Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out
By Gerald Traufetter
At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.
Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.
Reached a Plateau
The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”
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RR Kampen,
The deliberate ignorance that you display about your faith of choice is very entertaining. Please do not ever change.
That you actually type a response that asserts that Gore, whose latest book is premised on the idea sepcifically that if we do not do what he demands the world will look like the cover of his book, and apparently expect to be considered credible, is rich entertainment.
You true belivers are so sucked in to the bs that you do not notice the smell.
Thanks for making a great day even better.
Cheers,
RR Kampen (05:29:16) :
Re: Ron de Haan (03:35:25) :
“We have just been offered a peek into a “criminal conspiracy” cooking up our climate data in support of AGW. ”
“I do recognize a hoax when I see one. And what conspiracy is melting the glaciers?”
“Climate drivers:
Our sun, our oceans and our volcano’s. That’s it.”
There exist no greenhouse gases? Well, let’s forget physics then, and remember that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle is exactly 1.1!
“We are just a spec on the bud of an elephant.”
This ’speck’ can blow up the earth, end most life here and plunge the planet into nucleair winter. And this ’speck’ can change the atmosphere’s chemistry dramatically, burning up stuff that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. The ’speck’ you are can fly around the elephant in a day and a half.
You are underestimating the most dominant and agressive living force the solar system has ever endured. Why? Get some pride!”
RR Kampen,
So you believe human kind is responsible for melting the glaciers?
And human kind is the most aggressive living force the solar system has ever endured? That’s interesting. You’re talking to someone who had it’s finger on the button during the Cold War!
Glaciers were melting long before the Industrial Revolution so that’s a dead end street. And all our aggression and all our nuclear bombs, even if we ignited them all at once, won’t be able to match the power of nature by a long shot.
The biggest enemy of men is men and history has learned that people start dying
when a political elite takes control over the masses based on a false doctrine.
I prefer to prevent such a situation because I love my life and my freedom.
All that your confused idea’s will buy you is a bunch of green tax bills, high energy bills, high food bills and limitations on your personal freedom, blood in the streets and war. Not a single Euro will be used to improve to further improve the environment.
Hope you get the message. Wake up.
Kampen:
Then there is a group of people who will move against consensus on any subject, from habit. Like me 1990-2004.
So, you were against the “consensus” before you were for it?
Hmmm….. sounds familiar somehow.
These are the early feelers of some of the MSM pulling back to save their reputations. Expect more if the warming trend continues to plateau. There are some publications though, such as Time, Newsweak, and The economist that have invested their entire fortunes on the prospect of a global economic regime designed to cripple the USA.
Spen (01:15:23) : ICARUS – I am simple sole whose understanding is that global warming is caused by increasing C02 concentration in the atmosphere. C02 levels have continued to rise over the last 10 years but temperatures have not. The conclusion must be that there are greater natural forces masking the greenhouse effect.
Suppose you are cold at night and you put an extra blanket on the bed. You don’t instantly warm up – it takes a little while of reduced heat loss for you to reach an equilibrium at a higher temperature.
A similar phenomenon applies to the Earth, but of course on a much longer timescale. Greenhouse gases reduce the outgoing radiation to space, so that the planet warms up until the increase in longwave radiation (heat, i.e. infrared) is enough to balance the enhanced greenhouse effect, and the planet is once more in equilibrium. Therefore the rise in global average temperature is not proportional to how *fast* greenhouse gases have risen but to the *concentration*. The main consequence of this fact is that global temperature will continue to rise for many years *even if* we never emit another ounce of CO2 (this is what climate scientists mean when they talk about warming “in the pipeline”).
So, you should expect global average temperature to be rising just because CO2 is 100ppm higher than it was 200 years ago, *not* because CO2 is still rising… and that is what we do see. The warming trend is still at around 0.2C per decade, notwithstanding the normal interannual variability – the ‘noise’ superimposed on that long-term warming trend.
RE: Icarus (05:20:59) :
For the purposes of my comment, “cook the planet” is poetic shorthand for a crisis so severe as to require a worldwide “all hands on deck” response to throw our expensive carbon-dioxide cargo overboard at great personal loss in order to prevent a roll-over.
The global warming debate appears equivalent to arguing whether our ‘ship’ is in the process of rolling over or just responding to the sea. Dr. Lindzen’s data seems to indicate the latter situation.
Why is there increased debate on this website?
Because the AGW crowd knows their goals are slipping away and so on an individual basis, this is where they can take action adding their shoulder to the wheel.
Please do, and have your arguments demolished!
Here is the portion of the article that matters:
“‘We have to explain to the public that greenhouse gases will not cause temperatures to keep rising from one record temperature to the next, but that they are still subject to natural fluctuations,’ says Latif…
“‘Perhaps we suggested too strongly in the past that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line. In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal,” says Latif.
“They predict that the average global temperature will increase by about three degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, unless humanity manages to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, no one really knows what exactly the world climate will look like in the not-so-distant future, that is, in 2015, 2030 or 2050…
“If the deep waters of the Pacific are, in fact, the most important factor holding up global warming, climate change will remain at a standstill until the middle of the next decade, says Latif. But if the cooling trend is the result of reduced solar activity, things could start getting warmer again much sooner. Based on past experience, solar activity will likely increase again in the next few years.”
Also, note that this sentence is inaccurate: “the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” The IPCC did not “predict” that the temperature would warm 0.2 degrees from 1999-2008 – the 0.2 degrees is a trend. If it warms 0.07 degrees over this decade, and 0.33 degrees over the next decade, the IPCC prediction is correct.
Tom_R (07:37:53) :
“Icarus (04:46:23) : Where would you like it to start? How about 1880? –”
How about 1979, since there was never anything close to global coverage before the satellites.
OK then. Satellite data as cited by ‘NastyWolf’:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2008/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2008/trend
“Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”
What could he mean by “face that fact” ??
Brace yourselves, all of humanity. We all have to face the fact that temperatures are not changing currently. This is an uncontrollable and unpredictably harsh climatic situation that we will have to pull through together. Seat belts securely fastened.
Or:
OK my friends. Time to update your CVs.
From American Thinker Blog:
Scientific scandal appears to rock climate change promoters
At first many of us were inclined to dismiss the posted emails from the Institute as fraud, but the head of the institute admits the records were hacked and the emails seem genuine.
Here is a sample of the purportedly hacked material (1079 emails and 72 documents) available online:
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/11/scientific_scandal_appears_to.html
We have frequent “Global Warming Updates” (pun intended) on COMMON CENTS regularly. Check it out…. most are too funny…..
http://www.commoncts.blogspot.com
[Approved this time. Future plugs are Anthony’s call. ~dbs, mod.]
Spen (01:15:23) : ICARUS – I am simple sole whose understanding is that global warming is caused by increasing C02 concentration in the atmosphere. C02 levels have continued to rise over the last 10 years but temperatures have not. The conclusion must be that there are greater natural forces masking the greenhouse effect.
Spen, it is best not to ask Icky anything, and certainly not to believe anything he says, as all he continually does, in robot fashion is to continually spout the same, pseudo-scientific AGW gibberish. He is here for entertainment purposes only.
Espen (05:53:15) :
…if we make the assumption that CO2 was at 310 ppm back then (this is also debatable), we get 0.4 degrees out of the increase from 310 ppm to 390 ppm. That corresponds to 1.2 degrees C of warming per doubling of CO2, not quite what the alarmist tell us!
I don’t think your argument quite works here. Suppose you could change from 300ppm to 400ppm CO2 in one day. You observe that the world warms up 0.00001C by midnight, and conclude that climate sensitivity is actually 0.00003C per doubling of CO2. Is that a valid conclusion? I think not, for the reason I mentioned earlier – there is a lag of many years before the system once again reaches equilibrium, and the actual temperature rise depends on the *concentration* of greenhouse gases, not the rate of change. Not only do you need to consider this warming ‘in the pipeline’ just from the physics of greenhouse gases, you also need to consider long-term feedbacks from ice sheets, vegetation cover, thawing permafrost and so on, all of which make climate sensitivity a lot more complicated than your simple calculation above suggests. Palaeoclimate studies can help with that but I don’t think anyone would claim to know the value with certainty.
Alexander Harvey (05:30:17) :
“All in all this was an accident waiting to happen.”
That is what I feared most ever since this bandwagon got underway. Last night, while looking for information, I linked to a site that had a lot of additional links and commentary which got progressively wackier, until by the end, the guy was railing about special relativity, one of the most heavily confirmed and usefully predictive theories of all time.
In a time when a large segment of the population believes that heavy doses of vitamins will prevent cancer (such dosing appears to correlate with higher risk), that universal healthcare, economic well-being, and elimination of scarcity can be decreed by law, and that nuclear power plants can explode like nuclear bombs, we do not need the forces of pseudo-science to be given the enormous boost that the defeat of this juggernaut would provide.
The AGW camp bet the ranch of scientific credibility, which did not belong solely to them, on this one roll of the dice. It was irresponsible.
Isn’t odd that the warm period in the 40’s has roughly the same slope as the warming period in the 90’s? No CO2 in the 40’s = the same slope as the 90’s with CO2. Obviously no correlation.
Isn’t also odd that some of the same people warning about global cooling in the 70’s are now warning about global warming? Doesn’t that hint that there is more in politics and money than there is in science?
RR Kampen (00:49:21) :
Not only does warming have no causes, apparently so too does cooling, which has been going on the last 10 years.
For 20 years here, from the late 70’s to the late 90’s, it did not snow in November. Since 2001, it has been snowing in November. Yep, it’s snowing here today.
Global Warming is so last last century.
peeke (05:16:17) :
Ron de Haan,
Aren’t you the one that uses terms like “totalitarian world government”?
No Peeke, our politicians do and the Copenhagen Climate Treaty concept does.
It’s the reason why they started the AGW Hoax.
Icarus (10:17:51) :
“Not only do you need to consider this warming ‘in the pipeline’ just from the physics of greenhouse gases, you also need to consider long-term feedbacks from ice sheets, vegetation cover, thawing permafrost and so on, all of which make climate sensitivity a lot more complicated than your simple calculation above suggests”
And even more complicated if you also consider all the negative feedbacks which you so conveniently leave out.
Icarus (10:17:51) :
“…all of which make climate sensitivity a lot more complicated than your simple calculation above suggests…”
Then, I wish guys like here would stop saying things like “At the heart of this is basic physics.” He’s borrowing from my account to put off the regulators.
RR Kampen,
You wrote: “We know this because there no significant change in natural variables, whereas there is a very significant change in atmospheric chemistry; physics finishes the story.”
You adopt the ‘radiation argument’ when you say that there has been no significant change in the natural variables. This assumes that the only natural changes in global atmospheric temperature can result from a change in the amount of radiation coming from the sun, or something like a volcano that blocks the radiation from the sun. This assumption is obviously wrong. The ENSO cycle alone can produce significant changes in atmospheric temperature without any changes in solar radiation or volcanic activity. Furthermore, it is quite obvious that there are other ocean cycles like the AMO and PDO that have, unlike CO2, a very real correlation with global temperatures for all time scales, not just the last 30 years of the 20th century.
Based on the warming of th early 20th century, the natural ocean cycles probably account for at least 50% (conservatively) of the late 20th century warming. They do not, however, account for the overall increase from one cycle to the next. The sunspots do that.
The AGW supporters love to point out that the sunspots peaked before the warming of the late 20th century. Then I point out the warmest temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere always occur weeks after the peak solar input at the summer solstice. And the coldest temperatures occur weeks after the minimum input at the winter solstice. There is a delay because the thermal result is cumulative, not instantaneous.
The same type of delay occurs with sunspot activity, which probably has a small impact on the percentage of global cloud cover, changing the amount of sunlight absorbed by the oceans. Unlike CO2, the additional energy is cumulative and absorbed over a long period of time, manifesting as a temperature change in the atmosphere slowly over decades. Increasing CO2 has an instantaneous effect on air temperatures, which we are obviously not seeing now (or in the 50’s and 60’s), because it is too small compared to these natural factors! If CO2 was dominant, there would be no possible way to go through 10 years of increasing CO2 without increasing temperatures. It is obviously not dominant. This is ‘real’ physics finishing the story.
Of course, CO2 must have some impact on global temperatures. Lab results indicate a doubling of CO2 would result in about a degree of warming on a perfectly clear-sky earth, all else being equal. Factor in the global cloud cover and that drops to around 0.6 degrees, of which, half should have already occurred do to the logarithmic nature of CO2 warming. So far, there is no evidence of any positive feedbacks that would multiply this number, but Roy Spencer is showing some real evidence of negative feedbacks, which would reduce the CO2 impact even further.
Overall, the Earth is behaving precisely as if there was a very small warming from increasing CO2 and that most of the observed climate change is totally natural. This view of climate change has been held by many people for a long time. This view also explains all of the observed warm and cold periods of the last several thousand years, not just the last 30 years of the 20th century. This view predicted, back in the early 1990s, that global cooling would begin in the first decade of the 21st century and continue for about 3 decades. So far, the prediction appears to be spot on, while the AGW prediction is way off!
In science, we adopt the theory that does the best at explaining all the observations and predicting the future. AGW is obviously not the best theory.
Well I see that Icarus’ hockey stick data is a NOAA composite of land and ocean data. Well too bad; I hate to see that coean data in there.
Seems to me it was about 1980 when the first oceanic surface buoys were deployed to simultaneously measure water (-1 metre) and air (+3 metres) temperatures.
Christy et al reported in Jan 2001, Geophysical Research letters that the atmospheric warming was only about 60% (from memory) of the water warming, FOR THAT 20 OR SO YEAR PERIOD.
The really big opps was that the water and air temperatures are not correlated, which means that prior to about 1980 all the oceanic data obtained from water sampling is bogus (well it is good water temperatures); and the appropriate lower troposphere (air) temperatures are unrecoverable, since the two aren’t correlated.
That is MY conclusion; John Christy did not specifically say that; I infer that from the lack of correlation; so throw rocks at me not Dr Christy.
So nyet and nuts to NOAA’s composite data report.
Sorry Icarus; fortunately for you, your wing wax job isn’t going to melt any time soon.
Yes, it’s really complicated. It’s so complicated that the Arctic Sea Ice is recovering nicely and it’s getting quite cold out there.
It’s so complicated the way that expanding ice sheets are reflecting sunlight from a dinged Sun back into space, and GCR induced low clouds are bouncing back weakened sunlight.
It’s so complicated that all I have to do is open my front door and feel the icy cold out there.
It’s so complicated the birds flew south a month and a half early.
Man, that’s some rough stuff.
“”” Icarus (09:16:46) :
Spen (01:15:23) : ICARUS – I am simple sole whose understanding is that global warming is caused by increasing C02 concentration in the atmosphere. C02 levels have continued to rise over the last 10 years but temperatures have not. The conclusion must be that there are greater natural forces masking the greenhouse effect.
Suppose you are cold at night and you put an extra blanket on the bed. You don’t instantly warm up – it takes a little while of reduced heat loss for you to reach an equilibrium at a higher temperature. “””
Well that argument won’t fly either Icarus.
For a start the earth’s climate is not, and never has been in an equilibrium state; how could it possibly be, when the earth rotates on a 24 hour basis, so the sunlight comes and goes on any portion of the earth, so the whole system is continually moving.
But then you have this additional problem.
According to the Mauna Loa CO2 data, which I think most people do believe in some fashion, the CO2 is steadily rising on a ramp, although some believe that ramp is also steepening.
As any first year analog circuit design student can tell you, if you feed an input Voltage ramp into an RC delay circuit (simulating your warming delay), The final output Voltage is also a ramp with exactly the same rising slope as the input, except for a startup ramp which takes from 3-5 time constants to finally reach the correct stady state output slope.
So if the CO2 is the input driving signal, and is a rising ramp, the output should also be a ramp.
Oops! I’m sorry, I forgot that the temperature is only the logarithm of the CO2; scrub all that above.
Well maybe not; hang on a minute. I believe that Ln(1+x) = x for small values of x, and since ML CO2 increases maybe 1.5 ppm per year, out of 388 ppm maybe the value of x is about 1/2% or 0.005
So Ln(1.005) is about 0.005 (error is about 12.5 x 10^-6)
So I think that means that temperature is actually linear with CO2 after all; so resuscitate all that above I told you to scrub. A rising CO2 ramp should yield a rising temperature ramp after a short getting up to speed delay.
Now this rising CO2 ramp has been going on for at least all of the 20th century, and the so far years of the 21st, so when does your output ramp kick off, and if we did have an output ramp in the 1970; whay on earth would it stop if the input ramp is still playing at full loudness ?
No Icarus; I don’t think you have me convinced yet.
Bart (10:20:51) wrote: “…we do not need the forces of pseudo-science to be given the enormous boost that the defeat of this juggernaut would provide.”
Doesn’t Bart have this completely backwards?
In reality, the pseudo-science of AGW has done more to promote other pseudo-science than anything else on the planet.
How?
By setting the example that if you lie hard enough, big enough, and often enough, you can be successful with the “BIG LIE” and support your agenda or protect a failed scientific line of inquiry.
Don’t kid yourself, the money, funding, and comfortable careers are trumping real science at an alarming rate.