The REAL global warming

And the 1 year mean surface temperature anomaly. The remarkable warming of the poles is predicted by climate models.

Other maps can be found here: http://esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/clim/glbcir_rnl.shtml

sfctmpmer_365a.rnl.gif
 
dcraig1 said:
Yeah, risk does need to be properly assessed.
Click to expand...

With regard to energy, it won't be too much longer before people in the West start to take the situation seriously. At that point, we'll see a huge and long overdue expansion of nuclear power.

Cheap, abundant power, and lower "carbon" emissions for those that still care about such things. No more mad schemes , no more covering countless acres with windmills for the sake of a pitiful amount of power that requires conventional back up idling alongside it.
 
Today's column from the excellent Christopher Booker. Not debunking the "science" :)lol:) today, just commenting on the lunacy this obsession has brought us to.


Climate change: the true price of the warmists' folly is becoming clear
From the Met Office's mistakes to Gordon Brown's wind farms, the cost of 'green' policies is growing, warns Christopher Booker


By Christopher Booker
Published: 7:28PM GMT 09 Jan 2010


Impeccable was the timing of that announcement that directors of the Met Office were last year given pay rises of up to 33 per cent, putting its £200,000-a-year chief executive into a higher pay bracket than the Prime Minister. As Britain shivered through Arctic cold and its heaviest snowfalls for decades, our global-warming-obsessed Government machine was caught out in all directions.

For a start, we saw Met Office spokesmen trying to explain why it had got its seasonal forecasts hopelessly wrong for three cold winters and three cool summers in a row. The current cold snap, we were told with the aid of the BBC – itself facing an inquiry into its relentless obsession with “global warming” – was just a “regional” phenomenon, due to “natural” factors. No attempt was made to explain why the same freezing weather is affecting much of the northern hemisphere (with 1,200 places in the US alone last week reporting record snow and low temperatures). And this is the body on which, through its Hadley Centre for Climate Change and the discredited Climatic Research Unit, the world’s politicians rely for weather forecasting 100 years ahead.

Then, as councils across Britain ran out of salt for frozen roads, we had the Transport Minister, Lord Adonis, admitting that we entered this cold spell with only six days’ supply of grit. No mention of the fact that the Highways Agency and councils had been advised that there was no need for them to stockpile any more – let alone that many councils now have more “climate change officials” than gritters.

Then, with the leasing out of sites for nine giant offshore wind farms, there was Gordon Brown’s equally timely relaunch of his “£100 billion green revolution”, designed, in compliance with EU targets, to meet a third of Britain’s electricity needs. This coincided with windless days when Ofgem was showing that our 2,300 existing turbines were providing barely 1/200th of our power. In fact, 80 per cent of the electricity we used last week came either from coal-fired power stations, six of which are before long to be closed under an EU anti-pollution directive, or from gas, of which we only have less than two weeks’ stored supply and 80 per cent of which we will soon have to import on a fast-rising world market.

In every way, Mr Brown’s boast was fantasy. There is no way we could hope to install two giant £4 million offshore turbines every day between now and 2020, let alone that they could meet more than a fraction of our electricity needs. But the cost of whatever does get built will be paid by all of us through our already soaring electricity bills – which a new study last week predicted will quadruple during this decade to an average of £5,000 a year. This would drive well over half the households in Britain into “fuel poverty”, defined as those forced to spend more than 10 per cent of their income on energy.

Finally, following Mr Brown’s earlier boast that his “green revolution” will create “400,000 green jobs”, there was the revelation that more than 90 per cent of the £2 billion cost of Britain’s largest offshore wind farm project to date, the Thames Array, will go to companies abroad, because Britain has virtually no manufacturing capacity.

At last, in all directions, we are beginning to see the terrifying cost of that obsession with “global warming” and “green energy” which for nearly 20 years has had all our main political parties in its grip. For years governments, including the EU, have been shovelling millions of pounds into the coffers of “green” lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth and the WWF, allowing them in return virtually to dictate our energy policy. Not for nothing is a former head of WWF-UK now chairman of the Met Office.

The bills for such follies are coming in thick and fast. Last winter’s abnormal cold pushed Britain’s death rate up to 40,000 above the average, more than the 35,000 deaths across Europe that warmists love to attribute to the heatwave of 2003. Heaven knows what this winter will bring. And remember that the cost of the Climate Change Act alone has been estimated by our Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband at £18 billion every year until 2050 – a law that only three MPs in this Rotten Parliament dared oppose. Truly have they all gone off their heads.
 
maiden22 said:
This is really very simple. You beleive in the AGW theory, and presumably therefore think it wise to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions.

You also advocate the manufacture, distribution, installation and operation of millions of wholly unnecessary air-conditioning units. This will involve the emission of a very large amount of CO2, exacerbating a problem whose cause you consider "proven beyond reasonable doubt".

This is extremely silly.
Click to expand...

Did anyone advocate that humans stop crapping because water systems were spreading cholera from sewage?
No, they fixed the problem.
Did anyone advocate no longer using refrigerants at all because of the ozone hole?
No, they fixed the problem, and managed to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions as well, buying us a lot of time to solve the problem we're debating here.
This is a "taking-out-the-garbage" type problem, in that CO2 and the rest are byproducts of industry. You can either switch to non-fossil fuel sources, bury the CO2, or increase the efficiency of what we use.
As an example of the ridiculously low-hanging fruit in this, the average incandescent bulb converts something like 1 or 2% of the electricity it uses into visible light. Compact flourescents might reach 5%, which is double or triple the efficiency of an incandescent, but still crazily inefficient. Research to get us a bulb with efficiencies that don't make us exclaim in astonishment is, of course, underway.
Or, you could turn off the lights and make do with candles. I'd rather use electric bulbs, though, thank you.
Also, of course, research continues into making a/c more efficient every year as well.
 
Polar bear does face palm....

It's offical, it's off...well kinda official...:LOL: You really couldn't make this 5hit up if you tried...although with a couple of billion dollar budget you could give it a go...Tell me this polar bear isn't doing the face palm...:D

Big freeze could signal global warming 'pause'

The Arctic conditions which have brought Britain to a standstill over the past week could be the start of a "pause" in global warming, some scientists believe...

The world could be in for a spell of cooler temperatures, rather than hotter conditions, as a result of cyclical changes in ocean currents for the next 20 or 30 years, it is predicted.

Research by Professor Mojib Latif, one of the world's leading climate modellers, questions the widely held view that global temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/en...freeze-could-signal-global-warming-pause.html
 
Re: Polar bear does face palm....

Black Swan said:
It's offical, it's off...well kinda official...:LOL: You really couldn't make this 5hit up if you tried...although with a couple of billion dollar budget you could give it a go...Tell me this polar bear isn't doing the face palm...:D

Big freeze could signal global warming 'pause'

The Arctic conditions which have brought Britain to a standstill over the past week could be the start of a "pause" in global warming, some scientists believe...

The world could be in for a spell of cooler temperatures, rather than hotter conditions, as a result of cyclical changes in ocean currents for the next 20 or 30 years, it is predicted.

Research by Professor Mojib Latif, one of the world's leading climate modellers, questions the widely held view that global temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming years.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/en...freeze-could-signal-global-warming-pause.html
Click to expand...

Did you read your own link? Punch line:

"For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling."

But Prof Latif believes that the pause represents only a temporary respite rather than a challenge to the basis of global warming.
Click to expand...

Weather happens. Also, if you click on the link in my previous post, you'll notice that since 1990 there's been a halving in the rate at which greenhouse gases have been accumulating, due entirely to the Montreal Protocol. So, a slowdown in the rate of warming isn't exactly surprising.
Also, did you ever Monte Carlo a random system with a slight upward bias? "Pauses" in whatever uptrends you see happen all the time. Traders are supposed to know these things.
 
There is a lot more about what Latif actually has been saying

http://deepclimate.org/2009/10/02/anatomy-of-a-lie-how-morano-and-gunter-spun-latif-out-of-contro/

http://deepclimate.org/2009/10/02/key-excerpts-from-mojib-latifs-wcc-presentation/

Maybe he has strengthened his position since then and maybe not, but I am dead certain I wouldn't rely on the Telegraph for an accurate representation.

I also can't see what all the fuss is about - nobody has ever claimed that every year will be hotter than the previous or even a five year average is going to be higher than the previous five. Or that there won't be any cold winters in the future.

It is quite clear that Latif in no way questions AGW and the role of GHGs.
 
Hi Guys :)

Been a while since I posted here, but there is some very spirited debate going on. I like it (y)

A few points:

DCraig, my issue with the methods to assay atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are based upon the actual technique used, which is infrared spectroscopy. It takes very little thinking to realise that since methane, water and CO2 are all greenhouse gases, they are in fact IR absorbers at wavelengths which are relevent, and hence IR spectroscopy would actually have some difficulty in telling the difference between water, CO2 and methane because some of the regions that the gases occupy on a standard IR spec overlap to a great degree. The only precaution taken by the authors of the link you sent me was to trap the water out cryogenically. Hence, methane could still perturb the measurement. In this respect also, it is not just methane that is the problem here, but anything that contains a C-H bond, which is the real source of the absorption. Methane is simply the most abundant.
The other point being that I certainly have never been able to use infrared to tell me the amount of anything. To my knowledge it is not a strongly quantitative technique. However, the authors point out that they actually compare values to standard samples, so it's probably best to assume that the data is reliable, although I would assert that CO2 levels would be highly variable owing to interference from other trace gases, especially in rural areas where plant emissions can provide extreme variance in an IR spectrum.

Secondly, a point about peer review, which has popped up again and again. Since I am actually a practicing scientist and I have papers and articles published in peer-reviewed journals, I feel I could write something about my own experiences on the matter that might actually have some degree of authority:

First point: My work has been subdued by the peer-review process which was extremely un-objective and biased towards the cronies of the journal in question.
Second point: It all ended up getting published in the end, but in slightly less prestigious journals, and slightly more slowly owing to rejections.

So the basic idea I'm trying to put across is that peer review is not objective, is full of vested interests, but in any case if the work is valid it will get published somewhere. however, if it is published in less prestigious journals, it is much easier to discredit than if it was accepted by a front-line journal.
 
Gumping said:
Hi Guys :)

Been a while since I posted here, but there is some very spirited debate going on. I like it (y)

A few points:

DCraig, my issue with the methods to assay atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are based upon the actual technique used, which is infrared spectroscopy. It takes very little thinking to realise that since methane, water and CO2 are all greenhouse gases, they are in fact IR absorbers at wavelengths which are relevent, and hence IR spectroscopy would actually have some difficulty in telling the difference between water, CO2 and methane because some of the regions that the gases occupy on a standard IR spec overlap to a great degree. The only precaution taken by the authors of the link you sent me was to trap the water out cryogenically. Hence, methane could still perturb the measurement. In this respect also, it is not just methane that is the problem here, but anything that contains a C-H bond, which is the real source of the absorption. Methane is simply the most abundant.
The other point being that I certainly have never been able to use infrared to tell me the amount of anything. To my knowledge it is not a strongly quantitative technique. However, the authors point out that they actually compare values to standard samples, so it's probably best to assume that the data is reliable, although I would assert that CO2 levels would be highly variable owing to interference from other trace gases, especially in rural areas where plant emissions can provide extreme variance in an IR spectrum.
Click to expand...

Well, according to the CDAIC, that is how they do it for the record from Mauna Loa:

http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-mlo.html

using this http://www.orbital-uk.com/Catalogs/Ultramat_23 catalog extract engl.pdf instrument.

I haven't seen anybody seriously question the Mauna Loa record.

There is also the NASA AIRS satellite data as well as ground based observation from 2003 onwards:

http://airs.jpl.nasa.gov/
 
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Gumping said:
Secondly, a point about peer review, which has popped up again and again. Since I am actually a practicing scientist and I have papers and articles published in peer-reviewed journals, I feel I could write something about my own experiences on the matter that might actually have some degree of authority:

First point: My work has been subdued by the peer-review process which was extremely un-objective and biased towards the cronies of the journal in question.
Second point: It all ended up getting published in the end, but in slightly less prestigious journals, and slightly more slowly owing to rejections.

So the basic idea I'm trying to put across is that peer review is not objective, is full of vested interests, but in any case if the work is valid it will get published somewhere. however, if it is published in less prestigious journals, it is much easier to discredit than if it was accepted by a front-line journal.
Click to expand...

One hears a great deal of this kind of allegation. Sadly, it seems that many people suspend judgement, scepticism and common sense when presented with something bearing a "Peer Reviewed" tag.

Edward Wegman also made the same point rather forcefully about this process operating the other way, particularly with regard to Michael Mann.
 
Benton D Struckcheon said:
Did anyone advocate that humans stop crapping because water systems were spreading cholera from sewage?
No, they fixed the problem.
Did anyone advocate no longer using refrigerants at all because of the ozone hole?
No, they fixed the problem, and managed to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions as well, buying us a lot of time to solve the problem we're debating here.
This is a "taking-out-the-garbage" type problem, in that CO2 and the rest are byproducts of industry. You can either switch to non-fossil fuel sources, bury the CO2, or increase the efficiency of what we use.
As an example of the ridiculously low-hanging fruit in this, the average incandescent bulb converts something like 1 or 2% of the electricity it uses into visible light. Compact flourescents might reach 5%, which is double or triple the efficiency of an incandescent, but still crazily inefficient. Research to get us a bulb with efficiencies that don't make us exclaim in astonishment is, of course, underway.
Or, you could turn off the lights and make do with candles. I'd rather use electric bulbs, though, thank you.
Also, of course, research continues into making a/c more efficient every year as well.
Click to expand...

Well, I suspect that no-one advocated such a thing because human beings cannot stop crapping. From both ends in some cases.

Once again, this is simple.

You accept the "consensus" on AGW. The same "consensus" demands absolute and dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions, not merely a slower increase.

The mass manufacture, transport, installation and operation of millions of AC units in Europe is completely unnecessary. They currently do not exist and so contribute no CO2 to the atmosphere. Were they to exist it would result in the emission of a very large amount of CO2, which would also be wholly unnecessary. Yet this is what you advocate.

No matter how efficient such units might be, no-one who accepts the "consensus" (as you do) could possibly wish to see them built and operated. They would increase emissions for no good purpose.

Your position is extremely silly.

Personally, I am a great believer in scientific progress and technological advancement - for example, I am genuinely bewildered by the concern over limited oil reserves. The reason being that oil will become irrelevant long before the wells dry up. I would be happy for everyone to have AC, if that is what they want. However, I do not accept the "consensus" therefore in my opinion the atmosphere can stand a deal more CO2.
 
maiden22 said:
Well, I suspect that no-one advocated such a thing because human beings cannot stop crapping. From both ends in some cases.

Once again, this is simple.

You accept the "consensus" on AGW. The same "consensus" demands absolute and dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions, not merely a slower increase.

The mass manufacture, transport, installation and operation of millions of AC units in Europe is completely unnecessary. They currently do not exist and so contribute no CO2 to the atmosphere. Were they to exist it would result in the emission of a very large amount of CO2, which would also be wholly unnecessary. Yet this is what you advocate.

No matter how efficient such units might be, no-one who accepts the "consensus" (as you do) could possibly wish to see them built and operated. They would increase emissions for no good purpose.

Your position is extremely silly.

Personally, I am a great believer in scientific progress and technological advancement - for example, I am genuinely bewildered by the concern over limited oil reserves. The reason being that oil will become irrelevant long before the wells dry up. I would be happy for everyone to have AC, if that is what they want. However, I do not accept the "consensus" therefore in my opinion the atmosphere can stand a deal more CO2.
Click to expand...

Well, that's a matter of opinion, as to whether or not any purpose would be served.
My point is merely that CO2 has to be dealt with regardless of whether or not people get or don't get a/c. Residential electricity use is small in comparison to industrial, after all. Not using something to solve the CO2 problem won't solve it, but it will make you uncomfortable.
Also, I was wondering why no one seemed to have fans or even screens to keep out the bugs on their windows. Fans don't use much electricity, and screens serve a very practical purpose.
As for the main subject of this thread, I'm bored with it. In the real world, there's no evidence anyone really takes it seriously (rates of CO2 output continue to climb inexorably, even as every company says "I'm green!"), and on here, even traders who know how complex systems work seem to think that just because we're having a colder winter than normal in the populated and middle class parts of the Northern Hemisphere that that invalidates the entire theory.
Dumb, but people always ignore threats until they're on top of them. C'est la vie.
Just don't buy any coastal property if you can't afford to lose it. If you can, no worries.
 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html

The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years, say some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists.

Their predictions – based on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans – challenge some of the global warming orthodoxy’s most deeply cherished beliefs, such as the claim that the North Pole will be free of ice in
summer by 2013.

According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Colorado, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 per cent, since 2007 – and even the most committed global warming activists do not dispute this.
Click to expand...


As for buying coastal property, there may be many reasons why not to, but don't confuse coastal erosion, for example, with rising sea levels. Similarly changing land levels. In parts of Britain, for example, the sea is advancing, in other parts, the sea is receding, caused essentially by the land "bouncing back" slowly after the disappearance of the last glaciers.

Even the UK Met Office has criticised exaggerated claims of sea-level rises:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6982299.ece
 
montmorencyt2w said:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html




As for buying coastal property, there may be many reasons why not to, but don't confuse coastal erosion, for example, with rising sea levels. Similarly changing land levels. In parts of Britain, for example, the sea is advancing, in other parts, the sea is receding, caused essentially by the land "bouncing back" slowly after the disappearance of the last glaciers.

Even the UK Met Office has criticised exaggerated claims of sea-level rises:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6982299.ece
Click to expand...

I was thinking more of Florida, the Carolinas, or Long Island over here in the US, where there either have never been glaciers or they receded long ago.
Greenland would be another story entirely.
Over there, I suppose you might not want to look at Spain. Although I don't know: would the Mediterranean fill up or dry up?
As for the rest, it's the usual nonsense. As I said before, you're a trader, you of all people should know complex systems don't change in a straight line; if they did, you'd be out of business.
The dice you're rolling get more loaded every year.
 
maiden22 said:
One hears a great deal of this kind of allegation. Sadly, it seems that many people suspend judgement, scepticism and common sense when presented with something bearing a "Peer Reviewed" tag.
Click to expand...

Any old blather to sow doubt and confusion eh?

Who are these "many people" who abandon critical thinking just because a paper is published? Published work is criticized all the time. For example Lindzen's recent paper http://www.drroyspencer.com/Lindzen-and-Choi-GRL-2009.pdf is getting a fair bit of stick. Before you get your knickers in a knot about the bias of main stream climate science against a prominent skeptic, you should be aware that some of that criticism is coming from another skeptic Roy Spencer http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/11/some-comments-on-the-lindzen-and-choi-2009-feedback-study/. If a paper has flaws it is liable to be criticized regardless of which side of the debate is held to be on and in due course further research may be published refuting it.

Being published does not infer correctness - just that reasonable standards are met.

I don't know what flavour of "common sense" you think is appropriate in evaluating scientific research. Would that be little gems like "humans are too puny to change climate"?

Science has this rather inconvenient habit of challenging common sense. With rather suggests that common sense is a completely inappropriate metric for evaluating science. If you threw out everything in modern physics that contradicts common sense (to a degree that almost hurts) you would be left with very little indeed. Out the door would go quantum mechanics and relativity - just for starters.

And all this is rather ironic because the worst culprit for behaving in a way that you suggest is the denialist press who seize upon anything they perceive to be furthering their political agenda, loudly proclaiming that "scientists debunk AGW." A case in point being the recent Lindzen paper mention above:

"[LC09] has absolutely, convincingly, and irrefutably proven the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming to be completely false.” and “we now know that the effect of CO2 on temperature is small, we know why it is small, and we know that it is having very little effect on the climate”

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-...relevant-in-climate-debate-says-MIT-Scientist
 
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The new EU President, Herman Van Rompuy, has proclaimed 2009 as the “first year of global governance.” During Rompuy’s intervention as President on November 19th, he stated,

“2009 is also the first year of global governance, with the establishment of the G20 in the middle of the financial crisis. The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step towards the global management of our planet.”

Simon Linnett, Executive Vice-Chairman of Rothschild, has called for a new international body (another one), the World Environment Agency, to regulate carbon trading.

Unless governments cede some of their sovereignty to a new world body, he says, a global carbon trading scheme cannot be enforced and regulated.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/3323732/Carbon-trading-must-be-globally-regulated.html
 
Motorway Privatisation- More tax on thin air, under the guise of climate saving, to revive the battered public finances and further impoverish the taxpayer.

“This is an attractive, positive idea which could release considerable resources to the public finances and may have real environmental merits,” Cable said. “The scale of it is vast — it makes rail privatisation look like small beer.”

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/t...ectors/banking_and_finance/article6814923.ece
 
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