Himalayan warming – pulling another thread from IPCC’s fragile tapestry.

That, I am sure, it is happening because of all the heat produced by the XXX novels made by “Patchy”(A.K.A “Tantric doberman”) 🙂

Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
…”29 years is not useful for determining long term climate.
1000′s or 100,000′s of years is what is needed.” But – but we don’t have 1000’s of years. Global warming will not strike us the day after tomorrow, but two days before the day after tomorrow…. which is…. OMG!! run for your lives. Seriously, I will even go with the notion that the earth is warming slowly, but they mustn’t try sell me that they can detect it to tenths and hundredths of a degree – given the shoddy/uncertain state of the data – bollocks.

Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
…
The data set in the study you comment on is not useful in determining long term trend. This using of sort term time periods for determining ‘global warming’ has to stop. 29 years is not useful for determining long term climate.
1000′s or 100,000′s of years is what is needed.

That is clearly not true. What would happen to the much-celebrated Mediaeval Warm Period and Little Ice Age if we just drew a straight line trend through the last couple of thousand years of temperature data? What would happen to the last ice age if we used trend lines of hundreds of thousands of years? They would just disappear. That is not ‘determining long term climate’, it’s erasing it. The Earth does have inherent lags due to thermal inertia of the oceans etc., but periods of several decades are long enough to reveal substantial and significant changes in climate, especially in response to the relatively large forcings human activity has been responsible for.

It is hard to argue with the video evidence:

REPLY: Yes but video is not science. Would prefer a video report from an NGO (the Asia society) then? -A

Icarus says:
August 7, 2010 at 10:40 am
especially in response to the relatively large forcings human activity has been responsible for.
Since you claim it is clear then you must have clear evidence. But no one has evidence it is caused by man. There is only evidence it is caused by Nature and by the sun.
You say it is clearly man. So prove it.

Doug in Seattle says:
August 7, 2010 at 7:47 am
Please evidence your claim that the rules on grey literature were changed before IPCC AR4. The current rules on treating non-peer reviewed literature are at http://ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles-appendix-a.pdf
Those in force during AR3 are at http://web.archive.org/web/20000816183409/www.ipcc.ch/about/app-a.pdf
and are little different.
I don’t have access to the rules for AR1 or AR2, but since both reports cite non-peer reviewed literature, it is implausible that their use was forbidden.
The allegation that there is, or has been, a ban on IPCC using grey literature is a [SNIP]
[Strike one. ~dbs, mod.]

“No, but you can extrapolate into a data void.”
Kriging is a technique for interpolation, not extrapolation.

Whether the glaciers are melting or not, whether man had anything to do with it or not, is NOT the ultimate point.
The point is what will happen to LIVING things as a result–especially mammals and man.
We would benefit if there was warming. You find the most life in the tropics. You find a higher winter-death in people than summer death (and the alarmists would increase summer deaths by depriving us of air conditioning) when deaths-by-month are graphed.
I want to see more research into the health effects of small increases of carbon dioxide, but all I can find are less than a dozen studies–suggesting that even enormous increases of 50X CO (2) would be beneficial.

tty says:
August 7, 2010 at 12:52 pm
“No, but you can extrapolate into a data void.”
Kriging is a technique for interpolation, not extrapolation.

Kriging lets you interpolate or extrapolate, though of course the precision of an interpolation will be a lot higher than that of an extrapolation.
The valley of Nepal is a lot closer to the Himalayas than is say New Mexico, so I don’t see it as particularly egregious to use Nepal temperatures as indicators of Himalayan temperatures, in the absence of anything better.

Amino Acids in Meteorites says:
August 7, 2010 at 11:58 am
Icarus says:
August 7, 2010 at 10:40 am
“…especially in response to the relatively large forcings human activity has been responsible for.”
Since you claim it is clear then you must have clear evidence. But no one has evidence it is caused by man. There is only evidence it is caused by Nature and by the sun.

I’ll have a stab at it then:
Human activity has increased atmospheric CO2 by ~100ppm since pre-industrial times. We know this from straightforward calculations of historic fossil fuel use (how much coal, oil etc. we’ve burned) and from isotopic analysis of the atmospheric CO2 (fossil fuels have been in the ground for millions of years and therefore have a characteristic and detectable isotopic signature).
This additional ~100ppm of CO2, together with other human influences (both warming and cooling), amounts to a net anthropogenic forcing of ~1.6W/m² since the pre-industrial – IPCC figure from AR4.
Fast feedback climate sensitivity is around 0.75°C/W/m² – i.e. over a few decades, each additional W/m² of climate forcing will lead to around 0.75°C of global warming. Hence the current anthropogenic forcing should result in around 1.6 * 0.75 = 1.2°C of short-term warming.
The increased atmospheric CO2 from human activity should result in a top-of-atmosphere radiative imbalance (i.e. an enhanced greenhouse effect). This has been detected both by satellite measurements of reduced longwave radiation to space (Harries 2001) and by ground-based detection of increased downward longwave radiation (Wang 2009). Hence the Earth is warming up, as expected.
This enhanced anthropogenic greenhouse effect has so far produced around 0.7°C of global warming with a further 0.5°C in the pipeline (it takes decades for the climate system – primarily the oceans – to warm up enough for outgoing longwave radiation to increase and once again balance incoming solar radiation).
So, anthropogenic global warming is predicted by the straightforward physics of greenhouse gases and confirmed by experimental evidence from satellites and ground-based observations.
The evidence is very strong for the magnitude of changes in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and also very strong for the forcing which would result from such changes – it’s simply not credible that we could increase atmospheric CO2 without causing the forcing associated with that increase, as this is just basic physics.
Anyone suggesting that the warming of recent decades was due to some natural phenomenon (e.g. the sun) would have to also explain what happened to the anthropogenic radiative forcing which we know must exist. They would have to show that it was counteracted by yet another natural phenomenon which somehow masked its effects – i.e. a putative positive natural forcing entirely counteracted by a putative negative natural forcing, leaving just the anthropogenic forcing to cause the currently observed global warming… but of course that would be the same as agreeing that the anthropogenic forcing is causing the warming anyway. Otherwise, you have to resort to denying the basic physics of greenhouse gases, which is a nonsense since it can be proven in simple laboratory experiments.

Earth’s climate has been changing for millions of years and continues to do so. Here on the East coast we have been sweltering with 90 deg days for many weeks, while the West coast is shivering — even a heating contractor is having a far busier summer than normal. Is it due to an extremely fast transition from El Nino to La Nina? Global cooling concerns, anyone in far-out SF?
Here’s the whole story copied from today’s Wall Street Journal:
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
SAN FRANCISCO—While much of the U.S. is sweltering, the West Coast is experiencing one of its coolest summers in decades, putting a damper on everything from air-conditioning services to attendance at water parks.
The cool-down has stretched from Southern California to Alaska. The high temperature in Anchorage has reached just 73 degrees so far this summer, compared with 81 degrees last year. Portland, Ore., has seen only four days of 90 degrees or higher temperatures, compared with its usual seven or eight days at those levels by now, National Weather Service officials say.
Famously cool San Francisco had its coldest July since 1971, with high temperatures hovering around 63.2 degrees, 3.3 degrees below average, according to the National Weather Service. At Los Angeles International Airport, July’s average high was 70.5 degrees, 4.8 degrees below historic norms. With ocean temperatures as much as 10 degrees cooler than normal, Southern California’s famous beaches have been less crowded.
Southern California often experiences “June gloom,” a period of cool, damp weather in late spring and early summer. But this year, “the June gloom has been going on all summer,” said Leith Emery, owner of PV Surf Camp in Palos Verdes Estates. Mr. Emery said he has canceled four weeks of afternoon sessions so far this summer after three-quarters of his students dropped out.
In San Jose, Calif., where the average high temperature of 78.8 degrees in July was the coolest in 52 years, calls to service air-conditioning equipment have dropped 50% so far this summer for Valley Heating, Cooling & Electrical, owner Cindy Faulkner said.
“Normally on a good day, we get at least 30 to 50 calls in summer, but today so far we’ve taken four,” Ms. Faulkner said recently. Valley recently reduced its head count by three employees. “It’s definitely a struggle,” Ms. Faulkner said.
Attendance has been flat at three Raging Waters parks in California, despite new attractions and an improving economy, according to James Judy, vice president of operations for Palace Entertainment, a unit of Britain’s Candover Investments PLC that runs the water parks. Palace’s nine East Coast water parks were reporting stronger attendance this summer, he said.
“It’s definitely not the summer we were hoping for in California,” Mr. Judy said.
Meteorologists attribute the low temperatures partly to a trough of low pressure parking cooler air along much of the West Coast for months. That has created a thicker-than-normal marine layer, an air mass that develops over a body of water amid a temperature inversion, with stronger winds to bring the frigid air onshore, said Warren Blier, a weather-service science officer in Monterey, Calif.
Mr. Blier said the mirror image of that weather pattern is a high-pressure trough that has parked warm air over the East Coast.
“We don’t have a good understanding of why the trough is persisting here,” Mr. Blier said. “It probably has something to do with global distribution of sea-surface temperatures.”
One theory is that there has been an unusually fast transition from an El Niño condition, which features warmer waters in the equatorial Pacific, to a La Niña condition, with cooler waters. Meteorologists have credited El Niño for bringing a wet year to California after three years of drought. La Niña typically ushers in drier weather for California, but forecasting models so far are unclear what this winter will bring.
There are some pluses to being unseasonably cool. Alfresco Heating in Novato, Calif., is going out on four to five calls a day to install or service heating equipment, compared with the two to three calls it normally handles in July, said service manager Deanna Hoppin.
“This is normally one of the slowest times of the year, but now it has become one of the busiest,” Ms. Hoppin said.