Climate change another name for Weather

Calliope said:

The pressure and propaganda from the left in Western democracies to reduce carbon emissions will come to naught unless China comes to the party, However they are not nearly so gullible as we are, and are not likely to be convinced that CO2 is the problem. And why should they make such huge sacrifices, just because we think they should.

The Copenhagen talkfest will be a fizzer. If China tells Mr Rudd to shut up his nagging about GW, he will. He is learning to do as he is told. He has little choice.

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trainspotter said:

Oh My God !

THE Catholic Church has confessed it is one of the biggest carbon emission sinners in Australia.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25799480-29277,00.html

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2020hindsight said:

needless to say you run the risk of offending the accountants and bankers etc reading this.

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Smurf1976 said:

The problem arrived when banking and accounting transformed from a means of facilitating productive industry into a massive undertaking in its own right that, in due course, began to choke the productive base it was supposed to serve.

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spooly74 said:

Saying "maybe they're related" and "their frequency and severity are all due to GW" are two very different statements. That's my drift.

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2020 said:

Would be great if you answered in a commital way, one way or the other

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There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998

By Bob Carter
Published: 12:01AM BST 09 Apr 2006

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco.

Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

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Has the world cooled since 1998?
Robert Fawcett
National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology, Australia
Address for correspondence: R. Fawcett, National Climate Centre, Bureau of Meteorology, GPO Box
1289, Melbourne, Vic 3001, Australia. Email: r.fawcett@bom.gov.au

1. Introduction
In the past few years, there have been repeated assertions from some, commenting on the IPCC Assessment Reports2 and elsewhere, to the effect that global mean temperatures have remained static, or even fallen slightly, over the past decade. This is in spite of continued increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations (e.g., Carter 2006, 2007). In what follows, for brevity this will be referred to as the “cooling assertion”. A typical response to the cooling assertion is that the global warming conditions that occurred in 1998 were due in part to the very strong El Niño event of 1997/98, and subsequent years have been as warm or nearly as warm from much less emphatic El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions.

This article will explore this issue both globally and nationally from a statistical perspective, taking into account the role of ENSO in global and national mean temperature anomalies, with a view to seeing what evidence, if any, exists in the various global annual mean temperature time series to support the cooling assertion.

2. Data and time series smoothing
Australian annual mean temperature anomalies have been obtained from the Bureau of Meteorology’s National Climate Centre. They are available for the period 1910 to 2006, and are calculated with respect to the 1961-1990 period. Two different versions of the global annual mean temperature anomaly time series are explored here. The first is the HadCRUT3 time
series compiled by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit 2 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report is available at http://www.ipcc.ch . (www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature, Brohan et al. 2006). Anomalies in this time series are calculated with respect to the 1961- 1990 period. Values for the time series covering the period 1910 to 2006 are used.

While the time series is available from 1850 onwards, data from 1910 are used for consistency with the Australian national temperature data that are available only from 1910 onwards. The second is the NASA GISS time series of Hansen et al. (1996), obtained from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/ GLB.Ts.txt in November 20073. Anomalies in this time series are calculated with respect to the 1951-1980 period. The series is available from 1880 to the present, but again only the 1910 to 2006 data are considered.

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4. Concluding remarks
This article has explored the question of whether or not the cooling assertion, that global annual mean temperatures over the past decade have remained static or even declined slightly, has merit. This question is more relevant to the HadCRUT3 time series, in which 1998 is the warmest year (to 2006), than the GISS and NCDC time series, in which 2005 is the warmest year. In terms of the smoothed versions of these three time series, the evidence in favour of the cooling assertion is very slight at best.

Removing the ENSO-related inter-annual variability by means of linear regression against the SOI provides more evidence against the cooling assertion. Of the three global time series explored, the HadCRUT3 time series is the most ambivalent when ENSO-adjusted, and even that one has 2006 as the warmest (adjusted) year. In the GISS data set, ENSO-adjustment results in a stark warming over the past 40 years. Nationally, 2005 remains Australia’s warmest year whether or not the ENSO signal is removed. Ultimately, the correctness or otherwise of the cooling assertion is something for which the observations will in time provide the answer.

On balance however, the observational evidence of the past decade is against it.

Bulletin of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society Vol. 20 pg 148

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All 3 data sets demonstrate that the anomalously hot 1998 was due to the strong El Niño of 1997/98. When ENSO-adjusted, 1998 looks much less remarkable than it does in the original data. In the 3 ENSO-adjusted data-sets, 2005/ 2006 are the hottest year(s) on record and the trend from 1998 to 2007 is that of warming.

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Water stores an immense amount of heat compared with air. It takes more than 1000 times as much energy to heat a cubic metre of water by 1 degree Centigrade as it does the same volume of air. Since the 1960s, over 90% of the excess heat due to higher greenhouse gas levels has gone into the oceans, and just 3% into warming the atmosphere (see figure 5.4 in the IPCC report (PDF)).

Globally, this means that if the oceans soak up a bit more heat energy than normal, surface air temperatures can fall even though the total heat content of the planet is rising. Conversely, if the oceans soak up less heat than usual, surface temperatures will rise rapidly.

This is why surface temperatures do not necessarily rise steadily year after year, even though the planet as a whole is heating up a bit more every year. Most of the year-to-year variability in surface temperatures is due to heat sloshing back and forth between the oceans and atmosphere, rather than to the planet as a whole gaining or losing heat.

The record warmth of 1998 was not due to a sudden spurt in global warming but to a very strong El Niño (see figure, right). In normal years, trade winds keep hot water piled up on the western side of the tropical Pacific.

During an El Niño, the winds weaken and the hot water spreads out across the Pacific in a shallow layer, which increases heat transfer to the atmosphere. (During a La Niña, by contrast, as occurred during the early part of 2008, the process is reversed and upwelling cold water in the eastern Pacific soaks up heat from the atmosphere.)

A temporary fall in the heat content of the oceans at this time may have been due to the extra strong El Niño.

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2020hindsight said:

"nothing heard, over"

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Calliope said:

Well give it a go anyway. This thread is a good place to practice a little common sense. For starters try taking an opposite tack to 2020.

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Gamblor said:

When you can put forth some well thought out and researched arguments then we'll talk about comon sense.

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2020hindsight said:

ok
this one for both you and spooly then wayne ...
http://www.skepticalscience.com/antarctica-gaining-ice.htm

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It's Snake Pliskin said:

And yes, the sun has a lot to do with heating the Earth. .... This is proven.

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2020hindsight said:

you reckon snake,

well - how is it then,
that ....

on day 1 God said "let there be light"

and on day 4 he said " let there be the sun / stars"?

(ps gotcha )

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Calliope said:

When the alarmists are asked why they are making such a big thing about their predictions that by the end of the century we will all be fried or drowned, they inevitably say that they want to make the world a better place for their children and grandchildren etc.( and for the polar bears.)

They also throw in their idealogical hatred for the big energy companies. But their interest is more humanitarian than political. Or so they would have us think.

In spite of their wonderful ideals, their grandchildren will go to their own versions of hell in their own ways. They are indoctrinated at school to believe the alarmists version of "The Science", but hedonism and self interest soon take over.

As for saving all the other species. That's a pipe dream. When the astronauts landed on the moon they said that there were three billion people on earth. Now there are six billion. Our expanding population has a tendency to overwhelm all those species that compete with us for space. We only save those that are useful to us. But even with some of them it's a losing battle.

There is nothing the alarmists can do about that except come up with a virus to drastically thin us out.

All the hot air spouted on this thread by the alarmists is not going to make one iota of difference to the outcome.

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