Is the summer of 2007 a turning point?

[Anti-Mild]

I'm getting very weary of the stupid things written and said about Global Warming - not on this board I hasten to add, but 'out there'.

There has been little short of brazen cheek by some scientists who predicted after last year's heatwave that Mediterranean dry summers would become the norm because of AGW, but who now attribute the recent monsoons to AGW as well. The tendency to attribute any, and every, climatic variation to AGW (when presumably prior to the recent fad there was never anything other than entirely stable weather on this planet) is enough to bring the entire thing into disrepute.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not having second thoughts. In fact it's because I take global warming seriously that I want to see hard scientific analysis not headline-grabbing opportunism whenever any 'freak' event occurs. All we do by the latter is to play into the hands of sceptics who could, quite reasonably, rip some of this guff apart.

For goodness sake: there have been ups and downs in the climate over centuries and millenia. A tornado here, a snowflake there, a dust-storm or a downpour does not 'prove' AGW. The causal link between so-called extreme events and AGW needs to be explored and examined rigorously and it needs to be demonstrated precisely how there is such a link, if there is. At the moment, so stupid are some of these comments in the media, that I'm becoming a sceptic not on AGW but on these 'extreme weather events'. Afterall, presumably before the advent of Sky they went on all the time without many people noticing outisde of the local communities affected by them?

As for 2007 ... until proven otherwise I don't think it's the proof of anything other than it's 2007 (at least according to the Julian calendar). It's been hot here, cool there, wet here and dry there. Same old story for the past hundreds of thousands of years. Yes I think the planet is warming (the NH has been pretty hot outside of this corner), but does the flooding of some parts of Gloucestershire prove anything? I don't think so.

[Bobby]

I'm getting very weary of the stupid things written and said about Global Warming - not on this board I hasten to add, but 'out there'.

There has been little short of brazen cheek by some scientists who predicted after last year's heatwave that Mediterranean dry summers would become the norm because of AGW, but who now attribute the recent monsoons to AGW as well. The tendency to attribute any, and every, climatic variation to AGW (when presumably prior to the recent fad there was never anything other than entirely stable weather on this planet) is enough to bring the entire thing into disrepute.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not having second thoughts. In fact it's because I take global warming seriously that I want to see hard scientific analysis not headline-grabbing opportunism whenever any 'freak' event occurs. All we do by the latter is to play into the hands of sceptics who could, quite reasonably, rip some of this guff apart.

For goodness sake: there have been ups and downs in the climate over centuries and millenia. A tornado here, a snowflake there, a dust-storm or a downpour does not 'prove' AGW. The causal link between so-called extreme events and AGW needs to be explored and examined rigorously and it needs to be demonstrated precisely how there is such a link, if there is. At the moment, so stupid are some of these comments in the media, that I'm becoming a sceptic not on AGW but on these 'extreme weather events'. Afterall, presumably before the advent of Sky they went on all the time without many people noticing outisde of the local communities affected by them?

As for 2007 ... until proven otherwise I don't think it's the proof of anything other than it's 2007 (at least according to the Julian calendar). It's been hot here, cool there, wet here and dry there. Same old story for the past hundreds of thousands of years. Yes I think the planet is warming (the NH has been pretty hot outside of this corner), but does the flooding of some parts of Gloucestershire prove anything? I don't think so.

Don't disagree with anything there but I don't think anyone is actually saying a certain event is caused by global warming, just that it's likely that such things will perhaps become more common and severe in the future due to global warming. That's what I say anyway. One certainly can't say a particular event is caused by global warming, or that a event proves global warming is real.

[osmposm]

I'm getting very weary of the stupid things written and said about Global Warming - not on this board I hasten to add, but 'out there'.......

Very much agree with WIB's post on previous page.....but not sure it needed to be quoted in full three times in quick succession (once without any comment at all), making four full postings of it on one page!!!

When commenting on an entire post (as opposed to referring to a particular point in it), surely it's enough to quote just the first and/or last bits with a row of dots to represent an abridgement (as above)? Or if the original is further up the same page, I'm not sure you really need to quote it at all. Makes for a less cluttered thread - fewer pages and easier reading.

Grumble over.

Ossie

Edited August 2, 2007 by osmposm

[noggin]

I'm getting very weary of the stupid things written and said about Global Warming - not on this board I hasten to add, but 'out there'.

Gosh, I agree with an awful lot of what you have said, WIB. Of course there have always been fluctuations in the weather. I was going to say that it's just that we have much more "media" now than we did even as recently as, say, 30 years ago, so we hear about things now, which we wouldn't have heard of in the past.

Having said that....we all know what the tabloids are like and TV has recently proved itself to be so uneconomical with the truth that I for one no longer consider even the BBC to be a trustworthy source of information.

Who knows what or whom to believe? Personally, I observe what is going on in my little corner of the world and I draw my conclusions from my own observations.

Tut tut.

[Optimus Prime]

Extremely good post WIB, fully agree.

To the goverment/media Global Warming isn't a threat, it's a business where they can tax more money out of us and create hysteria that creates attention from the public and in turn profits the media.

[Tim B]

virtually every 'oldie' I speak to about it can't recall one as wet and miserable as this one has been (so far).

I can, the summer of 1998.

That was far worse than this one from what I can recall and if I hadn't gone to Turkey for 2 weeks at the end of August that year I would have gone insane. That year went the way this one did with a warm spring and massive heat thunderstorms in May followed by a rapid deterioration in to June which stuck right in to October.

Fortunately the following year was a good one.

There seems to be a pattern emerging with these washout summers from what I have seen these past few years, one or two good summers in a row followed by a bad one with one exceptionally bad one every few years. So on a plus note I don't think we will see another summer as poor as this one for another several years.

[paul tall]

I also always find it interesting when watching "who wants to be a millionaire?" that the ask the audience question rarely yields an absolute majority vote.

Thats because not everybody knows the answer.

What a completely invalid metaphor.

[Stratos Ferric]

Thats because not everybody knows the answer.

What a completely invalid metaphor.

PT, there can only ever be one explanation for something in science. Given that some scientists disagree with AGW and some agree, it stands to reason that some are wrong, yet none - presumably - believe that they are. Are you honestly telling me that everyone on WWTBAM KNOWS when they don't know the answer to a particular question? If that were the case NOBODY in the main seat would ever get a question wrong when they have money at risk. There's a difference between guessing because you know you don't know, and believing stridently that your (as it turns out incorrect) answer is correct. That's why I chose that analogy (a metaphor is something different).

[paul tall]

There is not always a majority on the WWTBAM question because some people guess and get it wrong. Some people guess and get it right. Some people know the answer and get it right, some people don't know the answer and get it wrong.

Not everybody in ask the audience who answers the question "thinks" they are right at all. Some will damn well know that they have no idea and press any button.

Quite how this phenomenon compares in any way to the GW debate is beyond me. On ask the audience there is a right and 3 wrong answers, often a fair proportion genuinely know the correct answer, often a fair proportion don't know the correct answer. The GW debate involves people on all sides who believe they are right yes, but has anybody got the definitive correct answer? They probably have but at the end of the day, it is not accepted fact as is the ask the audience question of "is John Wayne dead"...."yes".

Like I said, a rather pointless comparison/analogy/metaphor and an equally pointless debate we are now having over it.

[pottyprof]

And on that note, we now return to our normal programming...

Please.. If you wish to discuss why the sky is pink with purple dots then beat eachother up in a PM.. Ta muchly....

[paul tall]

But it isn't. Its blue you silly billy.

[PersianPaladin]

But it isn't. Its blue you silly billy.

Particularly for you...as the sky over you will never be white.

[paul tall]

Don't you start!

I still hurt after last............"winter".

[PersianPaladin]

Don't you start!

I still hurt after last............"winter".

Oh well....there is always this (ahem) 'winter'.

[Rustynailer]

This winter we are all doomed to a "mini" ice age

[paul tall]

i hope so. Winter OWES me.

[nick sussex]

IMO a few dodgy summer months doesnt prove anything in terms of our climate and the media are fast turning into a one trick pony! Soon events in the Big Brother household will be blamed on GW! The flooding recently, some sections of the media blamed this on GW, however if we would have had a hot summer the same media would have attributed this to GW. The whole debate has just got completely out of hand with all the politicians jumping aboard the GW gravy train! Then theres the new carbon footprint guilt police , and the fortnightly bin collections ( under the cloak of helping the environment by recycling but just really giving people less for their council tax). If the West cared so much why dont they subsidise the poorer countries by paying towards new cleaner technologies in these countries. Its one big talking shop where the politicians bang the GW drum to death in the hope of looking like they care and of course getting those extra votes and of course those extra taxes! Then to top it all they want to stop bringing in produce from far flung places because of the carbon footprint so that those poor areas have even less money because we're not buying that out of season produce in the supermarkets, so because of our obsession with GW we just kick the poor even more!

[Rustynailer]

i hope so. Winter OWES me.

Yes and me too. I feel like I have been ripped off for at least 10 years, somethings got to give in the end

[paul tall]

Was anybody else riled like me a few days ago when a bunch of eco warriors were protesting at Gordon Brown about climate change? "What are you going to do about climate change Mr Brown?"

Leaving aside the pros and cons of the debate and ignoring for now whether these people were right or not (I assume they were more bulled up from media hype than science fact though).......the thing that really annoyed me is that these clowns protesting simply had no idea that they were giving Brown what he WANTS........a reason to levy more taxes.

I bet he was stood there thinking "stupid lentil eating studenty types, give it to me!"

[ribster]

I see the MET are now predicting that temperatures will plateau for the next two years (I'm sure someone was suggesting this in this thread, so good call!), but then are set to rise after that. So maybe it is a turning point. Whos to say that it will warm again after the plateau, they could be wrong. And before someone jumps on me about accepting the science that I like and rejecting that that I don't, yes they could be wrong about plateauing too. Either way, I find the idea that the warming is possibly going to stop for a while rather encouraging!

[laserguy]

I see the MET are now predicting that temperatures will plateau for the next two years (I'm sure someone was suggesting this in this thread, so good call!), but then are set to rise after that. So maybe it is a turning point. Whos to say that it will warm again after the plateau, they could be wrong. And before someone jumps on me about accepting the science that I like and rejecting that that I don't, yes they could be wrong about plateauing too. Either way, I find the idea that the warming is possibly going to stop for a while rather encouraging!

Well I've not seen the item you refer to ribster but the first thing that immediately sprung to my admittedly 'cold biased mind' was that,hey is our collective carbon emissions going to also plateau or even go into decline for the next two years? If not,what else other than natural influence could bring about this situation? Pehaps it's the MET's subtle way of realising that the climate is heading for a cool down and has nothing to do with carbon emissions etc,and then in two years time when the 'anticipated' return to rising temps fails to materialise they'll have conveniently forgotten about ever making such a prediction. Whatever,the situation has now become so ridiculous that the causative agent of ANY weather event/perceived change will be assigned entirely to our CO2 emissions. Just my opinion,mind!

[summer blizzard]

I may have dismissed the assertian of a turning point as rubbish in the beginning, however i am becoming increasingly confident of a below average Autumn to come and possibly winter, after the warmest 12 months on record, it is possible that we could get two or three below average seasons on the bounce.

[osmposm]

Just my opinion,mind!

That's right, LG, just your opinion - and couched in your usual moderate, wouldn't-dream-of-stirring-things-up sort of way.....not, of course, alone in that !

A gentle suggestion, though - perhaps it might be an idea to try and find the original statement described before commenting on it? Who knows, it might even offer an explanation for the paradox you describe.

Ribster, where did you find it - is it on the Hadley part of the site (I assume "MET" is the Met Office)?

SB, I agree - I now think it's certainly possible (though not nearly enough evidence yet even to say "likely") that our local climate is 'pausing for breath' on a longer climb upwards. This would not be unusual - what tends to happen in many dynamic systems is that change occurs in a serious of jerks with pauses in between. That's certainly how evolution seems to work, not to mention tectonic plate movement, and even my mother's deterioration from Alzheimer's.

[Stratos Ferric]

Well I've not seen the item you refer to ribster but the first thing that immediately sprung to my admittedly 'cold biased mind' was that,hey is our collective carbon emissions going to also plateau or even go into decline for the next two years? If not,what else other than natural influence could bring about this situation? Pehaps it's the MET's subtle way of realising that the climate is heading for a cool down and has nothing to do with carbon emissions etc,and then in two years time when the 'anticipated' return to rising temps fails to materialise they'll have conveniently forgotten about ever making such a prediction. Whatever,the situation has now become so ridiculous that the causative agent of ANY weather event/perceived change will be assigned entirely to our CO2 emissions. Just my opinion,mind!

I think that any foray into reasonably authored, scientifically based, assessment will clearly acknowledge that the climate has always fluctuated (much as any system does), but that recently we've added a positive forcing. If anything, the hubris about "all weather emanating from AGW" tends to emanate at least as much from the scpetical side of the argument as it does from the supporters of the hypothesis. The simple fact is that climate will always fluctuate up and down, even a cursory assessment of CET shows that across any thirty years the annual outturn would tend to be quite frequently +/- 0.5, and generally +/- 1.0C.

The attached plot sjows this clearly. Some people argue as if the AGW "camp" believe AGW is the only game in town; it isn't. The likelihood appears to be that for the time being it is the biggest single driver, but that does not mean that it is the majority driver (though it may be), or, most certainly, that it is the ONLY driver. For instance, if we had a major volcanic eruption then, for a year or two, we would expect to see a dip globally, but any such correction would short term.

The other thing the attached plot shows, and this is a point a number of us were making late last year and early this, is that the 10 year mean is currently running well ahead of the thirty year mean. For this to be sustained there would need to be some dramatic and sudden forcing entering the system, or else we would have needed to have reached a tipping point. I did pose this very question myself during the late autumn, and my own view at the time, as I recall, was "wait and see". In essence, that is still the position, however, the chartists view would be that we're due a stabilisng correction (see the pattern in the early C18th for the best available analogue).

The other point to note is that our local climate, v.v temperature, is very stable and relatively tight at present, what we've been losing in cold years dropping out of the beginning of each 30 year series, we've been recouping at the top end. If we do enter a steadying phase then - though this is actually a bit of a statistical quirk in a rising trend - we'll probably enter a passage where we'll be returning the lowest range across 30 years in our CET history, unless something very dramatic happens at the bottom end.

[ribster]

Ribster, where did you find it - is it on the Hadley part of the site (I assume "MET" is the Met Office)?

I heard it initially on the BBC news, then subsequently on the front of the guardian, I believe it made reference to the hadley site, but I will find out.

Found this link http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007.../weather.uknews, although can't find anything on the met office site.

Edited August 12, 2007 by ribster