Eric Worrall writes:
Professor Bob Carter, writing in today’s edition of The Australian, a major Aussie daily newspaper, warns that the world is unprepared for imminent global cooling, because of the obsession of policy makers with global warming.
According to Bob Carter;
Heading for ice age
“GRAHAM Lloyd has reported on the Bureau of Meteorology’s capitulation to scientific criticism that it should publish an accounting of the corrections it makes to temperature records (“Bureau warms to transparency over adjusted records”, 12/9). Corrections which, furthermore, act to reinforce the bureau’s dedication to a prognosis of future dangerous global warming, by turning cooling temperature trends into warming ones — a practice also known to occur in the US, Britain and New Zealand.
Meanwhile, we have a report by Sue Neales that the size of our grain harvest remains in doubt following severe frosts in southern NSW killing large areas of early wheat crops and also damaging wheat and canola crops in South Australia and Victoria (“Trifecta of calamities to deplete. crop harvest”, 12/9)
Is it unreasonable to be surprised that none of your writers, much less the government, has noticed that leading solar astrophysicists, such as Habibullo Abdussamatov from Pulkovo Observatory in St Petersburg, have for years been commenting on the declining activity of the sun?
These scientists are projecting a significant cooling over the next three decades, and perhaps even the occurrence of another little ice age.
Obsessed as they are with a gentle global warming trend that stopped late last century, should the expected solar cooling eventuate, policy makers will rue the day they failed to heed the advice of independent scientists on climate change issues.”
Professor Abdussamatov, cited by Professor Carter in his letter, is head of the Space Research section of the Russian Academy of Science.
In 2006, Professor Abdussamatov issued a press release, warning that the world should prepare for imminent global cooling. Abdussamatov predicted that the global cooling would start in 2012 – 2015, and would likely peak around 2055.
http://en.ria.ru/russia/20060825/53143686.html
This predicted global cooling, if it occurs, will mean that polar vortex winters and cold related crop failures, such as the recent frost catastrophe which destroyed a significant fraction of Australia’s wheat crop, in the state of New South Wales, will become a normal part of life, and will most likely become a lot worse.
WUWT readers might recall a shameful incident last year, in which Professor Carter was unceremoniously dumped from his academic post. In my opinion, the removal of Professor Carter was part of an ongoing purge of Australian academics who hold unfashionable views on climate change.
==================================
Source of the graph: Source: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/trend
Looks like Michael Crichton will
be proven correct. Solar, oceanic
and Paleo data ALL point to both
near and long term Global Cooling.
I agree its related to global warming -global warming hysteria and propaganda- has made it appear to be safe to plant crops early. I would say these farmers should sue the Gov, BOM, CSIRO, and all the universities. They are the ones that said it is 99% certain that we are causing global warming. Based on that ‘intelligence’ they felt safe in planting early.
You’re definitely a 120% tryer, Grace … but no marks for stupidity.
We are at or very near the peak of a natural warming trend. These warming and cooling cycles have been relatively regular for the past 2,000 years or so. Within a couple of centuries, we will have descended by then into another Little Ice Age, which may or may not in itself, descend into a another major glaciation period – but I doubt it.
Thanks, Eric. I think Professor Carter has been in the right track for years, and paid dearly for it.
Look at this paper:
Bicentennial Decrease of the Total Solar Irradiance Leads to Unbalanced Thermal Budget of the Earth and the Little Ice Age. (Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov, 2012, Applied Physics Research)
At http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/apr/article/view/14754
Dr. Abdussamatov writes:
From early 90s we observe bicentennial decrease in both the TSI and the portion of its energy absorbed by the Earth.
The Earth as a planet will henceforward have negative balance in the energy budget which will result in the temperature drop in approximately 2014.
Due to increase of albedo and decrease of the greenhouse gases atmospheric concentration the absorbed portion of solar energy and the influence of the greenhouse effect will additionally decline.
The influence of the consecutive chain of feedback effects which can lead to additional drop of temperature will surpass the influence of the TSI decrease.
The onset of the deep bicentennial minimum of TSI is expected in 2042±11, that of the 19th Little Ice Age in the past 7500 years – in 2055±11.
“However just to put things in perspective, the frosty month in question July 2014 was the 353rd consecutive month in which global land and ocean average surface temperature exceeded the 20th-century monthly average. The last time the global average surface temperature fell below that 20th-century monthly average was in February 1985, as reported by the US-based National Climate Data Center.”
ALSO ….. “STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT.”
But aren’t you glad you got it in there ?
{Mods, u can delete the misplaced copy of this comment. It ended in the wrong order, my mistake so I’m copying it here, where it belongs, thanks.}
And where, one wonders, has actual science gone? I’ve posted a whole set of links to William Briggs’ blog where in a series of posts he points out that it is really pretty silly to try to fit linear trends to timeseries data and then use those trends to prognosticate the future. It’s silly to the point of inanity when climate scientists do it to “prove” that global warming is occurring, where a glance at the data suffices to show that (at least between 17th and 18th temperatures and today) without bothering to fit any curve to the data at all or pretending that any such fit curve has the slightest predictive value.
Have we all descended to the level of HenryP, who fits a quadratic to the timeseries he generates from a handful of carefully selected sites, notes that it is negative in curvature, and concludes that he can predict temperatures decades into the future? Because if fitting a linear trend to timeseries is dumb, fitting a higher order polynomial with even more fit parameters is surely dumber…
Look. The world’s best climate model builders, who surely are not all working in any sort of bad faith and who at the very least have some physical basis underlying the models they build, are empirically unable to predict the climate’s time evolution with any particular skill (at least not yet). That’s because it is an insanely difficult problem, one so difficult and being done at such a poor spatiotemporal resolution and relying on so many unvalidated approximations for averaging over finer grained data that it would literally have been and would yet be a MIRACLE if any of models WORKED.
But along comes person after person on both sides of the argument who point to this or that feature, this or that model, this or that isolated fact, related to this horribly complex, nonlinear, multivariate, chaotic open system and state that we are certain to warm, or cool, or dance a jig temperature wise for the next ten, thirty, fifty, or hundred years.
Bullshit.
The linear trend up above is utterly meaningless. The linear trend back to (pick your favorite starting date) is equally meaningless. They are meaningless in the precise sense that we have no good reason in either physics or statistics to imagine that the linear trends back to any particular start date will have the slightest predictive skill for the next 1, 3, 5, 10 decades. Indeed, examining the past the one thing we can be pretty sure of is that almost all possible linear trends we might cook up will not persist to 5 or more decades, because in the past they almost never have.
In the end, if we can’t solve quantitative predictive climate models with any skill trying our very best and with the best of equipment, why is it that people persist in thinking they can do better solving them in their heads?
So I have two major objections to the top article. First of all, we haven’t the slightest reason to “expect” cooling, or neutral, or warming to continue. If anything, we have a small, weak, reason to expect neutral to warming to be favored over cooling, but we’re not talking 10% to 90%, it’s more like 40% to 60% (that’s the “edge” I’d give to direct CO_2 forcing compared to natural variation for the next decade or three, but I’ll freely admit that this estimate is based on a pretty weak argument and could easily prove to be horribly wrong. The error bars on my prognostication, in other words, are so wide as to permit almost anything from runaway warming to rapid cooling to occur without it surprising me much. I haven’t any more of an idea of why the LIA happened or how the world managed to change temperatures by order of 10C (down and up) in at least some locations over one or two decades at various points in the geological record than you do, certainly not enough of an idea to be able to predict a future instance. Claiming otherwise involves putting faith in models with little demonstrable skill (which is silly) or putting faith in human punditry (which is even sillier).
Second, we haven’t any good reason to assert that the world is “unprepared” for global cooling as if that is somehow unique to the times. The world isn’t “prepared” for any climate variation, and hasn’t been back to the time of Joseph. We deal with climate as it happens, and if we are wise we plan for as many bad years as we can manage without claiming to be able to predict how the years will be bad. Too much rain is bad. Too little rain is bad. Too hot is bad. Too cold is bad. Cold at the wrong time is bad. Heat at the wrong time is bad. Only one climate or kind of weather is ever considered, by farmers and people who are vacationing at the beach to be just right and they aren’t even the same kind of weather.
So sure, we are unprepared for a sudden plunge in temperatures, local or global. We are unprepared for drought. We aren’t particularly well prepared for floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, erupting volcanoes, major earthquakes, stock market crashes, accidents that claim the lives of loved ones, losing our jobs, having babies, terrible presidents, greedy countries starting wars, insane muslims committing mass murder/suicide by flying airliners into tall buildings inhabited only by civilians.
But all of these things happen! They always have happened, and never have happened. That’s why they are always a surprise (when they happen to us) but are never surprising (when we read about them happening on the news).
I mean seriously, supposed it “cooled” back to the conditions of the early 80s. We aren’t “prepared” for that? Somehow we managed with the 80’s weather (which to my own recollection was hot, drought laden, and actually far worse for farmers in the US than current weather) back in the 80’s. What if it cooled to weather like the 60’s? Well, I managed to trick or treat in the snow in the 60’s, and I’ll wager that the inhabitants of upstate New York can still manage that should it come to pass.
That isn’t to say that we are “prepared” for crop failures in the event that we have premature warming followed by late frost, or an increase in the number of cold-related droughts. We never are, and get less so over time as world population (and stress on global food supplies) increases. People will probably die. It happens. And yes, people will probably die if the climate warms rapidly. It doesn’t even have to be global warming or cooling. A prolonged drought in North India, or coastal China, or central Africa, could kill millions of people without the GASTA changing a tenth of a degree. Rainfall is a lot more critical to humans than temperature, and the models suck even more at predicting rainfall or “extreme” weather variations than they do at predicting variations in temperature.
We haven’t had a major hurricane in the Atlantic make to the US shores for a really long time now — we’re actually looking at a full decade if we miss the next couple of years, IIRC. We aren’t “prepared” for it if it happens this month, though, any more than we were “prepared” for wussie little category one Sandy, which just happened to be a perfect storm (perfectly bad storm) in lots of ways other than wind speed, where category one-almost-two Arthur was a complete snooze earlier this year because it was a perfectly good storm that failed to do any of the bad things it could have done. Hurricane Floyd was hardly a hurricane at all as it came ashore, but it dumped so much rain into East-Central NC that the resulting floods did far, far more damage than wind might have done. We weren’t “prepared” for that — people had houses built into the floodplain just because floods into the floodplain are rare.
I for one would welcome a cooling trend, in part because it would shut down the debate over climate variation, force a serious reconsideration of our state of knowledge of our climate in the best of ways, and perhaps pave the way for actual unbiased progress to be made. We might even go back — as the figure above does — to earlier HADCRUT products, or to even more improved products that remove a lot of the model-adding warming bias in GASTA, because I’m guessing that a fair bit of the “warming” in GISS and HADCRUT4 is pure artifact as it is. I could be wrong, but until politics is purged from climate science, no one will ever know. Put Lindzen in charge of NASA GISS, give him three or four years to re-assess their GASTA products, and then we’ll see where we stand. I have no confidence at all in Hadley or anyone at NASA who has ever been associated with James Hansen. I’d have more confidence in BEST if it weren’t for the fact that they apparently ignored a lot of Briggs’ criticisms of their methods (which I’m pretty sure I’d agree with, categorically — I certain agree with the ones I’ve read so far). I haven’t got much of an opinion beyond that, except that if we honestly included error estimate in the assessment of any kind of trend, we’d conclude — as Briggs has carefully pointed out — that we really cannot conclude much of anything, even if the underlying model really is linear, or quadratic, or whatever,
rgb
Marvellous comment.
Worthy of being a post in itself.
It needs to be said again and again, “We don’t know“.
It’s not good to be ignorant but it’s better than being ignorant and not admitting it. And we are all ignorant.
No-one knows what will happen with the climate… that’s why the models failed.
So why guess that the opposite of the models’ predictions will come true?
Hi, RGB…. your position has limited merit and reflects an infant who looks at the pendulum swing of
Grandmothers wallclock. The climate is the pendulum swing and the infant starts guessing.
On the other hand, the one, who knows the clock´s intrinsic mechanism, knows what the
climate swing is all about….
I hate all the talk: We are stupid, we know nothing we cannot find out, all is mucho complicated
Therefore….better get the mechanism and you will understand the functioning of the climate
wallclock…All this speculation about the micro- and nanoforcings
is tiresome, better read about the macrodrivers which swing the climate in global climate
change up to 8 degrees in the past, see:
Booklet: “Joachim Seifert: Das Ende der globalen Erwärmung” on German Amazon.DE.
JS
Dearest Joachim,
Sadly, your clock has a pendulum that is made up of many pieces of unequal length — a much, much more complex version of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum
and is swinging through a jar of liquid at a speed that — in parts of its swing and for part of its cycle — passes the threshold for turbulence. Also, the spring that drives it isn’t a linear spring — it gets stronger and weaker as the clock ticks following a most irregular pattern. Finally, the swing is large enough that the ends of the pendulum can easily swing through one or more full rotations around the joints connecting the pieces.
Consequently, the clock is a chaotic, nonlinear clock and you could be god and still unable to compute the solution to its intrinsic mechanism out into the indefinite future. How far out you can compute it and remain reasonably close is entirely dependent on chance, because you cannot even accurate measure the state of the clock and all of the components of the pendulum and have to approximate it as a rigid rod, which indeed sometimes it resembles for many cycles in a row.
Until it doesn’t.
During times of apparent order, it is easy to be lulled into thinking that you understand its mechanism and that it can be safely predicted into the future. And then — because it isn’t just a highly multivariate nonlinear oscillator, but is a strongly driven open system — it turns out that many of its “pendulum” pieces are self-organized phenomena and are not themselves permanent. There you are, understanding it (you think) and they suddenly rearrange themselves in length and mass and the entire clock starts to follow a completely different (but still chaotic) trajectory.
rgb
Well written rgb,
I’ve commented before on the compulsion to fit meaningless lines to plots of data of dubious provenance. One has a sense that those so occupied have a misplaced religious like zeal and seem to be incapable of accepting ambiguity and uncertainty in their lives.
See here:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/update-2014-visual-proof-of-global-cooling/
Don’t worry folks, even now top people are conceptualizing methods to enable global rent seekers to extract money and power from global cooling. And if they come up with something, the elites will abandon global warming as quickly as they embraced it.
It’s not the problem that counts, it’s the solution, a vast global pseudogovernment bythe elite with unlimited power over all aspects of life and business and with the power to redistribute wealth with much of the moved money sticking to their fingers.
rgbatduke my reply.
Many of us are of the opinion that the chances of cooling going forward are near 100%.
CO2 is a non player in the global climate picture as past historical data has shown.
CO2 and the GHG effects are a result of the climate not the cause in my opinion.
I maintain these 4 factors cause the climate to change and they are:
Initial State Of The Climate – How close climate is to threshold inter-glacial/glacial conditions
Milankovitch Cycles – Consisting of tilt , precession , and eccentricity of orbit. Low tilt, aphelion occurring in N.H. summer favorable for cooling.
Earth Magnetic Field Strength – which will moderate or enhance solar variability effects through the modulation of cosmic rays.
Solar Variability – which will effect the climate through primary changes and secondary effects. My logic here is if something that drives something (the sun drives the climate) changes it has to effect the item it drives.
Some secondary/primary solar effects effects are ozone distribution and concentration changes which effects the atmospheric circulation and perhaps translates to more cloud/snow cover- higher albebo.
Galactic Cosmic Ray concentration changes translates to cloud cover variance thus albedo changes.
Volcanic Activity – which would put more SO2 in the stratosphere causing a warming of the stratosphere but cooling of the earth surface due to increase scattering and reflection of incoming sunlight.
Solar Irradiance Changes-Visible /Long wave UV light changes which will effect ocean warming/cooling. ocean warming.
Ocean/Land Arrangements which over time are always different. Today favorable for cooling in my opinion.
How long (duration) and degree of magnitude change of these items combined with the GIVEN state of the climate and how they all phase (come together) will result in what kind of climate outcome, comes about from the given changes in these items. Never quite the same and non linear with possible thresholds.. Hence the best that can be forecasted for climatic change is only in a broad general sense.
In that regard in broad terms my climatic forecast going forward is for global temperatures to trend down in a jig-saw pattern while the atmospheric circulation remains very meridional giving rise to more persistence in weather patterns and perhaps more extremes .
Gas cloud from the eruption drifts to the east. High level of SO2, sulphur dioxide, was measured at Reyðarfjörður. The highest value measured were just under 4000 micrograms per cubic meter. These are the highest values measured in Iceland. High level, 685 micrograms per cubic meter, was also measured in Egilsstaðir.
Things could change immensely. The earthquake activity in the Bárðarbunga caldera and the ongoing subsidence as some magma is draining to the Holuhraun fissure eruption may be leading to a caldera collapse. The 850 meters of ice in the caldera will not play well with the magma.
I agree. That many of you are of that opinion. And even more are of the opinion that the chances of warming going forward are near 100%. And an increasing number are betting on being neutral (for at least a while) going forward. Hey — it is a horse race. You pays your money and you takes your bet. You could be right, and the bookie is offering a 10:1 payback for cooling. Like all races, the long shots are a big payoff when they win AND you bet on them. Just don’t bet more than you can afford to lose, because the ground is littered with the losing stubs of people who bet on long shots.
That is, there is the chance that you could be wrong. Especially when your horse — for better or worse — is handicapped with that pesky increasing CO_2.
Dang horse racing. I’m gonna go bet on a sure thing, like gravity or electromagnetism.
rgb
rgbduke
“Professor Bob Carter, writing in today’s edition of The Australian, a major Aussie daily newspaper, warns that the world is unprepared for imminent global cooling, because of the obsession of policy makers with global warming.”
I don’t think the good professor is saying that we cannot cope , but merely that we may be ill prepared. You don’t go to the Arctic circle in your summer clothe .You plan ahead and do what is only prudent considering the weather ahead.. The problem is that we are being told wrongly to prepare for warmer winters only when the winters are actually getting colder the last 17 winters, both globally and nationally.. You say
“First of all, we haven’t the slightest reason to “expect” cooling, or neutral, or warming to continue.” Many will disagree with you, me included ,but I accept your personal opinion.
We can do better winter emergency planning, get adequate snow clearing infrastructure , ensure that your heating fuel supplies(oil, propane and natural gas) are stocked up for the winters , prepare adequate local winter budgets , recognize unique transportation needs , switch to more winter hardy crops , maintain adequate local power outage repair capability and recognize possible impact on local economy of sever winters .
One can skip all this and do nothing and cope with all the problems that arise . I would rather do the former.
It is odd that we are told to prepare for global warming but do nothing to cope with possible future cooler weather that has already been happening since 1998.
This is remarkably similar to the excuse being used in NC and many other states to pick our pockets spending hundreds of millions of dollars now to prepare for sea level rise. Never mind that the sea has been rising at a nearly constant rate for a very long time, and that there is little sign that that is going to change and only a weak physical argument for any change.
How long, exactly, do you think that it will take to implement measures to deal with “winter emergency planning”? Are you suggesting that it is time for Florida to invest in snowplows? That’s as silly as the assertion that I should plant banana trees in my back in NC or that people living near the coast should start investing in real estate several miles inland because it is certain to be beachfront any year now.
We are never prepared and always prepared for the next unexpected emergency. The never prepared is the “unexpected” part. Yet, because we are wise, we are always prepared in that we hedge our bets in reasonable ways. Colder winters are weather, not climate until there are decades of them lined up. We have plenty of time to adjust barring a plunge into glaciation. Is Bob Carter seriously proposing that we might plunge into glaciation?
“perhaps even cooling into another ice age…”
I guess he is. And, while that is always possible, it is absurd to suggest that we bet any significant fraction of our resources on that. You’d be better off plonking down hundred billion dollar bets on double 0 in roulette. Seriously.
rgb
rgbatduke September 15, 2014 at 4:42 am
This sounds perfectly reasonable in an academic argument. The problem is that the preparations for ‘global warming’ and the insistence on inefficient expensive energy generation to reduce ‘carbon’ emissions, have led to energy poverty on a huge scale, even in New England where gas prices were raised more than tenfold last winter. In UK the deaths from cold in energy poverty have been running at several thousand a month in Germany hundreds of thousands of families are living ‘off grid’ as they cannot afford electricity prices. This is purely due to preparations for a warm no-real-winter scenario that is not happening but (to use your analogy) all the money has been dumped on red – warming. So this is not a game with no downsides. IFF this winter is as cold as has been forecast by those with good track records, then there will be many people, probably thousands, who will die from cold – yet remember we are apparently on a plateau at the peak level of warming being told repeatedly that this is the hottest year ever. But we are being warned by worried energy companies to expect blackouts in the first world as the grids cannot cope, due to long term betting the farm on red. We are not in the position of betting one way or another – the bet has already been placed by the first world governments egged on by the UN. Bob Carter was merely pointing out that this may not be a totally good idea as they are unprepared for cold. There is a real shortage of grunt base-load energy generation and many ‘green’ regulations in place to ensure that it cannot be simply replaced. Faites vos jeux has already been called and nobody has bet on black.
Is the opposite of a warmist a coolist ?
Anyway realists will spot that this article raises the possibility of something that is of very low probability.
It’s called WEATHER!!!!
We cannot manipulate, con or cajole it. Let alone attempt to control it.
Because it doesn’t listen to us!
“Global Warming/Temperature Change/Global Cooling is just another lame liberal, left wing income redistribution scam. Given a new name after their latest attempt(s) at marketing failed.
Very much like LBJ’s “Great Society”. And look at what got us!
Reblogged this on The Next Grand Minimum and commented:
According to GJR in a comment , a sure sign of the next ice age is wheate killing spring frost. Please not the kill frost that destroyed the wheat havest in Australia.
Don’t know who GJR is but I haven’t seen any such comment.
I am in Houston where the weather has been cooler than usual since last November. I guess the wind turbines blew the heat away.
i suppose it’s inevitable that some who ferociously fought GW alarmism will become GC alarmists – and no doubt many GW alarmists themselves will convert to GC alarmism – (see Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer)
i think this battle demonstrates that there’ll be a rational core too – who will put demands on the science behind such claims
Hi Peter,
I just read Bob Carter’s letter and you seem to be putting words in his mouth. His point appears to be a lack of breadth in climate reporting in the Australian, in particular under-reporting of the warnings of a possible cooling trend. So he is actually criticizing the Murdock paper. Nowhere does he say that the NSW frosts were the result of such a cooling.
Here in the Sunshine Coast Hinterlands we had a warm May, but once winter started the nights quickly got cold and we had several hard frosts (-3 according to my thermometer) in July. The winter did seem cooler (and drier) than normal, certainly cooler than a decade or two ago, but nothing unprecedented. Even though all we seem to ever hear about is warming, it isn’t just a few Russian scientists who are predicting a cooling trend, so Carter’s point is valid.
“It would mean that the present interglacial is unique and unprecedented.”
Well, there’s another extreme climate event. Al Gore must be right.
Many people predict ….as in the Old Testament, the old prophets…. but necessary are
first class numbers of hard facts and reciprocable calculations for everyone. The
unrefuted climate analysis on the End of Global Warming” in the 21 Cty and thereafter
in the booklet: “Joachim Seifert: Das Ende der globalen Erwarmung” on the German
AMAZON.DE. Easy to follow, clear calculations made, no questions left. The author JS.
Wow. What a bunch of maroons. They’ll get blindsided by a Glacier.
Had to share this.
I looked up a survey of Khabibullo Abdusamatov’s “nonconforming opinions” and found that the dissenting opinions are all by individuals, except in two cases, the IPCC and Wikipedia. The IPCC were in the undecided (the “In-Between” camp – 2 opinions, from actual humans), while Wikipedia is in the “Mostly Disagree” ccamp.
http://www.takeonit.com/expert/18.aspx#opinions
Mostly Disagree
Wikipedia
World’s Largest Encyclopedia
25% agreement / 1 opinions
So there it is, Wikipedia apparently rates as a reputable ‘expert’ professional opinion in this survey. But what is it mostly disagreeing with? This:
“By the mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age, similar to the Maunder Minimum, because the amount of solar radiation hitting the Earth has been constantly decreasing since the 1990s and will reach its minimum approximately in 2041.”
Wikipedia’s ‘opinion’ is this:
“There has been no increase of solar brightness over the last 1,000 years. Solar cycles led to a negligible increase in brightness over the last 30 years, but this effect is too small to contribute significantly to global warming. The combined effect of natural climate forcing, solar variation and changes in volcanic activity, probably had a warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 but a cooling effect since. 27 Apr 2009 Source” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
Wikipedia references its own “Global Warming” webpage as excuse for why it has a considered opinion that ‘mostly disagrees’, referring to the same wiki page that says this:
“… but the 20th century instrumental temperature record shows a sudden rise in global temperatures.[66]”
Reference number [66] includes this citation:
Mann, M. E.; Zhang, Z.; Hughes, M. K.; Bradley, R. S.; Miller, S. K.; Rutherford, S.; Ni, F. (2008). “Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (36): 13252–7. doi:10.1073/pnas.0805721105. PMC 2527990. PMID 18765811. edit
Thus Wikipedia’s expert ‘opinion’ is once again rendered indubitably and irretrievably credentialed, honourable and backed by the most awe-inspiring integrity and rigour.
Yes, Abdusamatov’s can be completely wrong, as can any glorified fortune-teller, but I would appreciate it if the combined IPCC, Wikipedia, Mann, clown-employment-agency, would admit to the observable fact that they are no different in that regard, but do have a considerably more shambolic track-record within their chosen fortune-telling ‘profession’.
It would be wise to use the /sarc tag when referencing Wikipedia.
I don’t think that Lief would disagree with much of that (as stated in Wikipedia). Solar variation is, no doubt, a factor, but it is difficult to run the numbers with any reasonable model so far and show how the variation in solar energy associated with the solar cycle could be the dominant factor in climate variability over the last 1000 years. Variation due to orbital factors, perhaps. But the increased forcing from CO_2 is much larger than the total variability of either one on the timescale involved. So sure, it might be an explanation, or part of an explanation, but to show either one one has to solve a problem that is very likely unsolvable with our current resources. Otherwise you are just stating your literally indefensible opinion against somebody else’s equally indefensible opinion, a good way to start wars and riots and lead to a lot of misery all around.
I think the safest route is the humblest route. We don’t know what the climate is going to do over the next 100 years. In this, we are no different from all the people who have ever lived, so it is really not that big a deal. We might think “Gee, here we are with all of this physics and mathematics and these humongo-grosso computers, surely we can do better than that at this point in the 21st century…” but if we did we would probably be mistaken, because this is a hard problem. IMO unsolvably difficult even with orders of magnitude more computational resources applied to it that the many orders of magnitude already being used.
I have the advantage, here, of living through a lot of this in the world of heavy-duty computational physics. I remember well the days when a computer that was capable of 100 MFLOPS was considered an export-restricted weapon. Simulating a nuclear blast (an essential component of bomb design when you have banned nuclear testing) required complex exothermic, fission-fusion-coupled hydrodynamic solutions at microsecond if not nanosecond resolution, and it required “a supercomputer” to do this, so supercomputers became munitions. Ordinary computers would take forever to do the computations.
Then two things happened. One of them was Moore’s Law — computers kept doubling in performance every 18 months or so. 15 years worth of doublings is a factor of over 1000 in single processor speed. The other was my own speciality — building parallel supercomputers out of off the shelf computers. One could take (say) 100 cheap workstations and turn them into a computer 100x (well, almost, for certain problems but that is Amdahl’s law:-) faster than each individual CPU. Suddenly anybody could build first 100 MFLOP “munitions” (but it cost a fair bit of money still) out of export-unrestricted ordinary computers. Then every three years those ordinary computers were 4x faster at constant cost, and clusters very quickly got to where they could do GFLOPs and they literally made traditional supercomputers obsolete and put most of the manufacturers out of business. Since then my phone is now a “munition” by the standards of 20 years ago, and cheap desktop computer is 16 cores at 4 GHz each, — ballpark of 32 to 64 GFLOPS (depending on the code and efficiency of the floating point units as they stream the code through the caches). For $1000 whole dollars. One can now afford teraflops for remarkably modest sums, and the big boys are eying petaflops.
The sad thing is that even with tera- to peta-flops to play with, solving the climate problem is probably impossible. There are simply too many (say) 1km x 1 km x 1 km cells in the atmosphere and top layer of the ocean, and even cells this small are literally a billion times larger than the Kolmogorov scale of the dynamics.
If we do get to where we can do 1 km^3 resolution (with timesteps of roughly 3 seconds) — that is roughly 6 billion cells — and can evaluate a single three second (simulated) timestep in as little as three seconds of computation, we will actually be able to simulate climate as fast as climate actually happens. In the meantime, to get ahead of the present, we use 10^4 km^3 or larger cells, 300 or more (simulated) seconds per timestep of computation, and cross our fingers that the 14 orders of magnitude in between don’t really matter because we’ve captured all of that dynamics perfectly (enough) in the unverified approximations that are its foundation.
At least 1 km^3 might be able to resolve things like thunderstorms, approximately, as “whole” entities. It is still too coarse to actually simulate the nucleation and development of individual thunderstorms.
In other words, it isn’t just a hard problem like simulating a nuclear bomb’s detonation from the instant of triggering — that is comparatively easy. It isn’t like solving complex lattice problems in quantum field theory — that isn’t easy, but it is still a whole lot easier than this. It isn’t like simulating the time evolution of whole galaxies (although there are some resemblances) where it doesn’t really matter because you aren’t simulating any particular galaxy, just seeing what you get. It is a very, very difficult problem and one that not even Moore’s Law is going to resolve anytime soon, with 14 orders of magnitude to go just to get to a km^3 scale, which is still another 20 orders short of sufficiently microscopic to have a good chance of tracking the problem.
That isn’t to say it won’t prove to be solvable in the meantime. Perhaps we will find some approximations for the neglected/smoothed dynamics that empirically work well enough. Perhaps we will invent scale adaptive climate models and explore the intermediate dynamics well enough to be able to manage a sort of computed interpolation of the dynamics instead of ad hoc forms. Perhaps Moore’s law will be suddenly accelerated by new physics, or by the advent of quantum computing, and we’ll gain ten or twenty orders of magnitude of speed and storage and power there over a decade or two instead of over centuries (or not getting there at all, because of hard limits in the physics of computation).
Until that happens, however, it is very much a “show me” game. It would be wonderously surprising if the climate problem is solvable with any accessible human cleverness or tricks at the current scale of available computational power. Sure, it could be done, but for anyone to convince me that they have done so, they have to show me, by predicting the climate accurately (by my standards, not theirs) out decades into the future as well as hindcasting the past, explaining the ice ages and so on, in detail, and without fudging the results. It isn’t enough to build a model that creates “a planet” that looks a bit like Earth, and that has “weather” happening on its surface that looks a bit like real weather. It has to quantitatively predict the future, and quantitatively explain the past. It has to show skill. Not sometimes, all of the time. Reliably.
Then we’ll talk.
rgb
Less than 0.1 C cooling in 2001-2014 is a Little Ice Age? Cool phase of PDO is more like it. Carter claims no warming trend since 1958 based on radiosonde and satellite data. Is this validated by other scientists?
Not even close to an accurate depiction of Dr. Carter’s statement. But then you weren’t interested in telling the truth, were you?
“These scientists are projecting a significant cooling over the next three decades, and perhaps even the occurrence of another little ice age.”
Was that my statement or Dr. Carter’s?
About the lack of warming since 1958. Ask Bob directly. I’m sure he will enlighten you.
000
SXUS75 KBOI 130948
RERBOI
RECORD EVENT REPORT
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE BOISE ID
348 AM MDT SAT SEP 13 2014
…RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE SET AT BAKER OR…
A RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE OF 22 DEGREES WAS SET AT BAKER OREGON
YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 23 SET IN 1949.
Now that is cold!!!!! No tomatoes for you Baker City! The garden growing season has officially ended! Grew some corn did ya? Hoping to get it into the freezer? No worries. It’s already frozen.
If you ever get out this way (“this way” in Oregon is very isolated, ask Willis and his lovely wife, they know) you must visit Baker City. When I was a little girl, we used to travel the Talent circuit through that town. Did a tap dance or two (I was the caboose in the Little Red Engine routine) on the down town theater stage. Could be why I was a bit Eskimo chubby back then, it was the only way to keep warm! But with red unruly cowlick wavy hair, a freckled nose, and a 6 year old front-toothless grin I readily flashed, I was about as close to a leprechaun as you can get without actually being one. Are leprechauns chubby?
My garden was ruined by the lack of a summer. Barely any tomatoes, no peppers- well nothing else but a few tomatoes. What a waste. (North-central Massachusetts).
Yesterday I wanted to fire up the pellet stoves to warm up the house a bit but my wife denied me and handed me a blanket!
A little pudge, but not much.
http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2011/066/a/5/green_is_good_by_chubby_albino_panda-d3b3ss0.jpg
The Oregon Trail Interpretative Center whatchamacallit at Baker is really cool.
The Canadian magazine, Macleans , did an article on the “new norm” cold that has been hitting Canada. . Even with all the past experience in dealing with the cold , they found themselves ill prepared in many parts of Canada. I just quote a small part of their article
The winter that ruined everything
It broke records, kneecapped the economy, and showed us how ill-prepared Canada is for a future of extreme weather
In Winnipeg, frigid temperatures and heaping snowbanks are all part of the local charm. When your city’s nickname is “Winterpeg”—a label so famous it appears in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary—complaining about the cold is a waste of warm air. It’s bloody freezing. Everyone knows it. Bundle up and carry on.
But this record-breaking Canadian winter has been so nasty, so unrelenting, that even the Peg is losing its patience. Manitoba’s capital marked its coldest December-to-February stretch in 35 years, with a nagging mean temperature of -20.3° C. It’s been so ridiculously bitter that the ground is freezing at depths nobody can remember: more than two metres down. At last count, the unprecedented frost line has left nearly 1,000 addresses with frozen pipes—and city officials scrambling to restore running water with the four machines they have that can thaw the lines.
Some families haven’t been able to use their taps or toilets for two weeks. If they want to freshen up, Mayor Sam Katz has kindly offered the shower facilities at city-run pools. “This is like the exclamation point on a really rough season,” says Ian McCausland, a commercial photographer whose north-end studio lost its water supply more than a week ago. “People are really on edge.”
For McCausland, his pipes turned icy at the worst possible moment. His biggest shoot of the year was scheduled for March 10, and when he phoned his client to break the news—and explain his plan to order a Johnny-on-the-spot to replace his indoor plumbing—the client was not exactly flush with joy. Eventually, McCausland did find an acceptable solution: a company that rents high-end, trailer-style bathrooms complete with flowing water and a mirror. Parked a few steps from his studio door, the temporary john cost him $600 for the week. “This is my biggest client,” he says, “so I am willing to do everything.”
He is definitely not alone. From coast to coast, Canadians have done everything they can to survive this winter of discontent. The Old Man arrived early and never let go, unleashing a harsh brew of bone-chilling mornings, wicked gusts of wind and collective pleas for mercy. We learned a new scientific term—“polar vortex”—and felt it, firsthand, on our fingertips. It’s been so bleak that, as of early March, 92.2 per cent of the Great Lakes were covered in ice, the most since 1979. On March 1, Regina broke a 130-year-old record for that day’s temperarture: -36° C, with a wind chill of -53° C. In Kenora, Ont., where all-time winter lows have wreaked havoc on its maze of underground pipes, the city is in the midst of a two-week boil-water advisory.
http://www.macleans.ca/society/the-winter-that-ruined-eveything/
There is as strong possibility that this kind of weather is coming again this next winter to Canada and parts of United States
rgbatduke
You said
“How long, exactly, do you think that it will take to implement measures to deal with “winter emergency planning”? Are you suggesting that it is time for Florida to invest in snowplows? That’s as silly as the assertion that I should plant banana trees in my back in NC ..”
You might not need snow plows but you can get more freezing even in Florida . Remember 2010 winter?
You can rarely win an argument by going to the ridiculous. But things can get even more ridiculous when environmental consultant recommended a year ago or so that Toronto should sell off its winter snow clearing equipment because of upcoming global warming due to coming warmer winters with no snow.
You said “Colder winters are weather, not climate until there are decades of them lined up. We have plenty of time to adjust barring a plunge into glaciation.”
Where have you been the last two decades ? Winters have been getting colder for 17 years now , globally, Northern Hemisphere, United States and Canada
I would shutter to have you in charge of our city’s infrastructure . You might wait for 30 years and do nothing to prepare or cope before you are convinced that cold weather is here or that more is coming and by then the cycle will have already shifted to the warm again
I think you should move further north for a little while and experience first hand different weather and how to plan and budget for winter in our regions.
Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s a series of cold winters killed 10’s of thousands of acres of citrus trees in the Orlando area. It took more than a decade for them to recover.
I lived in Skaneateles, NY for around 8 years total, although I was a very small child for some of them. My mother, however, reported that she saw snow fall every month of the year in the 50’s. That includes June, July and August. I personally saw it falling in May (sitting in school, waiting for the “summer”) and September, and used to trick or treat in a foot of snow. I also — and I’m not kidding here — walked to school in Skaneateles — they didn’t run a school bus route in the town per se, a distance of around a mile, in mid-winter. I got frostbite walking to school. We had 20 to 30 below zero temperatures fairly routinely, and had several “blizzards” while I lived there (we were at the end of one of the finger lakes and got lake effect snow from Erie).
So thank, you, but no. I think I’ll stick to North Carolina where a snowfall is an adventure, an automatic holiday. And although the days are still depressingly short in winter, “short” means dark around 5 pm, not around 3 pm. “Cold” means that it went down below freezing the night before. “Snowy” means there is an inch of snow on the ground and everything is closed. And sometimes we have 70F weather in January (not very often, though, global warming or not).
As I pointed out above, I actually object to using weather — errr, I mean “climate” — models as the basis of public policy and decisioning of all sorts. That’s because they don’t work very well. I oppose doing so when NC tries to use them as the basis for planning for a sea level rise that just isn’t happening from an empirical point of view, even if the models call for it. I oppose doing so for snowplow purchase decisions. Surely those are best made not on the basis of model projections, but on the simple record of logged hours plowing snow, plus whatever one wishes to gamble. It costs everybody a lot of money when everything shuts down upon a snow, but in NC snows are rare enough that we don’t buy a lot of equipment, and just have to suffer in the odd years that we have 20″ snowfalls. Nothing moves for a week. C’est la vie.
Skaneateles, OTOH, would have to be populated by idiots to do any such thing. And generally, city managers aren’t idiots of that magnitude. I’m sure there are exceptions but I’m Darwinian — if you elect or appoint an idiot to manage your affairs, you are responsible when their decisions turn out to be idiotic.
As for Florida, if you look at their weather over the decades, they get killing frosts down there with annoying “regularity”. It’s not like it happens all the time, but they know better than to assume that it cannot or won’t happen because it does. They are never “prepared” for it when it does because how do you prepare your orange crop or banana tree in the back yard for a killing frost? In the one case, they spray water on the trees or turn on grove heaters and maybe or maybe not preserve some of the crop; in the other, it’s tough noogies for the banana — you can try wrapping it and maybe it will survive, but if the climate changes, you’ll just stop trying to grow bananas. Or oranges. You’ll know it when that happens because you’ll be out of business, or tired of replanting banana trees.
rgb