I suspect those who are in denial get their information from blogs, rather than keeping up with current research. Especially those who don’t realize why theory predicts winter warming.
The unexpected colder winters is of course being used by the political minded to try and cast doubt on all climate science. Hell, anything and everything is used by the political factions, who could care less about the science.
Weather is not climate. And a suggestion is not good enough to dismiss other research.
The evidence is already here that you do rely on denialist and debunked sources. And the last blogs you called the scientists quoted “nobodies”
BTW the last “nobody” I quoted from “The Conversation” was Andrew Glikson, earth and paleo-climate scientist at Australian National University. Just like in the case of your failed attempt at disparaging the scientists at Realclimate it is clear that it is mostly ignorance what is driving the dismissal of what scientists are telling us.
That’s not the problem here. If one looks at any of the legitimate papers mentioned here, or anything else in the contemporary mainstream literature, none of them are taking a metaphorical ruler to some arbitrary temperature graph of the past 10, or 11, or 12½ or 15¾ years and squinting to see if the graph is going up or down. This is childish nonsense. It’s incontrovertible that the planet has been warming in the post-industrial era at a rate that greatly exceeds any gradient typically found in natural variations, it’s incontrovertible that CO2 exerts a significant climate forcing, it’s incontrovertible that there is presently a huge and sudden CO2 spike unprecedented in millions of years, and virtually no one in the mainstream climate science community disputes the dominant role of human activities in post-industrial warming. These questions don’t even arise. The real research questions are focused on issues like more accurately quantifying climate sensitivity and, in the short term, better understanding the impacts of internal variabilities. The entire premise of the OP is a misdirection.
It’s unfortunate that you appear to be among them.
You also had some other priceless stuff about how CO2 couldn’t possibly be an effective GHG because it only absorbs in the same wavelengths as water vapor, but I can’t be bothered looking for that now. Perhaps you would care to clarify your views. I have had no problem being very clear about my position on AGW, for example here and here and here. Your position has been an apparent mass of contradictions, but here’s your chance to clear the air. Please provide your views on AGW in several paragraphs in your own words, so that we know exactly where you stand. By “AGW” I mean the role of human activities in post-industrial warming. This shouldn’t be hard. I’ve done it in dozens of posts.
Please make sure that you cover – as I have – the important things like the role of CO2, the role of feedbacks like water vapor, the role of solar variations, and your view of the credibility of climate science as published by the National Academy of Sciences and the IPCC.
That would go a long way toward clarifying what at this point seems to be a very ambiguous and constantly shifting position on your part. Thanks in advance.
They certainly do when the trend is going up. Then we’re treated to non-stop dissertations on the proof before our very eyes that global warming is happening. Every time there’s a storm that does damage we’re told that this is the cost of global warming. I agree, it’s childish nonsense. But that cuts both ways, doesn’t it? If a 17 year trend isn’t long enough to disprove global warming, it also is not long enough to prove it. And even if we’re in a short-term cooling trend in the middle of a longer warming trend, the fact that it’s cooling means that any storm that is happening today cannot be triggered or amplified by higher than average warming.
Yes, they do. There is considerable debate in the scientific community on the magnitude of the forcing. Much depends on on the response of the entire climate system in response to the CO2 forcing.
There is also much legitimate debate over what constitutes ‘significant’ warming, as this requires a cost-benefit analysis and not everyone agrees on where the line should be drawn, despite your side’s efforts to demand lock-step obedience not just to the science, but to your judgment as to the necessary and proper policy responses to it.
While I agree that these are important and valid questions. But these are where the debate starts - not where it ends.
I think you greatly overestimate the certainty we have when it comes to understanding the climate system. Climate scientists treat this problem as understandable through the traditional reductionist scientific method - if you can understand the effects that go into the process, you can understand the process. Break the problem down, solve each little piece, and when you find all the significant pieces and understand them, you understand the process and can then determine how to fix it.
The problem is that climate is a complex adaptive system, and these are notoriously opaque to standard reductionist discovery. That’s because the structure of the system is an emergent property of a highly complex interconnected network of decision machines, and it can and will behave in very unpredictable ways. And such systems are resistant to reductionism because they are much more than the sum of their parts. You can see the hardware, but not the software.
There isn’t just one ‘feedback’, or a dozen. There are cascades of feedbacks that pulse through the system, causing readjustment everywhere. And every time it’s different, hence the ‘adaptive’ part.
Understanding this behavior is much harder with climate than it is with, say, neuropsychology or immunology, both of which deal with complex systems as well. In those fields, you can do controlled studies. You can instrument the system out the wazoo. You can attempt to falsify results. You can study the constituents of the system under electron microscopes and FMRI machines that let you want the information propagate around in real time.
The climate is such a system, but it operates on geologic time scales as well as smaller ones. Our understanding of how it works is in its infancy as compared to say, our understanding of how the immune system functions - which isn’t all that much either.
We all know how noisy climate data is - part of that noise is simply the unpredictable and sometimes random ways in which the climate responds to outside forcings. One response may cause a change that makes the next response to such an event completely different.
One common characteristic of complex systems is that they are inherently stable - it’s an emergent property. That means they are dominated by negative feedbacks, and which makes me somewhat skeptical that there is a large positive feedback out there just waiting to tip us over the abyss. That feedback may be there, but it may be just one of a huge collection of feedbacks of which the overall impact is neutral or negative.
I’ve been reading a lot of literature lately on complex systems and the challenges of understanding and modeling them as part of my job. It’s striking that in less politically-charged areas of field there is widespread understanding of the uncertainty involved in any prediction of complex behavior. Predictive models are treated with suspicion and predictions are generally couched in caveats - so much so that it’s generally felt that the true value of these models is to help understand how the system behaves - not to be able to predict its exact state in the future.
If you want to understand how an ant colony emerges from ant rules, you can make a hypothesis, model it, and see if the model does something that looks like an ant colony. That’s useful, but it doesn’t mean the model can predict where a real-world colony will form, what its food harvesting pattern will look like, What direction it will migrate in, how long it will survive, what final shape it will take, or much of anything else about its specific future properties.
But when it comes to climate science, the validity of the models are assumed to be a settled issue, and the uncertainties of the estimates are downplayed. And anyone who questions them is deemed a ‘denier’ and treated like a heretic.
Complex systems look simple on the surface and reveal ever-more complexity as you drill down into them. In most fields that study complex systems, that’s been the pattern. Problems that look simple reveal hidden complexities, and more appear, fractal-like, as you dive deeper.
But that didn’t happen with climate change. We went from “we should study this effect” to "We can predict not only the climate 100 years from now in our models, but we can predict what the economy will look like then, how much of a certain compound society will be emitting into the atmosphere over that time. And not only that, we can also predict what effect that change will have on the economy 100 years from now to a degree where we can assign dollar values to the economic cost of the damage.
I think the basic atmospheric physics is correct. I think we do know pretty well how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere, and what the forcing from the basic thermodynamics is. I know CO2 has risen, and would accept that the immediate effect on temperature is understood.
It’s the next part that I think is not so well understood. What are the secondary forcings? The tertiary ones? Where are all the feedback loops, including the ones between the secondary effects? How long does it take for the feedback to propagate? Is it even possible for us to really understand a complex process that operates on this scale, given the amount we still don’t understand about its mechanisms?
I think there are valid questions here. And it may be that even if the system is stable in geologic time frames, it’s still possible for a sudden forcing in the right way to seriously screw it up. So I’m not arguing against the possibility or even probability of AGW.
I just think maybe a touch more humility is called for in light of what we really understand about the climate system.
I also worry about the quality of the science in such a politically-charged and politically funded field - on both sides. For example, when it was starting to be obvious that the real trend for temperature was going lower than the model, scientists started madly looking for previously-unknown mechanisms to account for it. They found one, corrected the model accordingly, and problem solved.
But I wonder if as much effort would have been spent on finding such events if the temperature trend had matched or exceeded the forecast? And if not, what does that bias do to our overall perception of the state of the science? What if we’re committing more type I errors on one side and more type II errors on the other?
magellan, does that set your bafflement at ease?
FX asks for a definition of terms, but won’t be the first to show his hand, because obviously, you can’t play “gotcha ya” that way.
I wasn’t the one who directly equated cooling and warming. I’m not the one who cried “semantics”. You did. I merely pointed out that “little to no warming”=/= “cooling” and “(regional) neutral trend” =/= “(global) negative trend”.
But then I don’t expect someone who’s furiously defending the Escalator approach to be able to even begin to define his terms. Because then it becomes obvious that “trend” means "any short-term average starting with the highest possible value I can find and always less than one full repeat (22 years) of the short term 11-year solar cycle. "
Cite? Metastable, sure, but “inherently stable” needs justification (beyond just May’s '71 paper)
No, you’re right - ‘stable’ is not the right descriptor, and metastable is much better. A complex system can certainly have cascades of changes and make sudden moves from one state to another. A financial panic might be an example. Or an avalanche. Maybe climate could do the same thing.
I guess my reticence about large positive feedbacks is more specific to the climate system. It has survived for billions of years within a fairly narrow range of temperature changes despite receiving massive numbers of shocks, and with fairly widely varying atmospheric chemistry. It seems awfully robust.
Of course, it might be robust in geologic scales but be quite sensitive on human time scales, so we should still care and not just assume it can absorb whatever we throw at it.
As you so elegantly stated.
Going forth into the other issues quickly turns a discussion into a virtual malström, which like the actual maelstrom, seems to offer more suction than is encountered in reality.
The amount of time and energy devoted to resisting even the suggestion that the “global climate” isn’t warming at present, and fast, is certainly large.
Or, stalled out before step 1 even shows up.
While it’s a sidetrack, the semantic “games” being played are indicative of a basic problem with “climate science”, in the sense that a certain illogical rhetoric is employed by some, to avoid using the words cooler and colder.
When in fact what occurred, and it was just a day ago at most, was the objection to my bringing up a peer reviewed paper that once again, noted the trends.
Rather than let a semantic issue divide, logic says define and explain,even when it isn’t needed.
And that gets twisted by MrDibble into “FX asks for a definition of terms”, as well as describing the exchange like a game of poker.
What is happening, in regards to the debate, is quite interesting, since it is a constantly changing gish gallop of claims and reasoning. In essence, those denying are saying multiple things at once.
“It’s not happenig” at the same time as “it’s not important”.
Or the “it was warm in Sochi” so it can’t be happening.
Or the “you are picking a start point” defense.
And of course the “warming switched to the oceans” so surface temperature no longer matter defense.
And then we have the “it was expected” defense.
From a science POV we have the arctic causing cold winters, along with the Pacific cooling, the “trade winds buried the heat”, the “China coal pollution caused it”, and of course “the sun went quiet”, all explaining something that didn’t actually happen. Unless it did happen/
Meanwhile, the most interesting part of this is ignored.
OK it’s time to look at the NOAA/NCDC data, which clearly nobody has bothered to check yet.
What can we see with the NOAA data?
A: Global mean
B: Winter cooling trend
C: Warming trends for the other seasons
D: Winter trend bringing global mean down
and
E: Trends for each hemisphere
There is of course the ocean issue as well, but one thing at a time.
I can’t link you directly to the evidence, which is a real problem, and a shortcoming of the NCDC web site.
But based on the denial so far, it probably wouldn’t make any difference.
However, the NCDC has a great advantage over the GISS maps, and that is the ability to measure trends by Hemisphere. So instead of a global trend, you can see the Hemisphere trends, which really makes it clear that the NH winters are the reason for the global “cooling” trend, or the “lack of warming”, which is the PC way to say it.
In essence the NH land temperatures show drastic cooling.
2002-2013 the land trend for winter is -.63 C
That is for the NH land. Land+ocean is - .26 C
And once again looking at the cold season for the NH, the trend is - .30 C
Which means the annual trend is 0, which is amazing, but true. The warm season warming cancels the cold season cooling trend if you look at the NH land only. . If you add in the oceans, it changes. To a slight negative trend.
What?
Yep. The NH annual mean would be flat except for the ocean cooling. The SH is negative, no matter how you look at it. Added together it’s a slight “cooling”, or “no warming”.
But, and this is the amazing thing. The winter. The NH winter. It is cooling so fast, it is the reason for the entire global mean being slightly negative. If th NH winter was just flat, no trend, we would see global warming still taking place.
Remember, the NH shows a 3 degree per decade warming for the warm season! That is huge. But so is the - 3 C cooling. It’s pretty damn dramatic changes.
It’s most unexpected, and it’s most unpleasant.
To sum up, because it’s quite possible this will be my final post, there is something very strange going on with the global temperatures, and I don’t think it’s a measurement problem.
As Cohen et al points out, there is asymmetrical seasonal changes, and it’s not what AGW theory predicted.
And, it does NOT MEAN there is no climate change. In fact, it is more than likely climate change, and it may be exactly what some are saying. Warming from greenhouse gases and land use change, being fucked with by “natural” variations.
In essence, global warming at the same time as global cooling.
Which is just so fucked up.
You can check the figures for youself, don’t take my word for it.
NH land only trends, decade trends, 2002-2013
Winter - .63 C
Spring +.28 C
Summer +.30 C
Fall +.20 C
That’s the facts.
The models were dead wrong. Something unexpected is happening.
This does not mean human caused forcing is not happening. It means something unexpected happened. If it continues, it’s the worst possible climate change.
Hotter temperatures except for winter. Winters will be colder with more snow.
That is a very bad sort of climate change. If it’s being caused by CO2, we are truly fucked. If it’s a combo of things, then nobody in charge actually has a handle on climate science.
My view is cautious skepticism, since I can’t tell you why it’s happening. I suspect the early cold pole hypothesis, combined with a cooling Pacific and low solar heating, but I can’t prove it.
The thing is, I can’t find any past period that matches this sort of trend change. It looks like, as Coehn et al says, it’s not natural variation. It might be human influenced. It could be. It could also be something completely unexpected.
The winter and the northern hemisphere are not all the seasons and not the whole globe.
Once we look at the big picture we can see again how misleading just looking at areas of the NH is.
Reported analysis of the observations and modelling studies tell us that an unexpected asymmetric cooling in some areas is neither inconsistent with a warming planet nor unexpected as the authors of the paper in the OP and the ones referenced by it show.
So, once again what the organizations that manage the data are telling us is:
Of course none of this, the strange asymmetric change, will matter to the true believer in all things are awful and warming. They actually can’t see it.
And nobody is saying that.
Cherry picking a cold start time is a tactic to try and make it seem all warming. Which is why GISS avoids showing you a trend from 1930-present.
That shows no warming, and even cooling, for large areas of the NH, including parts of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Note the December cooling for almost all of the US, as well as the north Atlantic. This is a 84 year trend.
But looking at the trend from 1930-1980, or1940-1977, shows what happened. there was dramatic cooling, the “coming ice age” period, where drastic drops in winters alarmed a lot of people. It was an extreme trend in areas.
Because it got cold, and fast.
The warming since then, if you start in 1950, masks that period, and makes it seem like there has been dramatic warming, since it starts in the cold period.
It’s a trick, it’s cherry picking.
Looking at ALL the data tells another story. I want everyone to look at it all, not just a cherry picked trend.
Thank you, Sam Stone, your post #624 is very well written and does a good job encapsulating a “middle ground” position. I admire your bravery to state such a position in this highly polarized environment.
You have my deepest sympathies …
As many that I respect noticed already in the forum that you claimed here that is allowing a discussion, you are indeed posting maps that do show that globally the warning is happening, the cold areas you point at are not enough to refute what they are reporting in happening overall, what your sources are reporting is already taken into account.
Your affirmation that “no one is saying that” is the real desperate move, NASA, GISS, and even NCDC are saying what is the overall trend, of even the northern hemisphere.
Speaking about politics, we had this conversation before, in the political arena there is a clear false equivalence, see the use of debunked sources by Republican senator Inhofe in this thread.
I do not wonder about this one, the answer is yes, as I reported before scientists did not grabbed 1998 as atypical year in reality most of the trend in the 1980’s was described as a warming that was going up more than expected. On the northern hemisphere scientists are indeed trying to figure out why the ice loss is much higher than expected. And part of effort to find what events caused that was found in recent studies that show that the warming of the Arctic was higher than was assumed before.
What you miss is that the polarization is artificial, and made by the same forces that deny the basic science, that Sam Stone does accept.
There is a big problem with that supposed middle.
That middle is not real when the false equivalence is the one that is creating it, the middle show by scientists academics and people that debunk pseudoscience for a living is not that.
Fair enough - that’s generally been my experience with natural systems - metastability and rapid changeover seems to be the rule - it certainly is in geology, you only have to look at a phase diagram to see that.
I don’t know - within just the last billion of years we’ve had everything from Snowball Earth to the Pangean Megamonsoon. Each of which was a meta-stable persistent global climate system, but very different from each other or other climate states inbetween and since. I wouldn’t call the paleo-temperature range “narrow” given the widespread effects of just a couple °C change.
That’s how I feel about it.
No, the objection was to your wrong assertion that the paper reached the same conclusion as your OP. An outright false statement by yourself.
