By Mike Bastasch
Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography recorded the warmest sea surface temperature taken in 102 years off the school’s pier in Southern California.
Scripps researchers recorded a high of 78.6 degrees Fahrenheit on Wednesday after a string of daily sea surface temperature records off the pier.
The researchers were quick to claim, “This is how global warming will play out,” according to a press release.
Wednesday’s sea surface temperature reading beat the previous record set on July 30, 1931, but only by 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit.
“It surpassed the previous record of 78.4°F (25.8°C) set on July 30, 1931, during an unusually warm period that year,” reads the Scripps release touting the new record temperature reading.
“Records related to heat and intense weather will become easier to break having been given a boost from anthropogenic climate change that has added about [one degree Celsius] to ocean temperatures over the past century,” scientists said, according to the release.
But while Scripps is trying to tie the record-high ocean reading to the broader wave of media coverage on global heat waves, there are a few caveats to note about what the scientists found.
First, these measurements are taken from a pier that’s near the shoreline, which would not necessarily make it representative of the entire Pacific Ocean, and therefore easily influenced by local weather events.
The “anomalously warm temperatures for the past week” that Scripps researchers observed at their pier somewhat mirror the temperature pattern in 1931, and indeed, the daily records broken in the past week have been very close to readings from 87 years ago.
There is an upward trend in temperature readings from Scripps’ pier, but the trend seems to also broadly coincide with the flipping of a natural ocean cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, to its warm phase. That flip occurred around 1976.
Source: Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego
Also, the scientists themselves admit there’s lingering heat from the incredibly strong El Nino that peaked in 2016. Pacific Ocean temperatures don’t seem to have returned to normal in El Nino’s wake — in fact, forecasters say there’s a 65 percent of an El Nino forming this fall.
“It looks like we took a step up during 2014-2016 from which we have not completely recovered,” Scripps oceanographer Reinhard Flick said in a statement.
Scripps has been measuring sea surface temperatures and salinity off its pier since August 1916, and the school began gathering seafloor data in 1925.
Scripps still takes temperature measurements off its pier by hand, but in that time the technology used to log readings has changed dramatically.
Read more at Daily Caller
Billions of gallons of wastewater and runoff from ~23.8 million people finds its way into the ocean off the Southern California coast daily, some of which flows through hot concrete channels. Could that help account for a .2F increase at San Diego’s shoreline?
Being a wastewater type, I can tell you that the Point Loma WWTP discharges about 180 million gallons a day south of the pier at Scripps. The discharge is about 3.5 miles offshore. There is another 15 million gallons a day from the WWTP just south of San Diego. Both of these discharges are very warm relative to the ocean water (20+ degrees F). North of the pier at Los Angeles, the Hyperion WWTP discharges almost 500 million gallons a day, also warm, about 7 miles offshore. Tides and currents can carry this heat back to the coastline. This is just the wastewater; it doesn’t rain much in S California but when it does the rainwater sends even more heat load to the coastal waters.
This thermal pollution is recognized by the State and is of concern. The State government has developed a Thermal Plan titled: “Water Quality Control Plan for Control of Temperature in the Coastal and Interstate Waters and Enclosed Bays and Estuaries of California.” This suggests that thermal pollution is a problem along the coast.
“Could that help account…”
When you consider the wastewater is highly enriched with frijolium, certainly.
Evapotranspiration from water cycle gives 486000 km^3/year. WIKI gives 503000 and Babkin in a Russian study gave 577000 but we will use the lowest figure.
1 km^3 = 10^12 kg
Heat of vapourization of water at 20C = 2,450,000 Joules/kg
Number of seconds in a year = 3.1536 x 10^7
1 watt = 1 Joule /second
Surface area of earth = 5.1x 10^11 m^2
NASA graph gives evapotranspiration = 86.4W/m^2 Check their Earth’s energy budget graph on their website
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2641/keeping-an-eye-on-earths-energy-budget/
The task is to convert the latent heat that is represented inside the water molecule from the water cycle upon evaporation to a W/m^2 equivalent of NASA’s figure of 86.4 W/m^2. I want to see if NASA’s figure has any basis in reality.
Solution : Total evapotranspiration = 486000 km^3/year * 10^12kg = 4.86 x 10^17 kg/year
Total number of Joules = 2,450,000 Joules/kg * 4.86 x 10^17 kg/year
= 1.1907 x 10 ^24 Joules/year
Number of Joules/second = 1.1907 x 10 ^24 Joules/year divided by 3.1536 x 10^7 sec/year
= 3.775684932 x 10^16 Joules /sec
= 3.775684932 x 10^16 Watts
W/m^2 from surface = (3.775684932 x 10^16 Watts) divided by 5.1x 10^11 m^2
= 7.403303788 x10^4 W/m^2
~ 74,033
divide by 4 because the earth is a sphere and is diurnal = ~18,508 W/m^2
which is 214.2 times the NASA figure. Where did I go wrong?
I love how the alarmists cherry pick there statements and references in order to show a absolute truth that is used falsely for their point. All one has to do is simply google the high and low temperature records for each US state. With the exemption of the Wikipedia site, pick any posting of this particular record. I use this to show young people that maybe they need to look deeper to see what other lies they have been told.
This link provide you with the live temperature data of Scripps Pier:
http://sccoos.org/data/autoss/
There is something which seems to me rather weird. How can the temperature of Pacific ocean raise 8 celsius during less than 60 minutes?
For example:
Time1: 08/01/2018 08:58:02 Temperature: 16.1844 celsius
Time2: 08/01/2018 09:54:02 Temperature: 24.1019 celsius
This rapid rise of temperature is observable every day.
Please, explain me.
At a guess it has to do with the sea-breeze starting up as the land warms. At night there is probably a land breeze that pushes the sun-heated surface water out to sea and replaces it with upwelling cold water. During the day this goes into reverse.
One thing is for certain : the highest temperature ever recorded in the world was in the US. Who said so? WUWT.
Yes, more than 105 years ago at Death Valley, California (10 July 1913, 56.7C). It is not WUWT that says that, it is the World Meteorological Organisation.
What you forget though, mon cher François, is that only the future is certain, the past is always changing!
The record had been 58C at El Azizia, Libya until the measurement was disqualified by the bureaucrats in Genève. What we know for certain is that we will have record hot temperatures and rapidly rising seas. What we do not know yet is how much we will see the past temperatures drop in order to ensure that records are set. Nor do we know how much past sea level readings will need to be adjusted down in order to ensure that sea levels are rising.
I would assume that there is a tidal effect. Maybe tide going out after being warmed on the hot sand?
Hi, Rich! I knew that, just like me, you would have a perfectly scientific argument on temperatures. The tides, of course, who would have thought about them? Then, again, only in the US.
I don’t know if it is tides or sea breezes or sloppy measurement error. I was speculating.
So you have come back to taunt us a second time, eh?
🙂
Tides ……… incoming sea water cool…….. outgoing sea water warmed by sun baked sand it flowed over coming in.
Why would Scripps … intentionally … omit any and all SCIENTIFIC context for this ‘shocking’ and ‘horrifying’ measurement? As if anyone with a brain doesn’t already know the answer …
Isn’t it sophistry to call ocean energy heat.
wheres the process, ?.
You only have a state of energy, constantly changing, heat the process does the warming. then it stops.
So we have a 0.2 degree F difference in 87 years. In another 348 years it might get up to a whole 1 degree F. That’s almost as much as the temperature difference between my living room and bedroom. Time to start the panic now! We’re all gonna fry!
“So we have a 0.2 degree F difference in 87 years.”
_________________________
Understandable, given the headline, that folks might think that. However, effectively this is just an new daily record high. As the article says, there has been a long term warming trend at Scripps peer and it is considerably higher than 0.2 F per 87 years!
The average monthly surface water temperature at Scripps peer averaged from 2001 to the present is consistently about a degree warmer than it was between both 1916-1950 and 1951-2000 across most months (image from Scripps site linked to in article).
A degree Celsius that is ( about 1.8F).
0.1 +/- 0.05 deg C = 0.2 +/- 0.1 deg F
Converting to Fahrenheit makes the temperatures look higher, but it also increases the error range. But, then who cares about the confidence interval? Certainly not AGW alarmists!
Do you think that’s from the atmosphere heating the ocean?
It MUST be … because every summer, when I swim in Lake Tahoe … the very top layer of the water is somewhat tolerable … but is near freezing cold just a foot below the surface. So our sinful Co2 spewing MUST be heating the oceans … ohhhhhhh mammaaaaaaa … we’re ALL doomed.
I don’t know what caused it. That doesn’t mean it’s not there.
DW is your graph indisputable proof CAGW has begun post 2001?
Has the recording procedure/instrumentation/location/ encroachment changed from 2001?
Show us the provenance and the data.
Try redoing your graph with 0C at the origin and 25C in place of 20C.
“Try redoing your graph with 0C at the origin and 25C in place of 20C.”
_______________________________________________
Not my graph – Scripps’s graph. Try reading the links in the article for answers to your questions re recording, instrumentation, etc. They’re all there.
Let’s get this straight: In a slightly warming world, one can pick the warming periods to show that an earlier 34 year period is equivalent to a following 49 year period, such that the ending 18 year period is slightly warmer than the two earlier periods.
Wadda joke! We have had both warming and cooling periods following the Little Ice Age, with a minor overall warming. In fact, we have had an overall cooling since the Holocene Optimum.
CO2 has not been shown to affect ocean temperatures. Show me the study!
You really need to remove “peer” from your spell checker. “Pier.”
Yup!
With a “Grand Solar Maximum” during the latter half of last century, I’m rather surprised there hasn’t been more warming.
This is just common sense. If there were two earths, one globally warmer than the other by some measurable temp (let’s use 1.0°C or 1.8°F for the global difference between 1931 and today) then you would expect that more warm ground records would be set than cold √ and more warm ocean records to be set √ in the warmer earth. Both are happening.
Oceans are warmer, trend is still up. Land is warmer, trend up. Why is something as simple as “warm records will be broken at a faster pace than cold records” that difficult?
El Nino and La Nina still exist of course, and as long as the current are not disrupted by other factors that change with the warming earth, then the colder earth’s El Nino years will show, on average, 1°C colder temps. The colder earth’s La Nina years will show, on average, 1°C colder temps than the warmer earth (land and oceans together.
CO2 is the primary forcing, and the oceans are simply moving heat around. There is simply no “oceans are warming miraculously on their own, thus El Ninos are warmer.” But that seems to be what some are saying here.
Alley, 43 years from now, when you’re in your 50s, you’ll see that 2019 was the start of a long cooling trend that walked back all the temperature rise of the past 43 years. Then you will understand that it is natural cycles of variation. Until then, I suppose you will continue to be deluded. And somewhere in the next 10 years or so, you’ll be firmly convinced that the cooling trend is caused by burning fossil fuels.
“you’ll see that 2019 was the start of a long cooling trend”
I can only hope to live into my 100s like many of my grandparents and their siblings!
How can natural cycles trend upward? You seem to have forgotten to explain how the earth is warming. How is it warming, since oceans are only moving the heat around?
Were you one of those people who, in the 80s when a consensus of global warming was very apparent, tell us that we were in a long cooling period, and to wait three decades?
Are you seriously asking this Alley? How old is the earth? How long have humans existed? Ice ages came and went long before any humans existed. There were natural cycles trending upward and natural cycles trending downward. Repeatedly. They were not caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide.
If there was once a great glacier over the northern hemisphere and long before humans had any significant impact on the environment, that glacier disappeared, then there has to have been a natural cycle that trended upward. In fact we are still in that trend. That is the reason for the slight upward trend in temperature, around which ocean oscillations produce medium-term warming and cooling periods.
You imagine that you have an explanation for recent warming that depends on a trace gas going from 0.028% to 0.041%, essentially from 0.0% to 0.0%. This supposed mechanism is claimed to be the master control knob of climate. Yet during the period of human-caused excess CO2 in the atmosphere, there have been periods where temperatures were in decline (from the 1940s to the 1970s), and as concentrations accelerated recently, temperatures were virtually flat (from around 2000 to 2015). Over geological periods, it is clear from proxy evidence that CO2 has not been a determinant of temperature. For the most part, temperature has been a driver of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, not the other way around.
That humans drive an excess of CO2 into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels is not seriously contested. Neither is it necessary to quibble about whether CO2 can trap heat in the atmosphere. Most skeptics are willing to concede the point. The point of dispute is with respect to feedbacks, positive and negative. Alarmists insist that there are catastrophic positive feedbacks which however have not been observed. Skeptics insist that there are many negative feedbacks which will hold the equilibrium temperature rise due to a CO2 doubling to on the order of 1.2 degrees C or even lower. A change of that magnitude is harmless, even beneficial. It is certainly not a justification for destroying economies and condemning most of the world’s population to energy poverty.
You or the people you choose to believe, are convinced that you have an explanation for warming (even though it doesn’t explain periods of cooling). I don’t pretend to be able to explain the details of how the observed natural cycles warm and cool the earth. It is probably related to orbital mechanics in terms of the very long term cycles, but the shorter term is a very complex system. It is very much more complicated than a 0.013% increase in a trace gas.
Alley
I was around in the 70’s when the concencus was global cooling if that’s any help.
There was no “consensus” – just a nice sensational story the media got a hold of…..
“An enduring popular myth suggests that in the 1970s the climate science community was predicting “global cooling” and an “imminent” ice age, an observation frequently used by those who would undermine what climate scientists say today about the prospect of global warming.
A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists’ thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth’s climate on human time scales. More importantly than showing the falsehood of the myth, this review shows the important way scientists of the time built the foundation on which the cohesive enterprise of modern climate science now rests.”
https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/131047.pdf
AnthonyB
That would be like the study undertaken to demonstrate the current 97% concencus would it?
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/09/Warming-consensus-and-it-critics1.pdf
Do the study yourself then, if you, like all naysayers, believe nothing that contradicts their “beliefs”.
AnthonyB
I ‘believe’ things when there is sufficient credible evidence presented. It’s you that ‘believes’ in AGW, not me. I don’t share your belief because there hasn’t been one credible, empirical study undertaken which demonstrates CO2 causes global warming. There should be dozens if not hundreds over the last 40 years but there are none.
So just what is your ‘belief’ founded on?
Scientific training and not having conspiracy ideation primarily.
Yours is the belief here as there is deffo no evidence for it, just founded on the rejection of the evidence (observations fitting theory), which has reached a consensus amongst researchers.
Plenty of empirical science out there – you need to look though because you wont find it on here.
It’s a planet and cannot be put in a lab but the evidence of a direct increase in forcing from increasing anthro CO2 has been observed via spectroscopic analysis of down-welling LWR fron 2 separate sites over 2 years.
I wont hold my breath that you will either read it and least of all accept it, it being par for the course on here.
https://phys.org/news/2015-02-carbon-dioxide-greenhouse-effect.html
So why does the UN IPCC say there is no causal link between man and climate?
Any have so many jumped off the CAGW ship having realised they were hoodwinked?
Do you even know that there is no empirical evidence linking man made CO2 emissions to (natural) warming and the entire scam is founded on flawed computer models?
The planet is still coming out of the LIA, the slight warming is entirely normal.
AnthonyB
How did I just know with 100% certainty you were going to produce that paper as evidence?
From David Middleton:
“What was observed? A ~20 ppmv increase in atmospheric CO2 correlated with a 0.2 W/m2 increase in radiative forcing at the Earth’s surface.
Total insolation at the Earth’s surface ranges from 40 to 340 W/m2 per year.
Assuming a linear relationship of .01 W/m2 per 1 ppmv CO2… A doubling of pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 from 280 to 560 ppmv will increase radiative forcing by 2.8 W/m2. This is about 2/3 of the IPCC’s estimate.
The total warming since 1850 has been about 0.7°C. Over the same period, CO2 increased by about 120 ppmv (~1.2 W/m2).
0.7°C ÷ 1.2 W/m2 = 0.6°C/W/m2
0.7°C ÷ 120 ppmv CO2 = 0.006°C/ppmv CO2
This means that a doubling of pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 can lead to a maximum warming of 1.68°C… less than half of the so-called consensus estimate.
Since my “back of the envelope” calculations assumed a linear, rather than logarithmic, relationship and that all of the warming since 1850 was GHG-driven, the actual climate sensitivity can be no more than half of my estimate… ~0.8°C per doubling of pre-industrial atmospheric CO2.
This essentially means that the human impact on climate change is insignificant.”
https://debunkhouse.wordpress.com/2017/11/06/from-the-no-schist-sherlock-department-lbnl-confirms-so-called-greenhouse-effect/#comments
And over forty years of study by some of the most brilliant minds in science, it remains the only study. Like I said, there should be dozens if not hundreds over the last 40 years but there are none.
But let’s not stop there shall we? NASA tells us the plane has greened by 14% in the last 30 years or so, 70% of that growth directly attributed to increased atmospheric CO2. Two continents the size of mainland America worth of extra vegetation, as one of the authors described it. It remains the only empirical manifestation of increased atmospheric CO2 and it is hugely beneficial.
Then there’s global temperatures. Contrary to IPCC predictions, observed temperatures have not increased nearly as quickly as they anticipated. As you will note from the following illustration, if the theory than man’s CO2 emissions are causing global temperature rise is true then:
1. It seems they are not doing a very good job and;
2. If mankind’s CO2 emissions were zero, then the observed temperatures would almost certainly be heading downwards, in other words, there would likely be a significant and worrying cooling of the planet.
So, along with greening it would appear mankind is doing the planet a favour (assuming the AGW theory is correct) and that the paper you cite is both inconsequential and, as David Middleton observes, inaccurate anyway.
YES! that would be similar to the several studies that found 97%.
I can’t believe there are still people who are duped by this. Nigel Lawson (philosopher) started GWPF to confuse the non-scientists. It’s working, apparently.
Alley
What, that Cook was found to have selected over 1,000 papers based on searches of their abstracts only, then pared them down to some 70 papers which suited his purpose, then claimed that 70 papers represented a 97% concencus from over 1,000 papers?
Is that they way science is done on the dark side?
Oceania is at war with Eastasia. It has always been at war with Eastasia.
I started randomly choosing papers they claimed predicted warming. The first, Ramanathan, 1975, studied chlorofluorocarbons and predicted they would have a net + forcing on climate if their concentration increased over 2 ppb, but made no statement about overall global temperature trend. The second paper, Schneider and Mass, 1975, studied the correlation between sun spots, volcanic dust, and the temperature record from 1600-1970 and concluded that solar variability contributed to the shape of the temperature record (at the time ALL temperature reconstructions showed a very cool LIA gradually warming into the modern warm period), but again made no statements about global temperature trends into the future.
At this point I remembered that I have actual science to conduct and tearing climastrology to shreds is so easy that it should be undergraduate work. Just at a quick glance, this paper is exactly like the 97% consensus meme generator papers.
It should also be pointed out that not only are they mischaracterizing papers, just like Cookoo et al., but many of them also contradict the meme that the 1945-75 cooling period was due to man made aerosols.
HA HA!!! I was around in the 70s when the consensus was global warming. Were you on another planet? There have been studies on the peer reviewed science, and the consensus here on Earth was warming.
How could you have missed this?
Alley
Clearly, the MSM at the time made it up themselves according to you. Doubtless the same unscrupulous methods that produced the hockey stick and the 97% concencus were employed to establish the concencus of the 70’s was warming.
Mod
here we go again.
Consigned to moderation. Is it my end or yours?
You have to wait longer for El Niño
It is not a degree C warmer now than in 1931. It’s probably not warmer at all, but the crooked gatekeepers have thoroughly cooked the books to a crisp, so we can’t know for sure.
It might be a K warmer now than in AD 1850, but I doubt even that.
Oh boy. A temperature denier.
“CO2 is the primary forcing, and the oceans are simply moving heat around. “
Please do provide evidence for CO2 forced ocean warming. How does a tiny CO2 fraction of the atmosphere warm the vast ocean to depth?
How did CO2 drive the approx 0.6C change in ocean temperature from 2009 to 2016?
Why in 2016 when the ocean temperature reached it’s maximum did the supposedly alarmingly high CO2 concentration not maintain the ocean or air temperature?
With all that heat & CO2 available why didn’t CO2 trap it per your theory?
Why? – because variable solar energy warms & cools the ocean, not CO2.
“Desperately Seeking a NSF Grant”.
“It’s All In The Error”!
Ha ha jajajajajajaja
So how was AGW to blame for 1930? If you’re going to compare something. Then make the accusations that the new reading is because of something. Makes the whole thing garbage. Cycles are never exactly on time like clockwork.
Look at https://bobsaw.smugmug.com/Nature/Pacific-Ocean-1/i-2WjbhTd image 104.The texture on the ocean surface is caused by oil/surfactant pollution. These patches will have lower albedo and reduced evaporation, which will warm the surface.
Scripps, do the research.
JF
I stand to be corrected on this but observe that sea surface temperatures rarely go much above 30C. OK sometimes in some places like the red sea it gets up to 35C ; but generally 30C seems to be the norm as the top end of the range.
I also observe that the Vapour Pressure of water equals the saturated Partial pressure at 30C. This may be a coincidence but I think NOT; for at and above this temperature the rate of evaporation equates to the level of energy input and thus provides a balance in temperature.
This may be checked in your kitchen; as when you turn up the heat under the kettle it just boils faster and the temperature remains the same.
I do wish that some of these scientists would extract their heads from their statistical computers go and put the kettle on and start thinking as they wait for the brew.
It would save us all a great deal of bother.
Overall sea surface temperatures down .2c since last year.
I detect the start of a hockey stick.
Sounds like budget justification for maintaining the pier. Otherwise, what is is good for?
Yes, it’s not like they even let the public use it…:^)
“Scripps still takes temperature measurements off its pier by hand, but in that time the technology used to log readings has changed dramatically.”
Unfortunately the techniques for marketing snake oil have not changed at all.
And BTW, just what was the accuracy of the measurements ‘taken by hand’ back in 1916 or so? <0.2˚F?
What is the difference in coastal development and population in that region between 1930’s and now? I suspect it has changed. 😉
And the accuracy level for that 1931 thermometer reading is?
There are likely other concerns about their asssumptions:
e.g.
A) Was it a student recording temperatures in 1931 and now?
B) A student that never drank or stayed up late cramming?
C) A temperature reading written in ink? Unchanged and unadjusted.
And how long was that 1931 pier?
At what depth was the pier location where the 1931 temperature taken and the same question for today’s temperature reading.
Given the school’s eagerness to trumpet their new record in the press, one must question whether activism is biasing their temperature readings?
Get ready to start hoarding ice cubes, everybody!
Love knowing we had a global ocean temperature monitoring system in 1931…
I have to say that water was nice. Spent a few hours on Saturday and Sunday near Oceanside pier and the water felt really warm (for southern California. Of course the water is usually warm in August.
“First, these measurements are taken from a pier that’s near the shoreline, which would not necessarily make it representative of the entire Pacific Ocean, and therefore easily influenced by local weather events.”
Nobody argued that it WAS representative of the ENTIRE Pacific ocean.
Here’s the simple fact. There was an LIA. IT has been warming since the LIA. As the world warms
past high records will fall. If it continues to warm they will continue to fall. NOT in a uniform fashion
because global warming theory ( REGARDLESS OF THE CAUSE) predicts NON UNIFORM warming,
over short runs some places will warm more, other less, some may not warm for a long time.
Its warming. As it warms where we have measured temperature you can expect there to be new records.
At some point every location will have a new record. At some point new LOW records will cease.
The fact of new records should not surprise anyone. It is warming.
Comes the question. WHY is it warming. what is the physical cause.
1. Global warming theory holds that increased radiative forcing causes the earth to warm.
Radiative forcing ( + and -) include
A) Solar
B) GHGs
C) Aerosols.
D) land change.
This adding warming ( or cooling if the sum of forcings is negtaive) Is added to a small natural
variablity.
2. Skeptics have no explanation. They believe its Anything BUT C02.
Only one of these counts as an attempt at science. #1
Final Jeopardy: It’s the most likely cause of the millennial-scale Holocene climate cycle that gave rise to these phenomena…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73tGe3JE5IU
OK Alex… What are long-term ocean oscillations?
https://judithcurry.com/2014/09/16/jc-at-the-national-press-club/
I like your list, Steven. Very concise. It does raise the question, what caused the initial warming out of the LIA? From your list we’d have to subtract GHGs and land change, and aerosols cause cooling. That would leave solar.
Here’s my problem with the whole CO2 hypothesis. We know the Earth has swung between Hothouse Earth and Snowball Earth in the past; several times. The CO2 hypothesis goes like this: something caused CO2 to increase, which forced global warming. Since increased CO2 and only cause warming, something had to stop its rise, and actually reduce it, to allow the Earth’s temperature to not run away hot.
What caused CO2 to increase in the first place? Don’t know. What stopped, and then reduced it? Don’t know.
The Anything-But-CO2 hypothesis says something caused the Earth to warm, and the seas gave up CO2 as they warmed (a known phenomenon), and then something caused the Earth to cool, and the oceans took up the CO2 they’d released.
So, whatever warming we’re getting today might be slightly exacerbated by human-produced CO2, but it’s certainly not the main driver — whatever that might be — because any CO2-driven scenario has to result in runaway warming. Which the Earth has never experienced, and which means the CO2 hypothesis is wrong.
What caused the 5 warm periods of the last 5000 years?
Why has the earth been warmer than it is now for 95% of the last 10,000 years?
Skeptics have a number of explanations.
How typical of you to lie about that.
Mosher,
What little credibility you have would be bolstered by responding to James Schrumpf and MarkW.
Occam’s Razor would suggest that whatever your answer to them is, would be sufficient to explain most of, if not all, the recent warming.
Does Mosher just slither away and pretend that he made a point and no one answered his WHY question?
I’d like to answer his ridiculous question another way by saying e. You don’t understand much of how complex nonlinear systems work. It’s a silly exercise to point at a temperature trend over such a short time scale and attribute it to a single cause as:
1) All variables are actively responsible for the current system state.
2) The system is hysteretic, so the current system state is responsible for all variables past histories.
Since you obviously need a lesson on how these systems work, here is the basic concept and demonstration of how even a two variable system is unpredictable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz6gXyfzV9A
So you either believe that planetary heat budget is dominated by a few tenths ppt CO2, or you believe that all other variables -especially the non-noise variables- are responsible for the current state and will keep the system in the current attractor state until one of those non-noise variables change.
RWT,
It is my experience that Mosher typically engages in drive-by comments, not unlike a pizza delivery boy who has no interest in whether or not the customer enjoyed the pizza. He behaves like someone who thinks his comments are above defending.
What are the error bars on both readings? I suspect it’s a lot more than 0.2F.
PS: 0.2F in 87 years. At that rate it will take 435 years for the ocean to warm one whole degree Fahrenheit.
What is totally absent in this discussion is any recognition of a fatal flaw in the much-touted, century-long SIO-pier record of SST: until digital recording was adopted a decade ago, the manual sampling was done only ONCE A DAY! Thus the diurnal cycle there is ALIASED into zero frequency, i.e. the apparent mean level of the time series. To make matters worse, the nominal time of daily sampling (noon) was not stringently adhered to, as became evident to me when conducting flow-meter evaluations at the pier many decades ago.
The upshot of this ill-conceived manual sampling scheme (adopted well in advance of the derivation of the Shannon Theorem) is that the ultra-low frequency spectral content of the SST series is irretrievably corrupted. It provides no serious scientific basis for estimating even the local temporal trend of any duration. Nor is there any credible basis for claiming that the daily readings capture the daily maximum temperature. All we have is a record non-descript instantaneous reading–not record temperatures in any accepted sense of the term.