News
This page is for discussion or presentation of news related to global warming and its issues.
Climate Conversation Group
Taking the heat out of global warming
For the first time in history, people shouting “the end is nigh” are somehow
For the first time in history, people shouting “the end is nigh” are somehow
the sane ones, while those of us who say it is not are now the lunatics.
Latest climate models v. reality
As the models continue to leave actual temperature readings in their dust, sizeable warming halted about 1995 — although it might resume at any time. It must hasten to have any hope of catching up with the predictions.
If you claim warming continues, we want evidence of continued warming — eminently reasonable. Making us wait for 17 years for that evidence invites us to doubt you.
Claiming that warming hasn't stopped is the same as claiming it has — and both are ridiculous, for nobody knows the future. The best you can do is describe the past.
Click graph for larger version.
Reuters are spinning a tricky news story with a little help from some warmists but they’ve been forced to eat a plate of crow in doing so:-
“Bombshell” to Reuters, old news to sceptics.
Note the use of the word “slowed”. Their headline is also titled ‘Slowing global warming no cause for complacency’. No warming is to be characterized as “slowing’ or “slowed” when there’s crow in the diet – it helps digestion.
There’s a bunch of “help explain” rubbish in the rest of the article but at least the UKMO/HadCRUT revision issue and “slowed” warming is being aired in the MSM, albeit cloaked in warmist vernacular.
Global warming stopped 16 years ago, Met Office report reveals: MoS got it right about warming… so who are the ‘deniers’ now?
By David Rose
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261577/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-Met-Office-report-reveals-MoS-got-right-warming–deniers-now.html?ito=feeds-newsxml
“We all get things wrong, and by definition futurology is a risky business. But behind all this lies something much more pernicious than a revised decadal forecast. The problem is not the difficulty of predicting something as chaotic as the Earth’s climate, but the almost Stalinist way the Green Establishment tries to stifle dissent.
There is, for example, the odious term ‘denier’. This is applied to anyone who questions the new orthodoxy about global warming. It doesn’t matter if one states that yes, CO2 does warm the planet, but the critical issues we need to address are how fast and how much: if one doesn’t anticipate catastrophe, one must be vilified, and equated with those who deny the Holocaust.
Yet the real deniers are those who don’t just claim that the pause is insignificant, but that it doesn’t exist at all. Such deniers also still insist that the ‘science is settled’. The truth is that the unexpected pause has triggered a new spate of research, in which many supposed ‘consensus’ conclusions are being questioned.”
Has the Met Office committed fraud?
Guest post by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In short, the Met Office lied repeatedly to do down a journalist [David Rose, Mail on Sunday] who had uttered the inconvenient truth that there had been no global warming for at least 15 years.
The Fraud Act 2000 defines the serious imprisonable offence of fraud as dishonestly making an express or implied representation that the offender knows is or may be untrue or misleading, intending to gain money or other property (here, grant funding) or to cause loss or risk of loss to another ($30 billion a year of unnecessary “green” taxes, fees and charges to the British public).
So I reported the Met Office to the Serious Fraud Office, which has a specific remit to deal with frauds that involve large sums (here, tens of billions) and organized crime (here, that appreciable fraction of the academic and scientific community that has been telling similar porkies.
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http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/14/has-the-met-office-committed-fraud/
“Why not try your local police?” said the Serious Fraud Office.
Ye Gods, the NYT give pro-natural gas movie Fracknation a glowing review
http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/01/11/movies/fracknation-a-documentary.html?smid=tw-nytimesmovies&seid=auto&_r=2&
Placed a carefully crafted comment Monday in the NZ Herald online taking to task “as the world continues to get warmer”
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/climate-change/news/article.cfm?c_id=26&objectid=10858874
Checked to see if the comment was posted today (Tuesday) only to be greeted with “Debate on this article is now closed.” Forgot to to keep a copy unfortunately. I note other comments were posted today (Tuesday) but not mine.
Had better luck at the TV3 de Freitas article:-
http://www.3news.co.nz/Default.aspx?TabId=1160&articleID=282994&ce12649=1#comment
Klimawandel: Forscher rätseln über Stillstand bei Erderwärmung
Von Axel Bojanowski
Wie stark erwärmt sich unser Klima wirklich? Nasa-Forscher belegen, dass der Temperaturanstieg seit 15 Jahren eine Pause macht. Gleichzeitig gibt es Indizien dafür, dass sich das Problem verlagert: Die Umwelt könnte sich vorläufig an ganz anderer Stelle erhitzen.
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http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/stillstand-der-temperatur-erklaerungen-fuer-pause-der-klimaerwaermung-a-877941.html
Translates to:-
Researchers Puzzled About Global Warming Standstill
by Axel Bojanowski,
How dramatically is global warming really? NASA researchers have shown that the temperature rise has taken a break for 15 years. There are plenty of plausible explanations for why global warming has stalled. However, the number of guesses also shows how little the climate is understood.
>>>>>>>>
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=10989
Doesn’t matter how you say it, there’s still some explaining to be done. This however (also Hansen, Sato and Ruedy’s line) sticks in my craw:-
Yeah right. There was only one La Niña event overlapping both 2011 and 2012 but 2012 also had a complete El Niño event. The previous 3 La Niña’s don’t show a rising trend either.
German media waking up? Another paper raising questions, on front page no less:-
Major German Daily Carries Front-Page Headline: “Global Warming Keeps Us Waiting…CO2 Over-Estimated?”
http://notrickszone.com/2013/01/21/major-german-daily-front-page-headline-global-warming-keeps-us-waiting-co2-over-estimated/
“Is carbon dioxide being over-estimated? British scientists announce: the temperature increase stopped already 15 years ago.”
Whatever happened to global warming?
Margaret Wente
The Globe and Mail [Canada]
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/whatever-happened-to-global-warming/article7725145/
“In other words, climate change is very, very complicated. Greenhouse gases emitted by burning fossil fuels are just one of many factors that affect the climate. Other factors – ocean temperatures, soot, clouds, solar radiation etc. – turn out to be a lot more important than we thought and aren’t so easily captured by computer models.”
BH has a post on aerosols that is relevant here
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/1/24/the-low-down-on-aerosols.html
Branching out on climate
* by: GRAHAM LLOYD, ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
* From: The Australian
* February 02, 2013 12:00AM
THE world’s great forests have long been recognised as the lungs of the earth, but the science establishment has been rocked by claims that trees may also be the heart of its climate.
Not only do trees fix carbon and produce oxygen; a new and controversial paper says they collectively unleash forces powerful enough to drive global wind patterns and are a core feature in the circulation of the climate system.
If the theory proves correct, the peer-reviewed international paper co-authored by Australian scientist Douglas Sheil will overturn two centuries of conventional wisdom about what makes wind. And it will undermine key principles of every model on which climate predictions are based.
The paper, Where do winds come from? A new theory on how water vapour condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics, is not designed to challenge the orthodox view on climate science. But Sheil, a professor of forest ecology and conservation at Southern Cross University’s School of Environment, Science and Engineering, says he is not surprised that is how the paper has been received internationally.
Boiled down, he says, bad science is protecting shoddy climate models.
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http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/branching-out-on-climate/story-e6frg6xf-1226566999146
Links to the paper and other commentary at JN, JC and New Scientist.
Makarieva, A. M., Gorshkov, V. G., Sheil, D., Nobre, A. D., and Li, B.-L.: Where do winds come from? A new theory on how water vapor condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics,
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/02/do-forests-drive-wind-and-bring-rain-is-there-a-major-man-made-climate-driver-the-models-miss/#more-26699
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/31/condensation-driven-winds-an-update-new-version/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21729024.500-keep-rainforests–they-drive-the-planets-winds.html
Newsweek 1975 : Climate Scientists Wanted To Melt The Arctic – To Save The Planet From Bad Weather
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/1975-climate-scientists-wanted-melt-the-arctic-to-save-the-planet-from-bad-weather/
West Burton power station: EDF to sue protesters
Climate change protesters who staged a seven day sit-in at a Nottinghamshire power station claim they are being sued for about £5m by the facility’s owners.
[...]
A statement on the No Dash for Gas website reads: “EDF has launched a civil claim for damages against the group and associated activists for costs the company claims to have incurred, a figure it puts at £5m.
“Should the claim succeed, several of the campaigners face losing their homes, and all could face bankruptcy or be forced to pay a percentage of their salaries to EDF for decades to come
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-nottinghamshire-21537939
The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along
By David Rose
The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. These moves have already added £100 a year to household energy bills.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294560/The-great-green-1-The-hard-proof-finally-shows-global-warming-forecasts-costing-billions-WRONG-along.html#ixzz2NpSuSi8d
Some interesting observations on the Mail article at BH:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/3/17/rose-in-the-mail.html
Discussion re the Rose article and provenance of the graph at Ed Dawkins blog here:-
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2013/updated-comparison-of-simulations-and-observations/#more-1104
Hmm…. The Carbon Brief response to Rose’s article goes straight to #1 on Google News ‘Climate Science’ while the original is relegated to #11.
On the bright side, the graph is now displayed prominently at #1 and #11 – thank you Google and Carbon Brief.
Limp attempt to “set straight” as it turns out:-
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/03/scientists-set-straight-mail-on-sundays-latest-climate-contortion
Strengthens the point more than anything:-
“Hawkins’s comparison shows global temperatures are tracking the bottom of the range in which 90 per cent of the model simulations lie. In other words, global temperatures are, broadly speaking, represented by a model simulation that is cooler than about 90% of the CMIP5 model runs.
More simply, most of the models predict warmer temperatures than we’ve seen in the past decade.”
The dimwits at Carbon Brief probably don’t realize that John Christy has taken his version of that graph (with the actual runs, not just the range) to the US Congress long ago – twice.
First trip,
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/christy-fig.jpg?w=808&h=622
Second trip (updated),
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/clip_image0042.jpghttp://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/christy-fig.jpg?w=808&h=622
There’s some more follow up at Bishop Hill
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/3/19/more-rose-reaction.html
BH also links to Slate which is good for a laugh if you like lots of D words thrown around
I see Plait prefers old-school CMIP3 to state-of-the-art CMIP5.
That’s because the error bars on CMIP3 are wider than CMIP5 so the temps fall within range
And the full ensemble “average” is spurious anyway for assigning uncertainty. Lucia:-
“I still don’t know why you and RC don’t show color for each model when making your error bands so people can *see* that spread isn’t “weather”.
I’m under the impression Gavin’s “point” is that we shouldn’t care the spread isn’t “weather” because — for some mysterious reason– we are only supposed to care whether the observations fall inside the larger-than-weather spread of all weather + structural uncertainty of forecast.
But that would be a rather bizarre limitation since what we ought to want to know is what range of forecasts are consistent with *earth weather* not merely “does trend fall inside spread of all models in all weather”. It does — because the models with the lowest projected warming aren’t inconsistent with the data.
It’s only the ones with the fastest projected warming that are inconsistent with the data. That is: Only a subset of models that we all anticipate will be accepted for inclusion in the ensemble to of the AR5 can be diagnosed as “wrong” in the sense that their projections of over all warming are inconsistent with observed warming. ”
http://www.climate-lab-book.ac.uk/2013/updated-comparison-of-simulations-and-observations/#comment-23534
The “wrong” subset can be tossed in my view, they are utterly useless. I don’t know why anyone even considers them – let alone determines uncertainty by including them.
“subset” – starting to sound like Glieck.
Twenty-year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scientists puzzled
* by: Graham Lloyd, Environment Editor
* From: The Australian
* March 30, 2013 12:00AM
DEBATE about the reality of a two-decade pause in global warming and what it means has made its way from the sceptical fringe to the mainstream.
In a lengthy article this week, The Economist magazine said if climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, then climate sensitivity – the way climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels – would be on negative watch but not yet downgraded.
Another paper published by leading climate scientist James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says the lower than expected temperature rise between 2000 and the present could be explained by increased emissions from burning coal.
For Hansen the pause is a fact, but it’s good news that probably won’t last.
International Panel on Climate Change chairman Rajendra Pachauri recently told The Weekend Australian the hiatus would have to last 30 to 40 years “at least” to break the long-term warming
But the fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted.
Research by Ed Hawkins of University of Reading shows surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range projections derived from 20 climate models and if they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.
“The global temperature standstill shows that climate models are diverging from observations,” says David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
“If we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change,” he says.
Whitehouse argues that whatever has happened to make temperatures remain constant requires an explanation because the pause in temperature rise has occurred despite a sharp increase in global carbon emissions.
The Economist says the world has added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010, about one-quarter of all the carbon dioxide put there by humans since 1750. This mismatch between rising greenhouse gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now, The Economist article says.
[...]
According to The Economist, “given the hiatus in warming and all the new evidence, a small reduction in estimates of climate sensitivity would seem to be justified.”
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http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/twenty-year-hiatus-in-rising-temperatures-has-climate-scientists-puzzled/story-e6frg6z6-1226609140980
A sensitive matter
he climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away
Mar 30th 2013 |From the print edition The Economist
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
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http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?
Climate change scientists acknowledge that the decline in rapid temperature increases is a positive sign
By Geoffrey Lean
05 Apr 2013, 451 Comments
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/9974397/Global-warming-time-to-rein-back-on-doom-and-gloom.html
“Besides, a broader problem remains: on present policies, atmospheric CO2 levels will not stop rising when they reach the doubling point, but go on soaring past it – meaning that the world will still reach the danger point, even if more slowly.”
Unless of course the rising CO2 levels are primarily a natural lagged effect of solar-driven rising temperature rather than being due to fossil fuel emissions (the lessor factor by far) in which case CO2 will not “go on soaring” when temperatures fall as they inevitably will now solar input is falling.
(Reuters) – Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.
UN PANEL SEEKS EXPLANATION
A rapid rise in global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s – when clean air laws in developed nations cut pollution and made sunshine stronger at the earth’s surface – made for a compelling argument that human emissions were to blame.
The IPCC will seek to explain the current pause in a report to be released in three parts from late 2013 as the main scientific roadmap for governments in shifting from fossil fuels towards renewable energies such as solar or wind power, the panel’s chairman Rajendra Pachauri said.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/16/us-climate-slowdown-idUSBRE93F0AJ20130416
Mostly scathing comments:-
http://www.reuters.com/article/comments/idUSBRE93F0AJ20130416
The above Reuters article is propagating (or whatever the news term is for “has legs”):-
Warming slowdown puzzles scientists
Oslo – Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.
http://www.news24.com/Green/News/Scientists-struggle-to-explain-warming-slowdown-20130416
STOP PRESS – Underwhelming Breaking News
‘Climate change may have little impact on tropical lizards’
Eureka! Science News – 17 hours ago
A new Dartmouth College study finds human-caused climate change may have little impact on many species of tropical lizards, contradicting a host of recent studies that predict their widespread extinction in a rapidly warming planet.
http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/05/17/climate.change.may.have.little.impact.tropical.lizards
“….a host of recent studies….” ????
Lizards…..and oysters:-
“Taxpayers even paid for research on climate resistant oysters. Let no barnacle be unturned.”
From JoNova – ‘Cook’s fallacy “97% consensus” study is a marketing ploy some journalists will fall for’
http://joannenova.com.au/2013/05/cooks-fallacy-97-consensus-study-is-a-marketing-ploy-some-journalists-will-fall-for/
‘Want climate resistant oysters, or climate “Justice”? The ARC has millions to help. But no money for skeptics.’
Guest Post: Dr Roberto Soria
“I counted at least 50 winning projects with the magic words “climate change” or greenhouse gas emission in them (compared with about 10 astronomy projects, and 19 cancer research projects, for example). “Climate change” projects raked up $16 million in the Discovery category alone.”
“There’s one that promises to study how oysters can be made resilient to climate change: here’s $285,000 coming their way”
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/want-climate-resistant-oysters-or-climate-justice-the-arc-has-millions-to-help-but-no-money-for-skeptics/