Android

nice analysis. The conclusion is pretty much along the lines of what I think regarding the '07/'08 cooling, although I also think it explains at least some of the post 2002 flat period too (you can even see ENSO declining slightly since 2002) Here's a similar image (although I didn't graph* ENSO I just noted the ninos and ninas) I made a while back. I also included tacked on a copy (in green) of coming out of the 89 nina as a kind of prediction. The red trend line is just an eyeball guess. The ~3 month lag you mention between ENSO and UAH can also be seen between global sea surface temperature and UAH too: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl...:1990/normalise Probably because ENSO impacts global SST so significantly. What's interesting is this seems to give a preview of upcoming UAH months. Side notes: -Mt St Helens is marked to explain the 82 cooling but I think El Chichon 82 eruption is the normal explaination. -Not so relevant, but I suspect that ENSO is by definition zero trend over the long term because it is derived by detrending sea surface temperature variations in the ENSO pacific regions (I don't know this for sure though). *actually I should add I didn't graph anything, the actual graph of temp is from somewhere else I can't recall, perhaps one of those blogs tracking temps from month to month. I just overlaid a badly scrawled mess over the top.

Wow look at this super warming we've had since May! http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2008.3 You know since May we've warmed 0.35C! That's equal to about half the temperature rise over the entire 20th century! *p.s this post is of course sarcastic

Claims that "150 years" of warming has been "wiped out" are like claiming in June that all the warming since January has been wiped out when a cloud covers the sun and it gets chilly for a few minutes.

I took the liberty of updating the graph to latest month (for some reason it ends in July even though the article talks about September...being cold...well now it goes up to September)

Im not sure that is the right image (?). What about this one, this is the 9th October 2008 (just a day behind?), seems to be more going on, perhaps better lighting? ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/IC..._modis_ch02.png

Sea surface temperature has shot right back up since La Nina ended: So without solar minimum and PDO how much higher would sea surface temperatures be? Really a question for those who think we are in global cooling to answer.. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1980

If I recall correctly (and don't assume that I do), hasn't the polar bear population increased in the arctic because of restrictions on hunting? It would seem like with aerosols and ghgs there are two opposing forces at play here determining polar bear population numbers: The amount of warming vs the amount of hunting regulation.

GDI = God Did It

That's a good suggestion to ask eli or RC people. It can wait though until they put up a somewhat related post, im in no rush to find this out. I am ok with the 33K figure being ballpark, just wondered if I was missing something obvious.

I used to answer this simply as "33K", but I don't really believe this anymore. "Some of the heat given off by the Earth is radiated back into space. If this were the entire story the average temperature of the Earth would be -18°C (-0.4°F), which is about 33 C degrees (59 F degrees) colder than it actually is." http://www.seed.slb.com/en/scictr/watch/cl.../greenhouse.htm "It has been calculated that if we did not have our natural greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the average global temperature would be 33C lower at minus 18C" http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/az/alphabet19.shtml I suspect now that this 33K figure is actually not the greenhouse effect at all, but the difference between Earth's average surface temperature and Earth's effective temperature as viewed from space. The Earth absorbs and emits about 240wm-2, so it's effective temperature is 255K (-18C). The Earth's surface is about 15C. The difference is 33K. That's not the same as the difference between the surface temperature with and without a greenhouse effect. I tried to see how it could be but couldn't get it to fit. What does Earth "without a greenhouse effect" mean? I think an Earth without a greenhouse effect is an Earth without gases absorbing longwave radiation in the atmosphere. This could be achieved in two ways: 1) Realistically it's achieved by removing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But this would mean far more than a lack of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which absorb longwave radiation. It would also mean no clouds, which would only be accomplished by a lack of significant evaporation which in turn requires no oceans on the planet and probably not much significant life. Mars without co2 would be a close example. I estimate below that Earth's surface temperature in such a case would be about 20K cooler than present. 2) Unrealistically an Earth without greenhouse effect is achieved by leaving greenhouse gases in the atmosphere but disabling their longwave absorption property. This means water vapor can still exist and so can clouds but water vapor is no longer able to absorb longwave radiation. I estimate below that Earth's surface could as much as 55K cooler than present in this case. Ie the warming provided by greenhouse gases in the current atmosphere could be as high as 55K with cooling they provide about 22K. For estimating these two cases (and they are estimates based on assumptions and perhaps flawed reasoning) I am basing nearly all of this off the K&T energy budget diagram: and the paper it's based on: http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/cours...ationBudget.pdf An Earth without greenhouse gases First remove the 324wm-2 back radiation from the diagram, that won't exist anymore without greenhouse gases. This immediately leads to a surface emission of 66wm-2 and an average surface temperature of -88C rather than -18C. Next is to remove clouds, because water vapor is gone. Without clouds 77wm-2 of incoming sunlight would not be reflected. Additionally the paper explains that clouds are reponsible for 7wm-2 of the 67wm-2 sunlight absorbed by the atmosphere. Of the other 60wm-2 sunlight absorbed by the atmosphere the paper explains that H2O and ozone absorb 58wm-2 of it! That leaves just 2wm-2 sunlight absorbed by oxygen O2. The effect of removing greenhouse gases (and as a side effect clouds) is that 340wm-2 sunlight reaches the surface instead of just 198wm-2. How much of this is 340wm-2 is reflected? I will assume the albedo of this imaginary Earth without clouds, oceans or plantlife is similar to that of Mars, about 0.15 (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/marsfact.html). Last of all is Thermals and Evapo-transpiration on the diagram. From the paper I gather that thermals is heat lost from the surface by convection and conduction, while Evapo-transpiration is heat lost by evaporation and transpiration. We can strike out Evapo-transpiration because there will be no water vapor in the atmosphere. In a cooler world would there be less less convection? conduction? I am not certain on this, but as the atmosphere without greenhouse gases cannot emit energy into space (http://www.netweather.tv/forum/index.php?s...t&p=1328974), energy emitted into space must come from the surface alone. So doesn't this suggest the surface is gaining energy from the atmosphere? In which case heat transfer from atmosphere to the surface is 2wm-2 if the atmosphere is in energy balance. Putting it all together: 340wm-2 sunlight reaches the surface. 51wm-2 of this is reflected. 289wm-2 is absorbed. Surface also absorbs 2wm-2 from atmosphere. Surface is about 268K (-5C) So based on all this, without greenhouse gases the Earth's surface would be about 20K cooler (very rough estimate given the assumptions) An Earth where greenhouse gases cannot absorb longwave radiation Again remove the 324wm-2 back radiation from the diagram. Again this leads to a surface emission of 66wm-2 and an average surface temperature of -88C. The case against Thermals and Evapo-transpiration still stands. The atmosphere can only lose energy to the surface, so the net energy transfer between the surface and atmosphere must be from the atmosphere to the surface (because the atmosphere still absorbs sunlight). The atmosphere still gains about 67wm-2 from absorbed sunlight, so this must be transferred to the surface. That leaves the amount of sunlight reaching Earth. This is mostly affected by the clouds which reflect quite a bit. My wild (and perhaps not correct) assumption is that a colder Earth = less cloud cover = more sunlight reaching the surface? I will also assume (more likely correct) that surface albedo increases as ice covers more of the Earth = less sunlight absorbed by the surface. So I assume both effects oppose, but I don't know the net effect of this. But if the net is zero (big assumption) the surface is absorbing about 168wm-2 sunlight as currently but also with about 67wm-2 also absorbed by the atmosphere. Which means a surface emitting 235wm-2 which gives a surface temperature of 253K (-19C). I assume the coldest case is where Earth is entirely covered in ice. The albedo of Europa, covered in ice is about 0.67 wheras the surface albedo of Earth is about 0.15. A greater than fourfold increase in surface albedo of Earth would mean sunlight absorbed by surface = 90wm-2 * (1 - cloud albedo). This suggests that even if all clouds are removed, the maximum amount of sunlight absorbed by Earth's surface is under 100wm-2 if it is covered in ice. In which case assuming it still gains 67wm-2 from the atmosphere it's gaining only 167wm-2 for a surface temperature of about -40C. With cloud it would be less (but could there be cloud in such a cold atmosphere?). In this case the greenhouse effect on Earth actually provides about 55K warmth. How can the Earth's surface can be 255K (-18C) without greenhouse effect as claimed? It seems too much of a coincidence that 255K is Earth's effective temperature.For the Earth's surface to be -18C without a greenhouse effect it would have to be absorbing 240wm-2. The Earth is absorbing about 240wm-2 solar energy, but is the Earth's surface isn't. Is the origin of the 33K figure so simple as a confusion between Earth's surface and the entire Earth? Conclusions - I am very skeptical of the 33K figure commonly cited. I am unsure what it is supposed to mean. - The presence of Greenhouse gases could provide as much as 55K warmth. - All this is why computer climate models are useful and can be used to answer complicated questions like this. The few mere calculations based on massive assumptions I have done based on a 0D energy budget diagram are insufficient. But if anyone can make me unskeptical of the 33K again that would be nice.

Scientific knowledge would have to undergo somewhat of a total overturning to reduce the importance of co2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Radiative-forcings.svg

Climate is like a sleeping dog that we are poking. Stable for now but prone to sudden changes in state. If you keep poking it maybe it will just stay in it's drowsy state and even if it does wake up maybe it will be friendly. On the otherhand it could change state by jumping up and biting you. I would weigh up the two scenarios and decide whether poking it is worth the risk. I don't agree that "climate change" is a new replacement term for global warming. Climate change covers a lot more than just temperature, and besides it's what the last two letters of IPCC stand for and that isn't new.

Thanks, so I guess in a non-greenhouse gas atmosphere the solar energy absorbed in the atmosphere would have to be passed down to the surface before it could be radiated into space? Doesn't seem anything wrong with that except it's not intuitive.

3 pixels..

So without greenhouse gases does the stratosphere not emit radiation into space? This is how I am seeing it..

I reproduced this graph using this page: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:...rmalise/mean:12 But I can make a similar graph using the period 1988 - 1994: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:...rmalise/mean:12 The full record looks like this: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:...rmalise/mean:12

The cryosphere today sea ice area graph shows only 4 pixels difference between last year's minimum and current ice area. It dropped 4 pixels over the course of about a week, so by this particular measure it seems remotely possible last year's minimum could be beat within the next week.

If only I had a better memory because I would love to recall this quote when faced with the "people are living longer than ever before" argument.

And perhaps not after that either.. http://www.upstreamonline.com/live/article158513.ece

It's usually a mistake to assume scientists are making obvious mistakes. If something seems to simple to be true it usually is. Species change over time. Species of coral that survived through a 3000ppm atmosphere and associated lower pH oceans have long ago been replaced by species of coral which are not adapted for such low pH oceans (by virtue of not needing to be). Now if we sink the pH fast enough we will likely get mass extinctions of such species of coral and many other calcifying organisms. There are extinctions associated with glacial and interglacial climate change, but of course it hasn't "sterilized" the Earth. The 0.8C warming over the past century is a far greater rate of warming than the about 6C warming over 5000 years that took Earth out of the last glacial period.

On the contrary, from what I see the first year ice has folded as expected - that's why ice melt has been so fast over the past month and why the current extent is so close to last year's. Additionally if this years melt indicates anything it's surely that ice decline is continuing. Last year's minimum was dramatic and yet we are seeing ice levels nearly as low as last year without the same unusual weather that contributed to last years record minimum. It's additionally remarkable considering that this years refreeze created a higher maximum extent than last years. Either the rate of arctic ice decline has accelerated or it's taken a step downwards due to 2007. I think what someone said on here about storms is very interesting. When the ice starts reforming it'll take longer to establish, as a result there is less time in the year for ice to reform than there used to be. Just as much time to melt, but less time to form.

The ncdc one for July is up, so here's the cru one: As for Arctic sea ice extent, looks like the difference today between 2008 and 2007 is now lower than it was back in May according to nsaidc: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/..._timeseries.png Im less interested in the minimum now and more interested in how fast it will freeze again. Will it be drawn out like it was last year? Someone earlier said about storms preventing it reforming in the open areas as fast, how does that work?

For Sea Surface Temperature there is HadSST2: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadsst2gl.txt Here are the anomolies for each month since Jan 2006: 0.266 0.284 0.240 0.305 0.326 0.337 0.361 0.437 0.384 0.379 0.379 0.387 0.365 0.361 0.310 0.286 0.264 0.332 0.354 0.282 0.294 0.228 0.149 0.112 0.116 0.154 0.165 0.194 0.220 0.251 0.352 Same again from the NCDC monthly sea surface temperature record: ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalie...01-2000mean.dat 0.3842 0.3745 0.3846 0.4177 0.4681 0.4653 0.4477 0.4767 0.4996 0.4897 0.5173 0.5133 0.4665 0.4760 0.4107 0.4118 0.3700 0.4345 0.3944 0.3489 0.3801 0.3411 0.2535 0.2519 0.2480 0.2933 0.3100 0.3275 0.3555 0.3926 0.4248 The minimum in sea surface temperature was about January this year near the peak of the La Nina. Since then sea surface temperature has climbed and is now back at about 2006 levels.

I just found a record break which dwarfs the Denver 9F. For Aug 15th: CHEYENNE WSFO AP, WY new record lowest max: 49.0F previous: *65.0F*. That's a record breaker by 16F!

On their own these are meaningless weather events with no relevance to US climate, let alone global climate, let alone trends in either. One step to getting anywhere near the bigger picture would be to at least find out how common such events are. If low records are broken by that extent just about every year at some time, somewhere in the US, then it happening in Denver this particular time isn't really meaningful so we can jump off right here. Then again if records broken by this extent have never been observed for 50 years then it is bears looking at, although still perhaps more for weather watchers than climate watchers to explain. There's a relevant site here concerning US temperature records: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/records/ Which lists record high lows, record low highs, record high highs, etc for daily, monthly and all-time over selected period. This gives a good overview of just how common record breaking temperatures (at both end of the spectrum) are. In just the first 17 days of August 2008 the number of daily records broken at some location is 1355, broken down as: New daily lowest max temperature records broken: 457 New daily lowest min temperature records broken: 165 New daily highest max temperature records broken: 367 New daily highest min temperature records broken: 366 Now just in light of this the Denver record breaking makes up just a small fraction of all records broken so far in August - at both ends of the spectrum. The Denver record does stick out above most of those new records because it has broken the record by such a large amount (5F). But I do say most. Glancing down the first few days of August I see several new high max records which were at least 5F or more above the previous record. The idea that the world is cooling based on fragmentary analysis is like claiming the dice in a casino are rigged just because you happened to see someone at some table roll snake-eyes twice in a row. I need to see a thorough wide-scale analysis demonstrating something stands out before I buy into this idea that August is freezing cold in the US, let alone in the entire world. Edit: sorry I missed the 2nd link which shows Denver record low max breaking the previous by 9F not 5F. So 9F is the target.