Climate Change

Just curious, CarbonCareful, do you post on any other thread? It is just that the only threads I ever see your name on are ones on climate change. I am sure there is more to your life than just that subject. It would nice to hear your views on other topics.

A new paper "The extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere temperature in the last two millennia: reconstructions of low-frequency variability,” by B Christiansen of the Danish Meteorological Institute and F C Ljungqvist of Stockholm University, confirms the climate was warmer 1000 years ago.

"In conclusion this impressive piece of research makes a significant contribution to a growing body of evidence that both the global extent of the MWP, and the temperature was similar, or even greater than the Current Warm Period, even though the atmospheric CO2 concentrations today are some 40% greater than they were during the MWP.

Some argue that without anthropogenic greenhouse gasses the world would have cooled in the past few decades. That might be the case, but the statement that it is warmer now than it has been for thousands of years is untrue. The rate of warming seen recently is also not unprecedented.

In the context of climate sensitivity – the real world climatic reaction to increasing greenhouse gasses – and climate model uncertainty, it is an interesting question to ask: if Nature alone in the past can produce temperatures like those we see today, why can’t she do so again?"

Another new paper by Jiansong Zhou and Ka-Kit Tung of the University of Washington, Seattle is titled “Deducing Multi-decadal Anthropogenic Global Warming Trends Using Multiple Regression Analysis” cuts recent anthropogenic warming trend in half according to Marcel Crok.

Yes Bags you just need to look at his various mansions to know he is doing very well thank you very much !

That has been my feeling for some time now, gillybob. Al Gore is another who has done very comfortably indeed out of being a scaremonger.

Hi Bags the sad thing is they probably can't see (or choose not to see)the hypocrisy of it all.

Personally I have no time to listen to the likes of Prince Charles and many like him that preach about the state of the planet and what we should all do to cut our carbon footprint, when the same person is jetting around the world on an almost daily basis and running several homes all requiring masses of power.

If the truth were known I would suspect that the ordinary man or woman in the street is doing more to help the environment than most of these people who bleat on about it so much.

No apology necessary, gillybob. I suspect that a lot of people feel the same.

Read a recent report about how the newest supercomputer for analysing climate data runs off power from a coal power station (and this supercomputer uses mind-bogglingly large amounts of power; amounts that most of us would find hard to imagine) and that the new computer was deliberately sited in the place it's now in because coal generated power is cheaper than the 'green' power generated in the state that is was in.

They probably argue that the end justifies the means but that, to me, is immoral. It's the kind of argument extremists use.

I am not arguing as to whether Climate Change is, or is not as a result of man's destruction of the planet/greenhouse gasses/whatever.

What I do know though is the successive governments have used this argument as a way to rip us all off in a big way.

Anything with "green" on the bottle is more expensive, anything with lower emissions is more expensive, anything with organic on the label is more expensive , the list is endless. Add together the pathetic excuse of keeping fuel expensive so we will use less and it makes me angry.

Of course those with money will always be warm. they will always be-able to jet around the world with no worry as to their carbon footprint.

Sorry for the rant......

Of course climate change is here to stay. It has always been here, and always will be. Adapting to climate change, as we have in the past, seems to me to make far more sense than trying to stop climate change, which we can't do anyway.

I don't think I've mentioned a conspiracy, carbon. You and a few others have though.

my son - who is responible for a large coastal area of the UK and it's flood defence is definately working with the assumption that climate change is here to stay. The point is that even if there is doubt we should surely work as if it is a reality as the consequences of ignoring it will be catastrophic and treating it seriously does nothing detrimental to the environment and might even improve it

Who exactly is supposed to be orchestrating this conspiracy Bags ?? Who would gain from spreading a rumour about climate change? Why would so many scientist go to so much trouble? And politicians and jounalists........what have they all got to gain?

How about refuting the statements, carbon, rather than just sneering all the time at things you don't like? At least I give my sources.

And here is something via the the blogoshere (more sneering no doubt), but which originates at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (can't get more kosher than that!) which shows how warmists just change the goalposts when real world observations don't fit in with their "cause":

“Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”

Source: www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf

wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/15/noaas-15-year-statement-from-2008-puts-a-kibosh-on-the-current-met-office-insignificance-claims-that-global-warming-flatlined-for-16-years/#more-72446

Denver Post ??????? Scraping the barrel comes to mind.

Denver Post ??????? Scraping the barrel comes to mind.

Hi carbon. Long time no see. I hope you are keeping well and happy.

Is the Met Office unobscure enough for you? And Judith Curry (Georgia Tech University)? And Roger Pielke Jr (professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder and author of “The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell You About Global Warming)?

Not about coral adaptability this time, just (not) rising global temperatures in spite of increasing CO2:

Global Warming Stopped 16 Years Ago

Met Office Quietly Releases Missing Data

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week. The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures. The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported. This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year. --David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 14 October 2012

Global warming stopped 15 years ago and the average temperature has not risen at all since 1997, the Met Office said last night. But critics said the Met Office had released the figures onto the internet without publicity – in contrast to the attention it gave to those released six months ago that reinforced the case for global warming. Those figures went up to 2010 – the hottest year on record – and showed a continuing warming trend. Dr Benny Peiser of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation said: “It is quite scandalous that the Met Office is misleading the public. The latest data proves beyond any doubt that there has been no warming [trend] over the past 16 years.” --John Ingham, Daily Express, 15 October 2012

The data confirms the existence of a ‘pause’ in the warming. The impact of this pause within the climate dynamic community has been to focus increased attention on the impact of natural variability, particularly the impact of internal multi-decadal oscillations in the ocean. The new climate model calculations for the AR5 have focused on trying to assess what it would take to accurately simulate these multi-decadal ocean oscillations and how predictable they might be. These new observations and climate modeling results will hopefully impact the the IPCC AR5 deliberations so that we do not see the same overly confident consensus statements that we saw in the AR4. --Judith Curry, Georgia Tech University, 14 October 2012

The Met Office says that the world has warmed by 0.03 deg C per decade since 1997 based on their calculation of the gradient in the Hadcrut4 dataset. But what the Met Office doesn’t say is that this is statistically insignificant. There is no case to be made for a statistically significant increase in global temperatures as given in the Hadcrut4 dataset between 1997 and August 2012. The Met Office says the 15-year standstill is not unusual. This is true but again the Met Office is being economical with the truth. --David Whitehouse, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 15 October 2012

Does it matter that campaigners and the media are actively peddling disinformation? For the most part, probably not, as the public is by now used to such nonsense on just about every subject from unemployment figures to Barack Obama’s birth certificate. But there is one group that should be very concerned about the spreading of rampant misinformation: the scientific community. It is, of course, thrilling to appear in the media and get caught up in highly politicized debates. But leading scientists and scientific organizations that contribute to a campaign of misinformation — even in pursuit of a worthy goal like responding effectively to climate change — may find that the credibility of science itself is put at risk by supporting scientifically unsupportable claims in pursuit of a political agenda. --Roger Pielke Jr, Denver Post, 12 October 2012

Bags: I see you are still spending your time searching for obscure items to challenge climate change (like the few bits of coral here and there that are managing to cope with increased temperatures - though goodness knows how that proves anything?). I sent your article re. star explosions to a Professor of Astro-Physics. Here is his answer :-

The phys.org item is very muddled and full of errors. I don't know if Wang is responsible for those or someone else. There is a less confused account at (unfortunately one needs a password to get into the site he suggests) so it is probably not Wang himself. I don't know what supernova problem he is talking about.

There is a quite separate question about the effect of cosmic rays in modifying the cloud cover over the Earth and so changing the temperature. This has been a big controversy but Lockwood at RAL has shown it is not responsible for more than a fraction of the change over the last 50 yeras. Actually a big reduction (not an increase ) in the flux would be required and that can be ruled out as responsible for the whole temperature change.

Next time I come across info about coral recovery, I'll send you the links, G.

Yes, I heard about that, but around the island I was on it was definitely bleaching due to temperature. The coral remains intact, but it is grey or brown - very disappointing. The big tsunami did a huge amount of damage, of course.
I watch every programme about the oceans, and in particular about coral, and I just wish governments would spend as much on oceanic research as they do on outer-space. Seeding new coral beds is one way forward.

Some of the damage to corals in the Maldives has been caused by dynamite fishing by the locals. I know this because DH went on a diving expedition there some years ago to 'educate' the fishermen and get them to use more sustainable methods.

Adaptability is what makes life tick.

Some corals are recovering/adapting to changes in sea temps too, G, as they have in previous warm periods. It's not all bad news.

Bags, I know you don't have a TV, but you would have been very interested in Great Barrier Reef yesterday. It showed how coral reefs are being destroyed by a rise in sea temperature - something I experienced in The Maldives. The programme makers were in no doubt that the rise was due to human activity. Corals are ultra-sensitive to water temperature and are good indicators of the health of the marine eco-system.

Charles Wang, at Aberdeen University, says that "There is a direct correlation between star explosions and the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere". He's devising an experiment to test his theory with the Higgs boson at CERN. 

Arctic sea ice extent is low, Antarctic sea ice extent is high, and meanwhile Life is as adaptable as ever.

A paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters finds there was an “Abrupt change in atmospheric CO2 during the last ice age” which occurred “rapidly, over less than two centuries. This rise in CO2 was synchronous with, or slightly later than, a rapid increase of Antarctic temperature.” The authors also report “carbon cycle modeling doesn’t capture all of the processes for CO2 variations.” Thus, rapid increases in atmospheric CO2 have been shown to occur naturally due to processes not captured by climate models. In addition, temperature rise during the last ice age was found to be synchronous or leading CO2 rise, implying that temperature controls atmospheric CO2, rather than CO2 controlling temperature.
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, doi:10.1029/2012GL053018

Transcript of an interview with well-known 'Pragmatic Skeptic', Anthony Watts. Worth a read.