I’ve got an even more exciting piece of data for you, a few weeks ago here in Rochester, we had a couple of days that were colder than probably the average temperature here for all of January. Therefore, it is clear to me that the claim that there is some supposed effect due to the sun and the inclination of the earth’s axis relative to it that climate scientists call “seasons” is a bunch of makarkey! After all, these scientists claim that this “seasons” effect should produce warmer temperatures in April than in January and we clearly see that this was not the case!
On a more serious note, Beechnut, not only is it understood that there is internal variability in the climate system, but in fact the same climate models that predict a general rise in temperatures due to increasing levels of CO2 show this variability. I.e., if you run a climate model with increasing levels of CO2, the global temperature does not rise smoothly, but rather has the same sort of jiggles up-and-down with a general warming trend as is seen in the real world. (In fact, one of the tests of the validity of climate models is how well they are able to reproduce the internal variability that is seen in the real climate system.) So, your suggestion that this is in somehow in contradiction with the theory of CO2 causing general warming is demonstrably false.
As others have noted, the real news is that in 1998 we had the so-called “El Nino of the Century” that produced a huge spike in global temperatures that was like 2 standard deviations above anything seen previously and yet only 7 years later, we nearly had as high an annual global temperature as 1998 (by NASA’s surface measurements even a tiny bit higher although somewhat lower by CRU measurements) despite the fact the the El Nino - La Nina index for the year was nearly neutral. So, it has taken only about 7 years for a year that was an extreme outlier at the time to be considered barely above normal now! And, while 1998 may still retain the record for the warmest year in the instrumental record (again, depending on whose data you use), the years 2002-2005 hold all the other places in the top-5.
Just to clarify when I say, “In fact, one of the tests of the validity of climate models is how well they are able to reproduce the internal variability that is seen in the real climate system,” I mean in a statistical sense…i.e., that the variability, or “noise”, is similar in magnitude and frequency distribution in the model and the real world. I don’t mean that the model simulation actually has the exact same pattern of jiggles…In fact, if you run a climate model twice with small perturbations to the initial conditions, you generally will not even get the same pattern of jiggles between the two runs, showing that these jiggles themselves are chaotic features. (Or, at least some of them are. There are also what one might characterize as jiggles that are due to known forcings such as the dip in temperatures in 1992 that was produced by the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, which cooled the climate for a few years…as major volcanic eruptions tends to do…because of all the aerosol particles that were injected into the upper atmosphere where they reflected some sunlight.)
(These damn dynamical systems with their chaotic variability! What a pain in the neck from the scientific-prediction point of view! I say we just get rid of the earth’s atmosphere entirely; it’ll make the mathematical models so much simpler. ;))
All of them show a distinct warming trend over the past 7 years, though. Still looks like 1998 is a data spike due to that year’s exceptionally warm El Nino.
Sadly, I think it’s become pretty clear that Beechnut never actually was listening, and is very unlikely to start now. Good try though, folks.
Beechnut, it is not a matter a “spin”. It is simply a matter of not being ridiculous. The theory of anthropogenic global warming does not state that the climate system is completely slave to CO2 levels and has no internal variability or sensitivity to other factors. And, in fact, no climate model worth its salt shows such unphysical behavior.
You are simply setting up a strawman. You could use the same cherrypicking of data to disprove the theory that there are climatic seasons or to do all sorts of things with data that has any amount of noise (i.e., internal variability) and/or the presence of other factors in it.
This is just plain silly and that is why no serious scientist has made your argument in any sort of peer-reviewed forum and, in fact, why all the recent studies (such as the one released just in the last few days from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and already linked to in this thread by another poster) have concluded that the climate continues to warm.
You’ll find you get a much warmer reception here in the SDMB if you make intelligent arguments rather than just silly ones relying on the cherry-picking of data. People here will not be fooled by such sophistry.
That’s funny, I see a very definite trend of warming beginning in January '99. The last seven years are clearly part of the period “over the last eight years,” so your statement makes no sense.
Now, if you want to try to persuade us of some point, take your data sources and plot the last ten or twelve years rather than using as the arbitrary beginning the known spike year of 1998. Do your numbers trend upward or downward from 1996 or 1994?
Sure there is; the long-term trend in the anomaly has been about 0.012 degrees C per year for several decades. However, it gets lost in the noise of short-term transients that can swing the temperature up or down by half a degree, or more, in a single year.
I wrote a function that combined a small, linear rise with a random cosine function, specifically y = 0.012(x-1979) + 3/(10cos(pirnd)), where the value of the cosine function was limited to ±1.
This is the plot of that function for eight values of x. Looks very similar to your plot. Do you see an increasing trend? If not, how is that possible? My data was constructed such that y explicitly increases with increasing x. For reference, I’ve also plotted the same data for approximately 50 datapoints.
Maybe only because 1999 was “low” do you see a trend … the 12 months of 1998 actually existed and can not be thrown based on any statistical basis … therefore, the conclusion stands.
That even real trends, if sufficiently small, can not be discerned if the resolution of your measuring device is lower than than the magnitude of the changes you expect to measure, nor if they disappear into the noise of other phenomena. In these cases, it’s pointless to draw conclusions based on such a small sample size. However, if small trends are sustained for sufficiently long, they will become ultimately become measurable, no matter how poor the resolution of your device.
You couldn’t measure the length of a brick very well with a high end GPS device, nor if the the corners were broken or rounded, but put enough of them in a line, and even a cheap GPS device could tell you the length of the Great Wall of China.
She would presumably be basing it on a graph like this or one like this. You don’t see it as a spike because you steadfastly exclude all the data before the spike so that your data sets always start around the top of the spike.
Why are you continuing to waste everybody’s time with bogus arguments? Do you have any evidence that anyone here on this board is buying into it?
By the way, you keep making these statements implying that people are throwing out data. Noone is throwing out data. That NASA GISS graph I linked to in the previous plot shows that the 5-year running mean has continued to rise significantly between 1998 and 2003 (the last year for which one can compute a 5-year running mean since we only have full year data through 2005). They did not throw out any data. The CRU people don’t explain what their black trend curve is exactly but it is presumably some similar type of smoothing.
However, if we want to play connect-the-dots like you do, I can show you that the temperature is actually rising much faster than the IPCC predicts. For example, taking the same UAH satellite data, the temperature rose 0.87 C degrees in the 9 years from April 1989 to April 1998…which is a trend that over the 110 year period (1990-2100) that the IPCC forecasts would yield a temperature rise of 10.6 C, which is double the high-end prediction in the IPCC TAR report! Better start loading up the ark!
Does this at all help you understand why it is so silly to cherry-pick data like this?
Beechnut, you are being intellectually dishonest and incompetent in refusing to consider any graph other than one starting in 1998’s El Nino of the century. Even then, I cited an article suggesting 2005 was even warmer.
You showed an article with words, no data. The 3 global temperature anomaly measurements by NASA / GISS etc. … the global lower troposhere, land-ocean and met.stations data do NOT inicate that what so ever!
Please provide the monthly data they use for the 1998 / 2005 comparison and reference.
