The December 2009 and year 2009 University of Alabama at Huntsville lower tropospheric MSU temperature data is available. Thanks to Phillip Gentry and John Christy for alerting us to these figures]. I have several comments following the figures.
This data shows why the focus needs to be on the regional scale and that a global average is not of much use in describing weather that all of us experience.
The news media seem to continue to avoid this perspective. For example, in the article Snow, ice and the bigger picture
excerpts read
“Rather than seeking vindication or catastrophe in this cold snap, now is a good time to remind ourselves that weather, like death and taxes, will always be with us. Spectacular regional swings in temperature and precipitation, sometimes lasting for months, often emerge from the natural jostlings of atmosphere and ocean. By themselves, none of these prove or disprove a human role in climate change.”
“What’s different now is that climate change is shifting the odds towards record-hot summers and away from record-cold winters. The latter aren’t impossible; they’re just harder to get, like scoring a straight flush on one trip to Vegas and a royal flush the next.”
“If you’re craving a scapegoat for this winter, consider the Arctic oscillation. The AO is a measure of north-south differences in air pressure between the northern midlatitudes and polar regions. When the AO is positive, pressures are unusually high to the south and low to the north. This helps shuttle weather systems quickly across the Atlantic, often bringing warm, wet conditions to Europe. In the past month, however, the AO has dipped to astoundingly low levels – among the lowest observed in the past 60 years. This has gummed up the hemisphere’s usual west-to-east flow with huge “blocking highs” that route frigid air southward.”
“Handy as it is, the AO describes more than it explains. Forecasters still don’t know exactly what sends the AO into one mode or the other, just as the birth of an El Niño is easier to spot than to predict.”
See also the post at Dot Earth by Andy Revkin titled Cold Arctic Pressure Pattern Nearly Off Chart
The obvious response to these claims is that if we cannot predict weather features such as the Arctic oscillation or an El Niño under current climate, how can anyone credibly claim we have predictive skill decades into the future from both natural and human caused climate forcings? The short answer is that they cannot.
The article concludes with the text
“If this winter tells us anything, it’s that we’ll have to remain on guard for familiar weather risks as well as the evolving ones brought by climate change.”
This admission implicitly recognizes the focus on the reduction of vulnerability that we wrote about in our paper
Pielke Sr., R., K. Beven, G. Brasseur, J. Calvert, M. Chahine, R. Dickerson, D. Entekhabi, E. Foufoula-Georgiou, H. Gupta, V. Gupta, W. Krajewski, E. Philip Krider, W. K.M. Lau, J. McDonnell, W. Rossow, J. Schaake, J. Smith, S. Sorooshian, and E. Wood, 2009: Climate change: The need to consider human forcings besides greenhouse gases. Eos, Vol. 90, No. 45, 10 November 2009, 413. Copyright (2009) American Geophysical Union.
The media, policymakers and others should recognize this evidence of our incomplete understanding of the climate system. We will continue to have surprises such as we have seen this winter.
Communism’s inability to produce enough food, clothes, electrical goods, cars, etc… used to be an open joke among the eternally queued Soviet citizenry, but it didn’t stop the politicians and newspapers from singing communism’s praises every day.
AGW’s Climate Change is exactly the same… The reality is in direct contrast with policy. But come hail, sleet, snow and continued lack of heating, they still persist in singing the validity of their AGW hypothesis.
So very roughly…… A temp record from 1850 to present shows ninety five years of warming when there shouldn’t have been-1850 to 1945. If one is to believe that CO2 is the primary driver for modern temperature changes.
Thirty four years of cooling when there shouldn’t be- 1945 to 1979.
Nineteen years of warming at a rate no different to earlier times-1979 to1998
Twelve years of cooling despite the continued rise of CO2-1998-2010
So, on the face of it…….. Nineteen years of unremarkable warming is a catastrophe needing the complete change of global energy usage and economic systems…..
I think we’ve been had!
Paul Vaughan (15:42:00) :
{Tenuc (10:55:47) ‘[…] because of deterministic chaos, our climate system cannot be forecast with any degree of certainty beyond a few days.’}
The assumption upon which this statement is based does not extend across all spatiotemporal scales. Via conditional analyses, we can identify the boundaries of hard constraints and substantially improve medium- & long-term forecasting probabilities. The lame, old “it’s ALL chaos” paradigm is holding back progress. It’s not all chaos – it is richly patterned if one looks with phase-aware methods. Eventually we may get down to residual chaos & measurement-noise, but we are nowhere near exhausting opportunities to learn from phase-conditioned analyses — quite the contrary – misguided paradigms have SHUT DOWN such pursuits, so little progress has been made despite tremendous effort (on largely unproductive fronts).
The fascinating thing about climate and deterministic chaos is that within the multiple interlinked process, seemingly orderly periodic behaviour starts to appear and it would seem that predictions can be based on these quasi-cycles.
Here’s a good example of a global temperature forecast for the the current century based on solar activity and planetary alignment, which I’ve used before.
1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA ?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA ?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold ???) – (LSA ???)
This is fine as far as it goes, but as a forecast it has many inherent weaknesses. It doesn’t give any information about the scale of the temperature changes. For example, will the cooling from 2010 to 2100 be another Maunder type minimum, or will it just be enough to wipe out the past warming trend, or will it be the start of the bifurcation which leads to the next ice age?
It also hides the fact that climate displays fractal behaviour at all temporal scales. On the decadal scale global temperature will also rise and fall, and that within each decade the same pattern will occur. It says nothing about when or where these shorter term events will happen or their magnitude.
It can’t explain all the mechanisms by which the changes happen or resolve the issues of is cause and effect.
To improve this forecast we need to be able to fully understand the net energy balance of all the interlinked global climate mechanisms, which includes what is happening in the biosphere. Our historic climate records are just not good enough to give us the base data to do this with any meaningful precision and even our current climate data gathering systems will only give a ball-park figure.
Examining quasi-cyclic behaviour can provide some idea of what is to come, but not at a resolution of scale or precision of location for it to be of much use and even this broad idea of what is to come can be easily confound should a super-volcano blow it’s top or random large meteor strike happen.
I checked my house insurance and it clearly states that meteor strikes and volanoes blowing their tops are specifcaly excluded as acts of God. As such they are pre-ordained and therefore predictable. All one need do is develope a reconstruction of God and extrapolate the frequency of smiting. Based on my initial reconstruction, smiting has hit a millenial low and stabilized at the current rate with no additional smiting forecast for the next decade at a minimum. My insurance company is insisting on corroborating reports from at least 3 accredited researchers before changing my policy. I have constructed 11 reports citing each other in such a fashion that scrutiny of any given report will only lead to direct examination of citations at least twice removed from the inital report. All I need now is some of you folks with PhD in your sig to step up and collaborate. Seriously, my house insurance is killing me.
Bob Tisdale (03:14:03) :
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com/2009/06/rss-msu-tlt-time-latitude-plots.html
Bob, I have just been over to your site, looking at your plots.
Very nice work!
Now, if some of those NASA money that James Hansen is using could be diverted to the CLOUD experiment, maybe we could get faster results from Svensmark.
When data from that experiment is official, we will know more about the driving factors behind all this. Or not.
Very exciting times.
I forgot including a thanks to Al Gore for inventing the Internet, and for settling the Science for us.
And, I also forgot to mention that its too late already. I mean, according to Western leaders, we had to sign in Copenhagen, or DOOM would be here.
Paul Vaughan (16:03:42) :
“Vukcevic (13:30:16) “[…] evolution of the SA anomaly during the last 400 years. http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/SA-mag-anomaly.gif “
“Interesting evolution at the constriction between South America & Antarctica – fits nicely with concepts laid out by Barkin.”
Thanks for the note. I’ve looked at the global evolution/ anomaly. Most stable Geo Mag is at 60S, 130E (between Australia and Antarctica) , it has hardly changed (less than 5%) during the last 400 years, while elsewhere due to drift of the magnetic pole, the changes are anything up to 50%,.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC1.htm
Although the changes are large in both hemispheres, South Hemisphere at 60S circle appears to be most uniform; perhaps some link to the Circumpolar current’s flow enveloping the Antarctica. More magnetic anomalies here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GandF.htm
Vukcevic (02:45:19)
P.S. on the above graphs of the global magnetic anomaly, sweeps are in 10 degree steps at 10 years intervals.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC1.htm and
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC.htm
Tenuc (00:28:59) :
“1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA ?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA ?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold ???) – (LSA ???)”
My list is a bit longer (numbers are from the NASA’s website), the rest is a bit of a guess-work.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GrandMinima.gif
Tom P
Comparing your graph with the
http://www.ianschumacher.com/img/TempsvsIPCCModelsWM.jpg graph, the difference is simple. Your graph uses 1990 as the zero date for the anomolies. The IPCC AR4 TS Fig. 26 clearly uses an older year for its zero mark. The two graphs are not comparable. Did you make the graph to which you linked? From where did the IPCC lines come? I looked at Woodfortrees.org. Their graphs do not seem to include an IPCC projections option, so they were drawn on later. If you shift the IPCC lines up vertically 0.2 degrees, you will see what people are complaining about.
I drew a picture for you:
http://users.vianet.ca/paulak2r/AGW/IPCC2007.JPG
John M Reynolds
Christopher Booker warns in the Sunday Telegraph:
Climate change: the true price of the warmists’ folly is becoming clear
From the Met Office’s mistakes to Gordon Brown’s wind farms, the cost of ‘green’ policies is growing………..
At last, in all directions, we are beginning to see the terrifying cost of that obsession with “global warming” and “green energy” which for nearly 20 years has had all our main political parties in its grip. For years governments, including the EU, have been shovelling millions of pounds into the coffers of “green” lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth and the WWF, allowing them in return virtually to dictate our energy policy. Not for nothing is a former head of WWF-UK now chairman of the Met Office.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6958093/Climate-change-the-true-price-of-the-warmists-folly-is-becoming-clear.html
” Brian Dodge (16:03:11) :
“… a global average is not of much use …”
What happened to…
Have you all thrown in the towel on climatology, and decided to play weatherman instead?”
No we haven’t thrown in the towel we just found out how badly the books were cooked. Also as new information come in I, at least am willing to change my mind.
COOKING THE BOOKS:
Hansen’s changing temps: http://i31.tinypic.com/2149sg0.gif
The homogenization of the temperature data
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/11/would-you-like-your-temperature-data-homogenized-or-pasteurized/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/20/darwin-zero-before-and-after/
And then there is how much error is in the raw measurements thanks to the USA surface station survey and this CRU’s own computed sampling (measurement) error: http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/11420
“The title of this graph indicates this is the CRU computed sampling (measurement) error in C for 1969. Note how large these sampling errors are. They start at 0.5°C, which is the mark where any indication of global warming is just statistical noise and not reality. Most of the data is in the +/- 1°C range, which means any attempt to claim a global increase below this threshold is mathematically false. Imagine the noise in the 1880 data! You cannot create detail (resolution) below what your sensor system can measure. AJ Strata
The graph show the USA with a sampling error of 0.5C but the surface station survey shows this is probably very generous. On top of that some are suggesting that as the effects of the oceans shift you get cooling in one location and warming in another, like we are seeing right now. Then you have the hot summer – cold winter phenomenon like in 1976.
At this point the temperature seems to have leveled. I have seen information that it has increased 0.28 C, leveled and decreased. I think the most honest “opinion” is the noise is greater than the signal and we need to do a lot more research.
With the sun in a different mode than modern science has ever seen before, honest, open research should net us a lot more information if the scientists are not stifled by the AGW straitjacket.
jmrSudbury (04:17:59) :
Your plots of IPCC projections are incorrect. The IPCC projections are plotted by Roger Pielke Jr in the link I gave above:
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-2592-2008.07.pdf
Tom P, looking at the Pielke reference I see that those are not projections, but linear fits to the temperature data on the various dates listed. Of couse a linear fit made in (say) 2007 would give a great linear fit for the temps up to 2007, and would still look reasonable on a plot from 1990 to 2009. However, if you look at just the part AFTER their corresponding dates in your Wood For Trees plot you’ll see that the IPCC lines fit poorly after their creation dates.
Based on such evidence as Darwin zero and the NOAA adjustments (ref below) there is also a legitimate concern that the published temperature anomoly graphs display more warming than reality.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/ushcn/ts.ushcn_anom25_diffs_urb-raw_pg.gif
Gail Combs – first thanks for the reference, and you nailed the bottom line in this. The ‘noise’ is much greater than any phantom signals people are seeing.
The large ‘undiscovered’ noise is that in the station data, which is orders of magnitude greater than in the tree ring data. I noted this escalating uncertainty/error in this post:
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/12118
You referenced the CRU’s own error analysis, itself demonstrating that the noise is greater than any signal. But the CRU analysis is incomplete and highly optimistic.
The fact is the sensor coverage from land based sensors is much less than 1% of the surface. To create the impression they can create a global index these so called scientists attempt to extrapolate these point measurements over ridiculous ranges of distance and time.
The fact is these point sources degrade incredibly fast over very short distance and time. In the course of 10 minutes or 10 miles the station data point has lost a lot of its accuracy. I would say, given the dynamics of seasons, the mechanisms of weather fronts, the impact of altitude, the impact of large local bodies of water, etc that these station measurements degrade to crap so fast that any regional index cannot get through a 2 degree uncertainty barrier – forget if someone is making up virtual stations which probably have error bars of 2-5° C.
It is only through satellite measurements that we can get a consistent global index. Conversely, we now have satellite data over a decade – which is perfect for assessing the accuracy of both station measurements and station derived regional or global estimates.
We have the tools and data to show that the noise is horrible in the station data, which means the noise going back to 1880 will grow to surprising levels. And since tree rings map to large temperature ranges, their uncertainty could be an order of magnitude greater than the station data.
The reality is the science to date has been cursory and illustrates we are just beginning to grasp the problem of determining a climate climate model that is valid across minutes, let alone days or decades.
Edit problem: expanding error should go like this satellites<modern stations<oldest stations<tree rings and other proxies.
Ugh, need to review before publishing. Land station data covers less than 1% of the surface, leaving 99% to be derived through questionable math.
[Fixed RT – mod]
I don’t quite understand this:
“…if we cannot predict weather features such as the Arctic oscillation or an El Niño under current climate, how can anyone credibly claim we have predictive skill decades into the future from both natural and human caused climate forcings?”
We can’t predict the EXACT effects of global warming, but it’s pretty obvious that they won’t be good.
There are always factors we can’t control.
…this is my first visit here. I guess I’ll have to look around some more.
There was once an expression heard round the world: “Everyone talks about the weather but no one does anything about it.” Today, in the omniscient present (the present is always omniscient:-), we hear: “Everyone talks about the weather but no one can do anything about it.”
Humans are the most gullible people on the planet. If you can sell a fool the Brooklyn Bridge or the Eiffel Tower, you can convince enough people that the climate is changing and you and your “friends” can prevent it from happening if people will only raise enough money and let the smart folks “invest” it.
Today, with 6.5 billion people on the planet (or there about) the percentage of fools is possibly no higher than it ever was. But the effect they appear to be having on the rest of us does seem out of proportion to their number. I guess that’s always been true, however. We love to think that we’re so smart and that we can spot a con-artist a mile away. History suggests that the vast majority of people aren’t as smart as they like to think they are.
Is the planet warming? Is the planet cooling? Nobody knows; not really. Can a former VP or Haverd professor or two be a con-artist, how about your local TV weather guy or gal? Yes they can! Be careful who and what you believe, it can be very expensive.
Vukcevic (03:11:07) :
“[Tenuc (00:28:59) :
“1410-1500 cold – Low Solar Activity(LSA ?)-(Sporer minimum)
1510-1600 warm – High Solar Activity(HSA ?)
1610-1700 cold – (LSA) (Maunder minimum)
1710-1800 warm – (HSA)
1810-1900 cold – (LSA) (Dalton minimum)
1910-2000 warm – (HSA)
2010-2100 (cold ???) – (LSA ???)”}
My list is a bit longer (numbers are from the NASA’s website), the rest is a bit of a guess-work.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GrandMinima.gif
Yours is a very similar broad brush picture, showing a two hundred year(ish) cycle of warm and cool. I worry that some other event like a super-volcano erupting could make this depressing picture worse. We are now entering uncharted territory regarding what our climate could do.
Tom P
They are not my projections of the IPCC that are incorrect. Here is a link to the IPCC figure I mentioned that has an anomoly of 0.4 for all scenarios starting in 2000.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-ts-26.html
This is a much easier graph to read than fig 10.26 which Pielke Jr used.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-10-26.html
John M Reynolds
Tom_R (06:24:52) :
“Tom P, looking at the Pielke reference I see that those are not projections, but linear fits to the temperature data on the various dates listed.”
You are mistaken. As it quite clearly states in the Pielke reference these are the “IPCC global average temperature predictions from 1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007.”
Your NOAA adjustment plot is just for the US, not for global temperatures. Global temperatures are in good agreement with the global satellite data since 1979 and so there is little evidence of any biasing in the land station records.
ryancmc (08:12:12) says:
How much global warming are you claiming won’t be good?
Being able to grow grapes for wine in England would seem to be pretty good.
The climate sensitivity to CO2 has been vastly overstated by the IPCC’s political appointees. If they were correct, global temps would be substantially rising, since there has been a third of a doubling of CO2. Yet despite that rise in CO2, current global temperatures are almost exactly the same as they were thirty years ago.
The fact that global temperatures have been on average flat to lower over most of the past decade indicates that the climate sensitivity to CO2 is very low.
It follows that with a low sensitivity number [≈<1], any warming from increased CO2 will be so insignificant that it can be completely disregarded; many other factors will overwhelm the minuscule CO2 effect, to the point that it cannot be empirically measured.
In fact, there are no empirical measurements showing that rise X in CO2 results in rise Y in global temperature.
Despite the many $billions granted to ‘study global warming’, it appears that no funds are ever made available to construct a relatively simple, testable and falsifiable experiment showing a verifiable real world temperature increase resulting from an addition of CO2 [and I am not referring to silly BBC “experiments” using plastic bottles]. No doubt those grants are rejected because that kind of experiment would be considered something only a skeptical scientist would perform.
The entire CO2 scare is based on model projections that result from programming done by people who are paid to expect a particular outcome. Who would pay such enormous sums only to be told that there is no emergency?
The alarm over the rise in a harmless and beneficial trace gas is fueled by money, and based on a litany of half-truths. And as we know, a half-truth is a whole lie. The geologic record shows conclusively that much greater rises in CO2, over million year time spans, did not result in a subsequent rise in global temperature. In fact, rises in CO2 are the effect, not the cause, of temperature increases.
The alarmists defend the outright rejection of the Scientific Method by those selling the CO2 scare, and ratchet up their squeals of anger over the fact that their half-truths are not sufficient to convince scientific skeptics – the only honest scientists – that the current rise in CO2 will lead to catastrophe. They demand that skeptics must accept their unverifiable, untestable assumptions on faith, and get angry when skeptics remain unconvinced.
If their motives of gaining money and control were not so catastrophic if put into effect, they would be taken no more seriously than if they were arguing their position wearing red rubber noses and clown shoes.
jmrSudbury (09:42:57) :
Pielke has plotted all the trends consistently, taking 1990 as an anomaly of 0 C. IPCC AR4 consistently uses the anomaly from the average 1961 to 1990 temperatures and hence 1990 is at 0.18 C.
You have mixed together trends based on two different anomalies and incorrectly shifted the 2007 IPCC projection up by 0.18 C. My plot, based on Pielke’s figure, is correct:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/811/ipccprojections.png
Re: Tenuc (00:28:59)
Consider that forecasts could be considerably improved in specific spatiotemporal windows. The multivariate phase-relations of terrestrial oscillations are nonrandom due to universal constraints. If you are not working with phase-aware methods, I can understand why you have given up. I offer the following suggestions:
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/QBO_fGLAAM_fLOD.png
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/WaveletMorlet2pi.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/QBOperiod.PNG
http://www.sfu.ca/~plv/PolarMotionXY.png
Chaos & fractal geometry have their roles at some spatiotemporal scales; at others they are constrained.