In The News

[su rui ke]

A lot of credible sources state that the world reached the peak oil production this year. Peak Coal is apparently scheduled to be reached in 2011. Peak natural gas is scheduled (by some) to be in around 2025.

That might be correct for oil - although all of these things are very hard to predict. I think there is still 'a lot' of coal down there though and would be very surprised if production is anywhere near a peak. Whether you would want to burn it all though is another question.

[Methuselah]

But, but, but.......are we not close to running out of fossil fuels? If it is the burning of fossil fuels which is being blamed for temperature rises, then surely when the fossil fuels have all been used up the temperature will come down again? Or will the CO2 continue to hang around?

I reckon that the most useful thing that mankind can do is get a blooming move on with creating a clean and renewable source of energy.

Absolutely, noggin!

[Gray-Wolf]

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-canada-trees_wittjan02,0,539661.story?goback=%2Egde_141485_member_30015480

Not good news

[Guest mycroft]

Seems things are'nt as cut and dried as some would believe as far as Arctic temps

http://notrickszone.com/2010/09/21/a-light-in-siberia/

[Argyllcraig]

Peak coal seems a bit of a claim... we are still being taught as geographers that even the uk has around 300 years of coal in the ground.

Again, i think the argument would be whether you want to burn it or not.

[Thundery wintry showers]

Well, those who predicted an Ice Age in the 1970s were not necessarily the scientific mainstream. The 1979 book "Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery", which I own a copy of, has been quoted as predicting an oncoming ice age, but looking closely at the book it also provides a hypothesis that anthropogenic greenhouse emissions could overturn that and warm the planet.

Without AGW it would be a case of when, not if, we plunge into the next ice age, as we are only in an interglacial.

I reckon that the most useful thing that mankind can do is get a blooming move on with creating a clean and renewable source of energy.

Aye, I can't argue with that!

[Gray-Wolf]

Seems things are'nt as cut and dried as some would believe as far as Arctic temps

http://notrickszone....ght-in-siberia/

Well that's a relief!! (maybe someone should tell the permafrost/sea ice?)

[Guest mycroft]

Well, those who predicted an Ice Age in the 1970s were not necessarily the scientific mainstream. The 1979 book "Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery", which I own a copy of, has been quoted as predicting an oncoming ice age, but looking closely at the book it also provides a hypothesis that anthropogenic greenhouse emissions could overturn that and warm the planet.

Without AGW it would be a case of when, not if, we plunge into the next ice age, as we are only in an interglacial.

Aye, I can't argue with that!

I believe James Hansen was one of those predicting an ice age,don't know how more

mainstream you can get? though i am sure with a bit of digging around some more names

might be found

[jethro]

http://www.chicagotr...member_30015480

Not good news

That article is slightly misleading.

The biggest cause of Pine Beetle infestation and spread has been the logging and building industries reliance upon Lodgepole Pine. Any form of vast mono-culture will always be susceptible to the spread of pests and diseases. There are species which are not true hosts, (Douglas-fir, true firs, spruce, larch, and incense cedar) they are occasionally attacked but broods rarely develop - a switch to these species would stop the Pine Beetle problem.

Another problem has been the drive to produce as much as possible from every acre, resulting in over-crowded and weakened trees, this in turn makes them highly susceptible to attack.

The idea that the old-growth northern forest should be protected for as long as possible with logging curtailed to preserve the carbon stored within them, is I guess a noble idea but really quite counter productive. It is the older, weaker tress which are more susceptible plus if there is, or will be an impact from climate change on the beetle population, it will be from a steady march Northwards as the snow line rises with warming temperatures. Much better to have a younger more diverse population of trees in the Northern areas to curtail the spread. Young, growing trees intake of CO2 is much, much greater than mature trees.

[stewfox]

I notice the Artic Oil and Gas conference now gets prime time BBC News attention. Will be interesting to see what Russia leaves for the rest

http://www.informaglobalevents.com/event/Arctic

[knocker]

I notice the Artic Oil and Gas conference now gets prime time BBC News attention. Will be interesting to see what Russia leaves for the rest

http://www.informagl...om/event/Arctic

Having heard the piece this morning my guess is very little. If you are interested in hearing the report from R4 Today prog. you can catch it here. There is even a Churchill quote!

http://news.bbc.co.u...000/9021947.stm

Edited September 22, 2010 by weather ship

[Guest mycroft]

Well that's a relief!! (maybe someone should tell the permafrost/sea ice?)

Why has all the sea ice/permafrost melted?

[Gray-Wolf]

Why has all the sea ice/permafrost melted?

All?? I don't think so?

Here's something to cheer you my;

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100922132002.htm

[Guest mycroft]

All?? I don't think so?

Here's something to cheer you my;

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100922132002.htm

How they come to that conclusion is beyound me! how can some thing be halted when it was not happening?

The temp record shows that the world cooled from 1940ish to the 1970ish possibly due to negative PDO,AMO.??

To say ocean cooling halted global warming..even before the term was in common use sounds like more double speak..or am i missing some thing

Glad to see Jones back earning his pay and not on gardening leave,plus he's recognized ocean cycles at last :o ..must have been all that fresh air

Edited September 23, 2010 by mycroft

[knocker]

I know this will bring great joy to many on here-the latest study from the Hadley Centre.

Met office warns of regular 40C heatwaves.

Britain could regularly bask in temperatures of more than 40C and endure much hotter heatwaves even if greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control, a study has found. The warmest days of summer could be more than 6C hotter by 2040, with the highest increases in eastern parts of the country, such as East Anglia.

The study by the Met Office Hadley Centre found that these changes were possible even if the world fulfilled the commitment, made last December at the Copenhagen climate summit, to limit the global temperature increase to 2C. The global temperature has already increased by 0.7C since pre-industrial times and this year is on course to be either the warmest or second warmest on record.

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/weather/article2737220.ece

[Guest mycroft]

Oh dear this seems to be a bit of a own goal

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/23/rcs-response-to-mcshane-and-wyner-the-teams-steaming-pile-of-snip/#more-25226

[PersianPaladin]

http://www.energywat...0-07-2007ms.pdf

http://www.sciencedi...5c6cddc44cbed20

Two studies concerning Peak Coal.

Edited September 23, 2010 by PersianPaladin

[sunny starry skies]

Oh dear this seems to be a bit of a own goal

http://wattsupwithth...nip/#more-25226

Indeed it is, from watts the weatherman, disinformer-in-chief over the pond. Accusing others of misusing data! McShane and Wyner have attracted not one, but two rebuttals for their garbage paper:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~tingley/Blakeley_Discussion_Tingley_Submitted.pdf

"Within the paleoclimate context, where the expectation is that each proxy is weakly correlated to the northern hemisphere mean

(for two reasons: proxies generally have a weak correlation with local climate, which in turn is weakly correlated with a hemispheric average) the LASSO as used by MW2010 is simply not an appropriate tool. It throws away too much information."

http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/notyet/inpress_Schmidt_etal_2.pdf

"Assessing the skill of methods that do not work well (such as Lasso) and concluding that no method can therefore work well, is logically flawed. Additional problems exist in their assessment procedure – reducing the size of the hold out periods to 30 years from 46 years in M08, for instance, makes it more difficult to meaningfully diagnose statistical skill."

So the McShane and Wyner paper that attempted to claim to disprove the whole of palaeoclimate science by using dodgy statistics is, in the words of the Cat from Red Dwarf, deader than corduroy. Not surprisingly of course, it has gone the way of other such papers, like McLean et al, that somehow make it past the review process, only to be publicly eviscerated by rebuttals. Of course, people like Watts gullibly, or deliberately, report on them as if they have rewritten the science. Sadly Watts has shown far too many times he does not know what he is talking about, and will happily repost anything contrary or misleading about the science of climate change, be it steven goddard's perpetual nonsense on the cryosphere, or Monckton's inane rantings. And he has the cheek to claim others' data analysis is flawed! Speaking of Monckton, some other news - he's had his rear handed to him by a large group of climate scientists regarding his false testimony to Congress:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton-response.pdf

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-scientists-respond-to-Moncktons-misinformation.html

Some of Monckton's arguments have been used by people here, so the report for Congress is worth a read!

The disinformation movement succeds in that it forced hard-working professional climate scientists in a variety of fields to devote time to debunk yet more garbage, rather than pushing on with the science.

Another interesting read here:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/billions-of-blow-dryers.html

http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/people/gjohnson/Recent_AABW_Warming_v3.pdf

...though maybe for 'new research' - looks like some of the missing heat from Earth's energy budget is reporting in - from the deep oceans, specifically warming of Antarctic Bottom Water.

[Guest mycroft]

Two whole rebuttal's, :blink:

And if McShane and Wyner paper is wrong then one would have say that the premise and method of the hockey stick is wrong...seiing that they used the same data,methods etc.

Edited September 24, 2010 by mycroft

[Gray-Wolf]

Very Timely S.S.S.

I'd seen another paper in the Indian Ocean that was noting similar in the deep ocean currents.

When raised some folk don't seem to get the impact of 'small' changes on the global system but I think they fail to understand the amount of heat it takes to warm that amount of water, energy now free to work in other places whilst surface temps are impacting by the 'warming' of returning bottom waters. If we are measuring it now we know that there is upwards of 70yrs of that 'warming' already in the deep sea currents.

When you are in a place where your seas are warming your atmosphere which in turn we have made able to hold more heat (to warm more ocean water) we can 'step change' into a more rapid phase of warming. If you've broken the 'thermostat' of the planet on top of that then what?

[barrel1234]

It is incredible that there are so many contradicting news stories these days to cover any view one has on climate change, you can find article upon article in the news to back up whatever stance that you might have although I have to say that most of the news rightly or wrongly on average is going ahead with Human forced global warming.

Information and stats are always difficult to break down and examine, especially where there can be issues such as looking in change 'hot spots' where change is happening quickly in one area which can lead people to come up with a stance on climate change (lets face it, its much more interesting to read about things that are happening quickly for the general public), but the stance that people take based on these location studies and following news stories could in many cases be completely wiped out by looking at smaller changes over a wider area worldwide. It is strange how data can be displayed and the subsequent news stories that can get everyone excited sometimes rightly or sometimes completely without need.

An example of this is glacial ice, when you hear in the news that glaciers are melting fast all over the world this is a fallacy, in some areas they are growing. Unless the mass and size of every glacier in the world is closely monitored it is impossible to know what the hell is going on, from what I have read I understand that most glaciers in new zealand are growing, and also Antarctica as a whole recently has more ice cover (even though the west wide has seen a drop in ice cover this is more than made up by increased cover on other areas)????????????

I mean what the hell is going on? surely we have the technology and the resolve for there to be more average studies instead of cherry picking in either one direction or another.

I personally believe that the news is very biased in favor of Human forced global warming, I don't have have a strong stance although I am leaning to the side where I think that its all being quite exaggerated, but I remain with a very open mind to both sides to the argument, the problem is the lack of data, too many of the forecasts are based on models where the inputs are junk in the first place because we don't yet understand the feedbacks that they put into these models and simulations. Remember that saying ''Junk In...... Junk Out'' yet on almost a weekly basis there is some scientific model that reaches the news headlines.

It truly boggles the mind why we try and pretend that we know so much about whats going on with our climate, maybe a lot of it is down to funding and the pressure to come up with conclusions. If I was being funded to conduct studies I would feel under pressure to come up with some conclusions otherwise the next year I would be worried about being unemployed.

Just some food for thought.

Edited September 24, 2010 by barrel1234

[blitzen]

It is incredible that there are so many contradicting news stories these days to cover any view one has on climate change, you can find article upon article in the news to back up whatever stance that you might have although I have to say that most of the news rightly or wrongly on average is going ahead with Human forced global warming.

Very true! A refreshing post.

[VillagePlank]

Speaking of Monckton, some other news - he's had his rear handed to him by a large group of climate scientists regarding his false testimony to Congress:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton-response.pdf

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-scientists-respond-to-Moncktons-misinformation.html

Some of Monckton's arguments have been used by people here, so the report for Congress is worth a read

A good point raised by Schmidt hidden in there:

Monckton’s premise that current concern rests on the supposedly unprecedented current temperatures is simply false. It is well known that past climates have had much warmer temperatures than today and much colder temperatures as well. The difference between the Cretaceous hothouse and Snowball Earth is vastly bigger than possible changes projected for the 21st Century. But the point is not the absolute temperature today, or in 2100, but in the rapidity of the change and the fact that society – in a multitude of respects – is adapted to the relatively stable conditions that have existed over the last few centuries.

ie - it's not the quantity of C0₂ it's the rate of change and life's adaptability to fast changing climate because of that rate of change.

Compelling.

Edited September 24, 2010 by VillagePlank

[barrel1234]

The thing that I am still trying to get my head around is if ;-

A) warming causes an increase in CO2

An increase in CO2 causes warming

C) Both of the above

It seems to me that there is overall consensus that it is C in the press but a growing number of A's popping up in the press. Seeing as this is the fundamental bit of all the carbon argument I am still left in a relative no mans land what to believe.

Of course Climate is so complex it cannot be controlled by only the above, but this is the bread and butter of the whole carbon debate, and to be honest im really not sure what to believe, given the IPCC's track record I am not willing to accept anything that I am told by them unless I look at the evidence myself. I really don't think that the real debate and analysis has really started yet but after doing quite a lot of reading I find it scary that so many researchers studying climate change factors specialise too much on any one small part of the Climate system and that they are missing the big picture.

[Methuselah]

My guess is that, if we could somehow take humanity out of the equation, all three have probably been true at some time or other, in the past at least...

The question we are left with is: does anthropogenic CO₂ cause warming? And, surely the only answer to that can be 'yes'. At least as, as yet, no-one's provided any evidence to the contrary??