A sound bite summary*
Guest essay by Rud Istvan
The climate consensus has two levels of derogation for those who disagree. Climate ‘contrarians’ like Bjørn Lomborg disagree about mitigation policies. Climate ‘deniers’ like Judith Curry disagree about the underlying climatology. The consensus does not want disagreement, since the ‘science is settled’. They decline to engage (Schmidt/Spencer), disappear comments (Real Climate, the Guardian), refuse to host comments (LATimes), and loudly allege a fossil fuel funded ‘denier’ conspiracy (Grijalva). But they cannot avoid the occasional personal encounter. Following are some possible ‘silver bullets’.
There are basic consensus points that most ‘deniers’ “97%” agree with.
Yes, climate changes. Millennially, we are in the Holocene interglacial not the preceding ice age. Centennially, we are warming out of the LIA; London no longer has Thames Ice Fairs. We are not yet back to the MWP; farmers in Greenland still cannot grow barley as the Vikings did then.
Yes, burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric CO2.
Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas (GHG), and doubling would by itself cause temperatures to rise between 1C and 1.2C (the Planck effect).
Yes, water vapor and clouds (to note two) provide natural feedbacks, which in the case of water vapor is positive.
Much more of the consensus cannot be scientifically correct.
Erroneous attribution. Observed decadal warming from about 1920 to 1945 cannot be attributed to increasing anthropogenic CO2 since it wasn’t very much; the IPCC said so. Nor can slight cooling from about 1945 to about 1970; CO2 warms. Yet the consensus attributes ‘all’ warming from about 1975 to 1998 to anthropogenic CO2 (and other GHGs). That cannot be right; natural variability has not ceased.
Overly sensitive models. Observed climate sensitivity from 1880 to now is about half of what climate models estimate (both TCR and ECS). Using the newest estimate of aerosol forcing produces TCR ~ 1.2 and ECS ~ 1.5.
Climate models are now falsified by the 18 year UAH and RSS ‘pause’, using Santer’s consensus criterion published 2011.
There are two underlying reasons for climate model falsification.
1. Parameterization embeds erroneous attribution by neglecting natural variability.
2. Inability to simulate tropical convective processes (thunderstorms) that carry latent heat of evaporation aloft, where it has an easier time escaping to space when released by condensing precipitation. That precipitation reduces the water vapor feedback and changes the cloud feedback. The inherent limitation is computational intractability beyond the smallest feasible GCM grid cells (1° or about 110km at the equator). NCAR says halving grid cells increases computational intensity 10 fold. Convective processes need to be simulated on less than 25km grids (best less than 10km). That is at least three to four orders of magnitude beyond today’s best supercomputers. This is evidenced by the modeled tropical troposphere hot spot that does not exist (radiosonde, satellite), and modeled tropical precipitation less than actual.
Unsurprisingly, derivative consensus sequelae have not come true either.
Sea level rise (SLR) is not accelerating. (Most tides gauges are unreliable owing to isostatic rebound or plate tectonics.) Satellite SLR altimetry since 1979 largely covers the temperature rise attributed to anthropogenic CO2.
No evidence for a historical sudden SLR ‘tipping point’ despite previous interglacial (Eemian) temperatures several degrees higher. The papers finding otherwise are flawed (tectonics), one arguably even academic misconduct.
No identifiable potential ice sheet tipping point. Greenland is bowl shaped; nothing to tip. East Antarctica is gaining ice. West Antarctica’s Ronne is stable. ANDRILL proved Ross is anchored, and has not ‘tipped’ before. Amundsen Embayment’s Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers are creeping, not tipping. Even if they did, they are not big enough to matter much. Most of the Amundsen catchment basin is not creeping, and its interior is gaining ice mass.
Barren ocean ‘acidification’ is half the rate predicted by AR4, since ocean is highly buffered. Its pH has much larger seasonal biological swings.
-Corals may be in trouble from pollution and overfished reefs, but not from ‘acidification’. The main papers claiming otherwise overlooked toxic hydrogen sulfide, arguably comprising academic misconduct.
-Pacific oyster spawn at Netarts Bay was not affected by upwelling ocean acidification. The hatchery needs to be managed like the estuary it isn’t, where warm summer spawning water is naturally >1.0 higher pH from biological activity. The NOAA PMEL papers claiming otherwise evidence willful negligence (or worse) based on the ‘knew or should have known’ standard.
Weather extremes are not increasing (cyclones, tornadoes, heat waves).
Polar bears are thriving thanks to curtailed hunting. No matter what happens to Arctic summer ice, the majority (80%) of polar bear seal feeding is spring ice.
No climate extinctions. The predictions are based on models that overstate (like species/areal range S=cAz), GCMs that do not regionally downscale to estimate A, and endemic species (small A) comprising strong selection bias.
Consensus mitigation solutions have no answers to contrarian objections.
Renewables are expensive; that is why they are heavily subsidized.
Renewables are intermittent, so must be backed up by equivalent peak gas or coal spinning reserves to keep the grid stable; that is a large hidden cost beyond subsidies, and why Germany’s Energiewende is floundering.
CCS is more expensive than nuclear, and (except in special circumstances) geologically impractical.
Denying inexpensive coal generation to Africa and Asia hurts the neediest, hindering development. China’s new development bank will fund coal stations in Africa and Pakistan, when per consensus mitigation the World Bank won’t. China and India won’t play the UNFCCC COP21 game.
Lower sensitivity suggests adaptation is sounder socially and economically.
*Drawn from ebook Blowing Smoke: Essays on Energy and Climate
While I agree with the above, it would be useful for arguments with alarmists elsewhere if there were papers cited to go with some of these items, such as the Greenland and Antarctic ice paragraph.
Seconded.
It’s a plug for his books, which presumably contain the cites.
Although we’re accustomed to getting this information for free (from other skeptics, not from the high priests of global-warming catastrophe), it’s understandable that a worker may want some compensation for his efforts. It is devoutly to be hoped that some will do well by doing good. (I just doubt that it will happen to any great extent in the global-warming context.)
Well I was actually considering buying his ebook until I read this intro.
There’s so much wrong it’s hard to know where to start.
What’s this “Plank effect” ? It is not the effect of CO2 that causes the rise it is the negative feedback that limits it. So it is not CO2 ” by itself “.
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That’s fine except that it misses stating that the most important feedback in the system is the Planck feedback , the others just tweak it up or down a bit.
This is all part of the IPCC word games which even Monckton had bought into. They can then talk about feedbacks being “net positive” when this is never on the cards. They can only be net “a liitle less negative” or net ” a little more negative” than Planck f/b which is and will always be the dominant controling feedback.
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No, parameterization embeds erroneous attribution by inserting speculative parameters instead of the much claimed physics based science.
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Is this tongue in cheek or what? The idea of “tipping points” is an analogy, no one is suggesting any ice sheets are going to physically tip over.
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So if all the data is unreliable, it is impossible to make the statement that it is or is not accelerating.
In fact a better statement would look at Jevrejeva’s most recent paper which shows that there has been no acceleration for over 100 years. That does put the lie the accelerated SLR using the data Rud says “unreliable”.
This article is so poorly written that all it does is give ammunition to those who want to disparrage this site as ill-inform climate “denial” .
I find it tedious and annoying when a fellow sceptic decides to say that sceptics believe, and therefor conceed, Greenhous Gas theory and that CO2 warms. I do not and it does not. In our dense wet atmosphere water vapor is the working fluid that cools the troposphere while CO2 is the radiator to space that cools the stratosphere. There is no greenhouse gas and no radiative buget in the troposphere.
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2015/04/25/one-tenth-bar-short-waves-and-solar-spectral-change/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/07/11/spherical-heat-pipe-earth/
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/12/28/ignore-the-day-at-your-peril/
But all the scientific originazations in the world support agw theory. I swear if I hear this one more time from someone know it all. The scientific organization consensus bs.
Charlie, here’s a little help with that http://kajm.deviantart.com/art/About-those-pro-AGW-scientific-organizations-501561189
I put it together from a number of skeptic articles, WUWT, JoNova, etc…
Pretty nice Otter!
I suspect some of those ‘pro AGW’ organizations are only pro agw in a PR statement, not as an agreement among it’s members.
Yes, ATheoK, my guess is that many organizations are subtly pressured (“Your company is a responsible organization, right? Your company wants to be seen as caring about the environment, right? Your company doesn’t want any bad publicity, right? Here, sign this boilerplate policy document.”) into agreeing to a ‘policy position’ by pro-CAGW “organizers”.
In other words, computational limitations produce AGW.
not exactly. I think its more along the lines of ‘well we know this stuff is happening, but we can’t model it exactly, so we will shove in a fudge factor’. (parametrization)
That factor could prove or disprove AGW.
They choose the one that ‘proves’ it.
however if the parameter is time invariant (constant) , and the observed effect is actually not, then you get the situation that wild swings in climate happen that are not predicted no matter what the parameter value is, because its not actually a constant.
Which seems to be (I am guarded in my claims) where we are now.
As the AGW protagonists are desperately seeking not Susan (who is?) but some time variant stuff they left out that will fit the gap between current model predictions and reality.
They may well succeed at that for a few more years, but it definitely blows the ‘science is settled’ claim completely out of the water.
Max Photon
May 3, 2015 at 4:35 pm
In other words, computational limitations enable forcing of CAGW claims.
Regards – Hans
maybe OT, owls to athens – but to remind on a trap:
yes, logic is expressed by language.
does’nt mean language ONLY supports locig.
Hans
Even if all of the ‘consensus’ claptrap were scientifically correct, there is still no legal or moral basis — beyond the arbitrary exercise of coercion — for imposing mitigation measures on whole populations.
If YOU think CO2 is a problem, then YOU cut back on YOUR output.
Beyond that, get the f*** out of my face.
Agree, but it doesn’t count what we the public think/want. Check out this 5 min. vid
– a very interesting chart in the vid
Great video!
Sadly that doesn’t work. 19h century London was plagued by disease and foul stenches. the Rich could only eliminate it by sorting out the sewage problem of the Poor as well as the Rich, on a grand scale.
No man is an island etc etc.
No, my complaint is not against the attempts to exert control over the mass to solve problems. It is against inventing problems to justify centralised control…
“Climate models are now falsified by the 18 year UAH and RSS ‘pause’, using Santer’s consensus criterion published 2011.”
Link to Santer = http://judithcurry.com/2011/09/12/santer-on-timescales-of-temperature-trends/
= Trends >17 yrs are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temp.
I guess reading Tamino’s latest entry might be useful for you.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/slowdown-skeptic/
The pause is not ‘good enough’ that it would yet do a huge impact. We need to wait to get significance.
And of course tamino uses the “highly adjusted” giss data set. Shocker he found no stop in warming. I would equate tamino as a hired gun propagandist for the alarmist apparatchik. Nothing more
Julia Gillard who was in charge of bankrupting the Australian Treasury for a time as PM was famous for saying of CC “The science is IN” but now JG is OUT at only 20 billion dollars +/- in the red later.
TA fixed that by saying “No “Carbon” Tax but you can have as many trees as you want” to convert evil CO2 to “nobody hates me” Oxygen… This way to sanity PLEASE.
“This way to sanity PLEASE”
Take your time, no shoving, there is plenty of extra room there now, what with all the CAGW crowd having left.
Re: “Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas (GHG), and doubling would by itself cause temperatures to rise between 1C and 1.2C (the Planck effect).”
This assertion is pure conjecture — it may be true. It has never been proven.
The Planck Effect is about temperature feedback. It does not say that CO2 drives temperature, i.e., is the controlling influence on what the temperature will end up being. It only says that temperature affects how much CO2 can potentially damp (or amplify). No tropospheric “hot spot” clearly indicates that doubling of CO2 has not measurably amplified temperature.
Per Huang and Ramaswamy:
“The change in atmospheric temperature further perturbs the Earth’s radiative energy budget, generating a feedback onto the initial surface temperature change. For convenience, we will term this process as ‘‘temperature feedback,’’ which constitutes one aspect of the climate feedback. *** {Note: in the climate system called “Earth,” there are many other powerful feedbacks which could potentially completely overwhelm any CO2 effects on temperature}
Atmospheric temperature directly influences the thermal emission according to Planck’s Law …
temperature feedback is often simply designated as the ‘Planck effect’ … .”
{Source: http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/related_files/yih0702.pdf }
Emphasis mine.
The so called Planck effect is not true feedback. It is the rate of change of radiation leaving the planet per C of surface warming, IPCC uses 3.2. A better estimate is about 3.75 using the 4 major sources that are all at differrent teperatures and with different contributions to the total radiation: surface, clouds tops, water vapor and CO2.
True feedback is the change in surface temperature as a fraction of a previous temperature change, but before additional changes are made from the feedback. Separate equations handle this and the combining with other feedbacks to form a single feedback multiplier. If there are different resonse times involved, then the feedbacks are combined at time steps over time and the multiplierwill vary with time.
THANK YOU, RUD ISTVAN FOR AN EXCELLENT
AND VERY USEFUL SUMMARY!
I hope people will buy your e books, such as this one:
Blowing Smoke by Rud Istvan
http://www.amazon.com/Blowing-Smoke-Essays-Energy-Climate-ebook/dp/B00OJSOCNK/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430701106&sr=1-1&keywords=Rud+Istvan+Blowing+Smoke
some inconvenient truths about which the public should be fully informed, but which the MSM does not disseminate widely/regularly:
27 April: WFSB TV: Experts warn about potential dangers of solar panels
While they are popping up everywhere, many people may not be aware of the dangers that come along with them…
“Look, we have very high electric rates in Connecticut and they continue to go up and so our electricity costs are high and that makes the whole value proposition of going solar really compelling,” O’Neill said…
A fire that broke out in Vernon last month wasn’t caused by solar panels on the roof, but it became more difficult to fight the fire because of them.
“There was some fire underneath some of the panels. They’re hard to work around. They’re very dangerous,” Vernon Fire Chief William Call said.
Solar panels pose an extra level of danger to firefighters, as they are always electrically charged, even in the moonlight. There is no way to turn them off.
If firefighters come into contact with them, they’re at risk of shock or electrocution.
“Don’t step on the panels. Don’t lean on the panels. Don’t put your tools on the panels. Don’t break the panels,” said Robert Duval, senior investigator of National Fire Protection Association.
He said the panels can also inhibit firefighters’ efforts to ventilate through the roof.
Plus, the added weight of the panels can also cause the home to collapse more quickly…
“We won’t risk one of our firefighter lives in an unstable structure, unless somebody’s inside there and that’s where the risk is worth the reward.” Rocky Hill Fire Chief Michael Garrahy said.
When firefighters can’t ventilate through the roof and are worried about a potential collapse, they may be forced to fight the fire from the outside, which means it could take longer to put out…
The alarming problem is just coming to light for some fire departments in the state as they scramble to have their knowledge and training catch up with the technology…
http://www.wfsb.com/story/28886201/experts-warn-about-potential-dangers-of-solar-panels
I am waiting for the insurance assessor to ask ‘do you have solar panels’ and stick a premium on the insurance.
And the estate against to ask the same, and knock 4% off the house value. Like they tend to do with asbestos anywhere.
Still there’s a great market opportunity coming up for people specialising in the safe disposal of toxic solar panels…
The fire departments need to carry a set of mats to unfurl o the panels. Make them magnetic to stick. Block out every bit of light.
“Climate models are now falsified by the 18 year UAH and RSS ‘pause’, using Santer’s consensus criterion published 2011”
Yes and no. IF AND ONLY IF, the Climate Models are producing ‘predictions.’ That is, if they are scientific models. In which case, they may be fairly said to have been falsified. And there are some arguments to why they may not be falsified as yet. Regardless of which, if they are a scientific model, we need to see the ‘fit’ of their predictions to reality *before* lending any credibility to them. This is basic science.
But if, taking the common line, the Climate Models are producing ‘projections’ then they are not scientific models. Ergo, there is no ‘scientific consensus’ possible. There may very well be a consensus of climate scientists about the general notion, of course. But there could also be a consensus of climate scientists about the legitimacy of cold fusion and perpetual motion machines. What sort of buy in that climate scientists give to various pseudoscientific crankery isn’t very interesting.
Outside Jonestown and Kool-aid.
“Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas (GHG), and doubling would by itself cause temperatures to rise between 1C and 1.2C (the Planck effect).”
And yet a man made greenhouse will reach the same temperature inside regardless of the IR transmission properties of the roof material. Greenhouses made with IR opaque or IR transmissive roof materials operate exactly the same way, by restricting free convection of heated air and reach the same temperature inside. This has been empirically demonstrated on numerous occasions. Starting over a 100 years ago by R. W. Wood in an experiment that has recently been replicated (an important concept in science).
If a totally IR opaque plastic film over a greenhouse cannot raise the temperature inside above that of a nearby greenhouse with an IR transmissive plastic film covering why do you insist that a trivial amount of a life giving gas in the atmosphere can raise the temperature by any amount ? Let along asserting that a doubling would result in a known temperature rise with an accuracy of 0.1 degree C (1.1 +/- 0.1).
Must you still insist that a trivial amount of gas in the atmosphere with 6-8 orders of magnitude less thermal capacity than the Oceans of the Earth is controlling the temperature of the Oceans. Have you ever tried to “warm” Mount Rushmore by standing nearby with a lit pocket lighter ???
Why do you persist in asserting a hundred year old conjecture is “true” when it has never been observed ?
CO2 has gone up some 30% in the last 18 years (plus or minus a few) and the temperature has not budged…. 30% is one third of the way to a doubling, must we all wait until CO2 has quadrupled and temperature has not changed to simply stand up and say that this conjecture (CO2 controls temperature) is still not proven in any way. Note a computer model that mimics a conjecture is not proof, no matter how many PHD’s worked on it.
This hypothesis is dead……
Cheers, KevinK.
30%?
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1998/to:2015
Anthropogenic maybe, but not total atmospheric.
I think this is the point he was trying to make (WFT): http://tinyurl.com/bq22d72
And a very good point too, Yirgach.
And it will be even stronger when WfT updates the UAH data.
But there’s not been a 30% increase in atmospheric CO2. Perhaps 10 – 11% is closer to the number.
“Satellite SLR altimetry since 1979 largely covers the temperature rise attributed to anthropogenic CO2.”
Could you restate that? I didn’t understand what you mean by “largely covers.” Disproves? Has error bars wider than?
Yes, I could not see what his point really was there either.
?w=596
Satellite data has been so rigged by continual “correction” ,cross-calibration adjustments and fiddle factors such as inverse barometer, “the oceans are getting deep, we think” that they are sadly no use for objective science.
Jevrejeva, despite being no climate “deenyer” shows that there is no acceleration that could be linked to AGW. Precisely the tide guage data that Rud wants to reject.
Is there a source for these graphs?
Not a bad list Rud, but your forgot an important point. Increased CO2 offers a major benefit to the planet due to CO2 fertilization. My own journey to skepticism began with this issue.
The weight of scientific evidence in favor of CO2 fertilization, both theoretical and experimental, is immense and overwhelming. The planet is greener, and the biosphere more vigorous because of increased CO2. Nonetheless, the response of academia, government, and the media on this point has overwhelmingly been one of silence.
Ignoring such a massive benefit, and even referring to CO2 as a “pollutant”, has done more to damage the credibility of these institutions than any other part of this debate..
…”but your forgot an important point. Increased CO2 offers a major benefit to the planet due to CO2 fertilization”
———————–I often say, the projected harms of CO2 are failing to manifest, the benefits are known and manifesting.
Every time some fool starts whining about negative externalities, I tell them that on net, CO2 has a positive externality, and by his logic should be subsidized, not taxed.
“Polar bears are thriving thanks to curtailed hunting.”
Speculation.
Gamecock:
I also bristled when I read that, and when it was stated previously.
In one sense the statement is correct, but many of us do not consider that hunting. Killing polar bears for their pelts and organs (Chinese medicine) is not hunting; it just market killers looking to make a profit.
Just as market killers, (market hunters previously), nearly decimated North America’s birds, animals and fish, they decimated polar bear populations in areas that were not controlled or overseen by an organization dedicated to managing wildlife populations.
Rephrasing:
Polar bears are thriving, including areas where market killers wantonly slaughtered bears for profit.
Hunting is one aspect to managing wildlife populations and providing benefit to citizens and animals.
90% with the article. Disagree with “CO2 is a Greenhouse Gas” and the water vapour feedback part. There are also enough physicists out there who refute the “greenhouse effect” hypothesis to make this part also bunk the “settled science” claim.
I have seriously come to the realization that all the science in the world will not change the course of the whores like Santer, Schmidt, Trenberth, and Phil Jones. They are whores, having sold themselves for trinkets to their political masters, while calling what they spew forth as “science.”
They are on a trajectory that will not allow them to deviate. Not inspite of, but because of, they have subjugated themselves as political slaves to a higher calling, called environmentalism to the outside world, for a paycheck for themselves and their team of followers. But it is a calling to global socialism that is the real target.
But lest they sleep well at night knowing their bank accounts will have government check deposit in it every month, climate change is a disease that intends to inflict death and starvation on at least half the world’s population by 2030. Sleep well. Sleep well if you can.
[Rather, “… their solutions to climate change are a disease that intends ..” ? .mod]
CAGW has become a joke.
All physics and empirical evidence show ECS will be around 0.5C~1.0C which is a net benefit, especially since CO2 at 560ppm will increase crop yields and forest growth by 50% from CO2 fertilization.
NONE of CAGW’s dire predictions are coming close to reflecting reality and the CAGW climate model global temp projections are already off by 2 standard deviations; in 5~7 years, they’ll likely be off by 3+ SDs…
Alarmists already know their precious CAGW hypothesis is DOA. They’re just desperately trying to railroad governments to implement as much expensive and wasteful command and control global wealth redistribution and enviro-wacko regulation and legislation as possible before CAGW is laughed and eye-rolled onto the trash heap of failed ideas..
The alarmists also have to orchestrate a way how to stay out of jail for malfeasance of public funds after CAGW crashes and burns after global governments have wasted $trillions on this scam.
The alarmists’ get-out-of-jail-free card is feigned ignorance of cloud cover’s net negative feedback effect from CO2 LWIR forcing/increased ocean evaporation….
They’ll be shocked, shocked!, their precious “positive runaway feedback loop from increased water vapor” is a physical impossibility….
Yes, water vapor and clouds (to note two) provide natural feedbacks, which in the case of water vapor is positive.
I am really not so sure about that.
yes at the GHG level water vapour should provide positive feedback, if, and only if rising temperatures result in more water vapour in the atmosphere.
However convection, condensation, clouds and rain are also effects that rising (sic!) water vapour has.
And the final effect may well be cloudier cooler and wetter temperate zones and more radiation to space as warm wet air is carried beyond the bulk of the CO2.
Remember that the model of CO2 as a GHG is all about taking surface radiation and stopping it escaping on cold clear nights. If the cold clear nights become warm wet cloudy nights, it may raise surface temps, but the overall effect may well be negative feedback as more heat is radiated from cloud tops instead.
The real key is how much heat is radiated from the ground compared with how much is radiated from the cloud tops. IIRC its about 50:50
Plenty of room for extra losses to more than compensate for the CO2 reductions.
Yes, Leo, I initially questioned that as well, but I think Rud has separated the effects of clouds from the effect of water vapour by saying ‘to note two’ and, discounting clouds, that leaves water vapour as a positive feedback. I don’t see the relevance of ‘convection’ in that argument.
Actually, much more is radiated from the ground; a ratio of over 10 to 1.
I believe that Leo’s point was that because of increased convection, there may not be much increase in total humidity.
Yes, ECS is likely to be indistinguishable from 0 when all is said and done.
“…..“Consensus” and “settled”
Are political phrases,
To relate them to science
Confuses and amazes.
We’re unable to see,
It’s a dangerous thing;
The population are blind,
The one eyed politician is king!”
Read More: http://wp.me/p3KQlH-CL
Some serious Spring Cleaning of many meme-fields appears necessary, as in http://tinyurl.com/n63jwwr
on a global average, the MWP was cooler than today’s temperatures
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Temperature_reconstructions_0-2006_AD.jpg
This chart is faulty for many reasons, and has been thoroughly shredded over and over again by men better than me.
The Wikipedia chart above is fabricated nonsense, a “composite” of invented temperatures.
Dr. Roy Spencer provides this chart:
http://www.plusaf.com/pix/2000-years-of-global-temperatures.jpg
This chart is from GISP-2 ice core records:
This chart is from a Prof. R.B. Alley peer reviewed paper:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
And another chart based on Alley’s data:
http://i.snag.gy/BztF1.jpg
I have more. But the bottom line is that the MWP was warmer than now. Not that it really matters. It’s natural climate variability, and each successive Holocene warming peak has been lower than the preceding peak.
Good grab of the troll’s attempt to drop in a bit of pollution as last one standing.
The above chart appears to be Mann’s hockey stick. Getting rid of the middle ages by careful selection of proxies and invalid statistical methods, then tacking on the instrumental record at the end.
We do not know the effect more Co2 in the air will have on the average temperature.
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We do not even know if the effect will be large enough to measure.
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There has been no past correlation of CO2 and estimates of the average temperature, assuming the estimates are worth anything!
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We do not know if average temperature is a meaningful statistic that anyone should be concerned about in the absence of REAL negative effect from climate changes (there are none except in leftists’ imaginations).
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We know only one thing about the future climate — it will vary.
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And we know two things about the past 135 years of climate — it’s slightly warmer, if we are to believe the measurements, and that’s good news, and green plants are growing faster, which is also good news.
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You can go to school and get a science PhD, but predicting the future just can’t be taught.
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In fact, it can’t be done.
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There is no scientific way to forecast if the next few decades will get cooler, or warmer — I hope warmer.
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Predicting the future is not science, especially when the subject is so complex (climate).
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Climate models are not data, and without data, there is no science — they are climate astrology.
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Claims of a coming environmental disaster are a political tool to scare people into allowing their government to seize more power over their lives — this has been going on since DDT in the 1960s — one false environmental boogeyman after another.
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When one boogeyman stops scaring people, a new one is invented!
Could the author or someone else post the link to where the “consensus” made the claim that “attributes ‘all’ warming from about 1975 to 1998 to anthropogenic CO2 (and other GHGs).”—–Who is the “consensus” and when and who claimed that? tia