This is a very important post and BAMS article — since the cooling nonsense remains the most common attack on climate scientists I get when speaking or writing on the subject. Kudos to your work on it.
I also think you may want to address the other pieces of “cooling” nonsense — that we are now in a cooling trend, either since 1998 (!) or, more recently, since last January.
Thanks for a great summary. I have been eagerly awaiting commentary on the recent hyping of a new sunspot minimum and ensuing Little Ice Age by the denial side. Any plans?
Well, for media only bad news are good news. Back in the 70s it was the just coming Next Ice Age, nowadays it’s the just coming disasterous GW.
What about the study
Miskolczi, Ferenc M., 2007. Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres. Idojaras Vol. 111, No 1, pp. 1-40, January 2007, online http://met.hu/doc/idojaras/vol111001_01.pdf
Quote from DailyTech March 6:
“Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.
How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution….”
[Response: Runaway Greenhouse is a strawman. I’m sure someone will take the paper to bits properly. The obvious problem for it is to explain the ice age cycle -William]
Someone should get Newsweek to revisit their 2006 revisit of their 1975 cooling prediction, defending it as an accurate depiction of the state of science at the time. RealClimate covered it once before:
To sound a note of caution, however, stand by for the counter argument to shift to what scientists were ‘predicting’ in the 1950s and early 1960s. You may also kick off a ‘citation fight’, with people claiming certain articles are not in good enough journals, or some of the data or predictions in the published papers turned out to be suspect, or the paper was not reviewed properly, or there are plenty of papers you have not cited which put the cooling argument, and so on and so on.
Well done, anyway, and I look forward to reading the paper!
Like you say maybe now we can lay this one to rest.
Maybe a article on the 1940 to 1970 cooling may be in order and the reasons as to why?
In future decades for example as humans clean up their pollution act how much warmer will it be? How much more additional warming will eliminating aerosoles create in w/m2?
Does this mean that we no longer have to worry about the THC stopping due to the melting of Arctic ice, and causing conditions to return to those of the Younger Dryas stadial?
If so, then our British Government might like to know, since they are currently spending £10M on the RAPID project which is currently throwing hundreds of buoys into the Atlantic to measure the THC.
Congratulations on this important work. It would be interesting (but another and even harder job) to go through the popular-press accounts of the time. Many of the moles in need of a good whack are actually responding to what the magazines etc. are saying today, not what the scientists are saying.
I am pretty sure that a study of the popular press in the 1970s (which I’ve only browsed through, not done up statistically) would find a substantial bias toward reporting predictions of cooling, since at the time “ice age coming!” would have been a lot more attention-grabbing than “warming.” Scientists of the time did worry that they were being misquoted. But I think such a study would also find that essentially all the journalistic accounts said it was all speculation and admitted that scientists had no consensus, indeed little understanding of climate, and were not making any kind of firm prediction–that is the most important difference from the current situation.
Well done. The whole sceptic argument rides on often repeated canards of which this has to be the top prize winner. Hopefully this much needed accounting and my upcoming novel will cement dispelling the myth of global cooling into poular culture.
Keep in mind that the classic paper by Hayes et al (1976) showed that isotopic composition of forams in marine cores fluctuated on orbital time-scales in accordance with Milankovitch. This supported orbital forcing of the ice ages and led to speculation that another ice age was inevitable as the planet moved toward the corresponding configuration. Much of the talk about global cooling in the 70s related to these orbital time-scales and the cause of ice ages. So the science of the day was predicting cooling, but on a completely different time-scale.
Those statistics make it look as if there’s actually more denial of warming going on now than there was then–when scientists were supposedly predicting an ice age!
It’s always good to see that a typical denier argument has little or no basis. Although, by debunking this argument, you give it more strength. The response I always use is, basically, these days we’ve got an extra 30+ years of scientific investigation–surely the scientists have got a better chance of being right.
As others have said, it would be interesting to see by what means the ‘ice age’ ‘prediction’ was the most noticed.
Alastair, see Peter Ward. Rearrangement, not halt, of the circulation looks likely to be what caused past anoxic events. The buoy system is appropriate to detect changes including rearrangement and to get a finer grained picture of a very complicated 4-dimensional process.
This is helpful to know. However, since a high proportion of misnamed “skeptics” are in fact deliberate liars, who endlessly repeat assertions that they well know have been repeatedly shown to be false, it will probably have little effect on the fake, phony, Exxon-Mobil sponsored “debate” about anthropogenic climate change.
Spencer - Here is at least one group that has looked at the issue of media coverage. Regardless of what one may think of their purpose for this report or their likely position on AGW, I think there presentation of the wild swings in media coverage of changing climate is probably about right.
For most people who are not reading Science or Nature or other more specialized climatology journals on a routine basis, their understanding of the current state of the science comes from media coverage of the science. Therefore, even if many or most peer-reviewed articles were discussing climate warming in the 70s, what people remember is the coverage from the popular media.
I think this was good work and I don’t mean to devalue it here. But I think the entire argument, even if true, would be specious. I mean, let’s say the AGW-deniers were right and the science (not just Newsweek) said we were coming to a new ice age. A mere 10 years later that was a minority opinion and it’s only become increasingly in the minority over the last decades. Do folks making the argument really prefer the science of the 70’s to the advances in understanding that have occurred since computers, satellites, 30 more years of data, etc have come to bear on the subject? I can’t think of anything that natural science ‘believed’ in the 70’s that is demonstrably more accurate than what natural science ‘believed’ in the 90’s.
RE: #19 The claims made in that ‘report’ about the popular press coverage have also been debunked. If you click through the links in the OP, you’ll quickly see that the newspaper coverage nearly always discussed the speculative nature of the science and was nearly always buried in the ‘filler’ sections of the paper. Applying denialist SOP, that report cherry-picks quotes and grossly misrepresnts the newspaper coverage.
Bob North #19 has a point. I clearly remember, though I no longer have the book, discussions in an undergraduate climatology class regarding the “Snowblitz” theory of climate change as written about by Nigel Calder in his book “The Weather Machine”.
This pre-dated the Newsweek article of April 28, 1975.
Let us not forget others that lead the way to the idea that an ice age was just around the corner.
The “Science” articles of 1956 and 1958 by Ewing and Donn about rapid climate change were popularized in a “Harper’s Magazine” article by Betty Friedan in 1958 titled “The Coming Ice Age”.
John Gribbin concluded that in the next few hundred years an ice age would be upon us in his “Forecasts, Famines and Freezes” (1976).
Don’t forget the book “Ice or Fire? Surviving Climate Change” (1978) by D. Halacy Jr.where the author suggests spreading soot to melt polar ice. Does that sound like seeding the ocean with iron filings?
[Response: I hadn’t seen the Science articles of 56/8. But the “ice age” scare is usually supposed to be the 70s - sometimes the 60s - I’ve never heard of it in the 50s before. And a quick scan of those articles doesn’t show much hint of predicting an ice age, or talking about rapid change. Which bits did you have in mind? “Snowblitz”, as I recall, only appeared in the book and never in a paper (Calder did have a paper in Nature, but I don’t think it had the SB in it) -William]
Is Peter Ward’s “Rearrangement” of the THC going to lead to a warmer or a cooler climate, and who is this Peter Ward anyway?
OTOH, If you follow the link on the RAPID page to Will global warming make European winters colder? you will find that the oceanographers from the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton University are writing:
“Luckily the new ice age from ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, is fiction, not future. But strange as it seems, global warming might bring colder winters to the UK and parts of North-West Europe. And if it happens, the change could take place over only a decade or so.”
In other words, we could have an abrupt cooling in the next ten years!
For others, don’t confuse local cooling (like ‘Medieval Warming’) with the current big denial theme: new ice age when the coal runs out on the Sun. Or something like that.
[[“Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount. ]]
Yes, it can only warm a couple hundred more degrees if all the carbon in the carbonate rocks were to be released, which won’t happen for a billion years. But it doesn’t look like this guy actually understands what a “runaway greenhouse effect” is. He should look up the planetary astronomy data on the history of Venus, where it happened.
#11 Zane writes: Why did those 7 article gain dominance over the 44 in school texts of the time?
They didn’t. But the examples have been repeated for many years, often as a minor note to ‘confusionist’ editorials. Small bits of text are cherry-picked to ‘prove’ the points. George Will did this in 2006 with 3 famous papers. pdfs of articles that don’t require cheery-picking are stored, linked and reused by many.
I hope William or someone can put copies of some of the other 64 articles on the web . . .
The public remembers some of the puzzle (perhaps only Johnny Carson jokes). After encountering misinformation often enough, many people accept it uncritically as fact. Since it wasn’t, the difference is now ‘explained’ as scientists ‘tricking’ the public. Since that is a social taboo it causes the desired mistrust and rejection.
mg, see the white rectangle, top right of each page?
Good exercise here for how to answer your question:
Pasting your question into it for Google.
(Many of the hits you get are from PR sites, which are really emphasizing the notion of a new ice age this week, curiously)
Scholar finds you the modeling results, including the Hadley that describes a brief flat temperature period this year from La Nina; simple Google gets you a wonderful melange of PR, denial, opinion, witnessing, and believers along with some science sites.
You have to make up your own mind.
First, about which tool you use, faith or science.
The history of the development of scientific knowledge vs. the misrepresentation of that history…
In many ways, this is a strange argument for the last remaining denialists to raise. Would they also use “Back in the 1950s, scientists didn’t believe in plate tectonics” as a criticism of modern geological science?
The chief culprit might have been Cesare Emiliani:
Calculating how the cycle should continue in the future, in 1966 Emiliani predicted that “a new glaciation will begin within a few thousand years.” . . .
In 1972, presenting more Caribbean cores, he again advised that “the present episode of amiable climate is coming to an end.” Thus “we may soon be confronted with… a runaway glaciation.” However, he added, greenhouse effect warming caused by human emissions might overwhelm the orbital shifts, so we might instead face “a runaway deglaciation.”
Thus, the media articles about 1970s climate science should read “Scientists warned of runaway deglaciation in the early 1970s”, shouldn’t they? Or, maybe “Scientists were unsure of the direction of future climate change in the early 1970s”, perhaps?
The modern picture seems to be that ice ages tend to end abruptly, but the onset of an ice age is gradual, driven by changes in sunlight across the northern land masses and decreasing atmospheric CO2 levels. So, we might have been past the warmest period of this most recent interglacial, and beginning a slow, multi-thousand year descent into a new ice age - until we changed the atmospheric composition.
However, we’ve added so much fossilized carbon to the atmosphere that we’re now approaching double anything seen in the glacial CO2 record. The Mauna Loa record shows that we’re currently at 384 ppm, increasing at 2 ppm per year. This carbon may stay in the atmosphere for a very long time. This may very well put off the next ice age entirely:
Dr Tyrrell said: ‘Our research shows why atmospheric CO2 will not return to pre-industrial levels after we stop burning fossil fuels. It shows that it if we use up all known fossil fuels it doesn’t matter at what rate we burn them. The result would be the same if we burned them at present rates or at more moderate rates; we would still get the same eventual ice-age-prevention result.’
Ike, if you haven’t read Ruddiman’s ,“Plows, Plagues & Petroleum”, it’s been out in paperback fro a few months, and bears on this, i.e., evidence of start of lonnnnng glaciation process possibly aborted by early CO2& CH4.
Important work, yes. Very good post. Let’s hope the mainstream media picks this research up and runs with it.
In this regard, the newly-minted Vaclav Klaus Climate Joke Awards might be of interest to some of the posters here. Named after the right honorable CEO of the Czech Republic, who believes that “climate is a joke” to quote a recent AP story from the Heartland Con, the awards honor those on both sides of the aisle who make unsound remarks about global warming and climate change. See the carnage here, and feel free to nominate your nominees, with references and quote sources please:
Browsing though file from my youth I cam across a junior-high school paper I was made to write in the early 1980’s. The premis given to the class was that industrial pollution might lead to another ice age, and we were supposed to describe how this might affect mankind.
I had forgotten all about it, but it certainly explains why I always had that “vague impression” about impending cooling. Does anyone else here have school age memories about cooling vs warming?
‘ . . Inevitably June snowfall is a much rarer creature, but widespread sleet and snow showers did manage to affect the UK on 2nd June 1975, rudely and infamously affecting a cricket match between Derbyshire and Lancashire at Buxton where early afternoon snow covered the pitch with around an inch of snow (Markham, 1994, Eden 1995). Elsewhere, snow settled on hills just south of Birmingham (Eden 1995), whilst to the south and east Manley (1975) reports snow being observed in both Cambridge and London and another county cricket match, this time featuring Essex and Kent, being played in Colchester was interrupted by snow (Ogley et al. 1993). Meanwhile, sleet showers were observed in RAF Manston in eastern Kent, Hassocks, Sussex and Totton and Portsmouth in Hampshire (COL Bulletin 1975, Eden 1995, Ogley en al 1995).
In his book Weatherwise, Philip Eden (1995) wonderfully describes this June snowfall as, “surely the most outrageous thing that June has ever done to us, meteorologically speaking”. It also seems that in recent times at least this is the latest in the season that such widespread snow has managed to affect southern Britain (Manley 1975, Eden 1995) and Manley (1975) suggests that the June 1975 snowfall was probably southern Britain’s latest snowfall since the turn of the nineteenth century.’ Snagged from: http://www.dandantheweatherman.com/Bereklauw/latesnow.html
This freak event, observed by many, did much to fix the idea of a coming Ice Age in the popular mind in Britain in the late 70s. It was much more influential than any scientific papers published at the time.
I remember the cooling prediction but all I remember was a book (and some brief media attention). Before that I had read science fiction novels and seen a couple of movies that predicted warming and melting… But anyway, after the cooling hypothesis came out (it certainly wasn’t impossible given that ice ages were cyclic), I decided to naively think up a mitigation strategy. So I asked myself, what in retrospect was a decidedly stupid question: What if we detonated nuclear weapons to melt the ice? After a bit of research I realized that the amount of heat (while awesome) was pathetically small and that, by comparing it to volcanoes, instead of warming we would get cooling from the dust throw up (this was before Nuclear Winter was put forward as a compelling reason against limited nuclear war).
So I remember it - but I certainly didn’t think it was “scientific consensus” - it seemed like a plausible hypothesis. But I mean, goodness gracious, the scientists weren’t entirely sure what the Great Red Spot on Jupiter was at that time (the leading theory was a big storm but that was far from proven).
In the AMS writeup linked in the post, page 3, I was amused to see CLIMAP decoded as the “Long-rage Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction project”. Freudian slip??
Planetary temperatures were colder in the 1960s and early 1970s. I believe newspapers and magazines ran articles that stated that the planet was cooling and could enter an ice age because of the cold weather at the time.
Planetary temperatures were also much colder in the 1800’s and early 20th century, as per the NASA data. Climate in the 1800’s and early 20th century must have been significantly different from 1980 to 2007.
Chris Squire (#36) — a decade or two back, it snowed in Cape Town, South Africa in December. It generally does not snow in Cape Town, and December is summer there (usually hot and dry). Freak events can always occur. This is why you should be leery of anyone who looks out the window and says, “Aha! I’ve spotted climate change.” But of course the press will pick up on these things, and we should call them to account when it happens. (When they pay attention: The Australian for example very seldom prints factual corrections of climate denial for example.)
Thanks for reminding us that the “Snowblitz” theory of climate change was written about by Nigel Calder in his book “The Weather Machine”. This suggested that an ice age could be initiated within a few years by eg a volcanic eruption causing cooling that caused widespread snow cover, causing further cooling by reflecting sunlight etc.
Nigel Calder is a prominent sceptic and made a pugnacious contribution to the Channel 4 “The Great Global Warming Swindle” film, just one year ago.
So, one of those “scientists predicting a new ice-age in the 1970’s” that contrarians keep banging on about is himself now numbered amongst the contrarians!
I should also note my considerable thanks to the authors of this paper for taking the time out of their busy schedules to do this comprehensively. That this should be necessary is a sad testimony to the effectiveness of the denialist disinformation campaign and the shabby standards of much of the press which reports this stuff without verification.
Any plans to issue a press release when the paper is published?
Do folks making the argument really prefer the science of the 70’s to the advances in understanding that have occurred since computers, satellites, 30 more years of data, etc have come to bear on the subject?
Don’t think so… the real gist of the argument is IIUC that the climate science of the 70s was already pretty good — the fundamentals were in place. Since then it has only gotten better still. Climatology as a science has a long history. Sure climatologists get things wrong all the time — but not this badly wrong, not this late in the game.
Good article…it would be interesting to see the same table 1 from 1980-2007 and see how it’s changed. Now infinitely more data has come to light from almost every earth science source. Were they using satellites in the 1970’s for climate study?
The global cooling argument is hitting hard again right now due to the recent chill. The standard response is of course La Nina but I’ve had several skeptics e-mail me this NOAA paper:
“Conversely, above normal ice cover was associated with La Nina conditions which are accompanied by the Aleutian low moving westward of normal allowing higher pressure and colder conditions to move over the Bering Sea. However, since the regime shift, this correlation of ice with both the Aleutian low movement and with the SOI has reversed.”
I haven’t seen this pop up on climate audit but someone is obviously parading this around.
In regards to the possibilty of an ice age or period of noticable cooling for europe and north america I suppose that depends uopn the rate of slowdown of the north atlantic current. I saw the movie ‘The day after tomorrow’ two days ago..what a crock of #@$%!..I dont think anyone with half a brain or even quarter for that matter would believe the speed of the onset of the ice age portrayed there. Even if there was an sudden outflow of many gigalitres east of canada like there once was eons back..that still took up to a decade for that iceage to take effect. No one knows with any certainty what effect a moderate slowdown of the NAC would have..but I just cant see it triggering a snap ice age. The increasing rate of freshwater entering the atlantic from a greenland/arctic melt alone will no-doubt slow-down the NAC but to what degree?
I’ve been fighting GW for nearly 20 years now, reducing my GHGs substantially at financial benefit to me, and trying to get others to do likewise. And I didn’t really know the science of climate change well (and still don’t) or where we stood in geological terms (so it doesn’t take a climate or rocket scientist to reduce GHGs).
Until recently when I’ve come up against these “ice-age” denialists, I’ve only been able to answer them with, “well science does advance over time, and now the scientists have a lot better understanding….”
Only this past year I’ve come to understand we are at a climate high point, a sort of plateau, in the glacial-interglacial cycle. And if there were no anthropogenic GHG forcing, we might expect over a long geological (in human terms) timeframe that we would be heading into an ice age….eventually. So the “ice-age” scientists back then were not necessarily wrong. But with our GHG forcing, we may be triggering positive feedbacks and tipping into a much greater warming period, as has happened several times in the past (251 mya, 55 mya), using this high warm plateau as our launching pad into hysteresis.
So now I answer the “ice-age” denialist argument (denialists usually trot out ALL their inconsistent & contradictory arguments) this way: I draw a sine-wave in the air with my hand, saying, yes, that the normal fluctuation over a long geological timeframe is to alternate between cold ice ages and warm interglacial periods, and that now we are right here in a warm interglacial period (my hand raised at the top of the wave), and if there were no human GHGs, then we would expect that over a long time frame we’d be sliding down into an ice age. However, there have been times in the past when other factors have kicked in, such as extreme vulcanism or as now with our tremendous GHG emissions, when instead of going back down into an ice age, it has gone into hysteresis (raising my hand higher) in which the warming spirals way up, causing mass extinction of life on earth — 95% of life died out in such an event 251 years ago. And now we may be causing the climate, out of it’s normal cycle, to go into just such an event.
RE #46, Lawrence, I think the creators of DAY AFTER TOMORROW made it clear somewhere (?in the film’s beginning?) that they were greatly speeding up the process for dramatic effect. But I was also put off, especially by the ice chasing the kids in the library — it popped out of my suspended disbelief.
So the real problem is how to make great movies about global warming, that captivate audiences. The nuclear issue was easy (CHINA SYNDROME, ON THE BEACH, etc); these were nuke movies that shook the world. Global warming is also a grave threat, but how to make it photogenic with the necessary “ticking time bomb” so people will watch and get inspired to mitigate. I’m sort of up to my gills in global warming documentaries, quite frankly, though we need them to keep coming out.
…..supposed to be +1C today in Yellowknife - Northern Canada. That beats the normal -17. I recall from my early science classes that ice melts at 0 degrees (well it was +32F when I learned it). So much for the impending ice-age around here.
It’s definitely warming here in Scotland - we never see polar bears here now. I think they may have moved up North. Here is an article about the remains of one in Scotland.
about 7th down, as well as other sources, the next attempt at a stade (massive ice sheets) will be in about 20,000 years. Even baring AGW the orbital forcing is rather weak and so this one might well be skipped. The next attempt will be about 50,000 years from now.
Lynn Vincentnathan wrote: “I think the creators of DAY AFTER TOMORROW made it clear … that they were greatly speeding up the process for dramatic effect … the real problem is how to make great movies about global warming, that captivate audiences … how to make it photogenic with the necessary ‘ticking time bomb’ so people will watch and get inspired to mitigate.”
The problem is that a realistic portrayal of the arrival of catastrophic global warming would have to span years or decades, which presents a dramatic challenge (although a sudden world-wide mega-drought that led to a global collapse of agriculture and mass die-off from starvation within a year or two would be pretty dramatic).
So, if I were developing a screenplay for a global warming disaster movie, I would probably finesse that problem by borrowing from the tradition of post-nuclear-holocaust dystopia movies, and set the movie after the worst effects of global warming had already occurred — say around mid-21st century. The drama would be in the struggle of the few remaining humans to survive in the harsh environment of a wrecked civilization and ruined biosphere. In other words more like Soylent Green than Godzilla.
Slightly OT, but here is more evidence from the natural world the things are disturbed. NPR had an item this week about the expansion of phytoplankton regions of the ocean. They are increasing 1-4% per year. That amounts to 2.5 million square miles in the last decade.
“Scientists studying climate change have predicted this kind of change. But the sea desert has been spreading 10 times faster than climate scientists predicted.”
One more underestimate. They do offer the caveat that they may have just caught a particularly rapid period of change, and it may slow down again.
So technology ascends as the human condition declines.
“History shows that every technical application from its beginning presents certain unforeseen secondary effects which are more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been. Every successive technique has appeared because the ones which preceded it rendered necessary the ones which followed.”
The funny thing about the day after tommorow was that it seemed to say that global warming will lead to everwhere getting much colder. Is there any science to support this? Did the film’s makers think tropical heat is less scary?
What shall we do with ” Torch “, the 1950’s Astounding Science Fiction short story about re-glaciation arisingfrom the ignition of a Siberian oilfield by a botched Soviet nuclear test?
Is it a cautionary tale of the hazards of Zero-Dimensional climate modeling, the precursor of TTAPS and Roland Emmerich’s Crutzen-based dystopic aerosol film, Der Arkprinzep, or the great grand-daddy of Niven & Pournelle’s sci fi novel Fallen Angels,in which excess of zeal in suppressing AGW leads to a Snowball Earth?
“…the old 1970s global cooling canard…” is hardly an accurate characterization. Many top scientists at that time bought into the “Ice Age Coming” hysteria, including apparently, James Hansen himself.
[Response: This is an appalling piece of reporting. Rasool and Schneider did not ‘predict an ice age’ in their paper, Hansen was not an author on the paper and his role (as mentioned in the acknowledgements was a piece of code that calculated Mie scattering for aerosols - equivalent to sharing code that does a fast fourier transform. How this rises to ‘predicting an ice age’ is impossible to say. This is just a drive-by smear, which IBD has a history of (see Deltoid for more). - gavin]
Re #45: That’s an early paper referring to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), although the term isn’t used. The PDO is a multi-decadal climate cycle that is associated with changes in ENSO; in its positive phase there are more El Ninos and in its negative phase more La Ninas. The PDO has been in a postive phase since 1976 and ever since it was identified (in the ’90s) some of the less-informed denialists have been hoping that a flip to the negative phase will erase the recent warming trend. Their idea is that if one El Nino can result in a warm year then a series of them will make for an entire trend.
What they neglect (among other things) is that what would be seen is an initial step followed by little or no further warming, and that the global trend looks nothing like that (but see below). A lot of them also seem to have the idea that ENSO cycles result in a real rather than an apparent heating or cooling, whereas what they mainly do is move heat around in the oceans (resulting in a change in ocean surface temperature that in turn affects the atmosphere).
Slightly more informed denialists will pull out the example of the temperature trend in southern Alaska as proof of their idea. In 1976 there was indeed a large step increase in temperature in that region followed by little change since. Of course the problem is that the trend in one small region proves exactly nothing with regard to the global trend.
The ENSO-sea ice correlation seems neither here nor there.
In THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, the weather special effects were great as long as you could suspend belief; but the ravening pack of wolves that conveniently showed up when the kids went outside was just lame.
In the caption of fig 1 of the paper, it says that in no year were there more cooling papers than warming. However, it shows 2 cooling and 1 warming in 1971. Does it mean to refer only to the cumulative number? It certainly doesn’t read that way.
#45, MJ. I don’t buy that hypothesis completely. they forgot the larger picture. Melting of a large chunk of old Polar ice in 07 has caused unknown after effects, one may be observed as already documented continuing Arctic clear air, this is a predominant phenomena now, there were a preponderance of Low pressure systems passing through Bering Strait, did see a few Highs as well, but the main cause of this continental cooling was born in North American Arctic , the window was open for simple surface radiation escaping upwards. Awaiting spring time cloud and fog bursts, however if unusual low cloud extent continues, there will be a transformation in the temperature scene towards greater warming, returning to the summer of 2007 main melting conditions.
Lynn, “Soylent Green” came actually close to what a realistic depiction of a worst-case aftermath would look like. It ought to be re-done in the light of the newest knowledge. (What stops you from doing this? Like George Lucas re-did Buck Rogers
(But the reality of failed nuclear states — famine decimating populations doesn’t promote good government, or friendly international relations for that matter — and an atmosphere carrying radioactivity from local nuclear war should be glossed over; we don’t want to completely scare off our audience now do we.)
Re: 51 Red Etin..haha! That means you must be 18000 years old..geez! what health sups are you taking??? But seriously…read a bit about warming scotland..and the 3000ft mountains at the border of the cairngorm plateau’s which in years past always were covered in snow now for the past decade are now snow free.
Pg. 2 “By the early 1970’s…the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted.”
Agreed. That’s the point — before scientists wrung their hands about GW, they were ringing them about global cooling. The article count doesn’t matter if you concede (correctly) that the notion of global cooling was widely accepted.
In his response to #60, gavin referred to Deltoid, but neglected to give a link. One can do worse than read Deltoid in its entirety, but here is the entry in question.
In reply to Ike Solem’s comment #31
“The modern picture seems to be that ice ages tend to end abruptly, but the onset of an ice age is gradual, driven by changes in sunlight across the northern land masses and decreasing atmospheric CO2 levels. So, we might have been past the warmest period of this most recent interglacial, and beginning a slow, multi-thousand year descent into a new ice age - until we changed the atmospheric composition.”
Ike, The data and analysis does not support your comment. Are there any papers or text books that support your statement? (I have Cronin’s “Principles of Paleoclimatology” and Bradley’s Paleoclimatology, “Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary”. Neither of those text books supports a gradual change from interglacial to glacial or glacial to interglacial.)
In the 1990’s analysis of the Greenland ice sheet core (which was confirmed, by analysis of ocean floor sediment), showed that there are millennium separated, abrupt (not gradual) planetary temperature changes. (The Younger Dryas is an example.) The Antarctic ice core proxy data masked the rapid climate changes due to the polar sea saw where the Antarctic ice sheet initially cools when the planet warms and visa versa. The polar see saw effect is occurring now. The Antarctic ice sheet has cooled slightly while the rest of the planet has warmed.
See Adam’s paper for a review of the discovery of abrupt climate change.
The other problem with the theory of insolation changes driving planetary temperature change, is that some other forcing function over rides insolation in the Southern Hemisphere, to synchronous the cooling and warming of both Hemispheres. This forcing function does not seem to be GWG, however, as the change in GWG levels lags changes in planetary temperature changes by a thousand years, based on the data and the GWG mechanisms.)
The recent discovery of synchronization of abrupt temperature changes between hemispheres (see link below) is new and was partially unexpected. (Cronin’s textbook notes this is an important question, as to whether Northern and Southern Hemisphere cooling is sychronized, as it sets a criteria for the forcing function.)
“We’ve been able to get quite precise ages directly on these glacial deposits,” says Singer, whose specialty is geochronology. “What we found was that the structure of the last South American ice age is indistinguishable from the last major glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere.”
“…seem to undermine a widely held idea that global redistribution of heat through the oceans is the primary mechanism that drove major climate shifts of the past.”
“The implications of the new work, say the authors of the study, support a different hypothesis: that rapid cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere synchronized climate change around the globe during each of the last two glacial epochs.”
“Because the Earth is oriented in space in such a way that the hemispheres are out of phase in terms of the amount of solar radiation they receive, it is surprising to find that the climate in the Southern Hemisphere cooled off repeatedly during a period when it received its largest dose of solar radiation,” says Singer. “Moreover, this rapid synchronization of atmospheric temperature between the polar hemispheres appears to have occurred during both of the last major ice ages that gripped the Earth.”
Thanks for the relevant information with sources. GW opponents I can only assume are mostly under 40yrs of age. Anybody that age or older knows from basic personal experience that the climate has changed radically from what it used to be.
Has anyone watched “Assume the Position”, the documentary/comedy that Robert Wuhl did? He makes a very salient point about our society and it’s one that we need to understand. His main point is that facts don’t matter in the age of mass media. He points out several cases where fact was completely distorted by fiction and now fiction is what is commonly accepted as fact.
He starts with a clip from “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance”:
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”
With respect to the coming ice age of the 70s, the public just doesn’t care anymore about it. They accept it as fact and no amount of scientific study otherwise will change that. Wuhl point out that most of the people think Columbus sailed west to prove the world was round and Oliver Stone showed the real conspiracy behind the JFK assasination when the overwhelming evidence shows otherwise in both cases.
We must also realize that the press thrives on controversy. And while they don’t usually invent controversy, they do everything they can to play up even the smallest controversy. Saying that we’re about to dive into an ice age sells. Saying that 25% of the scientists surveyed think that there’s a 15% chance that the planet will fall into the ice age won’t sell anything. So it’s not likely that the press would ever pick up on it.
A very current example was the NOAA release within the month that said that the main reason hurricane damage is up is because people have moved to the beach and NOT because of an increased number of hurricanes. The press didn’t cover it because it wasn’t controvercial. Likewise, we have record-breaking box office movies every year and yet none of these have ever approached the popularity of “Gone with the Wind” in terms of number of tickets sold. The press likes to sell the “new and improved” and they typically ignore “there is nothing new here…”
Re #69, George Lucas didn’t redo Buck Rogers, Glen Larson did. Checking IMDB shows no connection between George Lucas and Buck Rogers.
Right, just some climate thinkers espoused the cooling view, and the warming idea was usually orthodox since the famous Arrhenius paper of 1896 (!). (But that paper was soon criticized since CO2 and water vapor have such similar absorption bands, what’s up with that?) I have a Time-Life “Weather” book from 1965 which discusses global warming from CO2 as a danger. In any case, how goes the idea that a cooling Sun will comp. for global warming?
i am reading an article about the coming ice age in 18,000 a.d. as predicted by british major general drayson in popular science monthly 1936. the article, by gaylord johnson, shows how anyone can do an experiment to show how the polar caps will extend as glaciers to new york , where they had once been the last time they made their 23 to 35 degree angle cycle ,between which we always rotate. so predictions of a new ice age go way back in the popular press.there does seem to be quite a difference in what is said amongst professionals and what gets out through the popular media.
Watch this, it states some of the popular press and statements at the time. It sure does seem to be reinventing the wheel with regard to the environmental message of imminent doom but how true is it ?
RE#69, I actually contacted the author of the book on which it was based (the screenwriter has passed away) and asked if SOYLENT GREEN could be remade, with more of a global warming mention, and he said MGM had been considering doing a sequel, but chucked that idea. Then I wrote to MGM about them getting a professional screenwriter and doing a remake, but never heard back. I’m thinking even the original film could be slightly tweaked to mention global warming. That would be enough. Then re-released.
As I mentioned to Hank Roberts, I tried to use bore hole data to reflect the curves. I think there is smear since the translation from air temp averaged over a year to sub-surface (bore hole)values might not be fine enough compared to the relationship of air temperatures and CO2 amounts, but otherwise I can’t see a relationship.
From the bore hole stuff, there seemed to me to be a lot of normalization that could be hiding the weak correlation for the periods and the shift. I felt the bore holes should have shown a pattern, a depression that they did not show.
#4
Anyway, On the Runaway Green house and problems with the ice ages, I agree. I have been examining the paper, and so far it looks like Forenc Miskolczi has proven an identity. I am still examining the work in my slow way, so I could be “way off,” and I am not, the one to take it apart bit by bit by bit. Too many other things happening.
================
Runaway Greenhouse..?
There is some work on the pacific warm pool, and NASA and 87F SST where a kind of “runaway” take-off starts but collapses. . . I also fault the above paper on failure to deal with Venus — because the Russians showed there was light aplenty on Venus’ surface. That is a semi-transparent planetary atmosphere with way over 1500 W/m^2 even when the sun was 500Million years old 4 Gya ===============
Venus is a real situation and as Venus is, Earth will become.
====
As for old text books. Denver Radio KOA “Weatherman Bowman” used to describe the jet streams and how they controlled the weather, moving large masses of air around — even in the late 50’s early 60’s — and was an early user of this information from aircraft, especially stratospheric Jet information on head and tail wind speeds and directions, etc. This was before we had an Air Force Academy.
As for text books, nah. Meteorology has a long history, but the push to do real met science became possible after we sent the men to the moon. . .then the republicans and tricky Dicky flushed the space program except where the M-I complex could build cold war spy stuff.
Weather became a priority when insurance could estimate risks and warnings of hurricanes. . .etc. But the early weather sat’s …
Also I was on a team to look for impact dust on the moon where and when we crashed our cameras. (That is a while back.) I read Fall of Moondust as published in The Saturday Evening Post and even though Clarke was one of my favorite writers, I did not think there would be any dust danger of significance by looking at the
I remember Sputnik, and Laika, and I remember echo 1 and echo 2. I looked for them among familiar skies that now, global warming and local weather changes has destroyed. Oh yes, population is a problem we licked for a bit in the 1970’s when we were aimed at zpg.
“So, if I were developing a screenplay for a global warming disaster movie, I would probably finesse that problem by borrowing from the tradition of post-nuclear-holocaust dystopia movies, and set the movie after the worst effects of global warming had already occurred — say around mid-21st century. The drama would be in the struggle of the few remaining humans to survive in the harsh environment of a wrecked civilization and ruined biosphere. In other words more like Soylent Green than Godzilla.”
Hmmm. I handled it differently and in current time. I was in the last version of Godzilla. “Run but don’t step where the digital foot goes!”
Of interest is this particular morsel - the Ecologist’s 1972 publication “Blueprint for Survival” predicted 379ppm by 2000, and suggested a doubling of CO2 would see 2 degrees warming. The “chicken little” earth is cooling myth is exactly that - even in the early 70s warming was a serious concern for many.
SCEP points out that the trend towards depleting the remaining stands of original forests, such as those in tropical Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo, will further reduce the capacity of the ecosphere to absorb CO2 and may release even more CO2 to the atmosphere. The CO2 content of the atmosphere is increasing at a rate of 0.2 percent per year since 1958. One can project, on the basis of these trends, an 18 percent increase by the year 2000, i.e. from 320 ppmm to 379 ppmm. SCEP considers that this might increase temperature of the earth by 0.5°C. A doubling of CO2 might increase mean annual surface temperatures by 2°C. [See Table 3]
Ken Rohleder (#71): you quote the article as saying ““By the early 1970’s…the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted.” but left out the next 3 words, “albeit poorly understood”.
I suggest if you read the paper again, you will realize you understood it poorly. The thing that was widely accepted is the temperature trend at the time, which appeared to be cooling. This is rather different from nonexistent widespread prediction of further cooling (as evidenced by the literature review), and was in fact an error which was soon after corrected.
Further on: “A closer examination of Southern Hemisphere data showed that what appeared to be a global cooling trend was in fact dominated by Northern Hemisphere temperatures, while thermometers in the Southern Hemisphere seemed to be headed in the opposite direction”.
I’m always chary of short-run information about global systems: the SeaWiFS stuff is only a decade long and needs more time to become significant. At the moment it’s no more and no less relevant than a couple of year’s cooling from a La Nina.
However, there’s one detail on which I’d like more info. What is happening to the phyto populations at the edges of the expanding areas? I am on record as suggesting that starved phytos (I predicted the spreading of the ocean’s blue deserts) would switch to C4 metabolism, increasing the pulldown of heavier C isotopes and leaving a low atomic weight carbon signal in the atmosphere. Has anyone seen any research along these lines?
I am now hearing, the ice has returned and a large part of the NH 2008 winter has broken records for coldness and snowfall. Apparantly AGW has stopped !
What is realclimates answer to the ice returning and its being very cold in some of the NH this winter? La nina/ el nino cycle I have read. Would this be as good a explanation as any ?
[Response: Runaway Greenhouse is a strawman. I’m sure someone will take the paper to bits properly. The obvious problem for it is to explain the ice age cycle -William]
Interesting response… surely you shouldn’t be looking to “take the paper to bits properly”, rather, it should be viewed as possible new information & a determination made as to whether it is a) accurate, and b) if so how it can be integrated into GCMs OR if not, why not?
Part of the reason I have a problem with this whole Global Warming malarky is the bitter sniping from both sides which does nothing to move the science forward, and everything to create a snarky atmosphere & gosh-wow headlines. I do realise that science (any field) is competitive & some snarkyness is to be expected; but honestly all this does is turn agnostics (such as me) off the the whole thing. And since - like, I suspect, most agnostics - my default position is “don’t worry, be happy”, that ends up favouring the “AGW is not the end of the world” camp.
So come on folks (and RC does have some of the world’s pre-eminent climate scientists as contributors), stop sniping & start analysing. Maybe an article would be useful? After all, this is not some News of the World (The Inquirer is, I guess, the American equivalent) article - this is a peer-reviewed paper.
Thanks.
[Response: There are far more papers published than anyone person can read. You have to be selective. A paper that speaks as that one does is off to a bad start in the shall-I-bother stakes. And I already raised one problem, which is that it would make the ice age cycle unintelligible. There are lots of genuine problems to work on in climate change; the basic radiative physics though are well known. There are two other filters people use for shall-I-read-this: is it in a major journal? - in this case, no; and has it been cited? - in this case, its doesn’t look like it; even the skeptic blogs aren’t endorsing it. -W]
[[Pg. 2 “By the early 1970’s…the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted.”
Agreed. That’s the point — before scientists wrung their hands about GW, they were ringing them about global cooling. The article count doesn’t matter if you concede (correctly) that the notion of global cooling was widely accepted.]]
You have acceptance by the public or the media confused with acceptance by the scientific consensus. There was never a scientific consensus behind global cooling the way there is now behind global warming.
[[I also fault the above paper on failure to deal with Venus — because the Russians showed there was light aplenty on Venus’ surface. That is a semi-transparent planetary atmosphere with way over 1500 W/m^2 even when the sun was 500Million years old 4 Gya =]]
You’re confusing the Solar constant at Venus’s orbital distance with the amount absorbed by the Venus climate system and the amount that penetrates to Venus’s surface, all of which are different numbers. The Solar constant at Venus’s distance is about 2,611 watts per square meter (1500 or so early in Solar system history, as you point out). But the amount absorbed by the Venus climate system is:
F = (S / 4) (1 - A)
where A is the bolometric Bond albedo. The factor of 1/4 comes from the fact that Venus absorbs sunlight on its two-dimensional cross-sectional area but radiates on its spherical surface area. NASA gives the present albedo of Venus as 0.750, so we’re talking an absorbed flux of 163 watts per square meter — actually less than Earth gets (237 W m^-2). And of the 163, only 16.8 watts per square meter penetrate to the surface of Venus, the rest being absorbed by the cloud layers or the clear atmosphere. That’s enough light to read by, plus you’ve got some red glow from the rocks at 735.3 K, but it’s way less than 1500 W m^-2.
* 7 articles predicting cooling
* 44 predicting warming
* 20 that were neutral”
What criteria did you use to select the titles? You have 71 articles over a 15 year period. Certainly there were many hundreds more over that period that you did not select.
Basically, was this a random selection of articles?
[Response: No, it wasn’t a random selection. The linked pre-print described the methodology -W]
I was curious about global warming and found this site through a Google search. I have a question, why is the warming of the earth so bad? It is hot in the tropics year round and life there seems to thrive. I read some place that the ice caps are melting, and that places like Florida adn some other coastal areas would be flooded,would not people just move further inland or adapt like the Dutch building dykes?
Like I said I am pretty ignorant about the subject I just thought I could get some answers here.
Whether one believes in man-made global warming, man-made global cooling, or natural climatic cycles, the real worry that many people have is that some political body will dictate their perceived solution via punitive laws rather than allowing the free market to sort things out. Additionally, the hysteria to “do something now” ignores the immense ability for humans to adapt to wildly changing environmental conditions, and may cause the human race to take actions with unintended consequences which are more damaging to humankind than the climate change itself.
Those who believe in man-made climate change would do well to back off from the ledge if you want the so-called “deniers” to believe you are credible. (And also, explain the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998, as well as the sharp decline in the average global temperature to pre- “global warming era” levels in the past year alone - which just happens to correlate better with the extended solar minimum!)
RE #90, many hundreds? It’s really difficult to get articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. First you need to do years of study, then write up an article based on that, then if the manuscript is not outright rejected, you usually have to rewrite it, or even do some more study and rewrite it. The process from study to published article could take years.
I also imagine at the time not a whole lot of climate scientists were specifically studying warming or cooling trends, or writing articles about them — not like today anyway. So I’d think 71 articles (averaging about 5 per year) sounds to me like the whole population of science articles in peer-reviewed journals dealing specifically with the topic at hand here.
RE #86, I’m not too sure what the issue is here, but climate scientists are quite adament about not using the term “runaway warming” for the various climate scenarios in Earth’s past (& possibly to come in the future) in which initial warming causes nature to emit more GHGs (such as through carbon release from melting permafrost and ocean hydrates) & albedo decrease (from melting snow & ice), which in turn leads to greater warming, which in turn leads to greater GHG emissions/albedo reduction, and so on until it gets quite hot, but then after many millennia the process in reverse causes the earth to cool back down again. I’ve heard them use the term “hysteresis” for this process, which happened several times in Earth’s past — 251 mya & 55 mya, being 2 great warming periods connected to mass extinction.
However, I think “runaway” is still a good term to help laypersons understand the process, as in “runaway horse” or “runaway train” — something eventually stops them, so it isn’t permanent runaway. I would then consider the situation on Venus to be a special case of “permanent runaway warming.”
And I don’t completely share your view re “don’t worry, be happy.” I “expect the worst and hope for the best,” and keep paying my insurance premiums (tho I didn’t get onto the dental plan this year — bad mistake). However, I agree we should NOT waste time worrying; we should instead take up the challenge and reduce our GHGs as much as possible — and do it with a joy that transcends mere happiness.
re 95: “the real worry that many people have is that some political body will dictate their perceived solution via punitive laws rather than allowing the free market to sort things out.”
I don’t think the free market can sort it out. Every free market solution to a problem is based on response after something has affected them; it the case of AGW, many of the negative effects are 10 to 30 years out, by all accounts. Also, the free market is based to a large extent on accumulation of wealth - a credible response to AGW involves a counterintuitive response, the idea that no matter how we adapt, we’re going to be forced to give up things we take for granted.
“Additionally, the hysteria to “do something now” ignores the immense ability for humans to adapt to wildly changing environmental conditions…”
There is a credible argument that suggests there is an upward limit to adaptation. Too much of what we take for granted in the natural world depends upon the temperatures staying more or less stable. In a warming world, particularly if we hit 3 degrees, we might not be able to adapt.
“Those who believe in man-made climate change would do well to back off from the ledge if you want the so-called “deniers” to believe you are credible.”
No offense, but what you are asking for is akin to demanding that the king’s subjects acknowledge he has clothes when, in fact, he’s parading around in his skivvies…
Yeah Bart. Sorry. I should have clarified that. When the Sun ignited on main sequence 4.567 billion years ago, most solar models indicate it was only 70% as bright at it is now. (Sackmann, Boothroyd, Kraemer 1993 and subsequent).
Since, This Real Climate blog “comments section” won’t let me post an HTML table, I’ll put the numbers here:
Luminosity % ———–”Solar constants at top of atmosphere—–
——————————————————————–
L sol % of now —— Venus W/m^2 —– Earth W/m^2 —- Mars W/m^2
L 60% Sun 4.567Gya — 1568.3 ————820.6 ————-353.5
L 70% Sun 4.567Gya——1833.7 ————959.4————–412.4
L 100% Sun Present——2613.9————-1367.6————-589.2
L 110% 1.1Gy future—–2875.3————-1504.4————-648.1
L 134% 3.2Gy future—–3476.5————-1818.9————-783.6
———————————————————————
OK. After the Sun main-sequenced (settled down) the models provide various scenarios of burn, but generally use a slow linear fusion growth rate for the Sun around 10 billion years long. Then it grows red giant, possibly pulses and lots of 1 solar mass end-life-kinds- of-things even the AGB era and helium shell burning flashes and lots of planetary nebula forming mass ejections. Earth(as a molten blob) may escape engulfment, pending the solar wind mass ejection timing and rate. The table above carries NONE of the Solar endgame, but does show earth-life endgame beginning 1.1 billion years ahead. Venus undenied ensues for sure around 3.4 Gya from now. Earth’s runaway greenhouse, ends.
My point was that even when the Sun ignited at 70% present luminosity, the planet Venus had to begin with more than the Earth receives from the warmer Sun 3.4 billion years from now. Further, even when the Sun warms to its 3.4 billion years from now state, Earth will be at the terminus of any oceans, nearly all the available C in rocks (even) will be in the CO2 atmosphere of Earth which will have a ~101 atmosphere pressure, at the surface and the N2 will still be here at about 4% or so component part instead of 78% proportional part.
The 1500 W/m2 is my slack-jawed reference to the Solar Constant at Venus even if the Sun was only 60% as bright as present. My contention is that VENUS never had OCEANS, EVER.
I know those are bad words, but they would have been in lower gravity, etc. And Life never had a chance on the surface.
Thanks “Bart” for digging that out, and I will not post when I can’t be clear.(I hope) (Next time, (after this one) I might have my wife read it. . . to be sure.)
Re Richard Ricardo @ 94: “I have a question, why is the warming of the earth so bad? It is hot in the tropics year round and life there seems to thrive. I read some place that the ice caps are melting, and that places like Florida adn some other coastal areas would be flooded,would not people just move further inland or adapt like the Dutch building dykes?”
Richard, the potential threat of global warming is two fold. One is what else will change as Earth’s atmosphere warms and by how much, two is the rate of that change.
Under what else will change besides temperature, we have to consider, among many, many other things:
- How will weather change as the atmosphere warms?
- How will a warmer Arctic and Antarctic affect weather patterns across the rest of the planet?
- Will severe storms become more or less intense or more or less frequent?
- How will precipitation patterns change? Will precipitation during growing seasons remain dependable or will it come at the wrong time or all at once? A warmer, longer growing season will be of no use if there is less or no precipitation when it is needed.
- What crops will it be possible to grow as climate zones shift, and where will climate zones suitable for our current crops shift to?
- How much will it warm in areas that currently grow rice, for instance? Rice, the main food crop in some parts of the world, has an upper temperature limit above which it can not be grown.
- Increasing CO2 does more than raise temperature, it can also make the oceans acidic, which would have a huge impact on the marine food chain, on which a large number of human depend.
- We know the Greenland ice cap is becoming more unstable and that it has the potential to raise sea level by up to 7 meters. How much of it will actually melt and how fast, and how much will sea level rise and how fast? How much time will we have to move not just people, but infrastructure?
How fast any of these changes take place compounds each of them and bears on your question about our ability to adapt to the changes.
For example, think about the number of coastal cities, ports, power plants, refineries, grain terminals, etc world-wide that could be vulnerable to rising sea levels. Keep in mind, that they would not need to be completely inundated, just made significantly more vulnerable to storm surges. How rapidly could dykes be built or these facilities be moved inland, and how much would it cost?
Now think of low-lying nations like the Netherlands or Bangladesh. Where, exactly, would their displaced populations move to? Think back to the last great migration that took place on the Indian subcontinent when India and Pakistan were partitioned.
Now think of the wheat belt that stretches across the great plains of the US and Canada. What would happen should the climate zone suitable for growing wheat on an industrial scale shift northwards to lie in the area that is currently largely boreal forest and exposed shield bedrock by 2050, as some projections suggest? Cutting down the boreal forest is one thing, conditioning is acidic soils so that it can grow wheat is quite another, and in the shield soils are thin, lie in scattered pockets, or non-existent.
You see, a changing climate means fundamental changes in just about every facet of human activity, and those changes will be world-wide and simultaneous. Moreover, if they happen rapidly, it could outstrip and overwhelm our ability to adapt. That’s why a warming Earth could be so bad.
Re Fred @ 95: “Whether one believes in man-made global warming, man-made global cooling, or natural climatic cycles, the real worry that many people have is that some political body will dictate their perceived solution via punitive laws rather than allowing the free market to sort things out.”
Exactly, for many people climate change is an ideological, political and/or economic issue having nothing what so ever to do with science or with what is actually happening in physical reality.
Unfortunately for them physics has nothing what so ever to do with ideology, politics or economics. Perhaps that’s why they have such a hard time understanding the science of climate change and its ramifications, including the potential threat that some future political body will have no choice but to dictate solutions if nothing is done to address the problem until it’s presence is felt by even those who refuse to see what is in plain sight.
As for Fred’s assertions that temperatures have been steady since 1998, and that there has been a “sharp decline in the average global temperature to pre-global warming era levels in the past year alone”, these have been rebutted here at RC repeatedly.
Lynn: I think that there is a distinction between standard feedback processes and non-linear events.
Most climate scientists talk about standard feedbacks: this is the snow/ice albedo effect, the permafrost methane, etc. In most cases, the assumption is that every degree of direct CO2 induced warming has attached to it another 2 or 3 degrees of feedback. This is _not_ in any way “runaway” warming.
You tend to talk about the extreme non-linear events, where by passing some (unknown) threshold, a major state change occurs. Eg, if at 3.7 degrees C warming suddenly a vast amount of methane hydrate destabilized, adding another 5 degrees C warming - _that_ could be labeled as “runaway”. But I don’t think the climate community thinks that these events are at all likely. Possible, they might agree with, but likely, no.
“Hysteresis” is merely a term for a process that, when reversed, behaves differently. For example, the Greenland ice cap exhibits hysteresis under temperature changes: you need to warm the ice cap up a lot to get it to melt (say, 2.5 degrees C for a long time), because it is reflective and high altitude. But once it melts, you have to cool it down far below the point at which it melted to get it to refreeze, because now you have to form permanent snow and ice at a few meters above sea level, rather than a mile above sea level. But hysteresis is not only for huge events: if there is a one way road on the way to work, your commute would have hysteresis: you take the one way road to get there, but on the way back, you have to take a longer route.
Just trying to help you understand terms, and why “runaway warming” in particular is not the right term to use for what we expect from the climate.
#94 warming isnt bad. Its rate of change that bad. The concern here is not much whether climate is changing warm or cold but that its changing too fast to allow adaption.
#95
“(And also, explain the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998, as well as the sharp decline in the average global temperature to pre- “global warming era” levels in the past year alone - which just happens to correlate better with the extended solar minimum!)”
Huh? Do you just get your information from people distorting the data.
Try joining temp from 1997 to 2007. Still steady? Look around this blog and you will see more meaningful ways to analyse the data. And what makes you think that climate is only one factor? Sure the sun has a effort, so do aerosols etc. Every natural pattern is still operating but on top of this is rising CO2. Compare temps with last global minimum. Better still, read the IPCC “Scientific basis” for the gory detail.
Richard Ricardo, Do not confuse fetid with fertile. The jungles look green, but tropical plants actually produce little in the way of colories per hectare. Almost all of our most important crops require a period of cold to germinate and grow properly. Cold also kills off weeds, pests and disease. Moreover, “warmer” is not all there is to it. More energy in the system makes it less predictable. All the infrastructure of human civilization was developed during the past 10000 years or so of remarkable climatic stability. Now imagine trying to support 9-12 billion people as our agriculture begins to fail, our transport is washed out, our water sources dry up…
I am now hearing, the ice has returned and a large part of the NH 2008 winter has broken records for coldness and snowfall. Apparantly AGW has stopped !
Well, Bob Carter and the National Post say it’s so, so it must be so!
Many of the records cited recently are just normal variation, or in some cases sloppy writing. The multiyear ice is not back.
Go to the top of the webpage and click the link “Start Here”. Many of the questions you have have been addressed in detail on this extensive website, and the “Start Here” link will help you to organize your thoughts and questions and find the related discussions that have already occured…
Re #95 (”Fred”): First of all, the worry “that some political body will dictate their perceived solution via punitive laws rather than allowing the free market to sort things out” is a rather confusing statement from the point of view of the economics of markets. It makes no sense to talk about the market sorting something out when externalities are involved…i.e., the costs of the CO2 emissions are not being borne by the parties involved in any given transaction but are instead borne by all the rest of us. In fact, a proper understanding of markets, rather than a blind faith in markets, tells us that this is exactly why one needs a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system!
Your statement about “the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998″ is a strawman. The science of climate change does not say that the increase in temperature will be steady. There will be fluctuations as there always are in weather and in climate. In fact, climate models that are run with a steadily-increasing CO2 forcing show these same sorts of fluctuations. What the theory does say is that the trend over a large enough period of time that you get good “signal-to-noise” should be upward, as it has been for the last ~35 years.
Next, your statement about the temperature declining to pre-global warming levels over the last year is wrong. It is true that January 2008 was the coldest month (anomaly-wise) in a fair while. However, I believe that all the temperature data sets still showed a net positive anomaly relative to their 1951-1980 base period, which means that the global temperature was still higher than the average during that 1951 to 1980 period (which itself was already warmer than the average temperature earlier in the 20th century). And, again, that was a fluctuation. It is likely that 2008 as a whole will have an even higher positive anomaly from the 1951 to 1980 base period than January alone did.
Finally, your claim of the temperature being well-correlated with the solar cycle minimum is untrue. If you look at a plot of the two, they don’t look particularly well-correlated at all. It is much better correlated with a shift from weak El Nino conditions to pretty strong La Nina conditions, a shift that is understood to produce temporarily-cooler global temperatures, just as it did between 1998 and the following two years.
Re 95 the hysteria to “do something now” ignores the immense ability for humans to adapt to wildly changing environmental conditions, and may cause the human race to take actions with unintended consequences which are more damaging to humankind than the climate change itself.
Funny how we’re so capable of adapting to climate, but we can’t handle a little carbon tax.
explain the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998
It’s called natural variability. In addition, there’s no general expectation of an emissions-temperature correlation, because of the intervening accumulations of atmospheric carbon and heat. Falling emissions would be perfectly consistent with rising temperatures, as long as emissions exceed uptake and the equilibrium temperature given forcing exceeds the actual temperature (as at present). The reverse is also true.
as well as the sharp decline in the average global temperature to pre- “global warming era” levels in the past year alone - which just happens to correlate better with the extended solar minimum!
Your sunspot-temperature rapid response theory would predict a regular 11 year cycle in temperature, and a hot year in 1957. Neither fits the data.
Ken Rohleder (#71): you quote the article as saying ““By the early 1970’s…the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted.” but left out the next 3 words, “albeit poorly understood”
Which is precisely my point Philip — the notion was accepted but not understood. In ten years, the literature will likely disavow the current hysteria by saying, “By the early 2000’s…the notion of a global warming trend was widely accepted albeit poorly understand.”
“Widely accepted and poorly understood” sums up the current state of climate science.
[[I have a question, why is the warming of the earth so bad?]]
Because our agriculture and economy are adapted to the present temperature regime.
[[ It is hot in the tropics year round and life there seems to thrive. I read some place that the ice caps are melting, and that places like Florida adn some other coastal areas would be flooded,would not people just move further inland or adapt like the Dutch building dykes?]]
Sure — at a cost of trillions of dollars. Losing Miami, New York, San Francisco and New Orleans won’t be something we can compensate for cheaply.
[[explain the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998]]
You know damn well temperatures have not been STEADY since 1998, and you know it damn well because you’ve been on Tamino’s blog, “Open Mind,” where this has been discussed over and over for some time. You’ve had your arguments demolished there, and apparently your response is to come over here and repeat them again. Dishonest.
[[ claims that since the past year has been cooler, there can’t be global warming. How can I best refute this garbage? HELP!]]
Point out that climate is defined as regional or global average weather over a period of 30 years or more, and that a sample size of one year tells you nothing. There have been lots of little jogs downward in the curve of rising temperature, but the trend is still up.
Re Ken Rohleder @ 114: “In ten years, the literature will likely disavow the current hysteria by saying, “By the early 2000’s…the notion of a global warming trend was widely accepted albeit poorly understand.”
How scientific. Sounds more likely that you’re whistling past the graveyard to me, not a wise basis for making decisions that will have a global impact. We might as well be reading tarot cards.
) 
7 March 2008 at 10:18
Excellent! A really heavy mallet to whack that mole with!
7 March 2008 at 10:20
This is a very important post and BAMS article — since the cooling nonsense remains the most common attack on climate scientists I get when speaking or writing on the subject. Kudos to your work on it.
I blogged on your work here:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/02/22/another-denier-talking-point-global-cooling-bites-the-dust/
I also think you may want to address the other pieces of “cooling” nonsense — that we are now in a cooling trend, either since 1998 (!) or, more recently, since last January.
I discuss that here:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/03/02/media-enable-denier-spin-i-a-sort-of-cold-january-doesnt-mean-climate-stopped-warming/
Hansen has also debunked it:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/03/03/hansen-throws-cold-water-on-cooling-climate-claim/
Keep up the great work!
7 March 2008 at 10:21
Thanks for a great summary. I have been eagerly awaiting commentary on the recent hyping of a new sunspot minimum and ensuing Little Ice Age by the denial side. Any plans?
7 March 2008 at 10:57
Well, for media only bad news are good news. Back in the 70s it was the just coming Next Ice Age, nowadays it’s the just coming disasterous GW.
What about the study
Miskolczi, Ferenc M., 2007. Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres. Idojaras Vol. 111, No 1, pp. 1-40, January 2007, online http://met.hu/doc/idojaras/vol111001_01.pdf
Quote from DailyTech March 6:
“Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount.
How did modern researchers make such a mistake? They relied upon equations derived over 80 years ago, equations which left off one term from the final solution….”
[Response: Runaway Greenhouse is a strawman. I’m sure someone will take the paper to bits properly. The obvious problem for it is to explain the ice age cycle -William]
7 March 2008 at 11:12
Instead of endlessly bringing up the past, how about concentrating on the failures of the current models?
7 March 2008 at 11:15
Woo Hoo!
It’s GW Sceptic Bingo time again!
http://timlambert.org/2005/04/gwsbingo/
7 March 2008 at 11:29
Someone should get Newsweek to revisit their 2006 revisit of their 1975 cooling prediction, defending it as an accurate depiction of the state of science at the time. RealClimate covered it once before:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/global-cooling-again/#more-363
7 March 2008 at 11:34
A useful and timely post.
To sound a note of caution, however, stand by for the counter argument to shift to what scientists were ‘predicting’ in the 1950s and early 1960s. You may also kick off a ‘citation fight’, with people claiming certain articles are not in good enough journals, or some of the data or predictions in the published papers turned out to be suspect, or the paper was not reviewed properly, or there are plenty of papers you have not cited which put the cooling argument, and so on and so on.
Well done, anyway, and I look forward to reading the paper!
7 March 2008 at 11:41
Cool!!
Like you say maybe now we can lay this one to rest.
Maybe a article on the 1940 to 1970 cooling may be in order and the reasons as to why?
In future decades for example as humans clean up their pollution act how much warmer will it be? How much more additional warming will eliminating aerosoles create in w/m2?
7 March 2008 at 11:44
William,
Welcome back
Does this mean that we no longer have to worry about the THC stopping due to the melting of Arctic ice, and causing conditions to return to those of the Younger Dryas stadial?
If so, then our British Government might like to know, since they are currently spending £10M on the RAPID project which is currently throwing hundreds of buoys into the Atlantic to measure the THC.
Cheers, Alastair.
7 March 2008 at 11:50
Why did those 7 article gain dominance over the 44 in school texts of the time?
[Response: It would be nice to find a school textbook from the time, to see what it said -William]
7 March 2008 at 11:51
Congratulations on this important work. It would be interesting (but another and even harder job) to go through the popular-press accounts of the time. Many of the moles in need of a good whack are actually responding to what the magazines etc. are saying today, not what the scientists are saying.
I am pretty sure that a study of the popular press in the 1970s (which I’ve only browsed through, not done up statistically) would find a substantial bias toward reporting predictions of cooling, since at the time “ice age coming!” would have been a lot more attention-grabbing than “warming.” Scientists of the time did worry that they were being misquoted. But I think such a study would also find that essentially all the journalistic accounts said it was all speculation and admitted that scientists had no consensus, indeed little understanding of climate, and were not making any kind of firm prediction–that is the most important difference from the current situation.
7 March 2008 at 12:22
Well done. The whole sceptic argument rides on often repeated canards of which this has to be the top prize winner. Hopefully this much needed accounting and my upcoming novel will cement dispelling the myth of global cooling into poular culture.
7 March 2008 at 12:28
Keep in mind that the classic paper by Hayes et al (1976) showed that isotopic composition of forams in marine cores fluctuated on orbital time-scales in accordance with Milankovitch. This supported orbital forcing of the ice ages and led to speculation that another ice age was inevitable as the planet moved toward the corresponding configuration. Much of the talk about global cooling in the 70s related to these orbital time-scales and the cause of ice ages. So the science of the day was predicting cooling, but on a completely different time-scale.
7 March 2008 at 12:33
Those statistics make it look as if there’s actually more denial of warming going on now than there was then–when scientists were supposedly predicting an ice age!
It’s always good to see that a typical denier argument has little or no basis. Although, by debunking this argument, you give it more strength. The response I always use is, basically, these days we’ve got an extra 30+ years of scientific investigation–surely the scientists have got a better chance of being right.
As others have said, it would be interesting to see by what means the ‘ice age’ ‘prediction’ was the most noticed.
7 March 2008 at 12:33
RE: #5 Patrick Henry said:
“Instead of endlessly bringing up the past, how about concentrating on the failures of the current models?”
Which current models, in your estimation, have failed?
7 March 2008 at 12:55
Alastair, see Peter Ward. Rearrangement, not halt, of the circulation looks likely to be what caused past anoxic events. The buoy system is appropriate to detect changes including rearrangement and to get a finer grained picture of a very complicated 4-dimensional process.
7 March 2008 at 13:20
This is helpful to know. However, since a high proportion of misnamed “skeptics” are in fact deliberate liars, who endlessly repeat assertions that they well know have been repeatedly shown to be false, it will probably have little effect on the fake, phony, Exxon-Mobil sponsored “debate” about anthropogenic climate change.
7 March 2008 at 13:37
Spencer - Here is at least one group that has looked at the issue of media coverage. Regardless of what one may think of their purpose for this report or their likely position on AGW, I think there presentation of the wild swings in media coverage of changing climate is probably about right.
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice.asp
For most people who are not reading Science or Nature or other more specialized climatology journals on a routine basis, their understanding of the current state of the science comes from media coverage of the science. Therefore, even if many or most peer-reviewed articles were discussing climate warming in the 70s, what people remember is the coverage from the popular media.
7 March 2008 at 14:09
I think this was good work and I don’t mean to devalue it here. But I think the entire argument, even if true, would be specious. I mean, let’s say the AGW-deniers were right and the science (not just Newsweek) said we were coming to a new ice age. A mere 10 years later that was a minority opinion and it’s only become increasingly in the minority over the last decades. Do folks making the argument really prefer the science of the 70’s to the advances in understanding that have occurred since computers, satellites, 30 more years of data, etc have come to bear on the subject? I can’t think of anything that natural science ‘believed’ in the 70’s that is demonstrably more accurate than what natural science ‘believed’ in the 90’s.
7 March 2008 at 14:40
RE: #19 The claims made in that ‘report’ about the popular press coverage have also been debunked. If you click through the links in the OP, you’ll quickly see that the newspaper coverage nearly always discussed the speculative nature of the science and was nearly always buried in the ‘filler’ sections of the paper. Applying denialist SOP, that report cherry-picks quotes and grossly misrepresnts the newspaper coverage.
7 March 2008 at 14:58
Bob North #19 has a point. I clearly remember, though I no longer have the book, discussions in an undergraduate climatology class regarding the “Snowblitz” theory of climate change as written about by Nigel Calder in his book “The Weather Machine”.
This pre-dated the Newsweek article of April 28, 1975.
Let us not forget others that lead the way to the idea that an ice age was just around the corner.
The “Science” articles of 1956 and 1958 by Ewing and Donn about rapid climate change were popularized in a “Harper’s Magazine” article by Betty Friedan in 1958 titled “The Coming Ice Age”.
John Gribbin concluded that in the next few hundred years an ice age would be upon us in his “Forecasts, Famines and Freezes” (1976).
Don’t forget the book “Ice or Fire? Surviving Climate Change” (1978) by D. Halacy Jr.where the author suggests spreading soot to melt polar ice. Does that sound like seeding the ocean with iron filings?
[Response: I hadn’t seen the Science articles of 56/8. But the “ice age” scare is usually supposed to be the 70s - sometimes the 60s - I’ve never heard of it in the 50s before. And a quick scan of those articles doesn’t show much hint of predicting an ice age, or talking about rapid change. Which bits did you have in mind? “Snowblitz”, as I recall, only appeared in the book and never in a paper (Calder did have a paper in Nature, but I don’t think it had the SB in it) -William]
7 March 2008 at 15:03
Hank,
Nice to see that someone understood what I wrote
Is Peter Ward’s “Rearrangement” of the THC going to lead to a warmer or a cooler climate, and who is this Peter Ward anyway?
OTOH, If you follow the link on the RAPID page to Will global warming make European winters colder? you will find that the oceanographers from the National Oceanography Centre at Southampton University are writing:
“Luckily the new ice age from ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, is fiction, not future. But strange as it seems, global warming might bring colder winters to the UK and parts of North-West Europe. And if it happens, the change could take place over only a decade or so.”
In other words, we could have an abrupt cooling in the next ten years!
Cheers, Alastair.
7 March 2008 at 15:18
Alastair, here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=%2B%22Peter+Ward%22+%2Bclimate
Worth serious reading.
For others, don’t confuse local cooling (like ‘Medieval Warming’) with the current big denial theme: new ice age when the coal runs out on the Sun. Or something like that.
7 March 2008 at 15:41
One more reference for Alastair:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21468803/
(Proceedings of the Royal Society B, haven’t found a link)
7 March 2008 at 15:50
Timo H. posts:
[[“Runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” Miskolczi states. Just as the theory of relativity sets an upper limit on velocity, his theory sets an upper limit on the greenhouse effect, a limit which prevents it from warming the Earth more than a certain amount. ]]
Yes, it can only warm a couple hundred more degrees if all the carbon in the carbonate rocks were to be released, which won’t happen for a billion years. But it doesn’t look like this guy actually understands what a “runaway greenhouse effect” is. He should look up the planetary astronomy data on the history of Venus, where it happened.
7 March 2008 at 15:52
Zane says:
[[Why did those 7 article gain dominance over the 44 in school texts of the time?]]
What school texts? Can you give a specific citation?
7 March 2008 at 16:08
#11 Zane writes:
Why did those 7 article gain dominance over the 44 in school texts of the time?
They didn’t. But the examples have been repeated for many years, often as a minor note to ‘confusionist’ editorials. Small bits of text are cherry-picked to ‘prove’ the points. George Will did this in 2006 with 3 famous papers. pdfs of articles that don’t require cheery-picking are stored, linked and reused by many.
I hope William or someone can put copies of some of the other 64 articles on the web . . .
The public remembers some of the puzzle (perhaps only Johnny Carson jokes). After encountering misinformation often enough, many people accept it uncritically as fact. Since it wasn’t, the difference is now ‘explained’ as scientists ‘tricking’ the public. Since that is a social taboo it causes the desired mistrust and rejection.
7 March 2008 at 16:22
do any of the current GCMs predict global cooling modes?
what sort of near-term scenarios are outputted when short-term (eg 10 year) GWPs are used instead of the conventional 100 year GWPs?
7 March 2008 at 17:15
mg, see the white rectangle, top right of each page?
Good exercise here for how to answer your question:
Pasting your question into it for Google.
(Many of the hits you get are from PR sites, which are really emphasizing the notion of a new ice age this week, curiously)
http://www.google.com/search?q=+current+GCMs+predict+global+cooling+modes%3F
Now, try the same thing but use Google Scholar:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&newwindow=1&safe=off&scoring=r&q=+current+GCMs+predict+global+cooling+modes%3F&as_ylo=2007&btnG=Search
See the difference?
Scholar finds you the modeling results, including the Hadley that describes a brief flat temperature period this year from La Nina; simple Google gets you a wonderful melange of PR, denial, opinion, witnessing, and believers along with some science sites.
You have to make up your own mind.
First, about which tool you use, faith or science.
Where do you start?
7 March 2008 at 17:21
The history of the development of scientific knowledge vs. the misrepresentation of that history…
In many ways, this is a strange argument for the last remaining denialists to raise. Would they also use “Back in the 1950s, scientists didn’t believe in plate tectonics” as a criticism of modern geological science?
For the details about the history of the ice age theories, see http://www.aip.org/history/climate/cycles.htm.
The chief culprit might have been Cesare Emiliani:
Thus, the media articles about 1970s climate science should read “Scientists warned of runaway deglaciation in the early 1970s”, shouldn’t they? Or, maybe “Scientists were unsure of the direction of future climate change in the early 1970s”, perhaps?
The modern picture seems to be that ice ages tend to end abruptly, but the onset of an ice age is gradual, driven by changes in sunlight across the northern land masses and decreasing atmospheric CO2 levels. So, we might have been past the warmest period of this most recent interglacial, and beginning a slow, multi-thousand year descent into a new ice age - until we changed the atmospheric composition.
However, we’ve added so much fossilized carbon to the atmosphere that we’re now approaching double anything seen in the glacial CO2 record. The Mauna Loa record shows that we’re currently at 384 ppm, increasing at 2 ppm per year. This carbon may stay in the atmosphere for a very long time. This may very well put off the next ice age entirely:
Next Ice Age Delayed By Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels
7 March 2008 at 18:41
Ike, if you haven’t read Ruddiman’s ,“Plows, Plagues & Petroleum”, it’s been out in paperback fro a few months, and bears on this, i.e., evidence of start of lonnnnng glaciation process possibly aborted by early CO2& CH4.
7 March 2008 at 18:45
Thank you for the nice mole-whacker. I will put it to good use.
7 March 2008 at 19:46
Important work, yes. Very good post. Let’s hope the mainstream media picks this research up and runs with it.
In this regard, the newly-minted Vaclav Klaus Climate Joke Awards might be of interest to some of the posters here. Named after the right honorable CEO of the Czech Republic, who believes that “climate is a joke” to quote a recent AP story from the Heartland Con, the awards honor those on both sides of the aisle who make unsound remarks about global warming and climate change. See the carnage here, and feel free to nominate your nominees, with references and quote sources please:
http://climatejokeawards.blogspot.com/
7 March 2008 at 20:20
Browsing though file from my youth I cam across a junior-high school paper I was made to write in the early 1980’s. The premis given to the class was that industrial pollution might lead to another ice age, and we were supposed to describe how this might affect mankind.
I had forgotten all about it, but it certainly explains why I always had that “vague impression” about impending cooling. Does anyone else here have school age memories about cooling vs warming?
7 March 2008 at 20:25
‘ . . Inevitably June snowfall is a much rarer creature, but widespread sleet and snow showers did manage to affect the UK on 2nd June 1975, rudely and infamously affecting a cricket match between Derbyshire and Lancashire at Buxton where early afternoon snow covered the pitch with around an inch of snow (Markham, 1994, Eden 1995). Elsewhere, snow settled on hills just south of Birmingham (Eden 1995), whilst to the south and east Manley (1975) reports snow being observed in both Cambridge and London and another county cricket match, this time featuring Essex and Kent, being played in Colchester was interrupted by snow (Ogley et al. 1993). Meanwhile, sleet showers were observed in RAF Manston in eastern Kent, Hassocks, Sussex and Totton and Portsmouth in Hampshire (COL Bulletin 1975, Eden 1995, Ogley en al 1995).
In his book Weatherwise, Philip Eden (1995) wonderfully describes this June snowfall as, “surely the most outrageous thing that June has ever done to us, meteorologically speaking”. It also seems that in recent times at least this is the latest in the season that such widespread snow has managed to affect southern Britain (Manley 1975, Eden 1995) and Manley (1975) suggests that the June 1975 snowfall was probably southern Britain’s latest snowfall since the turn of the nineteenth century.’ Snagged from: http://www.dandantheweatherman.com/Bereklauw/latesnow.html
This freak event, observed by many, did much to fix the idea of a coming Ice Age in the popular mind in Britain in the late 70s. It was much more influential than any scientific papers published at the time.
7 March 2008 at 23:21
I remember the cooling prediction but all I remember was a book (and some brief media attention). Before that I had read science fiction novels and seen a couple of movies that predicted warming and melting… But anyway, after the cooling hypothesis came out (it certainly wasn’t impossible given that ice ages were cyclic), I decided to naively think up a mitigation strategy. So I asked myself, what in retrospect was a decidedly stupid question: What if we detonated nuclear weapons to melt the ice? After a bit of research I realized that the amount of heat (while awesome) was pathetically small and that, by comparing it to volcanoes, instead of warming we would get cooling from the dust throw up (this was before Nuclear Winter was put forward as a compelling reason against limited nuclear war).
So I remember it - but I certainly didn’t think it was “scientific consensus” - it seemed like a plausible hypothesis. But I mean, goodness gracious, the scientists weren’t entirely sure what the Great Red Spot on Jupiter was at that time (the leading theory was a big storm but that was far from proven).
8 March 2008 at 0:23
In the AMS writeup linked in the post, page 3, I was amused to see CLIMAP decoded as the “Long-rage Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction project”. Freudian slip??
8 March 2008 at 0:50
The following is the by month NASA planetary land-ocean temperature anomaly data. The base for the table is 1951 to 1980.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
Planetary temperatures were colder in the 1960s and early 1970s. I believe newspapers and magazines ran articles that stated that the planet was cooling and could enter an ice age because of the cold weather at the time.
Planetary temperatures were also much colder in the 1800’s and early 20th century, as per the NASA data. Climate in the 1800’s and early 20th century must have been significantly different from 1980 to 2007.
8 March 2008 at 1:57
Chris Squire (#36) — a decade or two back, it snowed in Cape Town, South Africa in December. It generally does not snow in Cape Town, and December is summer there (usually hot and dry). Freak events can always occur. This is why you should be leery of anyone who looks out the window and says, “Aha! I’ve spotted climate change.” But of course the press will pick up on these things, and we should call them to account when it happens. (When they pay attention: The Australian for example very seldom prints factual corrections of climate denial for example.)
8 March 2008 at 4:51
re #22 Steve Horstmeyer.
Thanks for reminding us that the “Snowblitz” theory of climate change was written about by Nigel Calder in his book “The Weather Machine”. This suggested that an ice age could be initiated within a few years by eg a volcanic eruption causing cooling that caused widespread snow cover, causing further cooling by reflecting sunlight etc.
Nigel Calder is a prominent sceptic and made a pugnacious contribution to the Channel 4 “The Great Global Warming Swindle” film, just one year ago.
So, one of those “scientists predicting a new ice-age in the 1970’s” that contrarians keep banging on about is himself now numbered amongst the contrarians!
8 March 2008 at 5:42
I should also note my considerable thanks to the authors of this paper for taking the time out of their busy schedules to do this comprehensively. That this should be necessary is a sad testimony to the effectiveness of the denialist disinformation campaign and the shabby standards of much of the press which reports this stuff without verification.
Any plans to issue a press release when the paper is published?
8 March 2008 at 7:53
Re #20 Steve L
Don’t think so… the real gist of the argument is IIUC that the climate science of the 70s was already pretty good — the fundamentals were in place. Since then it has only gotten better still. Climatology as a science has a long history. Sure climatologists get things wrong all the time — but not this badly wrong, not this late in the game.
8 March 2008 at 8:17
Good article…it would be interesting to see the same table 1 from 1980-2007 and see how it’s changed. Now infinitely more data has come to light from almost every earth science source. Were they using satellites in the 1970’s for climate study?
8 March 2008 at 8:29
The global cooling argument is hitting hard again right now due to the recent chill. The standard response is of course La Nina but I’ve had several skeptics e-mail me this NOAA paper:
I haven’t seen this pop up on climate audit but someone is obviously parading this around.
8 March 2008 at 8:33
In regards to the possibilty of an ice age or period of noticable cooling for europe and north america I suppose that depends uopn the rate of slowdown of the north atlantic current. I saw the movie ‘The day after tomorrow’ two days ago..what a crock of #@$%!..I dont think anyone with half a brain or even quarter for that matter would believe the speed of the onset of the ice age portrayed there. Even if there was an sudden outflow of many gigalitres east of canada like there once was eons back..that still took up to a decade for that iceage to take effect. No one knows with any certainty what effect a moderate slowdown of the NAC would have..but I just cant see it triggering a snap ice age. The increasing rate of freshwater entering the atlantic from a greenland/arctic melt alone will no-doubt slow-down the NAC but to what degree?
8 March 2008 at 10:32
2: Thanks for the links. I keep getting hit with this cooling/new iceage #$%^ and could use a good mallet to do some wacking of my own.
8 March 2008 at 10:37
I’ve been fighting GW for nearly 20 years now, reducing my GHGs substantially at financial benefit to me, and trying to get others to do likewise. And I didn’t really know the science of climate change well (and still don’t) or where we stood in geological terms (so it doesn’t take a climate or rocket scientist to reduce GHGs).
Until recently when I’ve come up against these “ice-age” denialists, I’ve only been able to answer them with, “well science does advance over time, and now the scientists have a lot better understanding….”
Only this past year I’ve come to understand we are at a climate high point, a sort of plateau, in the glacial-interglacial cycle. And if there were no anthropogenic GHG forcing, we might expect over a long geological (in human terms) timeframe that we would be heading into an ice age….eventually. So the “ice-age” scientists back then were not necessarily wrong. But with our GHG forcing, we may be triggering positive feedbacks and tipping into a much greater warming period, as has happened several times in the past (251 mya, 55 mya), using this high warm plateau as our launching pad into hysteresis.
So now I answer the “ice-age” denialist argument (denialists usually trot out ALL their inconsistent & contradictory arguments) this way: I draw a sine-wave in the air with my hand, saying, yes, that the normal fluctuation over a long geological timeframe is to alternate between cold ice ages and warm interglacial periods, and that now we are right here in a warm interglacial period (my hand raised at the top of the wave), and if there were no human GHGs, then we would expect that over a long time frame we’d be sliding down into an ice age. However, there have been times in the past when other factors have kicked in, such as extreme vulcanism or as now with our tremendous GHG emissions, when instead of going back down into an ice age, it has gone into hysteresis (raising my hand higher) in which the warming spirals way up, causing mass extinction of life on earth — 95% of life died out in such an event 251 years ago. And now we may be causing the climate, out of it’s normal cycle, to go into just such an event.
8 March 2008 at 10:53
RE #46, Lawrence, I think the creators of DAY AFTER TOMORROW made it clear somewhere (?in the film’s beginning?) that they were greatly speeding up the process for dramatic effect. But I was also put off, especially by the ice chasing the kids in the library — it popped out of my suspended disbelief.
So the real problem is how to make great movies about global warming, that captivate audiences. The nuclear issue was easy (CHINA SYNDROME, ON THE BEACH, etc); these were nuke movies that shook the world. Global warming is also a grave threat, but how to make it photogenic with the necessary “ticking time bomb” so people will watch and get inspired to mitigate. I’m sort of up to my gills in global warming documentaries, quite frankly, though we need them to keep coming out.
8 March 2008 at 10:57
…..supposed to be +1C today in Yellowknife - Northern Canada. That beats the normal -17. I recall from my early science classes that ice melts at 0 degrees (well it was +32F when I learned it). So much for the impending ice-age around here.
8 March 2008 at 11:57
It’s definitely warming here in Scotland - we never see polar bears here now. I think they may have moved up North. Here is an article about the remains of one in Scotland.
http://news.scotsman.com/scotland/Secrets-of-Scotland39s-only-wild.3857597.jp
8 March 2008 at 13:08
Ike Solem (31) & several others — From Archer/Ganapolski, A moveable trigger: Fossil feul CO2 and the onset of the next glaciation, available here
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/
about 7th down, as well as other sources, the next attempt at a stade (massive ice sheets) will be in about 20,000 years. Even baring AGW the orbital forcing is rather weak and so this one might well be skipped. The next attempt will be about 50,000 years from now.
8 March 2008 at 13:30
Just dis information if you ask me, people that are in a state of fear are easily controlled.
8 March 2008 at 13:58
Lynn Vincentnathan wrote: “I think the creators of DAY AFTER TOMORROW made it clear … that they were greatly speeding up the process for dramatic effect … the real problem is how to make great movies about global warming, that captivate audiences … how to make it photogenic with the necessary ‘ticking time bomb’ so people will watch and get inspired to mitigate.”
The problem is that a realistic portrayal of the arrival of catastrophic global warming would have to span years or decades, which presents a dramatic challenge (although a sudden world-wide mega-drought that led to a global collapse of agriculture and mass die-off from starvation within a year or two would be pretty dramatic).
So, if I were developing a screenplay for a global warming disaster movie, I would probably finesse that problem by borrowing from the tradition of post-nuclear-holocaust dystopia movies, and set the movie after the worst effects of global warming had already occurred — say around mid-21st century. The drama would be in the struggle of the few remaining humans to survive in the harsh environment of a wrecked civilization and ruined biosphere. In other words more like Soylent Green than Godzilla.
8 March 2008 at 15:02
Slightly OT, but here is more evidence from the natural world the things are disturbed. NPR had an item this week about the expansion of phytoplankton regions of the ocean. They are increasing 1-4% per year. That amounts to 2.5 million square miles in the last decade.
“Scientists studying climate change have predicted this kind of change. But the sea desert has been spreading 10 times faster than climate scientists predicted.”
One more underestimate. They do offer the caveat that they may have just caught a particularly rapid period of change, and it may slow down again.
The abstract from GRL is here.
8 March 2008 at 16:08
Good pointer, Tim; one important word missing, it’s low-phytoplankton or phytoplankton-desert areas that are expanding:
“… vast areas that were once green with plankton have been turning blue, as marine life becomes scarcer …”
8 March 2008 at 16:23
So technology ascends as the human condition declines.
“History shows that every technical application from its beginning presents certain unforeseen secondary effects which are more disastrous than the lack of the technique would have been. Every successive technique has appeared because the ones which preceded it rendered necessary the ones which followed.”
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
8 March 2008 at 16:39
The funny thing about the day after tommorow was that it seemed to say that global warming will lead to everwhere getting much colder. Is there any science to support this? Did the film’s makers think tropical heat is less scary?
8 March 2008 at 18:28
What shall we do with ” Torch “, the 1950’s Astounding Science Fiction short story about re-glaciation arisingfrom the ignition of a Siberian oilfield by a botched Soviet nuclear test?
Is it a cautionary tale of the hazards of Zero-Dimensional climate modeling, the precursor of TTAPS and Roland Emmerich’s Crutzen-based dystopic aerosol film, Der Arkprinzep, or the great grand-daddy of Niven & Pournelle’s sci fi novel Fallen Angels,in which excess of zeal in suppressing AGW leads to a Snowball Earth?
Then again, in 1932 The New York Times ran a ‘Fish Will Swim In Buckingham Palace’ story under the headline :
“Next Great Deluge Forecast By Science”; CF:
http://adamant.typepad.com/seitz/2007/04/the_hundred_yea.html
The mole is the least of our whacking worries –it’s a regular Pandora’s Menagerie.
8 March 2008 at 19:26
“…the old 1970s global cooling canard…” is hardly an accurate characterization. Many top scientists at that time bought into the “Ice Age Coming” hysteria, including apparently, James Hansen himself.
Take a look at http://www.personal.psu.edu/fth/JamesHansen-predictsIceAgeNASA.html
[Response: This is an appalling piece of reporting. Rasool and Schneider did not ‘predict an ice age’ in their paper, Hansen was not an author on the paper and his role (as mentioned in the acknowledgements was a piece of code that calculated Mie scattering for aerosols - equivalent to sharing code that does a fast fourier transform. How this rises to ‘predicting an ice age’ is impossible to say. This is just a drive-by smear, which IBD has a history of (see Deltoid for more). - gavin]
8 March 2008 at 20:16
Re #45: That’s an early paper referring to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), although the term isn’t used. The PDO is a multi-decadal climate cycle that is associated with changes in ENSO; in its positive phase there are more El Ninos and in its negative phase more La Ninas. The PDO has been in a postive phase since 1976 and ever since it was identified (in the ’90s) some of the less-informed denialists have been hoping that a flip to the negative phase will erase the recent warming trend. Their idea is that if one El Nino can result in a warm year then a series of them will make for an entire trend.
What they neglect (among other things) is that what would be seen is an initial step followed by little or no further warming, and that the global trend looks nothing like that (but see below). A lot of them also seem to have the idea that ENSO cycles result in a real rather than an apparent heating or cooling, whereas what they mainly do is move heat around in the oceans (resulting in a change in ocean surface temperature that in turn affects the atmosphere).
Slightly more informed denialists will pull out the example of the temperature trend in southern Alaska as proof of their idea. In 1976 there was indeed a large step increase in temperature in that region followed by little change since. Of course the problem is that the trend in one small region proves exactly nothing with regard to the global trend.
The ENSO-sea ice correlation seems neither here nor there.
8 March 2008 at 21:51
In THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, the weather special effects were great as long as you could suspend belief; but the ravening pack of wolves that conveniently showed up when the kids went outside was just lame.
8 March 2008 at 23:14
Here is an old video from 1958 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lgzz-L7GFg
The text of the message is very similar to today’s
8 March 2008 at 23:23
Another article from Peter Ward for Alastair, “Impact from the Deep” …
The SciAm location:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=1&articleID=00037A5D-A938-150E-A93883414B7F0000
… is down for maintanence at the moment, so try:
http://www.chicagocleanpower.org/ward.pdf
9 March 2008 at 1:07
re #9
Pete Best Says:
7 March 2008 at 11:41 AM
“Maybe a article on the 1940 to 1970 cooling may be in order and the reasons as to why?”
I have been curious about this as well. Has RealClimate written or linked to any info on why 1940 was warm, or why 1970 was cool?
9 March 2008 at 1:57
Just for fun, here’s another source. Back in 1982, did anyone reading this take it at face value ? A picture book showing “The Coming Ice Age” at http://www.paleofuture.com/2007/06/coming-ice-age-1982.html .
9 March 2008 at 3:13
In the caption of fig 1 of the paper, it says that in no year were there more cooling papers than warming. However, it shows 2 cooling and 1 warming in 1971. Does it mean to refer only to the cumulative number? It certainly doesn’t read that way.
9 March 2008 at 3:47
#45, MJ. I don’t buy that hypothesis completely. they forgot the larger picture. Melting of a large chunk of old Polar ice in 07 has caused unknown after effects, one may be observed as already documented continuing Arctic clear air, this is a predominant phenomena now, there were a preponderance of Low pressure systems passing through Bering Strait, did see a few Highs as well, but the main cause of this continental cooling was born in North American Arctic , the window was open for simple surface radiation escaping upwards. Awaiting spring time cloud and fog bursts, however if unusual low cloud extent continues, there will be a transformation in the temperature scene towards greater warming, returning to the summer of 2007 main melting conditions.
9 March 2008 at 3:54
Lynn, “Soylent Green” came actually close to what a realistic depiction of a worst-case aftermath would look like. It ought to be re-done in the light of the newest knowledge. (What stops you from doing this? Like George Lucas re-did Buck Rogers
(But the reality of failed nuclear states — famine decimating populations doesn’t promote good government, or friendly international relations for that matter — and an atmosphere carrying radioactivity from local nuclear war should be glossed over; we don’t want to completely scare off our audience now do we.)
9 March 2008 at 7:59
Re: 51 Red Etin..haha! That means you must be 18000 years old..geez! what health sups are you taking??? But seriously…read a bit about warming scotland..and the 3000ft mountains at the border of the cairngorm plateau’s which in years past always were covered in snow now for the past decade are now snow free.
9 March 2008 at 9:19
Pg. 2 “By the early 1970’s…the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted.”
Agreed. That’s the point — before scientists wrung their hands about GW, they were ringing them about global cooling. The article count doesn’t matter if you concede (correctly) that the notion of global cooling was widely accepted.
9 March 2008 at 10:30
In his response to #60, gavin referred to Deltoid, but neglected to give a link. One can do worse than read Deltoid in its entirety, but here is the entry in question.
9 March 2008 at 11:15
In reply to Ike Solem’s comment #31
“The modern picture seems to be that ice ages tend to end abruptly, but the onset of an ice age is gradual, driven by changes in sunlight across the northern land masses and decreasing atmospheric CO2 levels. So, we might have been past the warmest period of this most recent interglacial, and beginning a slow, multi-thousand year descent into a new ice age - until we changed the atmospheric composition.”
Ike, The data and analysis does not support your comment. Are there any papers or text books that support your statement? (I have Cronin’s “Principles of Paleoclimatology” and Bradley’s Paleoclimatology, “Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary”. Neither of those text books supports a gradual change from interglacial to glacial or glacial to interglacial.)
In the 1990’s analysis of the Greenland ice sheet core (which was confirmed, by analysis of ocean floor sediment), showed that there are millennium separated, abrupt (not gradual) planetary temperature changes. (The Younger Dryas is an example.) The Antarctic ice core proxy data masked the rapid climate changes due to the polar sea saw where the Antarctic ice sheet initially cools when the planet warms and visa versa. The polar see saw effect is occurring now. The Antarctic ice sheet has cooled slightly while the rest of the planet has warmed.
See Adam’s paper for a review of the discovery of abrupt climate change.
ttp://ethomas.web.wesleyan.edu/adamsetal99.pdf
The other problem with the theory of insolation changes driving planetary temperature change, is that some other forcing function over rides insolation in the Southern Hemisphere, to synchronous the cooling and warming of both Hemispheres. This forcing function does not seem to be GWG, however, as the change in GWG levels lags changes in planetary temperature changes by a thousand years, based on the data and the GWG mechanisms.)
The recent discovery of synchronization of abrupt temperature changes between hemispheres (see link below) is new and was partially unexpected. (Cronin’s textbook notes this is an important question, as to whether Northern and Southern Hemisphere cooling is sychronized, as it sets a criteria for the forcing function.)
http://www.news.wisc.edu/9557
“We’ve been able to get quite precise ages directly on these glacial deposits,” says Singer, whose specialty is geochronology. “What we found was that the structure of the last South American ice age is indistinguishable from the last major glaciation in the Northern Hemisphere.”
“…seem to undermine a widely held idea that global redistribution of heat through the oceans is the primary mechanism that drove major climate shifts of the past.”
“The implications of the new work, say the authors of the study, support a different hypothesis: that rapid cooling of the Earth’s atmosphere synchronized climate change around the globe during each of the last two glacial epochs.”
“Because the Earth is oriented in space in such a way that the hemispheres are out of phase in terms of the amount of solar radiation they receive, it is surprising to find that the climate in the Southern Hemisphere cooled off repeatedly during a period when it received its largest dose of solar radiation,” says Singer. “Moreover, this rapid synchronization of atmospheric temperature between the polar hemispheres appears to have occurred during both of the last major ice ages that gripped the Earth.”
9 March 2008 at 11:23
Thanks for the relevant information with sources. GW opponents I can only assume are mostly under 40yrs of age. Anybody that age or older knows from basic personal experience that the climate has changed radically from what it used to be.
9 March 2008 at 12:21
Has anyone watched “Assume the Position”, the documentary/comedy that Robert Wuhl did? He makes a very salient point about our society and it’s one that we need to understand. His main point is that facts don’t matter in the age of mass media. He points out several cases where fact was completely distorted by fiction and now fiction is what is commonly accepted as fact.
He starts with a clip from “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance”:
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”
With respect to the coming ice age of the 70s, the public just doesn’t care anymore about it. They accept it as fact and no amount of scientific study otherwise will change that. Wuhl point out that most of the people think Columbus sailed west to prove the world was round and Oliver Stone showed the real conspiracy behind the JFK assasination when the overwhelming evidence shows otherwise in both cases.
We must also realize that the press thrives on controversy. And while they don’t usually invent controversy, they do everything they can to play up even the smallest controversy. Saying that we’re about to dive into an ice age sells. Saying that 25% of the scientists surveyed think that there’s a 15% chance that the planet will fall into the ice age won’t sell anything. So it’s not likely that the press would ever pick up on it.
A very current example was the NOAA release within the month that said that the main reason hurricane damage is up is because people have moved to the beach and NOT because of an increased number of hurricanes. The press didn’t cover it because it wasn’t controvercial. Likewise, we have record-breaking box office movies every year and yet none of these have ever approached the popularity of “Gone with the Wind” in terms of number of tickets sold. The press likes to sell the “new and improved” and they typically ignore “there is nothing new here…”
Re #69, George Lucas didn’t redo Buck Rogers, Glen Larson did. Checking IMDB shows no connection between George Lucas and Buck Rogers.
9 March 2008 at 13:22
Right, just some climate thinkers espoused the cooling view, and the warming idea was usually orthodox since the famous Arrhenius paper of 1896 (!). (But that paper was soon criticized since CO2 and water vapor have such similar absorption bands, what’s up with that?) I have a Time-Life “Weather” book from 1965 which discusses global warming from CO2 as a danger. In any case, how goes the idea that a cooling Sun will comp. for global warming?
9 March 2008 at 16:29
i am reading an article about the coming ice age in 18,000 a.d. as predicted by british major general drayson in popular science monthly 1936. the article, by gaylord johnson, shows how anyone can do an experiment to show how the polar caps will extend as glaciers to new york , where they had once been the last time they made their 23 to 35 degree angle cycle ,between which we always rotate. so predictions of a new ice age go way back in the popular press.there does seem to be quite a difference in what is said amongst professionals and what gets out through the popular media.
9 March 2008 at 17:03
http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=-5272939285909467574&q=hansen+warming&total=30&start=30&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=8
Watch this, it states some of the popular press and statements at the time. It sure does seem to be reinventing the wheel with regard to the environmental message of imminent doom but how true is it ?
9 March 2008 at 22:16
RE#69, I actually contacted the author of the book on which it was based (the screenwriter has passed away) and asked if SOYLENT GREEN could be remade, with more of a global warming mention, and he said MGM had been considering doing a sequel, but chucked that idea. Then I wrote to MGM about them getting a professional screenwriter and doing a remake, but never heard back. I’m thinking even the original film could be slightly tweaked to mention global warming. That would be enough. Then re-released.
9 March 2008 at 23:38
re: #65, Re#9 - and - #4
1940-143 = 1800
1970-143 = 1830
http://mb-soft.com/public3/co2hitv.gif
As I mentioned to Hank Roberts, I tried to use bore hole data to reflect the curves. I think there is smear since the translation from air temp averaged over a year to sub-surface (bore hole)values might not be fine enough compared to the relationship of air temperatures and CO2 amounts, but otherwise I can’t see a relationship.
From the bore hole stuff, there seemed to me to be a lot of normalization that could be hiding the weak correlation for the periods and the shift. I felt the bore holes should have shown a pattern, a depression that they did not show.
#4
Anyway, On the Runaway Green house and problems with the ice ages, I agree. I have been examining the paper, and so far it looks like Forenc Miskolczi has proven an identity. I am still examining the work in my slow way, so I could be “way off,” and I am not, the one to take it apart bit by bit by bit. Too many other things happening.
0=0
0!= 1
1=1
2=2
http://met.hu/doc/idojaras/vol111001_01.pdf
================
Runaway Greenhouse..?
There is some work on the pacific warm pool, and NASA and 87F SST where a kind of “runaway” take-off starts but collapses. . . I also fault the above paper on failure to deal with Venus — because the Russians showed there was light aplenty on Venus’ surface. That is a semi-transparent planetary atmosphere with way over 1500 W/m^2 even when the sun was 500Million years old 4 Gya ===============
Read the complete statement on the pacific warm pool and lots of water vapor here: http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2002/02_60AR.html
Also relevant: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20040171753_2004168321.pdf
Venus is a real situation and as Venus is, Earth will become.
====
As for old text books. Denver Radio KOA “Weatherman Bowman” used to describe the jet streams and how they controlled the weather, moving large masses of air around — even in the late 50’s early 60’s — and was an early user of this information from aircraft, especially stratospheric Jet information on head and tail wind speeds and directions, etc. This was before we had an Air Force Academy.
As for text books, nah. Meteorology has a long history, but the push to do real met science became possible after we sent the men to the moon. . .then the republicans and tricky Dicky flushed the space program except where the M-I complex could build cold war spy stuff.
Weather became a priority when insurance could estimate risks and warnings of hurricanes. . .etc. But the early weather sat’s …
I remember all these
http://www.oso.noaa.gov/history/
Also I was on a team to look for impact dust on the moon where and when we crashed our cameras. (That is a while back.) I read Fall of Moondust as published in The Saturday Evening Post and even though Clarke was one of my favorite writers, I did not think there would be any dust danger of significance by looking at the
I remember Sputnik, and Laika, and I remember echo 1 and echo 2. I looked for them among familiar skies that now, global warming and local weather changes has destroyed. Oh yes, population is a problem we licked for a bit in the 1970’s when we were aimed at zpg.
Met took off with NOAA and NASA investigations.
9 March 2008 at 23:46
“So, if I were developing a screenplay for a global warming disaster movie, I would probably finesse that problem by borrowing from the tradition of post-nuclear-holocaust dystopia movies, and set the movie after the worst effects of global warming had already occurred — say around mid-21st century. The drama would be in the struggle of the few remaining humans to survive in the harsh environment of a wrecked civilization and ruined biosphere. In other words more like Soylent Green than Godzilla.”
Hmmm. I handled it differently and in current time. I was in the last version of Godzilla. “Run but don’t step where the digital foot goes!”
9 March 2008 at 23:46
Of interest is this particular morsel - the Ecologist’s 1972 publication “Blueprint for Survival” predicted 379ppm by 2000, and suggested a doubling of CO2 would see 2 degrees warming. The “chicken little” earth is cooling myth is exactly that - even in the early 70s warming was a serious concern for many.
SCEP points out that the trend towards depleting the remaining stands of original forests, such as those in tropical Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo, will further reduce the capacity of the ecosphere to absorb CO2 and may release even more CO2 to the atmosphere. The CO2 content of the atmosphere is increasing at a rate of 0.2 percent per year since 1958. One can project, on the basis of these trends, an 18 percent increase by the year 2000, i.e. from 320 ppmm to 379 ppmm. SCEP considers that this might increase temperature of the earth by 0.5°C. A doubling of CO2 might increase mean annual surface temperatures by 2°C. [See Table 3]
http://www.theecologist[dot]info/page30.html
10 March 2008 at 3:57
dean, oops you’re right, I meant Flash Gordon.
10 March 2008 at 4:04
Ken Rohleder (#71): you quote the article as saying ““By the early 1970’s…the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted.” but left out the next 3 words, “albeit poorly understood”.
I suggest if you read the paper again, you will realize you understood it poorly. The thing that was widely accepted is the temperature trend at the time, which appeared to be cooling. This is rather different from nonexistent widespread prediction of further cooling (as evidenced by the literature review), and was in fact an error which was soon after corrected.
Further on: “A closer examination of Southern Hemisphere data showed that what appeared to be a global cooling trend was in fact dominated by Northern Hemisphere temperatures, while thermometers in the Southern Hemisphere seemed to be headed in the opposite direction”.
#9, #65: 1940-70 cooling: I can’t find anything specific on realcimate though you would do well to read a few of the articles in the aerosols section (see sidebar). This one mentioned a while back http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/10/attribution-of-20th-century-climate-change-to-cosub2sub/#comment-19689 is interesting: http://www.stanfordreview.org/Archive/Volume_XXXVI/Issue_8/Opinions/opinions1.shtml
and also: http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/what-about-mid-century-cooling.html
10 March 2008 at 5:07
re 55 56
I’m always chary of short-run information about global systems: the SeaWiFS stuff is only a decade long and needs more time to become significant. At the moment it’s no more and no less relevant than a couple of year’s cooling from a La Nina.
However, there’s one detail on which I’d like more info. What is happening to the phyto populations at the edges of the expanding areas? I am on record as suggesting that starved phytos (I predicted the spreading of the ocean’s blue deserts) would switch to C4 metabolism, increasing the pulldown of heavier C isotopes and leaving a low atomic weight carbon signal in the atmosphere. Has anyone seen any research along these lines?
JF
10 March 2008 at 5:33
I am now hearing, the ice has returned and a large part of the NH 2008 winter has broken records for coldness and snowfall. Apparantly AGW has stopped !
What is realclimates answer to the ice returning and its being very cold in some of the NH this winter? La nina/ el nino cycle I have read. Would this be as good a explanation as any ?
10 March 2008 at 6:08
Interesting response… surely you shouldn’t be looking to “take the paper to bits properly”, rather, it should be viewed as possible new information & a determination made as to whether it is a) accurate, and b) if so how it can be integrated into GCMs OR if not, why not?
Part of the reason I have a problem with this whole Global Warming malarky is the bitter sniping from both sides which does nothing to move the science forward, and everything to create a snarky atmosphere & gosh-wow headlines. I do realise that science (any field) is competitive & some snarkyness is to be expected; but honestly all this does is turn agnostics (such as me) off the the whole thing. And since - like, I suspect, most agnostics - my default position is “don’t worry, be happy”, that ends up favouring the “AGW is not the end of the world” camp.
So come on folks (and RC does have some of the world’s pre-eminent climate scientists as contributors), stop sniping & start analysing. Maybe an article would be useful? After all, this is not some News of the World (The Inquirer is, I guess, the American equivalent) article - this is a peer-reviewed paper.
Thanks.
[Response: There are far more papers published than anyone person can read. You have to be selective. A paper that speaks as that one does is off to a bad start in the shall-I-bother stakes. And I already raised one problem, which is that it would make the ice age cycle unintelligible. There are lots of genuine problems to work on in climate change; the basic radiative physics though are well known. There are two other filters people use for shall-I-read-this: is it in a major journal? - in this case, no; and has it been cited? - in this case, its doesn’t look like it; even the skeptic blogs aren’t endorsing it. -W]
10 March 2008 at 7:25
Lynn,
I’m pretty sure 95% of life didn’t die out 251 years ago. I assume you meant 251 million?
10 March 2008 at 7:31
Ken Rohleder writes:
[[Pg. 2 “By the early 1970’s…the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted.”
Agreed. That’s the point — before scientists wrung their hands about GW, they were ringing them about global cooling. The article count doesn’t matter if you concede (correctly) that the notion of global cooling was widely accepted.]]
You have acceptance by the public or the media confused with acceptance by the scientific consensus. There was never a scientific consensus behind global cooling the way there is now behind global warming.
10 March 2008 at 7:41
Les Porter writes:
[[I also fault the above paper on failure to deal with Venus — because the Russians showed there was light aplenty on Venus’ surface. That is a semi-transparent planetary atmosphere with way over 1500 W/m^2 even when the sun was 500Million years old 4 Gya =]]
You’re confusing the Solar constant at Venus’s orbital distance with the amount absorbed by the Venus climate system and the amount that penetrates to Venus’s surface, all of which are different numbers. The Solar constant at Venus’s distance is about 2,611 watts per square meter (1500 or so early in Solar system history, as you point out). But the amount absorbed by the Venus climate system is:
F = (S / 4) (1 - A)
where A is the bolometric Bond albedo. The factor of 1/4 comes from the fact that Venus absorbs sunlight on its two-dimensional cross-sectional area but radiates on its spherical surface area. NASA gives the present albedo of Venus as 0.750, so we’re talking an absorbed flux of 163 watts per square meter — actually less than Earth gets (237 W m^-2). And of the 163, only 16.8 watts per square meter penetrate to the surface of Venus, the rest being absorbed by the cloud layers or the clear atmosphere. That’s enough light to read by, plus you’ve got some red glow from the rocks at 735.3 K, but it’s way less than 1500 W m^-2.
10 March 2008 at 9:24
Mr Fleck/Connelly:
“Between 1965 and 1979 we found:
* 7 articles predicting cooling
* 44 predicting warming
* 20 that were neutral”
What criteria did you use to select the titles? You have 71 articles over a 15 year period. Certainly there were many hundreds more over that period that you did not select.
Basically, was this a random selection of articles?
[Response: No, it wasn’t a random selection. The linked pre-print described the methodology -W]
10 March 2008 at 9:40
> I am on record
Cite, please?
> starved phytos … switch to C4
Mechanism for this? (Is it in the source? population change? species change? individual organism change?)
10 March 2008 at 11:14
Steve (74): Nonsense.
10 March 2008 at 11:18
Hello all,
I was curious about global warming and found this site through a Google search. I have a question, why is the warming of the earth so bad? It is hot in the tropics year round and life there seems to thrive. I read some place that the ice caps are melting, and that places like Florida adn some other coastal areas would be flooded,would not people just move further inland or adapt like the Dutch building dykes?
Like I said I am pretty ignorant about the subject I just thought I could get some answers here.
Richard
10 March 2008 at 11:31
Whether one believes in man-made global warming, man-made global cooling, or natural climatic cycles, the real worry that many people have is that some political body will dictate their perceived solution via punitive laws rather than allowing the free market to sort things out. Additionally, the hysteria to “do something now” ignores the immense ability for humans to adapt to wildly changing environmental conditions, and may cause the human race to take actions with unintended consequences which are more damaging to humankind than the climate change itself.
Those who believe in man-made climate change would do well to back off from the ledge if you want the so-called “deniers” to believe you are credible. (And also, explain the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998, as well as the sharp decline in the average global temperature to pre- “global warming era” levels in the past year alone - which just happens to correlate better with the extended solar minimum!)
10 March 2008 at 11:51
RE #90, many hundreds? It’s really difficult to get articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals. First you need to do years of study, then write up an article based on that, then if the manuscript is not outright rejected, you usually have to rewrite it, or even do some more study and rewrite it. The process from study to published article could take years.
I also imagine at the time not a whole lot of climate scientists were specifically studying warming or cooling trends, or writing articles about them — not like today anyway. So I’d think 71 articles (averaging about 5 per year) sounds to me like the whole population of science articles in peer-reviewed journals dealing specifically with the topic at hand here.
10 March 2008 at 11:53
#87, yes, my mistake I meant to write “251 mya.”
10 March 2008 at 13:36
RE #86, I’m not too sure what the issue is here, but climate scientists are quite adament about not using the term “runaway warming” for the various climate scenarios in Earth’s past (& possibly to come in the future) in which initial warming causes nature to emit more GHGs (such as through carbon release from melting permafrost and ocean hydrates) & albedo decrease (from melting snow & ice), which in turn leads to greater warming, which in turn leads to greater GHG emissions/albedo reduction, and so on until it gets quite hot, but then after many millennia the process in reverse causes the earth to cool back down again. I’ve heard them use the term “hysteresis” for this process, which happened several times in Earth’s past — 251 mya & 55 mya, being 2 great warming periods connected to mass extinction.
However, I think “runaway” is still a good term to help laypersons understand the process, as in “runaway horse” or “runaway train” — something eventually stops them, so it isn’t permanent runaway. I would then consider the situation on Venus to be a special case of “permanent runaway warming.”
And I don’t completely share your view re “don’t worry, be happy.” I “expect the worst and hope for the best,” and keep paying my insurance premiums (tho I didn’t get onto the dental plan this year — bad mistake). However, I agree we should NOT waste time worrying; we should instead take up the challenge and reduce our GHGs as much as possible — and do it with a joy that transcends mere happiness.
10 March 2008 at 14:50
re 95: “the real worry that many people have is that some political body will dictate their perceived solution via punitive laws rather than allowing the free market to sort things out.”
I don’t think the free market can sort it out. Every free market solution to a problem is based on response after something has affected them; it the case of AGW, many of the negative effects are 10 to 30 years out, by all accounts. Also, the free market is based to a large extent on accumulation of wealth - a credible response to AGW involves a counterintuitive response, the idea that no matter how we adapt, we’re going to be forced to give up things we take for granted.
“Additionally, the hysteria to “do something now” ignores the immense ability for humans to adapt to wildly changing environmental conditions…”
There is a credible argument that suggests there is an upward limit to adaptation. Too much of what we take for granted in the natural world depends upon the temperatures staying more or less stable. In a warming world, particularly if we hit 3 degrees, we might not be able to adapt.
“Those who believe in man-made climate change would do well to back off from the ledge if you want the so-called “deniers” to believe you are credible.”
No offense, but what you are asking for is akin to demanding that the king’s subjects acknowledge he has clothes when, in fact, he’s parading around in his skivvies…
10 March 2008 at 15:17
# 90
Yeah Bart. Sorry. I should have clarified that. When the Sun ignited on main sequence 4.567 billion years ago, most solar models indicate it was only 70% as bright at it is now. (Sackmann, Boothroyd, Kraemer 1993 and subsequent).
Since, This Real Climate blog “comments section” won’t let me post an HTML table, I’ll put the numbers here:
Luminosity % ———–”Solar constants at top of atmosphere—–
——————————————————————–
L sol % of now —— Venus W/m^2 —– Earth W/m^2 —- Mars W/m^2
L 60% Sun 4.567Gya — 1568.3 ————820.6 ————-353.5
L 70% Sun 4.567Gya——1833.7 ————959.4————–412.4
L 100% Sun Present——2613.9————-1367.6————-589.2
L 110% 1.1Gy future—–2875.3————-1504.4————-648.1
L 134% 3.2Gy future—–3476.5————-1818.9————-783.6
———————————————————————
OK. After the Sun main-sequenced (settled down) the models provide various scenarios of burn, but generally use a slow linear fusion growth rate for the Sun around 10 billion years long. Then it grows red giant, possibly pulses and lots of 1 solar mass end-life-kinds- of-things even the AGB era and helium shell burning flashes and lots of planetary nebula forming mass ejections. Earth(as a molten blob) may escape engulfment, pending the solar wind mass ejection timing and rate. The table above carries NONE of the Solar endgame, but does show earth-life endgame beginning 1.1 billion years ahead. Venus undenied ensues for sure around 3.4 Gya from now. Earth’s runaway greenhouse, ends.
My point was that even when the Sun ignited at 70% present luminosity, the planet Venus had to begin with more than the Earth receives from the warmer Sun 3.4 billion years from now. Further, even when the Sun warms to its 3.4 billion years from now state, Earth will be at the terminus of any oceans, nearly all the available C in rocks (even) will be in the CO2 atmosphere of Earth which will have a ~101 atmosphere pressure, at the surface and the N2 will still be here at about 4% or so component part instead of 78% proportional part.
The 1500 W/m2 is my slack-jawed reference to the Solar Constant at Venus even if the Sun was only 60% as bright as present. My contention is that VENUS never had OCEANS, EVER.
I know those are bad words, but they would have been in lower gravity, etc. And Life never had a chance on the surface.
Thanks “Bart” for digging that out, and I will not post when I can’t be clear.(I hope) (Next time, (after this one) I might have my wife read it. . . to be sure.)
Oh… the promises we make ourselves. . .
10 March 2008 at 15:53
Those 7 articles predicting cooling apparently inspired at least 2 films that I remember being shown in Junior High School.
10 March 2008 at 16:59
Re Richard Ricardo @ 94: “I have a question, why is the warming of the earth so bad? It is hot in the tropics year round and life there seems to thrive. I read some place that the ice caps are melting, and that places like Florida adn some other coastal areas would be flooded,would not people just move further inland or adapt like the Dutch building dykes?”
Richard, the potential threat of global warming is two fold. One is what else will change as Earth’s atmosphere warms and by how much, two is the rate of that change.
Under what else will change besides temperature, we have to consider, among many, many other things:
- How will weather change as the atmosphere warms?
- How will a warmer Arctic and Antarctic affect weather patterns across the rest of the planet?
- Will severe storms become more or less intense or more or less frequent?
- How will precipitation patterns change? Will precipitation during growing seasons remain dependable or will it come at the wrong time or all at once? A warmer, longer growing season will be of no use if there is less or no precipitation when it is needed.
- What crops will it be possible to grow as climate zones shift, and where will climate zones suitable for our current crops shift to?
- How much will it warm in areas that currently grow rice, for instance? Rice, the main food crop in some parts of the world, has an upper temperature limit above which it can not be grown.
- Increasing CO2 does more than raise temperature, it can also make the oceans acidic, which would have a huge impact on the marine food chain, on which a large number of human depend.
- We know the Greenland ice cap is becoming more unstable and that it has the potential to raise sea level by up to 7 meters. How much of it will actually melt and how fast, and how much will sea level rise and how fast? How much time will we have to move not just people, but infrastructure?
How fast any of these changes take place compounds each of them and bears on your question about our ability to adapt to the changes.
For example, think about the number of coastal cities, ports, power plants, refineries, grain terminals, etc world-wide that could be vulnerable to rising sea levels. Keep in mind, that they would not need to be completely inundated, just made significantly more vulnerable to storm surges. How rapidly could dykes be built or these facilities be moved inland, and how much would it cost?
Now think of low-lying nations like the Netherlands or Bangladesh. Where, exactly, would their displaced populations move to? Think back to the last great migration that took place on the Indian subcontinent when India and Pakistan were partitioned.
Now think of the wheat belt that stretches across the great plains of the US and Canada. What would happen should the climate zone suitable for growing wheat on an industrial scale shift northwards to lie in the area that is currently largely boreal forest and exposed shield bedrock by 2050, as some projections suggest? Cutting down the boreal forest is one thing, conditioning is acidic soils so that it can grow wheat is quite another, and in the shield soils are thin, lie in scattered pockets, or non-existent.
You see, a changing climate means fundamental changes in just about every facet of human activity, and those changes will be world-wide and simultaneous. Moreover, if they happen rapidly, it could outstrip and overwhelm our ability to adapt. That’s why a warming Earth could be so bad.
10 March 2008 at 17:14
Richard Ricardo (94) — At the top of the page there is a Start Here link. Start there. Then read The Discovery of GLobal Warming at
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.html
also linked on the sidebar, first under Science Links.
10 March 2008 at 17:54
Re Fred @ 95: “Whether one believes in man-made global warming, man-made global cooling, or natural climatic cycles, the real worry that many people have is that some political body will dictate their perceived solution via punitive laws rather than allowing the free market to sort things out.”
Exactly, for many people climate change is an ideological, political and/or economic issue having nothing what so ever to do with science or with what is actually happening in physical reality.
Unfortunately for them physics has nothing what so ever to do with ideology, politics or economics. Perhaps that’s why they have such a hard time understanding the science of climate change and its ramifications, including the potential threat that some future political body will have no choice but to dictate solutions if nothing is done to address the problem until it’s presence is felt by even those who refuse to see what is in plain sight.
As for Fred’s assertions that temperatures have been steady since 1998, and that there has been a “sharp decline in the average global temperature to pre-global warming era levels in the past year alone”, these have been rebutted here at RC repeatedly.
10 March 2008 at 18:14
A friend forwarded me the “Washington Times” commentary ( http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20071219/COMMENTARY/10575140 ) that claims that since the past year has been cooler, there can’t be global warming. How can I best refute this garbage? HELP!
10 March 2008 at 18:38
Lynn: I think that there is a distinction between standard feedback processes and non-linear events.
Most climate scientists talk about standard feedbacks: this is the snow/ice albedo effect, the permafrost methane, etc. In most cases, the assumption is that every degree of direct CO2 induced warming has attached to it another 2 or 3 degrees of feedback. This is _not_ in any way “runaway” warming.
You tend to talk about the extreme non-linear events, where by passing some (unknown) threshold, a major state change occurs. Eg, if at 3.7 degrees C warming suddenly a vast amount of methane hydrate destabilized, adding another 5 degrees C warming - _that_ could be labeled as “runaway”. But I don’t think the climate community thinks that these events are at all likely. Possible, they might agree with, but likely, no.
“Hysteresis” is merely a term for a process that, when reversed, behaves differently. For example, the Greenland ice cap exhibits hysteresis under temperature changes: you need to warm the ice cap up a lot to get it to melt (say, 2.5 degrees C for a long time), because it is reflective and high altitude. But once it melts, you have to cool it down far below the point at which it melted to get it to refreeze, because now you have to form permanent snow and ice at a few meters above sea level, rather than a mile above sea level. But hysteresis is not only for huge events: if there is a one way road on the way to work, your commute would have hysteresis: you take the one way road to get there, but on the way back, you have to take a longer route.
Just trying to help you understand terms, and why “runaway warming” in particular is not the right term to use for what we expect from the climate.
10 March 2008 at 18:38
#94 warming isnt bad. Its rate of change that bad. The concern here is not much whether climate is changing warm or cold but that its changing too fast to allow adaption.
10 March 2008 at 19:02
#95
“(And also, explain the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998, as well as the sharp decline in the average global temperature to pre- “global warming era” levels in the past year alone - which just happens to correlate better with the extended solar minimum!)”
Huh? Do you just get your information from people distorting the data.
Try joining temp from 1997 to 2007. Still steady? Look around this blog and you will see more meaningful ways to analyse the data. And what makes you think that climate is only one factor? Sure the sun has a effort, so do aerosols etc. Every natural pattern is still operating but on top of this is rising CO2. Compare temps with last global minimum. Better still, read the IPCC “Scientific basis” for the gory detail.
10 March 2008 at 19:09
Richard Ricardo, Do not confuse fetid with fertile. The jungles look green, but tropical plants actually produce little in the way of colories per hectare. Almost all of our most important crops require a period of cold to germinate and grow properly. Cold also kills off weeds, pests and disease. Moreover, “warmer” is not all there is to it. More energy in the system makes it less predictable. All the infrastructure of human civilization was developed during the past 10000 years or so of remarkable climatic stability. Now imagine trying to support 9-12 billion people as our agriculture begins to fail, our transport is washed out, our water sources dry up…
10 March 2008 at 19:30
Re 86
I am now hearing, the ice has returned and a large part of the NH 2008 winter has broken records for coldness and snowfall. Apparantly AGW has stopped !
Well, Bob Carter and the National Post say it’s so, so it must be so!
Many of the records cited recently are just normal variation, or in some cases sloppy writing. The multiyear ice is not back.
A look at the data should make it clear that news of the death of warming has been exaggerated:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/chart_anom.php?ui_set=0&ui_region=nhland&ui_month=1
http://www.remss.com/msu/msu_data_description.html#figures (last)
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
Tom
10 March 2008 at 19:32
Re: (94): Hello Richard, welcome to Realclimate…
Go to the top of the webpage and click the link “Start Here”. Many of the questions you have have been addressed in detail on this extensive website, and the “Start Here” link will help you to organize your thoughts and questions and find the related discussions that have already occured…
10 March 2008 at 19:53
Re #95 (”Fred”): First of all, the worry “that some political body will dictate their perceived solution via punitive laws rather than allowing the free market to sort things out” is a rather confusing statement from the point of view of the economics of markets. It makes no sense to talk about the market sorting something out when externalities are involved…i.e., the costs of the CO2 emissions are not being borne by the parties involved in any given transaction but are instead borne by all the rest of us. In fact, a proper understanding of markets, rather than a blind faith in markets, tells us that this is exactly why one needs a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system!
Your statement about “the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998″ is a strawman. The science of climate change does not say that the increase in temperature will be steady. There will be fluctuations as there always are in weather and in climate. In fact, climate models that are run with a steadily-increasing CO2 forcing show these same sorts of fluctuations. What the theory does say is that the trend over a large enough period of time that you get good “signal-to-noise” should be upward, as it has been for the last ~35 years.
Next, your statement about the temperature declining to pre-global warming levels over the last year is wrong. It is true that January 2008 was the coldest month (anomaly-wise) in a fair while. However, I believe that all the temperature data sets still showed a net positive anomaly relative to their 1951-1980 base period, which means that the global temperature was still higher than the average during that 1951 to 1980 period (which itself was already warmer than the average temperature earlier in the 20th century). And, again, that was a fluctuation. It is likely that 2008 as a whole will have an even higher positive anomaly from the 1951 to 1980 base period than January alone did.
Finally, your claim of the temperature being well-correlated with the solar cycle minimum is untrue. If you look at a plot of the two, they don’t look particularly well-correlated at all. It is much better correlated with a shift from weak El Nino conditions to pretty strong La Nina conditions, a shift that is understood to produce temporarily-cooler global temperatures, just as it did between 1998 and the following two years.
10 March 2008 at 22:08
Re 95
the hysteria to “do something now” ignores the immense ability for humans to adapt to wildly changing environmental conditions, and may cause the human race to take actions with unintended consequences which are more damaging to humankind than the climate change itself.
Funny how we’re so capable of adapting to climate, but we can’t handle a little carbon tax.
explain the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998
It’s called natural variability. In addition, there’s no general expectation of an emissions-temperature correlation, because of the intervening accumulations of atmospheric carbon and heat. Falling emissions would be perfectly consistent with rising temperatures, as long as emissions exceed uptake and the equilibrium temperature given forcing exceeds the actual temperature (as at present). The reverse is also true.
as well as the sharp decline in the average global temperature to pre- “global warming era” levels in the past year alone - which just happens to correlate better with the extended solar minimum!
Your sunspot-temperature rapid response theory would predict a regular 11 year cycle in temperature, and a hot year in 1957. Neither fits the data.
Tom
10 March 2008 at 22:16
Philip Machanick Says:
10 March 2008 at 4:04 AM
Ken Rohleder (#71): you quote the article as saying ““By the early 1970’s…the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted.” but left out the next 3 words, “albeit poorly understood”
Which is precisely my point Philip — the notion was accepted but not understood. In ten years, the literature will likely disavow the current hysteria by saying, “By the early 2000’s…the notion of a global warming trend was widely accepted albeit poorly understand.”
“Widely accepted and poorly understood” sums up the current state of climate science.
11 March 2008 at 8:05
Richard writes:
[[I have a question, why is the warming of the earth so bad?]]
Because our agriculture and economy are adapted to the present temperature regime.
[[ It is hot in the tropics year round and life there seems to thrive. I read some place that the ice caps are melting, and that places like Florida adn some other coastal areas would be flooded,would not people just move further inland or adapt like the Dutch building dykes?]]
Sure — at a cost of trillions of dollars. Losing Miami, New York, San Francisco and New Orleans won’t be something we can compensate for cheaply.
11 March 2008 at 8:07
fred posts, disingenuously:
[[explain the lack of correlation between RISING carbon emissions and STEADY global temperatures since 1998]]
You know damn well temperatures have not been STEADY since 1998, and you know it damn well because you’ve been on Tamino’s blog, “Open Mind,” where this has been discussed over and over for some time. You’ve had your arguments demolished there, and apparently your response is to come over here and repeat them again. Dishonest.
11 March 2008 at 8:12
Frank posts:
[[ claims that since the past year has been cooler, there can’t be global warming. How can I best refute this garbage? HELP!]]
Point out that climate is defined as regional or global average weather over a period of 30 years or more, and that a sample size of one year tells you nothing. There have been lots of little jogs downward in the curve of rising temperature, but the trend is still up.
11 March 2008 at 8:15
Ken Rohleder posts:
[[“Widely accepted and poorly understood” sums up the current state of climate science.]]
Speak for yourself.
11 March 2008 at 8:23
Re Ken Rohleder @ 114: “In ten years, the literature will likely disavow the current hysteria by saying, “By the early 2000’s…the notion of a global warming trend was widely accepted albeit poorly understand.”
How scientific. Sounds more likely that you’re whistling past the graveyard to me, not a wise basis for making decisions that will have a global impact. We might as well be reading tarot cards.
11 March 2008 at 8:33
Re #110, I know Tom but its good to see some data that clears it up.
Re #112, Fred is obviously just another person who trolls looking for an argument.
11 March 2008 at 9:07
Ken Rohleder, Wow, what an amazing use of double-speak. The ent