USA Today: Could we be wrong about global warming?

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And you were presuming that I was serious that you thought apes were responsible? That's a pretty odd way of interpreting my post. I'm using hyperbolic examples to elicit a response from you as to what you think is responsible, if there is anything to be responsible for. But I think the rest of the posters have done an admirable job, ad nauseum, of repeating that point.

Nobody, as of yet, can explain why CO2 emissions keep rising while temps stay stagnant, or even decrease.

I didn't get to the part about apes. You completely misrepresented my position on anthropogenic global warming versus my opinion on climate change, so that's what I was replying to in my post. That was the "strawman".

Still, not a single person can explain this lack of causation, or even correlation, in the data I presented.
 
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Good point. Only Americans had thermometers in 1934.

barfo

What was the average global temperature in 1934? A simple question, isn't it? How was it compiled versus how it is compiled today?
 
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Nobody, as of yet, can explain why CO2 emissions keep rising while temps stay stagnant, or even decrease.

I didn't get to the part about apes. You completely misrepresented my position on anthropogenic global warming versus my opinion on climate change, so that's what I was replying to in my post. That was the "strawman".

Still, not a single person can explain this lack of causation, or even correlation, in the data I presented.

I have, you've just ignored it. Temperatures are trending up, even if there's variance from year to year. CO2 is also trending up. They're going up at different rates, but I haven't read anyone say that they go up in direct proportion. Only that increased CO2 released into the atmosphere is a factor in the warming trend.
 
What was the average global temperature in 1934? A simple question, isn't it?

I'm sure that data is available if you want to look for it. What would you do with it if you found it?

barfo
 
how did they have movies in 1934? Those are way simpler than taking temperatures.

I'll have to admit I have no idea what you are trying to say here.

barfo
 
How was it compiled versus how it is compiled today?

If you want to know the answer to that, I'm sure it is documented in the scientific literature. All you need to do is go study it.

barfo
 
I have, you've just ignored it. Temperatures are trending up, even if there's variance from year to year. CO2 is also trending up. They're going up at different rates, but I haven't read anyone say that they go up in direct proportion. Only that increased CO2 released into the atmosphere is a factor in the warming trend.

Saying this does not make it so. There was not hotter year than 1998. CO2 emissions have continued to rise, while 1998 is still the peak of this warming period. There is no science behind your claim over the past 10 years, other than to say we're still warming, but it's just taking a break.

Man-made emissions of CO2 are a fraction of total CO2 output naturally, and CO2 is a fraction of all greenhouse gases put out naturally. The data set over the past ten years shows anthropogenic global warming to be a farce in terms of observable data.
 
Saying this does not make it so. There was not hotter year than 1998. CO2 emissions have continued to rise, while 1998 is still the peak of this warming period. There is no science behind your claim over the past 10 years, other than to say we're still warming, but it's just taking a break.

A peak doesn't have anything to do with an increasing trend.

A series of numbers like 2, 5, 7, 20, 10, 13, 15, 18 is a set indicating an upward trend. Just because the highest number does not come at the end doesn't mean there's no trend. If a statistician graphed the numbers and drew a trend line, it would have a positive slope. The same is true of global temperatures. 1998 represented a peak temperature, but when you draw the trend line through this graph:

global_temp1.jpg


You get a line going upward pretty significantly.

Something doesn't have to increase every year to be increasing over time...pretty much all natural data has variance and is prone to spikes here and there. The occasional spikes aren't the story, the entire data set is. Looking at the entire data, it's undeniable that we have observed rising temperatures over time, including the past decade. The past decade hasn't increased from the 1998 peak, it's been part of the overall trend over the past 150 years. 1998 is the type of outlier common to any large data set. Temperatures had steadily increased, 1998 happened to be a particularly hot year and you get the hottest temperatures in modern history and then it regresses and continues the climb upward that temperatures were already engaged in.

There was a similar spike (outlier) in 1945...and things regressed to their previous track and continued their climb upward, to the point that the 1945 spike is now way, way below where temperatures are now. 1945 and the years after didn't "disprove" global warming...we can see that the warming trend continued on afterward. The spikes simply are good for confusing people who don't look at the entire data set.
 
I'll have to admit I have no idea what you are trying to say here.

barfo

I was being sarcastic. Because we had movies in 1934, I would assume we could take temperatures around the world. Keep in mind that the US was not even a super power at this time.
 
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A peak doesn't have anything to do with an increasing trend.

A series of numbers like 2, 5, 7, 20, 10, 13, 15, 18 is a set indicating an upward trend. Just because the highest number does not come at the end doesn't mean there's no trend. If a statistician graphed the numbers and drew a trend line, it would have a positive slope. The same is true of global temperatures. 1998 represented a peak temperature, but when you draw the trend line through this graph:

global_temp1.jpg


You get a line going upward pretty significantly.

Something doesn't have to increase every year to be increasing over time...pretty much all natural data has variance and is prone to spikes here and there. The occasional spikes aren't the story, the entire data set is. Looking at the entire data, it's undeniable that we have observed rising temperatures over time, including the past decade. The past decade hasn't increased from the 1998 peak, it's been part of the overall trend over the past 150 years. 1998 is the type of outlier common to any large data set. Temperatures had steadily increased, 1998 happened to be a particularly hot year and you get the hottest temperatures in modern history and then it regresses and continues the climb upward that temperatures were already engaged in.

There was a similar spike (outlier) in 1945...and things regressed to their previous track and continued their climb upward, to the point that the 1945 spike is now way, way below where temperatures are now. 1945 and the years after didn't "disprove" global warming...we can see that the warming trend continued on afterward. The spikes simply are good for confusing people who don't look at the entire data set.

150 years versus 5 billion years. I still want to know how any data taken prior to the modern age can be taken at all seriously on a global scale. Emissions up; temps flat-to-down. One of the reasons we're now seeing "climate change" instead of "global warming". Nothing can convince me that fractionally reducing a fraction of the CO2 we contribute to the fraction that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse gas family is going to do anything substantial in terms of cooling a planet. Nothing short of a causal relationship, that is, and one cannot be found.
 
I was being sarcastic. Because we had movies in 1934, I would assume we could take temperatures around the world.

We could, and we did. Americans have always had the right to bear thermometers, and by god they can take my thermometer when they can pry it from my cold dead rectum.

barfo
 
YES IT IS, AT LEAST IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE INCREASE IN CO2. The graph I posted is not misleading. Tell you what. Start at 1998, grab the global average temp per year, and make the same temperature graph I posted.

Then plot CO2 emissions. Tell me what you see. Oh wait, I already posted it, and the graph doesn't show a causal effect, by CO2 emission, on warming global temperatures. You can't debate the point, so you continue to deflect.

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/32821

Globe may be cooling on Global Warming

Submitted by SHNS on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 14:33.

Australia, the land where sinks drain the other way, has alerted Americans that we see Earth's climate upside down: We're not warming. We're cooling.

"Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously." Dr. Phil Chapman wrote in The Australian on April 23. "All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead."

Chapman neither can be caricatured as a greedy oil-company lobbyist nor dismissed as a flat-Earther. He was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology staff physicist, NASA's first Australian-born astronaut, and Apollo 14's Mission Scientist.

Chapman believes reduced sunspot activity is curbing temperatures. As he elaborates, "there is a close correlation between variations on the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate." Anecdotally, last winter brought record cold to Florida, Mexico, and Greece, and rare snow to Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad. China endured brutal ice and snow.

NASA satellites found that last winter's Arctic Sea ice covered 2 million square kilometers (772,000 square miles) more than the last three years' average. It also was 10 to 20 centimeters (about 4-8 inches) thicker than in 2007. The ice between Canada and southwest Greenland also spread dramatically. "We have to go back 15 years to find ice expansion so far south," Denmark's Meteorological Institute stated.

"Snows Return to Mount Kilimanjaro," cheered a January 21 International Herald Tribune headline, as Africa also defies the "warming" narrative.

While neither anecdotes nor one year's statistics confirm global cooling, a decade of data contradicts the "melting planet" rhetoric that heats Capitol Hill and America's newsrooms.

"The University of Alabama-Huntsville's analysis of data from satellites launched in 1979 showed a warming trend of 0.14 degrees Centigrade (0.25 Fahrenheit) per decade," Joseph D'Aleo, the Weather Channel's first Director of Meteorology, told me. "This warmth peaked in 1998, and the temperature trend the last decade has been flat, even as CO2 has increased 5.5 percent. Cooling began in 2002. Over the last six years, global temperatures from satellite and land-temperature gauges have cooled (-0.14 F and -0.22 F, respectively).

Ocean buoys have echoed that slight cooling since the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration deployed them in 2003."

These researchers are not alone. They are among a rising tide of scientists who question the so-called "global warming" theory. Some further argue that global cooling merits urgent concern.

"In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is 'settled,' significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming," 100 prestigious geologists, physicists, meteorologists, and other scientists wrote United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon last December. They also noted "today's computer models cannot predict climate. Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998."

In a December 2007 Senate Environment and Public Works Committee minority-staff report, some 400 scientists -- from such respected institutions as Princeton, the National Academy of Sciences, the University of London, and Paris' Pasteur Institute -- declared their independence from the pro-warming "conventional wisdom."

"Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas," asserted climatologist Luc Debontridder of Belgium's Royal Meteorological Institute. "It is responsible for at least 75 percent of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it."

AccuWeather's Expert Senior Forecaster Joe Bastardi has stated: "People are concerned that 50 years from now, it will be warm beyond a point of no return. My concern is almost opposite, that it's cold and getting colder."

And on Wednesday, the respected journal, Nature, indicated that Earth's climactic cycles have stopped global warming through 2015.

If nothing else, all this obliterates the rampant lie that "the scientific debate on global warming is over." That debate rages on.

Assuming that the very serious scientists cited here are correct, the "inconvenient truth" about global-warming is inconveniently false. If so, mankind should chill out and turn our thinking right side up.

(Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. E-mail him at deroy.Murdock(at)gmail.com)
 
Saying this does not make it so. There was not hotter year than 1998. CO2 emissions have continued to rise, while 1998 is still the peak of this warming period. There is no science behind your claim over the past 10 years, other than to say we're still warming, but it's just taking a break.

Man-made emissions of CO2 are a fraction of total CO2 output naturally, and CO2 is a fraction of all greenhouse gases put out naturally. The data set over the past ten years shows anthropogenic global warming to be a farce in terms of observable data.

There is a thing called Outliers, which imply that if one data point is significantly different than the rest, you can note it as a "fluke." That being said, ALL of the temperatures in the last 10 years has been hotter than any temperature before that. There is scientific claim for this. Way to try to twist facts.

Would you agree that cows produce a lot of green house gas emissions? Would you also agree that cows are in an over abundance because of humans? Would you not consider this another example of humans affecting the climate?
 
150 years versus 5 billion years.

Says the guy who keeps quoting data from the last 10 years.

I still want to know how any data taken prior to the modern age can be taken at all seriously on a global scale.

What do you consider the modern age, and why?

Nothing can convince me

Agreed.

barfo
 
There is a thing called Outliers, which imply that if one data point is significantly different than the rest, you can note it as a "fluke." That being said, ALL of the temperatures in the last 10 years has been hotter than any temperature before that. There is scientific claim for this. Way to try to twist facts.
Would you agree that cows produce a lot of green house gas emissions? Would you also agree that cows are in an over abundance because of humans? Would you not consider this another example of humans affecting the climate?

10 years out of what, 50 that had somewhat reliable data. Statistically insignificant in any data set. What is significant, however, is the escalating CO2 levels versus a static temperature.
 
150 years versus 5 billion years. I still want to know how any data taken prior to the modern age can be taken at all seriously on a global scale. Emissions up; temps flat-to-down. One of the reasons we're now seeing "climate change" instead of "global warming". Nothing can convince me that fractionally reducing a fraction of the CO2 we contribute to the fraction that CO2 contributes to the greenhouse gas family is going to do anything substantial in terms of cooling a planet. Nothing short of a causal relationship, that is, and one cannot be found.

So are you suggesting "why bother trying to be more clean." ? genuine question, I cannot tell how you feel on that somewhat related topic.
 
150 years versus 5 billion years. I still want to know how any data taken prior to the modern age can be taken at all seriously on a global scale.

In the long view, it goes up and down. Of course, in the long view, 1 million years is tiny period of time...but if you're living in that million years, it's pretty damn important. So "modern temperatures" (however you define that) are pretty important. This could be the start of a mere blip in the eyes of the Earth, but a blip is long enough to wipe out plenty of species...even, potentially, us. We don't necessarily get to wait a hundred thousand years for things to cycle back down, if we push things too far now.

I don't think humans are likely to be wiped out but A. it's not at all impossible and B. life can continue, but get worse.
 
So are you suggesting "why bother trying to be more clean." ? genuine question, I cannot tell how you feel on that somewhat related topic.

I'm OK with reducing pollution. The US has done a good job of that since the 1970s. What I don't agree with is imposing ridiculous tax rates that will be passed to the consumer in the name of "saving the planet".

Al Gore's argument is primarily political. He didn't win the Nobel Prize for Science; he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now why is that?
 
So are you suggesting "why bother trying to be more clean." ? genuine question, I cannot tell how you feel on that somewhat related topic.

I think he's afraid of the impact new legislation will have on the economy. And who needs a sustainable, healthy environment when you have a strong economy anyway.
 
I still want to know how any data taken prior to the modern age can be taken at all seriously on a global scale.

Well I know there is some data taken from tree rings. The growth of the tree can tell you information about the weather of the year. There are trees that live for a thousand years, if not more.
 
Nobody, as of yet, can explain why CO2 emissions keep rising while temps stay stagnant, or even decrease.

I didn't get to the part about apes. You completely misrepresented my position on anthropogenic global warming versus my opinion on climate change, so that's what I was replying to in my post. That was the "strawman".

Still, not a single person can explain this lack of causation, or even correlation, in the data I presented.

From http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20080429.html

[More stuff in the article, but this seemed most pertinent at first glance]

The global climate is currently being influenced by the cold phase of this oscillation, known as La Niña. The current La Niña began to develop in early 2007, having a significant cooling effect on the global average temperature. Despite this, 2007 was one of the ten warmest years since global records began in 1850 with a temperature some 0.4 °C above average. Indeed, the years 2001-2007 recorded an average of 0.44 °C above the 1961-90 average, which is 0.21 °C warmer than corresponding values for the years 1991-2000

Another way of looking at the warming trend is that 1999 was a similar year to 2007 as far as the cooling effects of La Niña are concerned. The global temperature in 1999 was 0.26 °C above the 1961-90 average, whereas 2007 was 0.37 °C above this average - 0.11 °C warmer than 1999.

However, as La Niña declines, it is very likely that renewed warming will occur, as was the case when the Earth emerged from the strong La Niña events of 1989 and 1999.

Ten-year forecasts produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre capture this levelling of global temperatures in the middle of the decade; effectively La Niña has been masking the underlying trend in rising temperatures. These same forecasts also predict we will experience continued and increased warming into the next decade, with half the years between 2009 and 2014 being warmer than the current warmest on record, 1998.

It is worth remembering that 1998 was the warmest year on record because of an El Niño event amplifying the mean global temperature.
 
I think he's afraid of the impact new legislation will have on the economy. And who needs a sustainable, healthy environment when you have a strong economy anyway.

We don't have a strong economy.
 
Well I know there is some data taken from tree rings. The growth of the tree can tell you information about the weather of the year. There are trees that live for a thousand years, if not more.

There's also ice core data...drilling down into ice deep enough that the atmosphere from many years ago was trapped within the ice. The makeup of that ice can tell scientists what proportions of atmospheric gasses were present. This can give data to hundreds of thousands of years back.

There's even water captured in pockets in salt crystals from oceans that are gone now, and that salt is contained in the rocks. Scientists can use that water to see the atmospheric makeup millions of years ago.

There's quite a bit of data, going back a long way, to build climate models.
 
By the way, PapaG, you say you want an explanation of "causation or correlation", but you immediately dismiss theories and models. You can't have it both ways and keep a straight face. I'm guessing econ was your major.
 
There's also ice core data...drilling down into ice deep enough that the atmosphere from many years ago was trapped within the ice. The makeup of that ice can tell scientists what proportions of atmospheric gasses were present. This can give data to hundreds of thousands of years back.

There's even water captured in pockets in salt crystals from oceans that are gone now, and that salt is contained in the rocks. Scientists can use that water to see the atmospheric makeup millions of years ago.

There's quite a bit of data, going back a long way, to build climate models.

true, but I was trying to talk about temperature specifically.
 

Stupid math trick.

You can begin with the geologic scale of the time period or the scale of the numbers (-.6 to +.6). It's a scientific fact (not theory!) that you can zoom in on any graph with ups and downs and get something that looks like this. It's actually unimpressive.

But looking at your graph, would you say that temperature has increased by .8 degrees since 1850 (which is hardly anything to be scared of), or would you say that temperature has increased by .9 degrees since 1910?

I mean, .9 degrees is way scarier than .8 degrees.

I bet PapaG might be interested in this graph below. I'm interested in how you spin it as an upward trend in some respect.

210308graph2.jpg


Maybe a graph that actually does span geologic time periods holds some real cluse:

carbonDioxideLevels.jpg


It's quite evident that it's been hotter than now, when it was hotter than now there was less CO2, and that global warming trends occurred before man existed and the current one has been ongoing for about 10,000 years before the industrial age. It's also clear that CO2 levels actually lag temperature change.
 

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