Next decade 'may see no warming'

I don't see how anyone could be a climate change skeptic when it's known that carbon dioxide is a heat trapping atmospheric gas, that we are removing carbon from the ground and placing it in the atmosphere at about 10,000 times the natural rate, that human carbon emissions have increased carbon in the atmosphere by more than 30% to the highest level in more than 500,000 years, that ice core samples from around the world show that atmospheric carbon closely tracks average global temperature, and that every peer reviewed scientific study (ie: every credible study) says climate change is happening and humans are contributing to it.

To be a climate change skeptic, you apparently must assume you know more about climate change than the world's best climate scientists. That doesn't seem very likely. Perhaps you think there's a conspiracy in the scientific community where nearly all professional scientists would lie about climate change and risk their careers. That doesn't seem likely either.

No one with more than a room temperature IQ or an oil company paycheck can be a climate skeptic. Since you own a Prius, I assume you have more than a room temperature IQ.

Unless you're affiliated with the fossil fuel industry in some way, the only possible reason you could claim to be a climate skeptic is to annoy or bait those concerned about the environment, and possibly start an irrational discussion on PC.

Claiming to be a climate skeptic 15 years ago was like opposing interracial marriage 100 years ago. Now claiming to be a climate skeptic like being in the KKK.

 

Thanks for the post Tim, I'll check it out.

I do believe that historically CO2 levels were an amplifier and not usually the primary driver of climate right? At least that is how I see it described in papers. This is not taking into account vast amounts of volcanic gases which cause the earth to break out of "snowball" periods as described in the "snowball earth" theory.

 

Comparing a 200-year timescale graph with others will of course reduce the visible variation in a 20-year timespan. Furthermore, the graph at the BBC site you source doesn't really seem out of line with the above, at least not in the long term. The original primary source article is available online at Access : : Nature (although I'm not sure if it will be accesible to those accessing it from non-University networks).

 

This is a common contrarian tactic. Show graphs with wildly different timescales. The OP shows one graph with a 10 year span and a second with a 200 year span.

The best way to look at decadal temperature is to compare the current decade with previous. Like this:



This is also an example of quote mining. The authors of the papers cited by the OP conclude "Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming."

 

And as is typical with TimBikes, the information was incomplete. The first three sentences in the article are:

The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.
A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming.
However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say [emphasis mine].

Further down:
"His group's projection diverges from other computer models only for about 15-20 years; after that, the curves come back together and temperatures rise."

So, this one model predicts a short-term fluctuation. That's useful, but as the researchers themselves say, the results are not substantially different from other models for later time periods. There's a nice discussion on realclimate.org that boils down to, anything less than about a couple of decades is weather. Also, you can see from the article on the main page, this concept of "short-term climate prediction" is new and hot in the field, but does not have a lot of intellectual history behind it.

 

The last decade didn't see any warming either, in fact I think it cooled a little.

Wildkow

 

I don't think that's true. As I've posted several times before here. The last 10 years, on average, were warmer than the prior ten. So, this last decade was warmer than the prior decade.

When people say "global warming stopped in 1998" or "the last decade didn't see any warming", what they actually mean is that we have not (yet?) hit another record worldwide temperature since all the way back to ... 2005, and that 2007 was merely tied with 1998 as the second-warmest year on record.

There is substantial year-to-year variation in temperature around the "trend". See below. When data behave that way, whenever you see a high outlier (a black box way above the line), you're likely to see a string of years with lower temperatures. That has nothing to do with the trend. Looking at the graph, you could have said the same thing ("no warming for a decade or so") in 1974, 1981, 1990 or 1998. Meaningless. Realclimate.org has a nice discussion of why those short-term "trends" are meaningless -- they are statistical noise.

Anyway, yes, the black box for 2007 (end of the trend line) is indeed no higher then the black box for 1998 (far above the trend line). But use your eyes. Sometimes graphs can be deceiving, but in this case, I think not. In any case, since 2005 was the warmest year on record, and 2007 was tied for the second warmest, I'd say it's premature to suggest that no warming occurred for the last decade.

The NASA Goddard Institute summarizes the information clearly:

NASA GISS: Research News: 2007 Was Tied as Earth's Second-Warmest Year

 

Did you even glimpse at the graph two posts above yours?

 

I don't understand global warming ...... and are you ready for this ..... neither do you. I don't understand cold fusion either ....... and the list goes on and on and on and on!

There is one thing that I know for sure ..... and that is WHICH GROUP wants to do something about global warming, and which group does not. There is no "debate" anymore in terms of the reality of global warming. Even the Bush administration has finally had to agree that global warming is indeed real and impacting us right now. However, they still want to ignore it.

When an overwhelming majority of scientists back a theory, and another group with an UNLIMITED vested interest in denying said theory doesn't .... well, I pretty sure I have my answer. Your mileage may vary though.

Cliff Notes: I'm not a scientists, but I can follow the dollar as well as anyone.

... Brad

 

After reading the article I have to agree with chogan2 and the others. There is nothing in the article that disagrees with the idea behind global warming. In fact it states quite clearly that even the author and the supporting scientists agree with the basic formula for global warming.

 

I think your question can be answered by stating recent temperature fluctations are getting too close to the realm of weather and not climate. Long term trends tend to silence the noise of yearly fluctuations. We know enough to realize that there are more than a few regional and global factors (including cosmic) that play a part in weather so if any one of those factors increases or decreases it's influence then the recent weather will be affected yet in the long term the trends would likely show an upward increase in temp. a 10 year flat spot or even dip is noise IMO (although I don't believe we are seeing either yet).

What gets to me is some people get it stuck in their head that CO2 is the only factor that decides climate change and so use that to support their proposterous claims that CO2 has risen but temps have not (in the last few years) so therefor global warming is fake. I guess it is just too complex for those people to wrap their pitiful minds around. This is not directed at you Tim although your last sentence gets real close.

 

Yeah, golly, this is about the 3rd time I've answered this or something like it on these forums. Go to realclimate.org and read a real, actual exchange between real, actual climate scientists on the issue of whether or not short-term trends are meaningful and can be predicted:

RealClimate

Click the link to see that eight-year "trends" that are all over the place. The slopes of the "trends" are not statistically significantly different from zero. They are indistinguishable from noise.

In other posts on this forum, I've tried to make the simple point that several known factors factors contribute to year-to-year changes in global temperature, and it's not sensible to expect temperature to rise linearly with just one of them (GHG concentration). Let alone the variation that occurs for reasons unknown (true error term). It's just that GHGs are long-lived and cumulative, and the other factors tend not to be, hence the focus on GHGs.

So, just because short-term temperature changes a) occurred in the past, and b) will occur in the future, that does not mean c) GHGs don't cause global warming or that d) you can predict those changes enough to be useful for anything.

So, the answer to why the IPCC and similar show smooth lines is that they don't and don't pretend to make short-term temperature predictions. Why? Because they can't. At least, up to now, they had no reliable way to make such predictions. Based on the discussion on realclimate.org, that's a very hot topic these days -- short term "climate" prediction -- and it's still not clear that it can be done well enough to have any useful application.

It makes little sense to criticize criticize climate models something that they don't and (up to now) can't do. Why not criticize cars because they don't fly well.

So, what we have here is an article that says, in effect, we agree with the mainstream models of global warming, but we add a hitherto-untested shorter-term prediction for N America and Europe based on projected changes in Atlantic ocean circulation. When we do that, it suggests a short period of cooling there, followed by resumption of the upward temperature trend. Further, if I read it right, it also says that the short-term effect being modeled is neither strong enough to explain the current warming nor strong enough to offset the warming trend for very long. And that got posted as evidence against GHG-caused global warming. I think the way that research was characterized in the original post was flatly misleading.

 

Tim, one of the things I remember most from the climate talk (at my college) with IPCC member Jeff Price is that there is a wide range of opinions within the IPCC panel but the final product is an average of those opinions, not those of members on any extreme fringe.

 

My hat will be off to you If you can find a single paper published by an IPCC member that disagrees with overall conclusion of the report. I bet you would even be pressed to find a blog entry like that.

 

That's a dangerous line of reasoning. It really depends on how homogeneous the IPCC is. Why are people leaving and joining it. It is possible that it's comprised primarily of people who have "bought in". In which case you challenge is rubbish because the group is biased. I have no idea. The dissenters' viewpoints should be weighed on their scientific merit, not which clique the proponents belong to. That's something that I find disturbing about the "dialogue" that's going on in this space now. There's a lot of rancor in it, which suggests to me that people feel too much ownership over these ideas. There's too much ego involved and that's dangerous because it prevents people from questioning their own work and completely colours the way they go about their research. That's dangerous for the science.

There is WAY too much that's simply not understood at this point for us to be bickering and forming camps. The stakes are too high and it's counter productive. Yes there are some basic aspects of the science that are pretty settled, but there's load we don't understand and that's dangerous. We can't make really informed decisions as it stands now. We have some good ideas and should probably follow the precautionary principle until we understand the system better.

 

Yeah, that's what I was thinking.

Ordinarily, we'd see natural cycles of ups and downs, and if we see what should be a down cycle being a flat cycle after the latest up, then that is reason to take notice.