Onset of the Next Glaciation

The next glaciation will wipe out many countries and nothing will stop that from happening.
Luckily, the slide into a glaciation is long and slow, tens of thousands of years, and, of course, the sun has nothing to do with it [Jupiter has].

A good paper on Milankovitch’s theory: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2006GL027817-Milankovitch.pdf

With all our revulsion regarding models, it is difficult to say “OK, but this one refutes global warming”. Well, it might, but is it not still a model? And this ice age is how far into the future? No point in being alarmist at all, because the effects of continental glaciation are well known! It’s like running a big scraper across the world. Nothing will stop it.
The Climate alarmists, on the other hand, need to raise alarm to curry support for what is largely a speculative circumstance. They need to invent a bogeyman, and invent a solution, which, like kinetic energy, compounds at the square of its velocity! They can’t define the problem, so how on earth can they propose a solution?

This post so apes the CAGW meme that I can’t help wondering if it was not written with tongue firmly in cheek Very much, “Back to the Seventies”.

This effort turns everything everyone has been told for the last thirty odd years, completely upside down. It puts paid to the increase in warming as those old studies have continually demonstrated, which will not happen and also introduces the fact that the Sun, remember the Sun, will have the last say after all. Meanwhile we pass the popcorn as the lunacy of the CAGW hysterics wanders on it’s already disturbing path. But this time, it’s all downhill.

More likely those rocks were embedded in icebergs calved from Norwegian glaciers that got blown across the North Sea. BTW, they are called Drop Stones.

Please would somebody tell the Australian prime minister J Gillard what’s around the corner she is hell bent on destroying us with the carbon tax

Obviously, as a geologist, I find this easy to read – but for those who may find it difficult to comprehend, the net result is we don’t have to worry for a good few centuries yet!
In passing, I’m not keen on the use of the term ‘trigger’ for a glacial event – it implies a ‘non-reversible’ and ‘fixed’ point, kind of like the tipping point scenario that the warmista like to use for earths mean temp (which all geologists know is false!). Lots of factors have to come together, and remain together, for some considerable time for glacial onset to fully take hold (IMHO).
What I mean is that a glacial period could be presented/considered by ‘coolists’ to be initiated by the onset of several cold winters, but this would be a false premise – in the same way as ‘runaway’ thermal heating didn’t occur as per the ‘warmists’ arguments in the 90’s! Obviously. no one ‘knows’ for sure, but I can’t imagine the next glacial period being able to be defined without at least a few centuries of data?
An interesting piece, but to be fair, I think the timescale inferences have been perhaps lost to the general non-geological folk…just saying…

So, how long have we got before we are all screwed?

Maybe it is time to have central heating installed (at last)

Andy;
What have you been using up till now, campfires in a recess in the wall?

Remember when the cemetery plot salesman is justifying their exorbitant prices by promising perpetual care, that “perpetual” will end once an advancing glacier covers over the graveyard, and your “eternal resting place” gets scraped and ground away to non-existence. Get the “dust to dust” over early and take the cremation.
Although if anyone here feels up to the marketing challenge, there are many abandoned mines available that are suitable for conversion to thousands of glacier-proof burial vaults.

davidq says:
September 16, 2012 at 12:18 am
“Perhaps we need to widen and deepen the Panama canal. Didn’t the current onset of glaciation start occurring after the Atlantic and Pacific was cut off?
20 Miles wide, 300 feet deep. doable?”
For modern man, it is doable. We can make huge “Canal Machines”. Just like the tunnel machines.
Just click “Play”…..or “Dig”. But 20 Miles ? Make it 100 Miles wide.

It’s like running a big scraper across the world. Nothing will stop it.
Black carbon will. Well at least for a few hundred to a few thousand years.
Legally mandated inefficient coal and wood stoves, building the dirtiest coal fired power stations we can, prescribed setting of forest fires, legally mandated field burning of agricultural waste, make sure those peat fires in SE Asia burn every year.
It’s doable.

tango says:
September 16, 2012 at 1:23 am
Please would somebody tell the Australian prime minister J Gillard what’s around the corner she is hell bent on destroying us with the carbon tax
You wait til she introduces glaciation tax. It will be horrendous!

Glaciations take place when 65N is less insolated in springs and summers which causes snow not to melt. When snow is not melting most of solar radiation is reflected (instead of being absorbed by dark earth surface) so less energy is provided. Currently there is almost no snow at 65N in summers (despite the low insolation) so no glaciation can take place. And in the near future, because of Earth’s precession decade by decade 65N will be better and better insolated in sprigns and summers so glaciation will be less and less probable.

Building An Igloo
amazon.co.uk/Building An Igloo
Low Prices on Building An Igloo. Free UK Delivery on Amazon Orders

In the description at “most likely”, I find no test for predictive skill of the optimized model. One would do that by optimizing the model on only a part of the past data and use the remainder of the past data for a validation. So, just as I tell the warmists, I have to tell this modeler: as long as I have not seen such a test, I won’t believe the model until I have seen it get something right that it was not trained on.

Atomic Hairdryer says:
September 16, 2012 at 2:05 am
Good idea! do you need a PA? LOL

Well, normally, Tallbloke’s name in a posted comment appears with a direct link to his own Blog “Tallbloke’s Talkshop” – but not here:
tallbloke says:
September 16, 2012 at 12:39 am
Or, the 65N insolation may not drop low enough to cause glacial onset this time round and the Holocene may continue for another 50k years.
Nobody knows.
—————————————————————————————————————–
Also, the content of this comment makes me wonder, if we may perhaps have a Name Troll among us.
Tallbloke – was that really you?
[Not a Name Troll – IP and email is correct for Tallbloke ~mod]

This is bullish for Australian real estate…

Fortunately we are more than capable of preventing the onset of an iceage, with seabed propellers to drive ocean heat circulation, balloons, space mirrors, fusion, fission, dust on icesheets. The most cost effective methods might only cost a couple of percent of global GDP.
What’s the bet that the trigger for onset of a glaciation is a suitable large volcanic event? Drop the earth’s temp by 1°C and wham!

Another point, both LR04 and Huybers07 are based on benthic stacks and both gaze at the bad correlation with the 65North insolation, for instance around 420 thousand years when we had the highest benthic isotope swing combined with the least variation in the insolation.
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Milankovitch_cycles
That should raise red flags.
In this thread, one can read how the Greenland isotopes are NOT a proxy for temperature, but for absolute humidity
http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=4074335
Some comparisons there with fossil and paleobotanical records trash the temperature misunderstanding of the Younger Dryas.

I say that we contact “Jimmy-boy” Hansen, and tell him he was right all along about the coming “ice-age” . [from his ’70s claim], and get him back onto the “global cooling” bandwagon.
That way we get rid of a warmist, and show the public that the warmists don’t know what to believe.

CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere will lessen the impact of the glacial period on that part of the planet not covered in ice. The biosphere will benefit overall and human survival will be enhanced due to greater plant/crop productivity.
Note that humans were bottle-necked down to approx 3000 individuals in the last glaciation and almost died out.

Meanwhile, in the MSM…

Thanks, David, for perfectly destroying my peaceful and quiet sunday afternoon 🙂
Seriously, thanks for reminding us of some real-world climatology.
Warmth is not to be feared. It’s the cold that will destroy us in the end.

“…there are rocks on the beaches of Scotland that got blown over from Norway across a frozen North Sea.”
Another geologist here. It is true that Norwegian rock made it to Scotland in the last glaciation – but they were carried in ice flows, not blown by the wind. The North Sea was indeed frozen over though.
Reference:
“The ‘Pliocene’ gravels of Buchan: a reappraisal”
Scottish Journal of Geology, October 1981, v. 17:185-203

DaveF says:
September 16, 2012 at 3:12 am
kwik 2:22am:
“Make it 100 miles wide.”
I’m not sure that the Panamanians would be too keen on losing around a sixth of their country
===========================================================================
They won’t lose any ground, it will just be piled higher !!

Makes cheerful Sunday reading

“Baby boomers like me have enjoyed the most benign period in human history. The superpower nuclear standoff gave us fifty years of relative peace”
Factually correct, but it didn’t feel that great at the time with the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation.

Chris in Canada;
How much human-generated CO2 would be required to counteract an ice age? If we have 1000 years to pump CO2 into the atmosphere, is it possible to maintain the interglacial indefinitely?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
That’s one of those questions which, if you ask on a warmist blog, goes POOF! and disappears. ‘Cuz they’d rather not admit that CO2 is logarithmic, meaning it is subject to the law of diminishing returns. The accepted meme is that doubling of CO2 = +3.7 w/m2 = +1 degree. Let’s look at that starting with our current CO2 concentration of close to 400 ppm.
PART 1
400 x 2 = 800 = 1 degree
800 x 2 = 1600 = 2 degrees
1600 x 2 = 3200 = 3 degrees.
So, if we quadruple our entire consumption of CO2 starting today, it will take about 800 years to get us an extra 3 degrees.
From 1920 to now, CO2 concentrations have increase from about 280 to about 400. At that rate it will take only 2,800 years or so to get us an extra 3 degrees. Of course the warmists will point out that our CURRENT rate of increase is about double what it was in 1920. So at current rates, it will take 1,400 years to get another 3 degrees. And that’s assuming that feedbacks are not negative, an assumption that the science (in my opinion) is increasingly showing to be incorrect.
I’m not particularly worried however. What is remarkable about human beings is our ability to confront the challenges of nature and defeat them. An ice age won’t happen in an instant, we’ll have centuries to both adapt to it and mitigate it. The only way an impending ice age defeats the collective ingenuity of the human race is if we lay down and die.

The Milankovitch Theory was given a big boost when it was shown by Gerald Roe in a published science paper be well established.The charts in the below link is quite revealing.
In defense of Milankovitch
http://earthweb.ess.washington.edu/roe/Publications/MilanDefense_GRL.pdf

Here is a link to John Kehr who published a good book about the climate and what it portends in the future and I have the book in my possession and believe that it should be considered for reading because he has a good case about the CO2 conjecture being irrelevant because it promote so little warm forcing that it is not a big deal for us.
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/the-book/
Go to bottom the page and click on Chapters 8-10 and see what the series of charts show that we are already in Climate Autumn.Charts #3-5 shows a clear cooling trend that is in step with a NEGATIVE insolation trend at 65 degrees N.
Climate Winter is not far off into the future.

Thanks for the excellent article especially the clean summary graph showing the cycle. I would love we are here indicator in the first graph.
I did struggle with this sentence: “…That is where the landmass is that is either snow-covered all year round or not….” I have always wondered why insolation is usually given at 65 North.
I guess 510 watts/m**2 refers to the daily average insolation at top of the atmosphere on the day of the summer solstice, at 65 N latitude (from Wikipedia – Insolation).

I recall some work done on the low temperature trends in the US by region. That trend is negative. There might be a gradual increase in snow cover in mountain or higher terrain that increasingly lingers. Not that last winter in Alaska and Bering Sea ice are anything as a singular event, but in the total global picture of early winter snows and lingering spring snow cover, the extended snow cover does increase the reflection of solar radiation. Would it not that in concert with a decrease in solar output be an indication of longer winters and drier climates?

I am glad I won’t be there for the next warm peak… some future generation of warmists will “disappear” the present peak for sure and will say that it is unprecedented.

And now… again…. after being banned along with solar barycentric theory,
Jupiter: The Return
confusing times
http://www.argonavis.com.br/astronomia/servlet/orbitas.svg

. Insolation is already low enough to trigger glacial onset.

Yeah, I think we are close. It looks to me as you go back into historical temperature reconstructions that each cool period for the past 3000 years has been a bit cooler than the one preceding it. The Little Ice Age was long and cold. The next Little Ice Age will be a bit less “little” and longer and cooler than the period we call the LIA. But I also note the same that Tallbloke mentions above. We are in a rather odd insolation cycle in that insolation is actually going to INCREASE a little bit from here and our orbital eccentricity is low so those are moderating factors.
But should we get things lined up just right … say a solar minimum, volcanic eruption, global patterns that result in colder than normal temperatures and that might be all that is required to overcome the hysteresis and tip us over into the “cold” stable state. That state is more stable than the “warm” stable state as we tend to stay there about 90% of the time and only briefly tip over into the “warm” state 10% of the time. I think all we need to tip the system is a summer with a greater than usual amount of summer arctic sea ice. I believe it is arctic sea ice or the lack thereof that tips us across the boundaries of those two states.

Reblogged this on The Next Grand Minimum and commented:
David Archibald offeres readers good advice on where we should focus our attention, on vanishing sunspots and year to year snow accumulation.

Scarface [September 16, 2012 at 5:41 am] says:
“Meanwhile, in the MSM…”

ROTFLMFA!
Anyone know the story behind that video? Is it a group of warmies thinking this actually helps their idiotic cause or yet another great parody by normal people illustrating absurdity by being absurd?
I clicked through some if their links to figure this out and still can’t get a handle on it.

Bill Yarber says:
September 16, 2012 at 7:39 am
I agree – we can expect to come out of the current interglacial in the relatively near future – unless of course we have managed to reach the warmists runaway tipping point beforehand (/sarc!). But of course, this presumes the causal cyclical variation and periodicity continues as per expectation!
I still find it curious that excessive warming is declared after a few decades of slightly rising temps, in the same way as the so called ‘cooling’ was alarmingly declared in the 70’s – however, both deductions, when viewed on an appropriate scale, look more like insignificant ‘farts’ within the natural temperature variability range!! To then have the audacity to link some allegedly observed ‘little’ temperature rise to a trace gas (that has been at much much higher levels in the past), and extrapolate out to ‘catastrophe’ is really beyond any level of believability…..to a geologist anyway!

meemoe_uk says:
September 16, 2012 at 9:23 am
“the sun has nothing to do with it [Jupiter has]. ”
OK Leif, I wasn’t expecting that from u. So how does Jupiter control Earth’s slide into ice ages?
Glaciations are caused by changes in the Earth’s orbit and axial tilt. Gravitational perturbations from [mostly] Jupiter slowly changes those parameters with well-known cycles [known several million years past and in future]. This is how. And has, of course, nothing to do with solar activity.

Stones rolling across from Norway?
I don’t get the mode of traction.
Though I try and I try and I try and I try.
davidq wrote:

Perhaps we need to widen and deepen the Panama canal. Didn’t the current onset of glaciation start occurring after the Atlantic and Pacific was cut off?
20 Miles wide, 300 feet deep. doable?

Perhaps, but the greenies would hate it. It has been proposed to open up a sea-level canal by “nuclear excavation”.
Atlantic-Pacific InterOceanic Canal
http://archive.org/stream/interoceaniccana00unit/interoceaniccana00unit_djvu.txt
See also Operation Chariot
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chariot_(1958)
But I’m not sure of the need. It is just one glacial period we would want to avert not all of them. And there are probably other ways. Soot suits the bill.

Leif Svalgaard says on September 16, 2012 at 12:07 am:
“- – —- –.
Luckily, the slide into a glaciation is long and slow, tens of thousands of years, and, of course, the sun has nothing to do with it [Jupiter has].”
= = = = = = = = =
Are you quite sure that Jupiter is working quite independently and on it’s own? –
Is it not likely that there are possible Solar Cycles (SC) which we, at the moment, know didly sqat about” that influences things like planetary orbits and in fact everything else in the solar system?
Come to think of it; why do sunrays still shine through orifices in stonewalls etc. (Stonehenge is one example – and there are many others) the same way as they did when they were first built in ancient times if the axial tilt of the Earth fluctuates back and forth between 22 and 24.5 degrees every 41000 years – and the globe also does a “Gyroscopic wobble” or a complete circle around it’s axis every 23000 years – which should mean that since it is, presently, mid-summer in the Northern Hemisphere in June when that hemisphere tilts towards the Sun – 11500 years (half a wobble) ago it would have been mid winter in June. – Any evidence for that in ice cores etc.?

Thankfully, by the time the next “ice age” starts to seriously affect our ability to feed the population of the planet, food production won’t be dependent on climate.
http://www.plantlab.nl/4.0/index.php/social-contribution/
http://www.omegagarden.com/
Assuming, of course, we have not stifled electricity production to the point where these kinds of solutions are impossible.

aksam@op.pl
sept 16 3;01am
party pooper

But perhaps the most interesting thing is the high year to year variability. Given the large albedo difference between snow and bare ground, it looks to me like natural variability plays a significant role in the start of the glacial phase.
I agree. The Earth is clearly a system with a large “heat capacity” that exhibits considerable hysteresis and sufficient nonlinearity in the form of e.g. albedo and other feedbacks to sustain at least bistable behavior in the current glacial era. Bistable systems can, for certain values of the primary drivers (in the case of the Earth, at the very least net insolation but sadly there are many, many more and they themselves are highly nonlinear and possibly coupled and fed back independent of albedo or insolation per se) have two locally stable dynamic equilibrium states. The way the ice ages and interglacial eras should properly be viewed is on a timescale granularity of at least a thousand years if not longer, where long slow macroscopic (externally caused) changes in insolation associated with orbital resonances, precession, and possibly other unknown factors in the solar system or even the galaxy— not the Earth per se — create a cycle something like this: (starting arbitrarily with the Earth in a stable cold phase, since that is the most likely state in a glacial era):
* Macroscopic changes push the Earth from the single dynamically stable state it is in into a state which is truly bistable, where the sustained cold is due to local stability from feedbacks like albedo and possibly global circulation patterns and the presumably relatively low temperature/heat content of the oceans. CO_2 may or may not play an important role in this feedback — I rather think it does, but it is almost certainly not the dominant factor as it appears to follow rather than lead (also, see Ordovician/Silurian transition!).
* Macroscopic changes CAN — and at least sometimes, probably do — literally force the Earth out of glaciation by moving the climate system across the local stability boundary by force majeure, no fluctuations necessary. In this case the transition from stable cold to stable warm is directly driven and relatively rapid.
* At other times the macroscopic changes may simply alter things so that fluctuations gradually carry the climate from one state to the other through a random walk in a basically neutral environment. One expects a very different “spectrum” of fluctuations in the two cases — in the latter case one might see rapid warming followed by rapid cooling followed by rapid warming before (perhaps) stabilizing in one state or the other (usually in response to an ongoing but slow change towards full stability in the final state).
One way or another, then, we might well end up in the warmer interglacial phase of the glacial era, and initially it is quite likely that this warm phase is truly stable so that decadal or century scale noise (macroscopic or “microscopic”, the latter associated with phenomena or feedbacks in the Earth’s climate system itself) literally cannot cause transition back to a true cold phase. The end of the Wisconsin followed by the Younger Dryas fluctuation followed by the Holocene proper is a classic example of this sort of process — macroscopic drivers that first enabled, then mandated a warm phase transition out of the ice age to the point where even a global microscopic fluctuation like the YD could not stop the progression towards stable warmth.
* The macroscopic drivers continue to evolve, however, and they gradually return the Earth into first the truly bistable regime — where if we were glaciated we would remain glaciated but since we are warm we remain warm — and then to a point where fluctuations be damned, a driven transition to a stable cold phase occurs. Again the spectrum of the global temperature during the cold phase transitions would be expected to be quite different in the case where the macroscopic drivers quickly and directly force the transition compared to one where the changes are slow enough that fluctuations drive the process.
A glance at the thermal record of the Holocene suggests that the Earth is currently out in the bistable regime as far as macroscopic drivers are concerned. The paper above does nothing more than confirm this for at least one or two explicit models for those drivers. It also suggests that there could be time scales of decades to centuries before those drivers force the inexorable motion towards cold phase once again, but it quite literally cannot address the issue of fluctuation-driven transitions in the meantime because it does not provide much in the way of a MICROSCOPIC stability analysis or for that matter an analysis of macroscopic parameters with considerable variability outside of the model as well.
One of the most interesting of these is that of solar state. The Sun is apparently a rather variable star, with not only its regular 11/22 year Hale cycle variability but with considerable modulation of that variability on much longer and (as far as I know) not particularly well-understood timescales, timescales against which the entire period of observation with modern instrumentation are utterly insignificant. However, there are many other unknowns to consider — the progression of the Sun (and hence Earth) through an interstellar medium of variable density, “black swan” events that we simply haven’t been around looking with modern instrumentation long enough to observe (major CMEs such as the 1859 event or even one an order of magnitude longer and stronger), divergences between even the observable proxies of solar state (e.g. sunspots) and ones that would have been invisible e.g. solar magnetic state until very recently.
However, there is also noise due to volcanism — one good sized Tambora can ruin (or at least alter) global climate for years if not decades, global decadal circulation fluctuations, fluctuations in the “oceanic conveyor belt” (that may or may not have been responsible for the Younger Dryas), fluctuations in GHG levels outside of volcanism, and yeah, long term persistent changes due to human activity.
For example, one can consider
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertification
Deserts are a prime example of a MICROSCOPIC bistable climate system that share many properties with the bistability described above. Plants tend to both cool the local climate and bind moisture. If there are enough plants growing on a major geographical tract of land with marginal rainfall (marginal to put it into the bistable regime) the plants cool and bind moisture sufficiently that positive feedback maintains the growing plants and the regime is locally stable in a non-desert state. However, once you introduce goats… they create the Sahara. Perhaps not singlehandedly, perhaps not all of it, but there is substantial evidence that the introduction of goats and farming culture caused the collapse of a fragile non-desert state in North Africa leading to the desertification of much of it, a process that continues measurably today as an exploding human population continues to push land at its boundaries across the stability boundary in between the desert/non-desert states.
This sort of anthropogenic climate change has been occurring for thousands of years, and has occurred at a vastly accelerated rate in the 20-21st centuries as modern medicine and relative affluence have caused populations to increase in already strained local ecosystems. It absolutely has an effect on “global warming” — indeed century scale desertification of a substantial fraction of marginal land is precisely the sort of microscopic fluctuation that might be expected to have potential global effects due to feedbacks known and unknown within the global climate system. Curiously, it isn’t AFAIK invoked as even a partial explanation of late 20th century warming, although one would think that the shift of as much as 10% of the Earth’s land surface area in the strict direction of desertification of previously wild and vegetation covered lands over that same time frame might have an important effect quite outside of CO_2 levels (and indeed, has an important effect ON CO_2 levels as well).
The last “interesting” piece of evidence is that the Little Ice Age, occurring in apparent coincidence with the Maunder Minimum, was the coldest period in the entire Holocene post the Younger Dryas fluctuation, and occurred as global temperatures had been gradually decreasing from the Holocene optimum for thousands of years. This large temperature excursion in response to what may have been a relatively minor variation in a primary driver (the Sun) strongly suggests that the Earth is either entering or is already solidly into the bistable regime where sufficiently sustained fluctuations can drive it nonlinearly towards the cold stable state, quite possibly drive it “rapidly” in that direction (where rapidly is still century long timescales — the LIA was simply not long enough and didn’t get enough e.g. albedo feedback going to affect a full transition).
Some climate scientists I communicate with think it likely that the increased CO_2 levels have already shifted the Earth into a state where at the very least fluctuation-induced transitions are no longer possible — the Earth is no longer bistable (if it was in the first place, which of course we do not know). The CAGW prediction, of course, is that the Earth is at least tristable and that we may have shifted it or be shifting it all the way back to an even warmer phase that hasn’t been observed for some 50 million years of geologic time (and that intuitively seems a bit unlikely to occur in an ice age, interglacial or not). I have some doubts of this, largely because of the Ordovician/Silurian transition, wherein the Earth entered an ice age, relatively rapidly, in spite of having seventeen times the atmospheric CO_2 content that it does now when it began, and in spite of sustaining it at ten times the current concentration for the entire period the ice age lasted.
This one event suggests that macroscopic (or microscopic?) drivers exist that at least can trump massively greater CO_2 concentrations than we currently have and force an ice age straight into the teeth of only greenhouse warming. Since we are already in a relatively brief interglacial of an ice age, at the probable end of that interglacial on the timescale of a few thousand years either way (likely already in bistable/unstable to the cold transition) the plausibility of a third-phase “catastrophe” seems significantly reduced. However, our ignorance is great. For all practical purposes, we have at most 33 to 50 years of “reliable” data on global climate based on modern instrumentation and knowledge, and sadly much of even that data has been corrupted by things like nuclear war and the extensive testing of nuclear bombs post World War II confounding efforts to normalize radioactive proxy scales and at the very least reducing the reliability of our knowledge of prior solar state based on strictly visible light observational records (e.g. sunspots).
Lief an others appear to be conducting a truly heroic effort to rescue the situation, but in statistical modeling I like to tell clients the simple truth that you cannot squeeze blood from a turnip or make reliable inferences with inadequate or corrupted data. It’s not magic, it is information theory, and true information degradation cannot be restored or interpolated by statistics-fu.
This same process is at work throughout climate science. The thermometric record — what should be the single most reliable measure of the state of the global climate across at least the century or two of reliable thermometric instrumentation at least approximately distributed around the globe — is manifestly profoundly corrupted by confounding phenomena from the UHI effect and desertification to systematic method errors in the way temperatures were sampled (on what is quite frankly a completely inadequate fraction of the Earth’s surface throughout most of that period). Once again the issue is simple information theory. One cannot restore the missing or corrupted information without making assumptions, and if one then uses the restored information as if it were data to arrive at new conclusions, those conclusions are inevitably contaminated by the assumptions made to the extent that they have no real predictive power.
It has been said by very reasonable scientists that it will take at least a century of observation with modern instrumentation to be able to get a firm (predictive) grip on the climate. It will take us a good chunk of that to just get a good handle on the Sun, decades more of observation to come to properly understand the ocean, decades more to live through at least a few permutations of global decadal oscillations. Even over the last 30 years, however, there has been a truly substantial divergence between the off-the-cuff prediction of Hansen and at least some CAGW enthusiasts, a divergence that is gradually restoring a measure of sanity to the scientific discussion.
Unfortunately, much of the political discussion remains extreme, both because “catastrophe sells” whether the product being sold is a politician seeking votes or a news medium seeking readers or watchers. Saying “there isn’t anything particularly interesting happening to the global climate, however variable the local weather is and always has been” just isn’t the sort of thing to attract votes or public attention. Even scientists are hardly immune to the lure of the extreme — the extreme makes it easier to get grants, attracts more fame and notoriety to published papers, solidifies prospects for tenure and life success. Who reads a paper that says “I performed a statistical analysis of a hypothesized increase in the violence and frequency in major tropical storms and found that they were if anything less violent and less frequent”? Even scientists might give a secret little sigh — the extreme is so much more appealing, making the temptation to discover extremity in boring, quotidian data far too great.
Nowhere is this temptation more clearly visible in climate science than in the infamous extrapolations of “Sea Level Rise” (SLR). SLR has been recorded — and extremely reliably recorded, compared even to the temperature — for at least a century, and there is an overlap on a multidecadal timescale with satellite observations to further validate the fixed sea gauge-based results from all over the world. The data clearly show a nearly constant rate of SLR of 2-3 mm/year over nearly the entire period.
Almost all of this rise is due to thermal expansion of the ocean water, not ice melt. The ocean itself is, in fact, one very, very large thermometer! The thermal expansion is directly related to the increase of the enthalpy content of the ocean water as the Earth has re-warmed from the LIA and Dalton coldward fluctuations (whatever their proximate macroscopic/microscopic causes). It suggests a smoothly averaged steadily increasing global temperature that is utterly divorced from CO_2 as a proximate cause. It is also highly extrapolable. At 3 mm/year, a full century of continuation is a solid 30 cm of SLR, period. There is no statistically significant acceleration visible in the entire record, and the linear trend significantly predates the era where anthropogenic CO_2 might have contributed to it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Trends_in_global_average_absolute_sea_level,_1870-2008_%28US_EPA%29.png
Yet state governments such as that of NC are being urged to plan for and spend money like water subject to the assumption of well over one meter of SLR over less than 90 years! The public is being warned of dramatic surges, flooding real estate, doom and destruction! Science papers, with carefully cherrypicked end points, seek to scry some sort of disaster from some small section of the 140 year long record, even though a glance suffices to reveal that global sea level has risen almost exactly nine inches over the last 140 years.
Surely there is enough time to discern any such intense and dramatic acceleration in SLR rate and act on a decadal time scale, in plenty of time to avert any real or imagined disaster. But the actual 140 year record is not interesting enough, and does not sell newspapers or air time on the television. It does not attract the votes of either eco-nuts or mere ordinary citizens who have a perfectly normal concern about their environment (or oceanfront real estate). It does not make anyone’s research career to report that SLR is behaving the way it was when Teddy Roosevelt was riding over San Juan Hill, back when the sun never set on the British Empire, and most importantly, back when the global population of humans was roughly one seventh what it is today, and almost entirely non-industrialized by modern standards, with no cars or airplanes and only a few countries and continents even linked by rail.
Nature has plenty of room for disasters. We could at any moment be hit by a gamma ray burst that sterilizes the entire planetary surface. An asteroid could fall and produce a real climate change catastrophe. A pandemic could start that wipes out six out of seven living people in five years. Yellowstone could erupt as a supervolcano, provoking environmental changes that wipe out half of the human race and a million species over a few years. And yes, we could still have a nuclear or nuclear/biological war that decimates the human race and alters the planet in profound ways. Several of these — the pandemic, in particular — are far more plausible than the CAGW scenario. Others are plausible (but unlikely) and if they happen there is damn-all we can do about them.
It is a shame that people spend — or rather waste — quite so much time and energy and money on the prospects of unlikely disasters, so much more so when there are so many far more constructive uses to which all three could be put to the betterment of both the human race and for that matter the environment.
Replanting the deserts, for example
rgb

Leif Svalgaard says:
September 16, 2012 at 9:51 am
dallas says:
September 16, 2012 at 9:38 am
“The onset of the next glaciation is driven by the isolation at 65N.”
Since that is wrong, every thing that follows is wrong.
no, you are wrong. The evidence for orbital forcings is very strong: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2006GL027817-Milankovitch.pdf
See e.g. their Figure 3.
The next Ice Age will not determine who is right but who is left!

Matthew W 6:17:
“They won’t lose any ground, it’ll just be piled higher!!”
Now that’s the difference between me and you educated blokes – I wouldn’t have thought of that 🙂

ExWarmist says:
September 16, 2012 at 5:25 am.
Note that humans were bottle-necked down to approx 3000 individuals in the last glaciation and almost died out.
Interesting.Got a link for that ,please.
And as for glaciation,no need to panic.We Canucks get it every year,but glorious AGW fights it off for us. :):)
And of course,any scientist worth more than a plugged nickel knows warm is good,cold is bad.

george e. smith says:
September 16, 2012 at 11:28 am
So Dr Svalgaard, before I read your reference (which I will),
Please do before commented too much
it occurs to me, that Dr Archibald’s assertion (that 65N insolation drives interglacial onsets),
This is not Archibald’s assertion, but that of Milankovitch, Koeppen, and Wegner back in the 1940s. And most of Archibald’s article is borderline wrong. E.g. if you look at his first Figure it should be evident that temperatures the next 30,000 years are heading up, not down.

Leif said, “no, you are wrong” I don’t think so or I wouldn’t have said it 🙂
Frankly, 45S to 65S would be the latitudes to watch most closely for glaciation. It wouldn’t take much of a reduction in solar forcing to increase the Antarctic sea ice which would reduce the efficiency of the circumpolar current. From there, all hell would break loss at both poles, but the tropical oceans would remain rather stable.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/climate%20stuff/SouthernoceansSSTwithtanganyiuka.png
Working up from the southern oceans the Nielsen et al. southern oceans reconstruction with the Tierney et al. tropics (lake tanganyika surface temperature) shows a different picture of the thermal oscillations in the oceans.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-best-place-to-start-is-at-beginning.html
If you want a chuckle, I am looking at how longer term self organizing criticality can make “perfect” proxies of past climate rather easy to misinterpret. Since 40,000 years ago there were grass lands in northern Siberia, I am inclined to believe all glaciations were not created equally. The solar cycles provide a push, but need some help.

It seems both Axelrod and Svalgaard don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s a guessing game and rightfully so. Our knowledge is completely insufficient to make determinations about the next ice age. Axelrod seems a bit too certain of his guess and that is most likely where he is wrong; Svalgaard is too certain it isn’t the sun and he doesn’t *know* either. We are in an interglacial and the next one is coming but who knows when. The only thing I do know is not to let any of the morons with ideas of mitigating an ice age get any where near the switches to attempt any of the Rube Goldberg type idiotic ideas posted here.

David Ross says he doesn’t get the mode of traction. That’s easy, 650 million years ago we were on the edge of being a snowball with ice at the equator. Later on, glacial ice melted at the bottom and left the debris of thousands of tons of rocks as it traveled and that’s what we can see in the US West, that proves the ice age happened.

David Ross:
i believe that there is a better sealevel route from atlantic to pacific through nicaruaga. it got a bit of interest when the smart guys started talking about nuculear [sp] excavation in the fifties.
however hidden rice bowls got into the act (mostly panamanian and the threat of the loss of traffic revenues).
then someone pointed out the facts of radioactive fall out (they were not as knee jerk scared of it then) and another group figured out which way the subjective and political winds were blowing.
now days the job would only rate a couple of column inches in the federal rfp advertisements.
catapillar, letourneau and several others would smile though.
C

Dennis Nikols, P. Geo. says:
September 16, 2012 at 8:57 am
“Very interesting and much food for long term thought. That said, I am taken back in time back to the 1970′s when all the models showed cold was bold. Then again to a later time when models showed heat was neat and CO2 was the key. We must all remember two things. This kind of long term anything based on proxies and models is great cosmology or mythology. Remember to keep a skeptical eye and Mother Nature plays with loaded dice.”
Its interesting how it was thought that cold would lead to calamity, droughts and famines would ensue. When it is relatively warm, then warmth leads to calamity, famines and droughts.
It says (to me) that the human race is never in a good position and good old big government is there to tell us how rotten we are, so that we pay surcharges and taxes to make it right – or until we go into a relative cooling period when the paradigm changes back again as to how awful we are for a cooling climate, and ought to be taxed for that.
Afterall, if you want big taxes from a product, the product has to be vilified first.

DavidG says:
September 16, 2012 at 12:33 pm
It seems both Axelrod [sic] and Svalgaard don’t know what’s going to happen, it’s a guessing game and rightfully so. Our knowledge is completely insufficient to make determinations about the next ice age.
You obviously didn’t bother to read: http://www.leif.org/EOS/2006GL027817-Milankovitch.pdf
“The available evidence supports the essence of the original idea of Koeppen, Wegner, and Milankovitch as expressed in their classic papers [Milankovitch, 1941; Koeppen and Wegener, 1924], and its consequence: (1) the strong expectation on physical grounds that summertime insolation is the key player in the mass balance of great Northern Hemisphere continental ice sheets of the ice ages; and (2) the rate of change of global ice volume is in antiphase with variations in summertime insolation in the northern high latitudes that, in turn, are due to the changing orbit of the Earth.”

Kev-in-UK
We agree completely! And the idea the mankind can “control” or manipulate Earth’s climate in any measurable way is the height of arrogance, ignorance or both!
Bill

standbythree says:
September 16, 2012 at 5:50 am
I stand corrected, with thanks.

DavidG wrote:

David Ross says he doesn’t get the mode of traction.

Sorry DavidG for being too oblique, I should have been more clear.

rocks … that got blown over on ice from Norway

I’m not an expert -just high school geography. But I live in Scotland and can recognize raised beaches and such. David Archibald makes it sound like the rocks are blown by the wind over the surface of the ice rather than carried with (within, on or under) the ice and deposited as erratics or morraines at its edge or when it retreats (which is the process you describe). My language was just an attempt at humour.

Stones rolling across from Norway?
I don’t get the mode of traction.
Though I try and I try and I try and I try.
Rolling Stones (i.e. the rock band)
I can’t get no satisfaction
Cause I try and I try and I try and I try.

pk wrote:

i believe that there is a better sealevel route from atlantic to pacific through nicaruaga. it got a bit of interest when the smart guys started talking about nuculear [sp] excavation in the fifties.

I suspect a lot of it was political maneuvering i.e. to send a message to the Panamanians wanting more control over or revenue from the existing canal ‘Don’t get Bolshie or we’ll go build a better canal elsewhere.’
Eugene WR Gallun wrote:

This idea of widening the Panama Canal to prevent the next ice age just shows you the absolute silly ignorance of the people who post here on WUWT. THE PANAMA CANAL HAS LOCKS!!!!!!! Any fool knows you would need to dig a SEA LEVEL canal through Nicaragua!
Ignorance! Sheer Ignorance!!!!

Chill out Eugene.
Nobody is really serious -just throwing out science ideas for discussion. It wouldn’t happen in our life times. We’re talking about reversing an event that happened a long time ago.

The closure of the Panama Isthmus during the late Neogene, from about 14 until 2.75 Ma ago [1], caused large reorganizations of ocean circulation [2,3] with strong climatic impact. While the climate of the early to mid-Pliocene was characterized by higher temperatures than present and probably a stronger thermohaline circulation (THC) [4,5], a gradual cooling persisted during the late Pliocene [6], the reasons of which are still unknown. Striking is the temporal accordance of the final closure of the Panama gateway around 2.75 Ma with the intensification of the Northern Hemisphere glaciation
http://mgg.coas.oregonstate.edu/~andreas/pdf/S/schneider06epsl.pdf

Or here
http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?id=2508

Any fool knows you would need to dig a SEA LEVEL canal through Nicaragua!

Ferdinand de Lesseps was not any fool. Neither was John Findlay Wallace. The French intended to build a sea level canal across Panama as did the Americans when they initially took over the project. Technology has moved on a bit since then.
In any particular group with similar interests some things are taken as ‘understood’. It is understood by (almost) everyone here that we’re talking about a sea level breach in the Panamanian Isthmus -wide and deep enough for, not just ships, but ocean currents to pass through. It would be a huge geo-engineering project but do-able (removing existing locks would be the least of problems).
Backing up your arguments with evidence and propounding them in a civil manner is the best way to convince people, but any fool knows that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
Links to human population bottleneck within the article

This might be a bit off topic, but does anybody know why the sea level graphs on the ENSO page have not been updated in a coon’s age?

Leif, Have mercy! That is one big a$$ spreadsheet and unfortunately incomparable with my dinky openoffice.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/climate%20stuff/westerncaribbean.png
That is only 465,000 years of western Caribbean sea surface temperatures. Nothing personal, but I don’t live in the Antarctic. While I couldn’t load the solar forcing to do a proper comparison, I did eyeball a few similarities and a few not all that great matches with 8K and 10K lagged ice mass. I have no doubt that the orbital cycles are the cat’s a$$, I just don’t think ice is all that great an indication of what really happens in an ice age. Relating forcing to the main thermal mass of the Earth is a better route IMHO.

dallas says:
September 16, 2012 at 4:40 pm
Leif, Have mercy! That is one big a$$ spreadsheet and unfortunately incomparable with my dinky openoffice.
You didn’t get it from me [I think, but correct me if I’m wrong – which is it?]

Alert
http://www.wolframalpha.com/share/clip?f=d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427ep052dtv9o8&mail=1

Leif, I clicked on the link in the post but for some reason the only parts I could read were links to your site.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/climate%20stuff/westerncaribbeanwithTanganyika.png
While I am here, working back from the southern hemisphere I am finding internal oscillations that appear to respond at different rates to solar forcing depending on their thermal inertia. A.M. Selvam is one of those chaos kinda ladies which started me down this self organizing criticality road. With solar nudging instead of completely driving, the differences in the ice ages make sense, if you follow the energy through the system. 45S to 65S has the most stability, so it is the easiest starting point to explain were Milankivic appears to be off, when actually he pretty much nailed it.

http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/environment/climate-change/staggering-arctic-ice-loss-smashes-melt-records-20120917-260zu.html
anyone lese spot the hubris.
The Arctic icecap alone regulates the earths temperature. I thought it was Big Als contrails.
regards

dallas says:
September 16, 2012 at 5:52 pm
Leif, I clicked on the link in the post but for some reason the only parts I could read were links to your site. http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/…
I don’t recognize that plot and don’t know what you clicked on and what you got, sorry.
sunsettommy says:
September 16, 2012 at 6:45 pm
Thus it is ALWAYS on the cooling side of the line that make the snow and ice fields to grow.
Yet today is also below that line and it is warming [AKA Global Warming]

To continue along this line of thinking is that the last 4 main warming epochs in the Holocene have been about 1,000 years apart and last around 350 years.There is a decline from the days of the Minoan warming to now and still on line today.
The Minoan then the Roman then the Medieval and now the Modern warming are actually part of a long term cooling trend as shown by this Chart:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c01287656565a970c-800wi
http://www.c3headlines.com/2009/12/are-modern-temperatures-unprecedented-us-govt-greenland-ice-core-research-finds-theyre-not-even-clos.html
John Kehr posted some nice charts too:
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Chap_8-Illustration_65-550×450.png
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/chapters-8-10/

@ mike g on September 16, 2012 at 6:00 pm:
Among other things, if we’re approaching that as a serious proposal, the foil doesn’t have to match the existing contours. Flat sections can be placed on supports oriented towards the Earth. Imagine the Moon covered in millions of reflectors. It can be a focusing array directed at the Earth in general.
That’ll make for a cyclical signal, nothing but reflected Earth-shine for new moon, and rather bright nights for full moon, about nine times as bright.
Hey, if a few extra watts per square meter in retained longwave infrared is enough for global warming, leading to predicted catastrophic global warming, the contribution from a shiny Moon directed at Earth should be good for something, right?

Eugene WR Gallun says:
September 16, 2012 at 12:20 pm
CONSIDER THAT THERE ARE ROCKS ON THE BEACHES OF SCOTLAND THAT GOT BLOWN OVER THE ICE FROM NORWAY ACROSS A FROZEN NORTH SEA
True! Want proof? Never heard of the SLIDING ROCKS OF DEATH VALLEY did you!
“These rocks can be found on the floor of the playa with long trails behind them. Somehow these rocks slide across the playa cutting a furrow in the sediment as they move. Some of these rocks weight several hundred pounds.”
The sediment the rocks are furrowing in is a mud cracked shallow playa lake basin that contained water when temperatures fell below freezing. The shallow surface water froze encapsulating the rocks. Wind moved the ice sheets transporting the rocks leaving their scour path in the muddy bottom. The scour paths are mud cracked, indicating the rocks moved while the playa lake contained water.

There’s no chance of glaciation with modern man dominating the planet. Methane production from man and natural methane release from current warming will preclude the next ice age. What could have been the next ice age will probably not make a dent in the warming. If by some chance the natural cycle overtook man’s warming, mankind will already have technology developed to avert an ice age. Global warming remains the problem of the day and the problem for generations to come.

There will be no “next glaciation” as long as modern man dominates the Earth. While we can debate the onset of the next cooling cycle, the planet is current warming and warming rapidly. Methane production from man and natural methane release will likely accelerate it still further. If the next cyclical glaciation can actually take hold, mankind will prevent it from occurring. We’re great at warming the planet. Everything we do warms the planet. A few hundred years from now (let alone thousands of years from now) we’ll be technologically advanced enough to prevent cooling altogether. Global warming and not cooling remains the issue for this and immediate future generation.

I’m very skeptical, but the AGW proponents seem to have enough forward movement that even in the Oil Sands province they’re proposing various ways to reduce CO2 or they’ll limit oil production. By the time the hard evidence is in showing no correlation between CO2 and temperature the damage will have already been done. You think they’re going to reverse everything and hang the greenies out to dry? I don’t think so, the last hope is for the Republicans to get elected and take immediate and severe action ASAP. If we ever get a carbon tax and the temperatures start to fall, as they will for the next 50,000 years guess who will say he saved us, no not JC but JH.

What the heck, just bought the Super Gore CAGW Disaster-kit (shark-harpoon included) and what now? Should I get the new Ultra Gore Coolheaded Relief- or Reversal-kit, but it has to come with an free Ice-hockey stick what should I else do on the ice-plain?

This is a very interesting article, Anthony. Most scientific researches and predictions that the public are not very much receptive to end up to be true. We just have to know now when will the next glaciation will happen and how we can prepare for it.

Justthinkin says:
September 16, 2012 at 11:41 am
ExWarmist says:
September 16, 2012 at 5:25 am.
Note that humans were bottle-necked down to approx 3000 individuals in the last glaciation and almost died out.
Interesting.Got a link for that ,please.
And as for glaciation,no need to panic.We Canucks get it every year,but glorious AGW fights it off for us. :):)
And of course,any scientist worth more than a plugged nickel knows warm is good,cold is bad.

There is a brief description here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
with some links. There are other papers too if you take a brief look.

****
Bill Illis says:
September 16, 2012 at 4:42 pm
Here is a Zoom-in of 65N June solar insolation for the next 5,000 years. It declines by a tiny amount over the next 1,000 years before going back up (for anywhere between 50,000 years and 170,000 years.)
http://s14.postimage.org/stpo0vf5d/65_N_June_Solar_insolation_10k.jpg
****
Thanks, I was looking for a zoom-in on that. If we could just squeeze by the next couple thousand yrs, we might avoid a new glaciation. Hopefully we’re at a natural cusp (the present, relatively small variation in Milankovitch cycling) where the previous pattern of glaciation is (prb’ly temporarily) interrupted — not that it’ll affect any of us. 🙂
Despite some predictable nonsense, this is an interesting post.

Dr. Svalgaard writes:
“That is a red herring. There will be long-term warming the next 30,000 years, and only then will it cool. And that glaciation will be mild. There is a 400,000 year cycle due to changes in the
eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit. The next 100,000 years the orbit will be nearly circular so no modulation due to eccentricity. The remaining modulator is the tilt of the axis [the obliquity], but its effect in smaller so the glaciation will be milder. You see the various cycles here http://www.leif.org/research/Solar-Insulation-Cycles.png. The blue dot is where we are now.”
Thank your for your link.
I am only talking about the chart YOU brought up all along and it shows that the next 50,000 years will be below the 510 level David talked about:
“It seems that insolation above 510 watts/sq metre will end a glacial period.”
Since we are BELOW that level NOW and the chart he posted shows that it stay below that level for next 50,000 years and that he labeled it as “The next glacial period” surely that is no red herring sir?
David also pointed out:
“For the last 8,000 years, the Earth has been cooling at 0.25°C per thousand years, so the oceans are losing heat.”
Long term cooling is evident and now that insolation has fallen below the threshold line into the negative territory the glaciers that did not exist in the north 2,500 years ago are now advancing today and new glaciers have appeared more recently in the United States and even in South America too all mentioned by photos and captions in John Kehr’s link.The glacial evidence is growing as we go deeper into the climate Autumn.
Now I refer to a different chart by John Kehr who show that even while it WAS still above the insolation threshold it was cooling anyway because it was on the downward slope that went negative around 3,000 years ago:
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Chap_8-Illustration_71-550×380.png
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/chapters-8-10/
There are a number of places where large glaciers exist that were NOT even there during the Roman and MWP and easily surviving this Modern Warm Period.He mentioned a few of them in the above link with photo’s.
It appears that you say that this upcoming climate winter (glacial period) will be milder than the previous one because of a less favorable orbital positions and I will not argue with it because that was never my contention on whether it was going to a mild one or a severe one.It was about whether it was on the cooler side of the 510 level David pointed out in the chart.
I see that the next 50,000 years being below the 510 line therefore it is a cooling one and a glacial period.That is what the Chart shows and what David says about it.The severity of the upcoming glacial period is another topic of discussion.

johnpetroff says:
September 17, 2012 at 5:29 am
However, if the Barnes Ice Cap continues melting or disappears entirely, it proves warming is continuing even at what may be the starting point or even the heart of the next glaciation.
Regardless of its significance to the next glaciation, I’ll be very sad if the Barnes Ice Cap disappears in my lifetime.

Having looked at your link, I’d say:
It’s dead, Jim.
BTW It’s very unlikely that things will ever stay the same. Your favorite ice cap is either going to melt or start growing. If it starts growing – the next glaciation will have started.

To Richard, you say:
“All global temperature data sets show temperature has had no statistically significant trend for the last 10 years and some show no trend for the most recent 15 years.”
Here’s a page from a very “global cooling” or “stasis” website:
http://www.c3headlines.com/2012/01/nasas-research-substantiates-trend-towards-global-cooling-human-global-warming-from-co2-has-disappea.html
It appears to show cooling or stasis for the past 12 years or so. An article accompanies the graphs saying as much. Upon further inspection however, ALL values for the past 15 years are ABOVE ZERO, which means perceived graphical cooling is actually SLOWER WARMING. The graph does show a runaway CO2 arrow which is interesting.
Here’s a master graph page:
http://www.google.com/search?q=giss+global+temperature+graph&hl=en&prmd=imvns&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=TGdXULq1LevuiQLV-IGABA&ved=0CEQQsAQ&biw=1200&bih=1829
There are many graphs here to choose from. I’m going to look and see if I can find any that actually say “cooling” or “stasis” for the last 15 years. My point is, when you look closely at graphs that people say show “cooling” or “stasis,” they actually show decreased warming.
This summer was the second warmest on record for the Northern Hemisphere and third warmest on record for the USA according to NOAA. Here’s a post with associated links. Note the record low ice extent. Would we really have summer arctic ice extent at a record low and values cut in half from 10 years ago if we had stasis or cooling?
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/
I’ll hold out hope for genuine cooling statistics, but as I said, when I explore “cooling” graphs and websites, they’re actually selling slower warming. If I find genuine stasis or cooling numbers I’ll post them and you do likewise.

I don’t get this. The first graph shows us currently at a minimum, the second at a maximum and both graphs are said to correlate with temperature.

johnpetroff.
You like to trot out links and graphs from discredited organisations and individuals such as GISS, NOAA. But you may not be aware of the extent to which past temperature data has been massaged.
There have been other articles on WUWT demonstrating similar inappropriate behaviour with data thus falsely allowing them to claim record temperatures in recent times when in fact the record temperatures were in the past.
One example is this link below;
http://www.c3headlines.com/2011/12/science-by-lubchencos-noaa-fake-global-warming-by-changing-historical-temperature-data.html

johnpetroff says:
September 17, 2012 at 11:43 am
Sir, your interpretation of your linked graphs seems somewhat obtuse (I am being polite !) – but in reality, there is absolutely no merit in trying to defend the indefensible. In the last 10+ years CO2 has risen, whilst temps have not – that’s it, and THAT is with MASSAGED data!
Now, for the sake of completeness, I would concede that the recent lowering of temps may well be part of the natural climate variation. However, if it is part of natural variation then the direct logical derivation of that presumption, is that when it rises, it is also natural variation. I do not discount the possibility that increased CO2 may contribute to some warming, (but that doesn’t make me a lukewarmer) but if it is a significant contribution, the evidence would surely be readily visible – which it isn’t……..end of….

Leif,
Okay, I got the spread sheet open so here ya go.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/climate%20stuff/milankovicandTropicalSST.png
Without any lags, that plot is the Herbert 2010 tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature anomaly compared to the Milankovic 65 N solar forcing from the spread sheet in the post. The thermal capacity of the oceans is sufficiently large to smooth out the solar fluctuations and the internal oscillations where ice mass is not always deposited in the same region. I only did 450K years to show the more recent glacial cycles which are not created equally.
Like I said, 65N insulation provides the best match to an unreliable indicator of past climate. If you use the oceans, you would have a more reliable picture of the changes in thermal capacity.

dallas says:
September 17, 2012 at 2:18 pm
Great stuff. Your graph has set me off on another line of inquiry. With thanks.