As I said, this chart is irrelevant, and the added trend lines are even less relevant.Originally Posted by The Sun
Good grief.
Seems I touched a nerve when I present facts.
There is also no trend in Major Hurricanes as well.
Here is the summary of IPCC impacts of climate change. The relevant one is "Increased damage from floods and storms".
Last edited by owedtojoy; 25th February 2013 at 09:05 AM.
A summary of effects from the Stern report. Note one of the effects is "Rising intensity of floods and storms."
The claim is about intensity, not frequency, which is the denier myth.
Note this is relative to pre-industrial temperatures, when the earth was about 1C colder than it is today.
The Australian Climate Commission on the alleged "stoppage" in global warming.
Media: Earth continues to warm strongly despite sceptics' claims - Climate Commission1.The Earth continues to warm strongly. Scientists assess this based on long term observations of the heat content of the ocean, the air temperature (an indicator of the heat content of the atmosphere), and the amount of heat absorbed by the land, glaciers, ice sheets, and sea ice.
2.Understanding changes in climate requires data over long time periods, at least 30 years and preferably much longer.
3.The best measure of global warming is ocean heat content as it absorbs nearly 90% of additional heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Global ocean heat content has increased substantially over the last 40 years, and the strongly upward trend has continued through the most recent decade up to the present.
4.Singling out short term trends in air temperature to imply that global warming is not occurring is incorrect and misleading.
Just to take the 3rd point above, here is the chart of the NOAA sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly.
3.The best measure of global warming is ocean heat content as it absorbs nearly 90% of additional heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Global ocean heat content has increased substantially over the last 40 years, and the strongly upward trend has continued through the most recent decade up to the present.
Since 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the ocean, if there was a "stoppage" for as long as 17 years, we would see it in the SST. Sure, there is a case for a slowdown in the rate, but not for a "stoppage".
Data here: http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/woa/DATA_A...h_seasonal.csv (link may be down temporarily)
First, it is wonderful to see the American Geophysical Union commemorate a great Irish scientist with their annual Tyndall lecture at the AGU Annual Fall Meeting.
Wikipedia on Tyndall:
Tyndall was one of the world's first professional scientists, and a friend of Darwin and Huxley. Ireland has a Tyndall Institute now, as has the UK, but he has mostly been honoured in the US, where the Tyndall Prize is awarded annually to the "individual who has made pioneering, highly significant, or continuing technical or leadership contributions to fiber optics technology". Tyndall was the first to demonstrate Total Internal Reflection of light in a jet of water.He was the first to correctly measure (1850s) the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. He concluded that water vapour is the strongest absorber of radiant heat in the atmosphere and is the principal gas controlling air temperature. Absorption by the other gases is not negligible but relatively small. Prior to Tyndall it was widely surmised that the Earth's atmosphere has a Greenhouse Effect, but he was the first to prove it. The proof was that water vapor strongly absorbed infrared radiation.[9]
This year Professor Ray Pierrehumbert, author of Principles of PLanetary Climate gave the Tyndall Lecture on "Successful Predictions in Climate Science".
John Baez has listed these predictions:
Something to get under everybody's skin there! Successful Predictions of Climate Science | Azimuth
1896: Svante Arrhenius correctly predicts that increases in fossil fuel emissions would cause the earth to warm. At that time, much of the theory of how atmospheric heat transfer works was missing, but nevertheless, he got a lot of the process right. He was right that surface temperature is determined by the balance between incoming solar energy and outgoing infrared radiation, and that the balance that matters is the radiation budget at the top of the atmosphere. He knew that the absorption of infrared radiation was due to CO2 and water vapour, and he also knew that CO2 is a forcing while water vapour is a feedback. He understood the logarithmic relationship between CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and surface temperature. However, he got a few things wrong too. His attempt to quantify the enhanced greenhouse effect was incorrect, because he worked with a 1-layer model of the atmosphere, which cannot capture the competition between water vapour and CO2, and doesn’t account for the role of convection in determining air temperatures. His calculations were incorrect because he had the wrong absorption characteristics of greenhouse gases. And he thought the problem would be centuries away, because he didn’t imagine an exponential growth in use of fossil fuels.
Arrhenius, as we now know, was way ahead of his time. Nobody really considered his work again for nearly 50 years, a period we might think of as the dark ages of climate science. The story perfectly illustrates Paul Hoffman’s tongue-in-cheek depiction of how scientific discoveries work: someone formulates the theory, other scientists then reject it, ignore it for years, eventually rediscover it, and finally accept it. These “dark ages” weren’t really dark, of course—much good work was done in this period. For example:
• 1900: Frank Very worked out the radiation balance, and hence the temperature, of the moon. His results were confirmed by Pettit and Nicholson in 1930.
• 1902-14: Arthur Schuster and Karl Schwarzschild used a 2-layer radiative-convective model to explain the structure of the sun.
• 1907: Robert Emden realized that a similar radiative-convective model could be applied to planets, and Gerard Kuiper and others applied this to astronomical observations of planetary atmospheres.
1938: Guy Callendar is the first to link observed rises in CO2 concentrations with observed rises in surface temperatures. But Callendar failed to revive interest in Arrhenius’s work, and made a number of mistakes in things that Arrhenius had gotten right. Callendar’s calculations focused on the radiation balance at the surface, whereas Arrhenius had (correctly) focussed on the balance at the top of the atmosphere. Also, he neglected convective processes, which astrophysicists had already resolved using the radiative-convective model. In the end, Callendar’s work was ignored for another two decades.
1956: Gilbert Plass correctly predicts a depletion of outgoing radiation in the 15 micron band, due to CO2 absorption. This depletion was eventually confirmed by satellite measurements. Plass was one of the first to revisit Arrhenius’s work since Callendar, however his calculations of climate sensitivity to CO2 were also wrong, because, like Callendar, he focussed on the surface radiation budget, rather than the top of the atmosphere.
1961-2: Carl Sagan correctly predicts very thick greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of Venus, as the only way to explain the very high observed temperatures. His calculations showed that greenhouse gasses must absorb around 99.5% of the outgoing surface radiation. The composition of Venus’s atmosphere was confirmed by NASA’s Venus probes in 1967-70.
1959: Burt Bolin and Erik Eriksson correctly predict the exponential increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere as a result of rising fossil fuel use. At that time they did not have good data for atmospheric concentrations prior to 1958, hence their hindcast back to 1900 was wrong, but despite this, their projection for changes forward to 2000 were remarkably good.
1967: Suki Manabe and Dick Wetherald correctly predict that warming in the lower atmosphere would be accompanied by stratospheric cooling. They had built the first completely correct radiative-convective implementation of the standard model applied to Earth, and used it to calculate a +2 °C equilibrium warming for doubling CO2, including the water vapour feedback, assuming constant relative humidity. The stratospheric cooling was confirmed in 2011 by Gillett et al.
1975: Suki Manabe and Dick Wetherald correctly predict that the surface warming would be much greater in the polar regions, and that there would be some upper troposphere amplification in the tropics. This was the first coupled general circulation model (GCM), with an idealized geography. This model computed changes in humidity, rather than assuming it, as had been the case in earlier models. It showed polar amplification, and some vertical amplification in the tropics. The polar amplification was measured, and confirmed by Serreze et al in 2009. However, the height gradient in the tropics hasn’t yet been confirmed (nor has it yet been falsified—see Thorne 2008 for an analysis)
1989: Ron Stouffer et. al. correctly predict that the land surface will warm more than the ocean surface, and that the southern ocean warming would be temporarily suppressed due to the slower ocean heat uptake. These predictions are correct, although these models failed to predict the strong warming we’ve seen over the antarctic peninsula.
Of course, scientists often get it wrong:
1900: Knut Ångström incorrectly predicts that increasing levels of CO2 would have no effect on climate, because he thought the effect was already saturated. His laboratory experiments weren’t accurate enough to detect the actual absorption properties, and even if they were, the vertical structure of the atmosphere would still allow the greenhouse effect to grow as CO2 is added.
1971: Rasool and Schneider incorrectly predict that atmospheric cooling due to aerosols would outweigh the warming from CO2. However, their model had some important weaknesses, and was shown to be wrong by 1975. Rasool and Schneider fixed their model and moved on. Good scientists acknowledge their mistakes.
1993: Richard Lindzen incorrectly predicts that warming will dry the troposphere, according to his theory that a negative water vapour feedback keeps climate sensitivity to CO2 really low. Lindzen’s work attempted to resolve a long standing conundrum in climate science. In 1981, the CLIMAP project reconstructed temperatures at the last Glacial maximum, and showed very little tropical cooling. This was inconsistent the general circulation models (GCMs), which predicted substantial cooling in the tropics (e.g. see Broccoli & Manabe 1987). So everyone thought the models must be wrong. Lindzen attempted to explain the CLIMAP results via a negative water vapour feedback. But then the CLIMAP results started to unravel, and newer proxies demonstrated that it was the CLIMAP data that was wrong, rather than the models. It eventually turns out the models were getting it right, and it was the CLIMAP data and Lindzen’s theories that were wrong. Unfortunately, bad scientists don’t acknowledge their mistakes; Lindzen keeps inventing ever more arcane theories to avoid admitting he was wrong.
1995: John Christy and Roy Spencer incorrectly calculate that the lower troposphere is cooling, rather than warming. Again, this turned out to be wrong, once errors in satellite data were corrected.
In science, it’s okay to be wrong, because exploring why something is wrong usually advances the science. But sometimes, theories are published that are so bad, they are not even wrong:
2007: Courtillot et. al. predicted a connection between cosmic rays and climate change. But they couldn’t even get the sign of the effect consistent across the paper. You can’t falsify a theory that’s incoherent! Scientists label this kind of thing as “Not even wrong”.
The US Senate addresses Ocean Acidification.
Professor Stefan Rahmsdorf gives a 30-minutes lecture on the science of global warming.
This is part of a German University course series.
You guys are scrambling now.Just to take the 3rd point above, here is the chart of the NOAA sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly.
3.The best measure of global warming is ocean heat content as it absorbs nearly 90% of additional heat trapped by greenhouse gases. Global ocean heat content has increased substantially over the last 40 years, and the strongly upward trend has continued through the most recent decade up to the present.
Since 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases goes into the ocean, if there was a "stoppage" for as long as 17 years, we would see it in the SST. Sure, there is a case for a slowdown in the rate, but not for a "stoppage".
Data here: http://data.nodc.noaa.gov/woa/DATA_A...h_seasonal.csv (link may be down temporarily)
We are now pretty much at the point where global atmospheric temperatures could fall back the 0.6 degrees they have increased and you would still claim there is incontrovertible proof that we are warming the planet dangerously.
Don't think that nobody sees that in the constant goalpost shifting you are moving from more precise and reliable data (relatively speaking) in the form of atmospheric temperatures, to less precise and less reliable data like "extreme weather events" or total ocean heat content" as your central pillar of proof.
These are truly the dying days of this deluded and costly scientific and political cul de sac.
Of course the other meaningless game is using prediction as evidence. Two times on this very page you post alarmist predictions for more extreme climate events as a form of rebuttal to data showing there has been no evident increase in extreme events.
Must be time for that Munich Re paper again.
People like Odious won't let it die a peaceful death, they keep it alive artificially.
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