Guest post by J Storrs Hall
There are several ways to predict what the temperature trends of the next century will be like. The standard method of prediction in science is to create a theory which embodies a model, test the model experimentally, and then run it into the future for the prediction. There is another way, however, which is simpler in some ways although more complex in others. That’s simply to remember what’s happened before, and assume it will happen again.
Here’s a record of what’s happened before, which most WUWT readers will be familiar with. It’s the GISP2 Greenland ice core record, shown for the Holocene:
I have shamelessly spliced on the instrumental record in red (by setting the temps in 1850 equal); it is the HadSST record.
When I first started looking at GISP2 it seemed to me that there were several places in the record that looked very much like the sharp spike in temperature we’re experiencing now. The obvious thing thing to do seems to be to overlay them for an easy comparison:
Here I’ve plotted the 400 years following each minimum in the record that leads to a sustained sharp rise. There were 10 of them; the first five are plotted in cyan and the more recent 5 in blue. You can see that in the latter part of the Holocene the traces settle down from the wilder swings of the earlier period. Even so, every curve, even the early ones, seems to have an inflection — at least a change in slope — somewhere between 200 and 250 years after the minimum.
The hatched black line is the average of the 5 recent (blue) spikes. The red dots are the uptick at the end of GISP2 and HadSST, spliced at 1850. Note that ALL the minima dates are from GISP2.
Prediction of the 21st century is left to the reader as an exercise.
Read ’em and weep.
Am I the only one hoping for more global warming?
Thanks! A great comparison!
Personally i believe the Grand Minimum – the coming Eddy minimum – will send us 5 deg C lower like the Wolf minimum did after the MWP within 20 years. That’s what i’m planning for. Wished i had gloves on the bike this night coming home from the pub in July in Germany at 0:30. Cooling is already imminent here IMHO. “Inflection” in your words….
(Notwithstanding fake statistics by GISS and NOAA)
We are cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know.
==========
You are learning, Grasshopper. Now you must apply for huge grant. Sensei gets honorable movie rights.
The standard method of prediction in science is to create a theory which embodies a model, test the model experimentally, and then run it into the future for the prediction. There is another way, however, which is simpler in some ways although more complex in others. That’s simply to remember what’s happened before, and assume it will happen again.
===============================================================
Whether you remember it in your brain….or remember it in a computer
it’s still the same…….we can’t predict the future
Great post J, and something to think about…………
I think your graphs show that we will likely see a much colder climate over the coming decades. Since that means problems with growing food, and we now have over 7 billion people to feed; it don’t look good to me.
To add to the above …
A useful prediction is one that contains sufficient detail to reduce the number of explanations. Even better is a prediction that will rule out competing explanations.
Prediction is unhelpful if it leaves the field open to competing explanations as it does nothing to reduce scientific controversy.
A poor prediction is to claim that temperature will rise because it does nothing to favour one reason or to challenge other reasons.
The big red spot is an example of a much more acceptable prediction. Temperature might rise, but the big red spot is a very particular pattern of warming related to claims of the enhanced greenhouse effect. Other reasons for warming might cause a different pattern, as Chapter 9 of AR4 takes the time to explain.
Likewise, if that particular pattern of warming is not observed, the correct response is to conclude that the enhanced greenhouse effect is falsified.
J,
Interesting way to look at the data. I hope you will be able to plot the next couple of red datum- to see what the slope is up to.
Is there a way to calculate sun activity for the same periods ?
Great example of heavy use of common sense. Are you an Engineer (it takes one to know one!)?
I know predicting the future by looking in the rear view mirror is not recommeded, but for the well established cycle you’ve highlighted, it’s going to take a significant change in something to produce a different result. A minor change in a trace gas doesn’t qualify as that something in my book.
Quite clearly the end of the world is up next…
/sarc
Did somebody say “unprecedented”?
The 2nd graph is how it’s done. It shows what the weather/climate feels like: Going down real soon, hard by the bow.
In fact, the present curve looks just like a yearly cycle, January to December.
The 1850-present record, though it is a splice-on, looks spent. If Mann and others are going to present warming biased splice-ons, and keep recycling them as proof of warming, that 2nd graphic is the way to go. Relativity is honest.
Please note:
(1) HadSST is not local to Greenland so the red extension here may in fact be a larger peak.
A claimed nearby T reconstruction from Greenland itself has been presented (http://www.skepticalscience.com/10000-years-warmer.htm), a simplified version of which I made here:
http://oi53.tinypic.com/sg2wav.jpg
(2) A similarly long ice core from Antarctica (Vostok) does not correlate to this one:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Bond-events2.png
Unless you address these claims, here and on the SS web site, AGW enthusiasts will only scoff, mightily, and thus I no longer use the Greenland ice core in my usual package of arguments, since I don’t yet have a strong come back.
rbateman @ 4:44
I like your yearly cycle. And here we are on July 1. Perhaps CAGW was just a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.
===================
On the other hand if you want to consider what would happen to our civilisation if some if the more extreme temperature spikes in the record were repeated, go right ahead.
Let’s look for example at cereals like rice and wheat. As suitable temperature zones for these crops move towards the poles, what happens to the amount of land available? Since the earth is a sphere it likely goes down. Seems like Russia and Canada are going to be big winners.
I don’t believe those graphs. I mean it’s impossible to believe them because just one look at them, especially the first one should be enough to convince any sane person that current temperatures are not outside of natural variation. Why on Earth would anyone think otherwise?
Am I going mad or what?
Interesting post, thank you. “shameless splicing” – now where have I seen that before? When you look at the bigger picture the current trends all look precedented.
But…isn’t GISS Arctic temps “borrowed/filled-in/call-it-good” from a non-local source? If they can do it and call it appropriate, how come we can’t say HadSST is good enough for Greenland?
Nik,
You don’t have a strong comeback? Listen to yourself. A skeptic does not think like that. A skeptic follows the evidence – even if it is mixed.
The idea the Greenland temps are a proxy for global temps is absurd. That’s why there is no comeback! The evidence is clear the GHG’s are warming the world. Follow the science. Hint: science is done by scientists not blogggers.
Hope you are wrong!
This is not prediction. It is extrapolation. You are picking up the debased language of the Warmista. It will bite you in the behind.
Scientific prediction is a matter of having some reasonably well confirmed physical hypotheses and some set of initial conditions describing observable fact. Together the hypotheses and the initial conditions imply sentences describing observable phenomena in the future, unless you are retrodicting the past.
Looking at past graphs for patterns that resemble existing patterns is harmless enough and might give people some good ideas. However, it is not different in principle from reading chicken bones.
Finally, models are not found in theories or hypotheses. Models are analytic tools that can be used for investigating unknown assumptions in a theory. Using models to forecast the future is reading chicken bones.
Well I’ll use NASA for a proxy and state that the colder it was said to get the farther out to space NASA got. Later, when it got presumably warmer the less interested NASA to got to get out into space.
It’s really the coincidence that when NASA took on Hansen and let him bloom and come out and behave how ever, the higher the temperature got, the less NASA could sustain being a space faring organization, the more tax payers’s hard earned cash was needed to sustain a non space faring space organization model their way into even more of the tax payer’s hard earned cash. Go figure. :p
Splicing a global average temperature onto a point site is an interesting trick. Do you think the global-average variability is a valid comparison with this point variability?
What is the long term average temp on that top chart?
Nightly lows in upstate New York are getting ridiculous. I had to close the windows last night as it was absolutely frigid.
have tried for ages to post this on Tips today with no luck. cannot get my cursor activated in the message box. it’s been happening a bit this week.
anyway, heard the following on germany’s deutsche welle radio last nite and they specifically said they would be framing action against “climate change” as a “NATIONAL SECURITY” issue. that is why it is not a left/right thing, and why sceptics can get no traction in the MSM, and why half the GOP presidential candidates declare they are pro-CAGW and why Cameron, Sarkozy and Merkel are just as gungho as any so-called leftist govt. and that is why we must fight even harder to uphold the scientific method.
1 July: Deutsche Welle: Author Nina Werkhäuser, Editor: Andreas Illmer: Germany takes up chairmanship of the UN Security Council
Every presidency holds an ‘open debate,’ and Germany has selected climate change as the topic of their debate. It will be about the security implications of climate change, said Ambassador Wittig.
“Key points of the debate will be about the rise of sea levels and the disappearance of entire states,” said Wittig. “From the United Nations 192 states, for the first time several states could completely disappear,” he added.
The issue is not exactly new, but fits in with Germany’s profile within the United Nations as a pioneer of environmental and climate protection…
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15203646,00.html
Your Y axis is change in temp, no? So we should actually expect temps to continue rising for the next 150 years, no? (your hatched black line never makes it back to zero, much less negative temp changes.) Either I’m reading that incorrectly or about those commenting about seeing “a big upcoming cool down” in the graph are reading it incorrectly.
strike the “about” from the comment above
Mike says:
July 1, 2011 at 5:24 pm
“Hint: science is done by scientists not blogggers.”
Hint: Science is done by skeptics, not consensus.
John A:
No, you are not the only one hoping for a bit of warming! Even my AGW-leaning wife is hoping that we – in Canada at least – will be blessed with a little warming…
Mike illustrates the major problems in climate science. Arrogance and lack of critical evaluation of their own work. In the last few months Greenland glaciers melting has been cited as evidence of global warming. So, past behavior cannot suggest that global cooling might be next? At the very least, it is striking that the ancient patterns are very similar to the “unprecedented” warming that is causing the current melting. As a scientist in another field, it’s hard to take climate science seriously when the response to legitimate criticisms is contempt. This is even harder to understand when one realizes that the people held in contempt are funding climate research via their taxes. Warming may be real and mostly anthropogenic carbon dioxide driven, but the behavior of climate scientists makes me very suspicious. People with nothing to hide who have solid “unequivocal” evidence do not respond like cornered tasmanian devils (think, bugs bunny) when criticized. In biomedical sciences there was a period of frustration when a few scientists kept claiming that HIV was not the cause of AIDS. However, I don’t remember a lot of defensive angry outbursts. People working in that area knew the evidence was strong and getting stronger and their response by and large was simply to keep gathering data. However, they did consider the arguments offered by the opposition and responded in public (generally with restraint and at least some measure of respect, as I recall).
Mike says:
July 1, 2011 at 5:24 pm
“The evidence is clear the GHG’s are warming the world. Follow the science. Hint: science is done by scientists not blogggers.”….
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The “blogggers” only ask for data and methods.
“strong comebacks” may work in a debate, data wins the day.
He who shamelessly splices the instrument record on to reconstructed data is looking for trouble.
Maybe you can tell I went to a Chinese Restaurant for dinner and am writing like a fortune cookie.
The IPCC claims that ALL natural cycles are canceled by a little CO2. So, why waste time hashing over the past? Those who do not learn from the past are bound to repeat the mistakes of the past in the future. The IPCC does NOT want anybody to look at the past, at least not beyond the last 60 years.
Without looking at the past, we would have no clue what the Sun is bound to do in the next 50 years. These predictions have much more validity than the climate models as they incorporate the natural cycles of the Sun and simply extrapolate to the future. They do not cobble up a model based on selected factors and then discount all others.
Mike says:
July 1, 2011 at 5:24 pm
Follow the science. Hint: science is done by scientists not blogggers.
I expect many on this site are like myself, we have degrees in science, but like Hansen and Schmidt, these are not “Climate Science” degrees. Unfortunately most of us that graduated in science were good in math when that still counted for something, so we ended up with real science majors. Otherwise, having failed Fine Arts, we would have moved into Climate Science.
Climate Science is to science as Political Correctness is to freedom of speech. PC seeks to limit free speech through the application of political pressure. Climate Science seeks to limit the application of the Scientific Method to the study of climate through political pressure.
Unlike Science, “Climate Science” is not concerned with the search for truth. Climate Science already knows the truth. CO2 is bad – this is settled science as far as Climate Science is concerned.
Need more proof that “Climate Science” is not science? The concept of “settled science” does not exist in any other branch of science. Settled science is formally referred to as LAWS in the real sciences. Are we now to suppose that AGW has moved beyond hypothesis and is now a scientific law? Is that what “Climate Science” means by “settled science”? That AGW is now a scientific law?
I disagree Theo. Long before the correct model of the solar system was developed, people extrapolated from past events that the sun would rise the next day. It is not unreasonable to propose that what seems to be a stable pattern will continue. Of course, a model based on a complete understanding of the physical system is preferable, but it seems that new previously unknown contributors to the climate system keep emerging (algae in the Antarctic, who’d a thunk it?), so it seems doubtful that our current understanding is complete.
John A
July 1, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Am I the only one hoping for more global warming?
###
No. An increase of about 4C would suit me fine!
Mike says:
“Follow the science. Hint: science is done by scientists not blogggers.”
Mike must be referring to the RealClimate blog, where they follow the
sciencemoney.Mike;
Hint: science is done by scientists not blogggers>>>
Science is done by the scientific method.
No definition of the scientific method I’m familiar with prevents scientists from being bloggers.
In fact, the number of credentialed scientists on this blog both as writers and as commenters is staggering. There’s plenty of commenters with no credentials too, and when they talk science within the bounds of the scientific method, then its science.
When they talk gobbledygook, then it doesn’t mattter if they are bloggers, scientists or both, they’re just spouting gobbledygook. Very sad that so much climate “science” is gobbledygook dressed up as science. Even sadder are the blatant attempts like yours to discredit science based not on the method, but on where it is published.
From Mike on July 1, 2011 at 5:24 pm:
Thank you for your thorough dismissing of any scientific “research” done by Tamino, now I can be confident in my attempts to ignore him even more than totally. We can add Joe Romm as well, if he would do anything bearing a passing resemblance to science.
Also it’s been quite hard to determine if Gavin Schmidt is more scientist or blogger. Thus it would be fair to dismiss about half of the “science” he does as nonsense. At least half. The evidence has shown this to be well justified.
You’ve now dissed skeptic and (C)AGW-promoting bloggers alike. Ah Mikey, you hate everything. ☺
And once again ladies and gentlemen, THIS is why Wattupwiththat is the #1 science blog on the internet…
huishi says:
July 1, 2011 at 4:26 pm
I think your graphs show that we will likely see a much colder climate over the coming decades. Since that means problems with growing food, and we now have over 7 billion people to feed; it don’t look good to me.>>>>
The difference between animals and humans is that animals just do their best to survive when momma nature throws them a curve ball. They evolve, or they die. Humans don’t evolve. We adapt mama nature to us.
The most benevolent climate imaginable could not support 7 bilion people, let alone the actual climate we have. Greenhouses, dams, irrigation, rapid transportation, refridgeration, development of new crop strains, fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, mechanised processing, immunization…. shall I go on? These are the things that enable feeding billions, and we can adapt them to warmer temps and we can adapt them to cooler temps. All we need is two things.
Free enterprise and oil.
The rest takes care of itself.
After looking at the data presented here and a lot of other places, I can predict with near certainty that temperatures will either go up a little or down a little in the 21st century.
Theo’s comment is on the right track. Models based upon data that cannot be reproduced (i.e. the historical temperature record/ice cores/tree rings, etc.) are meaningless. Models do not make “predictions”.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
July 1, 2011 at 7:05 pm
From Mike…..
===========================
You forgot Cook!!, Moonbat, a plethora of others, and all who don’t seek to falsify their assertions first. Mikey, I don’t give a rats azz what people call themselves or what credentials they tout. If they don’t seek first to find why they could be wrong, they’re not scientists. They are pretenders. Or, to be more current, posers. They are pathetic and exposed.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to pile on, but was too easy.
@Mike
No, the evidence is clear that the models say GHG are warming the world. Those models were tuned based on corrupt team science as exposed by the climate-gate emails, among other things.
This “Bastardian” approach makes a whole lot more sense than using models that assume instability , in a system that has never demonstrated runaway temperature increases.
Looking at all of Holocene is a waste of time if you are concerned with what is happening in the immediate future. Look at just two things: the satellite temperature record and a longer term, perhaps a century and a half, history of temperature that has not been smoothed by any running average. That is because you want to see the El Nino record that is destroyed by that running average. If you do that you will note the following. First, the twentieth century opened with a cooling trend that had started about 1880 and which lasted until 1910. This was followed by a warming trend from 1910 to 1940, the start of World War Two. The winter of 1939/40 brought a very sharp cooling that lasted through the war. Temperature curves showing a heat wave during World War Two are simply dead wrong. Postwar temperatures were approximately level even though some claimed to see a slight cooling trend and suspected an ice age on the way. This level temperature regime prevailed until 1he arrival of the 1998 super El Nino. We are now into the satellite temperature era that started in 1979. NASA, NOAA, and the Met Office show a warming trend that begins in the late seventies. That warming is totally phony because satellites cannot see it. The only real warming within the satellite era started with the super El Nino of 1998, in four years raised global temperature by a third of a degree, and then stopped. It was oceanic, not greenhouse in nature, and it was a step warming. There was no warming before or after it except for periodic El Nino peaks that have been with us since the Panamanian Seaway closed. The super El Nino interrupted these ENSO phenomena but they are back with us since the 2008 La Nina cooling restarted the temperature oscillations that existed before it. Our climate future is now again controlled by these ENSO oscillations, its alternating El Nino and La Nina phases with an approximate five year frequency. Since the 2008 La Nina we have had an El Nino in 2010 and are now into the descending phase of the La Nina that came after it. These oscillations are what we have to look forward to this century, not some dangerous greenhouse warming concocted by IPCC climate modelers.
No-one is expert on the future. But with due respect to amplitude, frequency, and wavelength, recurring cyclical peaks and troughs reliably project patterns of activity not amenable to analysis in detail.
By c. AD 2050, riven by frigid depths of a new Maunder Minimum presaging the definitive end of Earth’s Long Summer, our current 12,250-year Holocene Interglacial Epoch, we think that technology will have advanced sufficiently to promote a mass exodus of humanity off-planet to giant intrasolar refugia immune to geophysical happenstance.
By analogy to medieval Italian city-states, such diverse socio-political/economic entities will represent an entirely new stage of human cultural evolution. Ossified cultists of all stripes may cling to Earth, but odds are that by AD 2500 our enterprising posterity will have reached the stars.
Theo: “Looking at past graphs for patterns that resemble existing patterns is harmless enough and might give people some good ideas. However, it is not different in principle from reading chicken bones.”
There are cycles. There are previous interglacials. Ignoring them because someone else has a wacked out CO2 theory — when CO2 has always followed warming — is kind of silly.
Comparing sun cycles from the past to sun cycles in the present is more than “reading chicken bones”. Sure, its nice to have an elegant theory and big pocketful of grant money, or even NASA behind you … but it doesn’t make you any good at predicting the suns next move.
Stephen Pruett says:
July 1, 2011 at 6:56 pm
Look up Kepler’s Three Laws. They are all over the internet, and that is for a reason. Kepler was the first to use hypotheses to explain a phenomena, the orbits of the planets as observed from Earth, and to predict some very interesting observable facts from those hypotheses. Galileo took Kepler’s work and explicated scientific method for anyone who has an open mind. Newton created the math that enabled rigorous formulation of Kepler’s hypotheses. Kepler’s Laws are derivable from Newton’s Theory of Gravitation. If you ride a roller coaster today, no matter how wild, you are riding a machine designed from Kepler’s Laws.
The system of epicycles that came from Ptolemy (100 AD) and was preserved by Copernicus is something like a computer model; however, planetary orbits are not circles and they are not circles upon circles. Kepler had the synthetic genius to create new hypotheses that organized the data in a new way, that explained the phenomena, and that enabled prediction of the phenomena. Galileo drove people mad by using a telescope to show that Kepler’s Three Laws were correct. For that he was placed under house arrest without medical attention for the remainder of his life. He wrote a new book and smuggled it out to a Protestant country.
AGW is based on a misapplication of the scientific method. By counting all the times AGW can be shown to be right, this is taken as proof that it is right. This is not the scientific method. It is propaganda, it is marketing, is is politics, it is cultism, it is religion, but it is not science. Otherwise, the fact that a stopped clock is right 700+ times a year would be evidence that a stopped clock keep perfect time, while the fact that a working clock is rarely if every right is proof that working clocks do not keep time.
NikFromNYC: Actually, I don’t really care much about what the warmists think. I’m just trying to figure out what *I* think about what’s likely in the next century. I was a bit surprised to see all the spikes peaking at roughly the same timeframe, even though their heights varied by a factor of six.
BTW, “skepticalscience” is so obviously political that it’s not worth the time it takes to read it.
Think of it this way: suppose you were forced to wager you house on what the temp would be in 2050. Who would you read, what calcs would you do? I frankly don’t know of any model I’d trust the output of better than simple comparison with the record. Of course, splicing the instrumental record is totally cheesy and I wouldn’t trust it for good relative temp values — but the key parameter in this set of traces turns out — surprisingly — not to be temps at all, but times. So we can be more confident than if we were judging something by the height of the dotted line. That said, this remains no more than a back-of-the-envelope ansatz. But one it might be worth following up.
John A says:
July 1, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Am I the only one hoping for more global warming?
and several here reveal he is not. But there is a catch: actual warming causes the Environazis to ponder drastic action which gravely endangers us all.
They do not care that more people die of winter chill than summer heat. They have never noticed at what temperatures grass grows best.
And anyhow, many of them are perfectly willing to kill anything else alive as long as they damage people.
Bruce says:
July 1, 2011 at 8:13 pm
“There are cycles. There are previous interglacials. Ignoring them because someone else has a wacked out CO2 theory — when CO2 has always followed warming — is kind of silly.”
I did not say that you should ignore them. They can be used in many ways. However, looking at graphs of older times and recognizing that they resemble graphs of present times is only a beginning. You may choose to take that beginning and create some science upon it. But scientific hypotheses are far more sophisticated than that. Take Kepler’s First Law as an example. It states that all planetary orbits are ellipses that have the sun at one of the foci. It organizes the data. All observations of planetary orbits from Earth should confirm that the planet in question is travelling in an ellipse with the sun at one foci. How can you get something like that from the fact that there were patterns in previous inter-glacials? Ancient astronomers knew of many patterns in the movements of planets, but they could explain diddly and predict diddly.
John Q. Galt says:
July 1, 2011 at 5:57 pm
Nightly lows in upstate New York are getting ridiculous. I had to close the windows last night as it was absolutely frigid.
Summer hasn’t started in Vancouver. Rainy and cold with a couple of nice days thrown in along the way. Still lots of snow on the local mountains. The calendar says July but outside it is more like April.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
July 1, 2011 at 7:05 pm
From Mike on July 1, 2011 at 5:24 pm:
“Follow the science. Hint: science is done by scientists not blogggers.”
kadaka, thank you for emphasizing this point. Science is the critical enterprise par excellence. Some scientists are fortunate enough to create hypotheses that organize the data in new ways, that explain the data, and that enable prediction of future data. All scientists then criticize the proposed hypothesis, including the scientist who proposed it. That is the way science advances. Any person who is adverse to criticism of what he proposes is not a scientist.
Bruce says:
July 1, 2011 at 8:13 pm
Theo: …………….
There are cycles. There are previous interglacials. Ignoring them because someone else has a wacked out CO2 theory — when CO2 has always followed warming — is kind of silly.
====================================================================
Bruce, I’m not Theo, and I can’t speak for him, but I don’t believe that’s what he was stating.
Theo is a sharp guy, and you can’t always discern what he’s stating by one comment. You may benefit by going back a bit to see where he’s coming from. My experience is that Theo doesn’t put much cotton in the current CO2 theory, either.
ferd berple says:
July 1, 2011 at 6:53 pm
Actually, the AGW mantra is now “Climate Change” and in that one thing they’re right since a changing climate is definitely the status quo. So they go off half cocked claiming that the discipline is entirely theirs while ignoring the most basic tenants and methodologies involved, but I say: “Go for it, ye unwashed, politically imbued traitors of science and citizenship”. Their whole thesis is based on CO2 and when that’s proven to be even more untenable than it is now, they’ll become expert navel gazers instead.
Theo Goodwin says:
July 1, 2011 at 8:33 pm
Actually, a heck of a lot of science is done by blogging scientists. And engineers. And statiticians. And pissed off tax payers. You don’t have to have a degree in science to apply and understand the scientific method–hence the reason the more the AGW crowd throws their “science” at the public, the less it’s accepted.
It’s not hard or difficult, by any measure, to follow the next roll in the waves. Most models today are only good for extrapolating straight lines. Such endless slopes nature smirks at while it prepares its next big surprise. We see the big cycles and the small cycles endlessly in the Ice Ages, Ice Core records, ocean cycles, yearly cycles, etc. Anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels may be holding up the tent for now (or wemight be fooling ourself), but when the fuel runs out…. It will scacely be any different given the large swings in the big scales.
History will vindicate us.
We’re doomed!
(And, what is worse, if Brisbane keeps cooling down I’m going to have to move to – shudder- Cairns.)
From GISP2 site linked earlier in the article:
“ABSTRACT:
Greenland ice-core records provide an exceptionally clear picture of
many aspects of abrupt climate changes, and particularly of those
associated with the Younger Dryas event, as reviewed here.
Well-preserved annual layers can be counted confidently, with only 1%
errors for the age of the end of the Younger Dryas 11,500 years before
present. Ice-flow corrections allow reconstruction of snow accumulation
rates over tens of thousands of years with little additional uncertainty.
Glaciochemical and particulate data record atmospheric-loading changes
with little uncertainty introduced by changes in snow accumulation.
Confident paleothermometry is provided by site-specific calibrations
using ice-isotopic ratios, borehole temperatures, and gas-isotopic ratios.
Near-simultaneous changes in ice-core paleoclimatic indicators of local,
regional, and more-widespread climate conditions demonstrate that much
of the Earth experienced abrupt climate changes synchronous with
Greenland within thirty years or less. Post-Younger Dryas changes
have not duplicated the size, extent and rapidity of these
paleoclimatic changes.”
Indeed, 10-15C temperature swings over 500 yr periods are common before the settling in of the Interglacial.
Look at the GISP2 data.
Climate change is in written and geological history, so in ice cores also. Models are GIGO!
Theo Goodwin says:
July 1, 2011 at 8:28 pm
However, looking at graphs of older times and recognizing that they resemble graphs of present times is only a beginning. You may choose to take that beginning and create some science upon it. But scientific hypotheses are far more sophisticated than that. Take Kepler’s First Law as an example. It states that all planetary orbits are ellipses that have the sun at one of the foci. It organizes the data. All observations of planetary orbits from Earth should confirm that the planet in question is travelling in an ellipse with the sun at one foci. How can you get something like that from the fact that there were patterns in previous inter-glacials? Ancient astronomers knew of many patterns in the movements of planets, but they could explain diddly and predict diddly.
The first step in any science is observation. One of the simplest observations is that something is happening repeatedly, that observation is made by noting that repetition and reporting that you would expect a further repetition. Then observing the repetition. You can use any synonyms you want for that reporting – extrapolation, forecasting, prediction, experience….. but that first observation of a cycle is the foundation of the science of why that repetition takes place. However, although knowing ‘why’ may make you feel superior but it doesn’t change the forecast. The old fisherman knows when the tide will rise and how high its likely to be today this season with the wind, but knows not a lot about gravitation, fluid flows and Coriolis forces. Does that make a scientist better at forecasting the next tide?
This post is highlighting the type of response that an old fisherman would make to a youngster seeing the sea and the tide coming in for the first time and running about saying that the world is going to flood. And your response is like the youngster saying to the fisherman “what do you know? You are not modeling and really forecasting tides using science; you are just extrapolating from the past – this time it will be different! The world is going to be flooded!!”
James Sexton says:
July 1, 2011 at 8:36 pm
Same to ya’. 🙂
As a total neophyte in these matters, I dare to ask why the Greenland Positive Degree Day Trends (Jason E. Box’s web pages at http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/) seem to have had an spectacular increase only since around 1998, the Super El Nino year, while increasing only modestly from 1840 to around 1930 and descending from around 1930 to around 1998, as well as how this relates to anthropogenical warming. I have also put these questions at Jason Box’s blog).
Thanks for whatever answer.
(In the wake of NikFromNYC’s post of July 1, 2011 at 4:52 pm, and http://www.skepticalscience.com/10000-years-warmer.htm article)
Tend to think of this “reconstruction” (based on O18/O16 I presume as “horse pucky”.
Having done an MS Thesis on “Heat Transfer in a Packed Bed” and being familiar with “thermal waves” through solids, I find this to be interesting…
Compare 1:44 in the vimeo with GISP2. It’s obvious there IS no comparison.
Excuse me for being a bit “simplistic”. But the “purely mechanical” way of determining surface temperature based on the “thermal wave” seems PDG (pretty darn good).
You decide..
Two sets of “scientists”. Two results. Which is true? Which passes the “quality assurance” muster.
I personally like this one, the blue line that is. Historically it looks like there is no place to go but down and 8 deg C is quite a drop:
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/400000yearslarge.gif
There is a famous quote from Einstein …
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
The converse should also be true ..
“Insanity: doing different things but expecting the same results.”
There are any number of causes for the previous changes. Rather surprisingly, as shown above, many of the past spikes had a similar time before they reached the peak. However, we know that there is at least one factor that is clearly different not than for any of the previous spikes – a very significant spike in CO2. This makes it questionable to expect this spike to be like the previous spikes.
Furthermore, this statement is telling:
“… there were several places in the record that looked very much like the sharp spike in temperature we’re experiencing now…”
There are many little spike; many large spikes. There are slowly rising spikes and rapidly rising spikes. Any time data is selected by “looks”, there is a strong possibility of introducing bias. There should be some clear criteria for selecting data, and for determining the length and rise of the spike. To me, even the spikes that were selected do not show any particular time to maximum.
Anyone who wants to bet on “what’s next” regarding the global temperature can find 14 bets available on Intrade at https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/?eventClassId=20
BFL says:
July 1, 2011 at 9:40 pm
Yes, that was interesting. “We made ourselves a very bad experiment: We started meteorology at the coldest point in 10,000 years”.
Max Hugoson says:
July 1, 2011 at 9:37 pm
Oops, 4th of July pre-LIA fever. That was your vimeo video link for my above post.
My favorite “Ok, Einstein, look at this picture and tell us what happens next” image is http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature_Rev_png
It is another candidate for stacking events – in this case, the trailing edge. No hiding that decline.
One guess is as good as another, usually. The AGW cultists though are examples where that Cliché fails (e.g., warming out into the future as far as the eye can see).
An educated guess can be better, particularly when it is based on recent experiences. Therefore …
*if* we have entered a 25-30 year cooling micro-cycle it could reach out to 2030-ish.
*if* after that there is a corresponding 25-30 year warming micro-cycle it could reach out past 2060-ish.
There is something important to note here, and I have been repeating it for some time. That projection of warming again out to 2060-ish. easily cover the ‘mid-century’ talk that seems to keep popping up in the AGW nonsense as of late. I have been referring to this as a kind of trap (by design or accident). Yes it is unlikely any of us discussing this issue today will be alive at the time to be proven correct, but we can use it now instead.
So I like to simply respond to AGW predictions of global warming by mid-century by saying: “Yes, it is supposed to warm up around mid-century. And your point is?”
Put me down for a few more degrees as well. Just using personal experience, the warming from 1980-ish to 2000-ish strikes me as a shorter cycle than the previous cooling cycle. There were a few good summers in the mid to late 1990’s but I am sure the warming did not equal the previous cooling. And, no I do not give a crap what the satellites say.
Roger Knights [July 1, 2011 at 9:04 pm] says:
“History will vindicate us.”
Yes it will. However it really won’t matter. The AGW cult doomsayers have gone ‘all in’ this time, thereby outdoing their 1970’s predecessors for idiocracy. I submit for proof the attempts to downplay the previous two epic NH winters (remember the use of questionable satellite data to state January 2010 was boiling). They are trying to erase the last *four* increasingly heavy winters from memory by all means possible. This even includes reversing the necessary logic to function as a sane human being by equating massive blizzards to warming. I’ll say it again, even if we get *30* epic winters in a row and surpass the 1960’s and 1970’s, it will not matter.
The cult members are in this for keeps. There is no debating point that will sway them. There is no evidence that will silence them. This is a power play outside of science. The goal is to convert everything including science and society at large to the green-red socialist agenda. Think of it as a neo-feudal system with a ruling class of an EU/UN type politburo using an aristocracy or nobility of scientists, celebrities and favored citizens. This will allow them to implement the whims of this intelligentsia under the guise of legality. They must be defeated, period.
I think that it is a good idea to look at the temperature data free from the assumption that many are trying to force on us
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record
The PETM is about 12 degrees c hotter then today we are going to have to put a heck of a lot of co2 into the atmosphere to reach that peak.Humans are perhaps putting more co2 into the atmosphere today but this will decline in the future no matter what actions we take today.
Mike said: [“Nik, You don’t have a strong comeback? Listen to yourself. A skeptic does not think like that. A skeptic follows the evidence – even if it is mixed.”]
I have determined to my own very-hard-to-please satisfaction that climatology contains a high level of devolved scientific discipline that now sadly represents true old school corruption. My main goal is to set this straight, vigorously. “Following evidence” is something I did for three years, and in this forth year I am on the war path, for the rabbit hole went very deep indeed, back to the dark ages. As a recently minted bachelor after 17 years of heaven and hell and relative calm and much bliss (now age 45), my good ole’ statement that “I’m basically a scientist” on dates started to feel awkward, due to and only due to AGW claims that appeared in the news each day. So I looked into it.
[“The idea the Greenland temps are a proxy for global temps is absurd.”]
They are not highly “local” however, since the O16/O18 ratio that is the actual proxy involves both the temperature of evaporation of the surrounding seas and the temperature of the condensation of water vapor (gas) into snow in large areas above the Greenland. Greenland is situated in a prime location where Atlantic ocean currents turn around and head back south. But it’s also an area of high local variability in the details of both wind and ocean currents. If “history is a hockey stick,” globally, then simple street smart logic requires that it show up at least in some way in actual data that doesn’t involve highly variable tree ring proxies but actually involves very simple physical science proxies that suffer no biological multiple-variable uncertainty.
[That’s why there is no comeback! The evidence is clear the GHG’s are warming the world. Follow the science. Hint: science is done by scientists not blogggers.]
What evidence? I want to believe! Caribou populations? Go fish.
The point of my original post was very singular: a scatter-shot soundbite approach to skepticism is not effective in the greater scheme of things, for there are smart people on both sides, and a single serious inconsistency in a singular argument like this “ha ha the other side is stupid” post does much much more harm than good to the cause of restoring science to a point where real debate is the only respectable dialog. I have no interest in being a maverick. I want solid, well-grounded arguments, and only those. This post is merely a song to the choir.
Neophyte skeptics who grab that ice core image and post it far and wide, in forums and at the end of news stories in a way that might actually influence layperson opinion are like kids pushed forth to the front line minus actual training in how to reload their weapon.
The second chart is most definitely not going to be included in the IPCC’s next fantasy report, as it totally shreds the AGW argument. Unfortunately, it will also not be shown to our children in schools and universities, as it completely undermines alarmist propoganda.
Anthony, I suspect this is one of the most important documents you have ever produced in your blog to support the average sceptic view of: “Yes, man may have had a little to do with the minor warming trend of the past half century, but our impact is almost irrelevant when compared to natural climate cycles.”
Please see the graphs here:
http://www.climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm
especially the overview at the top of the page.
So it looks like it will get colder, this will clearly be due to climate change and all we have to do now is find the anthropogenic cause.
Here I’ve plotted the 400 years following each minimum in the record that leads to a sustained sharp rise.
That was precisely my line of thought … until I remembered the problems with 1/f type noise and how by assigning the “noise” into sections, you can create the illusion of a hummock where no evidence really exists apart from your own psychological belief that it is divided into hummocks.
I fear what you have shown is an instinctive behaviour of humans to see a particular shape in noise rather than any actual characteristic of a the signal
My first instinct would be to do a nice simple fourier transform of the GISP signal, and plot the amplitude of the signal with frequency (real2+imagary2)^.5 and this stage it should be possible to see whether there is a dominant “hump” frequency in the signal, or whether (if plotted on log scale) what you see follows a general 1/f^n curve.
If however you want to analyse the real signal, I suggest creating some kind of trigger algorithm which decides when a “hump” starts and then playing around with this to see how sensitive it is to variation and whether e.g. a small change in the trigger settings leads to dramatically different results.
Hope this helps.
Global Mean Temperature Pattern: http://bit.ly/cO94in
NikFromNYC says:
July 1, 2011 at 4:52 pm
Regarding #2: Why should the Antarctic cores match those in Greenland? They do roughly match, but the details differ. Both clearly show glacial vs. interglacial. However, the Antarctic cores don’t see the Younger Dryas. There is nothing wrong with that. We know the Younger Dryas occurred. The difference can be explained by anisotropy of the cosmic ray flux. In other words, what the southern hemisphere sees is not exactly the same as what the northern hemisphere sees. Whether that is the “real” answer remains to be seen. Ball in your court.
There is another way, however, which is simpler in some ways although more complex in others. That’s simply to remember what’s happened before, and assume it will happen again.
I believe this is Piers Corbyn’s general strategy – and it seems to work, at least according to the bookies who banned him from betting on the weather.
It’s not proper climate science if you admit you spliced data together in an arbitrary way.
Mike says:
July 1, 2011 at 5:24 pm
The evidence is clear the GHG’s are warming the world. Follow the science.
OK Mike, we’re all eyes and ears. Firstly lets clarify that presumably you meant to say “dangerously” warming the world – that’s the general hypothesis. So lets get to it. I’d like to see that evidence. Where’s the hot spot in the upper troposphere? Because without positive feedback from H20 your claim of “GHGs are (dangerously) warming the world” is bogus. What is clear is that the relative warmth of today is nothing unprecedented.
davidmhoffer says:
July 1, 2011 at 7:17 pm
The difference between animals and humans is that animals just do their best to survive when momma nature throws them a curve ball. They evolve, or they die. Humans don’t evolve. We adapt mama nature to us.
Respectfully, we don’t “adapt mama nature to us,” as much as the cultists believe we can. It has always been us who do all the adapting, and so will it continue to be.
John A says:
July 1, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Am I the only one hoping for more global warming?
Depends how much warming. It would be nice to not have to pay massive fuel bills in the winter.
Climate follows natural cycles. I have chopped my aging Land Rover for a newer Jeep Grand Cherokee. Living in the country you have to rely on yourself so a capable 4×4 seems to fit the bill.
Stephen Pruett says:
As a scientist in another field, it’s hard to take climate science seriously when the response to legitimate criticisms is contempt. This is even harder to understand when one realizes that the people held in contempt are funding climate research via their taxes. Warming may be real and mostly anthropogenic carbon dioxide driven, but the behavior of climate scientists makes me very suspicious. People with nothing to hide who have solid “unequivocal” evidence do not respond like cornered tasmanian devils (think, bugs bunny) when criticized.
Such behaviour is far more typical of political and religious extremists who know full well they have no possible way to justify their claims.
higley7 says:
The IPCC claims that ALL natural cycles are canceled by a little CO2.
Put apparently only human produced carbon dioxide. Apparently it’s possible to tell the difference between that produced when coal, oil and gas are burnt by humans and that produced when they catch fire by natural means…
I see a lot of little bumps of about 60-year duration comprising these 10 temperature curves the author has plotted. How interesting.
kim says:
Perhaps CAGW was just a Midsummer’s Night’s Dream.
More like A Nightmare on Elm Street, I think. They do to science what Freddy Krueger does to his victims.
J Storrs Hall….very interesting…we have been looking at Vostok in a similar way…and each warm period lasts about the same, and is similar in all respects to the current warm period, especially the Holocene spikes, in rate of change and amplitude. They don’t correlate to CO2.
But be careful not to just average the GISP data – there are interesting patterns that get hidden by averaging….for example look at the 50-30 kyr BP period, where it is most clear….there is an approximation of an 8:5:3:2:1 ratio of duration of the spikes, close to a Fibonacci series. The Holocene is less clear, but there is a similar pattern. No one seems to have addressed this. We have yet to look closely at the Antarctic. What can cause this pattern…any ideas?
The patterns may not be ‘global’ but this is hardly relevant….the world’s food surplus is grown in the northern hemisphere. Whatever the power of CO2 (measured by both the Radiative Forcinng and the Lamda factor that and i would give it a low Lamda factor (L) in relation to the RF….maybe 0.1 or 0.2….hence where RF for doubling is 3.7 (watts per square metre), the expected temperature at equilibrium will be T= L (RF) or 0.37-0.74 C – it works either with or against the natural patterns and cycles. The IPCC gives lamda as 0.8, but within its ranks, there are those who go as low as 0.4….giving the range of 1.5 to 3 C. Naturally, IPCC prefer 0.8 and the scary climate that would follow, but the science within their own ranks supports a range of lamda down to 0.4. The rise in RF since 1980 is about 1 watt for CO2 and the maybe-not-yet-equilibrium T is 0.5C…assuming ALL the T change is antrhopogenic (which I consider highly unlikely!), then IPCC are relying on the heat-in-the-ocean-pipeline to confirm their choice of lamda.
Scottish Sceptic: Take the segment from 650 to 880 (the min before, and the rise of, the MWP) and do a sliding-window correlation of it across the whole record. The peaks in the resulting graph do a good job of replicating my eyeball selection. The key thing, whatever method you use, is to select by the valley shapes (in the temperature record) and only then look at the following peaks.
For completeness, the minima I showed were -6260, -5250, -3470, -2808, -2509, -1990, -1580, -325, 90, and 740.
huishi says:
July 1, 2011 at 4:26 pm
I think your graphs show that we will likely see a much colder climate over the coming decades. Since that means problems with growing food, and we now have over 7 billion people to feed; it don’t look good to me. )))
Now you are getting on track. If only others would wake up.
Following the “Limits to growth” BS and Erlich’s poor quality novel, a large group of radicalised Uni ferals, upper class monied elite, decided they did not want to share the last of our resources with those pesky Asians, Africans and South Americans who dare to want a better lifestyle.
Then the Big Kahuna. China opened up its economy.
Recently we have seen Big Al talk about population control, this web site, and in Australia the other day our Esteemed Dear WaterMelon Leader, Bob Brown, yes Bob Brown not Bob Down, spoke on the same subject to the National Press Club which was televised on our own Pravda, the ABC.
Connect the dots dears. Why else did this garbage start with the 2 rich, affluent, white countries that used the most oil.
Riddle me this…. who pissed in Stephen Schneiders pocket to go from cooling to warming?? That person or group hold the answer(s).
regards
Just noting these temperature estimates are from Richard Alley (Alley 2000) which used an inappropriate formula in converting the Greenland dO18 isotope data from the GISP2 ice cores into temperature. The changes should only be half as much – 1.0C instead of 2.0C etc.
The newest papers on the Younger Dryas and the Greenland ice cores are starting to correct this big mistake but it took the researchers awhile to do so.
This is more what happened in Greenland and Antarctica in the last 16,000 years (divide by 2 for the global temperature).
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/294/dryasevents.png
And the Ngrip ice cores were recently extended back to 123,000 years ago so that we can see the Eemian interglacial in Greenland (previously there was too much distortion at the bottom of the ice cores to be clear about the ages). The Eemian interglacial was about 2.0C warmer globally than today.
http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/9484/lasticeageglant.png
John A says:
July 1, 2011 at 4:01 pm
“Am I the only one hoping for more global warming?”
If by that you mean to ask if you’re the only sane, objective, informed person in the world then the answer is no.
The first graph appears to be a proverbial ‘target rich environment’ insofar as hockey sticks are concerned. 🙂
Ian W says:
July 1, 2011 at 9:34 pm
You have totally bought into the debased language of the Warmista. If you want to know about hypotheses and prediction, read about Kepler’s Three Laws. Then we will have a common background to discuss the matter. Using Kepler’s Laws, one can predict the phases of Venus.
The Warmista would like us to use the language of the man in the street. The man in the street believes that he can predict the next winning Lotto number, the next Super Bowl winner, and so on. Obviously, there is no basis for any such prediction. The man in the street has hunches and may have very good hunches, but it is a grave error to dignify them with the terminology of science. Hunches are not scientific predictions.
The Warmista offer us hunches and model runs but claim that they offer us scientific predictions. They are just as wrong as the man in the street. Models cannot predict. Hunches are not predictions.
Extrapolations from experience and old graphs might be useful and fun but they are not scientific predictions. This is easily demonstrated. Scientific predictions are falsifiable. That means that one or more hypotheses used in the prediction will be falsified if the prediction turns out to be false. If instead of hypotheses you have old graphs then what are you going to falsify? Are you going to say that the old graph is false? How can it be false? It is just what it is, a plot of numbers.
Ian W says:
July 1, 2011 at 9:34 pm
“You can use any synonyms you want for that reporting – extrapolation, forecasting, prediction, experience….. but that first observation of a cycle is the foundation of the science of why that repetition takes place.”
Why do you declare these to be synonyms? Do you believe that extrapolation from an old graph is scientific prediction? Why? Do you believe that forecasts by weathermen are scientific predictions? Why? Sorry, but this list you give is not a list of synonyms.
Do I live in the only country on the planet where local temperatures have been falling every year, freezing lakes that don’t usually freeze over and destroying crops? Forget global temperature charts that show increased temperatures, they are useless and do not represent reality.
Anyone who opens their mouths with the disgraceful lies that “man made global warming” will increase temperatures or that temperatures here are rising then its clear that they are idiotic fools and they need to be stopped in the interest of public safety, such people seem to have no concept of the dangers of cold winters, the death toll due to the past three winters alone were extremely high and injuries were even higher there were even reports of people losing limbs from frost bite.
It’s irresponsible (and I believe criminal) to inform the public that the entire planet is warming and to expect milder winters, barbecue summers and that our local climate will change to be a more tropical kind.
Man Made Global warming is a huge scam and I’m sick to my back teeth of all the false claims, regulations and taxes and increased domestic prices based on eco-dribble and what moronic public figures believe.
People need to get off their fat lazy asses and demand that these people get prosecuted it’s disgusting and bloody outrageous that this “Man Made Global warming” Bull Sh*t has dragged on for so long and cost so much.
Dave Springer says:
July 2, 2011 at 5:48 am
If by “global warming” you’re referring to what the IPCC-compliant computer models are projecting, I’d agree. However, only a “sane, objective, informed person” would look at the empirical data, be satisfied with the outcome, and completely reject those discrepancy-laden computer models. They can’t hindcast so I seriously doubt they can forecast. For me, a bit more warming would be tolerated; even gladly accepted. Besides, upon what thesis are you saying there will be intolerable warming in the future? CO2?? Laughable.
Bill Illis says:
July 2, 2011 at 5:41 am
The Arctic and Antarctic intertwine (converge and diverge) the same way in the long-term cycles as they do today in the Sea Ice cycles. They also follow much the same path, the walker being the Big Antarctic Cap and walked dog being the Greenland Cap.
Climate models, of the Hansen variety, can only create scenarios, IE “what if’s”. Spin creates predictions.
huishi says:
July 1, 2011 at 4:26 pm
“I think your graphs show that we will likely see a much colder climate over the coming decades. Since that means problems with growing food, and we now have over 7 billion people to feed; it don’t look good to me…”
Don’t worry too much, Huishi, the current population of the world could, for example, fit into a small Principality the size of Wales, with a generous 3m^2 of ground space per person. This means the rest of the world could be available for huge green-houses and battery farms for livestock. No worries… :-))
BFL says:
July 1, 2011 at 9:40 pm
I personally like this one, the blue line that is. Historically it looks like there is no place to go but down and 8 deg C is quite a drop:
http://www.brighton73.freeserve.co.uk/gw/paleo/400000yearslarge.gif
======================================================================
Well BFL, a sane person would look at that and see that every time CO2 levels went up…
….temperatures crashed
That for some reason, recent temperatures did not go up as high as they used to….
….and CO2 levels are higher than they use to be
but then that wouldn’t be science, would it?
Russia is taking the ‘Arctic business’ seriously.
Russia to create Arctic troops – defense minister
Russia will deploy troops in the north to defend its interests in the Arctic region, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said on Friday.
http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20110701/164952606.html
Bill Illis: Hi! Where do your two graphs come from please?
Dave
Mike says:
July 2, 2011 at 6:26 am
“…the over whelming(sic) evidence…”
Cite three papers that provide said evidence. To avoid… confusion, that would be;
Evidence that mankind’s contribution to total atmospheric carbon dioxide content caused the warming we have experienced since, say, 1911. Not evidence that the globe warmed. Not models.
If it is overwhelming I will be convinced. I may be pedantic but I am not wilfully stupid.
Theo: “I did not say that you should ignore them.”
You said even worse: “it is not different in principle from reading chicken bones.”
Go away Troll.
Tenuc says:
July 2, 2011 at 7:27 am
“Don’t worry too much, Huishi, the current population of the world could, for example, fit into a small Principality the size of Wales, with a generous 3m^2 of ground space per person. ”
Wouldn’t that make it prone to tipping over?
😛
(See: Hank Johnson D-GA ref Guam)
Eric Worrall says:
July 2, 2011 at 2:24 am
It’s not proper climate science if you admit you spliced data together in an arbitrary way
_____
Uh, this particular post has nothing to do with climate science…if you haven’t noticed.
If you merely circle wagons and don’t allow a factual debate ’bout Greenland, then you in this hour, don’t deserve a shower. Self-selection takes no prisoners. Thinkers fled from this debate, already. It’s Summer outside. No BANDWIDTH LIMITED issues exist, outside. Real people, they exist, out there. They want to meet you. Nothing would make them happier. Go out. Report back. Negative self-selection prevents my message from having any effect, here, in a especially contrived junior science backwater.
You hours do not affect.
M.A.Vukcevic says:
July 2, 2011 at 7:54 am
Russia is taking the ‘Arctic business’ seriously.
Russia to create Arctic troops – defense minister
Russia will deploy troops in the north to defend its interests in the Arctic region, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said on Friday.
http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20110701/164952606.html
_____
As well they should. The USA, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, and most recently China, have all initiated or expanded military readiness programs on one level or another to prepare for potential military action in the Arctic based on the sole criteria that access to the region and its resources is going to get easier and easier in the future as the ice thins and recedes on a year to year basis. Of course, those who think the next Little Ice Age is about to descend upon us probably think all this preparation is for nothing. We will know in less than a decade.
History repeats itself. Has to. No-one listens.
R. Gates says:
” potential military action in the Arctic based on the sole criteria that access to the region and its resources is going to get easier and easier in the future as the ice thins and recedes on a year to year basis. ”
You just made that up.
Rod Gill says:
July 1, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Great example of heavy use of common sense. Are you an Engineer (it takes one to know one!)?
I know predicting the future by looking in the rear view mirror is not recommeded …
I’m not qualified to comment on the OP, but (as a software engineer) I’ve done a lot of work relating to Risk Management systems for UK banks (read: working out potential and actual customer’s credit-worthiness). The golden rule in that area is “The future is like the past,” and it seems to work out more often than not. So, at least where the money is, “predicting the future by looking in the rear view mirror” is not only recommended, it’s essential. And the recent crash/recession/(depression?) is evidence of what happens when that golden Rule is set aside.
Regarding the GISP2 Greenland ice core record. The short term trends after major drops were up for the -5000, -3000 & -1000 (aprox). It appears stable and rising. The drop that ended the MWP (aka little ice age) has trended downward until recently.
While I hope for a warmer greener planet (with lots of CO2 for our plants) I think a downward trend is more likely. In real simple terms (ones I can grasp 🙂 3 out of 4 ain’t bad but I’m going to have to live through the 1.
R. Gates says:
July 2, 2011 at 11:51 am
Yes, step on it, and you just did. Russia doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit concerned over how much or how little ice there is in the Arctic:
http://en.rian.ru/business/20110617/164678803.html
The State run Rosneft Oil Company of Russia has invited all 4 of the Big Oil companies, including BP and Shell. Russia is busy making deals for the oil that you blame for all of the world’s troubles.
What are the Alarmists doing? Making up stories to steer the West into a poverty-stricken pile of goo, with the new Model A being Fred Flinstones’ car. Yabba-dabba doo.
As J Storrs Hall said “Read ‘em and weep.”
We better hope that he’s wrong.
A rough approximation on the arrival of “Bond Zero”.
http://i51.tinypic.com/6zbqds.png
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/01/whats-up-next/#comment-692980
Not sure why you are including Iceland, Finland. Sweden, and China in your list?
There are only five countries with actual territorial clains in the Arctic (CCW, and as it so happens to be, also in alphabetical order); Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia, and the USA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_Economic_Zone (200 NM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_claims_in_the_Arctic (only the five countries above have additonal claims over and above their respective EEZ’s (and even these EEZ’s are only disputed by said same five countries))
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_waters
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/06_08_08_arcticboundaries.pdf (not a whole lot left to fight over for as I see it)
Also, this “article” has absolutely no predictive skill whatsoever.
Cherry picking, did you say?
You betcha!
So, for example, pick the ten highest maxima, plot them to there respective minima, then plot the current surface temperature time series (1850-present) against those ten and guess what?
OMG, 100% bonafide proof of AGW!
🙁
theduke says:
July 1, 2011 at 7:18 pm
I’ll go you one better:
Temperature will not remain constant.
theduke says:
July 1, 2011 at 7:18 pm
“Ancient astronomers knew of many patterns in the movements of planets, but they could explain diddly and predict diddly.”
Ancient astronomers could predict many things. The position of the sun and moon (Stonehenge comes to mind). The could also predict the position of the planets in the various constellations. Predicting something using historical data is a valid scientific method, even if the mechanism is unknown. Climate science is the same way. Weather forecasting is the same way. We do not understand the whole mechanism, but we can extrapolate. Models are a valid means to test our predictions, but they are only that, models not laws not hypothesis. They are a tool and must be used with caution. Ask any good weather man on the accuracy of his short term forecasts. Personnaly I like the graphics of the “forecast weather”, but I’m still very skeptical about their accuracy..
NikFromNYC says:
July 2, 2011 at 11:43 am
If you merely circle wagons and don’t allow a factual debate ’bout Greenland, then you in this hour, don’t deserve a shower. Self-selection takes no prisoners. Thinkers fled from this debate, already. It’s Summer outside. No BANDWIDTH LIMITED issues exist, outside. Real people, they exist, out there. They want to meet you. Nothing would make them happier. Go out. Report back. Negative self-selection prevents my message from having any effect, here, in a especially contrived junior science backwater.
You hours do not affect.
I have read many hundreds of thousands of comments, and have myself written many tens of thousands of comments and replies in various places while on-line over the past years.
I must confess, however, that the above completely confounds me. Please explain just what the heck you are trying to say. But avoid the adult beverage (or recreational drug) this time. 8<)
In a red (by highlighting the graph from Figure 1 in a new Figure 3), or some other such method, please show which “upticks” you are using to create the second figure.
Dear Mr Hall,
Congratulations on a very interesting and useful observation. I would like to incorporate these charts in a future presentation, with attribution. To that end, if possible please email me the Excel files the graphs come from so I can re-plot them for Powerpoint. [trimmed, by request. Robt]
Thanking you in advance.
Just a quibble, but the GISP2 measurements were made in Greenland so it would be better to use the DMI data than HADSST when “shamelessly” splicing on the instrumental data post 1850:
http://diggingintheclay.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/coastal-average.png
John Q. Galt says:
July 1, 2011 at 5:57 pm
“Nightly lows in upstate New York are getting ridiculous. I had to close the windows last night as it was absolutely frigid.”
Yeah, my mom (western NY state; southern tier) has been complaining every time I speak to her that the furnace has been running every night and some days too. And it’s raining almost every single day. Meanwhile with me here in south central Texas we have an exceptional (beyond extreme) drought and temps are running well above average with 100F+ days rolling along like boxcars on a long train.
Be a good chap and send a little of that rain and cold down my way!
re; to those whining about Greenland not being representative of the whole planet
So Mann can use trees from just one region to reconstruct past global temperature, foraminifera from just one location to reconstruct past global sea level, ice cores from antarctica can be used to reconstruct past global CO2 level, but somehow Greenland ice cores are only applicable to Greenland?
Cake:having:eating
Greenland:global temperature
canary:coal mine
theduke says:
July 1, 2011 at 7:18 pm
“Ancient astronomers knew of many patterns in the movements of planets, but they could explain diddly and predict diddly.”
Nonsense. They could predict that the sun would rise in the east and set in the west. They didn’t know why. All they knew was it happened with reliability in the past and knew of no reason why it would NOT continue that way into the future.
Climatology is the analysis of past patterns and extension into the future. Is it reliable? To a certain extent, yes. Is it as reliable as having a theory of climate? No.
Back in the days when I was (very successfully) playing the stock market company quarterly reports which happened to be glowingly good would always have a caveat: Past performance is no guarantee of future performance. That by no means that past performance has no predictive value. Often it’s the best and only predictor you have to work with.
Derek Sorensen says:
July 2, 2011 at 1:27 pm
“(read: working out potential and actual customer’s credit-worthiness). The golden rule in that area is “The future is like the past,” and it seems to work out more often than not.”
True, but caution is advised and it’s always best to take all the data you have, however meager into account. The classic example is shoe size. If I were hiring people for positions where high intellect was essential and I didn’t have much time or data to work with I could screen candidates by their shoe size because, statistically, the larger the shoe the more intelligent the person wearing it. However, if we have an additional bit of information like the candidate’s age, we can do better screening due to the fact that shoe size:intelligence connection is radically skewed by baby shoes. Adult shoe size has very little relation to intellectual capacity although it would still be a good screening tool for NBA recruiters.
Nice contribution! According to GISP2 there were 7 longer periods that had an increase in temperature of more than the 0.6° C that we experienced during the 20th century. When you look at the glacial part of the GISP2 record ( ~50.000 – 10.000 BP), one counts 29 periods that exceed the 20th century increase. See: http://www.klimaatgek.nl/cms/?De_dogma%27s:Unieke_temperatuurstijging Translate button in the right upper corner of the (Dutch) site.
NikFromNYC says:
July 2, 2011 at 11:43 am
“If you merely circle wagons and don’t allow a factual debate ’bout Greenland, then you in this hour, don’t deserve a shower. Self-selection takes no prisoners. Thinkers fled from this debate, already. It’s Summer outside. No BANDWIDTH LIMITED issues exist, outside. Real people, they exist, out there. They want to meet you. Nothing would make them happier. Go out. Report back. Negative self-selection prevents my message from having any effect, here, in a especially contrived junior science backwater. You hours do not affect.”
Are you smoking crack?
With an as yet undetermined appendage R. Gates writes on July 2, 2011 at 11:35 am:
“Uh, this particular post has nothing to do with climate science…if you haven’t noticed.”
Bzzzzzzzt! Wrong!
The OP is pure unadulterated climate “science”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_science
My emphasis.
LazyTeenager says:
July 1, 2011 at 5:11 pm
“Let’s look for example at cereals like rice and wheat. As suitable temperature zones for these crops move towards the poles, what happens to the amount of land available?”
It doesn’t decrease as there’s no dearth of continental crust in higher latitudes. What actually happens is total amount of arable land increases as the permafrost zone shrinks. Just as beneficial, growing seasons get longer. In a few decades they might (again, as the Vikings did) have a long enough growing season in southern Greenland to grow apple trees and silage for livestock. In more temperate higher latitude climes they’ll be able to squeeze in two growing seasons instead of just one.
The bottom line is a warmer planet is a more productive planet insofar as life is concerned. Barren rocks and ice aren’t conducive to plant growth. Plants are the primary producers in the food chain. Plant productivity determines how much animal productivity can be supported.
Well, folks, looks like I’d been scooped on this one — some decades ago, which is as it should be, if there were real climate scientists out there:
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/05/26/1979-before-the-hockey-team-destroyed-climate-science/
I would bet that they were looking at just the same kind of peaks in the record that I was.
Observational vs. controlled studies
The OP is an observational study which is pretty much the only kind of study possible in climate “science”. I use the scare quotes because climatology is more actuary than it is scientific.
I was just reading a SciAm article on data mining in the medical field comparing results of observational studies and controlled studies. One successful example of observational study is linking increased risk of lung cancer with cigarette smoking. One unsuccessful example is estrogen replacement therapy for older women with declining estrogen levels. An observational study found that women with declining estrogen were at increased risk for stroke and cardiovascular disease. A controlled study found that estrogen replacement therapy did nothing to reduce risk of stroke and cardiovascular disease and only increased the risk of breast cancer. The reason for the error is that women with declining estrogen were seeing a doctor more often, which is how the lowered estrogen was detected in the first place. The actual relationship between estrogen and cardiovascular health was that the women with low estrogen were seeing a doctor more often and the doctor was, at the same time, assessing cardiovascular health and through earlier detection warding off cadiovascular disease.
racookpe1978: I suspect Mark V Shaney … http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_Shaney
as for the points I picked, http://i52.tinypic.com/20qb4eb.png
Dave says:
July 2, 2011 at 8:07 am
Bill Illis: Hi! Where do your two graphs come from please?
———————————–
Antarctica Epica Dome C 800,000 year temperature history
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/epica_domec/edc3deuttemp2007.txt
Greenland NGrip ice cores extended back to 123,000 years ago.
[Use this formula to convert d18O% to Temp C anomaly = (d18O% + 13.4) / 0.9 + 24.78 ]
http://www.iceandclimate.nbi.ku.dk/data/2010-11-19_GICC05modelext_for_NGRIP.xls/
Henry@DaveSpringer
I just wanted to throw another piece of wood (log) on the (cooling) fire:
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/ooops-global-cooling-is-coming
Actual recent observation. What do you think of this?
When a state gains power, endorsed by other states, and claims that the climate is a concern of national security, and also claims that other state’s national security, and by extrapolation soveriegnty, are thretened by the climate and that state seems to be on the edge of offering a solution if you just “do as i say”, the problem is beyond temperature graphs and who is right or wrong.
The problem becomes political, phylosophical and idealogical survival.
With Germany gaining UN chairmanship and making the noises it’s making, HHhhmm, just old, crusty and suspicous am I.
Looking at the time stamp of the last reply, I suspect nobody will read mine, but here it is anyway.
First off, my math says 1850 to 2011 is 161 years, yet graph two puts us at ~230 years on red. If all the other lines are correct on the x-axis then we (actually you and our children, I won’t see it) might be lucky enough for 40-90 years of general rise in temperature, based on past patterns.
Second, on graph one, the red line seems over extend. Please double check your ‘splicing’.
So now let’s look at the trends. Draw a straight line starting from the Minoan warm peak, through the Roman, MWP and Current WP; this is the systems topside resistance, for whatever reason, to temperature rise in the last 4,000 years. All peaks are roughly evenly spaced showing a non-random pattern. IF the temperature does not break through to the topside as it did after the cold period ~5280 BP, then it must go down.
Now, let’s look at the support the system displays on the low end: draw a line connecting two major bottoms; One at ~6260 BP and the other through ~1580 BP. The 2 lines cross ~1100 years from now which, based on the time period of peaks, would be roughly where the next PEAK is AND that peak is at or below the low of the LIA!
So what does this pattern imply?
1. We are probably at or near the peak temperature of the Current WP with a significant decline coming in the very near future.
2. That decline, based on the extent of previous declines will break through the support line we just drew through 6260 and 1580 BP. That’s very bad because that means their is no other system bottom support displayed anyplace in the in the Holocene pattern except during the Younger Dryas and we know how far down that went.
3. We know that looking at the typical past interglacial periods of the ice age we are in, the Holocene warm period has pretty much played itself out. A large temperature drop, 80K years of advancing ice sheets and a massive decline in the Human population (down ~5 billion from present) is on the way soon. Hopefully beyond all our lifetimes but it is going to happen as sure as a free falling hammer will hit the ground.
So, as I see it, the rational thing to do is plan how to survive as a civilization and as individuals / groups in the coming deep freeze.
David Loufek says: July 3, 2011 at 2:48 pm
So, as I see it, the rational thing to do is plan how to survive as a civilization and as individuals / groups in the coming deep freeze.
What we would learn on the way to preparing would be much more beneficial than scrapping the world economy and science over an unsubstantiated theory of warmth.
MM IT TOOK A WHILE FOR THE TROLL TO COME OUT, MUST BE THE COLD!
Bill – thanks for the data – Dave
HenryP says:
July 3, 2011 at 12:31 pm
“All we need is two things.
Free enterprise and oil.
The rest takes care of itself.”
We are screwed if this next election doesn’t bring us some “change”…
Every time I look at the GISP2 ice core record, I want to get it printed on a t-shirt or something. To me, it sure as heck looks like we’re in another uptick of a fairly regular ~1000 year cycle, using my trusty Mark-I eyeball. Of course, you don’t get fancy research grants for eyeballs…
That’s a frightening long term trend. Is the Holocene almost out of gas?
JSH:
I think others have already asked this, but is it possible to have you number or letter the curves on the second graph, and key them to the corresponding peaks on the first graph?
Thanks,
Mark H.
Henry@DaveSpringer
It seems my previous answer got lost in the air somewhere.
My own observations tell me that maximum temps. during the past 4 decades have been rising pretty much everywhere I look:
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
However, unlike the NH, which is warming, it seems the SH is cooling.
(look at the tables for the average and minima)
Humidity (RH%) and precipitation (mm/mnth/yr) at Tandil show slight increases over the past 4 decades.
Is that a sign of desert-ification?
Way after the fact, but what the heck, it’s still July, I came to this post (again) from Anna V’s comment on Lubos Motl’s blog. My two cents: Any “scientist” who pays no attention to history, Earth’s history — and this is what is being charted — is a fool. Yes, how accurate are ice cores? And, yes, the Southern Hemisphere (Antarctica ice cores) goes about cooling somewhat differently from the Northern; nevertheless it gets just as cold there, too. But history is about collecting the data from as many sources as possible, considering them skeptically, for the greatest truths they can tell about the past according, and making hypotheses. Ain’t this very close to the scientific method? Science adds the physical mechanisms so we can test our historical hypotheses. Ignore Earth’s history at your peril. I personally hope that CO2 does add some anthropogenically caused warming ’cause this history says we’re gonna need it. Unfortunately I have not seen much evidence such that I can say with absolute scientific certainty that our — human generated — CO2 is going to make much of a difference, except perhaps make the biosphere green and happy and protect plants from drought conditions.