Posts Made By: Hugh Bartlett

Day after day, week after week, month after month, I check spaceweather.com and I find the " The Sun is blank; no sunspots." Sunspot Cycle 24 is on a pace to set a record for a late return, which is highly correlated to the strength of the following 11-year cycle: the later the onset of the solar cycle, the weaker it is.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/01/19/what-the-solar-cycle-24-ramp-up-could-look-like/

This should give the alarmists some pause to stop and consider the public reaction to having over-stated their case, and having to retract their dire predictions as we enter a cooling phase for the next decade. If they cry "Wolf!" too many times and no danger appears, when a real danger threatens, few will believe their sensationalist claims of disaster.

Talk about spin, the headlines read “2008 is the 8th warmest year on record”, with the subheading that 2008 was the coldest year since 2000. From the graphs for both the global water surface temperature and global land/water surface temperature, the trend since 1998 is either sideways or slightly downward.

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2008/

The downward trend is most clear from the water surface measurements, which may be a clue as to the root cause. The melting ice sheets and glaciers may be absorbing enough latent heat of fusion (heat required for phase change), to forestall global warming of the air. Moreover, adding water near the freezing point to the world’s water bodies may be contributing to the cooling surface temperature of the world's oceans. If the anthropogenically added CO2 is the cause for the melt down, then humans are causing global cooling as well! Although there may be a feedback loop here (cooler oceans absorb more CO2), I’ll freely admit to spinning my headline against the AGW hypothesis (turnabout is fair play).

What do the scientists out there say about the recent downtrend?

Check out this recent (3/5/09) study by Garth Paltridge, et al. at:

http://www.icecap.us/ ... Well, it has been moved from this site, so here is the relevant quote from the abstract of the article:

Negative trends in q (specific humidity) as found in the NCEP (National Centers for Environmental Prediction) data would imply that long-term water vapor feedback is negative — that it would reduce rather than amplify the response of the climate system to external forcing such as that from increasing atmospheric CO2.

And here is another link to the article:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/05/negative-feedback-in-climate-empirical-or-emotional/


The IPCC models all incorporate positive reinforcements. Otherwise, (and this is not controversial) the global temperature rise from twice the current levels of CO2 over the next century would only be 1° C. Yet common sense says that if that were true, the Earth's climate would have already experienced a runaway greenhouse effect like that on Venus due to our having 10 times the current amount of CO2 in earlier geologic periods. Here is a new scientific study (and there are others) that point to negative feedbacks that will tend to stabilize our climate.

http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/E&E%20douglass_christy-color.pdf

I ran across this fascinating history of the Hockey Stick graph, put together by a British blogger, and wanted to share it with those who are trying to figure out which side is discredited.

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html

A couple of months ago, theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson caused quite a stir due to his opinions about global warming in an article in the New York Times Magazine (March 3, 2009). Many in the AGW community were outraged that this self-described fuddy-duddy without any training in climate science was getting such publicity for his opinions on the subject. In his first interview since the Times article, he explains his views in an interview with Yale Environment360, a publication of Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, that took place about a week ago. For your enjoyment, here are some of the more profound snippets from that conversation. The entire interview may be found at:

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151

Dyson: … No doubt that warming is happening. I don't think it is correct to say "global," but certainly warming is happening. I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. And that's where the warming is most extreme. And it's spectacular, no doubt about it. And glaciers are shrinking and so on.

But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell you it's made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful.

There's a lot made out of the people who died in heat waves. And there is no doubt that we have heat waves and people die. What they don't say is actually five times as many people die of cold in winters as die of heat in summer. And it is also true that more of the warming happens in winter than in summer. So, if anything, it's heavily favorable as far as that goes. It certainly saves more lives in winter than it costs in summer.

So that kind of argument is never made. And I see a systematic bias in the way things are reported. Anything that looks bad is reported, and anything that looks good is not reported.

A lot of these things are not anything to do with human activities. Take the shrinking of glaciers, which certainly has been going on for 300 years and has been well documented. So it certainly wasn't due to human activities, most of the time. There's been a very strong warming, in fact, ever since the Little Ice Age, which was most intense in the 17th century. That certainly was not due to human activity.

And the most serious of almost all the problems is the rising sea level. But there again, we have no evidence that this is due to climate change. A good deal of evidence says it's not. I mean, we know that that's been going on for 12,000 years, and there's very doubtful arguments as to what's been happening in the last 50 years and (whether) human activities have been important. It's not clear whether it's been accelerating or not. But certainly, most of it is not due to human activities. So it would be a shame if we've made huge efforts to stop global warming and the sea continued to rise. That would be a tragedy. Sea level is a real problem, but we should be attacking it directly and not attacking the wrong problem.

I am certainly willing to change my mind about details. And if they find any real evidence that global warming is doing harm, I would be impressed. That's the crucial point: I don't see the evidence...

And why should you imagine that the climate of the 18th century "what they call the pre-industrial climate" is somehow the best possible?

That's sort of what I would call part of the propaganda, to take for granted that any change is bad.

e360: It's more that any change is disruptive. You don't think that's reasonable?

Dyson: Well, disruptive is not the same as bad. A lot of disruptive things actually are good. That's the point. There's this sort of mindset that assumes any change is bad. You can call it disruptive or you can call it change. But it doesn't have to be bad.

e360: One thing is that if the temperature change projections are accurate for the next 100 years, it would be equivalent to the change that took us out of the last Ice Age into the present interglacial period, which is a very dramatic change.

Dyson: Yes, that's highly unlikely. But it's possible certainly.

e360: And the further argument is that this would happen much more quickly than that change happened. So it is hard to imagine that, at least in the short run, it could be anything but highly destructive.

Dyson: There's hidden assumptions there, which I question, that you can describe the climate by a single number. In the case of the Ice Age, that might be true, that it was cold everywhere. The ice was only in the northern regions, but it was also much colder at the equator in the Ice Age.

That's not true of this change in temperature today. The change that's now going on is very strongly concentrated in the Arctic. In fact in three respects, it's not global, which I think is very important. First of all, it is mainly in the Arctic. Secondly, it's mainly in the winter rather than summer. And thirdly, it's mainly in the night rather than at the daytime. In all three respects, the warming is happening where it is cold, not where it is hot.

e360: So, the idea is that the parts that are being disrupted are the parts that are inhospitable to begin with?

Dyson: Mostly. It is not 100 percent. But mostly they are, Greenland being a great example.

I feel very strongly that China and India getting rich is the most important thing that's going on in the world at present. That's a real revolution, that the center of gravity of the whole population of the world would be middle class, and that's a wonderful thing to happen. It would be a shame if we persuade them to stop that just for the sake of a problem that's not that serious.

And I'm happy every time I see that the Chinese and Indians make a strong statement about going ahead with burning coal. Because that's what it really depends on, is coal. They can't do without coal. We could, but they certainly can't.

So I think it is very important that they should not be under pressure. Luckily they are, in fact, pretty self-confident; (neither) of those countries pays too much attention to us.

NASA scientists have found that cirrus clouds, formed by contrails from aircraft engine exhaust, are capable of increasing average surface temperatures enough to account for a warming trend in the United States that occurred between 1975 and 1994.

Patrick Minnis, Senior Research Scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA,
determined the observed one percent per decade increase in cirrus cloud cover over the United States is likely due to air-traffic-induced contrails.

Using published results from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (New York) general circulation model, Minnis and his colleagues estimated contrails and their resulting cirrus clouds would increase surface and lower atmospheric temperatures by 0.36 to 0.54 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. Weather service data reveal surface and lower atmospheric temperatures across North America rose by almost 0.5 degree Fahrenheit per decade between 1975 and 1994.

Minnis worked with colleagues Kirk Ayers, Rabi Palinkonda, and Dung Phan from Analytical Services and Materials, Inc., of Hampton, VA. They used 25 years of global surface observations of cirrus clouds, temperature and humidity records from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis dataset. They confirmed the cirrus trends with 13 years of satellite data from NASA's International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project.

The study was published in the Journal of Climate.

Here is a link to the article I have quoted announcing the study:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/04/040428061056.htm

Check this out for June 2009:

http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/

Okay, it is the lower atmosphere, not surface temperature. But this is by satellite data, which is less prone to the vagaries in measurement technology that plague surface meassurements (urban heat island effects, etc.). The baseline is 1979-1998, the period of greatest surface warming, but if there is a greenhouse effect, it is in the atmosphere that it would be manifesting itself. There, the trend is basically flatlined over the last 30 years.

Hey Herb,

Take a look at ad 643683.

SOLAR MINIMUM VS. GLOBAL WARMING: From 2002 to 2008, decreasing solar irradiance has countered much anthropogenic warming of Earth's surface. That's the conclusion of researchers Judith Lean (NRL) and David Rind (NASA/GISS), who have just published a new analysis of global temperatures in the Geophysical Research Letters. Lean and Rind considered four drivers of climate change: solar activity, volcanic eruptions, ENSO (El Nino), and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. The following plot shows how much each has contributed to the changing temperature of Earth's surface since 1980:

http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2009/04sep08/leanrind.jpg?PHPSESSID=1g67v8h7ajko6n5djv5p0pscf0

Volcanic aerosols are a source of cooling; ENSO and greenhouse gases cause heating; the solar cycle can go either way. When added together, these factors can account for 76% of the variance in Earth's surface temperature over the past ~30 years, according to the analysis of Lean and Rind.

Several aspects of their model attract attention: "The warmest year on record, 1998, coincides with the 'super-El Nino' of 1997-98," points out Lean. "The ESNO is capable of producing significant spikes in the temperature record." Solar minimum has the opposite effect: "A 0.1% decrease in the sun's irradiance has counteracted some of the warming action of greenhouse gases from 2002 - 2008," she notes. "This is the reason for the well-known 'flat' temperature trend of recent years."

What's next? Ultimately, the authors say, temperatures will begin rising again as greenhouse gases accumulate and solar activity resumes with the coming of the next solar cycle. Of couse, the solar cycle could be out of whack; if solar minimum deepens and persists, no one is certain what will happen. Lean and Rind reveal their predictions for the future here.

Reference: Lean, J. L., and D. H. Rind (2009), How will Earth's surface temperature change in future decades?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 36, L15708