saying is: prove it. Or at the very least, provide strong, real world evidence that AGW exists.
Show the data that measures the temperature change caused specifically by human activity, versus natural global warming caused by the planet emerging from the LIA. The fact that no such data exists means that AGW is speculation.
If AGW can not be falsified, then it is not science… as stated by the same Karl Popper you refer to, who states:
1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory — if we look for confirmations.
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions; that is to say, if, unenlightened by the theory in question, we should have expected an event which was incompatible with the theory — an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every “good” scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen. The more a theory forbids, the better it is.
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice.
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it. Testability is falsifiability; but there are degrees of testability: some theories are more testable, more exposed to refutation, than others; they take, as it were, greater risks.
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory; and this means that it can be presented as a serious but unsuccessful attempt to falsify the theory. (I now speak in such cases of “corroborating evidence.”)
7. Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation. Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status. (I later described such a rescuing operation as a “conventionalist twist” or a “conventionalist stratagem.”)
One can sum up all this by saying that the criterion of the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability.
We can see the CO2=AGW conjecture between the lines throughout Popper’s rules — confirming the fact that the AGW conjecture may be many things, but scientific isn’t one of them.
[snip, Sorry Dave, a bridge too far. Take off the gloves and try again ~ ctm]
Awwww, it was so much fun to write. I wasn’t wrong and it was kinda funny. The part about AGWA was clever, no? Phlogistons post on the “beeb” truly was devastating, wasn’t it? Anyway, I always defer to your wisdom. It is what makes this blog great!! 8^D
I would like to add that Smokey can bring the pain as good as anyone. He also corrects me when I get outta line. I tip my hat to you, Sir !!
Bob Tisdale (07:48:04) :
3X2: You listed my statement (…)
Bob, sorry if my question appeared to be blunt or critical. It was certainly not intended that way.
I was just trying to get a grip in my own mind of what SST anomalies represent. I directed the question your way simply because I would put more trust your view.