Warming Then And Now?

[TheLurch]

Some readers might appreciate knowing what the source is.

NOAA: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/pcn/pcn-recons.html

[Truthseeker]

Reconstructions are necessarily "noisy" - there are fairly large error bounds on the temperatures extracted from things like tree rings and sediment cores. So my bet would be that the data from the South China Sea would be within the error bounds of the global temperature. You can get a sense of things here:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]3429[/ATTACH]

Some readers might appreciate knowing what the source is.

[TheLurch]

So you consider the South China Sea a "single location"! Anyway, I wonder what was the average temperature anomaly for the rest of the world at about the same time compared to the South China Sea.

Reconstructions are necessarily "noisy" - there are fairly large error bounds on the temperatures extracted from things like tree rings and sediment cores. So my bet would be that the data from the South China Sea would be within the error bounds of the global temperature. You can get a sense of things here:

fig6-10b.jpg

[Truthseeker]

Finding a single location that was warm back then doesn't change this at all. Until you get enough of them to show that previous global reconstructions were off, you're just waving anecdotes around.

Which, incidentally, is Watts' specialty. So i'm not surprised that's your source on this.

So you consider the South China Sea a "single location"! Anyway, I wonder what was the average temperature anomaly for the rest of the world at about the same time compared to the South China Sea.

[TheLurch]

News from http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/0...er-than-today/

"While government science and media begin the ramp-up to claim 2014 as the “hottest year ever” China’s Sea’s biggest bivalve shows that the Middle Ages were warmer than today, when Carbon Dioxide was lower." Coral samples also show that.

"Dr. Soon added: 'The UN’s climate panel should never have trusted the claim that the medieval warm period was mainly a European phenomenon. It was clearly warm in South China Sea too.'”

I'm not sure what the point is. We have global reconstructions that incorporate readings from a variety of geographical locations. They show that, while many regions of the Earth warmed during the period of roughly 800-1400, they didn't warm synchronously. As such, the global mean temperature appears to have been relatively stable during this period.

Finding a single location that was warm back then doesn't change this at all. Until you get enough of them to show that previous global reconstructions were off, you're just waving anecdotes around.

Which, incidentally, is Watts' specialty. So i'm not surprised that's your source on this.

[Truthseeker]

News from http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/0...er-than-today/

"While government science and media begin the ramp-up to claim 2014 as the “hottest year ever” China’s Sea’s biggest bivalve shows that the Middle Ages were warmer than today, when Carbon Dioxide was lower." Coral samples also show that.

"Dr. Soon added: 'The UN’s climate panel should never have trusted the claim that the medieval warm period was mainly a European phenomenon. It was clearly warm in South China Sea too.'”

[tabibito]

Maybe there will be a nice peaceful resolution to that problem, but I'm glad I won't live to find out.

I suspect that this might be a matter of wishful thinking.

[phank]

With regard to the sea surface temperature graph though
As far as I can tell - no one is arguing with the historical data and overall shape of that graph, just with the fudging of the most recent bit - the 2006 reading being fully 1 degree under where it should be.

The corrected graph[ATTACH=CONFIG]1073[/ATTACH]which still has all the peaks and troughs in place, with only the point for 2006 moved upward - so the historical ups and downs, and higher than current temperatures are still showing, and presumably valid. Unless those were falsified too, and the author of the critical article found it unnecessary to address that particular falsification.

No question historical (implied) global temperatures have been considerably higher and lower than today, and even the worst-case AGW predictions fall well short of accepted high global temperatures if you go back into the past far enough. Certainly we have solid enough estimates to conclude that the biosphere adapted to such times readily enough, though our granularity is not sufficient to determine whether global temperature change in the past occurred at current rates. There is surely some upper bound to the rate of change which evolution can track.

What the graph indicates is that a couple of degrees is quite a large swing, both in historical terms and in knock-on effects like sea level rises. And that's where the trouble of a 2 or 3 degree temperature rise really happens. A couple of thousand years ago, people just basically folded their tents and moved uphill. Not so easy to fold up New York (or all of Bangladesh) and relocate. Worse yet, the world was not jam-packed with as many humans as it could support (and perhaps more), who were squeezing all they could (often by artificial means) out of every square inch of arable land. So even if we COULD fold up New York or Bangladesh to relocate it, what uncontested livable land could we move it to?

So here we are gnashing our teeth over the unpalatable costs of reducing our carbon footprint, because doing so at all will mean economic losers as well as winners, and many of the potential losers have a lot of political clout. What sort of political fallout do we suppose there would be when 1/4 of the entire global human population needs a new place to live, and it's ALL spoken for already? Maybe there will be a nice peaceful resolution to that problem, but I'm glad I won't live to find out.

[tabibito]

Bah - I got those graphs from a site that looked like it was supporting climate warming.

So - there's no way for me to personally determine the validity of any data I might find.

With regard to the sea surface temperature graph though
As far as I can tell - no one is arguing with the historical data and overall shape of that graph, just with the fudging of the most recent bit - the 2006 reading being fully 1 degree under where it should be.

The corrected graph3000yr_2006b.gifwhich still has all the peaks and troughs in place, with only the point for 2006 moved upward - so the historical ups and downs, and higher than current temperatures are still showing, and presumably valid. Unless those were falsified too, and the author of the critical article found it unnecessary to address that particular falsification.

[Poor Debater]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]1071[/ATTACH]
Do the records for the past 10 000 years of core ice temperatures in Greenland show a pattern perhaps?

If they do, that's not global.

But even if they don't - Greenland is a lot colder today than it was 900 years ago.

Also incorrect. Sorry, but you've been misinformed by the armchair scientists of the denialosphere. That graph is based on the data of Alley 2000, where the most recent datum in the core was 95 years BP. In geosciences, "BP" means "Before Present", where "Present" is defined to be 1950 AD. So the most recent measurement in that core (and on your graph) dates from 1855, well before the current warming.

You can find the original data here.

And sea temperatures dating back through the last 3 000 years show some interesting peaks and lows - why, we're almost back up to the base line
[ATTACH=CONFIG]1072[/ATTACH]

And to "prove" your argument, you trot out perhaps the most dishonest graph in the history of this debate. Here's what one real scientist said about this, when he wrote to notify its authors of their errors:

Willie & Noah,

Attached is a draft of a couple slides I plan to present, which strongly suggest that your team fabricated the 2006 data point to hide the increase in Sargasso Sea surface temperature.

You plotted your 2006 point too low by more than a degree C. If this was an honest arithmetic mistake or silly drafting error, now would be the time to explain it and correct it. If you let me know before my presentation, I will be happy to include your explanation.

Best regards,

Mark Boslough

I did not get a response.

[klaus54]

The warming we're seeing now is not part of a cycle of any kind.








Since the mid-20th century, human activity is in fact responsible for essentially all of the observed warming. See:
*Tett, Simon FB, et al. "Estimation of natural and anthropogenic contributions to twentieth century temperature change." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984–2012) 107.D16 (2002): ACL-10.
*Meehl, Gerald A., et al. "Combinations of natural and anthropogenic forcings in twentieth-century climate." Journal of Climate 17.19 (2004): 3721-3727.
Stone, DáithíA, et al. "The detection and attribution of climate change using an ensemble of opportunity." Journal of climate 20.3 (2007): 504-516.
*Lean, Judith L., and David H. Rind. "How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006." Geophysical Research Letters 35.18 (2008).
*Huber, Markus, and Reto Knutti. "Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from changes in Earth/'s energy balance." Nature Geoscience 5.1 (2012): 31-36.
*Gillett, N. P., et al. "Improved constraints on 21st‐century warming derived using 160 years of temperature observations." Geophysical Research Letters 39.1 (2012).
*Wigley, Tom ML, and B. D. Santer. "A probabilistic quantification of the anthropogenic component of twentieth century global warming." Climate dynamics 40.5-6 (2013): 1087-1102.
*Jones, Gareth S., Peter A. Stott, and Nikolaos Christidis. "Attribution of observed historical near‒surface temperature variations to anthropogenic and natural causes using CMIP5 simulations." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 118.10 (2013): 4001-4024.



Not just over the past two decades.

A good resource for sea ice index data from nsidc.org:


http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/

[tabibito]

Greenland Ice Graph.jpg

If this were a cycle, then we would be seeing A LOT of cycles, over and over again. You haven't shown that. All you've shown is that some people are capable of seeing patterns in the noise.

Do the records for the past 10 000 years of core ice temperatures in Greenland show a pattern perhaps?

But even if they don't - Greenland is a lot colder today than it was 900 years ago.

And sea temperatures dating back through the last 3 000 years show some interesting peaks and lows - why, we're almost back up to the base line
sea surface temp 3000 years.jpg

[seer]

"Slowdown".. means it is rising slower, not not rising at all. "Hiatus is obviously the wrong word to use. it's a non-technical article and even Nature isn't perfect at those.

You have it exactly backward. It was Nature that called in a "slowdown" it was the climate scientist Thomas Stocker that called it a "Hiatus" and "Pause" in a direct quote.

[JonF]

It is a slowdown in the rise because it hasn't been rising:]\

"Slowdown".. means it is rising slower, not not rising at all. "Hiatus is obviously the wrong word to use. it's a non-technical article and even Nature isn't perfect at those.



Hiatus, pause? So the same Nature article says there is a pause and hiatus...[/QUOTE]

[seer]

What Nature called it (correctly) was a "slowdown in the rise." What kind of mental gymnastics does one have to perform in order to turn that into "flat"?

It is a slowdown in the rise because it hasn't been rising:

"Comparing short-term observations with long-term model projections is inappropriate," says Stocker. "We know that there is a lot of natural fluctuation in the climate system. A 15-year hiatus is not so unusual even though the jury is out as to what exactly may have caused the pause."

Hiatus, pause? So the same Nature article says there is a pause and hiatus...