Apparantly the weather is about to turn 'game of thrones' ...

[glend (Glen)]

Gee there is some serious stuff in this thread, and i thought it was about the fake Game of Thrones winters. Having spend many winters in Alberta Canada i don't mind a bit of warming. The real winters there are still just as cold, but yes summers may be a bit warmer than when i was young, but i didn't really take notice then. It happens so slowly that we adapt. Sure maybe more methane is released from frozen tundra, and ice melts, but this has all happened before, just like the sun spot cycle. We are still, thankfully, fairly insignificant in terms of what happens to the planet imho. Climate cycles, orbital tilt, sun cyckes, ice ages (yes they will occur again), are all part of living on planet, at least its not boring - like Mars. Mankind will adapt, or is that the Borg?

[andyc (Andy)]

Sadly, not quite, Glen. I wish we were insignificant! Attached are views of the change in temperature between a base period of 1951-1980 and the past decade, 2005-2015, you can see that January to March (northern winter) has warmed much more rapidly than July to Sept, including in Canada. You might be interested to see it, the source from NASA is here. This is exactly as expected. The rate of change is estimated to be among the fastest rate in at least the past 65 million years, and is getting on for an order of magnitude faster than the end of the last glaciation (that was 5C in 5,000 years, we've done 1C in 100 years). That, in geological/ecological contexts, is really very fast indeed and threatens all sorts of adaptation. Getting all serious, climate doesn't 'just change' (it's not a magical, Westeros world), it changes due to a change in forcing, and we know the primary radiative forcings on global climate and their size. The people that told you all about these past changes are the same ones telling you about the present changes. Ice ages are history until we stop emitting then draw down greenhouse gases - the energy balance is all wrong now to trigger them with Milankovitch forcing. They're "off the table", so to speak.

But hey, the last episode of Game of Thrones was quite something

[AussieTrooper (Ben)]

Originally Posted by andyc

But hey, the last episode of Game of Thrones was quite something

Quiet you! I'm only halfway through season two.
SWMBO is overseas for two weeks, so I actually get a chance to watch it now.

[rally]

Paul,

Not at all.
My post was all about people (usually the media) taking a carefully selected segment of contiguous data out of context and making a statement about just that piece of data without reference to the rest of the data.
ie use an isolated piece of data (fact) to draw a non factual but seemingly obvious conclusion in isolation.
For people who don't know or don't bother to look any further they are convinced by this - because after all its based on "Fact" - trouble is of course its not all the facts and its definitely not the whole story.
It then goes on and becomes a factoid.

I then deliberately extracted another potential factoid from another segment of the same data in order to draw an erronous and stupid conclusion to that data in order to highlight this very problem and I referred to that as "This is obviously cherry picking the data . . . "

Of course the real question is - Is it Game of Thrones weather ?
I guess in 200 years we will have a much better idea and in 20,000 years we might actually know !
The planet has regular Ice Ages and Global Warmings - the last Ice Age thaw was just over 10,000 years ago, so rapid global temperature change is nothing new - its more a Who Dunnit question.

Rally

Originally Posted by rally

Paul,

The reason the sunspot numbers have been "dropping" over the last 50 years is because roughly 60 years ago we had the the highest recorded annual peak since 1700 !
So, yes I guess its all downhill since then !
The relevance of it returning to "normal" is what ? - That its "Normal" or that its "Dropping" ?

But if you compared the last 50 years with what occurred 100 years ago you could then say that we now have roughly double the sunspots from that time !
Obviously man induced Global Warming - Im joking of course

This is obviously cherry picking the data and drawing any conclusions like these is meaningless misinformation.

If you look at the long term annual sunspot data you can see the cycles and see that the last 50 years is pretty ordinary and represents little variation to what has happened before (in fact quite similar to a similar period around 200 years ago) - what we can see is there is quite a lot of variation over time that probably indicates there is more going on inside the sun and given there is only a record of not quite 30 cycles since 1700 - we simply dont have a lot of data to truly analyse the internal cyclic nature of all that is going on inside the Sun.

jpg attached of chart showing annual sunspots since 1700
Graph X axis at ) actually represents 1700.
Data from reliable source - http://sidc.oma.be/silso/datafiles
Picture tells a 1000 words here - everyone can draw their own conclusions.

Rally