Global Warming progressing far faster than previously thought

The problem I have with this view is that it assumes that weather isn’t variable at all. We get things like a 100 year flood, or a 150 year hurricane season, or such, where it’s few and far between - but it does happen. I can look back in my own area’s history and see that about every 15 [+/- 2 years] years, we get a few very suck-ass winters in a row. On a longer term, using weather records, about every 30 years we also get so much snow that the city shuts down.

I don’t expect this to vanish simply because of 1 C of warming. I’d be suspicious of it at the 2 C level, with milder coming into play in the 2.5 - 3.5 C range and “spring winters” in the 3.5 - 4 C range, with elevating dryness up from there.

Don’t conflate single or short term events with what’s going on on the global scene. I warn the activists that saying Katrina is the earf trying to hurt us back of the same thing. (And I strain my eyes when people go “We will have a Katrina every year from here on out.” on the network news channels, too.)

As for the variable trends, I’d be careful doing that. When I look at temperature series, I don’t look at 1970 as a baseline. I look at the current available year for a baseline (so it becomes a negative or positive change compared to the most recent yearly average) and always look at graphs for as many years as I can. Finding patterns in select data is very, very easy. Especially if you use simple linear trending.

Using a polynomial trend helps you identify what can be short term downturns much easier. We all know that it raised, but while it was raising there was fluctuations. If there were 10 down turns this century that lasted 5-10 years, then we are either an extreme version of that same trend due to a confluence of events we can’t explain or we are breaking the mold. We don’t have enough evidence to predict either way, unfortunately.

Since we are holding relatively steady on average temperatures, though, I think that something we don’t understand is going on. We can accept that and still understand that things are a-changing.

I can also accept that some political shenanigans are afoot in regards to the climate emails, but, to be honest, I have several scientists in my family (not in climate science) and their fields are equally…erm…special. Arguments, rivalries, and claims like what we found in the climategate and climategate 2 emails can be found all over the place, not only in modern science but in old timey science as well.

If you purchased a flex fuel vehicle, odds are good that you can simply pipe in a new fuel and flash the ECM to time for it properly. I had a setup on my old car that would run LPG, Natural Gas, Gasoline, or E85. All I’d do is switch a dial in my dash to tell the ECM what to time for and to power that system’s pump/regulator (E85 and Gas obviously shared system-space, but were timed differently.)

My new car isn’t Flex Fuel compatible, but I got it for low gas burn at long commutes. I was looking into getting FF components installed and it was prohibitively expensive.

Climate is weather plus energy budget times time. Thus, looking at “climate” in terms of how polar air is affecting my city, today, is most useful when looking at in context of long term trends.

Thus, you need long term records and historical instances of that same thing happening, which is why I requested data on that. Saying “Well, they studied temperature and wind.” is like me studying quartz and shale and watching a volcano erupt and then saying I understand how the earth works. I need much more data than that, and we need more data to prove that the warming air is causing the so-called “polar vortex” when we had similar coldness in our weather 30-50 years ago, depending on region. If the warming caused it, it should have caused it back then which means the warming has changed nothing. If it didn’t cause it, what caused it, then? And what mechanism drives frosty air into the US in “normal” climate times?

The “they” are not climate scientists, nor are the experts that look at that data, you still need to post a single researcher from GISS, NASA, NOAA, scientific American that agrees that there is no natural variation that was expected or that the cherry picks you are doing are proper.

No, he is talking about the whole winter, not specific locations.

Ummm… yes, I do understand Cohen at al. Perhaps we should see who is making unsubstantiated claims here.

This is what you said:

This is what I said:

This is what the Cohen paper says:

Which is to say, there are (as I said several times now) areas of regional cooling, but also significant areas of boreal winter warming, and boreal winters on average are **NOT **getting colder.

And I have to mention this gem, also said by you in the above-linked post:

… now reflecting an apparent lack of understanding of the basic thermodynamics governing the earth’s energy budget, more or less on a par with the water-vapor-as-a-forcing nonsense. Note this statement, from the part of Cohen’s paper that talks about the possible dynamics influencing boreal winters:

You do realize that the AO is by definition an internal variability, right? It’s an index of atmospheric pressure differentials that determines the degree to which Arctic air penetrates lower latitudes. Its effect on the energy budget is precisely zero, and its persistent effect on global average temperature – in the absence of magic – must therefore also be zero.

Not quite, climate refers to the mean observed in a period of time. And that is why having even just monthly records helps a lot.

Long term records are available thanks to paleoclimate.

But that is once again demanding weather, not what the main point of climate, what they can tell you is only the likelihood of a weather phenomenon can take place. The problem here is that you are demanding certainty on an area that was already acknowledged as not being as precise as you want regarding extreme weather events, what researchers can tell is that we will see less cold days, but the chances will remain that we will see weather extremes like the polar vortex some day again.

Now, about ocean rise, more global warming, ocean acidification, and the intensity of several weather extremes (all that energy and material - more water vapor in some areas - has to go somewhere when a hurricane comes along) there is more certainty.

This is falling for the fallacy many contrarians make, nature is still the cause, the problem is that the warming caused by humans is making many of those phenomenons worse as time goes by. It was like Kerry Emmanuel reported once, humans are not the cause of a hurricane, but all that extra energy and material has increased in the background thanks to us, one does not need to be an expert to figure out where all that is going when a hurricane comes along. We are loading the dice.

The mean of what? Oh, that’s right: Weather. Climate is the mean of weather. Thus, if we are looking to explain why it’s frosty cold, right now, and the answer is “climate change” we need more data on how climate change is affecting the weather, and looking for data from the past, which would reflect what climate was in the past also, provides a greater building block to climate models for the future.

So, as I said, and your own source said in a simpler way, climate is weather plus energy budget over time. The energy budget is a key study area of climate science for a reason: If the sun becomes white hot (Angry God Syndrome?) and we get hit with three times the energy, that significantly affects the underlying weather that means into the climate. If energy budget and resulting temperature were completely useless to climate, we wouldn’t spend any time researching historical temperatures through trees and ice cores. The sad part is, temperature is half the picture and the only half of the picture we can reliably derive or have direct historical records for.

Remember that 11,700 year temperature recreation (Marcott et al, I think off the top of my head)? We had a couple hundred years of weather roughly as hot (+/- 1C of today) as we are experiencing now about 500-1,000 years after the end of the glaciation – but we have no idea what drove it there or what caused it to drop back down, again. Without those important contexts, we have no idea how much of our current climate is being screwed by CO2. We know we’ve been warming far longer than our industrial age, and some think that we should have dropped back into a second LIA, but it’s hard to know for sure what’s actually supposed to be “normal” right now because we lack this understanding of the climate’s underlying weather.

It is a well known weakness that our science community is trying to fix.

Long temperature derivations are available thanks to paleoclimate studies. How those temperatures got to be there isn’t. This is a well known failing of climate studies - we can look at various data sets (trees, ice cores, etc) and get the temperature and get a climactic temperature mean – but that’s half the picture.

Climate Scientists are trying to tease this apart and spend some decent time trying to figure out how a volcano affected the actual weather (and not just the temperature) so that we can figure out how to make their models betterer.

:dubious: So, climate is the mean of weather…but we can’t ask for data on weather? We can’t research it to help us understand the climate better?

I’m not asking for certainty, I’m asking for data. I will ask again: Do you have more data, from which a comparison or maybe even a hypothesis (if it’s a lot of data) can arise that would better define the climate model by making a better model of the underlying weather patterns that compose the climate mean?

I will say this to you, again: When I ask for data it’s for research. You have at least 12.9 million links sitting around on climate change topics and I tend to enjoy reading most of them. I know you have this many, I’ve seen you use them. :wink: If you have something handy, I’d love to read it. If you don’t have that information in front of you, you can just say “I’m sorry, I don’t have anything on that topic.” Telling me I shouldn’t be looking in the first place isn’t useful.

Yes, but often what we think is “somewhere” isn’t where it really goes. We will eventually find the dust bin of excess energy, but not all of the energy we currently think should be flinging tornados, hurricanes, and killer bees our way do what we think they should. We are missing components of the system and if those components are bleeding energy out, we are very much poorer for not knowing what those are.

…Understanding nature, and reviewing the data, will actually tell us how much we are loading the dice. Are they leaded to only show snake eyes and get us screwed or are they loaded to only make rain harder and snow rarer? We have a gap of understanding and everyone knows it. I certainly didn’t claim that nature is somehow king and that we somehow don’t have any impact.

Well, then I welcome you to:

  1. Point out existing peer-reviewed research addressing this hypothesis
  2. Do the legwork and produce your own, and submit it for peer review.

It’s the same thing as when I was presented earlier with someone who earnestly denied that CO2’s absorption spectrum allowed it to have any impact on global temperatures. I don’t know a whole lot about CO2’s absorption spectrum, but I do know where to go to look for peer-reviewed papers on the subject, and it turns out he was full of shit. Similarly, your hypothesis is interesting. I, like most people here, don’t really have the knowledge to critique it effectively, though. So why don’t you compile your data and publish it in a peer-reviewed journal instead of trying to take shortcuts? I mean, it doesn’t help your case that wolfpup sort of destroyed your hypothesis in the last thread (and you continued to trumpet it anyways), but it would be an interesting start, rather than a complete waste of time.

Yes! There is no actual scientific debate whether or not the earth is warming. That “debate” goes on in the tabloid press, on FOX News, and in the blogosphere. The “no warming in 16 years” crowd belong in a list alongside the “CO2 is plant food” crowd, the “Medieval Warm Period was warmer therefore current warming is natural” crowd, and for good measure the “Climategate proves it’s all a conspiracy” crowd. You know. Stupid, misguided, and/or crazy people.

But not a show stopper. Remember, that for the climate change contrarians somehow it should stop those darn scientists.

Plenty of resources over here on climate:

The point stands though, you are indeed demanding that climate researchers become weathermen, however as long as we understand what is the difference we can look at the work done on integrating weather and climate models, on that front it is mostly the Met office in the UK the ones that are doing a lot of work integrating their weather model with their climate ones.

AFAIK this is related to the increase of resolution that we are getting from the improved computer power now available; but, once again as Richard Alley would say, just because we are just getting there and more research is needed in that weather front it does not mean that we should stop or wait to do changes as the more likely problems that are coming in a warming world are still there.

Why am I remembering this? Once again, you have tried to turn a request for information into a rant about deniers.

All of which are temperature models. I’ll just take this to mean “No, Farin, I don’t have the data you asked for.” See? Simply.

:dubious: Climate is more than temperature. Temperature is a good indicator, but it’s half the picture.

I know that the Met has spent 20+ years trying to build bigger and better models that integrate weather and climate. But if you work with it, it switches to different models based on the time span you input. Each time scale is a separate model: 100-11 years, 10 - 1 years, 1 year to 1 month, 1 month to 7 days, 7 days.

And, I haven’t looked at it in a few years, but I doubt it suddenly has historical weather records for the arctic.

…When have I said “stop” to anything? While I don’t agree with your particular strategy (which I won’t go into here), I by no means think we should “stop.” Why do you keep arguing that point?

Because, once again, one side is not relying on science. I know that you are not a denier, but I have to look at the audience and posters here.

And you should know that even if you do not want to see it that way that insistence on talking about the weather is a typical maneuver from the deniers, just saying.

I feel I’m up front about what’s understood and where improvement is needed in most of my posts. The weather connection to climate is one of those areas for multiple reasons. What I don’t do is go “HEY THEY CAN’T EXPLAIN KATRINA/POLAR VORTEX/HYSTERECTOMIES THEY ARE FRAUDS.” I go "They can’t explain the polar vortex and I’m interested in learning more about this weather pattern, too bad we don’t have weather pattern histories as it would help the science very much. frowny face frowny face "

If someone were to extrapolate that conclusion from the limitations, I’d be the first to teach them that a lack of understanding doesn’t negate what is understood.

Once again your posting the strawman of reasonable and rational discourse. No progress can be made when you allow logic to enter towards your posting. As Richard Alley says “climate is what we make of it and if you are denying climate then you are denying 10,000 years of paleoclimate histories that tell us the climate did just do what it did just do.”

As pointed by many scientists, it is important to figure that out, but it should never stop us from going forward on controlling emissions.

Again, just check what Richard Alley is telling us:

I know it is a little bit maddening, but I do remember how difficult it was for the IPCC to keep out the best information on the acceleration of the ice loss in the arctic because it was not conclusive back in 2007, sure, it would had matched most of the ice loss that was in the end observed and the IPCC would had an early warning about the ice loss acceleration, but suppose the IPCC had not been conservative, told us about the likely acceleration but it had failed to pan out? Then not only clerical errors like the Himalaya ice loss date would be fodder for the contrarians but also a real mistake.

What Alley reports there is a similar situation now regarding weather extremes, AFAIK there is a lean towards those extremes becoming more prevalent than just more intense, but there are many studies that are a mixed bag.

The point here is however this one: it is bad enough that we will have to deal with rising oceans, acidification, desertification and weather extremes that are harsher thanks to the background energy and material out there in several regions.

I do not think we should continue with the experiment of not controlling our emissions if on top of all that there is a chance that we will get **also **even more wild weather extremes.

https://www2.ucar.edu/news/backgrounders/hurricanes-typhoons-cyclones

Edited to add: so no RaftPeople, Richard Alley did not said that.

Cite on that quote, please.

The rest of your post is uselessly hostile and irrelevant. If you want to fight ignorance you don’t introduce more of it to a discussion or debate.

You are arguing points I haven’t made with me. Please stop doing this. You have plenty of real fodder in this thread to rail against.

It was joke. It was nonsense.

GIGObuster was doing to you the exact same thing he has done to me and many others for a loooong time which is to continually not even grasp the point being made and then counter it with a rebuttal of an extreme statement that wasn’t even made in the first place.
I don’t think it’s possible to introduce more ignorance into a debate/discussion in which valid points (even from climate model scientists themselves) are argued against in a knee-jerk fashion without even grasping their validity or relevance.

[ol]
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Sorry, but as you can see from your previous reply to another that claims to be in the middle it is clear that **BrainGlutton **was correct, a lot of the discussion going on where it counts is not in the golden middle, and indeed FX did not had a good point there.

The point stands anyhow, thinking that it is “too bad we don’t have weather pattern histories as it would help the science very much” is not really much to the point and once again, a lot of the items in that line of criticism is coming from denial sources.

(post #112):

In the real world Winters are no more or less relevant than the rest of the year, and so should be assigned equal weight in calculating average global temperature. If Winter is defined as Dec-Jan-Feb then Winter should be weighted 25%, just like the other seasonal 3-month periods.

“Global warming” means that eventually average global temperatures will rise at all latitudes for every month of the year. It does not mean that the timing of the increase will be evenly distributed

For the record I am undecided about AGW, although I am inclined to believe it is taking place.

Excuse me, but in post #87 you repeatedly drew attention to Winter cooling going back to 1988 and further, and it was no strawman to provide rebuttal in the form of graphics illustrating full-year 12-month trends rather than partial year Dec-Jan-Feb trends.

Don’t think so, what it is clear in your case though is that just like a contrarian you will get stuck forever with the impression that I did not grasp the point, I actually did and I said what was needed also: Schneider would roll in his grave if he had see you only mentioning just a quote were he explained about direct experimentation not being possible with models and omitting all his lifetime work of observational experiments with models.

FWIW I got it, and thought it was funny.