Global warming is in full swing, say some of the world’s climatologists. Or is it?

On Thursday the U.N.’s weather agency announced that 2010 was a milestone, the warmest year on record, in a three-way tie with 2005 and 1998. “The 2010 data confirm the Earth’s significant long-term warming trend,” said Michel Jarraud, the World Meteorological Organization’s top official. He added that the ten warmest years after records began in 1854 have all occurred since 1998.

But how reliable is the data? Here are five good reasons some scientists are skeptical of these claims.

1. Where does the data come from? Average temperatures globally last year were 0.95 degrees Fahrenheit (0.53 Celsius) higher than the 1961-90 mean that is used for comparison purposes, according to the WMO—a statement based on three climate data sets from U.K. and U.S. weather agencies. They gather readings from land-based weather and climate stations, ships and buoys, and satellites—and they’ve come under dramatic scrutiny in recent years.

The land data is being challenged extensively by Anthony Watt on his SurfaceStations.org website. Watts recently graded 61% of the stations used to measure temperature with a D—for being located less than 10 meters from an artificial heating source. Many climate skeptics also take issue with NASA and NOAA, the U.S. agencies that gather U.S. climate data, but also manipulate and “normalize” it.

Satellite data is arguably the most accurate way to measure temperature. Roy Spencer, a climatologist and former NASA scientist, takes issue with the way that data is normalized and adjusted, instead presenting raw, unadjusted data on his website. The WMO does not use this data.

Watts pointed FoxNews.com to a new, peer-reviewed paper that looks at the reliability of the land-based sensor network, concluding that “it is presently impossible to quantify the warming trend in global climate.”

2. There’s less ice is in the oceans. Or more. Or something. The WMO report notes that Arctic sea-ice cover in December 2010 was the lowest on record, with an average monthly extent of 12 million square kilometers, 1.35 million square kilometers below the 1979-2000 average for December. The agency called it the third-lowest minimum ice extent recorded in September.

In fact, the overall sea-ice record shows virtually no change throughout the past 30 years, argued Lord Monckton, a British politician, journalist, and noted skeptic of global warming. He points out that “the quite rapid loss of Arctic sea ice since the satellites were watching has been matched by a near-equally rapid gain of Antarctic sea ice.”

When the summer Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point in the 30-year record in mid-September 2007, just three weeks later the Antarctic sea extent reached a 30-year record high, Monckton said.

3. El Nino has been playing havoc with temperatures. Over the ten years from 2001 to 2010, global temperatures have averaged 0.46C (0.83F) above the 1961-1990 average, the report points out, calling these measurements “the highest ever recorded for a 10-year period since the beginning of instrumental climate records.” The WMO notes that warming has been especially strong in Africa, parts of Asia, and parts of the Arctic.

Of course temperatures are up, said Joe Bastardi, a meteorologist with Accuweather: It’s El Nino, stupid.

“El Ninos cause spikes up. La Ninas drop it down,” Bastardi told FoxNews.com. “Why have we gone up overall in the past 30 years? Because we’ve been in a warm cycle in the Pacific,” he said. “But the tropical Pacific has cooled dramatically, and it’s like turning down your thermostat—it takes a while, but the house will cool.”

Japan’s Meteorological Agency agrees with Bastardi’s conclusion, stating recently that “it can be presumed that the high temperatures in recent years have been influenced by natural climate fluctuations with the periods ranging from several years to several decades,” as well as by greenhouse gases including CO2.

Icecap Note:
El Ninos are more frequent above (enlarged here) and longer below (enlarged here) in the PDO warm phase. La Ninas exhibit the same frequency and length dominance in the cold phase.

“This year’s warming can also be attributable to an El Nino event which lasted from summer 2009 to spring 2010,” the agency said.

4. Besides, it’s getting chilly. 2010 may have been a warm year, but 2011 has been off to a very cold start—and may be among the coldest in decades.

“December 2010 was the second-coldest December in the entire history dating back to 1659,” noted Steve McIntyre, a climate scientist and the editor of climate blog Climate Audit. He bases his claim on data from the longest continuous record in the world, kept by The Met Office, the U.K.’s official weather agency.

It’s an odd fact, one Bastardi thinks is telling. He said that the transition from the El Nino warming period into the La Nina cooling period will herald a crash of global temperatures, normalizing world heat levels—especially when analyzed via Spencer’s satellite data charts.

“If we look at the last 30 years, then the coming 30 years will cool back to where we were in the late 70s,” he said. “Look at it this way. Suppose you didn’t have a scale until 3 weeks ago. Every day for the last 3 weeks you weigh yourself and you are 175 or so. One morning you are 175.1 How much weight have you gained?”

You’re the heaviest you have ever been, right? “If you weren’t weighing yourself before, or were using a different scale, can you really say this is the heaviest ever?” he asked.

5. Forecasts are often wrong. Predicting the weather—especially a decade or more in advance—is unbelievably challenging. In 2000, a scientist with the Met Office’s Climatic Research Unit declared that within ten years, snowfall would be “a very rare and exciting event.”

And in 1970 at the first Earth Day event, one researcher predicted that the planet would be 11 degrees colder by the year 2000. Post here.

Contrary to claims of many modern Holocene denying climate hysteriacs, the 1970s did have a number of writers who beleived that the world was going to cool down. Among these were Stephen Schneider, the founder of the Climate Project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He wrote:

“I have cited many examples of recent climatic variability and repeated the warnings of several well-known climatologists that a cooling trend has set in-perhaps one akin to the Little Ice Age-and that climatic variability, which is the bane of reliable food production, can be expected to increase along with the cooling.” Stephen Schneider, The Genesis Strategy, (New York: Plenum Press, 1976), p. 90

Notice that Schneider says climate variability is caused by the cooling. Schneider eventually became a global warming alarmist but back in the 1970s when he wrote the above, he also wrote:

“The Dramatic importance of climatic changes to the world’s future has been dangerously underestimated by many, often because we have been lulled by modern technology into thinking we have conquered nature. But this well-written book points out in clear language that the climatic threat could be as awesome as any we might face and that massive world-wide actions to hedge against that threat deserve immediate consideration. At a minimum, public awareness of the possibilities must commence, and Lowell Ponte’s provacative work is a good place to start.” Book jacket endorsement of Lowell Ponte’s, The Cooling, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1976)

I point this out to show that at that time the hysteria was on cooling, at least as far as Schneider was concerned. I also point this out to verify that this book was within the mainstream of climatological thought at that time. This makes the following passage from Ponte’s book interesting, at least to me.

In countering the claim that a heat wave disproved global cooling, Ponte relates:

“But as Dr. Lamb pointed out calmly, such heat waves have accompanied every past global cooling and are to be expected. A high-pressure zone blocked warm air and chilled the North Atlantic. Now another hihg-pressure zone was blocking cold air and bringing extremes of heat into Europe. But such blocks were both symptoms of a cooling climate. Such cooling, he said, ‘means more volatile weather. It will be more hot, more cold, more wet and more dry, just as it was in the seventeenth century.’” Lowell Ponte, The Cooling, (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1976), p. 40

Back then global cooling explained everything, hot, cold, wet or dry. Cooling was everything.

But today things are soooo different. we are so much better. Today global warming explains cold, hot, wet and dry.

The alarmists have just changed horses, not the need for alarm.

Here is the concluding statement from a climate blog advocating global warming alarmism.

According to the scientists at NOAA, the extreme weather of 2010 may very well be the “new normal.” Hotter, colder, wetter, drier. And way beyond inconvenient. See here.

Yep now instead of global cooling causing every kind of weather imaginable it is now global warming. As Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun.

Even academic literature is littered with the idea that global warming is a universal causation of everything, hot cold, wet and dry.

“Our results indicate that fine-scale snow albedo effects influence the response of both hot and cold events and that peak increases in extreme hot events are amplified by surface moisture feedbacks. Likewise, we find that extreme precipitation is enhanced on the lee side of rain shadows and over coastal areas dominated by convective precipitation. We project substantial, spatially heterogeneous increases in both hot and wet events over the contiguous United States by the end of the next century, suggesting that consideration of fine-scale processes is critical for accurate assessment of local- and regional-scale vulnerability to climate change”.

Noah S. Diffenbaug, et al, “Fine-scale processes regulate the response of extreme events to global climate change,” PNAS, 102(2005):p. 15744.  That article was edited by Stephen Schneider. “Conservation group WWF has blamed climate change for the coldest August in Sydney for more than 60 years. The freezing temperatures are proof of the urgent need to cut carbon pollution, according to WWF development and sustainability program manager Paul Toni.” “We can expect more extremes in climate,” Mr Toni said.

A senior engineer from National Climate Center, Ren Fumin told Beijing Times: “The severe coldness this winter can be called an extreme weather event. The direct reason for this is the atmospheric circulation anomaly. The main reason is the emergence of new EI Nino Phenomenon caused by global warming.” ”Weather expert: Extreme cold weather in N China caused by global warming” January 7, 2010

As if no El Nino’s ever occurred before the 1900s. What a laugh.

“‘Even though this is quite a cold winter by recent standards it is still perfectly consistent with predictions for global warming,’ said Dr Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at Department of Physics, University of Oxford.” Richard Alleyne ”Snow is consistent with global warming, say scientists” The Telegraph Jan 23, 2011

The article this is from has the following as the teaser,

“Britain may be in the grip of the coldest winter for 30 years and grappling with up to a foot of snow in some places but the extreme weather is entirely consistent with global warming, claim scientists.” Richard Alleyne ”Snow is consistent with global warming, say scientists” The Telegraph Jan 23, But cold as well as hot as well as wet as well as dry can be due to global cooling or global warming, whatever explanation is needed.

See post here.

As the saying goes:

“If all you have in your hand is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail”.

It is hopeless to expect that Hansen could possibly analyze data objectively - all he has in his head is “CO2 climate forcing” and everything else has to be “forced” into that ridiculous paradigm. It makes no difference to him that the predictions of his past half-baked computer models based on “CO2 climate forcing” were completely wrong.

It is not worth my time (or anyone else’s in my opinion) to try to critique the entire paper, but the final paragraph on his p. 11 stands our like a sore thumb. In it he states:

“Earth orbital (Milankovic) parameters have favored a cooling trend for the past several thousand years, which should be expected to start in the Northern Hemisphere (NH). For example, Earth is now closest to the sun in January, which favors warm winters and cool summers in the Northern Hemisphere.”

Those statements are typical of the misunderstanding in the popular literature of the Milankovic cycles. Since we are now further from the sun in the NH summer, he argues that the NH should get less solar insolation in the NH summer thus “favoring the growth of glaciers and ice-caps in the NH”. So why then we may ask are we now in an Interglacial Warming? What Hansen fails to realize is that when we are further from the Sun in NH summer we move more slowly in orbit, and are therefore exposed to the summer sun for a longer period of time.

From the graphs in the web-site, one can calculate that in 2010 the NH summer half of the earth’s orbit from the Spring Equinox to the fall Equinox lasts 186.1 days. The NH winter half of the orbit lasts 179.0 days. So the summer half gets 7.1 more days of solar insolation than the winter half. (Go to your calendar and count!)

Exposure time in this case is more significant that daily insolation caused by our further distance during the NH summer. And that is why we are in an Interglacial Warming and why Hansen is completely wrong in arguing that we should be “favoring the growth of glaciers and ice-caps in the Northern Hemisphere”.

Now some 10,000 years ago, because of the precession of the Equinoxes, summer and winter would have nearly flipped but with not much change in the earth’s orbital eccentricity. From the same web-site, in the year 8,000 BC, the NH summer half of the earth’s orbit lasted 178.5 days while the winter half lasted 186.6 days, so that the winter half exceeded the summer half by 8.1 days.

So 10,000 years ago the earth was further from the sun during NH winter and it spent a longer time on the winter half of the orbit, thus both effects re-enforced each other to give us a marked Glacial Cooling. (Actually the peak in that Glacial Cooling occurred several thousand years earlier than 8,000 BC.) Today, while we spend a longer time during the NH summer half of our orbit, we are further away in the summer, so the effects tend to cancel, but the longer time exposure is more important than the further distance.

The following discussion from my Chapter 12 of our recently published book “Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory” is a more general critique of the Hansen paper. Simply substitute “Hansen” for “Gore”.

The Legend of the Sky Dragon and Its Mythmakers

There is a simple way to tell the difference between propagandists and scientists. If scientists have a theory they search diligently for data that might actually contradict the theory so that they can fully test its validity or refine it. Propagandists, on the other hand, carefully select only the data that might agree with their theory and dutifully ignore any data that disagrees with it.

One of the best examples of the contrast between propagandists and scientists comes from the way the human caused global warming advocates handle the Vostok ice core data from Antarctica (6). The data span the last 420,000 years, and they show some four Glacial Coolings with average temperatures some 6 to 8 C below current values and five Interglacial Warming periods with temperatures some 2 to 4 C above current values. The last warming period in the data is the current one that started some 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. The data show a remarkably good correlation between long term variations in temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are at a minimum during the end of Glacial Coolings when temperatures are at a minimum. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are at a maximum when temperatures are at a maximum at the end of Interglacial Warmings. Gore, in his movie and his book, “An Inconvenient Truth”, shows the Vostok data, and uses it to argue that the data prove that high atmospheric CO2 concentrations cause global warming.

Is that an objective evaluation of the Vostok data? Let’s look at what Gore failed to mention. First, the correlation between temperature and CO2 has been going on for about half a million years, long before any significant human production of CO2, which began only about 150 years ago. Thus, it is reasonable to argue that the current increase in CO2 during our current Interglacial Warming, which has been going on for the last 15,000 - 20,000 years, is merely the continuation of a natural process that has nothing whatever to do with human activity. Gore also fails to ask the most logical question: where did all that CO2 come from during those past warming periods when the human production of CO2 was virtually nonexistent? The answer is apparent to knowledgeable scientists: from the same place that the current increase is coming from, from the oceans. The amount of CO2 dissolved in the oceans is some 50 times greater than the amount in the atmosphere. As oceans warm for whatever reason, some of their dissolved CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, just as your soda pop goes flat and loses its dissolved CO2 as it warms to room temperature even as you pour it into the warmer glass. As oceans cool, CO2 from the atmosphere dissolves back into the oceans, just as soda pop is made by injecting CO2 into cold water.

But the real “clincher” that separates the scientists from the propagandists comes from the most significant fact that Gore fails to mention. The same Vostok data show that changes in temperature always precede the changes in atmospheric CO2 by about 500-1500 years.

The temperature increases or decreases come first, and it is only after 500-1500 years that the CO2 follows. Fig 3 shows the data from the termination of the last Glacial Cooling (Major Glaciation) that ended some 15,000 - 20,000 years ago through the current Interglacial Warming of today. The four instances where the temperature changes precede the CO2 curve are clearly shown. All the Vostok data going back some 420,000 years show exactly the same behavior. Any objective scientist looking at that data would conclude that it is the warming that is causing the CO2 increases, not the other way around as Gore claimed. I am indebted to Guy Leblanc Smith for granting permission to use Fig. 3 as it was published in Viv Forbes’ web-site.

It is even more revealing to see how the advocates of the human-caused global warming theory handle this “clincher” of the argument. It is generally agreed that the Vostok cycles of Glacial Coolings and Interglacial Warmings are driven by changes in the parameters of the Earth’s orbital motion about the Sun and its orientation with respect to that orbit; namely, changes in the ellipticity of its orbit, changes in its obliquity (tilt relative to its orbital plane), and the precession of its axis of rotation. These changes are referred to as the Milankovitch cycles, and even the human caused global warming advocates agree that those cycles “trigger” the temperature variations. But the human caused global warming advocates present the following ad hoc contrivance to justify their greenhouse effect theory. The Milankovitch cycles, they say, are “weak” forcings that start the process of Interglacial Warming, but once the oceans begin to release some of their CO2 after 500-1500 years, then the “strong” forcing of “greenhouse warming” takes over to accelerate the warming. That argument is the best example of how propagandists carefully select data that agrees with their theory as they dutifully ignore data that disagrees with it. One need not go any further than to the next Glacial Cooling to expose that fraudulent argument for the artificial contrivance that it really is. Pray tell us then, we slayers of the Sky Dragon ask, what causes the next Glacial Cooling? How can it possibly begin when the CO2 concentration, their “strong” forcing, is at its maximum? How can the “weak” Milankovitch cooling effect possibly overcome that “strong” forcing of the greenhouse effect heating when the CO2 concentration is still at its maximum value at the peak of the Interglacial Warming? The global warmers thus find themselves stuck way out on a limb with that contrived argument. They are stuck there in an everlasting Glacial Warming, with no way to begin the next Glacial Cooling that the data show.

But one has to be sorry for Gore and his friends, for after all, they are in the global warming business. Global cooling is clearly someone else’s job!”

I can think of nothing more inappropriate and insulting to Milankovic than having Hansen speak at a Symposium in his honor.

See SPPI blog here.

You gotta hand it to the guy, despite almost every single one of his prognostications turning out to be wrong, he doesn’t bat an eyelid but just right on going. And they keep letting him.

The latest escapade from Beijing Jim involves a paper he’s writing which says it’s “almost dead certain” that the sea will rise by a multiple number of metres this century. As Treehugger reports:

“[Business as usual] scenarios result in global warming on the order of 3-6C. It is this scenario for which we assert that multi-meter sea level rise on the century time scale are not only possible, but almost dead certain.”

Treehugger. Multi-Meter Sea Level Rise by 2100 Certain with Business As Usual Emissions: James Hansen.

Apparently, Beijing Jim reckons that something called “albedo flip” will speed the process of melting all the ice in the word (including the 90% of the world’s ice in Antarctica, currently chilling at around -40 degrees celsius). For more, you can read the draft paper here.

What’s so touching about the way Treehugger reports this latest paper is the level of doe-eyed trust they seem to still have in him:

James Hansen may be as much as a celebrity as one can be in the world of climate change science, so when he and colleague Makiko Sato say that we’re in for multi-meter sea level rise by 2100 you have to pay attention, even when that prediction falls well outside the range predicted by many other climate scientists.

Isn’t that nice? His predictions for temperature rises with “business as usual scenarios” from 1988 that kicked this whole thing off were miles out, yet still they believe in him, despite what those horrid sceptics say with their insistence on, y’know, verifiable evidence and empirical science rather than a simulation on a computer.

Copies of the draft paper being handed out. See post here.

Icecap Note: Beijing Jim in the late 1980s, projected flooding of the West Side Highway and water lapping on the steps of GISS in New York City within 20 years (by 2010). Sea levels have increased a little over an inch over that period. See how sea level rises have diminished gradually the last century here.

And as for an albedo flip, last year winter Northern hemispheric snowcover was second highest since records began in the 1960s. This winter is again (below, enlarged here) continuously above normal (higher albedo than normal, not lower). The last decade was the highest in the record, no albedo-flipping evident.

The American Meteorological Society is soliciting input on their draft statement (h/t to Joe Daleo)

“Communicating Science” An Information Statement of the American Meteorological Society

They have sent out the following

The following draft statement is currently under review by the AMS Council:”Communicating Science”

If you have comment on this draft AMS Statement currently under consideration, you may transmit those comments to the AMS Council by sending a message to the following e-mail address: statement_comments@ametsoc.org before 2 February 2011.

Thanks!
Melissa S. Weston, Executive Officer
American Meteorological Society
45 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-3693 USA
Phone: 617.226.3904
Web: http://www.ametsoc.org/

I urge readers of my weblog to send in comments. I have excepted a few statements from the draft text for my comments.

The first excerpt that I am commenting on is

“What Is Science?

Science is an enterprise that systematically acquires and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and verifiable predictions about the natural world.”

This is an excellent succinct summary statement of what science is. This is clearly a requirement that multi-decadal climate predictions for the remainder of the 21st century cannot satisfy.

The second excerpt is

“A model is a physical, mathematical, or conceptual framework for describing reality. Most weather and climate models, for example, are sets of equations that represent the principles and conditions that govern the behavior of energy, mass, momentum, and moisture in the atmosphere.”

The statement needs to have added that only the dynamic core of these models (i.e. the pressure gradient force, advection, and gravity) represent basic physics. All other components of these models are parameterizations, which means they are not fundamental physics but engineering code with tunable parameters.

“Modeling will continue to be an essential tool used by scientists for investigation and prediction. Because models are solidly grounded in mathematics and physical observations, and represent a logical description of the system that they are designed to predict, they offer the best and most effective means for testing the consequence of a full range of inputs to a system, from subtle changes to shocks.”

This statement has an important error. Modeling DO NOT “offer the best and most effective means for testing the consequence of a full range of inputs to a system, from subtle changes to shocks”.  Models are themselves hypotheses.  They cannot be used as a “test” without comparing their predictions with actual observed data. 

Real world observations, not models, therefore, are the appropriate means for testing the consequence of a full range of inputs to a system, from subtle changes to shocks!  Models can assist in the interpretation of the behavior of the studied system, as well as to make forecasts ONCE the accuracy of their predictions are verified against observed data.

This is clearly a requirement that multi-decadal climate predictions decades from now cannot pass until those decades have occurred.

I discuss this issue in a number of my posts; e.g.

When Is A Model a Good Model?

Recommended Reading - ”What Can We Learn From Climate Models?” By Judy Curry

What Are Climate Models? What Do They Do?

Real Climate Misunderstanding Of Climate Models
The bottom line message is the weather and climate models are not basic physics, but are engineering codes with a core of fundamental physics but with much of the atmospheric, ocean, cryosphere and land represented by tunable engineering code (i.e. their parameterizations).

I urge the AMS statement be modified to correct this misunderstanding concerning models.

See more here.