Quote:
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
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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
