re-3: Climate science: observations vs. models

From: David Creighton

Date: 19 January 2010 14:43:37 GMT

To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••>

Subject: Re: re/ climate

My reading of Dr Hansen, Richard, is that, “The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend. For the time being, until humanity brings its greenhouse gas emissions under control, we can expect each decade to be warmer than the preceding one. Weather fluctuations certainly exceed local temperature changes over the past half century. But the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales.” That accords with my own perceptions.

Cheers,

dc

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Hi David,

Yes, the perceptive person will note that temperatures have been steadily rising since about 1800, long before human-caused Co2 emissions were significant. Such a person will also note that such a two-century rise was to be expected, as such rises tend to occur about every thousand years in the Northern Hemisphere, and it’s been a thousand years since the last one, the Medieval Warm Period. The perceptive person will also note that the natural pattern indicates that the current rise is due to reverse downward, and such a person will not be surprised to notice that the reversal seems to have already begun, in January, 2007. 

This is all covered in detail in the new version of the article. The interesting question is not why we’ve experienced warming, but why high levels of Co2 have had negligible effect on the natural course of climate.

rkm

________

Sounds authoritative, but 30 years is entirely too short a timeframe to understand what’s going on with climate. That’s the kind of short-term thinking that misleads people into blaming warming on Co2. The ‘perceptive person’ would be aware of longer-term patterns. Then as “proof” of their point, they simply quote the projections of the climate models. That is an entirely illogical argument. If the validity of the model is being challenged, the output of the model cannot be claimed as counter evidence, unless it to demonstrate that the model matches observations, which it does not do in the case of the 2007 decline. 

The ‘rebuttal’ sites seem aimed at comforting folks who ‘want to believe’, rather than offering rigorous rebuttals.

If you want to argue with my material, then it makes more sense for you to state your argument in your own words so we can discuss it. I hope you will do so if you respond to the new version.

The northern and southern hemispheres seem to have somewhat different climate dynamics. For example, Antarctica emerged from the last ice a thousand years before Greenland did. One must question the wisdom of trying to ‘average’ systems with such divergent dynamics, apples and oranges as it were. I focus on the northern hemisphere in my article.

rkm

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From: “Herb Kline” 

Date: 20 January 2010 01:07:28 GMT

To: “‘Richard Moore'” <•••@••.•••>

Subject: RE: re-5: global warming – The official NOAA ice core data

http://tinyurl.com/yzhbzam

Hi Richard,

 

Do you know whether Climate Science has any idea as to the cause(s) of the cyclical variation in temperature in the bottom-most graph (the one going back some  400,000 years)

 Herb

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Hi Herb,

There’s a NASA tutorial on this topic that I cite in the new article:

http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sprecess.htm

The article talks about various cycles in the Earth’s orbit, with periods of about 100,000 years, 40,000 years, and 20,000 years, which interact with one another in complex ways. There are also theories about long-term cycles in solar magnetism. What I focus on is the visible patterns themselves, regardless of what might be causing them. It is recognition of patterns that leads to models, and the first step is to be as clear as possible about the patterns themselves.

rkm

From: Bill Ellis 

Date: 21 January 2010 17:04:37 GMT

To: Richard Moore <•••@••.•••>

Subject: Re: “It’s time to pray for global warming”

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newslog/message/2707

This article is intriguing but right here in Maine the climiate is changing  We can now  grow crops that in over 100 years on this farm did not grow.  We also note the loss of frogs and fireflies that were common just 70 years age, in my youth.  My father planted all kinds of fruit and nut trees.  Only apples live.  Now I have cherries, plumbs. wallnuts, and other crops.  When I lived in Alaska in my younger days I used to watch polar bears and climb glaciers now both have moved back. 

Something has changed.

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Hi Bill,

As I replied to David, above, there have been two centuries of warming, no question about it. But it’s been following a natural pattern, it has not reached dangerous levels, and it has now turned downward. 

rkm

From: “M.A. Omas Schaefer”

Date: 17 January 2010 04:36:29 GMT

To: “Richard Moore” <•••@••.•••>

Subject: Son of Climategate! Scientist says feds manipulated data >> Four Winds 10 – 

Apparently the disappearing (cold temperature) reporting stations weren’t just in Russia:

http://fourwinds10.com/siterun_data/government/fraud/us_government/news.php?q=1263670673

From the first article:

     For example, the report said the number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35 with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations plummeted.

Further, a vast majority of the climate stations reporting in the U.S. were either poorly or very poorly sited, taking temperature readings from paved driveways, in a waste treatment facility, on rooftops or near the exhaust from idling jet engines, rather than in open areas.

     Stations in such locations as the Andes and Bolivia have virtually vanished, meaning that temperatures for those areas now are “determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon.”