Cause of global warming hiatus found deep in the Atlantic Ocean
washington.edu
washington.edu
>> More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots.
>> “Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus,” said corresponding author Ka-Kit Tung
First of all, a hypothesis is NOT a theory. Secondly, they have a goal indicative of an agenda - they're looking for a plausible explanation and publishing speculation as "theory". If you don't have data you're just speculating, and by data I don't mean "yeah, volcanoes erupt and emit stuff". You need data that supports your hypothesis, and if you really want to claim a theory, IMHO you need some kind of mathematical model. If all these weekly explanations had data and models to back them, I don't think there would be nearly so many.
To me this resembles the folks who blame every weather event on climate change. Even if I accept the premise, they look like fools trying to tie warm, cold, erratic, extreme, and calm, all to the the same cause with nothing but simple high level hand waving.
Never mind my views on certain topics, doesn't all that speculation out in the public view damage the perception of science as a whole? That bothers me.
If it's as they say, then it seems to me like the next oscillation should be much more dramatic (for some measurable definition of dramatic) than the historic ones because most of that "stored warming" will come up in a rush. On the other hand, if we get to the time when the cycle reverses and it's no big deal (after giving it time to get into full swing), perhaps we should reconsider our premises.
Besides, other than saying that the climate is just too complex to make these predictions, I haven't ever heard a plausible argument against extending the simple observation that a volume of air enclosing an absorbing and emitting solid when exposed to a wideband source of light (the sun being a good example) will trap heat in different amounts dependent on the concentration of the gases in the volume and that CO2 is one of the gases that increases this effect if you start with a mix the same as our atmosphere.
Besides, the people who are saying that the system is too complex to make a prediction are not saying that there will be no effect. There is an increase in the energy going into this system and saying that things are so complex that we should bet on there being no effect is not saying that there is no global effect, but that there is a global effect that more or less exactly counterbalances the initial effect and that to me sounds like wishful thinking from the viewpoint that nature is somehow magically in balance.
Things that come to mind immediately:
1. The solid can change colors (amount of vegetation, amount of snow/ice cover).
2. Cloud cover at various altitudes. (I think I heard this one tends to annoy the model-makers, since they don't have a good way to predict it yet.)
3. How much of the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs, is already at 100%? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absorption_band has a picture that seems to imply "most of it".
Item #1 I've heard should make the effect stronger than your simple model, #3 would probably make it weaker, and #2 I doubt anyone knows.
I think it is unlikely, but definitely not that unlikely that reality will nicely balance for a wide range of values of CO2. I would like us to plan against that but it would be nice if it were so.
We are probably somewhere near a local minima, in terms of temperature stability, however we have no fucking idea really where the edges are or how deep the next valley may be.
The future doesn't have to be like the past, especially if we kick it.
I mean, get off it. "Theory" means something in "critical theory", something else in formal logic, etc. etc. There's nothing to say that applied scientist's uneasiness with tentative conclusions should dictate natural language. You don't want to be misinterpreted, you don't leak to the press before it's been in a few peer-reviewed journals.
And this is the problem with those "a posteriori" explanations of the hiatus. They are saying that the models that predict a global warming catastrophe can't be wrong, instead of recognizing that the models lack predictive power and they must be adjusted. But if the models can't be wrong they are not science.
Who said that?
The incompleteness of climate models isn't something that has just come up recently - they have always been incomplete (they can't be anything but - 'all models are wrong') and that is well understood by anybody who develops or uses them. There are large sub-systems that global circulation models don't even really attempt to model at this stage. Others where they are widely recognised to do a very bad job (e.g. ice sheets). Others that are just modelled stochastically because we don't know how to predict those processes on a year to year basis (e.g. ENSO).
Finding inconsistencies between the models and reality is one of the ways that they are improved.
I don't know where you are getting these ideas about how climate modellers think, but they don't bare any relation to how climate models are actually developed.
If you are asking, why have they not thrown out our entire understanding of the climate system and started over, then I would argue that isn't a way to actually improve our understanding of the climate. We would be starting over every day. Out understanding clearly isn't all wrong. There are all sorts of other lines of evidence used to develop our understanding of the climate system. From things that are reproducible with simple experiments (or just application of basic physical laws), to things that have taken large investments and long term study to work out.
There can be all sorts of reasons that the model got it wrong (assuming it did, I don't think we really have enough evidence one way or the other yet for the idea proposed in the OP - it seems like a bit of a curve fitting exercise at the moment). Not only is our understanding of the systems incomplete, our measurements are incomplete as well (and that gets much worse even just a few years ago - we've only had the Argo network of floats taking ocean temperature for a bit over a decade for example). Often there is just as much reason to suspect that it's our measurements that are wrong than that it's our understanding of the system. It's just the nature of working on a system the size of the entire planet. It's not easy to measure everything, and ever harder to measure what was happening in the past. There have been real issues where it was the data that was wrong and not the models.
See the UAH troposphere temperature record for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAH_satellite_temperature_data... It contradicted other data sets and the models, and it turns out there were errors in the way the temperatures were calculated. That is a record run by scientists very much on the skeptic end of the spectrum by the way, if you were getting worried about any kind of conspiracy.
I think that given the physics, global warming is probably true. That said, one of the things I find annoying about it is that there are many good reasons not to burn stuff and global warming has all the focus.
How about building stuff like solar based electric transportation, just because our city atmospheres are killing people right now, never mind in several decades.
I don't think that makes it strictly non-falsifiable, it just makes it a little fuzzier where you have to accept that there are too many variables to isolate, and you need to take clues and relative changes to be worth something even if there isn't a controlled scenario that science would prefer.
The worst part of climate change science isn't the uncertainty, it's the fact that any uncertainty will be grasped upon by the oligarchy to create FUD in favor of the status quo that generated their fortunes. That systemic bias could well be the end of the species as we are collectively unable to pull our heads out of our asses.
Ah, but it will also be grasped by researchers to create FUD in favor of sensationalism so they can get more grants and maybe become famous for Saving The World.
That systemic bias could well be the end of the species as we are collectively unable to pull our heads out of our asses.
Sure. Or equally unlikely, the opposite systemic bias causes the end of the species as a result of banning all effective telephone cleaning chemicals since they react with water to produce greenhouse gasses.
Or terror.
Can't be terror though.
You can't have a war against terror.
That's obvious.
Must be Terra then.
We surely aren't led by idiots.
After all.
I too am generally in favour of the world.
---
satellitecat:
Release the kittens.
I repeat:
Release all the kittens.
How do you explain folks who pick at the science but ignore the melting of every ice pack on the planet in a few dozen years? What principle are they exhibiting, to ignore overwhelming data for the sake of scoring some points on a web blog?
I feel the science is complex and not yet understood and we shouldn't treat questions about climate science as having nefarious motives.
Ironically, my comment here is the kind of science nit-picking that think JoeAltmaier is commenting on and I think he makes a good point. Something is bound to be happening to our climate and it would be remarkable if it wasn't at least affected to some degree by human activity.
[1] http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_std...
[2] http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_std...
It's acceptable to rush to the conclusion that temperature patterns from the 20th century are driven by anthropogenic influence and declare the matter settled, but when the warming trend doesn't continue I'm supposed to patiently wait for these folks to formulate all manner of alternate hypotheses?
There's also a short review of the state of the literature in this same issue. Well worth a read: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/860.full
(I'm not sure how much of this content is limited to ivory towers)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/30/list-of-excuses-for-th...
Main thing is to keep the show (and funding) ticking along nicely. I'm sure it will.
Edit: I ask because as a casual observer, I had always thought this "hiatus" was denier-speak. But now it seems to be being taken seriously in the articles I see.
See graphs here: https://www.google.ca/search?q=global+temperatures+annual&tb...
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:120/plot/ha...
The trend has been flat enough for long enough to falsify all the model predictions that assumed CO2 was the primary driver and nothing else really mattered. Those predictions looked GREAT in the late 1990s but don't work now, so the hunt is on for new explanatory factors. Everybody's got their favorites.
The main thing to consider with regard to new years being dubbed "the hottest on record" is selection bias: When a new year looks like it MIGHT be "the hottest on record", that makes for big scary newspaper headlines. Then when it (often) turns out that it actually WASN'T the hottest on record, that's not considered newsworthy. Nor is it newsworthy when the following year is only the 6th or 10th or 12th hottest. If you only see headlines about it when there's been a record or somebody has predicted that there WILL be a record, due to availability bias you are left with the impression that records are happening constantly.
(And even when the whole year isn't the hottest, the same dynamic applies to hottest summer, hottest winter, hottest in the northern hemisphere, etc.)
Another thing to consider is that although the current trend is essentially flat (and has been for over a dozen years), it's flat at a relatively high level. Since the temperature plateaued but hasn't yet significantly decreased, people can still claim it's a hot decade or invent silly "X of the last Y years" constructions to make it seem like the warming trend hasn't stopped.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warm...
There's a long-term trend with a lot of variability year to year. We happened to have a big temperature spike in the late 90s. That doesn't mean we had a pause afterwards. Measure from the years just before or just after the spike and it doesn't look like a pause at all.
4 years is a really tiny meaningless sample in terms of climate. However, here is what you asked for up to 1998, with a continuation of the linear trend in red, and a 'pause' in blue (I only have a 'before' graph for HADCRUT4 rather than GISS, but there isn't much difference - GISS and other temp records can be seen at the link).
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/hadcrut4_98.jpg
Maybe you would like to make a prediction?
Here is what happened: http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/hadcrut4.jpg
Some 'pause' eh.
Source: http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/global-temperature-th...
Anyway, I'm not the one trying to claim that there is suddenly no longer an energy imbalance in the climate system because of a decade of (incomplete) surface temperature data. I do think it's worth pointing out how cherry picked the 'pause' argument is though, even on its own terms.
(Relying solely on air temperature isn't really valid either. Heat is also absorbed by the ocean and by melting ice.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/21/antarctica-greenlan...
But what is interesting is not anyones definition of pause or hiatus or whatever. It's the comparison between predictions of climate models and real temperatures. And the models are really, really bad at predicting reality:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/02/95-of-climate-models-agr...
If this trend continues, real temperatures will fall below the error range of all models.
Roy picks a baseline of 1979-83, which is unusual (I've never seen any other anomaly graphs plotted using that baseline, and it's especially strange since the graph only begins in 1983). The reason he does that is that during those years there is a brief but significant deviation between the model runs and the surface temperature data. By picking that baseline the effect is to shift the model results upwards. Hopefully these two images will make it clear what has been done:
This is the full data for GISTemp, UAH and a mean of the CMIP5 model runs (which I believe is the dotted black line on Roy's graph) based on a longer 1981-2010 baseline. Also note the model runs actually started in 1979 not 1983:
http://i.imgur.com/c2adVtw.jpg
As you can see, there is a brief but strong spike in the temperature data above the model mean (the model takes a dip as well increasing the effect). Using a narrow baseline of 79-83 gets you a graph that looks like this:
http://i.imgur.com/Ys1ZMZF.jpg
With the data starting at 1979 it's a bit more obvious what has been done. Roy cropped his graph at 1983 so that it looks like the models start in 1983. Then used a baseline that shifted the model mean upwards to align with the 1983 temperature so that is looks like the model runs began with a starting point 1983 with the 1983 surface temperature and then immediately diverged. That is very misleading.
If you are wondering why some climate scientists don't take the skeptics seriously, then this kind of manipulation is one of the reasons why. Roy is supposedly one of the reputable skeptics, being an actual scientist.
Graphs taken from: http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/02/roy-spencers-latest-decei...
The fact that the CMIP5 mean and UAH have nearly the same anomaly value in 1983 when using a 1979-1983 baseline is just coincidental. They diverge quite a bit in several of the other years in the 1979-83 period. Roy crops his graph to hide that and make it look like they begin together. So he hasn't even done what you claim (aligned the trends to match at the very beginning of the satellite record) because his method puts the CMIP5 mean anomaly about 0.2 of a degree above UAH at the beginning of the satellite record. Plotting all the available data would show that. Hiding data just deceives the reader.
If he really wanted to just "match at the very beginning of the satellite record" as you suggest, why not just use a baseline of 1979? I suspect the answer to that is that it wouldn't support his argument to present the data that way.
Your idea of aligning to the beginning of the satellite record is ill conceived anyway. That would only make sense if GCMs took the temperature data at that time as their starting point. They don't.
"The authors dug up historical data to show that the cooling in the three decades between 1945 to 1975 – which caused people to worry about the start of an Ice Age – was during a cooling phase. (It was thought to have been caused by air pollution.) Earlier records in Central England show the 40- to 70-year cycle goes back centuries, and other records show it has existed for millennia."
This is why you can't extrapolate from a cyclical process.
But I also don't understand your comment when compared to actual scientific articles. The high-level conclusions tend to be in the abstract and the introduction. Scientific papers aren't structured as mysteries, they try to front-load the important lessons up front.
Don't confuse articles about science, or papers by scientists explaining their findings, as the scientific process itself.
What you do instead, is look at available information, intuit an explanation, then systematically compare the implications to known results. If all goes well, you might then do a simulation or predict other effects that can be observed. However, the process is very dissimilar to other fields of science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_of_quasi-experiments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_discontinuity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_variable
etc. etc.