by Walter Starck (in Quadrant Online)
The average temperature for the Earth, or any region or even any specific place is very difficult to determine with any accuracy. At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. Weather stations are relatively few and located very irregularly. Well maintained stations with good records going back a century or more can be counted on one’s fingers. Even then only maximum and minimum temperatures or ones at a few particular times of day are usually available. Maintenance, siting, and surrounding land use also all have influences on the temperatures recorded.
The purported 0.7°C of average global warming over the past century is highly uncertain. It is in fact less than the margin of error in our ability to determine the average temperature anywhere, much less globally. What portion of any such warming might be due to due to anthropogenic CO2 emissions is even less certain. There are, however, numerous phenomena which are affected by temperature and which can provide good evidence of relative warming or cooling and, in some cases, even actual temperatures.
These include growth rings in trees, corals and stalactites, borehole temperature profiles and the isotopic and biologic signatures in core samples from sediments or glaciers. In addition, historical accounts of crops grown, harvest times, freezes, sea ice, river levels, glacial advances or retreats and other such records provide clear indication of warming and cooling.
Recent Warming Nothing Unusual
The temperature record everywhere shows evidence of warming and cooling in accord with cycles on many different time scales from daily to annual, decadal, centennial, millennial and even longer. Many of these seem to correlate with various cycles of solar activity and the Earth’s own orbital mechanics. The temperature record is also marked by seemingly random events which appear to follow no discernable pattern.
Over the past 3000 years there is evidence from hundreds of independent proxy studies, as well as historical records, for a Minoan Warm period around 1000 BC, a Roman Warm Period about 2000 years ago, a Medieval Warm Period (WMP) about 1000 years ago and a Modern Warm Period now developing. In between were markedly colder periods in the Dark Ages and another between the 16th and 19th centuries which is now known as the Little Ice Age (LIA). The warmer periods were times of bountiful crops, increasing population and a general flourishing of human societies. The cold periods were times of droughts, famines, epidemics, wars and population declines. Clearly life has been much better in the times of warmer climate, and there is nothing to indicate that the apparent mild warming of the past century is anything other than a return of this millennial scale warming cycle.
Good News Unwelcome to Alarmists
This rather good news about a possibly warmer climate has not met with hopeful interest from those who purport to be so concerned about the possibly dangerous effects of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). On the contrary, their reaction has overwhelmingly been a strong rejection of any beneficial possibility. It is apparent that their deepest commitment is to the threat itself and not to any rational assessment of real world probabilities or the broader consequences of any of their proposed remedies.
Fabricating a Hockey Stick from Hot Air
This blanket rejection of any possibility other than the hypothetical threat of AGW has led to some strange behaviour for people who modestly proclaim themselves to be the world’s top climate scientists. Not only have they ignored and dismissed the hundreds of studies indicating the global existence of a Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, they have set out to fabricate an alternate reality in the form of a graph purporting to represent the global temperature for the past thousand years. It portrays a near straight line wiggling up and down only a fraction of a degree for centuries until it begins an exponential rise gradually starting at the beginning of the 20th century and then shooting steeply up in the latter part of that century. This hockey stick-shaped graph was then heavily promoted as the icon of AGW. It appeared on the cover of the third climate assessment report of the IPCC published in 2003 and was reproduced at various places in the report itself.
Among the emails between leading climate researchers released in the Climategate affair were a number which revealed a concerted effort to come up with some means to deny the existence of the MWP. The implement chosen to do this became known as the Hockey Stick Graph.
The methodology used to construct the graph involved the use of estimates of temperatures from a very small sample of tree growth rings from the Yamal Peninsula in far northern Siberia and ancient stunted pine trees from near the tree line in the High Sierras of California. This data was then subjected to a statistical treatment later shown by critics to produce a hockey stick form of graph even when random numbers were used as raw input data. To make matters even worse, the same tree ring data also indicated a significant decline in temperature for the 20th century, but this was hidden by burying it in a much larger number of data points from instrument measurements. The resulting study was published in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature in 1998. Remarkably, this very small, highly selected and deceptively manipulated graph was proclaimed to be an accurate representation of global temperatures and the extensive body of contrary evidence was simply ignored.
full essay here: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/11/speak-loudly-and-carry-a-busted-hockey-stick
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Steven Mosher says: “A good skeptic looks at all the evidence.”
A great skeptic or believer analyzes the evidence instead of taking others at their word.
richardscourtney: “…only an ignorant idiot would make such a claim.”
(That Hitler was a socialist.) But what did der Fuhrer himself say?:
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
— Hitler, May 1, 1927; quoted in Toland 1976, p. 306.
I will grant you, however, that the claimant was indeed an ignorant idiot. : > )
It was relatively easy to measure the temperature of a planet using satellites. And from what I understand, satellite measurements show the earth has warmed over the last 30 odd years.
Re: Mosher November 27, 2012 at 9:07 am
I agree with Steven Mosher that you cannot start dismissing the instrumental records and then take for granted that the MWP or the Minoan Warming did take place. Besides, I fail to see any correlation between global warmth and prosperity. The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution began in the middle of the LIA. The Middle Ages were times of widespread misery.
However, I don’t understand his analogy of the gas can. We don’t have a fire that we know was started by lightning and a new fire where we find a gas can. We rather have a fire that we don’t know how started and then we find a gas can that we’re pretty sure was placed at the fire scene *after* the fire had already started. So it may well be playing some role in the current fire but it surely didn’t initiate it and we’re not sure how much of a role it’s playing right now.
Juan Slayton:
re your post at November 27, 2012 at 4:41 pm
You are not the first to have taken H1tler at his word instead of observing his actions. There was inadequate preparation for a World War because many others made that mistake.
In politics, actions speak louder than words. And the ultra-right always pretends to be socialist.
Similarly, few countries with the word Democratic in their title are democracies. Fascists also pretend to be other than they are and for the same reasons.
Richard
Could someone provide a peer reviewed study confirming the existence of the Minoan Warm Period? Sounds interesting but I dont remember seeing any reference to it before.
Mikel Mariñelarena says:
We cannot “take for granted that the MWP or the Minoan Warming did take place.”
The MWP, the RWP, the Minoan warming, the Holocene Optimum, etc., are all found in numerous ice core proxies from both hemispheres — from the Arctic, to Greenland, to the Antarctic, and they correlate closely with one another. So that is not something that we just “take for granted”; that is verifiable, empirical, scientific evidence. If you refuse to accept such definitive evidence, that pretty much confirms that you are anti-science.
Next, you say, “I fail to see any correlation between global warmth and prosperity.” That only means that you fail to see any correlation. It’s probably hopeless trying to point out that Greek civilization flourished during the Minoan warming, and that Roman civilization expanded and grew during the Roman Warm Period, and that civilization in general prospered during the Medieval Warm Period.
Civilization benefits from global warming, and it starves when the planet cools. Warmth is good; cold kills. That is why the global warming scare is such nonsense. A couple more degrees of warming would be entirely beneficial to humanity. Cold is the real threat.
LetsBeReasonable:
At November 27, 2012 at 4:56 pm you say
Not “easy” but perhaps “relatively easy” depending on what you mean by “relatively”.
The satellite data only exists since 1979. There two analyses of the MSU data from the satellites. These are the remote sensing systems (RSS) analysis which is slightly different from the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) data set, but the two data sets are sufficiently similar that either can be used as illustration.
The RSS system is outlined at
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html
and it says there that the temperature trend of the lower atmosphere for the period from 1979 to October 2012 is 0.133 K/decade.
However, that does not inform about the warming over the twentieth century because there were periods of cooling from ~1880 to ~1910 and from ~1940 to ~1970.
Indeed, the RSS data shows slight cooling over the period since January 1997 (i.e. the most recent 15 years and 10 months prior to October 2012) which is about half of the time since 1979 when the satellite data started to be obtained.
This recent data was plotted by Werner Brozek on another thread. His plot also included HadCRUT3 data and HadSST data: it can be seen at
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.25/trend/plot/rss/from:1997.0/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.1/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.25/plot/rss/from:1997.0/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.1
Richard
Birdieshooter,
Here are some charts found in the peer reviewed literature, or charted from peer reviewed data:
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Images/Main/Warm_periods.jpg
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://www.murdoconline.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/gisp2-ice-core-temperatures.jpg
richardscourtney: “…only an ignorant idiot would make such a claim.”
this statement is not only false, it is a logical fallacy called ‘argument from intimidation’.
mr slayton was absolutely correct; his statement, entirely accurate and truthful.
Struth mate! Good on ya!
I particularly appreciated your discussion of the duty of care and the legal precedent set by the Italian court. From a legal perspective does this decision set a precedent as regards burden of proof when predicting things climate?
I mean it’s one thing for “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals closed the door last month on a five year effort by a coastal village in Alaska to use the common law of nuisance to fight climate change. In Native Village of Kivalina v. ExxonMobil,[1] the small town of Kivalina, located on the Chukchi Sea in Northwestern Alaska, alleged that the greenhouse gas emissions attributable to 22 oil, energy, and utility companies have exacerbated global warming and thereby exposed the village to rising sea levels and flooding. Relying on the Supreme Court’s holdings in American Electric Power Co., Inc., v. Connecticut (AEP),[2] the Ninth Circuit dismissed the suit, holding that the Clean Air Act had displaced the federal common law of nuisance with respect to greenhouse gas emissions.”
states Dustin Till at Marten Law.
And quite another to ponder “the legal basis of their culpability was not in failing to predict the quake but in falsely asserting certainty in their own prediction. In this instance the scientists assured the local population that there was little risk of a dangerous event and that they should all go home, have a nice bottle of wine and not worry. A strong quake took place and several hundred people were killed.”
There might be a silver-lining in this misunderstood cloud……..
Thanks Richard for your input, I found it interesting. I am wondering if the slight cooling since 1997 may lie with in the margin of error? Do you know what the period of time we would need to be able to say the heating/warming would be significant?
On another matter, a report on the permafrost melting has just been released. The concern raised is that this will release massive amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and act as a positive feedback loop.
Mosher is troubled by the presence of the gas can. Has he considered that the can was placed at the scene after the fire burnt itself out. Or has he considered that the National Firefighters Foundation is awarding grants to study why humans always seem to leave gas cans at fires, be they natural or man-made.
@Doug Proctor: you wrote: “The IPCC is, however, straightforward in saying that they provide “scenarios”, not predictions.”
I am not convinced the IPCC have been straightforward. They have a summary for policy makers designed to give credence to the idea that we must reduce carbon emissions. The IPCC is not straightforward, they are one sided. They speak from both sides of their mouths.
LetsBeReasonable says: “The concern raised is that this will release massive amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and act as a positive feedback loop.”
The positive feedback loop will be:
1) minor compared to water vapor’s effects as Greenhouse gas
2) limited because the amount of existing IR light is limited
Think of #2 like adding more wood (CO2) to a fire, without increasing available fresh air, as in oxygen (IR light).
That Huffington Post article that osopolitico linked to above, is a perfect example of the next phase of alarmism. Instead of claims that the world will be irrevocably destroyed by 2010, 2012, 2016, or 2020 (if we don’t act right now!!!!), they just continue to push the goalposts back to 2050 or 2100. And people will just allow them get away with it indefinitely. They will do this forever and the same people will always believe in the dogma. This is never going away.
Secondly, for experts who claim to believe in the beauty and majesty of natural climate change, I’ve never seen them attribute anything to a natural cause. Every single climate/weather event is now caused directly by humans. By sheer odds, shouldn’t at least one event have a natural cause, even if as they say, AGW controls most of the climate? How did we gain such power?
Darren, I am a little confused about your response, but are you suggesting that by putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will have no effect because the amount of heat in the form of IR will be the same? I would have thought that like adding a blanket on your bed, you would heat up, despite your body generating the same amount of heat?
As to your first point, even if the effect is minor, wouldn’t any increase in greenhouse gases have an affect, thereby increasing the heat retained by the planet, and therefore increasing the melting of the permafrost?
You also wrote:
“As to your first point, even if the effect is minor, wouldn’t any increase in greenhouse gases have an affect, thereby increasing the heat retained by the planet, and therefore increasing the melting of the permafrost?”
I would not assume the affect would move things measurably in one or the other direction. That is, more water vapor could act in a negative or a positive feedback. The fact is that it’s so complex that most of the IPCC models are way off… Their models do not consider other natural explanations for climate such as Solar Irradiance making it’s way to warm the surface based on solar based changes which cause cloud formation, and stored energy in the oceans causing effects which move the heat around in El Nino and La Nina, which correspondingly affect cloud formation which affects the amount of solar energy getting to the oceans…
I have to laugh. At the bottom of the posting page, just below the link to the full article, is an ad that I imagine is generated automatically, and is probably different for each reader.
Mine is for the Toronto Marlies hockey team.
Oh, the irony…
Jeff Alberts says:
November 27, 2012 at 7:44 am
“The average temperature for the Earth…”
Might as well stop reading right there. There is no such thing.
Sure there is if you want one. An average is a mathematical abstraction and you could calculate an estimated global average temperature from a thermometer on the equator and one at the south pole. The question is how useful a metric would it be. Another question is whether there is sufficiently high quality data collected from adequately representative sites to estimate it reliably.
Duster: You wrote: “Sure there is if you want one. An average is a mathematical abstraction and you could calculate an estimated global average temperature from a thermometer on the equator and one at the south pole.”
I think we agree… but let me add to that…
The Earth is more than the temperature of some of the air one point in altitude take in two places. It does not include water temperature at various altitudes, or soil temperature… or …. There’s enormous amounts of latent heat energy in various forms (gas, liquid, solid) that store and release heat from and to the air.
Frank K. says on November 27, 2012 at 9:43 am:
If the air temperature in one or more locations shows no trend, how could this be so if CO2 globally is increasing? Over the large time scales associated with planetary climate change, I would suspect that no place would be immune to a general rise in temperature over, say, 100 years or more.
+1
And there are many places in the USA rural areas at which this is happening.
Has anyone challenged this bogus idea of an average temperature for the atmosphere, and any lessons to be drawn from it, by instead referring to the changing heat content of the atmosphere—including the latent/sensible heat of airborne water vapor; the same of ocean/land ice; and temperature-sensitive ocean water evaporation changes—and how it’s not possible to measure a meaningful average energy in such a chaotic system?
Why has the world let alarmists use temperature a metric? Haven’t they ever experienced the difference between a 105 degree day in Phoenix, with a rel humidity in the 30’s, with the same temperature but a 75% humidity in Delhi?
LetsBeReasonable says: “… but are you suggesting that by putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will have no effect because the amount of heat in the form of IR will be the same?”
No. The available amount of IR light is for the most part is limited. To often proponents of AGW assume that no matter how much CO2 is added there is always an equivalent (more) IR light for CO2 interact with.
From: Cold Facts on Global Warming / Absorption of Infrared Radiation
“the effect of carbon dioxide is roughly logarithmic. Each time carbon dioxide (or some other greenhouse gas) is doubled, the increase in temperature is the same as the previous increase. The reason for this is that, eventually, all the longwave radiation that can be absorbed has already been absorbed. ”
Think of it this way with Sunglasses representing CO2: You have numerous pairs of sun glasses, each of which blocks (interacts with for CO2) 50% of sunlight. You put on first pair and 50% of the light is blocked and 50% is passed through. You put on a second pair, which again blocks 50% of the light and passes 50% of the light that got through the first pair, ultimately 25% of light is passed to your eyes. You put on a third pair, resulting in only 12.5% of original light being passed to your eyes. With a fourth pair, only 6.25% of sunlight reaches your eyes.
But to the point, the fourth pair of sunglasses can only adsorb 6.25% of the original light because the 1st, 2nd, & 3rd pair have already adsorb 87.5% of existing light. As you can see, doubling and doubling again the sunglasses (CO2) has little effect because of prior absorption of original sunlight.
LetsBeReasonable says: “even if the effect is minor, wouldn’t any increase in greenhouse gases have an affect,”
Yes, but the effect diminishes as the CO2 levels increase as stated above.
Also, realize water vapor accounts for 95.0% of Greenhouse gas effect.
All sources of CO2 amount to 3.62% (natural 3.5%) (man-made 0.12%) of Greenhouse gas effect. Thus a slight increase in natural CO2 would have a minor effect in comparison to water vapor’s Greenhouse gas effect at 95.0%.
The evidence of all this is right before proponents of AGW eyes, but they choose to ignore mother nature. Despite CO2 levels having continued to rise (to recent high levels), Earth’s temperatures have not. Some would even argue the Earth has cooled very slightly vs. rising over the last decade. This is completely counter to the claims of the proponents of AGW. Which would indicate to most people, the claim of AGW is utterly wrong.
@LetsBeReasonable: You wrote: “I would have thought that like adding a blanket on your bed, you would heat up, despite your body generating the same amount of heat?”
It is well believed that CO2’s ability to act as a greenhouse gas is nearing it’s limits. So in taking your example above; It would be like adding the 98th blanket on top of the 97 blankets that are already on your bed.
Even the IPCC mentions this to some extent. They say that the initial warming caused by the extra CO2 that man put into the atmosphere will cause other positive feedbacks, primarily water vapor, and that most of the water vapor will insulate the planet from shedding heat. Their models largely rely on that water vapor being the main feedback that causes the warming. But in fact, water vapor could also act as low lying clouds which increase the reflectivity of the earth thereby acting as a negative feedback which would lead to cooling.
Let me know if this explains it.
Mario
@ur momisugly richardscourtney
Ignorance in science is often coupled with ignorance of economics and history. There is NO spectrum of economic systems….there is only freedom and personal property rights….OR….there is total control by unelected, primo-geniture oligarchs. From ‘One Pleasant Day in Runnymede’….
“Feudalism, fascism, socialism and communism are merely distinctions with no difference. An individual or small group of individuals have complete control of all property and all human activity. If ever elected, they always rule unopposed. It is no surprise that there are those that lust for this control. It must be a genetic defect that so many long for or accept this type of rule. New World Order is just re-branding of Old World Order.”
Our media, federal government and education system are under near total control of neo-feudalist who believe that they can ONLY be kings….if most of humanity are reduced to serfs. There was almost NO distinction between the economics of Hitler and Stalin….or Mao….or Castro. Total control of energy, property and human activity is the end game of AGW tool.
[snip. Please, no Principia links, per Anthony. Thanks. — mod.]
Has Michael Mann lost his court case against Dr Tim Ball?
“This dismissal us due to Weaver’s (and Mann’s) bizarre refusal to comply with court rules to reveal the hidden evidence that supposedly underpins their science. Honest researchers would have no qualms over a little ‘show and tell’ to convince a jury their science is “settled.” But these charlatans must now think its worth blowing a cool million to keep it hidden. As such, for refusing to come clean both their lawsuits are now scheduled for summary dismissal, plus costs.”
Would seem as if Dr Tim Ball is also launching a counter attack against these two gentlemen.