NASA group most widely quoted now finds about a +0.07 C /decade warming trend in the lower atmosphere
A statistical regression of a mere thirty years of raw data does not consitute a climate trend, especially concidering that data set spans several el-nino/el-nina events as well as volcanic events inducing error in regression measurements that would supposedly be attributable to a longterm "Global Warming".
Note the following data that until Feb 2002 exhibited a .04C/decade, only one additional el-nino event doubled the "trend" measure to that 0.07C/decade regression you are quoting.
|
Globally Averaged Atmospheric Temperatures
(NASA) 
This chart shows the monthly temperature changes for the lower troposphere - Earth's atmosphere from the surface to 8 km, or 5 miles up. The temperature in this region is more strongly influenced by oceanic activity, particularly the "El Niño" and "La Niña" phenomena, which originate as changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulations in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The overall trend in the tropospheric data is near zero, being +0.04 C/decade through Feb 2002. Click on the chart to get the numerical data. |
Such instability in regression measurement is a result of the more than 0.2C stand deviation noise in a short term measurement, not the effect of a secular change in Climate do to any effect of mankind.
Mankind's impact is only 0.28% of Total Greenhouse effect
" There is no dispute at all about the fact that even if punctiliously observed, (the Kyoto Protocol) would have an imperceptible effect on future temperatures -- one-twentieth of a degree by 2050. "
Dr. S. Fred Singer, atmospheric physicist
Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia,
and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service;
in a Sept. 10, 2001 Letter to Editor, Wall Street Journal
Anthropogenic (man-made) Contribution to the "Greenhouse
Effect," expressed as % of Total (water vapor INCLUDED)
| Based on concentrations (ppb) adjusted for heat retention characteristics |
% of All Greenhouse Gases |
% Natural |
% Man-made |
| Water vapor |
95.000% |
94.999% |
0.001% |
| Carbon Dioxide (CO2) |
3.618% |
3.502% |
0.117% |
| Methane (CH4) |
0.360% |
0.294% |
0.066% |
| Nitrous Oxide (N2O) |
0.950% |
0.903% |
0.047% |
| Misc. gases ( CFC's, etc.) |
0.072% |
0.025% |
0.047% |
| Total |
100.00% |
99.72 |
0.28% |
Even if one were so foolish as to accept such a raw statistic as representative, the change in temperature acoss a century of time would still amount to only 0.7oC(far less than the IPPC's model projections) with no causual connection with CO2(natural or manmade).
CO2-Temperature Correlations
- "(1) correlation does not prove causation, (2) cause must precede effect, and (3) when attempting to evaluate claims of causal relationships between different parameters, it is important to have as much data as possible in order to weed out spurious correlations.
***
Consider, for example, the study of Fischer et al. (1999), who examined trends of atmospheric CO2 and air temperature derived from Antarctic ice core data that extended back in time a quarter of a million years. Over this extended period, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each of these climatic transitions, earth's air temperature rose well in advance of any increase in atmospheric CO2. In fact, the air's CO2 content did not begin to rise until 400 to 1,000 years after the planet began to warm. Such findings have been corroborated by Mudelsee (2001), who examined the leads/lags of atmospheric CO2 concentration and air temperature over an even longer time period, finding that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lagged behind variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years over the past 420,000 years."
[ see also: Indermuhle et al. (2000), Monnin et al. (2001), Yokoyama et al. (2000), Clark and Mix (2000) ]
- "Other studies periodically demonstrate a complete uncoupling of CO2 and temperature "
[see: Petit et al. (1999), Staufer et al. (1998), Cheddadi et al., (1998), Raymo et al., 1998, Pagani et al. (1999), Pearson and Palmer (1999), Pearson and Palmer, (2000) ]
- "Considered in their entirety, these several results present a truly chaotic picture with respect to any possible effect that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration may have on global temperature. Clearly, atmospheric CO2 is not the all-important driver of global climate change the climate alarmists make it out to be."
Global warming and global dioxide emission and concentration:
a Granger causality analysis
http://isi-eh.usc.es/trabajos/122_41_fullpaper.pdf
- "We find, in opposition to previous studies, that there is no evidence of Granger causality from global carbon dioxide emission to global surface temperature. Further, we could not find robust empirical evidence for the causal nexus from global carbon dioxide concentration to global surface temperature."
Here Comes the Sun
"Carbon dioxide, the main culprit in the alleged greenhouse-gas warming, is not a "driver" of climate change at all. Indeed, in earlier research Jan Veizer, of the University of Ottawa and one of the co-authors of the GSA Today article, established that rather than forcing climate change, CO2 levels actually lag behind climatic temperatures, suggesting that global warming may cause carbon dioxide rather than the other way around."
***
"Veizer and Shaviv's greatest contribution is their time scale. They have examined the relationship of cosmic rays, solar activity and CO2, and climate change going back through thousands of major and minor coolings and warmings. They found a strong -- very strong -- correlation between cosmic rays, solar activity and climate change, but almost none between carbon dioxide and global temperature increases."
A statistical regression of a mere thirty years of raw data does not consitute a climate trend, especially concidering that data set spans several el-nino/el-nina events as well as volcanic events inducing error in regression measurements that would supposedly be attributable to a longterm "Global Warming". Note the following data that until Feb 2002 exhibited a .04C/decade, only one additional el-nino event doubled the "trend" measure to that 0.07C/decade regression you are quoting.Acceleration, AG, acceleration is the key that is the concern of climate scientists. The trend since 1975 is about 4x faster than the accepted warming of 0.6 C during the 20th century. Perhaps it's not a "climate trend", which is why a wait-and -see attitude is advisable. How long would you like to wait? 2010? 2015? And the atmospheric trend is not exactly zero or negligible. When the Spencer and Christy MSU data was flat due to erroneous analysis, the 22-year flat trend was widely touted by skeptics like Singer and Michaels as evidence that nothing significant was going on. Now that the trend is definitely upward, we hear that the record isn't long enough to be significant or that it's less than expected. That's a big change in tune, if you're listening.
Regarding that 0.28% contribution; the article cited is either being disingenuous or erroneous. Everybody knows that water vapor is the dominant greenhouse gas; if it wasn't the Earth would be an uninhabitable -40 C world. BFD. The key is the forcing effect of the CO2 being added to the atmosphere, which in turn increases relative humidity (water vapor, of course) and has additional positive feedback effects. The climate sensitivity to increasing CO2 is the important factor, not the direct heating contribution of CO2. We've been over this before and I've posted the Hansen forcing diagram in response, but you keep regurgiposting the same stuff. It's somewhat pointless to try and discuss this with you when you post outdated information (such as the 0.04C/decade caption to your first figure) and you continue posting propaganda pieces.
Next: Regarding the time lag between warming and CO2 levels. I think we've been over this before, but due to the reservoir of dissolved CO2 in the surface ocean, there's no doubt that warming due to astronomical factors would definitely cause a CO2 increase. It's also a positive feedback mechanism: once higher C02 concentrations are in place, they contribute to the maintenance of a warmer climate, DUE to their radiative forcing contribution.
Next: The problem is, we're in a relatively stable climate regime, with no indications of astronomical warming/cooling factors (and anyway, they act on a much longer time scale than one or two centuries). So the increasing concentration of CO2 is hard to model in terms of climate effect, because it's the primary changing forcing factor. As Pat Michaels noted very recently (in an editorial in the Washington Times published today) there has been some convergence on the likelihood of a 0.75-1.0 C temperature increase over the next 50 years -- he quotes James Hansen on this and belittles the high-end IPCC projections, which are derived from model modifications designed to DETERMINE the potential maximums. What he doesn't point out is that Hansen also advocates a range of 2.0 - 3.0 for the entire next century (while admitting that the longer range is harder to predict due to the uncertainty of non-climate factors). If he thinks so highly of Hansen, why only push the lower 50-year prediction and not the accelerating (due to higher CO2 concentrations) century prediction? Partly because more significant detrimental ecosystem effects are expected to happen when global temperature rises more than about 2.5 C.
Plus, I think Michaels is misleading, based on this article:
Climate Change: 50 Years Past and Possible Futures
Quoting from introduction: "A new NASA-funded study used a computer climate model to simulate the last 50 years of climate changes, projects warming over the next 50 years regardless of whether or not nations curb their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions soon. If no emission reductions are made and they continue to increase at the current rate, global temperatures may increase by 1-2º Celsius (1.8º-3.6º Fahrenheit). But if the growth rate of carbon dioxide does not exceed its current rate and if the growth of true air pollutants (things that are harmful to human health) is reversed, temperatures may rise by only 0.75C (1.35F)."
Michaels is very consistent in always emphasizing the lower-bound estimates of future warming. So do we really expect that the growth rate of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere won't increase?
Next: with regard to the Veizer article, I'm going to save time and refer to my own earlier discussion of it here on FR:
Here Comes the Sun Refer in particular to comments 12, 14, and 16. I will supply this quote from Dr. Kump in evaluation of Veizer's research. However, this is the full quote, not the excerpt from the FR thread I posted earlier:
"When we put everything we know into models of the carbon cycle", Lee Kump writes, "we predict changes in atmospheric CO2 that largely parallel inferred climate shifts. So the lack of close correspondence between climate change and proxy indicators of atmospheric CO2 may force us to re-evaluate the proxies, rather than disavow the notion that substantially increased atmospheric CO2 will indeed lead to marked warming in the future."
You also might like to read this letter to the editor from the magazine New Scientist from noted climate modeler Stefan Rahmstorf, which I provide in its entirety:
"Stott claims that the paper by Shaviv and Veizer is important science that did not get enough attention from media and policy makers. The opposite is true: it received a disproportionate amount of media coverage due to the strong but unfounded claims the authors made in their press releases.
Shaviv and Veizer claim to have found a correlation between cosmic ray flux and temperature. Even if we accept their (questionable) data, it should be noted that this correlation was constructed by arbitrarily stretching the timescale to shift the maxima of cosmic ray flux by up to 20 million years, to make them coincide with temperature minima. The unadulterated data show no significant correlation - we have checked this. Shaviv and Veizer then proceed to estimate the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentration through regression analysis, which for a number of reasons is not possible.
If it were, far better data is available for this analysis: the Antarctic ice core data. It is much more accurate, shows variations on more relevant timescales and closer to present CO2 levels, and applies to the present-day configuration of continents. Such an analysis would yield a climate sensitivity exceeding 10 °C, but no climatologist would suggest this is a viable method."
(Not exactly a ringing endorsement.)
That's about enough for today, and probably this week. I can probably manage one or two extended responses like this a week now. It takes time and I always do Web searches to back up my statements. So go ahead and respond to this, and you'll have to wait until next week for me to take it up again.
