Global Cooling

[dr.placebo]

My background tends to prefer the term "solar wind." The solar wind is a flow of mostly charged particles from the sun (a plasma) driven outwards by a combination of thermal and magnetic effects, plus a contribution from solar radiation. Although it is on balance of neutral charge, the solar wind is composed of positive and negative particles, mostly protons and electrons (both mostly from ionized hydrogen).

One can consider the plasma flow to have currents because of the motion of the particles, but one has to think of it as both positive and negative currents, with the net current tending towards zero, since there is negligible accumulating charge.

In the Wiki article I cited earlier Birkeland is cited as a pioneer:

In 1916, Birkeland was probably the first person to successfully predict that, "From a physical point of view it is most probable that solar rays are neither exclusively negative nor positive rays, but of both kinds". In other words, the solar wind consists of both negative electrons and positive ions.

My reading of it is that Birkeland is an early worker in the field, with a very useful but crude understanding of the solar wind (the proton is generally considered to have been discovered in 1919, and plasmas still elude full understanding).

I found the thunderbolts.info article a bit confusing. The notion of complicated electrical and magnetic effects in the solar system, especially effects due to the interaction with the earth's magnetic field, has been a subject of intense investigation for years. That an informal term like "ropes" is used by NASA to describe some of the observed effects does not seem to be a useful point of criticism.

[geekster]

Global temperatures continuing to follow ocean temperatures down:



2010 won't be warmer than 1998.

Ocean temps are continuing to fall:



Notice that since 2007, sea surface temperatures have spent more time below average than above.

We have a really strong cold NAO and AO right now and a cold PDO. The NH polar jet is "loose" in that it has dropped considerably South from the track it had been taking. The jet stream has also gone more "loopy" which is why you see cold temperatures in the Western US but warm temperatures in Eastern Canada as the jet stream loops South and then makes a hard left and loops North again rather than a zonal East-West flow.

[can't sit still]

Much of the global warming data is crunched by the MET. "Met Office was boasting of the £33 million supercomputer," With that kind of computing power,,, they must be right !! After they screwed up the forecasts [royally], they say "they could be remedied by giving it another £20 million a year for better computers"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/colu ... eezes.html
Piers Corbyn received an award for scientific integrity and competence. He gives far better forecasts with far less investment. http://www.weatheraction.com/
If he is indeed as accurate as he claims, the meteorological "method" for forecasting will have to be tossed out. He claims that he can forecast a several day period that is a few months in the future. If he can do this consistently, there won't be any question that his method is better.

[dr.placebo]

Hadley's results are not yet announced, but NOAA and NASA have both declared that 2010 is tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record for global surface temperature. See

http://climateprogress.org/2011/01/12/n ... on-record/

Isolated records don't prove trends, of course. But of the 10 warmest years (according to NASA and NOAA), 9 of them are in the past decade, and the 12 warmest are all after 1997. Consistent record highs are, in fact, a trend.

It would be convenient if one could fault a particular data set. But independent results are pretty consistent. See

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Assessi ... tions.html

According to NOAA, 2010 also set a record as the wettest year on record, based on global precipitation. Water vapor is up by roughly 4% in the past 30 years, so one should not expect this record to stand for long.

It would be easy to cite conditions in areas that are unusually cold or dry, and express some skepticism about these records. But these records are for global averages, not for specific areas. Local conditions are not relevant except as they contribute to the average.

Consider the earth's surface as a massive (and chaotic) heat engine, driven by the sun. The mechanical work is observed in precipitation, winds and ocean currents. If one imagines a steam engine, then it is natural to have more work done when more heat is added to the system (assuming a large attached heat sink). As an analogy, one would expect more work to be done on the earth's surface. An expected side effect of this work is to increase the extremes we see in temperature and precipitation. The recent cold wave in the UK, for example, is due to a blocking of the winds that normally bring the Gulf Stream warmth, and a replacement by winds from the colder north. At the same time, Canada's Hudson Bay remains unusually warm.

[can't sit still]

Yes, no, maybe;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110119/sc ... armingfood

[Ugly Dougly]

Rather warm today.

[dr.placebo]

Yes, no, maybe;
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110119/sc ... armingfood

Details count. A very quick sanity check would have sufficed to avoid saying something really stupid (like a 2.4 C increase by 2020). Sadly, that mistake undermines the rest of the study, which predicts food shortages in the fairly near future. So it pays to be careful if you want to be credible. Here's a link with more details about the error:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/ar ... ngs-right/

As a quick update, Hadley has weighed in, and their estimate is that 2010 is only the second warmest after 1998, but the difference is small:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releas ... emperature

All 3 of the major global surface temperature datasets show that 2010 is statistically tied for the warmest year, despite the 4th quarter La Niña influence. For satellites, both UAH and RSS still show 1998 as warmest and 2010 in second place, mostly because the satellite measurements of the lower troposphere tend to emphasize El Niño effects.

One year does not establish either cooling or warming. But when all of the major indexes show the past ten years as the warmest by a significant margin then it is worth paying attention to.

[can't sit still]

Don't worry Dr. There WILL be huge food shortages in the near future. Here is a paper with a simple explanation on purported plasma effects.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2011/ ... nmaker.htm
I still maintain that we are failing to appreciate and consider all the variables.
BTW, the shortages will be artificial / Malthusian.

[geekster]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/enviro ... finds.html

Himalayan glaciers are actually advancing rather than retreating, claims the first major study since a controversial UN report said they would be melted within quarter of a century.

Researchers have discovered that contrary to popular belief half of the ice flows in the Karakoram range of the mountains are actually growing rather than shrinking.

The discovery adds a new twist to the row over whether global warming is causing the world's highest mountain range to lose its ice cover.

It further challenges claims made in a 2007 report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the glaciers would be gone by 2035.

Although the head of the panel Dr Rajendra Pachauri later admitted the claim was an error gleaned from unchecked research, he maintained that global warming was melting the glaciers at "a rapid rate", threatening floods throughout north India.

The new study by scientists at the Universities of California and Potsdam has found that half of the glaciers in the Karakoram range, in the northwestern Himlaya, are in fact advancing and that global warming is not the deciding factor in whether a glacier survives or melts.

[dr.placebo]

OK, you appear to like the Telegraph as a source. I prefer ScienceDaily:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 162708.htm

Why do I prefer ScienceDaily? Let's compare the headlines.

Telegraph: "Himalayan glaciers not melting because of climate change, report finds"

ScienceDaily: "Debris on Certain Himalayan Glaciers May Prevent Melting"

Would you care to place a bet on which headline and article more accurately reflects the report? The report only claims that certain glaciers are not receding, most likely due to debris protecting the glacier surface. The report further claims that Himalayan glaciers are quite varied, so it is unwise to lump them together.

Details count. It's practically a mantra for me in my career, and it's just as true for climate studies. I think that the IPCC should be more careful, and not assume uniformity in its statements.

I also think that the Telegraph report is deliberately misleading.

[can't sit still]

Dr, I have trouble with the conclusions. I've been on glaciers from the Himalyas to Alaska to the Alps. Sure there is detritus at the edges. A few meters out and it's generally clear. The second question is the obvious one; albedo. I could see 20 mm of soil acting as an insulator. I can't see pebbles doing the same.
Another consideration is that many glaciers surge on their own time schedule;
http://www2.gi.alaska.edu/ScienceForum/ASF12/1210.html
The glaciers I've seen have very little detritus except where 2 flows join. They drag in a lot of the tail end of the "divider". Inconclusive.

[dr.placebo]

I don't have the experience to know whether the paper on glaciers has any merit, and I don't have access to the paper. The original press release is covered in

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/ ... 012411.php

According to the press release, the study does fault the IPCC for lumping together all Himalayan glaciers together. But it does not even come close to denying a general retreat of Himalayan glaciers:

The authors found that half of the studied glaciers in the Karakoram region are stable or advancing, whereas about two-thirds are in retreat elsewhere throughout High Asia. This is in contrast to the prevailing notion that all glaciers in the tropics are retreating.

The press release did not a lot of detail about the typical amount of debris on a Himalayan glacier. This certainly does not mean that you are wrong, CSS, in your glacier experience, but it may mean that you did not visit the same glaciers as they studied.

The study does not negate the other ways that glaciers may advance. Local temperature, snowfall, and rainfall patterns certainly affect glacier melting. I know of no climate scientists who claim that global warming is uniform. Oddly enough, glacial advance may occur through slippage even when the glacier is losing volume, so once again, the details count.

What pushed my button was the difference between the coverage by the Telegraph and ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily did a pretty minor rewording of the press release (appropriate for a science news aggregator). The Telegraph misrepresented the study in several key ways, starting with the headline and continuing into the few details it extracted from the press release. Not exactly ethical journalism.

[can't sit still]

Agreed. "Consumer science" leaves a lot to be desired. I've been to the Himalyas [local spelling] but, not to the Karakorums. I also drove through the Andes on my way to Peru from Los Angeles. Drove to Ak 7 times. Did a couple trips to Ak by boat and saw the coastal glaciers. They get a huge amount of snowfall. They're pretty clean. Lots of variables.

[dr.placebo]

Here's a very good program (about an hour) on current attitudes about science, focussing on attitudes about climate change. It features Nobel Prize winner Paul Nurse, head of the Royal Society (the oldest scientific society in the world).

[youtube][/youtube]

[geekster]

Ok, here we go! Witness the end of Gavin Schmidt's career!

(speculation, of course, but this is a real "in your face" article from one climatologist to another).

Dr. Judith Curry (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences · Georgia Institute of Technology) finally calls out Dr. Gavin Schmidt on IPCC AR4. This implies she has a lot more in reserve. This is going to make an interesting series of postings.

http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/22/hiding-the-decline/

Gavin is having a hissy fit in the comments and seems to be forgetting the "stop digging" rule.

I would have to assume she has something in reserve and has alluded to that in the comments, without making clear yet exactly what it is.

This is going to be fun to watch.

[can't sit still]

Geekster, I'm buried in economic stuff. I've read just a bit about an approaching "solar minimum". What have you seen?

[dr.placebo]

As usual, there is another side to the story. If anyone would like to know what it is, see:

http://climateprogress.org/2011/02/23/b ... ry-muller/

As far as I can tell, the ostensible issue is whether the northern tree ring data anomalies were deliberately and dishonestly underplayed in the IPCC report. So far the data is not obvious to me, but the official inquiries so far have found no such dishonesty. If I had to place a bet it would be that the IPCC could have had a better explanation, but that their story is essentially correct. Given the current discourse I know of no way to settle such a bet fairly.

But there is a larger issue, which is whether the body of evidence outside of the disputed tree ring data should be ignored because of this dispute. In my opinion, you simply do not get this much evidence and this proportion of experts to agree on a scientific proposition when the opposite is true. There is no instance since the introduction of calculus where such a thing has happened. The implication that many (most?) scientists who work on AGW are dishonest strikes me as being an ad hominem attack, and is itself intellectually dishonest.

I am not saying that every detail is known, or that current theories will be proven to be completely correct. That situation also has not happened in the history of science. What I am saying is that the broad outline of AGW will survive largely intact.

[can't sit still]

A bit of an update; http://iceagenow.com/Flip-flopping_thro ... drifts.htm

[Simon of the Playa]

Dr. Placebo....the Voice of Reason.
CSS..............The Voice of Treason.

[can't sit still]

A great historical view of warming and cooling;
http://dailybail.com/home/president-oba ... r-sen.html

[dr.placebo]

The characterization of "Obama's Top Scientist" is a bit astray. Also, his childhood memories are not evidence.

If you want to know what science actually taught about the impending ice age in the 1970's, see

http://www.skepticalscience.com/ice-age ... ediate.htm

Most scientific papers predicted warming from greenhouse gases.

The article from iceagenow.com talks up Joe D'Aleo, a retired meteorologist and climate change skeptic. It did not mention that the American Meteorological Society officially endorsed the global warming explanation in 2007:

http://www.ametsoc.org/POLICY/2007climatechange.html

So, CSS, what exactly are you claiming to be true, or even probably true? And most of all, where's the data?

[can't sit still]

dr. placebo, I liked the part where the guy had a bunch of literature from the 70s screaming about global cooling. They didn't have a clue then,,, and they don't have a clue now.
These so-called scientists claim that the world is heating up. They claim that they have it ALL down to a science and know all the cause-and-effect shit. Then, when we get anomalous COLD events, they claim that these events are a result of global warming. If they really had an understanding of true cause-and-effect, they would have predicted the severe cooling. NOPE, they make it up as they go along.
They can't legitimately claim a complete understanding of the claimed small warming effect if they can't even predict near-term cooling. They make continuous adjustments to their theories to fit the developing FACTS.

As far as the veracity and legitimacy of the scientists involved, grant money is the decider. Look at the sector of academia involved in economics. Talk about a shamed profession. That whole sector of academia had their collective heads way up the ass of GOV looking for tidbits of grant money. One can't see the daylight when one's head is WAY up some benefactor's ass.
The big-brains at Harvard lost $ billions and billions of the endowment fund because they believed their own bullshit about the economy.
I see no reason to differentiate between the desired-results-for-money in academic economics and the desired-results-for-money in climate study.

The scandals have legitimately clouded the results so much that the results can't be trusted. We can cite all the sources in Christendom but, none of us know if they are legitimate. I believe that most of the results are slanted with hubris. We just don't have a complete understanding of all the factors.

[dr.placebo]

Waving around a few articles, mostly from popular media, is not the same as a scientific literature search. The link I gave above makes the point that cooling was not the consensus in the 1970's, and it is even less favored now by climate scientists.

As for cold (or warm) events, no climate theory explains them, precisely because the theories do not operate at the scale of individual events. What the global warming models claim is that extreme events are going to be more common as more thermal energy is pumped into the system, and that the average temperature will increase on a global scale. As an analogy, people talk about rain causing traffic accidents. But none of those accidents is individually caused by rain; the vast majority of additional accidents in the rain are caused by people who ignored changing conditions.

You want to think that grant money determines the opinions of scientists? It has in a few cases, most notably when big business starts to get involved, as with the pet "scientists" paid by big tobacco. I don't know of any cases of government funded research where the government has demanded a particular scientific result. Perhaps that will change with so many creationist representatives. I hope not.

I will not defend economists. I also don't tend to think of them as scientists, but that is perhaps a bias that I have.

You claim that "the scandals" have clouded the results. It is true in one narrow sense: the deliberate disinformation about climate science has obscured the results and the slanders against climate scientists have hurt their reputation among the public. This anti-science campaign is partly working, but as far as I can tell it is based on dirty money and superstition.

They make continuous adjustments to their theories to fit the developing FACTS.

Actually, this is supposed to happen. It is the people who do not adjust their theories to fit the facts that worry me.

[theCryptofishist]

I will not defend economists. I also don't tend to think of them as scientists, but that is perhaps a bias that I have.

As best, economics is a "soft" science with the numbers associated with money obscuring that. It often is little more than a sort of faith.

[ygmir]

I will not defend economists. I also don't tend to think of them as scientists, but that is perhaps a bias that I have.

As best, economics is a "soft" science with the numbers associated with money obscuring that. It often is little more than a sort of faith.

I agree........economists. yikes!!! nope not a science. More a guessing game, as I see it. And, they get paid. Well, macro economics, anyway.
If they're wrong "unforseen market forces" or something, and, if they're right "I told you so" and, they write books, which are never right, but sell them "cause, I called it back in 93".........

[can't sit still]

"As for cold (or warm) events, no climate theory explains them, precisely because the theories do not operate at the scale of individual events"
Absolutely true. They don't have the requisite precision in their theories.
"the slanders against climate scientists have hurt their reputation among the public"
Yup ! the TRUTH hurts.
Piers Corbyn has a completely different methodology and FAR more accurate results. I'm not "waving around" anything. Go ahead, dismiss his methodology and accuracy. You can also dismiss the equally accurate work of Jennifer Lawson. Shoot, dismiss the work presented by "Electric Universe". Dismiss them all. If YOU don't understand the work, just dismiss it. If YOU don't agree, just dismiss it. That worked for the Catholic church.
There are so many areas that ALL of us are not competent in. YOU just won't admit it.

To you, ZPE is something from Star Trek. You shouldn't post on subjects that you are ignorant of. You could read instead of denigrating.
"Two generations of remarkable research by thousands of Ph.D. level specialists have emerged from Kozyrev’s seed findings". Doesn't mean SHIT to you.
http://divinecosmos.com/index.php?optio ... &ltemid=36

I have no more patience for you.

[dr.placebo]

Real climate theorists don't claim precision. They use error estimates and publish them. People who claim precision about climate should be held to the same standard of proofs as other folks who make claims about the physical universe.

I can't really comment on Piers Corbyn's results because I've not found objective sources or reviews. I googled "Jennifer Lawson climate" and I can't figure out who you are referring to.

ZPE is a valid physical concept, but outside of the Casimir effect (maybe) and the Lamb shift (maybe) the experimental evidence is pretty weak. Both of the mentioned effects are really, really, small. A practical demonstration of using ZPE should take the world by storm (and the use by Syndrome in The Incredibles does not count).

Similarly, the "Electric Universe" stuff throws around claims, but not evidence.

Oddly enough, I have patience. The universe is vast, and surprises await. But the universe is as it is, not as we wish it to be. The distinction is empirical.

[can't sit still]

Here is a collection of cites on the evidence for global temp change;
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/146138/146138

[dr.placebo]

The Express article ("CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL: 100 REASONS WHY") is trash from start to finish. There are no cites, no way to check the provenance of the items, and many of the items are utterly incoherent.

Let's look at the first item in the list:
[quote]There is “no real scientific proofâ€

[can't sit still]

dr.placebo, I was going to go through your cites. The first cite was so horribly inaccurate that , I ddin't read any further. They were arguing about the variations of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere. What a ridiculous argument. Mankind burns huge amounts of firewood, gas, oil and coal. ALL of them have a different balance of carbon isotopes. Everyone knows that that fact is the basis of carbon dating. Any attempt to correlate combustion of carbon with atmospheric prevalence of any given isotope is worthless.

To demonstrate just how weak your arguments are you, denigrate the Daily Express. You attacked reason # 1 because it is horribly weak and vague. You ignore the strong cites, individuals, studies, and groups. You consistently attack the weak elements exclusively.
When geekster demonstrated the obvious culling of high-altitude and high-latitude data collection, you ignored it completely.
I cited "electric universe". You stated that there is no proof. INCORRECT , like so many other things you cite. Your cites are SO biased . Your data is SO incomplete. 50 % of the neutrino emissions from Sol are believed to be absorbed by Terra. That is one item on a long list of factors that are just ignored.
Neither the warmers or the coolers can possibly model the number one greenhouse gas: water vapor.
I'll stick with cite # 17
17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.