Humanity is causing Global Warming, for sure.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Eh, it won't be long now. The oceans taking up heat, which they never caused a "pause" before, is last ditch reaching. Still, it must be very difficult to admit an error of this size, apologize for the waste of b i l l i o n s and then head for the unemployment lines with all your coworkers.


None of this was predicted btw. The dire predictions which turned out to all be completely false are being recorded for posterity by the folks who you say I am " getting all of your information from the wrong mouthpieces." They do this for posterity I believe. "50 million climate refugees" Ice here and there melted by 2013 or some such, it goes on and on. The polar bears, how absurd was that?


Anyway there are folks out there who would not be convinced by glaciers rolling over their homes. They would point at the encroaching frosty doom and pronounce the walls of ice to be a sure sign of global warming.

So what chance have I to convince?

A little over 2 years to go mate.

 

[bhsup]

I'm still waiting for the polar vortex from hell to hit in 2012.

 

[tokala]

Cool! I knew the reason 1998 is always chosen as the start year for the warming "pause" is that its extreme El Niño caused a large temperature spike, but I was under the impression that at least some of the leveling off wasn't attributable to just ENSO, volcanic aerosols, and the solar cycle alone. I had read that deep ocean heat uptake (700-2000 m) was likely where the remaining extra heat had gone based on recent measurements that finally do now cover enough of the deep ocean to know about its warming trend. The IPCC listed that as "likely" in the ocean section of AR5; I suppose I could poke around more on Google Scholar to see how much is known in detail.

ENSO being predominantly in neutral/La-Nina state pretty much is equivalent with increased ocean heat uptake. The details where exactly the energy is going is indeed under lively discussion.

Some links that might be of interest to you:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/02/going-with-the-wind/#ITEM-16861-1
(discussing this paper)
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/el-nino-and-the-non-spherical-cow/
(discussing this paper, which shows that current climate models do actually reproduce the observed temperature curve, if you constrain them to follow the historic ENSO cycle)

Spoiler :

As well as another simple analysis showing that global temperature recently is dominated by greenhouse warming + ENSO:

The Foster/Rahmstorf paper the first image of my last post is based on doesn't look at the details of the physical mechanism, but simply used some important climate indices to try and fit a fairly simple model to the observed gobal surface temperature. This doesn't mean that this fit is to 100% describing the complete physical reality, it almost certainly is not. But it is fairly suggestive that those "natural cycles" commonly invoked by the deniers are simply masking a pretty much linear temperature increase in the last 4 decades.

 

[CavLancer]

Thanks for that Bootstoots, much appreciated. It may be an end to the Holocene, or a minimum, not sure. Yet my expectation is that the precipice is where we are. Time will tell...

"Slight, tiny, little cooling trend over the last decade."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9GWDhw1-k0

A little over 2 years to go mate.

How time flies when we're having fun amigo! I for one am content with the progress towards the prediction. Gotta get a little lucky I admit, such a short time frame. I might have been drunk. Still, makes being right all the sweeter, if it happens in time. I don't doubt the trend however, just whether the time frame was long enough is in doubt.

Nevertheless... there is debate whether temps have declined slightly, remained steady or gone up slightly. There is not correlation with CO2, and that alone is meaningful.

 

[Bootstoots]

FWIW, I actually wouldn't argue with the proposition that increasing the CO2 concentration from ~280 ppm to ~330 or so is a good thing. Conditions during the Little Ice Age were somewhat suboptimal for people at high latitudes, and raising the thermostat half a degree or so seems to provide nicer conditions on the whole. But we're presently shooting past 400 ppm and going at about 2.3 ppm/year, which is just completely uncharted territory for at least the last several million years.

We know this will shoot us well above the Holocene's unusually stable temperature regime and the area above +2 C or so is unknown; the Earth hasn't been there since the Pliocene warm period that ended 3 million years ago (2-3 C above present, sea levels higher by ~25 m IIRC). Even during the Eemian (the previous interglacial, which peaked slightly warmer than the Holocene but was less stable), sea level appears to have topped out roughly 6 m above present levels, which, although it would take a while, would be inconvenient to say the least.

It is true that CO2 levels have typically followed rather than led temperature rises. The reason is that the present ice age's glacial advances and retreats have been led mostly by changes in solar insolation at high latitudes acting as a trigger to melt ice at the boundaries of the ice sheets. This triggers an ice-albedo feedback, where white ice gets replaced by darker background, leading to a lower albedo and more energy absorbed, and further warming. CO2 levels start to rise (from roughly 180 ppm in glacials to 280 ppm in interglacials) in response to higher temperatures, which is a positive feedback that further reinforces the ice-albedo effect, but ice-albedo dominates.

But none of the previous interglacials have featured apes getting loose and lighting so many underground hydrocarbons on fire that CO2 levels climbed from ~280 ppm to 400 ppm and rising rapidly (at the present rate, we get to 500 ppm in 40-50 years, and even faster if the rate itself continues to rise). The fact that CO2 traps heat and causes warming is well-known from basic chemistry and physics.

It seems that you're caught in a false dichotomy: that either the planet warms following CO2 concentration increases, or CO2 concentration increases following temperature increases. That's not the way it works. The CO2 concentration can either lead or follow temperature increases depending on how they happened. In the previous interglacials it lagged a bit behind the dominant ice-albedo feedback, but still contributed warming itself. We'd be somewhat cooler, maybe even in glacial conditions, if the CO2 level had stayed fixed in the 180-190 ppm glacial range. This time, it is leading the temperature increase, because we directly emitted it and it has a well-known warming effect on its own. Either way, the net effect is to warm the planet.

 

[CavLancer]

Certainly, and yet the CO2 has risen so far so fast in the last 15 without a corresponding increase in temps. This indicates to me that either temps would have dropped like a rock without the added CO2 -or- CO2 isn't all what its claimed to be. Either way CO2 becomes a good thing. If its keeping us from dropping like a rock then its saving our over populated planet from famine. If it isn't the greenhouse gas claimed, or is much less of a greenhouse gas, good again, our harvests will be more abundant.

CO2 isn't a pollutant, not a carcinogen, can't hurt anyone...unless a lot of folks lose their jobs.

Bring more...:b:

"The scary graph."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJ2Ht4mUBY

 

[brennan]

"Slight, tiny, little cooling trend over the last decade."

'Man in bus says something' is not a citation.

You might want to look here for a video and citation of an actual published paper.

the global surface warming trend for 1997–2012 is approximatley 0.11 to 0.12°C per decade

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Don't bother Brennan. I made him eat his words months ago when he spouted the "it has been cooling" nonsense, and lo and behold, he is spouting it again. Cherry picking the '98 date, using a single year temp and hello Bob.

When you think it's "cool" to go against the trend, no amount of evidence will be able to rob him of that.

I have this thread bookmarked. When you guys are freezing your privates off I'll bump it with a few of these. --->

Especially when "Scientific Articles" back him up

 

[Arwon]

He also sometimes looks at solar's percentage of total energy, but that's not fair at all because liquid fuels will be with us for a long time even if we go to a 100% renewable grid.

It's also a not quite comparing like with like, because total energy per the IEA Energy Balance tables counts coal and petroleum resource supply but counts solar and wind at the point of electricity generation. But of course fuels you burn have substantially less than 100% thermal efficiency so a gigajoule of coal or petroleum or gas does less useful work than a gigajoule of solar or wind generated electricity.

 

[CavLancer]

Sure there is the issue of credulity, but this cuts both ways. Putting faith in scientific results brought about by scientists who are hired to prove man made global warming tests mine.

This sort of thing is why I put my faith in what really occurs rather than papers and climate models which exist to prove the adage, "garbage in, garbage out", as they never fail to earn their programmers pay.

So we will see what happens, shall we? I do hope my stating my thoughts on the matter is not so offensive as to cause any warm words...

 

[brennan]

And how are you determining 'what really occurs'? Because from here it looks like your methodology is 'ignore the real facts'.

 

[CavLancer]

As temps have paused (like they are going to resume warming any time soon) and the pause is admitted even by advocates that human caused CO2 was the main driver to earlier global warming, it is seen by both sides of the debate to have really occurred. This while CO2 has shot up like a rocket.


Pause + vastly increased CO2 should ring a bell in those still retaining one.

 

[peter grimes]

"Temps appear to have paused because 3 factors have termporarily counteracted the full amount of warming" is a very different statement than "Temps have paused."

I think CanLancer ascribes to the second statement, while the first one appears to be more accurate.

Reposting for Convenience, bolding mine:

But it’s certainly likely that the same natural cycles played a large role in both the rapid warming from 1970-1998 and the relative stability since then.

Oldie but goldie:

Spoiler :

Quite a lot of that "pause" and "accelerated warming to 1998" simply comes down to that one extreme El-Nino. And if you look at a longer timescale, as befitting a climatological perspective, there isn't much of a "pause", but rather some excursions above and below a long-term trend of ~ 0.15 ... 0.2 °C per decade.

Spoiler :

(http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/11/short-term-trends-another-proxy-fight/)

 

[brennan]

As temps have paused...

In order to say that you must directly contradict the warming since 1998 and also ignore the warming in the oceans. So that's a double dose of counter-factualism.

Plus, you're using a cherry picked start date.

 

[CavLancer]

Gents, lets agree to disagree.Time will tell and I'm willing to let it. They can only use the oceans as an excuse for so long...

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

See, that's always your MO when you run out of arguments.

I have shown you temperatures have gone up the last 15 years. I agree to disagree with you because you are wrong when you state they haven't.

 

[CavLancer]

We'll see what the future holds is an MO? Okay...

 

[Tee Kay]

Just gonna leave this here


Link to video.

 

[Ayatollah So]

Aerosol dimming will be most effective in the tropics and subtropics, and in the middle of the day.
Greenhouse gas heating is most effective at night, and at high latitudes.

Sure. Tropical people are among the most needy for relief from global warming, according to my (admittedly weak) understanding of agriculture and temperature. A reasonable goal might be to get the tropics back down around their average pre-industrial temperature. That might still leave the arctic significantly elevated, but still better than the current trajectory the world is on.

CO2 should still be tackled, but in the meantime, it would be nice to survive. As for pissing off half the world, right now, almost all the world is pissed off - or at least has a right to be.

 

[CavLancer]

Using trillions and trillions of dollars we could take some huge rockets, the combined space programs of all the world's space faring nations, do massive launches into Earth orbit, open the specially built nose cones and release those trillions out into space, the bills effectively blocking the sun! Lets do it!