The earth is getting colder: and people's reactions

Discussion in 'Earth Science' started by sculptor, Apr 13, 2014.

  1. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    OK to start, oh, high again:
    I posted this bit in another "science" forum and ran up against what seems to be a sort of insanity as/re "anthropogenic global warming" adherents who got really mean and nasty at the thought that someone might want to look at other aspects of climate science:
    So, I was wondering if it would be possible to follow this where the science leads us without people's emotional outbursts clouding the issue?
    Ok here is what I posted there:

    The world is getting colder(less warm)

    Here are a couple NOAA charts showing global temperatures with trend lines for the last 10 years
    land and ocean:
    http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-s...ase=10&firsttrendyear=2003&lasttrendyear=2013
    ocean only:
    http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-s...ase=10&firsttrendyear=2003&lasttrendyear=2013
    the land chart still shows a slight gain.
    The oceans are giving up their heat faster than the land----water is a better heat conductor

    (wild guess du jour)
    The quieting sun is becoming more dominant as a climate driver.

    This picture shows the decline over the past 3 solar cycles.

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    so far, 24 is shaping up much like #5
    5 led us into the dalton minimum

    It seems that Livingston and Penn (using the Zeeman splitting technique)think #25 will be even weaker-----(damned bold of them to predict 25 so far out in advance of the event)
    ...............
    alternately we could look into how much heat is being shunted from the lower troposphere(which is normally hot) into the lower stratosphere(which is normally cold)during msw and ssw events.
    Caveat: Even less is known about sudden stratospheric warming(ssw) events than is known about the solar cycles.

    If anyone is interested in discussing these, i'll post several sites to give a basic primer of the knowledge and prognostications regarding the ssw events. The science is young and has little real time event data and a lot of speculation. With smiles up and running on the space station, we could know more soon.

    ...............
    caveat:
    the links to the charts are kinky
    sometimes the trend period 2003 to 2013 remains accurate
    and sometimes not
    anyone who reads this, please reset the dates to 2003 through 2013 for both the main plot and under "options" display trend also
     
    Last edited: Apr 13, 2014
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  3. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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  5. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    From your link:
    Your link does not support your position.
     
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  7. Aqueous Id flat Earth skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    People who read and research science are not properly called adherents. That term is best reserved for people who absorb the propaganda fed to them by Big Oil and the evangelical religions they've allied themselves with.

    It leads to the journals. Any other path derives from pseudoscience.

    You might want to set the example for that

    False.

    10 years does not make a trend. Nor does reverse the melting of glaciers or resurrect the crashed ecosystems. Nor does it reverse 150 years of findings. In any case the first link shows February temps over the last century. You goofed but anyway it shows we are warming, not cooling.
    Moot.
    None of that has anything to do with the cause--greenhouse gasses.

    That's more like dreaming than science.

    So you think IPCC is unaware of solar cycles?

    What is the position of climatologists on this?

    What does this have to do with the evidence that global warming is caused by greenhouse gases?

    What do climate journals day about it?

    Quote science in a science thread, and post your speculations on solar cycles in the fringe forum (the lower half of the home page). Do not post junk science links in the science threads.


    It's older than particle physics. It's about as old as evolution.

    That's false and incorrect.

    It has copious science behind it.

    We've known enough since 1957 to justify curbing emissions.
     
    Last edited: Apr 13, 2014
  8. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    That's your first mistake. The rest of your errors flow from this one error.
     
  9. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    To elaborate further on this, first consider this graph:

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    This graph was generated using Excel. It uses the GISS temperature data-set. Using the GISS data set I graphed the slope of rolling ten year periods. The value read off this graph indicates the slope of the GISS data set for the ten years up to that point. Even though it uses a decadal slope, as you can see the data is recorded on a monthly basis, so Excel assumes you want the slope expressed in degrees per month rather than degrees per decade. I could adjust that for you if you feel strongly about it, but it won't change the shape of the graph, only the absolute values,

    There are two things to note. Negative slopes are not unusual. The last time that the decadal slope was negative was in the '60s.

    It also illustrates the third point I wanted to make - trying to read trends from ten years worth of data is a pointless exercise.



    Now consider this graph:

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    This graph is a scatterplot of monthly wolf sunspot number and monthly temperature anomal expressed in tenths of a degree.

    It shows two things. It shows that yes, a positive correlation exists - higher monthly sunspot numbers generally correlate with higher monthly temperature anomalies. It also shows, however, that this correlation is relatively weak, with variations in monthly wolf sunspot number explaining only 2.3% of the variation in monthly temperature anomaly.

    Now for the final point, which will probably blow your mind - this 2.3% variation is both already known by climate scientists, and is already accounted for in climate prediction models.
     
  10. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Punters may want to consider this graph as well:

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  11. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    I agree that 10 years is not a long term trend---just a 10 year trend, and that just barely.
    Alternately, one could say that we are 24 years into a solar trend leading to a quieter sun.

    couple things
    1) The United States has just gone through its coldest interequinoctial winter in a century.
    and I live where that was obvious.
    2) Do you wholly discount the work of Livingston and Penn?
    Let us assume for the moment that their prognostication as/re solar cycle 25 are accurate-----what then for cycle 26?

    If Livingston and Penn are accurate(about #25), and solar minima do lead to (at least) interglacial cold spells then we may see that 10 year trend continue for another 17 years, and if #26 also remains quiet, then for another 28 years.

    Of course, the end point of such a trend, and it's climate impact remain for future study.
     
  12. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Ten years isn't a long enough baseline to form any meaningful conclusions from climate data, period.

    But we're not 24 years into a period of cooling, are we?

    Not universally true:

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    You understand we're talking about global climate here, and the globe extends beyond the national borders of the USA right?

    I generally try and avoid dismissing things without evidence. Livingstone and Penn aren't the only ones predicting an exceedingly quiet, or virtually non existant solar cycle 25. So far the predictions about 24 have been fairly accurate.

    Even if everything you say comes to pass, it still won't be significant. Take a moment to actually study the first graph I posted.

    Climate change, and how the multiple aspects of the climate interact is an area of ongoing research. Nothing changes the simple observations that Carbon Dioxide absorbs infra-red radiation at around the frequency the earth emits it and that this process warms the atmosphere and the surface above what one would ordinarly expect based solely on the earth behaving as a grey-body.
     
  13. billvon Valued Senior Member

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    Agreed. So for 24 years (averaging out the solar cycles) we are seeing less total energy hitting the Earth. For 24 years (averaging out the extremes) we have been seeing warming. So something other than the sun is causing the warming.
    Agreed. And just as obviously, the rest of the world has gone through one of the warmest winters in a century.
     
  14. Arne Saknussemm trying to figure it all out Valued Senior Member

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    OP Sculptor. Greetings. You seem to be quite the expert on this matter. May I ask, without your giving any personal details, what your qualifications in this field are? Thank you.

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  15. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Just curious here Alex. What, exactly, is it that you think is my position?
     
  16. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    I sincerely hope that your comment made sense to you as that would make it at-least one of us.
     
  17. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Your first mistake is the assertion of cooling - as I elaborated in my subsequent post, which used actual data. If you want a discussion, address that or my subsequent response.
     
  18. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    We had a long-snow and unusually cold winter where I live, in the middle of North America - but with an odd feature: not a single 24 hour minimum temperature record for my region (central Minnesota) was broken during that time. (That bit of trivia from the Minneapolis Star Tribune weather section; checked at the big airport near Fort Snelling, which has the longest weather record in the area, with the long record available from the Duluth port, and best with a local weather station I like to visit online once in a while, which supplies better info for my needs than the Twin Cities' airport - here: http://www.webring.org/l/rd?ring=da...www.mlmweather.com/WeatherDisplay/weather.htm )

    What do you suppose the odds are that a very long and near-record (top 3 - 5 since the Civil War) snow/cold severe winter would not show a single record overnight low temperature for any given date? Just by chance, that is, without an explanatory mechanism?

    And if that probability calculation leads you to search for such a mechanism, as I think it might, where would you look? Sunspots - for overnight temp drops?

    Edit in: I and the others of my generation with childhoods on the Lake Agassiz/Red River valley prairie noticed the drop in frequency and apparent clarity of those truly bitter, hollow-air, star-spectacular winter nights years before this global warming stuff broke into the public discussion - we do miss them, one of the few scenery benefits of that bleak landscape (see a relatively lush, rolling, and well-populated daylight version in the background of the movie "Fargo"), but they were and are best enjoyed in the vicinity of fossil-fuel central heating and cocoa - some kind of paradox there. One suspects the original-sin folks are on to something.
     
    Last edited: Apr 15, 2014
  19. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Greetings Arne:
    qualifications
    I am a very curious fellow, with a fairly comprehensive background in research, and a critical mind.
    As a young man, i spent about 13 years at 5 universities acquiring a rather eclectic education. At my 3rd U. I took the meteorology series, and at my 5th developed an interest in paleoclimates. I have a strong distaste for(distrust of) climate models which are not constantly checked against what is known of paleoclimates.
    I much prefer models directly derived from field data. When I cannot find suitable information, I prefer to do my own research and come to my own conclusions.
    So, whenever i think I see a connection, I start the research. Some of which is simply by presenting an observation, then watching the responses.
    Lately, I've come across many who's responses seem somewhat irrational. There seems to be much more emotion involved with climate science to the detriment of critical thinking. And, quite often people are imagining that I am saying something that I am not saying, and then responding to their imaginations.
    But, then again, I could say the same for the clovis first anthropological archaeologists and the people who while doing field work have come up with different dates.
    Many had hesitated to publish for fear of being attacked by the "clovis first" wold pack.
    It seems, that when people "buy into" a concept, they tend to hang onto it long after they should trade it in for something more closely resembling reality.

    No offense intended, but if I knew all the answers, I wouldn't bother to present the questions.
     
  20. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    iceaura:
    I'm just a couple hundred miles south of you in east central Iowa.

    This past winter I'm fairly certain was due to the polar vortex being displaced to hover over the hudson bay.
    It seems that we could look to 2 causal factors for the oddity of record cold winter with few record cold temperatures.(most of those were east of us)
    1) We have been loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses which obviously have their primary and most noticeable effect on the atmosphere it's self.(eg more warmth noted at higher latitudes and altitudes)
    2) we have just gone through the highest solar energy period in well over 1000 years. Though we get almost all of our heat from the sun, the earth and it's atmosphere is a very large heatsink. So that part of our temperatures directly attributed to solar activity tends to lag that activity as warmth is being absorbed by the land and oceans and atmosphere.
    The oceans tend to give up their heat from the layer above the thermocline much faster than does the land. (from my above--"the land chart still shows a slight gain"). If you take a link and go to the noaa charts and take the date for the ocean chart as far back as it will go, then compare that to solar spot charts, you will note that the solar activity increased decades before the oceans began to heat up.

    If I seem overly confident here: Please bear in mind that for these discussions, i am still in the rough draft phase of developing a consistent hypothesis, and am looking for any null hypothesis that will refine my concepts. I feel confident that what I think I'm seeing so far warrants a closer and continuous look.
     
  21. sculptor Valued Senior Member

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    Did you look at the noaa charts? Please take the link then reset the trend to 2003-2013, and you'll see what I saw.
    NOAA are the ones asserting cooling for the period 2003 - 2013. I am just directing people to look at their charts.

    You may dispute noaa's findings and you wouldn't be the first. Until I find another organization with access to more and/or better instrumentation, I'll give noaa the benefit of the doubt.

    Please know that I am declaring no trend longer that the 10 years mentioned.

    From your chart, it is difficult to fathom accurate dates. Could you redo it with overlaying grid lines?
     
  22. Trippy ALEA IACTA EST Staff Member

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    Have you done any research into the factors that are know (through observation) to cause the early destabilization of the polar vortex (which is specifically what happened during your winter)?
     
  23. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    Your position is stated in the title. The earth is getting colder, global warming does not exist.
     

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