Tom Nelson captures this delicious irony, apparently it isn’t a travesty any more, it’s the sun.
Has Global Warming Stalled? | Royal Meteorological Society
[Trenberth] “Warming” really means heating, and so it can be manifested in many ways. Rising surface temperatures are just one manifestation. Melting Arctic sea ice is another. So is melting of glaciers and other land ice that contribute to rising sea levels. Increasing the water cycle and invigorating storms is yet another…Another prominent source of natural variability in the Earth’s energy imbalance is changes in the sun itself, seen most clearly as the sunspot cycle. From 2005 to 2010 the sun went into a quiet phase and the warming energy imbalance is estimated to have dropped by about 10 to 15%.
…Human induced global warming really kicked in during the 1970s, and warming has been pretty steady since then…Focusing on the wiggles and ignoring the bigger picture of unabated warming is foolhardy, but one promoted by climate change deniers. Global sea level keeps marching up at a rate of over 30 cm per century since 1992 (when global measurements via altimetry on satellites were made possible), and that is perhaps a better indicator that global warming continues unabated.
Kevin Trenberth’s REAL travesty | Climate Sanity
[Trenberth in Climategate1, 2009] The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.
Uncertainty about “invigorating storms” must be the new unaccountable travesty.
From an interview after the Moore, OK tornado in Scientific American:
[Q:] I know this kind of extreme weather is part of the territory in the middle of the country, but is climate change going to make such extreme weather more likely or more powerful?
[A: Trenberth] Of course, tornadoes are very much a weather phenomenon. They come from certain thunderstorms, usually supercell thunderstorms that are in a wind shear environment that promotes rotation. That environment is most common in spring across the U.S. when the storm track is just the right distance from the Gulf [of Mexico] and other sources of moisture.
The main climate change connection is via the basic instability of the low-level air that creates the convection and thunderstorms in the first place. Warmer and moister conditions are the key for unstable air. The oceans are warmer because of climate change.
The climate change effect is probably only a 5 to 10 percent effect in terms of the instability and subsequent rainfall, but it translates into up to a 33 percent effect in terms of damage. (It is highly nonlinear, for 10 percent it is 1.1 to the power of three = 1.33.) So there is a chain of events, and climate change mainly affects the first link: the basic buoyancy of the air is increased. Whether that translates into a supercell storm and one with a tornado is largely chance weather.
The most humorous part of the post is where he warns us about 30 cm of ocean rise in a century. This is 1.2 inches per decade, 3 mm per year. This is on the high side of the 9 observed inches over the last 140 years, but is equivalent to the rate of sea rise last seen roughly 70 years ago, within the natural variation of the observed tidal gauge data. We can ask whether or not the satellite data is, in fact accurate, if it is being “massaged” to support a particular conclusion, if it is presenting a perfectly natural swing that has nothing to do with climate per se. No matter how one answers the question, however, the rate is not catastrophic — the next twelve inches over a century are no more “catastrophic” than the last 9 inches over a century plus — if it persists at 3 mm/year.
He also needs to get his story and that of Hansen straight. Hansen regularly, even routinely, predicts 1 to 5 meters of SLR by the end of the century. In fact, 1 is on the low end of what he claimed even remotely possible on his TED Talks show — he said in a carefully scripted aside that he personally thought it would be 5. If >>TRENBERTH<< is dropping back to 12 or 13 inches (still very probably on the high side, given flat global temperatures) then the entire doomsday scenario Hansen has so carefully constructed disappears. Almost all of the supposed “catastrophic” aspects of CAGW come from enormous SLR. Take them out of the picture — a placid inch or inch plus per decade — and nobody will even notice, any more than they noticed the last 9 inches of rise. We just don’t live long enough to see more than a few inches of that — if it persists.
No wonder that they are falling back on egregious claims about extreme weather. And the tragic thing is, this is one of the easiest ways to lie. “Extreme” weather events are normal. A temperature record is set somewhere on the planet every day. All it takes to convince the idiots in the crowd of anthropogenic global warming is to make sure that every time a record is set (every day, that is) it is made known to the public. Every time an “extreme” storm hits — whether or not it is, in fact, all that extreme — be sure to attribute it to CAGW. The only way to disprove their assertion that e.g. Sandy was due to CAGW or CACC (since it is no longer warming) is to do a serious statistical study of hurricane frequency and power (which is in fact routinely done and which shows no increase in either one, if anything the contrary). Or tornado frequency and power, again, at historical lows if anything. Or rainfall (boring, no real droughts, no real floods). Or heat waves (always one happening somewhere, but no pattern of extreme heat everywhere). Or cold waves (because they have managed to make COLD weather part of their dialectic, blaming it on CACC now that CAGW is manifestly in hibernation).
There is no statistical evidence that the current global climate — the aggregated weather — is in any way abnormal, or for that matter changing in any statistically significant way either warmer or cooler, wetter or drier, more or less extreme, over the last 16 years. Even cherrypicking at the level of individual events (which is very close to being pure “antiscience”) is wearing thin for the CAGW/CACC crowd. Sadly, they are at this point invested well past the point of no return in the picture they have painted up to this point. Every year that passes without dramatic “climate change”, even with all of the anecdotes they can collect and amplify beyond all reason, is one year closer to not only the end of careers but considerable public humiliation AND the end of careers.
What will Trenberth do, if there is no measurable warming for another five years? What will he do if tide gauge data splits from satellite data the way LTT has split from the land record? What will he do if (shudder) it starts to cool?
I hear that there are always jobs as Wal-Mart greeters available. He can work right next to James Hansen and Phil Jones.
We all want to save the world. But what if the world doesn’t need saving, or if the real thing the world needs saving from is lies and distortions of reality that kill people in the third world by diverting resources away from providing them with desperately needed energy and into half-baked schemes that even if the risk they supposedly address is real will not prevent the very disaster being predicted?
In order to really help to save the world, Trenberth should stop playing the anecdotal evidence game, acknowledge that just as the statistically sound analysis of the data not only doesn’t support Hansen’s 5 meter SLR, it doesn’t at the moment support any sort of catastrophic scenario at all. It might warm anywhere from 1 to 2 degrees K more by the end of the century, and only some unknown fraction of that is attributable to anthropogenic activity. The sea could rise by a whole foot — or not. The Greenland ice is safe. The Antarctic ice is not only safe, it is growing. Alaska is setting records for cold (just as anecdotal as heat records, but one that is understandable in terms of global decadal oscillations). Finally, even WITHOUT the word-saving crap, the world is still going to move towards a better balance of renewable and fossil fuel energy resources, not because it saves the world but because as technology advances, it will save money. In two decades the entire issue will be moot.
In the meantime, it might be nice to help all of the poor people in India and Africa and South America who live in a state of abject energy poverty, condemned to unclean water, dung fueled cooking fires, a day that reaches from sunup to sundown (no artificial lights), hand washing of clothes in parasite-laden streams, and so on to access more, cheaper energy by removing the entirely artificial price supports and barriers intended to force people away from “demon carbon” while still not permitting them to use the sensible carbon free alternatives, such as Uranium or Thorium nuclear power en masse.
How about it, Dr. Trenberth? Care to save not a whale, but rather a few million children, not in eighty or ninety years but right now? All it takes is real honesty.
rgb
“The climate change effect is probably only a 5 to 10 percent effect in terms of the instability and subsequent rainfall, but it translates into up to a 33 percent effect in terms of damage.” –Kevin “Travesty” Trenberth.
Dave says: “Don’t ask me why, but when I read what he said, images of a top hat, cane, and tap shoes came to my mind.”
After Trenberth’s outrageously unscientific hand-waving as he attempts to blame an extra 0.01% of CO2 in the air for more storm variability, with no calculations to back it up, this is what came to my mind:
http://www.blinkx.com/watch-video/willie-the-hand-jive-by-johnny-otis-1957-oldiestelevision-com/L9pEipfcSXrr9ALLriYCvg
Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 says:
May 22, 2013 at 3:10 pm
“So to get fewer tornados we need to reduce the temperature difference between air coming south from Canada and air coming north from the Gulf of Mexico. Now if we got the Canadians and the Mexicans together and said “either Canada has to get warmer or Mexico has to get colder”, which option do you think would more likely win favor with both sides?”
Gotta be careful here, most Canadians would probably like colder to extend outdoor hockey season.
“Another prominent source of natural variability in the Earth’s energy imbalance is changes in the sun itself, seen most clearly as the sunspot cycle. From 2005 to 2010 the sun went into a quiet phase and the warming energy imbalance is estimated to have dropped by about 10 to 15%.”
I wonder how this will play out in AR5?
C’mon Kev, level with us now!
Way back in high school I had a history teacher who had formerly been studying for the priesthood. Well, he got married at the last minute. And his wife had been studying to become (no surprise here) a nun. Now he acted just like someone who had narrowly missed a bullet, by mere millimeters, and having missed it, immediately discovered the treats that bullet would’ve deprived him of. Of course I’m talking about sex here.
And, in our history class that’s all he talked about. He wasn’t really in a legal position to give adolescent males useful information. Nor could he be very specific. But it insured that we learned absolutely nothing about history.
But we still had to pass the damn tests. They were essay tests. Anyway, here’s an example of how I passed them: I’d get a question like; “Who was Colonel Hornblower?” Now, it was a long time ago so I don’t know if that was or is the real name but it sticks in my mind ’cause it sure sounds like a 1700s English military kind of name (or perhaps a Freudian slip for what the teacher was actually talking about).
Anyway, I’d get that question, put two and two together, figure he had to be important in one way or the other or he wouldn’t have been brought up. Ok, so I know that much. He’s obviously a colonel, heck, the question just told me that. And, since he was a colonel it probably had to be a wartime kind of thing. I’m good to go.
So here was my answer, “An important colonel during the war.”
The teacher actually marked that answer correct. I couldn’t tell you what year, what war, what country, nothing. Nothing at all, but I got it right. And I guess technically it was.
Can one see a parallel here with Trenberth? I have a nagging suspicion (Christopher Landsea, a hurricane expert who resigned from the IPCC could possibly confirm this) that, at least when it comes to hurricanes our dear Kevin has been winging it. How many other answers of his were, “An important colonel during the war.”
The problem for him now, regarding the missing heat, is phrased a little more like this:
What is gkgijjgfihgthjgjjhhfughvcbnhjku?
Let’s see you wing that one, Mr. Trenberth?
An Super Solar Eclipse took place on May 9 – 10 (UTC), 2013, with a magnitude of 0.9544. Obviously CO2 was to blame. My model projects that we could experience as many as 87 more of these extreme events by the end of this century.
Our grandchildren may never know what the Sun looks like.
If Obama gets impeached over the IRS scandal, does that mean Global warming will finally be over?????
Fifteen years of non-warming is a meaningless blip but one tornado is proof of AGW. Got it.
I guess when all that missing heat emerges from the Double Secret Probationary Travesty Layer in the oceans we will be in real trouble.
rgbatduke says:
May 22, 2013 at 3:38 pm
He also needs to get his story and that of Hansen straight. Hansen regularly, even routinely, predicts 1 to 5 meters of SLR by the end of the century.
————————————
Thank you rgb, not only for this post, but also for some of the other fine posts this past couple of days, not to mention the other exceptional posts that have helped shape many people’s thinking on this blog.
You mention Hansen, and I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. I could probably do the calculation myself, but I’m sure it would be way easier for you to do.
I was wondering if Hansen is actually the quantifiable record holder in getting something wrong, in the whole history of human scientific endeavor.
Just what would it take for the oceans to boil. Let’s say we had two doublings of CO2 – 280 X2 X2 ppm = 1120 ppm, on a background of 30,000 – 40,000 ppm of water vapor over the oceans in the tropics, and let’s give him a hundred years for it to effect the boiling (makes the saying ” a watched pot never boils” a bit lightweight, doesn’t it?). How many orders of magnitude was the guy off by ?? …. even if you don’t include Doppler shift overlap, line broadening effects at sea level, etc. etc., the additional back radiation from purported anthropogenic CO2 absorbed by the ocean, would be close to zero. Multiply that by the humongous volume and temperature of the world’s oceans, and I have to believe he could be off by a hundred orders of magnitude.
Whatever is the number, has any “scientist” in the history of mankind ever been off by so many zeros ??
This might be important, as I think that, in his new position, he will be rearing his ugly head once again. It will be nice to have a big mallet to play whack-a-fraud with.
In 2009 he couldn’t account for the lack of warming, and it was a “travesty”. Now, four years later, the some 16 years without warming is a mere “wiggle”, and besides, he now can account for it; by some physics-defying feat it is transmogrifying into making the oceans rise. CO2 is indeed amazing stuff.
Then, Dr Trenberth better inform NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center because some of us regular folk can use google effectively and get different info from what he’s peddling. [Emphasis in original]
Trenberths faith is admirable and one must respect such religious fervor.
A purely agnostic question here for anybody who might have enough information to make a stab at the calculation: is it possible that a significant portion of the ‘missing heat’ has actually been utilised melting of ice?
To turn H2O from ice at 0 degrees centigrade to water at 0 degrees centigrade requires latent heat. Specifically it requires 334 kilojoules of heat to melt a kilogram of ice without actually raising its temperature.
Regardless of the cause of the recent ‘global warming’ (and I do like Bob Tisdale’s take on it), if you consider at the satellite data, there does seem to have sufficient been net warming to have melted quite a lot of the ice over the arctic ocean. There has been far less melting, and possibly a net gain in the Antarctic, and some net loss or gain from other localised ice caps, glaciers, etc. But presumably it is possible to make a reasonable estimate of any net loss of global ice cover form the satellite data.
From the point of view of purely scientific interest, it would be very interesting to make the calculation as to how much heat has been used up in the latent heat of fusion of global ice melt.
So, is there anybody here who has access to such data and could calculate this for us?
With regards,
LK
Having read this post again I have come to the conclusion that Kevin Trenberth was clumsily trying to explain that a 10% increase in wind speed is a 33% increase in the energy in the wind because wind power in an open air stream is proportional to the third power of the wind speed.
He ought therefore to be taken to task over whether global warming has produced a 10% increase in wind speeds, either in common weather events or in extreme weather events.
I am very dubious that such is the case.
“@William Howard Astley. Could you consider not writing small novels as comments?”
Amen, but I never read any comment over two screens long. Unless it’s from rgbatduke.
Tom J asks: “What is gkgijjgfihgthjgjjhhfughvcbnhjku?”
“Easy one. It’s a volcano in Iceland.” –Kevin
Mark Bofill says:
May 22, 2013 at 11:21 am
………..is he speaking his opinion ex-rectum?
LOL, nearly choked on your Latin. You nailed it.
Larry Kirk says:
May 22, 2013 at 6:14 pm
A purely agnostic question here for anybody who might have enough information to make a stab at the calculation: is it possible that a significant portion of the ‘missing heat’ has actually been utilised melting of ice?
==========================
Larry, I think this was probably inadvertent, but you actually did ask the “when did you stop beating your wife?” question so, in that regard, it could be construed as not really an agnostic question.
Many on here would tell you that the so-called “missing heat” is well past Alpha centauri by now.
Global sea ice cover as a proxy for heat and/or missing heat doesn’t tell us much other than changes are indistinguishable from zero (check the sidebar). Like the rest of the CAGW theory – indistinguishable from zero.
Polar ice volume is probably something that the frauds will try to push, as the lay person can’t look at it daily on a satellite, but that’s only the ones who are too unsophisticated to know that the jig is up and want to continue their their fake-scientist lives for money, and also want to continue to be planet-saving heroes at their grannies’ knitting circles.
@ur momisugly philincalifornia
Phil, I was treading lightly, seeking a scientific answer to a genuine scientific question whilst hoping to avoid a welter abuse from some who might have thought I was batting for the other side. Perhaps I should have phrased it more carefully: ‘A question from a climate agnostic here..’
(This climate agnostic being one who swings wildly between his Bob Carter-like geologist’s conviction that there is nothing remotely unusual, or to any appearances unnatural, about the recent erratic ‘global’ warming, which looks just like the usual, constant natural climate change of the past half million years, and some concern at the steady rise of the Keeling Curve and the equally rational open question: “What if I am wrong?” )
Not quite sure that I asked a “When did you stop beating your wife?” question. I did use the word ‘stab’, but not in the marital context.
Now let me look at that sidebar..
jorgekafkazar says:May 22, 2013 at 7:20 pm
Amen, but I never read any comment over two screens long. Unless it’s from rgbatduke.
Ha ah … gotta 100% agree with that!
(well, the last bit anyway!)
Mark Bofill says:
May 22, 2013 at 11:21 am
“….is he speaking his opinion ex-rectum?”
In China it is: “He who speaketh from both ends.”
Those flat periods were probably allowed–but in the event of a major volcanic eruption. That condition must have slipped Trenberth’s mind. (Anyway, that’s his get-out if he’s challenged about it.)
[Q:] I know this kind of extreme weather is part of the territory in the middle of the country, but is climate change going to make such extreme weather more likely or more powerful?
{A} Answer: more likely, no. More powerful, no.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=257
@ur momisugly philincalifornia
I didn’t find what I was looking for on the sidebar unfortunately. I as looking for ice VOLUME data, but could only find ice sheet AREA data. For floating ice sheets such as the Arctic ice sheet, the ice volume can be calculated with extreme accuracy from high resolution satellite-borne radar altimetry of the ice surface. The volume of ice thus mapped above mean sea level is then approximately nine times the total volume of ice in the ice sheet.
Satellite-borne radar altimeter readings are typically accurate to a vertical resolution of a few centimetres, so no matter what your opinion of the ethics of particular end users, the data itself will not be fraudulent. It will be extremely accurate, and is of great scientific value.
I do think I know where I can get hold of it though, so that is where I shall redirect my question to.
This may be off topic- but- the poster you used to illustrate this post is incorrect. My son pointed out that the data referred to on the poster was from August 1997 to August 2012. However way you spin it- that’s only 15 years!
C’mon guys- must do better!
The enemy might be useless at math(s) but disinterested observers will be. How can you win over the disinterested when your facts are wrong? Are we not in danger of being as bad as the bad boys?