It is not magical at all, one of the points at issue. In fact, it is well established that 1998 had the highest global temperature and April 1998 was the highest month at +0.773 C. Today, March 2006, the global temperature is +0.192 C.
The only argument people who believe in global warming have is that 1998 was a “spike?” El Nino doesn’t explain it from an energy balance, land-ocean temperature measurements nor a global effect? Otherwise, there has been no global warming in 8 years. They cannot explain where the energy came from resulting in the global lower troposphere temperature of +0.773 C in April 1998 nor why global temperatures have been lower since then?
What is clear to me is you are not a statistician and have no basis what-so-ever to to throw out the 12 months of 1998 data. The data is no where near even 2 sigmas, let alone 3.
Who said they “believe in” global warming? Much like evolution, global warming is both a fact and a theory.
Certainly there are people who take undue, spiritual-like faith in the phenomenon and mechanism of global warming, but the vast majority of people who follow the issue from a phenomenal point of view simply observe long-term trends in temperature rise and weigh the usefulness of several competing theories to try to explain the data.
And yet, there has been global warming in the past 7 years, and in the past 9 years. We’re warmer now than we were in 1997, and we’re also warmer now than we were in 1999. Why are neither of those facts significant, but the comparison to 1998 is?
What facts are you citing? March 2006 lower troposphere temperature is +0.192 C and the land-ocean is +0.049 C. Do you want to cite how many months out of the time periods you quoted were higher / lower?
Could you explain why you think that El Nino doesn’t explain the 1998 spike? As far as I can tell, your objections seem to be based on the assumption that all parts of the ocean have to be in thermal equilibrium, so that if the ocean surface is warmer then the whole ocean must be warmer, so the atmosphere should have been colder in order to avoid postulating the spontaneous creation of energy.
But AFAICT, your assumption isn’t true. Different parts of the ocean don’t always have to be in thermal equilibrium. The higher-than-normal temps in the ocean surface during the 1998 El Nino simply come from losing less heat than normal to upwelling colder waters.
Very true.
Whoa there, nobody’s suggesting that it should be thrown out. The argument is merely that it can be adequately explained without contradicting the hypothesis of a general warming trend over the past several decades.
If, since the 1990s, my salary chugged along nicely at a 4% annual increase, my annual income would graph out as a nice straight line, showing the increase. Suppose in 1998 I sold my house, thus creating a spike in my annual income, but not in my salary. A graph starting in 1998 would show that my annual income had actually gone down in the last 8 years.
Beechnut’s graph is the equivalent to that last graph. It does not show total energy in the earth’s system, just in one part of it, the lower troposphere. El Niño is the sale of my house, conversion of one for of energy (or cash) into a form that is shown on that graph.
I don’t understand your problem with conservation of energy … if a local part of the ocean becomes warmer from other sources in the ocean … it doesn’t change the GLOBAL temperature as is shown in the land-ocean temperature graph. So what caused the GLOBAL increase in lower troposphere (air) temperature?
This is obviously very difficult to get across … if CO2 is going up and SUV’s are still being drive in larger numbers, how can the global temperature not have gone up in 8 years, has even dropped? How is that possible?
Anologies … when you have a fever it goes up, stays the same or it goes down. It doesn’t take a respite for 8 years …
But global land-ocean temperature measurements only take into account the surface of the land and ocean. The deep ocean temperatures are not being measured in these obervations.
So if, due to El Nino, the ocean surface stays warmer than normal and the deep ocean stays cclder than normal, what we will measure is a noticeable temporary rise—i.e., a spike—in global land-ocean temperature.
The deep oceans are cooler? You are violating the 3rd law of thermodynamics with statements like that? The surface can never become warmer due to the ocean depths water.
Um, the surface becomes warmer than normal in an El Nino due to having less contact than normal with the colder deeper water. Because of less efficient upwelling from the thermocline.
Recently there was an episode on Nova which put forth some theories about global warming.
The show transcript isn’t up yet, but basically it said (IIRC) that a couple of researchers had independently discovered that although there was a small but measurable amount of global warming in the past few decades, the actual amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface had decreased by a much greater amount.
They had been measuring the sunlight, the energy from the sun that made it to the surface, and were surprised to see such an amazing drop (something like 22% drop in 20 years I think it was). Yet there was still global warming.
Their conclusion was that particles in the upper atmosphere were reflecting the sunlight, reducing the amount that penetrated the atmosphere, yet the increase in greenhouse gasses still had a net warming effect. If for some reason the particles were eliminated from the atmosphere, the greenhouse effect would be exponentially worsened, possibly to a runaway.
Click through the links, I know Nova isn’t the last word on global warming, but it’s worth pondering.
The troposhere is every bit as “local” as the other entities being measured; it is just a larger locality. The troposphere exchanges energy with the oceans (which exchange energies from surface areas to deep areas) and with the stratosphere, as well as with the surface of the land, itself. When we compute averages of the “global” troposphere, were are still limiting ourselves to one “locale,” we have just focused on the air at a certain height/depth surrounding the lands and oceans and surrounded, in turn, by the less dense air above it.
In addition, the conservation of energy has to be much more carefully defined than we have done so far in this thread. The Earth is not a closed system as it constantly receives energy from the sun while radiating off energy into space. In addition, the energy at the surface cna be affected by reserves from below the mantle. before we try to determine anything based on conservation of energy, we probably need to figure out how much is being added to and subtracted from the system each day.
Not if the land-ocean temperature doesn’t include the deep ocean temperature. Which it doesn’t, since the overwhelming majority of ocean temperature gauges are at the surface.
In fact, I think the point of confusion regards this idea of “cold moving up” from the ocean depths. The El Nino phenomenon is more intuitively understood if one considers heat moving down in a non-Nino year, but far less so in a Nino year such that it stays at the surface and moves in to the atmosphere instead. In 1998, a very small amount of heat moved down into the depths, causing the spike which skews the graph (and which it is statistically incompetent to use as a starting point in a graph).
