It’s such a cold December: 2010 ends on a chilly note where people live

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“It’s such a cold December: 2010 ends on a chilly note where people live“. Another Guest Post for Anthony Watts, by Ryan Maue, once again proving that there is no Global Warming. Did you know that December 2010 was cold in some places? It’s the final nail in the coffin the Global Warming myth!

However Ryan’s not going to talk about the inconvenient fact that the full year was actually rather hot until the “government temperature keepers” release their analyses. Nice side-stepping!

Instead we get a simplistic series of excuses:

  1. Mutterings about weather fluctuations.
  2. Invocation of “regional variation”.
  3. Casual dismissal of the places where there happens to be the most warmth (Ryan actually says, with an apparently straight face, that “You’ll hear a lot about the historically warm Arctic, but who cares at this point, no one lives there and it is still plenty cold.”).
  4. Allusions to governmental conspiracies (“It’s a foregone conclusion that the official government data from whatever nation or agency will show that 2010 was the hottest year ever.  It just has to be that way“).
  5. An attempt to minimize the factual record 2010 temperature by suggesting that it’s only slightly record-breaking.

So for Global Warming to be true the evidence has to be homogenous, continuous, and in large steps? How scientific.

Bangladesh, the Poster Child

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“Bangladesh, the Poster Child“. B.Quartero guest posts for Anthony Watts that Bangladesh’s ‘climate risk’ is simply about living on a massive river delta. The delta will magically stay balanced with changes in sea-level because of sediment deposition, “almost by definition”. So don’t worry about them!

This is classic past equals present don’t-worryism. Natural conditions have not been maintained. Reduced sediment volumes in the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta owing to climate change means that we have no clear idea if sediment deposition will keep pace with sea-level rise. But they’re all poor and brown, so it doesn’t really matter anyway. “Learn to swim!”

Geologically speaking, deltas “sink” if sediment intake doesn’t balance compaction + sea-level rise and “grow” laterally if sediment intake exceeds that balance. So can the 1 mm/year of flood deposition continue? Will it keep pace with sea-level rise and sediment compaction? B.Quartero is optimistic, but offers no evidence in support of this (even a single reference would be start).

Here’s something brought to my attention, from Nicholls & Goodbred (2004), Towards Integrated Assessment of the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta:

This early-Holocene mangrove facies has been recognized across the entire delta front indicating that the coastal ecosystem was widespread, and radiocarbon dates and deposit thickness indicate the environment’s long-term stability (GOODBRED and KUEHL, 2000b). In terms of delta response, that the Ganges-Brahmaputra system was able to maintain coastal stability under 30 meters of sea-level rise at rates exceeding 1 cm/yr is not a result recognized by traditional deltaic models.

Let’s keep our fingers crossed that the future situation be stable enough to allow millions of people to live there and grow a crop a year.

Do solar scientists STILL think that recent warming is too large to explain by solar activity?

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“Do solar scientists STILL think that recent warming is too large to explain by solar activity?“ Alec Rawls, an apparently anti-gay, anti-muslim, rigidly partisan failed sheriff, tells us that the temperature anomaly that coincidentally started at the same time as atmospheric CO2 climbed is entirely driven by Sunspot cycle length, somehow. He read it on a commercial weather company’s website.

Those solar scientists and climatologists all have it backwards and wrong. Don’t they know that sometimes there’s a lag in climate response to solar activity and sometimes there isn’t? And that it’s the duration of a sunspot cycle that matters, somehow, not the actual energy output?

Strangely, actual solar scientist Leif Svalgaard disagrees with him at length in the comments.

US Energy Independence by 2020

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“US
Energy Independence by 2020“. David
Archibald, geologist, solar climate enthusiast and cancer
researcher, suggests that the US can have enough coal-to-gas plants
and thorium-based nuclear reactors running by 2020 to make the
whole energy debate irrelevant. This is called a “Hail Mary pass”
in football.

Antarctic Ice Cores: The Sample Rate Problem

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“Antarctic Ice Cores: The Sample Rate Problem“. Geologist David Middleton returns to tell us that those Antarctic ice cores that seem to support the climatology conspiracy consensus can’t be trusted. After-all, the ice doesn’t permanently capture the CO2 level at the exact instant it begins to form. Also, maybe CO2 got sucked out of the old ice. And everyone knows that only second-by-second CO2 samples can be trusted.

Actually, David is suggesting that the ice CO2 levels blend a bit. He wants us to think that maybe there have been large fluctuations in atmospheric CO2 that have been blurred together and are no longer seen in the ice samples, maybe the modern CO2 trend just happens to be an ordinary large natural swing in CO2, and that we just happen to be at the peak of one of those “swings”.

Although, if the ice cores chanced to suit denialist wishes I’m sure they’d be just fine. In this case the erratic plant leaf stomata CO2 proxy values (sotto voce: does David know that they are a computer model?) are praised because they show large fluctuations that can be used to “prove” that there has been wide variation in the modern era and hence today’s CO2 levels are perfectly natural.

This puzzling quote comes from one of the apparently supporting papers, CO2 diffusion in polar ice: observations from naturally formed CO2 spikes in the Siple Dome (Antarctica) ice core (italics mine):

“Smoothing of the CO2 record by diffusion is one to two orders of magnitude smaller than the smoothing by diffusion in the firn at the depth of 287m (gas age = 2.74 kyr BP) in the Siple Dome ice, and so does not degrade the record.”

So… scientists know about this crazy diffusion thing and have been able to assess it as being insignificant. So what’s David really trying to do?

Greenhouse Thought Experiment

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“Greenhouse Thought Experiment“. A Guest Post from Jeff Condon. Denialists go to great lengths to misrepresent the “greenhouse” effect and direct our attention to partisan television commercials telling us that CO2 is “essential for life”. Mr. Dunning–Kruger Derek Alker, inspired by Tim Ball et. al.’s comic novel Slaying the Sky Dragon – Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory, sent Jeff an Excel spreadsheet and a really ugly PDF that “ends the AGW scam” (again).

Apparently Derek received a geometric flash of insight into Earth’s shape. Them dumb physicists are ignoring the “back” half! Only they’re not of course…Science of Doom tries to turn the conversation back to reality on Jeff’s “No Consensus” website (sorry, I can’t write that without quotes around it).

But for us, this is Jeff’s launching point for a thought experiment about “the greenhouse”. He considers two Earths (specifically, a happy 1℃ warmer Republican Earth and a miserable colder Democratic Earth). Which will appear “warmer” to an external observer? After-all, a real greenhouse will appear warmer to an external observer. As any Physics 100 student will tell you, the answer is that the two Earths must exactly balance the radiative energy. In = out.

The interesting question is how could one Earth be 1℃ warmer than the other. Who wants to guess?

New paper – “absence of correlation between temperature changes … and CO2″

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New paper – “absence of correlation between temperature changes … and CO2″ Anthony Watts proclaims the deliciousness of a new paper by Paulo (not a climatologist) Cesar Soares in the brand-new International Journal of Geosciences, part of the Scientific Research Publishing “empire” (click on that link!), where all the cool papers will now be published. Warming Power of CO2 and H2O: Correlations with Temperature Changes tells us that no correlation exists between CO2 and global temperature, so it must be… something else. Why? Because the response to CO2 variations isn’t instant.

Temperature went up... because there was more water in the air. Or did something happen? Thanks for the blog science, IJG.

Is Soares really trying to tell us that the “correlation” proves that increased atmospheric water is producing warmth? If Anthony buys it, well, maybe we should stop picking on the little rascal…

I’ll leave today’s rebuttal to Greenfyre’s Flimsy post:

For any that think it matters, the paper basically correlates regional weather with solar variation, PDO etc, and then calls it climate.

It’s really too silly to waste any time on, so naturally the Denialosphere will be announcing it as “the final coffin nail” (again).

Zombie satellite cured, brought back to life

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“Zombie satellite cured, brought back to life“. Anthony Watts mentions something neutral! The unresponsive  telecommunications satellite Galaxy 15’s internal batteries finally ran down, triggering a computer reset that enabled bringing it back under control. It’s erratic transmissions have interfered with the operation of a number of commercial satellites, including parts of NOAA’s National Weather Service.

See, Watts Up WIth That isn’t all anti-scientific disinformation! It’s just almost entirely anti-scientific disinformation.

I had some personal experience with telecommunications satellite malfunctions years ago when ANIK E-2 was incapacitated for several months by a solar storm. Satellite malfunctions sure get your attention when your business depends on them!

Time Magazine and Global Warming

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“Time Magazine and Global Warming“. Anthony Watts shows three Time Magazine covers about Global Warming, only two of which are real. Now that’s comedy!

Is the real message this though: “Skeptics”! Pay attention!

  • 1977 was one of the “cold” years. You know, when there were 7 scientific papers predicting global cooling. (And 42 scientific papers predicting global warming.) Pay attention!
  • 2001 was when the 1998 temperature record was still fresh in journalist’s minds. Pay attention!
  • 2010 is the hottest year on record globally and yet snowfall is high. How could that be? Maybe because more evaporation over warmer (regardless of cause) oceans means more precipitation over land. You know, what goes up, must come down. Pay attention!
So did those evil social engineers decide that their alarmism should be about Global Cooling instead of Global Warming in the ’70’s? Did scientists predict an impending ice age in the 1970’s? You could always start at Wikipedia or Skeptical Science and figure it out yourself.

USA record lows outpace record highs 19 to 1 this week

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“USA record lows outpace record highs 19 to 1 this week“. Anthony Watts wants you to think that “snow” (somewhere) equals “cold” (everywhere) and therefore Global Warming is a fraud. His convincing evidence? One week of US data.

In 2009 Gerald Meehl published a report in ScienceDaily that the denialists have tried to undercut ever since titled Record High Temperatures Far Outpace Record Lows Across US. He used 60 years of data.

60 years beats seven days. Source: ScienceDaily.

The last paragraph in Anthony’s post shows that he knows his headline was not only misrepresentative but also only momentarily accurate (italics mine):

*Note: some people clicking on the interactive map will see different numbers, since that map will record new highs and lows as this post ages. The headline was originally based on 16 highs during the week (see the highs map for a ratio of 21 to 1) then by the time the post editing was completed and the post made, the number of highs was up to 18, giving an 18.6 to 1 (~19 to 1 in the title) ratio. Later in the day the number of record highs in the one week period increased as new weather occurred (on Dec 31) and reports came in. The numbers were accurate at the time the post started. Weather records, like weather itself are dynamic with the forward moving one week period the interactive map generator uses, so please don’t assume error if you click on the interactive map and the numbers don’t match now, or in the future. – Anthony