The Sun Is So Boring.....

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

My problem is I can do just a little math. As for being slack...yep..I really haven't got the time to run you through my somewhat ancient and dog-eared undergrad Physics tome, Resnick & Halliday.

You have ignored the previous 130 years of data, and have just focused on the last 15, (an incorrect assumption as stated in the IPCC4 preamble)

A pause/hiatus would be zero.

Hence the "rubbish" statement from me, as a positive number, as much as you want to say otherwise, just isn't zero. Capish?

But assuming we just look at 15 years and Hadcrut 4 decadal data is now the new "norm" at just 0.04 degrees... (which I still maintain is a rubbish number)

....the consequences are not good.

No math required, just do the arithmetic

Humanity has been using written forms for about 6000 years.

The blink of an eye in geological scales. But, let's go forward an equivalent timespan.

600 decades x 0.04 degrees per decade = 24 degrees, making the average temperature a balmy 38 degrees C

Record highs would then be 80 degrees or so....

But taking the IPCC4 view (chapter 2, top page 162) derived from independent datasets, from 1880 to 2012 their "best estimate" trend figure is 0.78 degrees per decade.

But let's not go forward 6000 years...and say go forward about the same time as Ramesses II was building most of the Egyptian monuments in the past....say 1300 years

130 decades x 0.78 = 101 degrees C

I invite others to draw their own conclusions. I'm done with this.

The waltz and prevarication continues.

Suddenly you put me up as someone who is focusing on 15 years of data and ignoring the previous 130 years of data. And then continue with your sermon.

Again - do you believe or not, that something coined by the IPCC as "The Hiatus", which they address quite a number of times in their 5th Assessment Report, and which I have given you the links to, exists?

You said that what I said - that there was a pause/hiatus - was rubbish. The onus is on you to prove it.

All you have done so far is recite bits of your Creed from your Bible, The Executive Summary, and pretend you have addressed the issue. While at the same time dismissing out of hand all references to the Hiatus in the Working Group Report that led to the creation of your Bible.

Funny how you invite everyone to read the Executive Summary (the one written to make things simple for the policy makers), which leaves out the Hiatus.

Simple question, is there a Hiatus or is there not?
And if not, what superior expertise do you possess to disagree with the IPCC who acknowledge it?

Regards,
Renato

P.S. Exactly what Resnick & Halliday, a physics book published in 1966, has to say about the hiatus in world temperature from 1998 to now, escapes me.

[Peter Ward]

Originally Posted by Renato1

..........Exactly what Resnick & Halliday, a physics book published in 1966, has to say about the hiatus in world temperature from 1998 to now, escapes me.

Yes, the Physics therein probably does.

I know I said I was done....and my apologies for this last post:

You said: "in the late 1990s, the earth's temperature has entered a pause, a hiatus - has failed to increase"

I said: "Utter rubbish"

You rebutted: saying " the temperature hasn't risen or fallen", quoting the IPCC 5th Assessment Report.

I said and quoted the same IPCC report: " the temperature has gone up best case 0.04 degrees per decade, most likely case 0.78 degrees per decade"

Your said: "0.04 per decade is statistically insignificant"

I said: "0.04 (a POSITIVE number) is not zero", and with a little arithmetic showed what temperatures that sort of warming number generates in the future.

But, to cut through the cr@p:

0.04 does not equal zero.

You can hold your breath and turn blue.

It still won't equal zero. Hence to say so is rubbish.

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

Yes, the Physics therein probably does.

I know I said I was done....and my apologies for this last post:

You said: "in the late 1990s, the earth's temperature has entered a pause, a hiatus - has failed to increase"

I said: "Utter rubbish"

You rebutted: saying " the temperature hasn't risen or fallen", quoting the IPCC 5th Assessment Report.

I said and quoted the same IPCC report: " the temperature has gone up best case 0.04 degrees per decade, most likely case 0.78 degrees per decade"

Your said: "0.04 per decade is statistically insignificant"

I said: "0.04 (a POSITIVE number) is not zero", and with a little arithmetic showed what temperatures that sort of warming number generates in the future.

But, to cut through the cr@p:

0.04 does not equal zero.

You can hold your breath and turn blue.

It still won't equal zero. Hence to say so is rubbish.

I note that the prevarication continues unabated.

You will not directly say whether you agree or disagree with the IPCC that there is an hiatus.

And plainly you are unable or incapable of consulting a dictionary which states that
"Hiatus" is "a pause or gap in continuity".

And you now apparently insist that there is no Hiatus, no Pause and no Gap in Contuity, and find yourself in the strange position of being at odds with just about all climate scientists in the world, where this Hiatus is the uppermost issue on their mind.

But you are equally insistent on not saying that they are speaking rubbish.

So, how come when I say one thing it is utter rubbish, and when they say the very same thing - which I have only repeated - it is not rubbish?

And perversely, when repeatedly challenged, you keep insisting that what I said was rubbish, but will not acknowledge the same for them.

Could it be that it is because you've dug yourself a hole, and I refuse to play your games of engaging in your diversions and strawman arguments, like your silly linear application of 0.04 degrees over six millennia?

Perhaps you can write to Dr. Pachauri and ask him to help you out?
Regards,
Renato

[Peter Ward]

Originally Posted by Renato1

And plainly you are unable or incapable of consulting a dictionary which states that
"Hiatus" is "a pause or gap in continuity".

Mate..I'm not the one digging the hole....you initial comment was "has failed to increase" ..... do you now retract that?

I've simply pointed out this is not the case.

1/2 of one degree per decade, like compound interest, still adds up.

[Pinwheel (Doug)]

Play nice you two..IIS is supposed to be a friendly place!

[Steffen]

Speaking of sun spots being related to global warming, how about this site:

http://www.tylervigen.com

Seems like the US should stop spending on science, space and technology immediately!



Cheers
Steffen.

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

Mate..I'm not the one digging the hole....you initial comment was "has failed to increase" ..... do you now retract that?

I've simply pointed out this is not the case.

1/2 of one degree per decade, like compound interest, still adds up.

Hadcrut4 data = 0.04C per decade
Mr. Ward = 0.5C per decade

Anomaly range over 16 year period = +0.7c to -0.3c, with typically 0.2C variation in yearly anomaly change.(see earlier graph which I posted).

There are things called standard deviation and significance testing. I can't be bothered doing the work for you, but please feel free to do it yourself.
A trend result of 0.04C per decade from data that typically jumps around by more than 5 times that amount over that 16 year period, but often by much more so, is going to be statistically insignificant.

The rest of the world's climate scientist have had to accept it, because that is the statistical reality. Why can't you?
Regards,
Renato

[MortonH]

Originally Posted by Steffen

Speaking of sun spots being related to global warming, how about this site:

http://www.tylervigen.com

Seems like the US should stop spending on science, space and technology immediately!



Cheers
Steffen.

Jeez, no wonder you shouldn't eat cheese before going to bed!

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by Steffen

Speaking of sun spots being related to global warming, how about this site:

http://www.tylervigen.com

Seems like the US should stop spending on science, space and technology immediately!



Cheers
Steffen.

Very interesting. Makes sort of sense though. US spends heaps on all that stuff, people don't get the free handouts, so they go kill themselves.

Anyhow, up till the 70s, the correlation between sunspots (Maunder Minimum) and temperature, given a 400 year record, was taken seriously. But if you Google it now, for the most part, the results that show up dispute it - using graphs that cut at at around 1980, though there is the occasional diehard supporter. Though curiously, all those reams of sunspots I saw back in the 1980s apparently weren't so great relative to the past.

Then, just when you'd think the issue was all over, back in January, NASA put this out,
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news...an_sunclimate/

Interesting to see where it goes from here.
Regards,
Renato

[Peter Ward]

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

Mate..I'm not the one digging the hole....you initial comment was "has failed to increase" ..... do you now retract that?

I've simply pointed out this is not the case.

1/2 of one degree per decade, like compound interest, still adds up.

I do need to clarify this....

I did not intend to suggest 0.5 degrees/decade is the IPCC's projection, it's simply a random small positive number to illustrate the point.

IPCC 4 states with high confidence, meaning there is robust evidence and data agreement that temperatures by the end of the century will be 2 degrees (globally) higher than they are now (their words, not mine), which of course around 1/4 of one degree per decade, not 1/2 a degree.

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by Peter Ward

I do need to clarify this....

I did not intend to suggest 0.5 degrees/decade is the IPCC's projection, it's simply a random small positive number to illustrate the point.

IPCC 4 states with high confidence, meaning there is robust evidence and data agreement that temperatures by the end of the century will be 2 degrees (globally) higher than they are now (their words, not mine), which of course around 1/4 of one degree per decade, not 1/2 a degree.

Rehashing obsolete stuff. They were using 90% confidence levels back then.

They've now switched to 95% confidence levels. From memory, (I can't be bothered looking it up again) IPCC5 figures are that they now have very high confidence that by the end of the century the temperature will have increased by between 1C and 7C.

Currently not on track to meet even that huge range.
Regards,
Renato

[N1 (Mirko)]

....what if there is a hiatus in temp increase, and it is because of reduced solar activity/ solar max that doesn't deserve the name? Wouldn't that mean a strong causal link between solar activity and global temperature? And if there is a strong causal link between solar activity and global temp, shouldn't this planet be getting colder right now, like it did in the past during failed solar maxima as some might suggest?

Well, it isn't. It's just slowed its rate of warming. I take that to mean that the sh*t we're in is even deeper than initially thought, because once solar activity returns to higher levels, we might discover that 2014 was actually quite a cold year compared to what's in store .

[MortonH]

Whether you call it a hiatus or not, it seems to me that it's over such a relatively short period that it can't be construed as more than a blip in the overall trend. Future history may prove otherwise, but it won't be clear for a long time yet.

However, regardless of one's beliefs on man-made climate change, there's no doubt that we need to take steps to reduce the amount of pollution we're dumping on the planet. The food chain is being damaged in plenty of other ways too.

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by N1

....what if there is a hiatus in temp increase, and it is because of reduced solar activity/ solar max that doesn't deserve the name? Wouldn't that mean a strong causal link between solar activity and global temperature? And if there is a strong causal link between solar activity and global temp, shouldn't this planet be getting colder right now, like it did in the past during failed solar maxima as some might suggest?

Well, it isn't. It's just slowed its rate of warming. I take that to mean that the sh*t we're in is even deeper than initially thought, because once solar activity returns to higher levels, we might discover that 2014 was actually quite a cold year compared to what's in store .

Hi,
Good points. And your question raises a lot more questions than you suspect. And it has been raised by others. One thing though, if there was a connection between sunspots and earth temperature, there would have to be lag effects - you wouldn't expect the planet to start going cold instantaneously.

You have to remember that the IPCC rejected all other possible causes for the increase in temperature from the mid 70s to late 1990s - stuff like that we were just coming out of the Little Ice Age, and this is what you'd expect the temperature to be doing, as well as the associated possible sunspot/global temperature connection. It took as a given that increased C02 was the cause. And all the supercomputer models have that built into them.

If you now accept, that sunspots have something to do with the earth's temperature - and it is demonstrated - then you have a problem with the models, as "the sh*t we're in" may not have been there in the first place.

The discussion on this matter seems to be all over the place, as you'd expect when there are so many variables. I forget the exact figure, but it is that something like a quarter of all the man-made CO2 that has ever been added to the atmosphere, has been added to it in the last 16 years - during the time of the Hiatus! Which has now raised all sorts of questions about CO2 sensitivity having been overestimated.

I have seen arguments claiming that the cooling effect of the sunspots is masking the horror we would have had from that huge increase in CO2, and when the sun returns to normal, disaster looms. But if one accepts the sunspot cause, it calls into question the accuracy and forecasts of the initial supercomputer models using CO2 as their root basis.

Anyhow, while 95% of the supercomputer models have had their predictions shown as flawed by this Hiatus, two of them haven't - and it will take another five of so years of Hiatus to disprove their predictions, or to show them on track. So, it will be interesting to see if the Hiatus continues, and which way the temperature goes when it ends.

Regards,
Renato

[N1 (Mirko)]

Originally Posted by Renato1

One thing though, if there was a connection between sunspots and earth temperature, there would have to be lag effects - you wouldn't expect the planet to start going cold instantaneously.

Completely agree.

Originally Posted by Renato1

something like a quarter of all the man-made CO2 that has ever been added to the atmosphere, has been added to it in the last 16 years - during the time of the Hiatus! Which has now raised all sorts of questions about CO2 sensitivity having been overestimated.

Hm. Could there be a lag effect here too? In which case I wouldn't expect the planet to heat up instantaneously. Would you?

[andyc (Andy)]

Originally Posted by Renato1

Hi Andy,
The good thing about this climate debate is that most of the actual data is available just by Googling. One can read blogger sites like Skeptical Science which claims that the earth is warming at the rate of dozens Hiroshima bombs every second, and start getting scared when they point out effects on the Arctic ice as evidence of their point. Only problem occurs when one then Googles and checks the global sea ice anomaly. Which shows that earth's sea ice is of right now - at record levels. The Arctic has recovered from its lows (it didn't disappear by last year, as many had predicted), and Antarctic sea ice (which is far greater than the Arctic's) just keeps getting bigger. Anyhow, if you check the IPCC 5th Assessment report, they can't figure out why the Antarctic ice just keeps getting bigger, contrary to all predictions of theory.

As for the effect of the sun on temperature, the still unproven theory (from some group in Scandinavia) about the sun's possible role in earth's temperature changes relates to the effect of the solar wind. With an inactive sun, more cosmic rays hit the earth leading to cloud formation at lower levels, and results in a cooler earth. When solar winds predominate from a very active sun, those particles result in clouds forming at higher levels, leading to a warmer earth. (I read that in American Sky&Telescope some years back). I expect it will be some time before that theory is either proven or dis-proven.

But I didn't really want to start a debate about this. What the skeptics were calling a "Pause" since 1998 (for which they were much derided) has now been acknowledged by the IPCC, and they call it an "Hiatus".
Its existence is not debatable anymore.

Anyhow, I still miss the decent sunspots of the early to mid 80s. And I really miss the summer of 1987/1988 - where down here in Melbourne, I got a suntan in the first week of September, Carlton won the premiership on 30 September in 30C heat, and it was beach weather from September through till the very end of May. I even went to the beach on the second of June. By way of contrast, we only had a month and a half of beach weather this year.
Cheers,
Renato

Renato, you've been stuffed chock full of misinformation my friend. Can I recommend a detox and some time reading about the basics of climate science, before you go shooting from the hip? Not everything you read on the Internet is correct, and I prefer to get my science from the original research papers (particularly being that my PhD was in studying physical climate change). Skeptical Science is an excellent resource, in that not only does it rely on the primary research literature, but also has a good few actively publishing climate scientists among its contributors.

I'll note a couple of things -
1: Atmospheric physics tells us that the amount of non-condensing GHGs we have been emitting should be causing a large energy imbalance, much larger than the observed solar variations (have a read of Spencer Weart's history of CO2 for an online starter).

2: We've observed (from the ground and from space) that there is a radiative imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, occurring at the wavelengths where CO2 scatters infrared radiation (Harries et al 2001, Philipona 2004 I think).

3: Earth has been observed to be continuing accumulating heat, dominantly in the oceans (93% of the energy goes there), see Levitus et al 2012. As most of the energy goes into the oceans, and the oceans have warmed rapidly in the 2000s, it is fair to say that the warming rate of the planet has likely accelerated. The atmosphere must follow the oceans heat-wise, and so we will continue to warm. Many atomic bombs per second equivalent, whether you like it or not - we are incredibly lucky the oceans are big, as they're the only significant buffer.

4: The hiatus is quite substantially an illusion, caused by cherry-picking the largest El Nino in recent history as a starting point, and several strong La Ninas as an end point. From memory, the average 30-year trend is about 0.16C/decade. The 15 years from 1992-2007 had a trend almost twice that, while the 15-year trend from 1998-2013 was a similar amount below the long-term trend. Were you saying global warming had doubled in speed at that point? The scientists correctly identified it as noise at the time. Both 15-year trend lines are not significantly different from the long-term warming trend, and for that reason, climate is done on 30-year trends/averages, to get rid of this noise. When you remove EL Nino, volcanic and solar factors, the trend really sticks out (Foster and Rahmstorf, 2011). Your argument is akin to suggesting a hot week in April means that winter isn't on its way!

5: There may be some small slowing of warming due to extra Chinese aerosols, and likely a slight reduction in warming rate due to the lowest solar activity in a century, but you should be very concerned as to why the climate is not sharply cooling when ENSO, solar and aerosols are aligned in such a way as to suggest it should be (see for example Feulner 2010). That because of the underlying warming trend that we know from atmospheric physics and observation is due to our extra CO2 emissions.

6: Remember that the spatial pattern of observed warming is not consistent with a solar activity origin, as I described previously. Did you think that scientists hadn't thought of the Sun? Or do you believe in a grand conspiracy comprising every national science academy on the planet, as well as thousands of academics, despite their career progression often depending on proving each each other wrong? And somehow colluding with governments to put the poor, honest, suffering fossil fuel industries out of business, despite few governments actually getting really serious on climate?

7: Actually, Antarctic sea ice increase has a number of entirely reasonable explanations... for example increased precipitation and melting land ice (which is occurring at an accelerating rate) freshens the oceans round Antarctica - and fresh water freezes more easily than salt. The ozone hole indirectly leads to higher circumpolar wind speeds, driving more rapid sea ice production, pumping more ice out onto the ocean. You'll find this information in the literature, find links to the research papers here. Counterintuitive processes like these are why one should listen to professional science bodies rather than the Murdoch press or amateur blog skeptics. Unfortunately all that extra Antarctic ice is languishing in the polar dusk of winter, contributing virtually nil to the planetary albedo. The more rapid Arctic ice decline occurs in summer and early autumn, where it does affect albedo (especially when combined with the extremely rapid decline in Northern Hemisphere summer snow cover).

8: Last point - the numbers don't sound large, but this is perhaps the fastest warming event outside a cataclysmic asteroid/volcanic eruption in geological history. The best analogues may be the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or the end Permian mass extinction, but neither makes comfortable reading. 5C is a glacial-interglacial change (hardly small), but we're changing the climate more than an order of magnitude faster, and more rapidly than species or soils typically adapt. And we depend on agriculture, not on Gina Rineheart's profit margin. Richard Alley has a superb lecture on the palaeo evidence here. And all quite apart from ocean acidification, an even scarier beast.

Once again, I apologise to the mods for continuing this discussion, way too much from me and I'll back out now - but I can only hope that some of the above information is useful to those confused about climate. People always say that scientists should communicate more, not less

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by N1

Completely agree.



Hm. Could there be a lag effect here too? In which case I wouldn't expect the planet to heat up instantaneously. Would you?

Lag effect and trends are interesting. The trend from the 1940s to mid 70s was down, and the big predicted catastrophe was Global Cooling.

The 15 or 16 years of global warming from mid 70s to early 90s, was sufficent to whip alarm and start the whole stop global warming bandwagon.

And now we have had 16 years of no temperature increase.

When 16 years of one trend (lags included) is sufficient to overturn the previous 30 year trend, then when a new 16 year shows up, it cannot be so easily dismissed.

In 1977, as part of my undergraduate degree I did a course called Applied Ecology and Conservation at Monash University. The big threat taught was Global Cooling. The effects of CO2 in warming the atmosphere was mentioned, but the general view was that it could not stop Global Cooling.

It transpired that one of the gurus of the Global Cooling catastrophe, Stephen Schneider, had written a scientific paper addressing the issue, and he demonstrated that one could increase the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere 8 fold, and it would have neglible effect on stopping global cooling.

Of course, Dr. Stephen Schneider later went on to become the guru for Global Warming. When questioned about his earlier paper demonstrating how ineffectual CO2 was, he had a simple answer, namely that he was wrong.

I tend to take everything I read about this issue with a grain of salt.
Regards,
Renato

References:
Schneider , Stephen and Rasool, N "Atmospheric carbon dioxide and aerosols. Effects of large increases on global climate" Science July 9 1971.

Schneider, Stephen "On the carbon dioxide climate confusion", Journal of Atmospheric Sciences. Nov 19754

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by andyc

Renato, you've been stuffed chock full of misinformation my friend. Can I recommend a detox and some time reading about the basics of climate science, before you go shooting from the hip? Not everything you read on the Internet is correct, and I prefer to get my science from the original research papers (particularly being that my PhD was in studying physical climate change). Skeptical Science is an excellent resource, in that not only does it rely on the primary research literature, but also has a good few actively publishing climate scientists among its contributors.

I'll note a couple of things -
1: Atmospheric physics tells us that the amount of non-condensing GHGs we have been emitting should be causing a large energy imbalance, much larger than the observed solar variations (have a read of Spencer Weart's history of CO2 for an online starter).

2: We've observed (from the ground and from space) that there is a radiative imbalance at the top of the atmosphere, occurring at the wavelengths where CO2 scatters infrared radiation (Harries et al 2001, Philipona 2004 I think).

3: Earth has been observed to be continuing accumulating heat, dominantly in the oceans (93% of the energy goes there), see Levitus et al 2012. As most of the energy goes into the oceans, and the oceans have warmed rapidly in the 2000s, it is fair to say that the warming rate of the planet has likely accelerated. The atmosphere must follow the oceans heat-wise, and so we will continue to warm. Many atomic bombs per second equivalent, whether you like it or not - we are incredibly lucky the oceans are big, as they're the only significant buffer.

4: The hiatus is quite substantially an illusion, caused by cherry-picking the largest El Nino in recent history as a starting point, and several strong La Ninas as an end point. From memory, the average 30-year trend is about 0.16C/decade. The 15 years from 1992-2007 had a trend almost twice that, while the 15-year trend from 1998-2013 was a similar amount below the long-term trend. Were you saying global warming had doubled in speed at that point? The scientists correctly identified it as noise at the time. Both 15-year trend lines are not significantly different from the long-term warming trend, and for that reason, climate is done on 30-year trends/averages, to get rid of this noise. When you remove EL Nino, volcanic and solar factors, the trend really sticks out (Foster and Rahmstorf, 2011). Your argument is akin to suggesting a hot week in April means that winter isn't on its way!

5: There may be some small slowing of warming due to extra Chinese aerosols, and likely a slight reduction in warming rate due to the lowest solar activity in a century, but you should be very concerned as to why the climate is not sharply cooling when ENSO, solar and aerosols are aligned in such a way as to suggest it should be (see for example Feulner 2010). That because of the underlying warming trend that we know from atmospheric physics and observation is due to our extra CO2 emissions.

6: Remember that the spatial pattern of observed warming is not consistent with a solar activity origin, as I described previously. Did you think that scientists hadn't thought of the Sun? Or do you believe in a grand conspiracy comprising every national science academy on the planet, as well as thousands of academics, despite their career progression often depending on proving each each other wrong? And somehow colluding with governments to put the poor, honest, suffering fossil fuel industries out of business, despite few governments actually getting really serious on climate?

7: Actually, Antarctic sea ice increase has a number of entirely reasonable explanations... for example increased precipitation and melting land ice (which is occurring at an accelerating rate) freshens the oceans round Antarctica - and fresh water freezes more easily than salt. The ozone hole indirectly leads to higher circumpolar wind speeds, driving more rapid sea ice production, pumping more ice out onto the ocean. You'll find this information in the literature, find links to the research papers here. Counterintuitive processes like these are why one should listen to professional science bodies rather than the Murdoch press or amateur blog skeptics. Unfortunately all that extra Antarctic ice is languishing in the polar dusk of winter, contributing virtually nil to the planetary albedo. The more rapid Arctic ice decline occurs in summer and early autumn, where it does affect albedo (especially when combined with the extremely rapid decline in Northern Hemisphere summer snow cover).

8: Last point - the numbers don't sound large, but this is perhaps the fastest warming event outside a cataclysmic asteroid/volcanic eruption in geological history. The best analogues may be the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or the end Permian mass extinction, but neither makes comfortable reading. 5C is a glacial-interglacial change (hardly small), but we're changing the climate more than an order of magnitude faster, and more rapidly than species or soils typically adapt. And we depend on agriculture, not on Gina Rineheart's profit margin. Richard Alley has a superb lecture on the palaeo evidence here. And all quite apart from ocean acidification, an even scarier beast.

Once again, I apologise to the mods for continuing this discussion, way too much from me and I'll back out now - but I can only hope that some of the above information is useful to those confused about climate. People always say that scientists should communicate more, not less

Hi Andy,
Thanks for your detailed response.

Attached is the current satellite data. I think you are too quick to dismiss the Hiatus with notions of cherry picking from the high 1998 El Nino peak, which is largely cancelled out by the 2000 dip. Pick the 2002 point if you like, there's no upward trend. And you seem to dismiss it as being of little import, unlike what the IPCC does. Though I note that they say it's a 0.05C per decade warming trend, compared to the 1951-2012 warming trend of 0.12C per decade (I guess it would have been embarrassing comparing it to the 1975-1998 warming trend)

Climate science is about the predictions from super computer models, and what goes into them to make those predictions (and that encompasses most of the points that you raise). The whole movement to change the dependence on fossil fuels and radically change the way of life on the entire planet, stems from the predictions of those models. Models have been making predictions for a long time now, and they can now be tested against empirical reality. 95% of them have failed in their temperature predictions for the present temperature right now, having overestimated. But two are still in the hunt, as they didn't predict big temperature rises for around another five years.

Governments aren't going to take action on dud predictions and accept excuses, like we forgot about the Chinese aerosols, lack of sunspots may be having an effect (when we said they wouldn't have any effect), and the missing heat may be in the deep oceans where we don't take any measurements.

Anyhow, the British MET have now predicted no temperature increase for a total of 20 years (four years to go), before it starts rising again. So in five years, we'll see if the MET got it right or wrong.

Would you agree that 20 years of no significant warming, in the face of increasing relatively astronomical emissions of man-made CO2, would be problematic for climate science? If not, how many years?

I note that you say that there is no problem with understanding the huge increase in sea ice around Antarctica, and cite a blogger.

So I'll cite the 5th Assessment Report section, "Observations and Understanding of Recent Climate Change" which is the summary from other sections, which states,
"Sea ice trends Arctic and Antarctic
- Recent Arctic decline larger than models
- Recent Antarctic increase not well understood"

Perhaps the IPCC should have consulted Skeptical Science?
Regards,
Renato

[andyc (Andy)]

Renato, there's little point in having a discussion if you won't read what's written. I've twice pointed out that 93% of *observed* warming goes into the oceans, and yet you're still banging on about a non-significant short-term 'hiatus' in 2% of the climate system (the atmosphere) as if that proves Earth isn't still rapidly gaining heat.

You didn't follow the links to all the Antarctic sea ice research papers in the SkS link? Or was reading and following information to it's source too much?

Climate science is completely underpinned by *observations*. Old tired talking points about it only being models fall into the 'not even wrong' category.

You're wrong about so many things it is painful! I'm sorry to see a fellow astronomer in such a position. I only hope that one day you'll understand this and have the grace to accept it. I'd love to be wrong about climate, but based on the research literature, the chances of that are virtually nil.

Clear skies

[N1 (Mirko)]

Originally Posted by Renato1

When 16 years of one trend (lags included) is sufficient to overturn the previous 30 year trend, then when a new 16 year shows up, it cannot be so easily dismissed.

Doesn't that assume that the factors causing both trends were the same, or at least were of the same causative force? Were they?