This is Hansen et al’s end of year summary for 2009 (with a couple of minor edits). Update: A final version of this text is available here.
If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?
by James Hansen, Reto Ruedy, Makiko Sato, and Ken Lo
The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.
Figure 1. (a) GISS analysis of global surface temperature change. Green vertical bar is estimated 95 percent confidence range (two standard deviations) for annual temperature change. (b) Hemispheric temperature change in GISS analysis. (Base period is 1951-1980. This base period is fixed consistently in GISS temperature analysis papers – see References. Base period 1961-1990 is used for comparison with published HadCRUT analyses in Figures 3 and 4.)
The global record warm year, in the period of near-global instrumental measurements (since the late 1800s), was 2005. Sometimes it is asserted that 1998 was the warmest year. The origin of this confusion is discussed below. There is a high degree of interannual (year‐to‐year) and decadal variability in both global and hemispheric temperatures. Underlying this variability, however, is a long‐term warming trend that has become strong and persistent over the past three decades. The long‐term trends are more apparent when temperature is averaged over several years. The 60‐month (5‐year) and 132 month (11‐year) running mean temperatures are shown in Figure 2 for the globe and the hemispheres. The 5‐year mean is sufficient to reduce the effect of the El Niño – La Niña cycles of tropical climate. The 11‐year mean minimizes the effect of solar variability – the brightness of the sun varies by a measurable amount over the sunspot cycle, which is typically of 10‐12 year duration.
Figure 2. 60‐month (5‐year) and 132 month (11‐year) running mean temperatures in the GISS analysis of (a) global and (b) hemispheric surface temperature change. (Base period is 1951‐1980.)
There is a contradiction between the observed continued warming trend and popular perceptions about climate trends. Frequent statements include: “There has been global cooling over the past decade.” “Global warming stopped in 1998.” “1998 is the warmest year in the record.” Such statements have been repeated so often that most of the public seems to accept them as being true. However, based on our data, such statements are not correct. The origin of this contradiction probably lies in part in differences between the GISS and HadCRUT temperature analyses (HadCRUT is the joint Hadley Centre/University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit temperature analysis). Indeed, HadCRUT finds 1998 to be the warmest year in their record. In addition, popular belief that the world is cooling is reinforced by cold weather anomalies in the United States in the summer of 2009 and cold anomalies in much of the Northern Hemisphere in December 2009. Here we first show the main reason for the difference between the GISS and HadCRUT analyses. Then we examine the 2009 regional temperature anomalies in the context of global temperatures.
Figure 3. Temperature anomalies in 1998 (left column) and 2005 (right column). Top row is GISS analysis, middle row is HadCRUT analysis, and bottom row is the GISS analysis masked to the same area and resolution as the HadCRUT analysis. [Base period is 1961‐1990.]
Figure 3 shows maps of GISS and HadCRUT 1998 and 2005 temperature anomalies relative to base period 1961‐1990 (the base period used by HadCRUT). The temperature anomalies are at a 5 degree‐by‐5 degree resolution for the GISS data to match that in the HadCRUT analysis. In the lower two maps we display the GISS data masked to the same area and resolution as the HadCRUT analysis. The “masked” GISS data let us quantify the extent to which the difference between the GISS and HadCRUT analyses is due to the data interpolation and extrapolation that occurs in the GISS analysis. The GISS analysis assigns a temperature anomaly to many gridboxes that do not contain measurement data, specifically all gridboxes located within 1200 km of one or more stations that do have defined temperature anomalies.
The rationale for this aspect of the GISS analysis is based on the fact that temperature anomaly patterns tend to be large scale. For example, if it is an unusually cold winter in New York, it is probably unusually cold in Philadelphia too. This fact suggests that it may be better to assign a temperature anomaly based on the nearest stations for a gridbox that contains no observing stations, rather than excluding that gridbox from the global analysis. Tests of this assumption are described in our papers referenced below.
Figure 4. Global surface temperature anomalies relative to 1961‐1990 base period for three cases: HadCRUT, GISS, and GISS anomalies limited to the HadCRUT area. [To obtain consistent time series for the HadCRUT and GISS global means, monthly results were averaged over regions with defined temperature anomalies within four latitude zones (90N‐25N, 25N‐Equator, Equator‐25S, 25S‐90S); the global average then weights these zones by the true area of the full zones, and the annual means are based on those monthly global means.]
Figure 4 shows time series of global temperature for the GISS and HadCRUT analyses, as well as for the GISS analysis masked to the HadCRUT data region. This figure reveals that the differences that have developed between the GISS and HadCRUT global temperatures during the past few decades are due primarily to the extension of the GISS analysis into regions that are excluded from the HadCRUT analysis. The GISS and HadCRUT results are similar during this period, when the analyses are limited to exactly the same area. The GISS analysis also finds 1998 as the warmest year, if analysis is limited to the masked area. The question then becomes: how valid are the extrapolations and interpolation in the GISS analysis? If the temperature anomaly scale is adjusted such that the global mean anomaly is zero, the patterns of warm and cool regions have realistic‐looking meteorological patterns, providing qualitative support for the data extensions. However, we would like a quantitative measure of the uncertainty in our estimate of the global temperature anomaly caused by the fact that the spatial distribution of measurements is incomplete. One way to estimate that uncertainty, or possible error, can be obtained via use of the complete time series of global surface temperature data generated by a global climate model that has been demonstrated to have realistic spatial and temporal variability of surface temperature. We can sample this data set at only the locations where measurement stations exist, use this sub‐sample of data to estimate global temperature change with the GISS analysis method, and compare the result with the “perfect” knowledge of global temperature provided by the data at all gridpoints.
| 1880‐1900 | 1900‐1950 | 1960‐2008 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meteorological Stations | 0.2 | 0.15 | 0.08 |
| Land‐Ocean Index | 0.08 | 0.05 | 0.05 |
Table 1. Two‐sigma error estimate versus period for meteorological stations and land‐ocean index.
Table 1 shows the derived error due to incomplete coverage of stations. As expected, the error was larger at early dates when station coverage was poorer. Also the error is much larger when data are available only from meteorological stations, without ship or satellite measurements for ocean areas. In recent decades the 2‐sigma uncertainty (95 percent confidence of being within that range, ~2‐3 percent chance of being outside that range in a specific direction) has been about 0.05°C. The incomplete coverage of stations is the primary cause of uncertainty in comparing nearby years, for which the effect of more systematic errors such as urban warming is small.
Additional sources of error become important when comparing temperature anomalies separated by longer periods. The most well‐known source of long‐term error is “urban warming”, human‐made local warming caused by energy use and alterations of the natural environment. Various other errors affecting the estimates of long‐term temperature change are described comprehensively in a large number of papers by Tom Karl and his associates at the NOAA National Climate Data Center. The GISS temperature analysis corrects for urban effects by adjusting the long‐term trends of urban stations to be consistent with the trends at nearby rural stations, with urban locations identified either by population or satellite‐observed night lights. In a paper in preparation we demonstrate that the population and night light approaches yield similar results on global average. The additional error caused by factors other than incomplete spatial coverage is estimated to be of the order of 0.1°C on time scales of several decades to a century, this estimate necessarily being partly subjective. The estimated total uncertainty in global mean temperature anomaly with land and ocean data included thus is similar to the error estimate in the first line of Table 1, i.e., the error due to limited spatial coverage when only meteorological stations are included.
Now let’s consider whether we can specify a rank among the recent global annual temperatures, i.e., which year is warmest, second warmest, etc. Figure 1a shows 2009 as the second warmest year, but it is so close to 1998, 2002, 2003, 2006, and 2007 that we must declare these years as being in a virtual tie as the second warmest year. The maximum difference among these in the GISS analysis is ~0.03°C (2009 being the warmest among those years and 2006 the coolest). This range is approximately equal to our 1‐sigma uncertainty of ~0.025°C, which is the reason for stating that these five years are tied for second warmest.
The year 2005 is 0.061°C warmer than 1998 in our analysis. So how certain are we that 2005 was warmer than 1998? Given the standard deviation of ~0.025°C for the estimated error, we can estimate the probability that 1998 was warmer than 2005 as follows. The chance that 1998 is 0.025°C warmer than our estimated value is about (1 – 0.68)/2 = 0.16. The chance that 2005 is 0.025°C cooler than our estimate is also 0.16. The probability of both of these is ~0.03 (3 percent). Integrating over the tail of the distribution and accounting for the 2005‐1998 temperature difference being 0.61°C alters the estimate in opposite directions. For the moment let us just say that the chance that 1998 is warmer than 2005, given our temperature analysis, is at most no more than about 10 percent. Therefore, we can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that 2005 is the warmest year in the period of instrumental data.
Figure 5. (a) global map of December 2009 anomaly, (b) global map of Jun‐Jul‐Aug 2009 anomaly. #4 and #2 indicate that December 2009 and JJA are the 4th and 2nd warmest globally for those periods.
What about the claim that the Earth’s surface has been cooling over the past decade? That issue can be addressed with a far higher degree of confidence, because the error due to incomplete spatial coverage of measurements becomes much smaller when averaged over several years. The 2‐sigma error in the 5‐year running‐mean temperature anomaly shown in Figure 2, is about a factor of two smaller than the annual mean uncertainty, thus 0.02‐0.03°C. Given that the change of 5‐year‐mean global temperature anomaly is about 0.2°C over the past decade, we can conclude that the world has become warmer over the past decade, not cooler.
Why are some people so readily convinced of a false conclusion, that the world is really experiencing a cooling trend? That gullibility probably has a lot to do with regional short‐term temperature fluctuations, which are an order of magnitude larger than global average annual anomalies. Yet many lay people do understand the distinction between regional short‐term anomalies and global trends. For example, here is comment posted by “frogbandit” at 8:38p.m. 1/6/2010 on City Bright blog:
“I wonder about the people who use cold weather to say that the globe is cooling. It forgets that global warming has a global component and that its a trend, not an everyday thing. I hear people down in the lower 48 say its really cold this winter. That ain’t true so far up here in Alaska. Bethel, Alaska, had a brown Christmas. Here in Anchorage, the temperature today is 31[ºF]. I can’t say based on the fact Anchorage and Bethel are warm so far this winter that we have global warming. That would be a really dumb argument to think my weather pattern is being experienced even in the rest of the United States, much less globally.”
What frogbandit is saying is illustrated by the global map of temperature anomalies in December 2009 (Figure 5a). There were strong negative temperature anomalies at middle latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere, as great as ‐8°C in Siberia, averaged over the month. But the temperature anomaly in the Arctic was as great as +7°C. The cold December perhaps reaffirmed an impression gained by Americans from the unusually cool 2009 summer. There was a large region in the United States and Canada in June‐July‐August with a negative temperature anomaly greater than 1°C, the largest negative anomaly on the planet.
Figure 6. Arctic Oscillation (AO) Index. Positive values of the AO index indicate high low pressure in the polar region and thus a tendency for strong zonal winds that minimize cold air outbreaks to middle latitudes. Blue dots are monthly means and the red curve is the 60‐month (5‐year) running mean.
How do these large regional temperature anomalies stack up against an expectation of, and the reality of, global warming? How unusual are these regional negative fluctuations? Do they have any relationship to global warming? Do they contradict global warming?
It is obvious that in December 2009 there was an unusual exchange of polar and mid‐latitude air in the Northern Hemisphere. Arctic air rushed into both North America and Eurasia, and, of course, it was replaced in the polar region by air from middle latitudes. The degree to which Arctic air penetrates into middle latitudes is related to the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index, which is defined by surface atmospheric pressure patterns and is plotted in Figure 6. When the AO index is positive surface pressure is high low in the polar region. This helps the middle latitude jet stream to blow strongly and consistently from west to east, thus keeping cold Arctic air locked in the polar region. When the AO index is negative there tends to be low high pressure in the polar region, weaker zonal winds, and greater movement of frigid polar air into middle latitudes.
Figure 6 shows that December 2009 was the most extreme negative Arctic Oscillation since the 1970s. Although there were ten cases between the early 1960s and mid 1980s with an AO index more extreme than ‐2.5, there were no such extreme cases since then until last month. It is no wonder that the public has become accustomed to the absence of extreme blasts of cold air.
Figure 7. Temperature anomaly from GISS analysis and AO index from NOAA National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center. United States mean refers to the 48 contiguous states.
Figure 7 shows the AO index with greater temporal resolution for two 5‐year periods. It is obvious that there is a high degree of correlation of the AO index with temperature in the United States, with any possible lag between index and temperature anomaly less than the monthly temporal resolution. Large negative anomalies, when they occur, are usually in a winter month. Note that the January 1977 temperature anomaly, mainly located in the Eastern United States, was considerably stronger than the December 2009 anomaly. [There is nothing magic about a 31 day window that coincides with a calendar month, and it could be misleading. It may be more informative to look at a 30‐day running mean and at the Dec‐Jan‐Feb means for the AO index and temperature anomalies.]
The AO index is not so much an explanation for climate anomaly patterns as it is a simple statement of the situation. However, John (Mike) Wallace and colleagues have been able to use the AO description to aid consideration of how the patterns may change as greenhouse gases increase. A number of papers, by Wallace, David Thompson, and others, as well as by Drew Shindell and others at GISS, have pointed out that increasing carbon dioxide causes the stratosphere to cool, in turn causing on average a stronger jet stream and thus a tendency for a more positive Arctic Oscillation. Overall, Figure 6 shows a tendency in the expected sense. The AO is not the only factor that might alter the frequency of Arctic cold air outbreaks. For example, what is the effect of reduced Arctic sea ice on weather patterns? There is not enough empirical evidence since the rapid ice melt of 2007. We conclude only that December 2009 was a highly anomalous month and that its unusual AO can be described as the “cause” of the extreme December weather.
We do not find a basis for expecting frequent repeat occurrences. On the contrary. Figure 6 does show that month‐to‐month fluctuations of the AO are much larger than its long term trend. But temperature change can be caused by greenhouse gases and global warming independent of Arctic Oscillation dynamical effects.
Figure 8. Global maps 4 season temperature anomalies for ~2009. (Note that Dec is December 2008. Base period is 1951‐1980.)
Figure 9. Global maps 4 season temperature anomaly trends for period 1950‐2009.
So let’s look at recent regional temperature anomalies and temperature trends. Figure 8 shows seasonal temperature anomalies for the past year and Figure 9 shows seasonal temperature change since 1950 based on local linear trends. The temperature scales are identical in Figures 8 and 9. The outstanding characteristic in comparing these two figures is that the magnitude of the 60 year change is similar to the magnitude of seasonal anomalies. What this is telling us is that the climate dice are already strongly loaded. The perceptive person who has been around since the 1950s should be able to notice that seasonal mean temperatures are usually greater than they were in the 1950s, although there are still occasional cold seasons.
The magnitude of monthly temperature anomalies is typically 1.5 to 2 times greater than the magnitude of seasonal anomalies. So it is not yet quite so easy to see global warming if one’s figure of merit is monthly mean temperature. And, of course, daily weather fluctuations are much larger than the impact of the global warming trend. The bottom line is this: there is no global cooling trend. For the time being, until humanity brings its greenhouse gas emissions under control, we can expect each decade to be warmer than the preceding one. Weather fluctuations certainly exceed local temperature changes over the past half century. But the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales.
This information needs to be combined with the conclusion that global warming of 1‐2°C has enormous implications for humanity. But that discussion is beyond the scope of this note.
References:
Hansen, J.E., and S. Lebedeff, 1987: Global trends of measured surface air temperature. J. Geophys. Res., 92, 13345‐13372.
Hansen, J., R. Ruedy, J. Glascoe, and Mki. Sato, 1999: GISS analysis of surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 104, 30997‐31022.
Hansen, J.E., R. Ruedy, Mki. Sato, M. Imhoff, W. Lawrence, D. Easterling, T. Peterson, and T. Karl, 2001: A closer look at United States and global surface temperature change. J. Geophys. Res., 106, 23947‐23963.
Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, R. Ruedy, K. Lo, D.W. Lea, and M. Medina‐Elizade, 2006: Global temperature change. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 103, 14288‐14293.
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Bart Verheggen says:
19 January 2010 at 9:08 AM
Particularly relevant to Richard Steckis 3rd and 5th point combined:
“What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end, all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true!”
We have not developed science well enough to make predictions. Anyway, that is not the role of science. Climate modelling should be about understanding the climate system and not about trying make accurate prediction. Predictions in climate modelling should be about testing the model and nothing more.
[Response: What tosh. There is no scientific method without predictions. What is the point otherwise? This is just trying to avoid what the predictions say by demanding they not be made! Very ostrich-like. – gavin]
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Ray Ladbury says:
19 January 2010 at 3:11 PM
“Maybe when y’all are done blamestorming about the latest typo–one that you guys didn’t even find–we can get back to actually considering evidence.”
I came in late. What typo are you referring to?
Tilo, your peering at individual grid cells and noting that this one or that one is significantly different in GISS than HADCRUT is pointless. The masked versions have, to .01 degrees, the identical anomaly.
Therefore, these variations in detail do not affect the global values significantly. That means 1) that the polar values must account for the GISS-Hadley variance, and 2) that, regardless of differences of detail here and there, Hadley and GISS algorithms reproduce essentially the same result. This doesn’t prove that they *are* correct, but it is an indicator that they *may* be correct.
The significance of the small differences you are going on about resides largely in your imagination, I’m afraid.
Kevin McKinney: #353
“Tilo, your peering at individual grid cells and noting that this one or that one is significantly different in GISS than HADCRUT is pointless.”
No, not just “this one or that one” are different, whole areas are different. For example, 8 gridcells in a row in HadCRUT which showed cooling have been changed in GISS to show maximum warming in the top row of 2005. In other words, the difference is 6.7C or greater. When two methods cover the same gridcells and show a difference of 6.7C for a long row of them, you can believe that it all comes out, somehow, magically, in the wash. I don’t believe it.
Also, when only 2 or 3 maximum hot gridcells in HadCRUT are extrapolated to be 25 to 30 maximum hot gridcells in GISS, that is also not just a few individual gridcells. And looking at the bigger picture of the Arctic areas that do have coverage in HadCRUT, it simply doesn’t justify the super hot extrapolation that has been done in the 2005 GISS arctic chart. This may be a product of the GISS algorithm – but it has introduced a huge bias into the Arctic. Look at the top row of the HadCRUT 2005 chart. It is a mixture of values, including even some cold anomalies. Now look at the GISS 2005 chart. It only has two values. The absolute hottest and the next to absolute hottest.
Kevin:
“The masked versions have, to .01 degrees, the identical anomaly.”
I’m not so much interested in the similarity of the masked version to HadCRUT as I am with the extrapolation that was done to get the hotter unmasked GISS. The thing that does worry me about the masked version, however, is why cells that were not masked changed their value when moving from the GISS chart to the masked GISS chart.
Kevin:
“That means 1) that the polar values must account for the GISS-Hadley variance,”
There you are correct. But the variance that they produce are a result of the extrapolation, interpolation process, not of actual radical temperature differences in the Arctic.
And when you look at the Antarctic, you have huge areas of warming that are produced by a very few measurement sites. Virtually all of the warm gridcells in the last two rows of the Antarctic are a result of extrapolating a very tiny number of actual measurements. Look at the bottom row of the HadCRUT 2005 chart. You can see that there are many cool gridcells available. And yet all of the gridcells immediately below these in the GISS chart have been extrapolated as hot.
Kevin:
“2) that, regardless of differences of detail here and there, Hadley and GISS algorithms reproduce essentially the same result.”
No, they produce a very different result at the poles that goes well beyond simply filling in the missing gridcells.
Kevin:
“The significance of the small differences you are going on about resides largely in your imagination, I’m afraid.”
The differences that I’m going on about account for most of the difference between GISS and HadCRU, and they appear to be much more of an algorithm artifact than a real temperature difference.
Maybe you should peer at a few gridcells yourself, Kevin, and see if there is a rational way to justify both the differences and the extrapolations.
Richard Stekis: “We have not developed science well enough to make predictions [. . . .] Climate modelling should be about understanding the climate system and not about trying make accurate prediction”
Richard Stekis: “Global warming is finished for the moment. The next 30 years will be a period of little or no warming.”
no inconsistacy in this guys bias
Richard Stekis: “I came in late.”
obviously – maybe you’d be so kind as to leave early
Comment by Barton Paul Levenson — 19 January 2010 @ 7:22 PM
A question of degree of degeneration, there are a number of features about your prediction of timing and resource starvation which I’m inclined to quibble about but unfortunately doing so would end up making my original point, which is that predicting the end of civilization takes our eye off the ball, here, now.
If you’re keen to sway opinion, don’t stuff your consumers until they gag and choke.
That’s a research finding, BTW.
Doug Bostrom said (re wishing for an IPCC update on melting ice in general): “Doubters should be careful what they wish for.”
Not referring to me, I hope. I was just echoing the ClimateProgress post that you linked to earlier.
Gilles: In any case, what do you think would be the consumption of fossile per capita per year in the world you describe ?
BPL: Nearly zero, since the infrastructure for acquiring and distributing it will be gone. People in places like Pennsylvania and Kentucky will be able to burn easily accessible coal for a while–a year or so.
Gilles : hemmm I puzzled here. If the consumption of fossiles has fallen to nearly zero, this is very very far from any SRES scenario and the GW would be MINIMAL, actually probably just 1°C or less, even Hansen has not dreamt of that !!!!
so really your situation is much closer to that described by those who think that peak oil for instance would cause a complete collapse of the industrial society – well it’s possible but it completely at odds with GW predictions, which describe exactly the opposite : massive consumption of fuels driven by a constant economic growth, GW being just a “side effect” (less snow on the low altitude ski resorts ..sigh..)
So really at this point this is really a mess : how can you hold for two exactly opposite senarii ??? I thought that we were on a “scientific” blog, not a romantic movie.
So apart from cousins drowning in 20 cm sea water, less snow on small ski resorts , and unlikely back-to-the-tree scenarii , is somebody able to describe the REALISTIC problems I can have in the next decades, pleaaaaase ??? I’m scared but I don’t know exactly why … :(
The following paper just published in JGR uses reanalysis to confirm the trends estimated from station data, and (similar to the GISS estimates) demonstrates these trends probably underestimate global warming. It also contains interesting results on humidity.
Simmons, A. J., K. M. Willett, P. D. Jones, P. W. Thorne, and D. P. Dee (2010), Low-frequency variations in surface atmospheric humidity, temperature, and precipitation: Inferences from reanalyses and monthly gridded observational data sets, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D01110, doi:10.1029/2009JD012442
RS: If you think that the biota cannot adapt to changes in ocean pH then you know nothing about biology, ecology and geology.
BPL: They can adapt if it happens slowly enough. It’s happening very fast, which is why 50% of the coral reefs in the world are ALREADY DEAD and 30% of the krill are also missing–you know, the base of the whole ocean food pyramid?
We can and should wait until the science is in (and it isn’t)
This one is my favorite. Let’s make it personal:
I was diagnosed with Stage IIb lung cancer last year and elected to have a pneumonectomy. Statistically, my chance of survival after five years is 50%. Should I have waited until there was something with a 95% chance of working before doing any treatment? Lindzen, Seitz, Singer and the Cato Institute all say that there is little evidence that smoking causes cancer. Should I believe them and go back to smoking two packs a day?
> Steckis
> You bring up the good old ocean acidification crock. If you think
> that the biota cannot adapt to changes in ocean pH then you know nothing
Rate of change; you must be talking about natural selection, not adaptation –right? We can guess there are genes out there at a low level from the last time ocean pH went much lower than it is now (so we don’t have to wait for random mutations to occur — this time — but merely for the selection pressure to change and the organisms with those genes to have more grandchildren.)
So we can hope the ocean biota will “adapt to changes in ocean pH” — but weren’t you saying something about not being able to predict what happens with climate change?
Citation needed. Would you be able to either cite some source for this stated belief, or show your work?
oh, by the way…are we still talking about it being cold in the US? Because…it’s been unusually warm here on the East coast this past week (overnight low temps. exceeding our normal daily high temps. for January!)
Richard Steckis says “Climate modelling should be about understanding the climate system and not about trying make accurate prediction.”
Wow, somebody needs to go review Scientific Method 101. Predictions are how you test the model/science. And predicting a 30 year warming trend ain’t half bad. Predicting details of what regions would warm, about how much and that some regions in the atmosphere would cool while others warmed? Priceless!
The typo is the incorrect date given for Himmalayan glacier melt in a relatively obscure WG report. Yawn!
Kieth (363) that’s the point, really.
It’s only newsworthy to the self-described “skeptics” when it “proves” AGW wrong. That they don’t apply their skepticism equally shows this is not the right term.
Since they place their disbelief only where AGW is right and accept unconditionally ideas saying AGW is wrong, they are in denial of the science that AGW is right.
Denialists.
[Response: What tosh. There is no scientific method without predictions. What is the point otherwise? This is just trying to avoid what the predictions say by demanding they not be made! Very ostrich-like. – gavin]
You have got to be joking. Scientific method is about empirical investigation of hypotheses and not prediction. An hypothesis is not prediction it is an individual scientists conjecture and conceptualisation of how a system operates. That is not prediction. The scientific method is employed to collect data on the system under study and then to analyse those data to verify or reject the hypothesis.
I can understand that as mathematicians and physicists you have a problem with that concept. I think a referral to this web page will give you some insight as to why we seem to be poles apart on this philosophical argument of what is scientific method: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v419/n6904/full/419244a.html
There is another site that I would like you to look at but I will have to track it down.
So. For a biologist, prediction does not even have to come into the scientific method.
[Response: I’m going to be charitable and assume that you think that predictions can only be about future events. In that case you would just be a little wrong, but if you really think that science is just a cataloging of observations, then I’m afraid I’m going to go all Ernst Rutherford on you. – gavin]
“So apart from cousins drowning in 20 cm sea water, less snow on small ski resorts , and unlikely back-to-the-tree scenarii , is somebody able to describe the REALISTIC problems I can have in the next decades, pleaaaaase ???”
Yup:
More environmental refugees from lowlying areas (Bangladesh), marginal desert areas (North Africa), snowmelt-deprived regions (China).
If you’re in the first world and above 20m ASL.
Ask the Danes or, indeed, Louisianans how they feel about 10cm rise in sea level.
” I’m scared but I don’t know exactly why … :(”
Nope, you’re kidding on you’re scared.
360
Barton Paul Levenson says:
20 January 2010 at 5:41 AM
“RS: If you think that the biota cannot adapt to changes in ocean pH then you know nothing about biology, ecology and geology.
BPL: They can adapt if it happens slowly enough. It’s happening very fast, which is why 50% of the coral reefs in the world are ALREADY DEAD and 30% of the krill are also missing–you know, the base of the whole ocean food pyramid?”
Oh God! NO NO NO it is not happening fast. The problems with coral reefs is not from co2 acidification. The problem is, that with few exceptions, coral reefs are impacted by heavy population pressure by humans who are populating those regions that have coral reef systems. I dispute your 50% figure. I would like multiple references please so that I may verify.
The problem with the krill is not pH change in the oceans (unless you have multiple references confirming such) and is most likely due to overfishing (krill is a very sought after fishery commodity). There is some conjecture about a disease impact. Again, I dispute your 30% and would request a justification for the statement.
BPL you really need to research more carefully before attributing any loss of reef systems or ocean populations to pH changes or global warming.
I would suggest
Response: I’m going to be charitable and assume that you think that predictions can only be about future events. In that case you would just be a little wrong, but if you really think that science is just a cataloging of observations, then I’m afraid I’m going to go all Ernst Rutherford on you. – gavin]
That is not what I said nor what I implied.
[Response: You said that the scientific method didn’t involve prediction. You are absolutely, fundamentally, 100%, completely, entirely, utterly and wholly wrong. What is the point of a hypothesis that only covers the cases you already have observations for? There is none. Hypotheses and theories have power because they can predict what new observations are likely to show – that’s how they get tested and rejected if necessary. Like I said, if you think that ‘prediction’ is some special word that only applies to multi-decadal climate projections, you would only be a little wrong, but if it is anything else, the above applies. – gavin]
Richard Steckis@ 350,
Oh my. Just, oh my. How do you get so much wrong in a single post:
1)It looks to me as though Schwartz is making the same mistake he did back in 2007–forgetting that the climate is not yet at equilibrium. And even with this the amount of warming seen is well within what would be expected for the 90% CL of sensitivity estimates. Steckis, there are about a dozen different independent constraints on climate sensitivity, and they all pretty much point to 3 degrees per doubling as the most probable value and rule out less than 2 degrees per doubling.
2)The consensus: Steckis, even Bray and von Storch get about this level of agreement in their most recent survey (flawed though it was).
http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/CliSci2008.pdf
The denialists simply are not publishing because they have nothing to say. Prove me wrong: Cite any denialist work in the past decade that has increased our understanding of climate.
3)I asked: What science, specifically, do you contend is missing?
Steckis replied: Most of it.
Oh, Steckis. That is just so sad. It reads like a 5th grader’s response when he hasn’t done his homework. Let us review, shall we? The science is based not just on the radiative physics of CO2, but also on paleoclimate, on dynamical models that incorporate best estimates of the physics and astoundingly get the basic characteristics of Earth’s climate right over millions of years AND predict the response of Earth’s climate to changes with pretty good accuracy. And the denialist response? Bupkis. Just a constant whine of “Oh, it’s all too complicated.” Well, Steckis, there are several hundred published papers that say “No, it ain’t.” If it’s OK, I’ll take those documented successes over your unsubstantiated assertion that it’s impossible to succeed.
4)Steckis, I’d be a lot more willing to experiment on planet Earth if you would kindly show me another habitable planet we can get to just in case something goes wrong. Now as to your factual errors:
A)Steckis: “A two year solar minimum is not a prolonged one ”
Jeez! Do you even think about this stuff before you write it. A “normal” solar minimum is about 4 years. This one was about 6 years.
B)”the good old ocean acidification crock”
Is it your contention that the ocean is not acidifying? Gee, that will come as news to the dissolving coral. And of course biota can adapt–but on long timescales, and that is not what we have here.
C)Methane: Did you notice it’s on the rise again, Steckis? Gee, I wonder where it’s coming from. Given its far greater warming potential, it might be nice to know, don’t you think?
All in all, Steckis, your sanguine attitude toward climate change might be more convincing if it were backed up by even a modicum of research, data or understanding. It is clear that is not the case, so I hope you won’t mind too much if I listen to the experts and verify their results to the best of my ability rather than simply accepting your reassuring platitudes.
“Scientific method is about empirical investigation of hypotheses and not prediction.”
Ah, evidently someone who has been told what to say and has no clue about what he’s saying.
How refreshing.
Not.
How, RS, can you investigate and empirically measure a hypothesis if you don’t predict what measurement you should get if your hypothesis is true?
E.g.
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/stargaze/Sfall.htm
G: I hypothesise that gravitational and inertial mass are the same.
—hypothesis—
G: I predict therefore that though I drop two things of very different weight, they will hit the ground at the same time.
—prediction—
G: [drops lead ball and wooden ball]
G: [measures the time difference between them hitting the ground]
—empirical investigation—
G: Looks like I was right.
—science has been done—
368: RS you really need to research more before you make statements as if you were knowledgeable on the subject.
Steckis says “So. For a biologist, prediction does not even have to come into the scientific method.”
This is simply false. Without a prediction–meaning a necessary implication of a result by the model which is outside the data/info used to build and calibrate the model–you have no way of verifying the model. Yes, it is true that in its very early phases, a science can be mainly observational, but eventually the science has to grow up and make sense of all those observations. Otherwise, a)there is nothing to guide future observations, and b)the field will stagnate.
Also, you really need to go back and read that article again–it says that biology is in need of models to make progress. Yes it’s difficult, but you seem to equate difficult with impossible. With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder you still don’t understand climate science.
“Response: You said that the scientific method didn’t involve prediction. You are absolutely, fundamentally, 100%, completely, entirely, utterly and wholly wrong. What is the point of a hypothesis that only covers the cases you already have observations for? There is none. Hypotheses and theories have power because they can predict what new observations are likely to show – that’s how they get tested and rejected if necessary. Like I said, if you think that ‘prediction’ is some special word that only applies to multi-decadal climate projections, you would only be a little wrong, but if it is anything else, the above applies. – gavin”
Where did I actually say that the scientific method cannot involve prediction?
I think my statement was that prediction (and I did mean predicting the future ala climate models) is not the role of science.
Personally, I think we are circling over the semantics of the meaning of prediction.
[Response: You are still wrong. Prediction is the central role of science. Without it, it is just stamp collecting. – gavin]
370
Ray Ladbury says:
20 January 2010 at 9:51 AM
“2)The consensus: Steckis, even Bray and von Storch get about this level of agreement in their most recent survey (flawed though it was).
http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/CliSci2008.pdf
The denialists simply are not publishing because they have nothing to say. Prove me wrong: Cite any denialist work in the past decade that has increased our understanding of climate.”
Ahhh. Ray!!! You should have qualified your statement. You were talking about climate scientists not all scientists! And I still don’t believe the 97% figure. After all you cite only one limited survey. I can’t cite any denialist work because I do not regard Lindzen, Choi, Soon, Carter, Spencer, Christie, Svensmark, Shaviv etc. etc. etc. as denialists. And those scientists have published more than a hundred papers between them and all of them have contributed to our understanding of climate.
“3)I asked: What science, specifically, do you contend is missing?
Steckis replied: Most of it.
Oh, Steckis. That is just so sad. It reads like a 5th grader’s response when he hasn’t done his homework. Let us review, shall we? The science is based not just on the radiative physics of CO2, but also on paleoclimate, on dynamical models that incorporate best estimates of the physics and astoundingly get the basic characteristics of Earth’s climate right over millions of years AND predict the response of Earth’s climate to changes with pretty good accuracy. And the denialist response? Bupkis. Just a constant whine of “Oh, it’s all too complicated.” Well, Steckis, there are several hundred published papers that say “No, it ain’t.” If it’s OK, I’ll take those documented successes over your unsubstantiated assertion that it’s impossible to succeed.”
Your little tirade completely ignores the impact of biological, chemical and geological and geophysical influences on climate. The models can reproduce our past climate so well because they are made to after each failure. I did not say it is impossible to succeed just that our knowledge is young. As usual you set up a straw man to tirade against.
“A)Steckis: “A two year solar minimum is not a prolonged one ”
Jeez! Do you even think about this stuff before you write it. A “normal” solar minimum is about 4 years. This one was about 6 years. ”
My original statement stands. By the way, Cycle 23 reached it’s minimum in 2008 I don’t know where you got six years from. I can provide a reference if you wish.
B)”the good old ocean acidification crock”
Is it your contention that the ocean is not acidifying? Gee, that will come as news to the dissolving coral. And of course biota can adapt–but on long timescales, and that is not what we have here.
I attribute a lot of said acidification of coral reef systems to runoff from human land-use activity and sewage disposal etc. not from carbonic acid produced from co2. Has anyone actually bothered to identify the species of acid that is causing the pH changes along coral reef systems that are increasingly under pressure from human activity and not global warming.
It is my understanding that pH is one of the hardest chemical metrics to measure. So trying to measure it on a global scale from satellites is almost laughable particularly when pH can change significantly over a distance of a kilometer along a beach. Of course your tirade ignores completely the buffering effect of sea water to moderate the impact of pH change. We biologists often buffer highly acidic compounds such as formalin with sea water to reduce it’s corrosiveness.
“C)Methane: Did you notice it’s on the rise again, Steckis? Gee, I wonder where it’s coming from. Given its far greater warming potential, it might be nice to know, don’t you think?”
Love to know how much methane is running around the system Ray. Got any figures? Or at least a site where I can access long term methane data?
Gilles said:
It’s easy to get confused. Scientists are saying “we must act now“, but at the same time, they are saying there will be almost negligible effects over the next few decades. How can this make sense?
Think of it like this: what we put in the atmosphere today has an impact over the following decades and centuries. So, our problems over the next few decades are already “locked in” – there’s little we can do about it. But what we shouldn’t do is make things worse. If we keep heading down the road we are on, then in 2050 we will not only have to deal with the emissions we have already dumped into the atmosphere, but also all the emissions between now and 2050.
And if, in 2050, we suddenly decide we had made a big mistake – and we magically reduced our emissions to zero – then our emissions to date would still be raising the global temperature for decades beyond 2050. It would take centuries for temperatures to reduce.
Some of the effects of global warming will be a consequence of ever-increasing temperatures. But other consequences only require that the temperature be elevated slightly for a very long time. Ice (and therefore sea level) is one of the latter consequences. It doesn’t matter if we stabilise at 2 degrees or even 1 degree – if it’s too warm, then the ice will continue to melt, and sea level will continue to rise. The temperature really only determines how quickly it happens.
It’s easy to see why so many deniers are old people. They won’t be around. But their children, and their grandchildren? They won’t be so lucky.
Have a look at this diagram to see what impacts we can expect from what temperature increases: http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/projected-impact-of-climate-change
Gilles, your area of interest lies between 1 and 2 degrees rise – but we must act immediately to avoid making the consequences at the right hand edge of the diagram inevitable. Think of it like steering a ship. A really huge ship. If we put on full rudder right now, it will take a long time to turn – but we may just avoid a tragedy ahead.
“Where did I actually say that the scientific method cannot involve prediction?”
Here:
“Scientific method is about empirical investigation of hypotheses and not prediction.”
Oh dear.
RS has the brain of a goldfish.
I blame MTV.
Giles: “It’s easy to get confused. Scientists are saying “we must act now“, but at the same time, they are saying there will be almost negligible effects over the next few decades. How can this make sense?”
I’d like to think of it like this:
Should you worry about the sudden stop at the end of the drop off a cliff in the last 8 inches, or would have thinking about it BEFORE walking forward off the edge have been a better idea?
In other news, I really wish this site had a comment preview.
In other other news, I really wish this site operated a “stupid threshold” similar to Tamino’s comment policy. When individuals demonstrate a long-term unwillingness and total inability to learn, is it fair to let them repeat the same nonsense ad nauseam?
Temperature, not pH, did the damage in this study of a remote coral island.
http://www.botany.hawaii.edu/faculty/duffy/arb/545-555/551.pdf
Far from the other human use runoff/fertilizer/etc. factors Steckis is claiming are causing the problems. He must be able to find this himself.
And isn’t there a physical chemist on the faculty where he works, who can explain how increased atmospheric CO2 changes ocean pH? This is a lot simpler than climate change.
377
Completely Fed Up says:
20 January 2010 at 11:00 AM
“Where did I actually say that the scientific method cannot involve prediction?”
Here:
“Scientific method is about empirical investigation of hypotheses and not prediction.”
I stand corrected.
[edit]
Giles said – “It’s easy to get confused. Scientists are saying “we must act now“, but at the same time, they are saying there will be almost negligible effects over the next few decades. How can this make sense?”
I look at it like stopping at a stop light. You don’t just suddenly hit the brake when you arrive right at the edge of an intersection – you have reaction time and stopping distance to deal with. A typical passenger car will take about 265 feet to come to full stop (variable, of course, with specific type of car, brake and road conditions, etc.) from a speed of 55 mph (88.5 kph), of which about 121 feet is perception and reaction time from realizing the light has changed to getting your foot to the brake pedal. The other 144 feet is the amount of distance it takes for the braking action to actually stop the vehicle. So, getting your foot on the brake 50 feet from the intersection means you’re going to stop on the far side of the intersection and, what with physics being a cruel master, there is nothing you can do about it at that point.
We’re in the perception/reaction period of AGW period and we’re right at edge of being able to stop in time (maybe), but if we react too slowly… again, physics being a cruel master, we will be at a point where there will be nothing we can do about it. The problem is right now we have a driver at the wheel that thinks he can make it through the yellow light, while one passenger is hollering at him to stop and the other passenger is saying “What stop light? And even if the stop light exists, it’s not for another 265 feet, so why brake now? And where is this other guy’s proof that the stop light will turn red after the yellow anyway? Besides, there might not even be another car coming from the other direction anyway, so why worry about it?”
Steckis, I don’t know why I’m even bothering with someone who doesn’t even acknowledge the importance of prediction in the scientific method, but here goes.
Solar cycle is roughly 11 years on average, with 7 years of solar maximum and 4 years of solar min in a typical cycle. Solar cycle 23 had about 7 years of solar max and 6 years of solar min. FWIW, the longest cycle had about 7 and 7 for 14 years. Trust me on this, Steckis. It’s my day job.
Now as to CO2 senitivity estimates–actually these would take into account biology, geology and chemistry unless you are assuming that paleoclimatic conditions wrt these variables were utterly different (Try justifying that!) Again, you are waving your hands and saying, “Oh, it’s all too complicated.” It really isn’t. The fact of the matter is that you simply cannot understand anything about Earth’s climate unless sensitivity is somewhere in the 2-4.5 degree per doubling range. Sometimes you have to take Occam’s razor to the Gordian Knot
Your assertions wrt acidification and pH betray a truly special ignorance. Just what do you think happens when you dissolve CO2 in water. Ever wonder why soda water tastes sour? See:
http://pubs.acs.org/cen/science/87/8708sci2.html
WRT methane:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8437703.stm
What’s your explanation here? Whale farts?
OK, now, finally, let’s see if I can overcome that reading program. I said cite works by denialists THAT HAVE INCREASED UNDERSTANDING OF CLIMATE IN THE PAST DECADE!!!!
Hopefully that is clearer.
Your ability to deny what is clearly staring you in the face continues to astound!
the gulf between scientific and public “opinion” on global warming is appalling.
***PROJECT JIM***
sorry I fully understand the problem of the cliff. Usually when I see a cliff, I stop at a respectable distance to avoid a deadly fall, I’m not stupid.
I was just asking some precisions on the KIND OF FALL I could experience in my life. I didn’t hear a very clear answer, concerning a middle-aged european living in a temperate country. Nothing that seems to be that dangerous.
OK, let us examine the argument that I should do something for the poor people of Bengladesh living in 50 years. Hmmm. First there would be many things we could do NOW for the poor people of Bengladesh od NOW , who are lacking basics things like water, cars, buildings, etc… The most simple thing to do would be to give them money, directly or indirectly . Plus it has the advantage to reduce our own purchasing power and so our fossile consumption :) . So I assume that probably most of you are already giving a fair part of their income to those people you are very concerned with – please let me know the order of magnitude you are currently giving them annually, so that I can imitate you.
Now are my present actions really efficient to avoid anything in the future … hmm.. France doesn’t burn a lot of coal, it has the biggest part of its power produced by nuclear plants , you know (the biggest in the world actually). So I burn essentially oil in my car – and wood in my chimney completed with electric (heat pump) heating, but that’s ok for CO2. But I understood that there are only 300 Gtep proved reserves of oil and gas – and that’s a ridiculous amount of CO2 whatever we do with them. Actually peak oil could come soon so there is nothing left to spare, let us finish the second half as we can. The danger is in the 2000 or 3000 Gt of coal .. but.. I DON’T USE IT ANYWAY ; what can I cut ??? furthermore, these 2000 to 3000 Gt of coal (a propos nobody knows exactly where they lie and who could offer them since the proved reserves are only 800 GtC or may be stlll lower…) will not be burnt mainly bu western people but by all these poor people you are very concerned with, who need them to produce power , steel, concrete … but what I could do NOW could prevent people from Africa and Asia to burn them in 50 years ??? really I can’t imagine that a chinese guy in 50 years (that may be not yet born) would think something like “oh , I remember, this poor Gilles in France went to his office by bike 50 years ago to spare some oil, so I won’t use this coal to heat my house , I will rather freeze”. Hemmm.. it’s possible , but is is EXTREMELY UNLIKELY , speaking IPCC language. I can’t see how the fossile consumption will have NOW has anything to do with what people 5000 km away from us did 50 years ago .. but I may be of course completely stupid. So in practice what can i PERSONNALLY DO to avoid that anybody in the world will touch some of the 1000 or 2000 GT of coal during the whole century ????
(that, by the way, no one can precisely locate up to now …)
I really would help, if I could.
364
Ray Ladbury says:
20 January 2010 at 8:51 AM
“The typo is the incorrect date given for Himmalayan glacier melt in a relatively obscure WG report. Yawn!”
What date was that Ray? 2035? Well that is the date that was quoted in the New Scientist article and the WWF report and admitted to by the scientist who was quoted.
The fact is that the reference should not have even made into Ch.10 of AR4 as it was not peer reviewed literature.
Are we trying to spin doctor here?
“…the perceptive person should be able to see that climate is warming on decadal time scales.”
This conclusion has the caveat in the note that the perceptive person needs to have been around in the 1950s. That seems OK to me since we don’t know that we are seeing a steady climate trend without a long baseline. But what other caveats might be needed?
I am wondering if, based on fig. 9, one should say the warming should be noticeable if you don’t live in Uruguay, Gabon, Hawaii or the Bahamas?
Also, do you need to be a homebody? Again, based on fig. 9, a politician from Oklahoma should notice changes at least in the Winter and Spring but what if the politician spends most of his time at Washington, DC energy company fund raisers during those seasons? Would he miss the direct experience of warming? I think it likely.
Making global warming accessible to direct experience is a big departure. After all, it is the accumulation of data from everywhere that puts the “global” in Global Warming. But, at some point, the change does have to become noticeable if it is large enough. I still like this demonstration even though it depends on geographical averaging: http://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm
This is obviously my own opinion and not science. I suggest that Jim Hansen is not alone as a senior scientist in his concern for possible future events in the United States and the world unless sharp action is taken to curb fossil fuel use…much more so than we are currently doing.
I am doing this with the purpose in mind of perhaps giving some readers some food for thought and perhaps as an impetus for their own personal inquiries.
In the last year, I have privately talked to several senior scientists at both a national center for climate research as well as at NOAA, and a visiting Canadian government-linked scientist about their private thoughts (opinions) of where we might be headed.
One of the highest-placed senior scientists from the place I was as well one of the highest-placed senior scientists at NOAA and two senior NOAA scientists in one of their divisions, both stated to me phrases that deeply concerned me.
Among the phrases they privately stated to me were that unless sharp action was taken to sharply reduce fossil fuel use, that they were concerned about the eventual possibility of “anarchy”, “destabilization”, “questions about the future viability of our democracy”, “questions about the future viability of interntional trade”, “martial law”, “mass population evacuation out of the American southwest including parts of California”, and “severe water shortages” eventually coming to the United States as a result of the effects of mass numbers of climate change refugees both internal and external, the evacuation of major US coastal cities, the moving northward of storm tracks, rising sea levels and the inability of the US central government to adapt quickly enough.
A Canadian government scientist told me privately that the Canadian government “is well aware of these potential issues in the USA and is taking necessary actions.” He also stated to me that he believed that Canada is hardly immune to many of the same problems and that he too was very concerned. Most of Canada’s population lives in a band of land near the border with the USA. These are obviously all only personal opinions.
I suggest that Jim Hansen is not alone.
CM says: 20 January 2010 at 3:10 AM
“Not referring to me, I hope. I was just echoing the ClimateProgress post that you linked to earlier.”
Not at all.
Richard Steckis says: 20 January 2010 at 10:13 AM
“I think my statement was that prediction (and I did mean predicting the future ala climate models) is not the role of science.”
Entirely leaving aside science, when you’ve adequately quantified the properties and behaviors of a material or a system, you may then do predictions in the form of engineering. Engineering is -all- about making predictions, informed by scientific research. Dealing with our various effluvia is an engineering challenge, we’re rapidly improving our ability to make the predictions we need in order to rise to that challenge. C02 is undoubtedly a major undesirable sidestream arising from our various activities, managing it is an engineering challenge, effective management and resultant engineering of solutions requires predictions.
Is that so hard to understand? Surely not.
Richard Steckis #366 said: “An hypothesis is not prediction”
The hypothesis is used to generate a prediction – a claim that can be empirically tested to confirm or disconfirm the hypothesis. Where I went to university, understanding the hypothetical-deductive method was an entrance requirement, and not an awfully hard one at that.
From the article Steckis cites to explain to physicists why biologists abhor prediction:
Is that supposed to be a bad thing for biology? The article doesn’t say so.
Steckis says “So. For a biologist, prediction does not even have to come into the scientific method.”
Agricultural entomologists would disagree.
Gilles, you should read a copy of “Six Degrees” by Mark Lynas. It paints a fair picture of what is thought will happen with each degree of warming.
You’ll have to help yourself out some though because it doesn’t say how soon any particular temperature will be reached, nor what level of CO2 is required for any particular level of warming.
As for regional predictions about exactly what will happen in any particular region on/by XYZ date, I don’t think there’s anything really available yet. Regional models are being developed, but are likely to be harder than general global models to verify.
On a related note, I’d just echo previous sentiments that the biggest, earliest, effects will be changing weather patterns (drought, floods) that impact agriculture in a growing population. Look up the podcast for “Climate Wars”. They couldn’t put it better when they observed: “Over human history people always raid before they starve”
Tilo, I don’t know why I keep trying to dispel the peculiar brand of confusion you specialize in sowing.
However, you state that GISS and Hadley “produce a very different result at the poles that goes well beyond simply filling in the missing gridcells.”
Wrong. Hadley doesn’t produce a result at the poles at all–and the result elsewhere is functionally identical to the GISS algorithm. No matter how you try to spin it, that remains the bottom line here.
By the way, do you know how GISS and Hadley grid boxes compare? Do you know that they use the same scheme? Perhaps you’ll share your knowledge of this.
http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/viewArticle.do?archives=true&id=65266
excerpt follows:
Although ocean acidification and global warming stem from the same source, they are different problems, said Cooley; acidification is a matter of simple chemical reactions that have been understood for more than 100 years. Excess CO2 in the air dissolves in seawater and forms carbonic acid and, through a series of other reactions, reduces the amount of carbonate in seawater.
That is bad news for many of the so-called calcifying sea creatures that use carbonate and calcium to build their shells or skeletons. “The waters are becoming less and less welcoming for shelled organisms,” Cooley said.
Experiments done at WHOI and elsewhere show that in seawater containing high levels of CO2, corals have difficulty making new skeleton and may have existing skeleton dissolve away; many calcifying plankton struggle; mollusks such as oysters and scallops find it harder to build and maintain shells; and juvenile mollusks grow more slowly and have more abnormalities and lower survival rates. Among calcifying organisms, only crustaceans such as crabs and lobsters appear to tolerate low carbonate levels; some even make thicker exoskeletons under such conditions. On the whole, though, more acidic seas and lower carbonate levels could spell trouble for hundreds of species, the ecosystems they belong to—and the human communities that depend on them.
‘Not just a dollar thing’
In a paper in the December 2009 issue of Oceanography, Cooley and her coauthors described how ocean acidification could endanger some “ecosystem services”—the benefits to human societies provided by healthy ecosystems. …
“sorry I fully understand the problem of the cliff. Usually when I see a cliff, I stop at a respectable distance to avoid a deadly fall, I’m not stupid.”
Good.
Now when you have a pain in your chest and your left arm goes a bit numb, do you wait until you KNOW it’s a heart attack? Or do you pop along to the doctor?
When he tells you to cut back on the red meat and exercise more, do you refuse because you’re not dead yet?
I mean, you like meat and don’t have time for exercise (you’d rather be with your kids).
And there’s no *proof* that cholesterol causes heart attacks: all they can prove is that more (but by no means all) people who die of heart attacks have higher levels of blood cholesterol.
And anyway, it’s God who does this, not medical so-called “doctors” who are just spreading their heathen word…
“First there would be many things we could do NOW for the poor people of Bengladesh od NOW , who are lacking basics things like water, cars, buildings,”
Which won’t be movable in 50 years, so all that spending will be wasted.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
And a lot of them do not lack such things: have a look at the homeless in your country.
PS I notice that Giles has given up appearing to be scared for no reason.
Now he’s so “scared” he ignores the AGW problems. Either that or he’s ***terrified*** of people in the third world without a home.
re 397 completely fed up says:
“”I notice that Giles has given up appearing to be scared for no reason.
Now he’s so “scared” he ignores the AGW problems. Either that or he’s ***terrified*** of people in the third world without a home.””
Oh, don’t worry…they “will” find a new home . (Sorry, I really don’t mean any disrespect to anyone or anything. Some people at the climate center where I was, were developing a graveyard sense of humor).
But seriously according to quite a few sources, India is building an anti-climate change refugee fence with concertina wire around Bangladesh to stop climate change refugees from entering into India.
All this global warming is really happening now, people…we’re not making it up (and we have a solid body of peer-reviewed evidence back to 1824- Fourier)…and it’s going to be coming to a country near you unless we slow it down. We have to stop burning oil, coal and gas before it is too late for major changes to be locked up in the 20-30 year ocean pipeline(thermal inertia). (Sorry for being preachy).
Remember, there is also probably a tremendous lag in the climate system…in other words a lot of change is already here in the USA…but the oceans are most likely causing a 20-30 year delay before it hits us (thermal inertia): Also, below the Bangladesh fence references, there are peer reviewed possible solutions from Science and Nature journals.
“Next door in Bangladesh, 15 percent of whose land mass will be under water if sea levels rise as predicted, things are even worse. Little wonder India is building a fence along its border with Bangladesh in anticipation of a wave of climate-change refugees. At 4,000 kilometers in length, the Indo-Bangladeshi Barrier will rival the Great Wall of China.”
Here in America, we apparently don’t want to hear things like this… so not many American sources can be given:
Bangladesh GW fence:
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:SxTN324x5BwJ:www.sfu.ca/cstudies/idfe/climatechange/powerpoint/Zaman_SFU_Climate%2520Chnage_21%2520May09.ppt+india+built+fence+bangladesh+climate+change+refugees&cd=5&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/8/811837/-NBC-Report-500,000-Climate-Refugees-per-year-in-Bangladesh-NOW
http://www.countercurrents.org/kamdar150609.htm
http://www.docudharma.com/diary/14646/climate-refugees
http://www.khabor.com/english/news/03302009_0000005.htm
Peer reviewed possible solutions:
http://www.princeton.edu/mae/people/faculty/socolow/socdoc/carbonincheck.pdf
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/305/5686/968
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0807/full/climate.2008.59.html
The interesting thing that I have been thinking last days is that whenever there are so big see-saw perturbations in mid-latitudes as the ones we have seen … energy is being transported to the northern latitudes by the atmospheric circulation. So … perhaps higher latitudes are really “warm” lately. People tend to forget this.
I think what Gilles represents is what ‘warmilists’ face in motivating policy makers to move ahead on adaptation and mitigation in the ‘developed world’. The middle aged ‘man on the street’ doesn’t see the urgency in preventing a problem that will have profound effects beyond his lifetime, beginning in areas of the planet he’s not too concerned about, particularly when a major part of the change seems required on the part of others.
As an old timer myself I can relate – I already live frugally, consume little, use the least possible fossil energy, and am expecting to be gone well before ‘peak oil’ causes real peak prices – do I press for fast action like a carbon tax that will only benefit future generations [that I haven’t contributed too], so that the minimal energy I do use will increase in price tomorrow? Never mind 2100 or even 2035, what’s the motivation and solution from my side of the fence?
Where climate science needs to go is where folks live, like the CRED guide points out, rather than to “prove” AGW theory or terrify people about remote possibilities, it needs to be related to the day to day of the here and now – the denialists will fade away like smokers and CFCs once science can show more immediate cause/effect rather than trying to convince Joe Average of the validity of a hypothetical proposition. The reason the ‘big boys’ are fighting the science so hard is they know it’s right, convince the middle class before the ‘tipping points’ become the proof. I appreciate Gavins clarity and focus as a contributor to understanding, hopefully he can continue as long as needed!
OTOH, considering the real problem is human overpopulation, maybe I’ll root for the planet to shake many/most/all off like a dog shaking fleas – population crashes or even extinction events [stun the creationists!] aren’t necessarily all bad.