I don’t follow…
Is this the same Roy Spencer that is a member of the Heartland Institute, scientific advisor to the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a science roundtable member of Tech Central Station, an “expert” with the George C. Marshall Institute, and a supporter of Intelligent Design? I guess we’ll just let God save us from climate change problems (as well as smoking, based on his associations). I just want to make sure we’re talking about the same Roy Spencer.
While you’d think he’d be rather busy helping so many agenda-based organizations, at least he’s probably cheap, if you need a mouthpiece.
It’s been fall and winter. 
It’s sort of a play on the “It’s not gotten hotter since 1998” bullshit pulled by various climate change deniers.
What are you talking about “short term models”? The models show the same behavior in the short term as the observations…namely, that whether or not CO2 is increasing, the short term will be dominated by internal variability with a sensitive dependence on initial conditions. However, the long term behavior predicted by the models in response to the CO2 forcing is a rise in the “base level” temperature that the fluctuations occur on top of.
Again, your argument would be akin to saying, “This seasonal cycle theory can’t be right because it doesn’t do a good job in predicting whether the temperature will go up or down over the next few days.” Well, the point is that we know that the seasonal trend, although quite strong (at least once you are outside of the tropical latitudes), changes on a (relatively) slow timescale and still has the faster internal variability of weather imposed on top of it.
Again, nobody was arguing that there wouldn’t be significant year-to-year variability. They were talking about the trend. And, by the way, it should be noted that, in the field of hurricanes, the data is actually leading the modeling in the sense that, while the modeling suggested that the rise in powerful hurricanes would be relatively modest at this stage, the data suggested that the rise in powerful hurricanes is happening more rapidly than the modelers had predicted. (And, by the way, contrary to your view of history, I don’t think they were ever saying “more hurricanes” and then changed it to “more powerful”…It was always “more powerful”. In fact, if you look at the relevant table of predicted effects in the summary for policymakers for the Third IPCC report released in 2001, they list two things: “Increase in tropical cyclone peak wind Likely, over some areas available intensities” and “Increase in tropical cyclone mean and Likely, over some areas peak precipitation intensities,” both of which have a footnote that reads “Past and future changes in tropical cyclone location and frequency are uncertain.”
Finally, it is worth pointing out that the question of the impact of climate change on hurricanes is still evolving rapidly and is not in as a mature state as some other aspects (such as the general increase in global temperatures). In particular, it is still under discussion how much of the thus-far observed increase in intensities is real and how much could be due to changes in detection techniques although most people in the field seem at the moment to believe that most of the observed increase is real.
The statement that water vapor is a greenhouse gas is indeed a true statement (hence the discussion above about the “water vapor feedback”) but a rather incomplete one. The completion of the sentence would be “albeit one that mankind has a negligible influence in on a global scale directly through our emissions of water vapor”. The basic point is this: Because of the higher concentrations of water vapor in the atmosphere and, even more importantly, the very fast timescale over which water vapor is removed from the atmosphere (about a week…it rains out), our emissions of water vapor will not at least in the foreseeable future be able to significantly increase the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. The only way we can increase is through the indirect effect of putting long-lived greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, thereby warming the atmosphere and causing an increase in the evaporation of water into the atmosphere (i.e., the so-called “water vapor feedback”).
It is also worth noting, by the way, that water vapor is the other combustion product besides CO2 in the burning of fossil fuels (which are, after all, hydrogen-rich already), so it is not as if we are not already putting water vapor into the atmosphere even without an hydrogen economy.
Yeah…One and the same. And, I might add that he also apparently recently was speculating about the idea that most of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere might not be due to man, which really puts him pretty far out there!
To be fair though, after Richard Lindzen, he and his colleague John Christy are probably the two climate skeptics with the strongest credentials…i.e., they are actually publishing a significant number of papers in peer-reviewed journals and such. (Spencer and Christy are most famous for being the first ones to analyze the satellite data providing a measure of global temperature in the troposphere since ~1979…and their initial conclusion that there was cooling instead of the warming seen in surface temperatures was one of the biggest skeptical points for many years until the combination of a longer data series and, more importantly, various corrections that others pointed out they had to make [to account for subtle effects like the decay in the orbit of the satellites] caused their data to gradually come in line with the surface temperature trend. Now, it has generally been accepted that the data from satellites agrees with the surface temperature record [to within the error bars of both] on a global scale, with some remaining discrepancy in the tropics that may or may not be significant depending on whether you believe Spencer and Christy’s latest analysis or the analysis of another group.)
As with other skeptics, what Spencer says outside of journals is often quite a bit more bombastic than what he says within his peer-reviewed papers. For example, in that paper that brazil84 linked to, he says:
So, while trying to argue that his conclusions (if correct) might play a quite important role in climate models, he is not as direct as he and others have been outside of the peer-reviewed venue in saying that they think they have found an important negative feedback to global warming due to clouds.
It is important to keep in mind, by the way, that the current interpretation of past climatic events such as the glacial - interglacial transition (as well as more recent, although smaller-scale and thus harder-to detect events such as the Mt. Pinatubo eruption) rely on having a decent-sized climate sensitivity, so those arguing for some significant negative feedback have to also explain why this feedback either didn’t operate then or why the current estimates for the forcings involved are significantly too low or estimates of the temperature response significantly too high. [Or, to summarize this more succiently: We have more evidence for a decent-sized climate sensitivity, and thus a reasonably-sized net positive feedback, than just the predictions from climate models.]
Whoops… Those first two quotes got garbled by my cutting-and-pasting. They should read: “Increase in tropical cyclone peak wind intensities: Likely over some areas” and “Increase in tropical cyclone mean and peak precipitation intensities: Likely, over some areas.”
I don’t have a cite handy but I read an interesting article about the 9/11 effect. There was a significant change in average temperature that was linked to the lack of aircraft vapor trails.
I’m not hugely worried about temperature change or co2 because we have the technology to alter both now.
Oh I read that too. I don’t have a link but I think it was in the Bughouse Gazette.
So you’re saying that no planes flying over the USA but continuing as normal just about everywhere else for I think – 2-3 weeks? – You contend that this caused a “significant change” in average temperature? Average of what? Two weeks? Two days? Two centuries? And where-- just in the USA? Or worldwide?
Just because an idea seems pretty far out there doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Continental drift comes to mind. Of course, in this case, it is easily proved wrong, yet the disproving of this idea adds another datum.
I was using “far out” as a euphemism. It is wrong…and it is not even an original wrong idea. It is one that the evidence has already shown is wrong.
Do you have a cite for that? TIA
Actually, the effect that they measured was not a change in average temperature but a change (increase) in the difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures. Here is one media story about it. The paper itself is available here [PDF file]. (I also think some other scientists were skeptical of their results because the time period also corresponded with having a large part of the country under a strong high pressure system with clear skies…and I am not sure what the resolution of this has been or whether or not there has been a clear resolution.)
What technology are you referring to? I think I have heard of one or two demonstrations of technology to remove CO2 from the air but nothing that I know of has been demonstrated to work on a large scale and be cost-effective. As for technology to change temperatures, there have been some “geo-engineering” solutions discussed, such as injecting aerosols into the stratosphere but, again, we have the problems of cost-effectiveness and also the additional problems of side-effects or ineffectiveness of such approaches. See, for example, the discussion in this RealClimate post on the geoengineering talks at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting last December.
You know, don’t you, jshore that you are educating a lot more people than you are debating with. In fact, my own learning curve has improved so much since brazil84 began his debunking of global warming it almost seems like I should send him a token of my appreciation.
My thanks to you.
Tris
In the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, Working Group I, see Section 9.6 and Box 10.2.
Yes, that’s what I was talking about and I described it as an average for want of a better word.
We have the technology to scrub CO2 if necessary and we are already altering cloud cover without trying. Jet engines and water injection are old technology so it’s not a stretch to go back to it using a subsidized program. Water could be carried as freight and dispersed during routine commercial flights.
Personally, I am still undecided on the AGW issue and gathering data all the time. My biggest hurdle is believing that, even if the worst AGW predictions are true, that there would be catastrophic consequences. The reverse I can easily see - the next ice age would definitely be catastrophic - and I’m wondering if we should be dumping all the CO2 into the atmosphere we can in order to stave off that dire possibility.
However, that said, I greatly appreciate the scholarly approach from jshore, and others, in educating the ignorant among us (especially me). I did find a link in a previous thread, in one of brazil84’s posts, that I thought was fairly persuasive. I never saw any comments about it so I was wondering if someone (jshore?) might take a few minutes to review it and comment.
Here is the link.
Indeed we do. That’s the problem, dude!
Thing is, when (natural) ice ages come, they come on slow. Not “catastrophically.” The glaciers build up and creep south over a matter of decades or centuries. Lots of time to get used to the changes. But we have no precedent for comparison, not in all of Earth’s history, for the way humanity is now affecting the atmosphere and climate. The changes might well come on catastrophically, that is to say, really fast – not all-in-a-week fast like in The Day After Tomorrow, but fast enough to affect the value of your coastal real estate portfolio within your lifetime. Or maybe not. We just don’t know.
Thanks for the kind words, Tris.
On that note, see a very funny SF novel, by Larry Niven, David Pournelle and Michael Flynn, based on that idea. In this story, set in the early 21st Century, environmental extremists have come to power in the U.S. Not long after, a new Ice Age has made Canada uninhabitable and America unpleasant. The Ice Age was due in the normal course of events anyway, but the blame is still put on the ecofreaks-in-power because – in addition to putting an effective stop to technological progress, ruining the economy and ending the space program – they put a stop to global warming just when it would have come in useful.
Like I said, a very funny novel, and not only in the ways the authors intended.