“In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880.”
“There’s a contradiction between the results shown here and popular perceptions about climate trends,” [NASA's James] Hansen said. “In the last decade, global warming has not stopped.”
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) released its final report on 2009 surface temperatures Thursday, concluding:
2009 was tied for the second warmest year in the modern record, a new NASA analysis of global surface temperature shows. The analysis, conducted by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, also shows that in the Southern Hemisphere, 2009 was the warmest year since modern records began in 1880….
January 2000 to December 2009 was the warmest decade on record. Throughout the last three decades, the GISS surface temperature record shows an upward trend of about 0.2°C (0.36°F) per decade.
This is especially impressive because we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” The point is, notwithstanding the all-too-effective disinformation campaign of the anti-science crowd, it’s getting hotter “” thanks primarily to human emissions.
I usually show the combined global temperature record, but the split figure above for the hemispheres is interesting for two reasons. First, we see that 2009 set the record for the southern hemisphere, which is dominated by water.
Second, the figure suggests one reason why Americans have softened their views on global warming in the face of a well funded disinformation campaign pushing the “global cooling” myth — and general lame media coverage on the subject. Both 2008 and 2009 were not close to record-breaking for temps in the northern hemisphere. And indeed, during those years, parts of North America saw relatively cool temperatures. GISS and Hansen comment on this very point in the report:
The near-record temperatures of 2009 occurred despite an unseasonably cool December in much of North America. High air pressures in the Arctic decreased the east-west flow of the jet stream, while also increasing its tendency to blow from north to south and draw cold air southward from the Arctic. This resulted in an unusual effect that caused frigid air from the Arctic to rush into North America and warmer mid-latitude air to shift toward the north.
“Of course, the contiguous 48 states cover only 1.5 percent of the world area, so the U.S. temperature does not affect the global temperature much,’ said Hansen.
In total, average global temperatures have increased by about 0.8°C (1.5°F) since 1880.
“That’s the important number to keep in mind,” said Gavin Schmidt, another GISS climatologist. “In contrast, the difference between, say, the second and sixth warmest years is trivial since the known uncertainty “” or noise “” in the temperature measurement is larger than some of the differences between the warmest years.”
You can see NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt’s official interview here and a NASA video here. Schmidt explains why NASA shows slightly higher temperatures than the Met Office:
NASA: Why does GISS get a different answer than the Met Office Hadley Centre [a UK climate research group that works jointly with the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia to perform an analysis of global temperatures]?
Schmidt: It’s mainly related to the way the weather station data is extrapolated. The Hadley Centre uses basically the same data sets as GISS, for example, but it doesn’t fill in large areas of the Arctic and Antarctic regions where fixed monitoring stations don’t exist. Instead of leaving those areas out from our analysis, you can use numbers from the nearest available stations, as long as they are within 1,200 kilometers. Overall, this gives the GISS product more complete coverage of the polar areas.
NASA: Some might hear the word “extrapolate” and conclude that you’re “making up” data. How would you reply to such criticism?
Schmidt:The assumption is simply that the Arctic Ocean as a whole is warming at the average of the stations around it. What people forget is that if you don’t put any values in for the areas where stations are sparse, then when you go to calculate the global mean, you’re actually assuming that the Arctic is warming at the same rate as the global mean. So, either way you are making an assumption.
Which one of those is the better assumption? Given all the changes we’ve observed in the Arctic sea ice with satellites, we believe it’s better to assume the Arctic Ocean is changing at the same rate as the other stations around the Arctic. That’s given GISS a slightly larger warming, particularly in the last couple of years, relative to the Hadley Centre.
Even the Met Office now admits it is low-balling actual warming (see Finally, the truth about the Hadley/CRU data: “The global temperature rise calculated by the Met Office’s HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming”).
Related Posts:
- The hottest decade ends and since there’s no Maunder mininum “” sorry deniers! “” the hottest decade begins
- World Meteorological Organization and NOAA both report: 2000-2009 is the hottest decade on record
- Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira “” “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous”
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
2010, el nino is easing but expected to hang around for another 6 months
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
the sun is starting to wake up
http://www.solarcycle24.com/ (I know NASA does the work but solarcycle24.com is easy to read.)
An extreme negative Arctic Oscillation is making the Arctic very warm, (but colder elsewhere). So we have got a lot of rotten and first year ice that will go relatively quickly, a record low is worth backing.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/index.html
Time to check i predict to see what odds I can get for 2010 being a record breaker. oops they are still on last year.
https://www.ipredict.co.nz/Main.php?do=stock_detail&stock=TEMP.2009
This is interesting, but I would like an adjusted global temperature record with the influence from known factors (ENSO, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycle) removed. Tamino has discussed this in a recent post at his site, and the adjusted the temperature record to remove volcanoes and ENSO, resulting in a very interesting upward trend.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/exogenous-factors/#more-2150
Some of the comments on that post were written by Todd Friesen, who independently developed a similar record removing volcanoes, ENSO, and the solar cycle. His graph is here:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_PwOeFv7HIQE/S0ARx7eWURI/AAAAAAAAABc/URfsFDgfAIQ/s1600-h/GISS+Adjusted+(1975-2009).JPG
When Friesen put a rising trend expected from AGW, he got a simple model that mimics the recent rises and falls in the temperature record due to exogenous factors quite well:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_PwOeFv7HIQE/SxYFkUJh1zI/AAAAAAAAAA8/pTF7BFWo5z0/s1600-h/Actual+vs+Model+(smoothed).JPG
What does a statistical test of the model predict for 2010, given the current El Nino and low solar cycle influence? Here is what Friesen says:
Todd Friesen // January 2, 2010 at 9:42 pm | Reply
I’ve been doing my own modeling of climate for a couple of years, and I agree that adjusted for natural variability, 2009 is the warmest year on record. Using the GISS data, 2005 was the warmest year, and I would apply a -0.04C adjustment for solar, and a -0.05C for ENSO to adjust for 2005 to 2009. From the data, I see that 2009 is roughly 0.05C cooler than 2005. Based on my anthropogenic+natural model (adjusted for ENSO, solar, volcanoes), I would have expected both years to be roughly the same. (Anthropogenic forcings, i.e. GHGs, aerosols, various albedoes etc.) suggest about a 0.09C warming, which are roughly offset by ENSO and solar).
The model has about a standard deviation of 0.06C between model and actual annual global anomaly. 2005 was warmer than the model by about +0.06C (+ 1 s.d.), and 2009 is warmer by a little over +0.01C.
Prospectively, I expect 2010 will be +0.08C warmer than 2005 actual, with a land+ocean anomaly of +0.71C. Anthropogenic forcings will contribute about +0.10C of this +0.08C, solar: -0.03C, ENSO: +0.07C. (This doesn’t add up to +0.08C because 2005 actuals were +0.06C warmer than model).
Of course, these sorts of models don’t control for every global weather variable, just the most material ones.
Interestingly, my model would have expected 2003 to be the warmest year, but in this case, actual was below model by 0.06C (-1 s.d.).
Given no model bias, the chance of 2010 not breaking a new record is quite slim. A single-tail probability of less than -1.2 s.d. would be required (< 10%). The current El Nino (assuming it pans out for a few more months as per NOAA's predictions) is plenty strong enough to overcome any decline in solar irradiance relative to 2005. The 2010 El Nino impact is expected to be roughly the same as that for 1998. Not to say that the 1997-1998 El Nino was weaker (it won't be), but that much of the Nino impact from the 97-98 Nino was during the latter half of 1997. [End of quote]
So based on removing the known factors and putting in the expected rise from AGW, there is a 90% probability that 2010 will be the hottest year in the GISS record. This year will be interesting.
This forecast from CDC show a moderate El Niño will persist until July.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/people/wwang/cfs_fcst/
Note the high warm anomalies over North America!
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/people/wwang/cfs_fcst/images3/glbT2mMon.gif
So is likely a new record in Arctic sea-ice melt this year.
Here in the Pacific North West we are experiencing a record smashing warm spell with no end in sight. Some of our daily “lows” have been above the average “highs” by a number of degrees. The lawn is green and growing. The fruit trees in serious bud and the Alder trees as well. Spooky in my book.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/
Welcome to the El Niño, Leif!
From Peru, #4: Combined with Global Climatic Disruption!
“Although 2008 was the coolest year of the decade”
Yet the coolest year of the decade is still warmer than any year before that decade, except 1998. That is quite stunning.
Leif:
Check this:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/slp_01b.fnl.html
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfcwnd_01b.fnl.html
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmpmer_01b.fnl.html
All are from the NOAA map room:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/clim/glbcir.quick.shtml
The SSTs from this El Nino should have peaked and should start to decline now (in an *entirely* normal fashion, just like all the other El Nino’s over the past 20 years).
There was recently the first M-Class flare associated with a sunspot from cycle 24, the sun is waking up, and we’re on track for a solar maximum in 2012/2013 timeframe.
If you shift the ENSO SSTs by 5 months forward, that makes 2009 dominated by weak La Nina and ENSO-neutral conditions, and it was still tied for second place in the atmospheric record. Barring a significant volcano, 2010 should be the warmest ever. I’ll also hazard a guess that 2010 will be the warmest ever for the CONUS and be hotter than 1998 and the 1930s — that might be wishful thinking about the weather though.
Moderator: I think a comment of mine was lost in the spam filter this morning. I don’t have time to re-type it, so if it is still there, can it be retrieved?
For anyone trying to sort out the temperature record in the light of El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) influences, and volcanic eruption impacts, I recommend this post on Tamino’s site (also read the comments looking for Todd Friesen’s comments):
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2009/12/31/exogenous-factors/#more-2150
They adjust the temperature record for these known impacts and get a relatively consistent rising temperature result. I recommend that it is worth the time to read the post and comments.
What makes this data “official”? The public, for good reason, has zero confidence in any governmental agency promoting global warming.
Even if we could, so what? There’s no reason to believe it’s caused by me…or other humans. What a crock.
Ranger47:
so what caused the warmth?
El Niño was weak for most of 2009(and the year began with a La Niña!)so for it temperatures should not be matching the 1998 ones(as there was a Super-El Niño).
The Sun was in the deepest minimum in a century…
What else could have caused the warmth ouside Global Warming?!
Ranger47: And what data source do you trust, oil and coal companies? If I recall one oil company alone made over $100 billion. You sound like a employed shill. Do they even give you health care?
From Peru: Cliff Mass (Com. #4) talks a bit about the record braking low pressure areas that have everyone big eyed.
Ranger47 says: January 23, 2010 at 6:29 pm
How sad it must be waking up every morning and wondering, will gravity still keep your feet on the ground, will the electrolyte in your car battery will do what it did yesterday, will the sun will come up, will hemoglobin transport oxygen. It must be very distressing to live in a universe undefined, unpredictable and unknowable.
No wonder you’re so fearful. I’d be frightened, too.
4th attempt to post!
September’s unwelcome news, from the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain, was that if fossil fuel use continues on the present trend line, the planet will be an average of 4 degrees C warmer by the 2060s.
This month’s bad news came from the drilling ship JOIDES Resolution (Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling), which brought up cores from the ocean bottom containing sediments dating back 20 million years. The news was that when the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was last at 450 parts per million, the average global temperature was 3-6 degrees C hotter than now, and the sea level was 25-40 metres (80-130 ft) higher.
That is bad news because 450 parts per million is where we are hoping to halt the rise in CO2 in the atmosphere this time around. (We are currently at 390 ppm.) All the world’s major governments have agreed in principle that the warming must never be allowed to exceed 2 degrees C, because beyond that we risk runaway warming – and it was thought that 450 ppm would let us stop at that point. Not so, it would appear, or at least not for long. The leader of the JOIDES research team, Aradhna Tripati of the University of California at Los Angeles, put it bluntly: What we have shown is that in the last period when CO2 levels were sustained at levels close to where they are today, there was no icecap on Antarctica and sea levels were 25-40m higher.
Suspicions that the 450 ppm target is much too high have been growing for some time. Late in 2007 James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, made a public appeal at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union to move to a 350 ppm target. Hansen’s study of ancient climates had led him to the conclusion that the first time permanent ice appeared on the planet, after a complete absence for tens of millions of years, was when the amount of carbon dioxide fell to 425 ppm some 35 million years ago. His calculations had a possible error of plus or minus 75 ppm, so for safety’s sake he settled on 350 ppm as the long-term target for human stewardship of the atmosphere. Hansen even thought that 350 ppm might still be too high, because the “normal” level of CO2 during the 10,000 years of human civilisation, before we began burning fossil fuels, was only 280 ppm.
Now JOIDES has given us a more accurate measure of ancient climate, from closer to the present. By 20 million years ago, almost all the ice on the planet had been lost again, due to a prolonged period of volcanic activity in the Columbia River basin of North America. The carbon dioxide emitted by that activity had raised the average global temperature to 3-6 degrees C above the current level, and all the melted ice had raised the seal level by 25-40 metres. But the actual level of CO2 that caused all that was only 400 ppm. We will be there h. attempt to post. won’t even proof read it this time!
Doug B; For people like Ranger47 there is no gravity. The earth sucks. I would suggest a “vision quest” for him. Preferably in some of our sacred wilderness areas. If he gets his way they will be unrecognizable by his children’s time.
3rd try!
Sorry about the length of the above article. I was trying to shorten it but was afraid to spend too much time or it would get deleted! It’s from Gwynne Dyer’s website and titled, “An Avalanche of Evidence”.
The last sentence is supposed to read: “We will be there in five years but we better not stay there for very long or history will repeat itself.”
(Something’s wrong with my computer!!)
Doug Bostrum (#15), We KNOW what the future will be. We’re not afraid. You’re the one who is so mis-informed and obviously clueless! If anyone should be afraid it’s you! (Because of your ignorance).
#!5:
I’ve long believed that the complexity of determining a Quantum Mechanical interpretation of General Relativity is due entirely to the need to continue funding to Physics research institutes. They’ve been drinking at the trough of Big Science budgets for way too long, getting fat off of government grants. And while the government continues to fund research studies regurgitating this ‘Gravitational’ propaganda, I choose to be skeptical of the entire field of study. Since a quantum mechanical understanding of gravity is completely beyond my abilities to comprehend and modern scientists disagree over its details, Gravity must not exist at all, and I will *prove* it by leaping off a roof this afternoon…
Leif, (#4). I know what you mean! I have the same reaction when going outside in the middle of winter and seeing people out jogging with shorts on. It gives a very eerie, uneasy sensation! Almost nauseaus feeling!
espiritwater says: January 23, 2010 at 7:39 pm
“We KNOW what the future will be. We’re not afraid. You’re the one who is so mis-informed and obviously clueless! If anyone should be afraid it’s you! (Because of your ignorance).”
Oh, golly, now I’m a soccer ball being driven into my own goal!
Esprit, I’m sorry, I was making a sarcastic response to some poor gullible sap regurgitating half digested chunks of Club for Growth talking points further up the thread.
Believe me, I’ve got my feet firmly planted in the material world…
espritwater #19: I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. Doug was giving a sarcastic remark to drive-by poster ranger47 because of the latter’s obvious trolling.
Well, Doug was quicker than me. ;)
Re #10 – Paul -is there a 5-year floating average done for the last chart on the website you posted?
It’s nice that you guys all have such faith in the data. My impression is that it’s based on scattered surface stations representing a very tiny percentage of the globe and even that limited info is collected by who knows how many different people and is subject to all their errors and then requires subjective adjustment.
I don’t think we know how to measure global temperature yet.
Rick: Well if you don’t trust the temperatures try looking around. You might of noticed that the Arctic Ice cover is in serious decline as well as the majority of the worlds glaciers. Migration patterns have been changing, growth seasons have lengthened and shifted. There are numerous bits of collaborating evidence that over power any minor discrepancies that might have evaded detection. That is the reason science is convinced green house warming is reality, even though how it might play out remains mirky. What science will tell you is that the future climate will not resemble what you have grown to know and love. And being that life has evolved within climatic stability, the odds are that you are not going to like climatic instability very much.
In many ways, “how” we measure global surface temperatures is irrelevant from an “absolute” point of view so long as that measurement is consistent. There are arguments about why meters are better than yards, but there are trivial methods of translating the one into the other. What matter is not which unit or standard is employed so much as whether that unit is employed in a consistent manner.
Rick’s comments in #27 strike me as fretting over units rather than the methodological soundness of how those units are used. The peer-reviewed literature gives no reason to fret over that methodological soundness.
If my impressions on this point are mistaken, then there are logically robust criticisms that are themselves publishable in the peer-reviewed literature which Rick can present to us here to justify his suspicions.
Rick says: January 23, 2010 at 11:05 pm
“I don’t think we know how to measure global temperature yet.”
The good news is, you don’t have to take anything on faith.
Check it out:
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/20ctrend.htm
Here’s John Christie talking about how he doesn’t feel global climate measurements from Hadley are accurate:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/environment/a-critical-perspective-on-climategate
Is there any merit to what he’s saying?
NASA’s saying a 1.5 degree Fahrenheit increase since 1880. Given the concerns of John Christie and others like him (to me he’s the second-most credentialed denier after Richard Lindzen, with more of a meteorology background than Lindzen), should there be a plus-minus of one-tenth of a degree or something (so 1.4 – 1.6 degrees of warming)?
I’m wondering if that would help persuade the least frothing-at-the-mouth and Fort Knox-vault-close-minded of the deniers that their 10,000 nitpicking denial-based concerns don’t fundamentally change the equation of global warming or anything else about reality.
#27: True, measurements can always be perfected. However, with surface station coverage steadily improving plus satellite measurements it is highly unlikely that with better coverage there’ll be a major shift away from what weve been seeing for the past few decades. To take the oft-quoted doctor analogy: If your physician told you that if you continued smoking there was a 80%+ chance of you developing lung cancer, it would probably be very wise to stop. Maybe nothing will happen, but would you take that chance? Climate science is like that, only with the best estimates ranging in the 95%+ for likelihood of considerable global warming and resulting climate change.
Ranger47: What you fail to comprehend is that man is controlling, not the weather per say, but the climate, as we speak and the vast majority of world scientists, a goodly majority of the worlds citizens, as well as numerous obvious physical indicators will testify to. You fail to be convinced that man is the culprit in the equation, I do not. Evidence appears to be a lost cause on you as you parrot the corporate swan song. Tell me if you succeed in delaying needed social justice and those corporations win, will they be volunteering health care? Livable wage? Clean water? Breathable air? Food untainted with pesticides? ???
The thing that amazes me the most is that “Corporations” KNOW what is coming down even if you do not. It is in their immediate self interest to use your “ignorance” to improve their bottom line. I used the term “swan song” deliberately in that when it becomes obvious, and it will, that corporations have been lying to humanity all these years the “game” will be up and humanity WILL change the rules. I vote for a rule change, hopefully before it is too late. Not only for me and mine but you and yours as well.
Well, gee, Rick, when you stick a thermometer in someone’s mouth and it reads “105F” so you:
1. Take them to the emergency room
- or -
2. Say, “oh, it’s just one measurement representing a very tiny percentage of your body, until we can put a microthermometer into every cell of your body, we just can’t trust the data”
Actually, Rick’s problem is that he’s obsessed about small random errors and doesn’t believe in our ability to systematically reduce those errors.
Rick wants science to be perfectly clean and not have any messy errors and randomness in it. But even if you look at something considered to be highly precise, like particle collider experiments, there’s errors that occur when particles miss detectors or go down the beam pathways, there’s missing information in neutrinos, and all the “proof” of the existence of new particles is done statistically. Those experiments are actually supremely messy, and they have to be modeled very carefully and then statistical cuts have to be made and physicists look for excess numbers of events in certain cuts to establish that the physics that they predict is ocurring (and then infer from the rate of events things like the top quark mass). All very messy, and there’s no good way to just put a top quark on a scale and weigh it and get a number out.
Similarly, the global atmospheric temperature record is messy, but scientists have applied statistical analysis to come up with a good estimate. That still isn’t trusted by people like Rick because they want something as simple and obvious as measuring the length of a 2×4.
Still, the evidence is:
- geological evidence of glacial retreat confirms the temperature record
- summer northern arctic ice coverage confirms the temperature record
- theoretical models of global warming confirms the temperature record
- migration of animals, flowering of planets, etc confirms the temperature record (involving thousands of biological ‘thermometers’, most immune to UHI effects).
- satellite measurements confirm the temperature record.
- ocean heat content records confirm the temperature record.
- measurement of earth radiation budget imbalance confirms the temperature record
- satellite and terrestrial measurements of sea level rise confirms the temperature record
- satellite measurements of earth oblateness (J^2) confirms the temperature record
That all suggests that the corrections to the temperature record produce a data set which is useful enough to do climate science against, despite its known inaccuracies.
The fact that you can’t point at a single measurement instrument, however, which is free of bias and precise to +/- 0.01C that reads out “global temperature” is going to always give people like Rick wiggle room to doubt, because they’re not capable of looking at the overall big picture (or simply choose not to).
dhogaza: You miss the point. You stick a thermoeter in your butt and ten others and they all read 105F. You and the ten others should go to the doc. But don’t ask me and millions of others whose temp is 98.6F to take the medicine you need to get well. We’re ok…we don’t need, nor want to pay for meds we don’t need.
That’s part of your data problem. You’ve quit measuring in a few thousand places…which just happened to be cooler.
Ranger47: You and your kind have been poisoning the air, water, and land, and consequently have delivered humanity to the “door step of doom.” Now that the evidence of your transgressions mounts you refuse “medicine” for the masses. You defiantly line up with fingers in your ears and head where the sun don’t shine and scream, “It ain’t happening.”
Ranger47, so just keep on dishing out and ignoring the measured posts that are patiently explaining the various lines of evidence. Please answer to Lamont, who’s laid these out in very plain English. It doesn’t help, nor does the issue of anthropogenic climate change go away by sticking fingers in your ears and shouting “LALALALA”.
So, Ranger47, your argument is that the entire science of climatology has just happened to only measure things at all the wrong times and all the wrong places. You however magically “just know” that all those measurements are wrong or meaningless. Obviously you don’t “just know” this based on any actual measurements since, as you’ve so carefully “proven” with your ipse dixit announcement, any such measurement would have to be wrong. Rather, you’ve simply “proven” in the same pontifical declaration that everything is OK.
You don’t really bother yourself with little things like logic or critical reasoning, much less scientific methodology, do you?
Ranger47 says: January 24, 2010 at 3:10 pm
If faith is all you’ve got, say a prayer. Quietly, strictly between you and God. Thanks!
So, hottest since 1880.
So the record we are using now is from just over 130 years to prove global warming is (1) bad for us, and (2) man made?
How about going back, oh, let’s say, 2,000 years or so. Was there a time when temperature were hotter during that period than over the last 130 years, a time when there was no industry causing those horrible C02(one of the basic building blocks of life) emissions?
This article proves nothing. It makes no link between man-made C02 and global warming, and is misleading at best. It is simply more propaganda for world taxation.
Geddy, we were not pouring CO2 into the atmosphere 2,000 years ago. Your comment is just plain silly.
So many errors in so few words, truly I must congratulate you…
There’s one truth there – the instrumental record only goes back about 130 years, true.
It doesn’t “prove” global warming is man-made.
Physics proves that CO2 warms the planet – be thankful for that, we’d be back to “snowball earth” if it weren’t true (look that up, if you must).
The only question is how much and how fast.
The warming we’ve been seeing the past few decades closely match scientific predictions as to how much and how fast it will warm given the amount of CO2 we’re pouring into the atmosphere.
In other words, science has made a prediction, and observations match the prediction, causing increased confidence in the prediction.
As far as “bad for us”, there’s been a lot of research into what the implications of continuing warming. The fact that predicted warming is being observed doesn’t prove “it is bad for us”, rather it’s a whole bunch of research done by a whole bunch of scientists that causes us to worry.
Globally, no, the overwhelming evidence from a variety of sources tells us that *global* temperatures are overall warmer now than they were over the last 1,000+ years, and most likely warmer now than at any time during the last 2,000 years.
Exactly right, CO2 levels were lower, and it wasn’t as warm as now. You’re catching on.
As far as the “one of the basic building blocks of life” bit goes, so is water. If you think that water, then, is always harmless, allow me to outfit you with concrete boots and toss you into they icy, briny, deep blue sea.
No, the article per se only shows that those who claim it’s cooling or that we’re entering a new ice age are lying out their rear. It shows that it’s warming just as science predicts it will on average.
CO2 and photons don’t give a rat’s rear about taxation of any time. CO2 causes warming regardless of your political beliefs.
Oh, yes, Geddy, we know that you’re going to come back with some baloney about the Medieval Warming Period. Don’t bother, that’s why I said “global” in a couple of strategic places up there, there’s no evidence that the MWP was a synchronized global warming.
To Doug and Jason: Sorry about that! I thought Doug was a troll.
Geddy says: January 24, 2010 at 6:13 pm
“It is simply more propaganda for world taxation.”
Any chance of being taken seriously suddenly vanishes as irrelevant ideology is blurted out.
Something to remember: curiosity is not ideological. The folks doing the fundamental research in this field would -still- be following their sense of curiosity even if nobody else knew or cared what they were doing.
espiritwater says: January 24, 2010 at 7:26 pm
“To Doug and Jason: Sorry about that! I thought Doug was a troll.”
No problem! Troll or not troll, it’s a little bit context dependent. Besides, I need a haircut and have not shaved this weekend, so I do look like I just came out from under a bridge.
Geddy, that last sentence was highly informative of the real motive behind your “skepticism”, and it is true of many “skeptics” of AGW out there. You don’t like what AGW implies economically and/or politically and therefore mix the science with the politics. What we as a society or set of societies can do, is an entirely separate issue to what the science is telling us.
Science tells us how it is, and what will liekly happen, and what we’d have to do to avoid what will happen.
Politics and industry/business/technology tells us how we should go about it, which is where the disagreements come in.
“It is simply more propaganda for world taxation.”
We keep hearing about this global conspiracy – politicians funding scientists to produce flawed science in order to provide a pretext for higher taxes and other opressive government actions. You would imagine then that when politicians got together at Copenhagen they would use it as an opportunity to create a masterplan to introduce such measures and ultimately (as we know this is their real goal) to create a world government.
Now whatever one thinks of the agreement that came out of Copenhagen it ain’t that.
I extend an open invitation to Geddy and Ranger47 to conclusively prove AGW wrong by taking a walk across the Northwest Passage area around the end of August any summer from now on. PLEASE invite all your friends. Let us know what you find. PLEASE also document your findings on video.
Here’s a hint: Prior to 2007, you’d have found ice.
This is very simply explained. Garbage in = garbage out. End of subject.
Whoops, people – the game is up. JOHN aka “Sherlock” has snooped us out. End of subject (or not). Go and troll somewhere else.
Doug, I thought you said all of the post (#15). Just skimmed over the first line which indicated it was said mostly by Roger. Guess I should have looked closely before barking.
I loved your first reply (reference to a soccer ball being kicked). Ha! Even laughed about it later when I remembered it! Sorry again for the mistake. :)
3rd. attempt to post!
Doug, I thought you had said the entire post (#15). Just skimmed over the first line which indicated it was said mostly by Roger. Guess I should have looked closely before barking.
I loved your first reply (reference to a soccer ball being kicked). Ha! Even laughed about it later when thought about it. (Good attitude!) Sorry again for the mistake. :)
To you climate change deniers out there – just wondering if you also deny:
1) that CO2 is increasing in the a oceans?
2) that increased CO2 in oceans is harmful to coral reefs and shellfish because they will ultimately dissolve if present trends continue?
Put all of the climate change deniers (they are NOT skeptics) in a room full of CO2 and then ask them if excessive CO2 is harmless. Make it a party and Invite excessive CO2 loving Michele Bachmann too.
And of course, the more land and ocean that’s continually being exposed due melting ice, the faster the heat absorption rate and resultant temperature increase. It isn’t rocket science.