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.
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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.