“The Models didn’t have the skill we thought they had…”
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian, a prominent green UK daily newspaper, reports that scientists have given up on surface temperature as a measure of global warming:
Stephen Briggs from the European Space Agency’s Directorate of Earth Observation says that sea surface temperature data is the worst indicator of global climate that can be used, describing it as “lousy”.
“It is like looking at the last hair on the tail of a dog and trying to decide what breed it is,” he said on Friday at the Royal Society in London.
“The models don’t have the skill we thought they had. That’s the problem,” admits Peter Jan van Leeuwen, director of the National Centre of Earth Observation at the University of Reading.
Obviously if the surface temperature was still rising, as it was in the 90s, instead of inconveniently contradicting model predictions, then it would still be considered a valid climate metric.
Thankfully however, climate scientists have not yet run out of metrics which show an upward trend. The new measure of global warming is to be sea level rise – presumably because it is still moving in the right direction, and because it ties in nicely with the “deep ocean heating” narrative.
The inconvenient fact that sea level was around 6 metres higher during the Eemian Interglacial, and around 2 metres higher during the Holocene Optimum, 5500 years ago, was not mentioned in the Guardian article.
http://www.soest.hawaii.edu/ericg/kap_paper.pdf
The European Union is supportive of the effort to find climate metrics which point in the right direction – The Esa Climate Change Initiative (CCI) is a €75m programme, active since 2009, to produce a “trustworthy” set of ECV (Essential Climate Variable) data that can be accessed by all.
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The guardian story is here: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jun/13/pause-global-warming-data-sea-level-rises
[note: there was an error in HTML coding that made the entire article look like a quote when that was not intended, that has been fixed – mod]
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How can atmospheric CO2 ‘acidify’ the Oceans, when there’s 140 times more CO2 in the Ocean than the atmosphere? It’s such a rich resource, the America Navy is going to make jet fuel out of it (so you can pretty much guarantee that the 140 times more CO2 than the atmosphere is accurate), ALL of the CO2 in the atmosphere could go into the Oceans, and they wouldn’t miss a beat.
Just about everything on land would die though.
This sea level rise? How many vulnerable coastal sand dunes that exist close to the high tide mark, have disappeared in the last 300 years? A few inches extra on a spring tide, with any sort of reasonable storm surge (storms tend to coincide with spring tides), and those dunes are gone (build sand castles on the beach and observe what happens when the tide comes in, and what just a couple of inches of wave action rapidly does to them). Locally, vulnerable sand dunes have been in place for over 300 years (in one place maybe even 600+ years).
‘Level’ in ‘sea level’ is like a builders level, or the type of surveying water ‘level’ used by the Egyptians to set out the construction of the pyramids.
The warmists don’t seem to be able to grasp what ‘level’ actually means, and some of them even think all this ‘surplus’ massive increase in water, is somehow stacked up, ‘over there,somewhere over the horizon’, biding its time until it decides to kick butt or something.
Yes there are variations in sea level due to gravity anomolies or whatever, but the amount of water even at an inch a decade, over even 30 decades, would add up to humungous volumes of water, with nowhere to hide.
So where is it?
Something else too. If sea temperatures were a lot colder during the LIA, and other very cold periods, the gas content of the water would increase quite significantly with reduced temperature. Once it has sunk to the depths at the Poles, it will carry that gas payload to the tropics, and when it gets there and warms up, before heading back to the Poles at the surface, it should be offloading rather large amounts of gases as it rises from the depths.
How much of that plays into atmospheric CO2 content?
A little off topic, I thought it was funny though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yis7GzlXNM&feature=inp-tw-paq-3914
Thankfully however, climate scientists have not yet run out of metrics which show an upward trend. The new measure of global warming is to be sea level rise – presumably because it is still moving in the right direction, and because it ties in nicely with the “deep ocean heating” narrative.
__________
Sea levels are not rising, at least according to the world’s foremost expert and the only one who has actually gone and measured the sea levels.
Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told’
“The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker…”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5067351/Rise-of-sea-levels-is-the-greatest-lie-ever-told.html
Snake oil can be a tough sell.
Edited for accuracy.
“””””…..Greg says:
June 15, 2014 at 1:41 am
george e. smith says:
June 14, 2014 at 8:16 pm
“””””…..sunshinehours1 says:
June 14, 2014 at 4:35 pm
MikeB: “Compared to the Sun’s energy input, 342 watts per square metre (at Top of Atmosphere), human produced ‘waste heat’ is negligible.”……”””””
The suns rate of energy input (to earth) is 1366 W / m^2., not 342.
And the units of energy are Joules, not Watts.
====
Hint 342 * 4 = 1368 😉
MikeB’s figure correctly gives the average of the solar flux over entire Earth’s surface. Compare surface of sphere ( 4 pi r^2 ) to the circular cross-section intercepting solar rad. ( pi.r^2 ) at 1366 W / m^2
Joules and Watts are surnames, the scientific units are joule and watt, neither capitalised nor pluralised. The “rate of energy input” would be W not W / m^2, the latter being a unit of flux. If you’re going be pendantic, you need to get it right. ;)…..”””””
Well thanks Greg for the arithmetic lesson. I’m sure I knew my “4 times table” by age four.
“”..And the units of energy are Joules, not Watts…”””
And the UNIT”S” of energy ARE (j)oules, not (w)atts.
Oh I missed the conversion.
Plural of “joule” is “julies” and plural of watt is watties; just follow the henry to henries rule.
If you and your disciples don’t know that power is an instantaneous quantity, and that AVERAGE POWER is quite irrelevant to the understanding of any physical process, then I’m not going to try and change your mind.
Try explaining to the people of Hiroshima, that a good thunderstorm carries a lot more destructive ENERGY, than the little bomb that was dropped on them; on average of course.
342 W/m^2 on each and every point on earth continually would result in a snowball earth.
UHIs would never get above freezing , at 250 W/m^2 applied forever. But they actually get around 1,000 when in direct sunlight (do I actually have to tell you to measure in the direction of the sun.)
Power is not averaged by ANY physical process; they all respond to the instantaneous value, even in the first attosecond.
So we can argue whether to actually use the guy’s name or let the French tell us what to do.
When, I went to school, many units were named after prominent scientists, using their actual real names. I’m not going to change now, but you can all do what you are told, if that is how you are able to communicate any ideas at all.
If I were writing a paper for a peer reviewed journal (which I absolutely never do), I’d probably see that I used the official spellings.
Only peer reviewed papers I ever wrote are all stored and available from the US (and foreign) patent office. Yes they care about words; not so fussy about incidental spelling conventions.
And my difference with what I cited, was not with the conventions of spelling and units (or should that be unit that is not pluralized either)
My complaint was the far less important (than mere spelling) use of completely incorrect units.
We don’t simply interchange the units, “farad” and “henry”, as if the physical attributes don’t matter.
Energy and power are not interchangeable units, and pointing out that one of them involves time but the other does not, is not particularly helpful.
In fact much of physics instruction is just about how various quantities may be related. Such relationships do not license interchangeability.
So Greg, if you and Mike B get your jollies out of your juvenile snide remarks; have at it.
I was studying real physics before you guys were knee high to a grass hopper; with commensurate mental faculties
So get over it; power is not energy
Crashing into a brick wall at 50 km/hr is not the same as doing it four times at 25 km/hr.
Hint : 4 = 2^2
Okay, so TEMPERATURE is not the best measure of how warm it is? Makes no sense. Climate change is all about warmth, and the one direct, objective measurement of warmth available to us, temperature, is to be ignored? Instead we are to replace it with other, less direct proxies for temperature, proxies that are influenced by a multitude of factors OTHER than warmth.
Suppose you wanted to determine the weight of a penny. You COULD simply put it on a scale and look at the dial to determine its weight. OR you could determine the VOLUME of the penny by submerging it in a glass of water and recording the difference in the water level before and after the penny was dropped in, then mutliplying that by the horizontal area at the surface of the water (or if the sides of the glass are not quite vertical, the average surface area of before and after the penny was dropped). Noting that volume is one of the three factors that determine the weight of an object (the other two being mass and gravity), you claim that volume is actually a BETTER indication of weight than weight itself, and report the weight of the penny as 0.463 cubic centimeter. After all, the weight of an object is a lousy measurement of how heavy something is.
If you wanted to determine the height of your child, you COULD stand him against a wall (making sure he is standing flat on his bare feet), mark the wall even with the top of his head, then use a tape measure to measure the height of the mark. OR, noting that the height of a human is a (partially) inherited trait, you could wait until he grows up, marries, and has kids of his own, then wait until your grandchildren reach your child’s current age. At that point, you could stand your grandchild on a flat surface x meters away from you and, using a sextant, determine the vertical angle between the center of your eye and the top of your grandchild’s head. You could then use trigonometric identities to determine the height of your grandchild from the value of that angle, the height of your eye, and the distance between your grandchild and yourself, but why bother? Simply report your child’s height, on a specific date 20+ years ago, as -3 degrees. After all, the height of a person is a lousy measurement of how tall that person is.