One interesting fact is that alarmists have to deal with the lack of warming or increase in ocean heat content over the last 12 years or so. They will argue that this is just a temporary aberration, and a much shorter time frame than they are working on. Let’s think about that.
Here is the core IPCC argument: for the period after 1950, they claim their computer models cannot explain warming patterns without including a large effect from anthropogenic CO2. Since almost all the warming in the latter half of the century really occurred between 1978 and 1998, the IPCC core argument boils down to “we are unable to attribute the global temperature increase in these 20 years to natural factors, so it must have been caused by man-made CO2.” See my video here for a deeper discussion.
In effect, the core IPCC conclusions were really based on the warming over the 20 years from 1978-1998. There was never any implication that their models couldn’t explain, say, the 1930’s or the 1970’s without manmade CO2.
So while 12 years is admittedly short compared to many natural cycles in climate, and might be considered a dangerously short period to draw conclusions from, it is fairly large compared to the 20 year period that drove the IPCC conclusions.
Here is where we stand: The IPCC models supposedly cannot explain the 20 year period from 1978-1998 without factoring in a high climate sensitivity to CO2. However, I would venture to guess that, prior to tweaking, the IPCC models cannot explain the 12 year period from 1998-2011 while still factoring in a high climate sensitivity to CO2.
Postscript: I suppose the IPCC would scream “aerosols,” but even putting aside the equivocal and sometimes offsetting effects of aerosols and black carbon, I do not think one could reasonably argue their effect was much greater in one period than the other.
Only the seriously retarded are still falling for the bizarre notion that 1998 was anything other than just another year in a long warming trend. You show us, time and time again, that you’re seriously fucking retarded.
re: hunter–
Aside from demonstrating you have no argument but would rather waste your time with childish insults, what is your point? Yours is a demonstration of pure media promulgated, sensationalized flock mentality that ignores the science of empirical data and serious statistical analysis. When it comes to the climate change debate unfortunately the real work that goes into being informed requires putting aside feel good missions that vilify man. Take the time, look at the data, not Hollywood movies for your information. Realize the ‘science’ for man made global warming is based on computer models. The problem with that? Nothing, if you live in the Matrix. But… that’s made up too…
Ad hominem attacks are always my favorite, as they reveal much about the attacker and nothing about the person being attacked or the point they’re making.
Hunter
Perhaps you haven’t noticed the failure to warm since 1998.
During the period from 1940 to 1978 there were more La Nina’s than El Nino’s and it cooled. Coincidence ?
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml
During the period 1978 to 1998 there were more El Nino’s than La Nina’s and it warmed. Coincidence.
During the period 1998 to preset there are periods where El Nino’s predominate and the temperature went sideways. Coincidence ?
I pulled the data into Excel and graphed it. The exercise was enlightening.
This confirmed [using an independent source] what the PDO chart said had happened.
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/img/pdo_latest.jpeg
CONCLUSION
The conclusion I see is that CO2 had nothing to do with the observed temperature record El Nino’s/La Nina’s had everything to do with it.
It seems to me that even a 1-year drop in ocean temperatures is a big problem for the warmistas. How could this possibly happen unless some significant force is in play which they do not understand? And if there is such a force at work, it shows that their models are seriously flawed.
The IPCC is a political organisation, not scientific. It exists to influence public policy on an international scale. We cannot expect IPCC output to be dispassionate, objective, neutral. IPCC biases have been clear for some time, and cannot be expect to change until its backers and beneficiaries get what they want, or until UN funding nations get sick of the massive fraud and dispose of it.
netdr: I suppose the problem with being as retarded as you are is that you have no way of knowing how stupid you look. The 12 years since 1998 have been the warmest 12 year period in the instrumental record of surface temperatures.
Hunter
Even if the 12 years have been the warmest does that mean that there has been warming during the last 12 years ? That is obviously a fallacy.
It warmed from 1990 to 2000 so of course the average is lower than 2000 to 2010.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
Does that mean it didn’t fail to warm during thee last 12 years. Poor thinking skills must be a requirement of being an alarmist.
Here is the proof.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif
I have run into this obvious fallacy and it is obvious to me that alarmists are incapable of thinking clearly.
It certainly has been warming during the last 12 years. Only if you don’t understand the difference between short-term variability and a long-term trend would you have a problem with this very simple fact. What kind of idiot wouldn’t even be able to understand that?
hunter
Saying:
“The 12 years since 1998 have been the warmest 12 year period in the instrumental record of surface temperatures.”
.
And claiming that proves that there has been no cooling or “failure to warm” during the last 13 years is mentally challenged.
Both statements could be true at the same time as anyone with normal intelligence can see.
Claiming A disproves B is foolish.
.
The temperature has gone essentially sideways for 13 years, if you want to quibble about .01 ° C go ahead. For all intents and purposes it hasn’t warmed.
.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif
.
Do you see warming ?
BTW: Why hasn’t it warmed ? Hand waving and saying temperatures don’t go straight up is a cop out. Why not ?
The only reason they can’t identify a natural cause of warming is that the IPCC refuse to look!
It’s obvious that the 5% decrease in cloud cover was responsible for most of the warming (contributing 0.3-0.35 of the 0.4deg warming seen during that time).
They also refuse to look for real life examples of climate sensitivity. Solar forcing varies by about 1w/m2 during the 11 year solar cycle and causes 0.1deg of temp variation. That gives a climate sensitivity of 0.1deg/w/m2 which is ten times lower than what the IPCC speculate for CO2. So the 3.7w/m2 forcing for a doubling of CO2 will only result in 0.3-0.4degC of warming.
Simple but climate pseudo-scientist cant get off the computer models for long enough to actually consider the available data.
Hunter,
As an accountant I like to have figures that are properly validated and audited. Of the available data sets, the GISS figures show the strongest recent warming. They are under the influence of James Hansen, who has a strong personal interest in showing a warming trend. There are good explanations of this bias as well, such as failure to properly account for the urban heat island effect.
The why I am a skeptic is because of the failure of the consensus to present a coherent case. Instead there are a few shoddy statistics and a lot of name calling. This to enforce policies that will make a few rich, with the rest getting worse off, especially the poor.
A more important thing to remember is that the natural climate cycles (which take about 50-60 years to cycle) are so powerful that they can overwhelm CO2 forcing (what there is) and cause temperatures to fall for decades. As such, the AGW mantra of 30 years is climate…IS A LOAD OF CRAP! Its an arbitrary figure meant to make their side sound better. Looking back to the smoothed peak of the previous warm period 60 or so years ago…we’ve only had about .4C of warming. Clearly something more in line with the duration of the rather obvious (3 warming peaks recorded) 60ish year cycle length would be ‘climate’ and not 30 years.
Some of the individual systems (oceans, ice pack, etc.) within the total atmospheric climate system have got to have impulse response tails that range out to a number of centuries. It is absolutely impossible to believe that they can be properly modeled without histories that would have to date back millennia. This data simply does not exist.
Hunter just uses the NOAA/HADCRUT/GISS meme. If they say it’s the warmest time on record it must be true. These are the same people who emailed eachother in 2009 complaining that there was no warming. Privately they are very worried. They can only massage data sparse regions so much (Most of the “warming they focus on has very few if any reporting stations. Remove those areas, and most of the narrative disappears. Remove thier homogenuity adjustments and most of their record warming goes away as well). But stricrly speaking, we’ve gone a decade without any warming -and the “experts” know it.
Since 2005, the Alarmists muddy the waters even more by focusing on individual weather events (thier weather isn’t climate meme goes away concerning things like draughts, floods, cold snaps, tropical storms, and blizzards). Of course, this creates a problem. If they can attribute individual weather events to long term “climate change”, then they can surely predict daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal weather events as well. I don’t know of one Alarmist who has had any training or experience forecasting weather; yet, they do it all the time. And they’v found out much to thier chagrin that they have no skill. And this has public ramifications. I warned 5-6 years ago of the potential PR problem the Alarmists would creating by getting into the “weather business”. Now those problems have arrived. And the average Joe on the street is wondering how these people can make such confident predictions for 2100, if they cannot forecast with any skill for the upcoming Winter or Summer.
hunter
Why put so much effort and time into parsing the climate of the last few years? We have a solid 10,000 years of recent climate change to consider, and it shows several periods of greater warming than present, none explained by increased atmospheric CO2, or more obviously, by human activity. Sea levels have risen over 400 feet in the 10,000 years since the last Ice Age, an average of 4 feet per century. Is it unusual that sea levels are still rising, although only six inches per century? Glaciers in retreat now were in retreat 1,000 years ago, but were advancing only 600 years ago during the Little Ice Age. All of this was a product of natural climate change. How can knowledge of such natural variation be attributed to mental retardation? It would seem ignorance of it, or not accounting for it in relation to current warming, would be better evidence of impaired mental functioning.
If, as you imply, the IPCC’s argument boils down to: ‘We are unable to attribute the warming during that period (1978-98) to natural factors, THEREFORE IT MUST HAVE BEEN DUE TO MAN-MADE CO2’ – surely that is unadulterated bullshit..! There could be 1001 reasons – but if, like the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel for Climate CHANGE – geddit..?) you have already decided what the cause is, then you descend to the ‘unequivocal’; ‘consensus’; ‘nothing to see here: move along’ – standard of scientific logic.
Here’s a thing.
As JP implies above, if the warmists shout: ‘Look at these floods..! Proves climate change..!’ Why then, when we have – how shall I put it – ‘normal’ weather, aren’t they saying the same thing..?
‘Look at this normal weather..! Proves climate change..!’
Won’t exactly hit the headlines, will it..?
Sorry but my annoying little 14 year old has been using the internet even though he has been grounded for being obnoxious
The main thing that bothers me about this posting, and apparently all the comments, is a lack of understanding of what constitutes “long-term” relative to climate trends. We have only 150 years of instrumental records of weather (and some of those records are not very good). We do not have enough data to discern trends in the climate. We have only 6,000 years of written history, some of that pretty vague and mythological, but it contains hints of lots of variation.
Short-term trends might be 1,000 to 10,000 years. Long-term would be 10,000 to 100,000. The few degrees of global temperature rise since the depths of the Pleistocene glaciation (say 18,000 ybp) can be seen as a short-term reversal of a long-term cooling trend.
There seems to be no evidence for a “normal” global temperature, unless it might be the level, 10 or 12 degrees C above the present average, which pertained for most of the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic until the middle of the Oligocene, when the present cooling trend began.
“Normal weather”, to most people, is what they remember from their childhood.
And you’re a shit-eating whore, aren’t you?
Hey Hunter’s first dad, stop yelling at your master. That is Ma’am to you. don’t make me come over there and tie you up again.
i don’t agree with you here, equivocal is offsetting effects of aerosols and black carbon.
The early arguments in favor of AGW included the “hockey stick” and the parallel ice core CO2 and temperature graphs. The latter was quite compelling. It later turned out that the rise of temp preceded the rise of CO2, not vice versa, thus shooting down the argument. The main thing the AGW crowd now has are the computer models. These have not reflected the actual data of the past dozen years. Thus, they have not been validated. Very much the opposite.
If the cost of implementing the AGW agenda was minor, there would be no problem. $80 billion was spent in the Carter years chasing oil shale. What the AGW folks want to do is destroy the industrial economy and push mankind into starvation. All this based on computer models!
I have many times pointed out that to fully implement the AGW program (80% reduction in CO2) requires that alternative energy be found and that everyone else (Chinese and Indians) must get on board. Otherwise, we will merely send our industry abroad with no diminution in CO2. As of now, there is no viable large scale alternative energy (especially transportation fuels) source, and the Chinese and Indians show no sign of getting on board.
I have pointed all this out many times on this blog, but the AGW enthusiasts never answer but charge off on some new enviroloonie tangent. If someone has an answer to my points, I would be delighted to hear them.