Global Warming Again With a Twist

The abstract report deserves my abstract opinion:

Yes...

and no.

After 15 years of no global warming, isn't it time to kill that hoax about anthropogenic climate change and look at the real culprit of most climate change? --

http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/05/26/to-the-horror-of-global-warming-alarmists-global-cooling-is-here/

Good link, thanks. If we look back in the natural records for the past 55 million since the Cretaceous period you will recognize that the earth was much, much warmer until a cooling began about 450,000 years ago. In fact we were declining for the whole period and it was definitely heading for a long cold period. The slight warming over the past 150 years or so is hardly a geological blip. The only good from all the climate models will be that humans may indeed have a formula to prevent global cooling. Are we arrogant enough to believe we can really affect climate? Perhaps we will have to put CFCs and CO2 back into the atmosphere as a necessity to survival. The global warming alarmists may just provide us with the correct tools to save us from cooling. A kind of about face to the current alarmist theories.

One unsubstantiated scientific article does not invalidate the many thousands that show that Global Warming/Climate Change is due to CO2, though it is interesting.

The tone of the Forbes article, on the other hand, gives away the bias of the writer: "Since those models have never been validated, they are not science at this point, but just made up fantasies." He shows no understanding that the models are not considered proof of anything. The increasing global temperatures are the proof. Anecdotes about how cold it is somewhere do not counteract the actual measurements of the higher temperatures of the whole globe.

Likewise, the Forbes author says, "That means there is a natural limit to how much increased CO2 can effectively warm the planet, which would be well before any of the supposed climate catastrophes the warming hysterics have tried to use to shut down capitalist prosperity." For the true believer capitalists, the only question is how to fend off imagined attacks on their fanatical faith in the invisible hand of the marketplace. Perhaps liberals want to use the government to prevent global warming. So what? Conservatives have no plan at all except accuse liberals of trying to destroy capitalism.

So I have a hypothetical question. Suppose global warming is proven beyond any doubt. How would conservatives prefer to deal with it, instead of using the government? Are there any conservatives on this site who can deal with this hypothetical situation?

The apparent lack of warming for the past decade or so might be explained by looking at the Enso anomalies data:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Enso-global-temp-anomalies.png

Here's the relevant graph:

Notice that the trend of El Nino years is almost uniformly upward. The trend of the La Nina years is almost uniformly upward. The trend of other years is more variable, but still upward. So will 2013 be an El Nino, La Nina, or other? Is anyone thinking that any of them of them shows signs of stopping their increase, let alone starting to decline?

It may be that the only reason the temperature increase seemed to stop for the past few years is that the frequency of El Nino and La Nina years is increasing, but they are going up too, and now they've caught up with the "other" years.

It all depends where you stick the thermometer...

We are talking about a global phenomenon and your graph covers ONLY the years since 1950. That is not enough time to make a case for global changes. You need thousands of years of data to have any meaningful dataset. The Earth has undergone heating and cooling cycles lasting several thousand years and across several degrees over an existence lasting billions of years. 1950 to present isn't even a hiccup at those time scales. Jut sayin'.

Deef, there you go, acting like an old fart, again. You're not SUPPOSED to look any farther back than your lifetime (or, if you're feeling generous, your father's .... maybe). Telling anyone under 35 years old, and a lot who are a lot older, to look back 200 years, let alone those huge numbers you are using (C'mon, thousands of years? Who can even imagine thousands of years?)is nearly impossible. No frame of reference, no concept of how small a blip MY lifespan is on this planet (And I, being a Creationist, believe in a planet lifetime of no more than 10,000 years, but that makes my 59 a VERY small blip. The millions and billions some of you guys talk about are like Congress discussing the National Debt Ceiling, when I have a hard time putting gas in my car AND food on my table at the same time).

So, all sarcasm aside, and I'm 100% in agreement with you, we don't have near enough years of data to accurately back out a "validated, proven model of anthropogenic Global Warming". So what it the globe is warming? After so many centuries of cooling, it's time.

And the system is entirely too complex for puny man to change it either direction, at will.

For the global warming discussions, look at:

www.skepticalscience.com

But I will comment on this:

"And the system is entirely too complex for puny man to change it either direction, at will."

The Fertile Crescent was once one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. Now it is a desert because of the farmers there used water from the rivers to irrigate their fields. Over thousands of years salt accumulated and destroyed the fertility of the soil.

Nowadays, farmers in California helped build an irrigation system to bring water to the Central Valley, with the condition that the water be given an outlet to avoid salt buildup. Guess what? They built the irrigation, and decided the outlet was too expensive. Now there are parts of the Central Valley hat have too much salt to be planted, and spreading.

The Gobi Desert used to be fertile, but irrigation destroyed it.

The fish stocks in the oceans used to be massive, but now won't survive if human fishing continues at the current rate.

Humans only had to accidentally carry the wrong fish, the Asian Silver carp, into the Illinois River in order to wipe out native fish. Now only a single lock prevents them from getting into the Great Lakes, potentially wiping out most native fish along with the entire fishing industry there.

(I read once, but cannot confirm now, that the Sahara Desert used to be savannah, and then a huge civilization across North Africa spread agriculture there, and caused an ecological tipping point that caused it to turn to desert. If anyone knows a reference to this, please post it.)

Perhaps you never heard of the devastation caused by the Gypsy Moth in the 70's in the Eastern US. The moth was accidentally released by one puny human, and it ate all the leaves off of all the trees in entire forests. July looked like winter. Only another intervention by other puny humans wiped out the Gypsy Moth by introducing a wasp that killed it.

Did you ever wonder about why all the huge mammals disappeared wherever humans appeared? North America, Australia, Europe. Puny humans did something, perhaps accidentally, that caused their extinction. From Wikipedia: "these megafaunal extinctions followed a distinctive landmass-by-landmass pattern that closely parallels the spread of humans into previously uninhabited regions of the world, and which shows no correlation with climatic history"

Many of these things happened when there were far fewer humans on the planet. Now there are 7 billion and rising, and they're still hungry, and they ALL burn things. Instead of the changes taking thousands of years to become visible, they take place in a century or less, or fast enough for you to see with your own eyes. But only if you look.

I didn't say we don't have effects on our globe! We certainly do. I'm saying we don't know our effect on the current rising temperature or the major cause of rises and falls over long time periods.

We have had a serious impact on water, and land chemistry. There is no doubt of that. I live in northern California and one of our biggest complaints up here is all of the water we send to the butt-end of the state. Our rivers and creeks have less salmonid fishes and some even go bone dry in summer when 100yrs ago they ran. And the salt buildup is worse than you state, the salt is high in selenium, not just sodium.

It is difficult for many people to separate the changes we do cause and know we cause from other changes that are natural or natural changes we may be exacerbating. We must be careful to not make the assumption that it is always our fault when something big changes on the Earth. It is likely to effect us for sure, but we need to know for sure if we are the cause if we are to have any meaningful solutions.

The geologic record shows several periods of falling temperatures (ice ages) preceded by sudden (~100yr) rises in temperature. What if we spend all our money on solar panels to "fix" the rise, only to discover we should have been building underground habitat and developing deep earth energy sources?

In order to do it right we have to be sure, not just "right".

You may want to learn a little more geography. For a start, read Harm Blij's book. Why Geography Matters.

Gypsy Moth is a small example of something that humans may have helped to introduce sooner. However, theses pests would be in NA some time soon anyway. The Gypsy moth is mostly controlled by NPV or Borralinivirus reprimens, a parasite that infects the larvae. The parasite is sprayed in areas of concern as a pesticide.

The Gobi desert may contain small areas of fertility even today but to blame human irrigation is a stretch. There are natural barriers that make the area susceptible to drought.

The Sahara desert has a history of flux with regard to rainfall. The flux has a time period that correlates better with ice age cycles rather than human intervention. When is the next ice age? You will not grow any crops there or in most places during an ice age. Lake Chad has shrunk to less than 10% of its size since about 7,000 BC.

And yes fish stocks deplete if an area is practising non sustained removal fishing. And bad irrigation practice can lead to loss of fertile areas.

It is strange how we once predicted the demise of humans as the population approached 8 billion. Well guess what we are here or very close. However, we feed more people today on much less farmland. In fact there is a huge rebound of forests throughout the globe as farmland is put out of service. Our crops are becoming better and bigger. In fact, the planet is getting greener albeit not equally dispersed.

I do not deny humans can alter the earth and create local havoc on environments. However, when looking at the issues, sometimes one must look at more detail and in a historical reference. The fertile crescent is a good starting point where human and natural causes have conspired to change agricultural practices. 9,000 years has changed the areas natural ability and human population has grown beyond the areas ability to support sustained agriculture. Keep digging but keep an open mind.

The graph is only to show a deeper understanding of the past 10 years or so. Critics of global warming say that it has stopped rising. Climate scientists have been just waiting to see whether it shoots up again after pausing, as it has twice already since 1940, or actually turns downward. Looking at the underlying trends show that is not stopped rising. I would advise people to prepare for it to shoot up again suddenly.

I'm not really interested in going into a discussion of how they know global warming today is unprecedented, and dangerous. They do have hundreds of thousands of years of data, but not in a form that critics accept. According to those heating and cooling cycles, we should be in a cooling trend right now, but we're not. For detailed, scientific, rational, (and very long) discussions of global warming, see this site:

http://www.skepticalscience.com

10 years does not even cover one solar maximum and can not be considered "deep" where the subject of discussion is global warming. Yearly cycles vary greatly but their variance is background noise relative to the geologic time scales of the Earth and her changes in temperature.

Perspective is everything when you are doing science. If you listen to only the last second of a song, you may say it is only a note. If you listen to each secon of a song in one second increments you may define a range of frequencies and even graph the mean and average note, but you will still not hear the song. If you listen to the whole song, note for note, but in the wrong order, you will not hear the music.

10 year studies, 100year studies even 1000year studies of global temperature are not sufficient to know the song and the music of the Earths changes in temperature or anything else. One must have data spanning may thousands or even millions of years to get a handle on the "tune".

I was gone for Memorial Day weekend, and never got back to this thread.

Cycles happen, but the recent rise in temperature does not conform to any of the known cycles. The Hockey Stick model has been validated by ongoing research over and over again. Now they have shown that it also happens in the Southern Hemisphere as well as the Northern.

It is like listening to a piece of music with many frequencies of sound happening at the same time, and then all of a sudden you hear a sharp, loud, single spike of noise that is very clearly not part of the music. It could be static from innumerable unknown sources, but it just happens to exactly coincide with turning on the microwave oven. So do you dismiss it as just some unknown part of the music, or do you say that there may have been noises that loud a long time ago before we started listening to music, or do you investigate the microwave oven?

Climate scientists have been doing the equivalent of the latter, and they have found that the rise in temperature cannot be explained using any of the known cycles. They have found that a rise in CO2 can explain it. They have known for a long time that CO2 released by humans might cause this kind of rise, ever since Arrhenius calculated how much CO2 would be needed to cause a greenhouse effect on Earth in 1896, and have been watching for that to happen.

The problem is that we are performing a massive experiment with the Earth's climate without knowing what the outcome will be. We are releasing massive quantities of CO2 in an extremely short time, and we know it might cause a strong greenhouse effect. Some 95% of the people who are in the best position to know believe that the warming we are seeing is due to CO2, and that continuing to release CO2 might cause massive disruptions in climate. The big question to be answered is how sure do we have to be that these things will happen before we decide to reduce CO2 emissions.

Some people say that doing so will disrupt the economy, but I have far less faith in their predictions than I do in those of the climate scientists. Massive spending for WWII did not destroy the economy, but there is no reason to use government spending to do this. People who privately spend money to improve the insulation of their houses save money in the long run. The percentage of people who install solar panels on their homes is higher for conservative wealthy people than for liberals, because they actually save money by installing them. Where I live there are companies that advertise that anybody who has a suitable house can get a solar installation for free. The solar installation company finances it and just charges the customer a fee that is less than what they save on electricity. Everybody wins. No cost to government. You could do a similar business model for insulating houses, rather than installing solar panels. You could get rental properties involved by giving the landlords a cut of the savings. No need for government, except to get out of the way.

There is no reason to think we will lower our standard of living by conserving and switching to wind and solar. When Benjamin Franklin invented the pot bellied stove to replace fireplaces, less heat went flying up chimneys, the houses were warmer, and there were environmental benefits. People used less wood to heat their houses, air pollution went down, houses were safer. Their standard of living went up, not down.

And then there are other reasons not to burn fossil fuels. Oil spills, wars in the Middle East, ocean acidification, air pollution, water pollution, government subsidies, support for terrorist countries, just to name the ones that come to mind in a minute.

In short, the obvious course of action is to put a massive private effort into conservation and various sorts of renewable energy, even if we are not completely sure about the climate warming yet. Our standard of living will go up, our national security will improve, the economy gets stimulated by solar companies, and their customers save money. What is the down side?

And if those 95% of climate scientists turn out to be right, we will have reduced the danger some.

I wonder about Arrhenius' work with respect to what we are observing.

Accordingly, the doubling of the percentage of CO₂ in the atmosphere would increase the temperature by 4° (C). According to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (Scripps study) (^{_{there are many others}}) the atmospheric amount has increase from ~300 ppm to nearly 400 ppm since 1960 alone.

Where are our increased temperatures according to these figures?

Eugenics aside, we could use *more Arrhenius* right about now. With today's modern tools...and more scientists of his caliber...wow.

"Where are our increased temperatures according to these figures?"

Here is the hockey stick, as of 2000. See for yourself. My previous post included the past 10 years.

If you're asking why it didn't rise by 4 degrees, I don't know. My previous post shows that the many El Nino and La Nina years have an effect as well.

Here is an analysis of high and low temperature records broken over the past 60 or so years. These are the starting and ending points of an animation in which you can see the distribution of high and low records shifting over that time.

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center GISS and Scientific Visualization Studio

Notice the long tail to the right has moved farther than the actual peak, meaning that high temperature extremes are not only higher but also farther above average than they were in the 50's. It is bad enough to have higher average temperatures, but one good heat wave could kill entire crops. A couple of years ago my bean crop was hit by a 117 degree heat wave that had little effect on the plants but killed all the flowers. It took weeks for more flowers to come out to replace them.

You can see the original animation here:

http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a003900/a003975/

or here (might be easier.)

http://www.skepticalscience.com/coumou-robinson-rahmstorf-2013.html

"According to those heating and cooling cycles, we should be in a cooling trend right now, but we're not."
We are also supposed to be at a different point in the 11year solar cycle and we're not. Is it the fault of man or is it the error in the the theory used to intemperate the data?
Taking sides and clinging to what may be false assumptions and incorrect theories is not good science. Our role in the current warming trend may be only marginal and if it is assumed in the theory that the current up trend has us as the causality and not just a factor in the margin of error, then the theory is incomplete because if as you say we have thousands of years of data, then mans role in the majority of the data set is marginal at the outset! That smells of agenda not theory.
If we are "supposed" to be in a cooling cycle, then what is the theory behind this supposition? And why is the conclusion reached about the deviation from theoretical modeling anthropomorphic when the dataset itself cannot account for the current levels of human activity nor can it account for any anthropomorphic changes over the majority of the dataset due to the much lower numbers of human beings and the very recent Industrial Revolution? Cause of warming NOW must be cause in the past too or the data, the theory and all the assumptions must be thrown out the window.
I say take Human activity out of the equation by studying climate change a priori to the Industrial Revolution and formulate theory that has natural causality first. When those models match up with a very small margin of error to the data, then, and only then, can we extend the study into what we know is an anthropomorphically skewed time period. The margin of error when trying to determine human causality from natural causality would be much better, and perhaps, because theory and study was more logical and thorough, we will actually have a real "knowing" of our role and the means by which we alter the big picture.

Nice post. GA

That is the nice thing you will find about the participants on this form. They are mostly skeptics and we all consider that the way things should be. Very few of us drink Koolaid. I posted this entry because I knew it would create controversy. Do I think CFCs are a problem with global warming, yes. Do I believe the removal of CFCs will abate global warming, no. Even if some correlation exists. So show us your graphs to support your position. If someone claims you have not enough data points to make any claims of proof, it is because that is just good skeptic science that most engineers and scientists will practice.

I am sure if you surveyed science and engineering people you will find that most believe there is global warming. If you asked if the global warming was mainly human induced, you will find that the majority has dropped to about one third. Your position may be better supported by indicating a history of CO2 values over very long time frames. Temperatures have been about 8 degrees C higher in the past. Unprecedented rises in temperature is a stretch. However, CO2 values at 400 has not been seen in 400,000 years. Without putting all the blame on humans, you can say it is unprecedented over such a time frame and that is troublesome. Over much longer time frames, CO2 has been much higher.

I am not one to swallow any rhetoric until I understand the convincing evidence. Galileo was not believed for a long time but his ideas were eventually accepted. Global warming science is still in its infancy. Eventually, as more information is added to models. the models will become more accurate. There are many areas of natural global warming not fully inclusive in the models or poorly monitored. The question of human induced global warming is not denied but the levels of human and natural induced global warming still need to be refined. To base all information since the industrial era as a basis is leading to false surmises. In the meantime, we should all try to use less CO2 emitting energy. Just do not think you can tax carbon to resolve a global problem.

Agree--Taxes are often used to reduce or quell the use of something, (think cigarettes), or to try to change the habits of individuals. I say we tax stupidity! What ? Won't work? Well then tax the carbon burning fires around the Planet that contribute more to CO2 emissions than all other Man-based activities..No? THen we can tax Volcanos--What a pain in the arse they are...Hurricanes too --What about Solar Flares? Al Gore has so far missed that one...OR how about those pesky deep water Ocean currents that move more heat around the Planet than anything..Man--I should be head of some Government agency.

Most of the Geography in the US is the result of ice. Moving, such as drumlins, NY finger lakes, Long island, Great Lakes, or melting. Eg: river courses, Possibly the upper levels of the Grand Canyon, or those round rocks we all see in the western movies. So, as far as the Global Warming debate goes, " what caused the ice to melt over 15000 years ago?" Did the dinos have an advanced carbon based technology we haven't discovered yet? or does the earth and climate cycle?

The dinos did have an advanced carbon based technology we haven't discovered yet. That's what created all that coal for us. They meant it for the use of their descendents, the birds, to create a planet wide civilization, but the birds turned their prehensile limbs into wings, so all their effort was a total waste.

On the other hand there are definitely cycles of ice ages. Are you suggesting that we not worry about our own effect on the planet because someday it will have another ice age anyway?

That last sentence...yeah...that sounds about right.

"Civilization" (as we know it) will not survive the next ice age.

Every time the earth has gone through an enormous geologic event, life has changed significantly on the planet's surface.

Stop...Master Clear...Reset