Why is it so difficult to answer three simple climate questions?

[Ban my account ffs!]

The first and third questions are pretty good.  The 2nd one is crap.

Scientists have found that much of the warming prior to 1975 was due to natural causes, namely, a big rise in solar irradiance beginning after 1915 and peaking in the late 1950s.

Solar irradiance then dipped during the '60s and then went back to its 1950s levels and has remained there since.  This has been the most intense sun we've seen in the past 1000 years, according to various data sources.

In this area, some explorers kept detailed records of weather while in the area in the early 19th century.  One well kept record actually recorded a climate that was somewhat warmer than modern day. 

The weather records began at Fort Snelling near Minneapolis in 1820.  Take a look at this graph and tell me there is a strong warming signal there.  The temperatures of the 1820s were about the same as the 1990s.  How can one explain the huge cooling trend from 1835-1875 despite rapidly rising CO2 emissions and urban development in the region?


If you look at the global satellite temps going back to 1979, they follow a similar pattern to Minneapolis.  There has been warming since 1975.. but nothing like the instrument records that NOAA uses.. which are known to be in bad locations near areas that have recently developed.  Noaa also tends to adjust new data upward even though they should be adjusting it downward to account for the Urban Heat Island effect.  Every time they adjust the data, the temps from the early 20th century go down and the temps from the late 20th century go up.  If you look at old data sets, the warming trend wasn't nearly as strong.

And over time, the deviation between the surface records and satellite records grows ever larger.  It seems NOAA is warming a lot faster than the planet is.

Still, with all that said, all indications point in the direction that the planet should have warmed only slightly after the 1970s before starting a cooling trend during the 1990s.  The planet has warmed more than known natural forces can account for (solar irradiance, ocean cycles, atmospheric cycles, etc.)  Even then, some of that unnatural warming has been caused by reductions of aerosols in the atmosphere, so to say that the planet has warmed 1˚F due to CO2 is a huge exaggeration.  Perhaps a fifth of that.

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It's difficult to answer because Gorebull warming is a crock of sh**t.

Is that your expert scientific opinion, hack?

No, just the founder of the Weather Channel, among many other climatologists.

Who told you that?  Limbaugh?

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The evidence is pretty convincing that the U.S.'s surface temperature record is deeply flawed and biased towards a warming trend.

Here is a great example:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/02/14/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-51/

While we’ve taken some detours looking at some of the amazing things that have happened globally for temperature in January, with another detour to the sun, our www.surfacestations.org volunteers continue their mission.

This NOAA USHCN climate station of record #415018 in Lampasas, TX was found to be tucked between a building, and two parking lots, one with nearby vehicles. According to the surveyor, it is right next to the ACE Hardware store on the main street of town. While likely representative of the temperature for downtown Lampasas, one wonders how well it measures the climate of the region.

(notice all the asphalt and building which directs heat towards the thermometer.  This station used to be in a park, but was relocated to this location in 2000)

In her survey, volunteer surveyor Julie K. Stacy noted the proximity to the building and parking, which will certainly affect Tmin at night due to IR radiance. Daytime Tmax is likely affected by the large amount of asphalt and concrete in the area around the sensor. The main street of the town (28 ft from US 183) and the ACE Hardware parking lot are visible in this photo below:

Google Earth shows just how much asphalt and buildings there are around the sensor.


According to NCDC’s MMS database, the Lampasas climate station has been at this location since 10-01-2000.Previous location was an observer residence, which appears to have been a park-like location according to MMS location map. The sensor was apparently converted to the MMTS style seen in the photo in 1986, so the move did not include an equipment change. See the complete survey album here.

But the big surprise of just how bad this location is came from the NASA GISS plot of temperature. It clearly showed the results of the move to this location, causing a jump in temperature almost off the current graph scale. Note that before the move, the temperature trend of Lampasas was nearly flat from 1980-2000.


(notice the huge jump in temperatures after 2000 despite a flat trend beforehand.  NOAA claims that they adjust the data for such changes... so one would assume they would be cooling the new measurements by quite a bit after 2000 due to the obvious jump caused by the hotter asphalt.  The old place was in a green park where the Urban Heat Island effect wasn't as strong).

Here is the raw data (blue) put up against the adjusted data (red)

Rather than adjusting the new data down, they simply cooled down the oldest data and actually ADJUSTED UPWARD the new data, further adding to the huge warming trend.  NOAA claims this is accurate.



This is where our global warming is coming from.  I won't go all conspiracy theory and say they do it on purpose... but the amount of adjusting downward of older measurements and upward adjustment of newer measurements is where most of the warming trend has come from... the raw data shows a much slower warming trend.

It's no wonder that the difference between the surface data and the satellite measurements, which measure the temp all over the globe, are consistently getting bigger and bigger, with the surface data (officially used in all those global warming reports) getting continually warmer and warmer at a faster pace, even as urban development occurs around them and nearly 2/3rds of all stations have closed in the past 20 years.. mostly in rural areas.

So now the data is all coming from warmer urban stations, and NOAA simply fills in the areas not covered with these warmer anomalies.  It is striking how much the planet warmed up as the number of rural weather stations plummeted (mostly in Russia after the fall of the USSR).

[Ban my account ffs!]

It is a question I'd like to see Harry answer.  Why has the earth cooled in the past 10 years?

No matter how much NOAA cooks the numbers on the surface record, the planet has still been in a cooling trend for the past 7 years.

Remember... 7 years was about the length of time it took for scientists to go from "we're headed towards an ice age" to "the greenhouse effect could be devastating"

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It is a question I'd like to see Harry answer.  Why has the earth cooled in the past 10 years?

No matter how much NOAA cooks the numbers on the surface record, the planet has still been in a cooling trend for the past 7 years.

Remember... 7 years was about the length of time it took for scientists to go from "we're headed towards an ice age" to "the greenhouse effect could be devastating"

I'm not an expert on climatology, and neither is anyone else on this forum.  However when there is such a profound agreement by the people who are experts, you have to trust it.

All your numbers and charts are nice, but you ruin all of your credibility when you actually try to suggest that the 70's media fad of "omg ice age!" had even a fraction of the scientific consensus behind it that the fact of global warming has.

Sunspots and flares. Really, is it that hard?

Why do you reject the consensus of scientific opinion in favor of something that few if any climatologists believe to be the cause?

How can you trust the consensus of scientists when they have not addressed the question at hand?

How about rather than using ad hominem attacks, you debate the issue.  If you can't be a big boy and debate it, then please keep your mouth shut.  You have a really stuck up militant liberal attitude when it comes to this issue... and I've seen you throw out a lot of loaded rhetoric as well as dismissals of well researched climate information and yet you offer almost nothing to the debate in return.

As far as the "ice age hype"... I merely brought it up because at the time, nobody knew much of anything about the Greenhouse theory or the greenhouse effect, and at the time, the planet was cooling and had been for 30 years.  Within 7 years, however, the trend had turned around strongly and with the record high temps for the planet in 1980 and 1981, talk of the Greenhouse effect came into the national spotlight.

It was mostly to point out that while you may not think 7-10 years of cooling (which the planet has cooled in the past 7-10 years) is really worth anything in the grand scheme of things, it has got a lot of scientists thinking that natural climate cycles have a stronger effect than previously thought.  It's not just all Co2 all the time like Al Gore would have you believe.

So, how about rather than trusting the politicians and their claims of "scientific consensus", you trust the scientists that are researching the climate.

[Ban my account ffs!]

I already proved on this thread that there is a scientific consensus, but I'll quote the post on the offchance that you didn't just ignore it:

Regardless of the opinion of one man who founded a TV station, I'll trust the opinon of 97.4% of climatologists (cite) than a few conservative political talk show hosts on this issue...

The consensus is simply that humans play a major role in climate change.  88% of climatologists and 97% of climatologists who actively publish on climatology agree that the planet has been warming and that humans are a significant cause of that warming.

It says nothing of discounting natural variability.

What you are doing, Harry, is taking the position of Al Gore and then asserting that that is the consensus, when it isn't.

If somebody were to ask me "do you agree that the planet has been warming and that humans have played a significant role in that warming?"  I'd agree.  If someone asked me "Do you agree with people like Al Gore and Jim Hanson who believe that nearly all of the climate change over the past 1000 years has been driven by CO2 levels and that current CO2 levels in the atmosphere will lead to catastrophic warming of the planet, resulting int he deaths of milliosn of people, mass extinction, the inundation of coastal areas, and the desertification of vast swaths of the planet?"

I'd resoundingly say no.

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The growth in the difference between satellite temperature measures of the globe and the NOAA surface station data continues to grow.

Both the satellite measurements, which measure the entire surface of the earth but only have records dating back to 1979, showed June 2009 to be virtually at the 1979-2000 average.  The NOAA dataset will show that June 2009 was the 2nd warmest June on record for the globe in 130 years.

here is a graph of the temperature differences between the satellite measurements and two key surface station measurements since 1979.  Notice the huge growth, which accounts for the vast majority of the "warming" over the past 30 years.


And here are two global plots showing the surface station anomalies from 1978 and 2008.  Notice the vast swaths that were covered in 1978 that have since been decommissioned.  Instead, these areas are "filled in" by computer models using the data from the remaining stations, which are often in highly developing urban areas.
1978

2008


Virtually all of Canada has dropped out, large sections of Siberia, most of Africa and Australia

On top of losing nearly 3/4ths of our surface stations since 1990 (when the huge warming really began), the number of missing months has increased 10 fold.  Again, data from 'surrounding' (I put quotes on that because the surrounding stations are getting fewer and farer between) is used to 'fill in the missing data'.

There is no correction for urbanization despite a multitude of studies proving the Urban Heat Island effect (NOAA claims one study that disproved the Urban Heat Island theory as the reason they don't adjust the data, and that study has since been debunked).  Keep in mind that hte world population has grown from 1.5 to 6.7 billion during the period of record and the number of rural stations has fallen by 80%.

Here is the global satellite temp data compared to Co2 concentrations since 2002.



It's not a whole lot, but I am fast losing any faith I have in our weather observations.

[Ban my account ffs!]

I'd also like to add this:

This graph shows the difference between the raw temperature data collected and what the final numbers are once NOAA has 'adjusted' them.  Notice the difference was near zero but began to grow after WWII before peaking.

Not only are they not adjusting data downward due to the urban heat island effect, they are adjusting it upward!


The global warming trend has been hugely exaggerated by scientists adjusting the data upward to create a warming trend.

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You're so predictable, Coburn.  Have you ever had an original thought in your life or do you just keep sending bullsh**t through your blowhole hoping somebody will catch some?

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This is all too much for me.  I don't know if I'm going off the deep end or what.. but ever since the June 2009 global temp data came out, I've been completely baffled.

The satellite data showed no positive temperature anomaly for the entire lower troposphere for June, while the surface data, once crunched and adjusted, showed the 2nd warmest June on record.

Up until last fall, the NOAA surface data was compiled of surface stations with algorithms in place to fill in non-covered land areas.  The ocean temperatures were measured by satellites and tied into the data, since they could give the best picture since our ocean measurements can be so few and far between.

In the fall, however, NOAA decided that the satellite data had a cold bias, and decided to use its few water surface measurements and fill in the vast majority of the rest with the same process they use to fill in uncovered land areas.

Guess what happened?  Just take a wild guess.

You got it.  Suddenly, the oceans had warmed to record levels!  All over night!

And so of course NOAA has been tooting its horn over how warm the oceans are now.. and yet when you see any SST map and compare it to what they put out with their scant raw data and fancy algorithms and guesswork, you see a striking difference.

Here is the most recent global sea surface temperature map provided by the satellites:
Notice lots of cool water in the southern hemisphere, the north Atlantic, and the north Pacific.


Now look at the NOAA map for June

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While I can appreciate the scientific and level-headed approach to the issue, snowguy, I have to point out that 30 years is about as significant as dust in the planet's history.  We haven't been around for very long and a large increase to us over a long time may in fact be an insignificant increase over an even more insignificant period of time.  I am of the belief that we as humans have grossly over-estimated our worth and power over the earth.  If we look at carbon in the atmosphere in the context of the world and not just humans, we've emitted nothing of note.

I don't disagree, and I'm not sure Snowguy would either. None of the data he's presented really contradicts this - if anything it would support this idea. His main deal is just showing that a lot of the data that people are using to make claims about global warming is erroneous and possibly even outright biased.

Right, my post was poorly worded.  It sounded like I was calling him out on it, but what I meant for that to say was that in addition to his points I find the most important to be about the time periods we use.  Then I just went rambling on.  I apologize for any confusion, haha.

I agree with the spirit of that argument, but there is also science proving that the earth has gone from warm interglacial conditions to ice age conditions in as little as a decade.  That's why the climatologists get all worked up.  They're afraid we could trigger something that would cause a sudden warming or cooling of the planet in a very very short period of time that would significantly alter life on the planet as we know it.

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There is a lot going on in the field of climatology right now and there is increasing evidence that the surface temperature records are greatly exaggerating the warming trend of the planet.  A new study put out by Dr. John Christy at the University of Alabama-Huntsville found that the dramatic warming trend in eastern Africa, recently touted by others as being a major danger to Africa and proof of global warming in tropical areas, was, in fact, caused by dramatic urbanization around the recording stations and that almost all of the temperature increase was at night, and not during the day.

This is because the increased number of buildings causes the air to be more turbulent at night.  Night time temperatures often cool so much at the surface because a boundary of cool air sinks ot the surface with warmer air above it.  You see this in the mountains all the time with inversion layers.

The buildings increase the turbulence, thus mixing the air better and preventing a layer of cold air from building at the surface.  Also, the concrete/building materials are better at absorbing heat than soil and plant matter, and they release this heat at night.

The researchers found that while night time temperatures had warmed by 1-2˚F over the past 50 years, day time temperatures hadn't changed at all.

Christy studied temperature data that goes back to 1904 across many areas of Kenya and found that rural stations that hadn't seen much development didn't have a warming trend while stations that had become urbanized had a much bigger warming trend.  He mentioned a town he taught in many years ago.. at the time it had 10,000 residents and had mud/dirt roads with few concrete buildings.  That same town now has 100,000 people and has many concrete apartment blocs.

And yet these temperature observations are used by NOAA and GISS (Goddard Institute of Space Studies) in compiling global temperatures which are used by the IPCC.  Like I've said before they no longer adjust temperatures downward to account for localized urban development, so the warming trends have become greatly exaggerated.