global warming?

[timNms]

probably not the correct spot to place this, but here it is.

RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE JACKSON MS 0855 AM CDT FRI OCT 13 2006 ..RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE WAS SET AT GREENVILLE A RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE OF 35 DEGREES WAS SET AT GREENVILLE ON FRIDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF 37 SET IN 1946.

[WindRunner]

Yeah . . . try the US Weather forum . . .

http://www.storm2k.org/phpbb2/viewforum.php?f=24

and such a small-scale and short-term effect says nothing about global warming either way.

[Johno8080]

Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology
New South Wales

Significant Weather Media Release
Issued at 1622 on Friday the 13th of October 2006

Unprecedented heat, but with relief in sight

Sydney is in the grip of a hot spell, unprecedented in October and rare in any
month.

Temperatures in Sydney City today climbed to 36.7°C, the 6th highest value for
October and some 15 degrees above the average for this time of year. Even hotter
conditions are possible on Saturday. Two October days in a row with temperatures
this high have never been recorded in close to 150 years of record. It is rare
for this to occur at any time of the year.

The hot and dry weather will lead to extreme fire conditions on Saturday.

Relief is in sight with a much cooler and gusty southerly change expected on
Saturday evening. Maximum temperatures on Sunday and Monday will be back to
around 20°C with a shower or two.

The Bureau of Meteorology advises people to take care in this early season heat.

http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/wrap_fwo.pl?IDN38503.txt

[timNms]

Yeah . . . try the US Weather forum . . .

http://www.storm2k.org/phpbb2/viewforum.php?f=24

and such a small-scale and short-term effect says nothing about global warming either way.

Short term, you are probably correct...but, in the overall big picture of things, doesn't weather history tend to repeat itself? Thus, wouldn't one be able to come to the conclusion that at one time or another in history, things were just as warm/cold/hot/wet/dry...etc as it is now?

[AussieMark]

I think the Sydney heatwave was more about warm ENSO phase than global warming. Also the fact that australia has been dominated by high pressure for most of the month its not really suprising.

as a result we kinda got a summer pattern rather than a Autumn type pattern.

I hope some normality returns now tho

[Matt-hurricanewatcher]

Where is global warming?

[Bunkertor]

Germany cracked some temerature-records. One City announced 27 °C. Down here in Hamburg, 21,5° at midnight.

[x-y-no]

Where is global warming?

All over the globe - just as the name suggests.

Of course this doesn't mean every spot on Earth must be warmer than average all the time. And AGW skeptics know this perfectly well, yet continue to play the silly game of pointing out local or regional cold anomalies as if they were meaningful counter-evidence.

[CycloneCarl]

Where is global warming?

All over the globe - just as the name suggests.

Of course this doesn't mean every spot on Earth must be warmer than average all the time. And AGW skeptics know this perfectly well, yet continue to play the silly game of pointing out local or regional cold anomalies as if they were meaningful counter-evidence.

And in spite of the fact that the Earth has recently come out of the Little Ice Age so is warming due to natural climate variability, AGW believers continue to play the silly game of pointing out local or regional warm anomalies as if they were meaningful evidence that humans are somehow responsible for all the warming.



Maybe someone will get on with job of determining exactly how much warming extra CO2 contributes (best estimates so far about +0.5C for CO2 doubling), instead of playing computer games with proxy data that has no uncontaminated temperature signal to make bold pronouncements such as "warmest decade in (insert favourite number) centuries", and using GCMs with dubious guesswork feedback mechansisms to make wild claims about how hot it is going to be in (insert other favourite number) years.

I mean no disrespect to those doing real climate research with too little quality data while trying to identify trends, as what they are doing is of academic interest and may lead somewhere as more data becomes available and better methodologies are developed.

My beef is with the over-hyped scare mongering that is being propagated based on research where the true level of uncertainty is so great one cannot reasonably make a sound conclusion from it.

[curtadams]

AGW believers continue to play the silly game of pointing out local or regional warm anomalies as if they were meaningful evidence that humans are somehow responsible for all the warming.

No serious researcher has ever said that. Find a quote to support that, or withdraw the claim.

[CycloneCarl]

AGW believers continue to play the silly game of pointing out local or regional warm anomalies as if they were meaningful evidence that humans are somehow responsible for all the warming.

No serious researcher has ever said that. Find a quote to support that, or withdraw the claim.

Your statement and demand for a retraction does not address what I actually said - I referred to "AGW believers" - where in that sentence did I say or even infer "serious researcher"?

Aside from trying to change the meaning of what I said, you also removed it from the context it was in and ignored the rest of what I said.

However, I probably should have worded it a bit more carefully by saying most instead of all, although it really is amazing just how many media reports and web pages either say or infer that it is all, which was the point I was trying to make.

For example:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/ear ... nge/dn9903
"Instant Expert: Climate Change
Climate change is with us. A decade ago, it was conjecture. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes. Canada's Inuit see it in disappearing Arctic ice and permafrost. The shantytown dwellers of Latin America and Southern Asia see it in lethal storms and floods. Europeans see it in disappearing glaciers, forest fires and fatal heat waves.
Scientists see it in tree rings, ancient coral and bubbles trapped in ice cores. These reveal that the world has not been as warm as it is now for a millennium or more. The three warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998; 19 of the warmest 20 since 1980. And Earth has probably never warmed as fast as in the past 30 years - a period when natural influences on global temperatures, such as solar cycles and volcanoes should have cooled us down. Studies of the thermal inertia of the oceans suggest that there is more warming in the pipeline.
Climatologists reporting for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say we are seeing global warming caused by human activities and there are growing fears of feedbacks that will accelerate this warming.
Global greenhouse
People are causing the change by burning nature's vast stores of coal, oil and natural gas. This releases billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year, although the changes may actually have started with the dawn of agriculture, say some scientists."

http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/fcons.asp
"The latest scientific data confirm that the earth's climate is rapidly changing. Global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the course of the last century, and will likely rise even more rapidly in coming decades. The cause? A thickening layer of carbon dioxide pollution, mostly from power plants and automobiles, that traps heat in the atmosphere."

And some not quite as strongly worded examples:

http://www.ecobridge.org/content/g_evd.htm
"The year 1999 was the fifth-warmest year on record since the mid-1800's; 1998 being the warmest year. According to Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center (NOAA), the current pace of temperature rise is "consistent with a rate of 5.4 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit per century." By comparison, the world has warmed by 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit since the depths of the last ice age, 18,000 to 20,000 years ago.
The potential for floods and droughts is increasing."....... the heating from increased greenhouse gases enhances the hydrological cycle and increases the risk for stronger, longer-lasting or more intense droughts, and heavier rainfall events and flooding, even if these phenomena occur for natural reasons. Evidence, although circumstantial, is widespread across the United States. Examples include the intense drought in the central southern U.S in 1996, Midwest flooding in spring of 1995 and extensive flooding throughout the Mississippi Basin in 1993 even as drought occurred in the Carolinas, extreme flood events in winters of 1992-93 and 1994-95 in California but droughts in other years (e.g, 1986-87 and 1987-88 winters)," says Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)."

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/scie ... ?s=oldest&
"The average surface temperature of earth has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900 and the rate of warming has been nearly three times the century-long average since 1970. Almost all experts studying the recent climate history of the earth agree now that human activities, mainly the release of heat-trapping gases from smokestacks, tailpipes, and burning forests, are probably the dominant force driving the trend. The gases add to the planet's natural greenhouse effect, allowing sunlight in, but preventing some of the resulting heat from radiating back to space. Drawing on research on past climate shifts, observations of current conditions, and computer simulations, many climate experts say that without big curbs in greenhouse gas emissions, the 21st century could see temperatures rise 3 to 8 degrees, weather patterns sharply shift, ice sheets shrink and seas rise several feet. Articles and multimedia about global warming published in the New York Times appear below."

Of course, a little time spent with Google could show you hundreds more examples (if you could be bothered look).

[x-y-no]

And in spite of the fact that the Earth has recently come out of the Little Ice Age so is warming due to natural climate variability, AGW believers continue to play the silly game of pointing out local or regional warm anomalies as if they were meaningful evidence that humans are somehow responsible for all the warming.

If you have read my comments on this board about global warming for any significant period, you will know that I consistantly make the exact same point WRT local and regional warm anomalies as I do with local and regional cold anomalies.

Maybe someone will get on with job of determining exactly how much warming extra CO2 contributes (best estimates so far about +0.5C for CO2 doubling), instead of playing computer games with proxy data that has no uncontaminated temperature signal to make bold pronouncements such as "warmest decade in (insert favourite number) centuries", and using GCMs with dubious guesswork feedback mechansisms to make wild claims about how hot it is going to be in (insert other favourite number) years.

Contrary to what you imply - the issue of how much warming extra CO2 contributes has been intensely studied for decades now. It's extremely misleading to suggest that this is something which has not even been embarked upon and thus someone must "get on with [the] job" of doing so. Now if your standard is that we must know exactly how much - see below.

And how, pray tell, do you propose that one attempt to make projections about the future other than by using modelling techniques?

I mean no disrespect to those doing real climate research with too little quality data while trying to identify trends, as what they are doing is of academic interest and may lead somewhere as more data becomes available and better methodologies are developed.

This is a classic example of what I have long called the "Tobacco Institute Defense". The tobacco industry successfully obfuscated what was really very well understood science regarding the harmful effects of their product by amplifying the marginal uncertainties and the scientific debates about specific mechanisms. Climate warming skeptics are engaging in the same tactic when they now argue the "there are so many uncertainties" - "we must study this further" etc.

Of course climate change does need much more study, but the fallacy in the above argument is that knowledge is never perfect and therefore we must of neccesity make decisions based on probabilities, not certainties. And by that standard, we are far past the point where we have enough good information to make significant policy decisions.

My beef is with the over-hyped scare mongering that is being propagated based on research where the true level of uncertainty is so great one cannot reasonably make a sound conclusion from it.

Well how did we get to that beef in this thread? We had a post about a single cold record in a single city, and a reply to that post implying that this was couter-evidence to global warming. I replied to this absurd argument.

Nowhere in this thread has anyone made the kind of argument you say your beef is with. So wy are you posting your beef here?

[CycloneCarl]

And in spite of the fact that the Earth has recently come out of the Little Ice Age so is warming due to natural climate variability, AGW believers continue to play the silly game of pointing out local or regional warm anomalies as if they were meaningful evidence that humans are somehow responsible for all the warming.

If you have read my comments on this board about global warming for any significant period, you will know that I consistantly make the exact same point WRT local and regional warm anomalies as I do with local and regional cold anomalies.

I was actually responding to your use of this argument to take cheap shot at "AGW skeptics", so I turned your point back on to the "AGW believers" to illustrate the absurdity of using it in that context.

Maybe someone will get on with job of determining exactly how much warming extra CO2 contributes (best estimates so far about +0.5C for CO2 doubling), instead of playing computer games with proxy data that has no uncontaminated temperature signal to make bold pronouncements such as "warmest decade in (insert favourite number) centuries", and using GCMs with dubious guesswork feedback mechansisms to make wild claims about how hot it is going to be in (insert other favourite number) years.

Contrary to what you imply - the issue of how much warming extra CO2 contributes has been intensely studied for decades now. It's extremely misleading to suggest that this is something which has not even been embarked upon and thus someone must "get on with [the] job" of doing so. Now if your standard is that we must know exactly how much - see below.

Yes, it has been intensely studied for decades now, and trying to get a consistent answer as to how much warming increased levels of CO2 contributes from the literature reveals so many different answers that one comes away realizing that nobody actually knows with any level of confidence, so this part of the puzzle needs much more work.

Pure physics suggests that atmospheric CO2 doubling directly contributes approximately +0.5C, and there is little disagreement about that, but with all the confounding factors and feedbacks going on it seems the AGW crowd currently think it will be somewhere between approx. +1.4C and +5.8C. I will be surprised if in the long run it turns out to be greater than about 1C, as it seems to me that our climate would be far more unstable if feedbacks amplified CO2 and Solar forcing more than 100 percent for either.

BTW, 'exactly' was intended rhetorically, as it seems even the AGW crowd cannot get anywhere near agreement on a number for the feedback amplification of CO2 forcing yet.

And how, pray tell, do you propose that one attempt to make projections about the future other than by using modelling techniques?

One could visit an astrologer or a tarot card reader....

Models are great, and some are also useful for certain things - project away - just don't try to con anyone into believing that the stuff that comes out the other end has any more validity for the Earth's climate in 50 years than NOGAPS does for the weather 15 days out.

I mean no disrespect to those doing real climate research with too little quality data while trying to identify trends, as what they are doing is of academic interest and may lead somewhere as more data becomes available and better methodologies are developed.

This is a classic example of what I have long called the "Tobacco Institute Defense". The tobacco industry successfully obfuscated what was really very well understood science regarding the harmful effects of their product by amplifying the marginal uncertainties and the scientific debates about specific mechanisms. Climate warming skeptics are engaging in the same tactic when they now argue the "there are so many uncertainties" - "we must study this further" etc.

Of course climate change does need much more study, but the fallacy in the above argument is that knowledge is never perfect and therefore we must of neccesity make decisions based on probabilities, not certainties. And by that standard, we are far past the point where we have enough good information to make significant policy decisions.

Your "Tobacco Institute Defense" comments are a strawman that has precisely nothing to do with the issues I'm pointing out.

I have no difficulty with decision making based on probabilities provided the foundation is solid - for example if it was soundly demonstrated that the current warming of the globe was an exceptional situation that really was caused primarily by increasing CO2,

And just to clarify prior to anyone attempting to tar me with being a big oil and big coal supporter, I am not a supporter of either - cleaner and greener alternatives do need to found, but lets do it for the right reasons - particulate pollution kills people.

Unfortunately, much of the stuff that is being passed off in the media as solid science with sufficient certainty to make very costly decisions simply does not stand up to scrutiny as being that solid.

Rather than diverting huge amounts of taxpayers money into saving the world from an imagined threat and sucking more through carbon taxes to pay for it, a much smarter idea would be to spend a few billion on a high resolution global instrument network to gain enough information over a decade or so to see if the threat is real.

Another thing deserving attention is to spend far more time and funds on research into the various factors used as proxies to see if it is even possible to isolate a temperature signal from the divergence issues and multiple confounding factors that effect all of them to a greater or lesser degree, as until this is done the claims of the proxy jockeys about past climate are little more than computer artifacts based on idle speculation.

My beef is with the over-hyped scare mongering that is being propagated based on research where the true level of uncertainty is so great one cannot reasonably make a sound conclusion from it.

Well how did we get to that beef in this thread? We had a post about a single cold record in a single city, and a reply to that post implying that this was couter-evidence to global warming. I replied to this absurd argument.

Nowhere in this thread has anyone made the kind of argument you say your beef is with. So wy are you posting your beef here?

The name of the thread is "Global Warming?", and the thread starter timNms does appear to be questioning AGW assumptions (but I could be wrong):

Short term, you are probably correct...but, in the overall big picture of things, doesn't weather history tend to repeat itself? Thus, wouldn't one be able to come to the conclusion that at one time or another in history, things were just as warm/cold/hot/wet/dry...etc as it is now?

Now, I cannot speak for timNms, but he may have been subjected to the same type of one-sided flood of AGW media hype as I have in recent years which might have led him to to stop and think for a bit and then start asking questions about what he is being told, however only timNms knows whether that is the case.

With regard to timNms's questions, it is quite likely that weather history does tend to repeat itself if long enough time scales are considered, and the probability is very high that things were just as warm/cold/hot/wet/dry...etc as they are now at various times in the past. A definitive 'yes' or 'no' answer is simply not possible as we do not currently have enough information from past times to give a better answer, however there is abundant anecdotal and proxy evidence that hints that the globe was probably warmer than current temperatures at least once within the last 1000 years.

[curtadams]

Your statement and demand for a retraction does not address what I actually said - I referred to "AGW believers" - where in that sentence did I say or even infer "serious researcher"?

You can find people who say the earth is flat. You probably could find a few goofballs who say global warming is entirely caused by humans, but that's irrelevant. So I'm asking for anybody, even vaguely authoritative, who said that. And you're not finding them, because they don't exist. You aren't even finding the occaisional goofball.

Aside from trying to change the meaning of what I said, you also removed it from the context it was in and ignored the rest of what I said.

However, I probably should have worded it a bit more carefully by saying most instead of all, although it really is amazing just how many media reports and web pages either say or infer that it is all, which was the point I was trying to make.

For example:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/ear ... nge/dn9903
"Instant Expert: Climate Change
Climate change is with us. A decade ago, it was conjecture. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes. Canada's Inuit see it in disappearing Arctic ice and permafrost. The shantytown dwellers of Latin America and Southern Asia see it in lethal storms and floods. Europeans see it in disappearing glaciers, forest fires and fatal heat waves.
Scientists see it in tree rings, ancient coral and bubbles trapped in ice cores. These reveal that the world has not been as warm as it is now for a millennium or more. The three warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998; 19 of the warmest 20 since 1980. And Earth has probably never warmed as fast as in the past 30 years - a period when natural influences on global temperatures, such as solar cycles and volcanoes should have cooled us down. Studies of the thermal inertia of the oceans suggest that there is more warming in the pipeline.
Climatologists reporting for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say we are seeing global warming caused by human activities and there are growing fears of feedbacks that will accelerate this warming.
Global greenhouse
People are causing the change by burning nature's vast stores of coal, oil and natural gas. This releases billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year, although the changes may actually have started with the dawn of agriculture, say some scientists."

Doesn't say everything is due to human effects.

http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/fcons.asp
"The latest scientific data confirm that the earth's climate is rapidly changing. Global temperatures increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the course of the last century, and will likely rise even more rapidly in coming decades. The cause? A thickening layer of carbon dioxide pollution, mostly from power plants and automobiles, that traps heat in the atmosphere."

Doesn't say everything is due to human effects.

http://www.ecobridge.org/content/g_evd.htm
"The year 1999 was the fifth-warmest year on record since the mid-1800's; 1998 being the warmest year. According to Thomas Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center (NOAA), the current pace of temperature rise is "consistent with a rate of 5.4 to 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit per century." By comparison, the world has warmed by 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit since the depths of the last ice age, 18,000 to 20,000 years ago.
The potential for floods and droughts is increasing."....... the heating from increased greenhouse gases enhances the hydrological cycle and increases the risk for stronger, longer-lasting or more intense droughts, and heavier rainfall events and flooding, even if these phenomena occur for natural reasons. Evidence, although circumstantial, is widespread across the United States. Examples include the intense drought in the central southern U.S in 1996, Midwest flooding in spring of 1995 and extensive flooding throughout the Mississippi Basin in 1993 even as drought occurred in the Carolinas, extreme flood events in winters of 1992-93 and 1994-95 in California but droughts in other years (e.g, 1986-87 and 1987-88 winters)," says Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)."

Doesn't say everything is due to human effects.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/scie ... ?s=oldest&
"The average surface temperature of earth has increased more than 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900 and the rate of warming has been nearly three times the century-long average since 1970. Almost all experts studying the recent climate history of the earth agree now that human activities, mainly the release of heat-trapping gases from smokestacks, tailpipes, and burning forests, are probably the dominant force driving the trend. The gases add to the planet's natural greenhouse effect, allowing sunlight in, but preventing some of the resulting heat from radiating back to space. Drawing on research on past climate shifts, observations of current conditions, and computer simulations, many climate experts say that without big curbs in greenhouse gas emissions, the 21st century could see temperatures rise 3 to 8 degrees, weather patterns sharply shift, ice sheets shrink and seas rise several feet. Articles and multimedia about global warming published in the New York Times appear below."

Not only doesn't say everything everything is due to human effects - it specificial implies there are others because it says *dominant*.

Of course, a little time spent with Google could show you hundreds more examples (if you could be bothered look).

I've seen lots of stuff on global warming and I've never seen anybody say GW is *only* caused by human effects. You cite four examples - none of which make the claim that global warming is only caused by human effects, and one of which denies it. That's not *everybody* says it, that's not *most* say it, that's not even people *occaisionally* say it.

They *are* all saying it's predominant - which is the truth. As a result, we are facing significant possibilities of catastrophic agricultural changes, the obliteration of of most coastal land on the planet, mass extinctions possibly the worst since the Cretaceous, and catatrophic increases in hurricane strength. None are certain but even a slight chance of any of those justifies major investments to stop warming - and, for that matter, they'd still be justified if it were mostly due to natural cycles. I don't understand why, when we're facing the possibility of the greatest economic catastrophe of all history, that people would care to raise - incorrect - complaints about the phrasing of articles on the problem.

[x-y-no]

The name of the thread is "Global Warming?", and the thread starter timNms does appear to be questioning AGW assumptions (but I could be wrong):

Yes. And that's why I responded by pointing out that a single cold anomaly in one city is meaningless WRT global warming.

Had the title of the thread been "Global Warming!" and the original post cited a single warm anomaly, I would have pointed out exactly the same thing - but aimed at propnents of AGW (check my posting history if you don't believe me - I've done so in the past). Would you then have responded with a tirade against climate skeptics? Somehow, I doubt it.


I haven't undertaken any study of the matter, but it's my perception that the use of this illegitimate tactic (and quite a few other illegitimate tactics as well) is far more prevalent among skeptics. Maybe that's because at this point they have far less to work with. There really is far less ambiguity about the reality and seriousness of AGW than they want to pretend at this point.

One final quibble with what you wrote: it is not a foregone conclusion that mitigationg policy actions are neccesarily "very costly decisions." In my observation, cost projections tend to be an order of magnitude or more less reliable than our climate projections are.