[quote=“BigJohn”] I am more of a climate skeptic than I used to be.
[/quote]
Interesting. Do you mean you are more skeptical of the science, or the political process that surrounds it, just curious.
[quote=“Mick”][quote=“BigJohn”] I am more of a climate skeptic than I used to be.
[/quote]
Interesting. Do you mean you are more skeptical of the science, or the political process that surrounds it, just curious.[/quote]
The latter. I am more prone to believe that the cries that AGW is an massive threat that needs immediate action may often be the result of alarmism (a scientific version of the apocalypse?) NGO hyping and groupthink.
As to the science, I have no basis to criticize it. I believe in science, to a large extent because it treats each conclusion as a theory and is open to revision. That is why I am interested to see what the IPCC will do in 2014.
I am now, I guess, open-minded about the issue, as opposed to taking a side.
All you have to do is examine the models that are used to hyperventilate the most awful of predictions. If there is some big scare it is almost always based on some projection from a computer model and not actually observed conditions.
They say it’s going to rain today.
[quote]Big John, no one agrees with fred. As gao, and earlier I pointed out, the reason GW isn’t an election issue is obvious and is unrelated to the seriousness of it.
Other issues I have noticed not of much concern with US voters (despite their obvious significance):
Collapse of worldwide fish stocks due to overfishing
Growing Chinese aggression toward US allies in Asia
The crisis with the Euro
Failing democracy in Russia[/quote]
Human rights abuses…
The list really goes on, doesn’t it? Why should we be surprised that what is the MOST SERIOUS event on the planet takes a back seat to so many other issues like… failing democracy in Russia… really? REALLY?
[quote]Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it
The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures. This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
Research: The new figures mean that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported. This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year. Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions. Others disagreed. Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the [color=#800080]
computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.
[/color]Even Prof Jones admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’ – factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and changes in the output of the sun. However, he said he was still convinced that the current decade would end up significantly warmer than the previous two.
The regular data collected on global temperature is called Hadcrut 4, as it is jointly issued by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and Prof Jones’s Climatic Research Unit. Since 1880, when worldwide industrialisation began to gather pace and reliable statistics were first collected on a global scale, the world has warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius. Some scientists have claimed that this rate of warming is set to increase hugely without drastic cuts to carbon-dioxide emissions, predicting a catastrophic increase of up to a further five degrees Celsius by the end of the century. The new figures were released as the Government made clear that it would ‘bend’ its own carbon-dioxide rules and build new power stations to try to combat the threat of blackouts.
At last week’s Conservative Party Conference, the new Energy Minister, John Hayes, promised that ‘the high-flown theories of bourgeois Left-wing academics will not override the interests of ordinary people who need fuel for heat, light and transport – energy policies, you might say, for the many, not the few’ – a pledge that has triggered fury from green activists, who fear reductions in the huge subsidies given to wind-turbine firms.
Here are three not-so trivial questions you probably won’t find in your next pub quiz. First, how much warmer has the world become since a) 1880 and b) the beginning of 1997? And what has this got to do with your ever-increasing energy bill? You may find the answers to the first two surprising. Since 1880, when reliable temperature records began to be kept across most of the globe, the world has warmed by about 0.75 degrees Celsius. From the start of 1997 until August 2012, however, figures released last week show the answer is zero: the trend, derived from the aggregate data collected from more than 3,000 worldwide measuring points, has been flat. Not that there has been any coverage in the media, which usually reports climate issues assiduously, since the figures were quietly release online with no accompanying press release – unlike six months ago when they showed a slight warming trend.
The answer to the third question is perhaps the most familiar. Your bills are going up, at least in part, because of the array of ‘green’ subsidies being provided to the renewable energy industry, chiefly wind.
They will cost the average household about £100 this year. This is set to rise steadily higher – yet it is being imposed for only one reason: the widespread conviction, which is shared by politicians of all stripes and drilled into children at primary schools, that, without drastic action to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, global warming is certain soon to accelerate, with truly catastrophic consequences by the end of the century – when temperatures could be up to five degrees higher.
Global industrialisation over the past 130 years has made relatively little difference.
And with the country committed by Act of Parliament to reducing CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050, a project that will cost hundreds of billions, the news that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years comes as something of a shock.It poses a fundamental challenge to the assumptions underlying every aspect of energy and climate change policy. This ‘plateau’ in rising temperatures does not mean that global warming won’t at some point resume. But according to increasing numbers of serious climate scientists, it does suggest that the computer models that have for years been predicting imminent doom, such as those used by the Met Office and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are flawed, and that the climate is far more complex than the models assert. ‘The new data confirms the existence of a pause in global warming,’ Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at America’s Georgia Tech university, told me yesterday.
[color=#008080]‘Climate models are very complex, but they are imperfect and incomplete. Natural variability [the impact of factors such as long-term temperature cycles in the oceans and the output of the sun] has been shown over the past two decades to have a magnitude that dominates the greenhouse warming effect. [/color]
‘It is becoming increasingly apparent that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance.’
Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who found himself at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ scandal over leaked emails three years ago, would not normally be expected to agree with her. Yet on two important points, he did. The data does suggest a plateau, he admitted, and without a major El Nino event – the sudden, dramatic warming of the southern Pacific which takes place unpredictably and always has a huge effect on global weather – ‘it could go on for a while’. Like Prof Curry, Prof Jones also admitted that the climate models were imperfect: ‘We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans, and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming. We don’t know what natural variability is doing.’ Yet he insisted that 15 or 16 years is not a significant period: pauses of such length had always been expected, he said. Yet in 2009, when the plateau was already becoming apparent and being discussed by scientists, he told a colleague in one of the Climategate emails: ‘Bottom line: the “no upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’ But although that point has now been passed, he said that he hadn’t changed his mind about the models’ gloomy predictions: ‘I still think that the current decade which began in 2010 will be warmer by about 0.17 degrees than the previous one, which was warmer than the Nineties.’ Only if that did not happen would he seriously begin to wonder whether something more profound might be happening. In other words, though five years ago he seemed to be saying that 15 years without warming would make him ‘worried’, that period has now become 20 years. Meanwhile, his Met Office colleagues were sticking to their guns. A spokesman said: ‘Choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system.’
He said that for the plateau to last any more than 15 years was ‘unlikely’. Asked about a prediction that the Met Office made in 2009 – that three of the ensuing five years would set a new world temperature record – he made no comment. With no sign of a strong El Nino next year, the prospects of this happening are remote. Why all this matters should be obvious. Every quarter, statistics on the economy’s output and models of future performance have a huge impact on our lives. They trigger a range of policy responses from the Bank of England and the Treasury, and myriad decisions by private businesses.
Yet it has steadily become apparent since the 2008 crash that both the statistics and the modelling are extremely unreliable. To plan the future around them makes about as much sense as choosing a wedding date three months’ hence on the basis of a long-term weather forecast. Few people would be so foolish. But decisions of far deeper and more costly significance than those derived from output figures have been and are still being made on the basis of climate predictions, not of the next three months but of the coming century – and this despite the fact that Phil Jones and his colleagues now admit they do not understand the role of ‘natural variability’. The most depressing feature of this debate is that anyone who questions the alarmist, doomsday scenario will automatically be labelled a climate change ‘denier’, and accused of jeopardising the future of humanity. So let’s be clear. Yes: global warming is real, and some of it at least has been caused by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels. But the evidence is beginning to suggest that it may be happening much slower than the catastrophists have claimed – a conclusion with enormous policy implications[/quote]
And it did! Bloody hellfire, these climate model guys are good.
And it did! Bloody hellfire, these climate model guys are good.[/quote]
Climate models are generally more accurate than weather models.
All you have to do is examine the models that are used to hyperventilate the most awful of predictions. If there is some big scare it is almost always based on some projection from a computer model and not actually observed conditions.[/quote]
Then lets go with the actual observed conditions into the future. I’m sure that you’ll have no trouble at all in posting a link to the observed temperature and rainfall conditions of say, 2050.
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Observed conditions into the future? Um… well… yeah… that would be um kinda difficult since observed conditions um could not by its very definition be forecast to 2050 but hey… don’t let that get in your way of a defense. Also, where have you been? Seems like weeks since I responded to your points and you er have um not had much to say… what? with all your climate change or rather climate science education… you cannot respond to my points? no cut and paste effort from a web site to answer my assertions? okay… yeah… we might have to wait until 2050 after all 
and hahahahahhahahahahaahah
Observed conditions into the future? Um… well… yeah… that would be um kinda difficult since observed conditions um could not by its very definition be forecast to 2050 [/quote]
Exactly.
Which, if you’d read any of the IPCC report as you claim, you’d realize that your point I quoted makes no sense.
Doubtful. Nothing that you say ever matches the words “exactly.” Let’s see…
No need to read the IPCC report on this. I do not believe the computer models. I have cited numerous sources to show that even the proponents admit that the models are failed and do not adequately account for climactic conditions.
Hence, given that I doubt the model’s accuracy, I doubt the IPCC report’s accuracy. Clear? And given that I have stated WHY I disagree with the PROJECTIONS, and the reason for that being that OBSERVED conditions do NOT bear out what the models forecast earlier and that OBSERVED conditions TODAY are not in alignment with the models and their predictions, then… sing along with me here… you all know the words… it is UNLIKELY that the projections to 2050 will be more accurate, in fact, they are likely to be much less accurate, than the problems and discrepancies that were are seeing TODAY. Therefore, I believe that IF observed conditions TODAY are not bearing out the alarmist stances of climate change alarmist experts (such as yourself given your study with the world-renowned what’s his face in Melbourne), then there is no need to assume or even project any sort of alarmist need to “take urgent action” now when the “science” as to what will happen and the “science” which underpins these models and their projections is so “lacking in consensus” and per the very definition of science… you get this right? NOT REALIZABLE in terms of EMPIRICAL (read: observable) verification.
So, for all of your “expertise” in “science” you fail Science 101 which is what? conducting an experiment and then seeing how the results support or fail to support the theory being proposed, no?
Best head back to that “expert climatologist professor of yours” in Melbourne. AND you still owe me several answers regarding your earlier commentary which I took the time to respond to. Just because you cannot find a cut and paste job does not mean that you “as the climate change expert who studied with the world-renowned what’s his face in Melbourne” should not be able to answer given that you are so knowledgeable in this area, non? Back to you. Smirk. SMIRK.
Fred, as I told you before, I’m not spending any time engaging you in a debate unless and until you show some effort in trying to understand basic science. There have been numerous instances in these threads where I and others have taken the time to explain basics to you, only for you to return a few weeks or months later repeating your original claims. Debate is great when both parties engage in it but on this issue at least, you’ve shown over and over that you’re only interested in the sound of your own voice and others that sing your tune, even when its shown to be in error.
Make whatever claims about predictions and observations you want but until such time as we reach the time period the predictions are for, you’re just talking out of you’re arse.
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Basic science? Like where people are required to actually prove their assertions? Didn’t realize this was a religious discussion. Oh wait… actually, I did.
Alternatively, things have been explained to you only to have you come back and repeat your original claims. The models are failed. This has been proven again and again. The proof is there. These projections from these computer-based models are what most of the most dire forecasts is based on.
Fine. Just posted something on how the climate models have been labeled as being very inaccurate. Got anything to prove that they are other than the sound of your own voice, which I cannot help but notice goes awfully quiet when you do not have a cut and paste job to supply. And with all of that expertise learned at the feet of that amazing world-renowned expert. Surely you could do better?
Sure I am. So explain why the article that I posted notes the exact opposite that the alarmists deliberately chose the dates and periods to exaggerate the threat. Sorta kinda like how we always get references to warming and Arctic Ice cover based on 1979-1982 starting dates? Wonder why that is? Yes, there is a great deal of talking out of one’s ass and we all know that this is something that alarmists specialize in.
