millennia

It makes perfect sense for the huge loss of ice last year to be due to heat input for ocean currents rather than warmer air temperatures as the quantity of heat imported is far greater.

I wasn't talking about the tropics warming the most I was referring to the IPCC report on model predictions for CO2 induced warming producing a tropical troposhere hot spot: Model-calculated zonal mean atmospheric temperature change from 1890 to 1999 [degC per century] as simulated by the PCM model from [a] solar forcing, volcanoes, [c] well-mixed greenhouse gases, [d] tropospheric and stratospheric ozone changes, [e] direct sulfate aerosol forcing, and [f] the sum of all forcings [iPCC 2007, p.675]. Note the pronounced increase in warming trend with altitude as a 'fingerprint' of greenhouse forcing. The US Climate Change Science Program report of 2006 also reported the conglomerate of the forcings: and then procuded radiosonde data to show the actual anomaly pattern as observed: I do not have an up to date actual observation chart, and therefore could only refer to the satellite chart which does provide troposhere temperatures up to March 2008 and still does not show the warming the models predicted. My point isn't about global warming it's about observing the effects of CO2 forcing as predicted by the IPCC and by which Govts all over the world are producing policies. The question is of the accuracy of the models if real observations don't confirm them. I do not refute that observed temperatures have increased, or that polar warming has been measured to be stronger than tropical warming. To me that is a different arguement.

This is also interesting with regard to this thread with sign of the PDO reversal gaining strength, which is where I suppose the general potential for cooling may come: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/...p3?img_id=18012

I fail to see how the part of the world from 20N to 20S can be called "irrelevant", especially as this is the area that should show a fingerprint CO2 warming according the IPCC 2007 report as it receives the greatest degree of solar forcing and therefore *should* show the greatest degree of CO2 absorbtion and temperature feedback. So only two assumptions can come from this: the warming isn't occurring or the models upon the which IPCC projection of a tropical troposhere hot spot were made are wrong. I don't pretend to know which of those assumptions is true, but in either case the persistent inability to observe the hotspot as shown by IPCC 2007 make me wonder why everybody remains so convinced CO2 is a primary driver, as opposed to a contributory driver. As ever we just need more research into other potential sources of warming and stop diverting so much in resources to just one, otherwise we just risk missing something that may come back and bite us. The science is not settled, it is ongoing and will be for hundreds of years. At a solstice the sun is furthest away from the tropical belt in the opposing hemisphere so it makes sense that when the sun in in the middle of the tropics, over the equator at an equinox, it has equal effect on the entire tropics and therefore maximises the general effect. This is why IPCC shows the projected hot spot as most intense at the equator and lessening as you move north or south. Sorry if I didn't make myself clear on what I meant.

Not according to this it isn't: This is a graph of the tropical troposphere anomaly from a mixture of satellite and CRU measurements to March this year, and two things are obvious: the peak in temperature in 1998 and the continuing drop this year with another 0.3C drop in March - this is at the equinox when the sun is directly overhead the tropics!

This is why the science of climate change isn't "settled", we just have so much yet to learn. Whatever the final outcome of the debate this gives us more time, which can't be a bad thing.

Yes, true. I suppose for the agnostics among us the blatant attempts to irradicate any evidence of these by Michael Mann with his infamous hockey stick graph is what makes us pay more attention to them than is really required. Once you smell a rat you just can't forget it and you always wonder why, if the GW arguement is so iron clad, does there have to be management and interpretation of the data? Perhaps if Al Gore hadn't beaten us over the head with the temperature hockey stick there's be less of a discussion about the past and a bit more concentration on the present and future.

I thought Iceland came from "Fire and Ice Land" (or whatever is Norse for that), but it is a bit gothic for a name today and Iceland stuck. The Vikings were certainly able to sustain villages, although I suspect their diet was principally sea based, but the theory was supposed to be that a warm period created enough ice free space in south west Greenland to be cultivated and a remarkable sight from the sea - with the backdrop of the ice covered mountains of the interior - and hence the name (no suggestion any human has ever seen the entire island green). These settlements were abandoned in the middle of the millennia as the LIA set in. I've no idea if these areas are able to be settled by the same methods today as our technology makes it easier to live anywhere so it's not a straight comparison.

Then it does look like an arguement that doesn't hold water - or grape juice - I had NO trouble growing them, I just couldn't get them to ripen enough! Birds loved them though

Taking total ice area as a whole; it can certainly be agreed 2007 was a bad year for ice and was the culmination of a 3 year downward trend - which for something like billions of tons of ice is significant in such a short time frame. However 2008 sets to buck that trend by a margin way above anything since 1979; 1988 appears to be the top year but that was from a minima around about 1m sq km below normal. This time we may beat the 1988 figure from a minima of 3m sq km below normal - truly stunning. It will be interesting to see how this changes as the NH summer warms up and how much Arctic ice is lost this year compared to last.

Quite, just like the logic that if we save fuel we save money - a built in inducement. Although if the Govt get their hands on it the increase in green taxes will offset the saving in fuel leaving the public just as jaded as ever....

It gets cold in all over Europe in winter, I think the Romans installed central heating in other countries in addition to Britian - it's flippin cold in northern Italy in January! Maybe on the vines, but the terraces in the Cotwolds - having survived at least 1600 years and still clearly visible today - appear more substantial than a few years of experimenting. Warmer oceans, more moisture, more rain - is what we keep getting told is the likely future for Britain in GW. If it's peeing down in Britain it will feel cold regardless compared to the long hot summers of Rome.

?Points of reference? One I'd like to see explained is the complete lack of vineyards covering the country. On the south west flanks of the Cotswolds we have row upon row of terracing from Roman vineyards yet from my own foray with grapes I can say it's too high to bother cultivating now. Vineyards were active as far north as Northumberland in the early part of the last millennia, and yet today there are only a few commercial operations. In the absence of thermometers from the Roman and Medieval warm periods we only have records of how people lived and I don't see us as having caught up with warm periods in the last 2000 years yet - not to say that we won't, of course, I just don't see how it can be anywhere near certainty that we are topping the tables this decade.

Assuming both GW and solar activity forecasts are correct then maybe we get a break while the science is hammered out. Has anybody worked through the potential that we actually SAVE ourselves through climate change offsetting cooling long enough for us to do something about it? Now there's a clever human

On a planetary emergency scale our current situation isn't even a blip. We have a balmy climate that has, in the last 10,000 years allowed us to develop faster than any other species, ever. Even with "six degrees of warming" life will be tough for us but nothing the planet hasn't experienced in the past, and not really a rapid disaster such as, say, a 6km lump of rock and ice hitting us at 20,000km/h! The worst danger for the planet is the death throes of our upstart species - nukes. No other species has been able to replicate the ELE of an asteroid with the push of a button, and there is nothing like starving to death to show us we aren't as advanced as we think we are and return us to more animal like survival instincts. We need to mange out the excessive consumption without triggering the conflicts that could lead to that sort of end game, but there is no appetite for that kind of change and to many what may need to be done will be as bad as not doing anything. The "Mutually Assured Destruction" arguement won't work in this scenario as it will be unstable holders of the nuclear trigger that are the danger. In the Cold War, whatever your thoughts about either side, the two major superpowers had self control as all that was at stake was idealism, not life itself.

I think the scary thing is, Dev, that some sort of catastophe might me unavoidable if we end up creating one to avoid another. One day somebody with influence is going to stand up and say the unthinkable - there are too many people on the planet and there has to be less. What sort of horrors that raises for the future of humanity I don't want to think about, but one thing is for certain: if we don't do something about it ourselves then Mother Nature has had lots of practise at doing it for us! Get the feeling we'll be looking back to today as the 'Golden Times'?

OK, here's a different tack from the warm/cold debate. Assume the IPCC are completely correct, the trend of temperature will continue to rise in lock step with CO2 emissions and we have to act strongly to avert a natural disaster - what do we do? Many leading campaigners and environmentalists are pushing for an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050, and this is receiving serious support from some decision makers. Just how would that be achieved with 7 - 8 billion people on the planet and China on course to produce more than double the CO2 output of the US within 25 years? Even if we were to convice everybody to reduce their per capita output in some way we have to find that way, so get out your calculators, read this: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1209344590...in_commentaries and then let us know what your suggestions are for averting a human catastrophe without causing a worse one in the process?

Magpie is right, and I'm not even in the warming camp. It does look too much like point scoring to announce a cooling before the moving averages turn over, this is a waiting game, as VP has also eluded to. I just hope that while we are in a wait and see we keep researching this on BOTH sides - articles like this http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5736103.html are not what I want to see. Good science is not "settled" science but one where we constantly measure and remeasure to make sure the theory is correct, and having the guts to admit it when you are wrong - which again counts equally to both sides.

Ah, right, HadCRUT and the great debate about the quality of the data used to produce it. OK, let's take that as a given because other people are actively working in that field and I've no idea whether the data is accurate or not (i.e. not UHI or other poor site location contaminated). So what continues to confuse me is why this pattern isn't confirmed by satellites and the warming is all on the surface and not in the atmosphere at any sort of altitude - as has to be the case with CO2 absorbing infrared aloft and reradiating it back to Earth? I'm seriously interested in this bit as I've not yet seen an article explaining the lack of a GW signature hot spot in the upper troposhere as designated in the IPCC papers. I'd like to be able to read something on it.

Where DOES that graph come from, it keeps popping up like an AIT bad penny? Even the IPCC aren't claiming a 1C rise since 1860 and 0.45C since 1979 (!!!), a poignant date as this is when satellite measurements started and they show a flat line from 1979 to 1999 (via a peak at 1998) in the only graph I could get my mits on at short notice, so I'd love to know what the base data is for such a precipitous rise. Also as AGW via CO2 would warm the upper troposphere first and the ground after why are surface temps increasing with NO corresponsing hot spot aloft?

Apologies for the facetiousness (and my spelling) at the end of the post but the point is valid. The ice held a +ve anomoly through the summer and the anomaly position this April comapared to last is phenomenal. I've read your other posts about glacier acceleration but couldn't that be due to the vast amounts of snow being deposited on the Antarctic island? Also what effects on surface albedo / cooling of the atmosphere will all this extra ice have. Yep, it's very serious and my point about two camps pointing at different poles this year still holds.

My, My GW - look at the gradient of the graph in the Antarctic: This is going to be an interesting year. All the GWers are going to be pointing at graphs of the Arctic and going see! see!, and then this summer all the sceptics will be pointing at graphs of the Antarctic breaking new records for ice extent with similar glee. Perhaps all the ice will melt at the North Pole and shift to the South Pole and then the Earth will go into an uncontrolable wobble on it's axis and we'll spin off into the Sun :lol: Sorry, the doom predictions in other threads are starting to rub off :o

It's the response to CO2 and fossil fuel use that's probably responsible for the methane increase: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008...waste.pollution Lat's face it , we haven't a clue what we are doing and every time we try and make things better they get a whole lot worse. Having said that I'm now starting to think methane is being over played (I would, wouldn't I :blush: ). Yes it's 23 times stronger as a greenhouse gas but it's concentration in the atmosphere is just 1800ppb against CO2s 385000ppb - so let's not start another flippin panic please. Also methane is a lot more unstable in the atmosphere and doesn't hang around anywhere near as long as CO2.

Actually the the shortage of rice is not so much the lack of supply but the increased demand caused by the tripling of the price of wheat. There are even stories of rationing and panic buying in the US and UK as people typically try to stockpile like it's the end of the flipping world. These are the same people that probably still have 2000 tins of food left over from the Cuban missile crisis :blush: Commercial biofuel production to replace oil in a world having enough of a problem feeding itself is complete madness. Domestic biofuel production to take waste oil away from landfill is a very good idea. As usual when the big boys get involved it all goes to pot. Has anybody seen this? http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008...waste.pollution Back to brown paper bags I say! :blush:

I would like to add that I don't want to get dragged off in manacles being accused of "denying" that CO2 is rising, or that humans have anything to do with it, I'm just looking to make sure we can be confident what proportion of the observed rise is anthropogenic against the general backgroud noise of natural changes. I'm also a little concerned that it appears there are very few place on Earth where it can be accurately measured according to Rabett - which means it wouldn't be uniformly contributing any affect across the planet. Also if 500ppm is measurable over urban areas then would this lead some to assume UHI is caused by CO2 over the urban area rather than land use changes? Better be careful on that one as it may be just a step too far....