Global Temperature Change, baseline in History

[Dancing David]

Wikipedia may not be prefect but it is a good tool for gauging the “established” view. Climate science isn’t exactly a candidate for something to slide by based on obscurity.



There is no controversy. Mann’s hockey stick has won out. There are a dozen reconstructions backing and every major science organization in the world backing it up while Manns critics are batting zero. (Unless you count Loehle’s poorly received paper published in the pseudo-journal Energy and the Environment. For those not familiar with that particular publication it’s roughly the equivalent of the Creationist/ID “peer review” journals we see from time to time.)

I will ask you politely to not engage in this discussion here. While it is a great issue and I would love to read about it, please start another thread. I am trying to keep this from derailing.

I have asked Mhaze the same.

 

[Dancing David]

===========

Denigrate \Den"i*grate\, v. t. [L. denigrare; de- + nigrare to
blacken, niger black.]
1. To blacken thoroughly; to make very black. --Boyle.
[1913 Webster]

2. Fig.: To blacken or sully; to defame. [R.]
[1913 Webster]

To denigrate the memory of Voltaire. --Morley.
[1913 Webster]

Or

denigrate
v 1: belittle; "Don't belittle his influence" [syn: {minimize}, {belittle},
{derogate}]
2: charge falsely or with malicious intent; attack the good
name and reputation of someone; "The journalists have
defamed me!" "The article in the paper sullied my
reputation" [syn: {defame}, {slander}, {smirch}, {asperse},
{calumniate}, {smear}, {sully}, {besmirch}]

===========

Perhaps you intended:

===========

Degenerate \De*gen"er*ate\, v. i. [imp. & p. p. {Degenerated};
p. pr. & vb. n. {Degenerating}.]
1. To be or grow worse than one's kind, or than one was
originally; hence, to be inferior; to grow poorer, meaner,
or more vicious; to decline in good qualities; to
deteriorate.
[1913 Webster]

When wit transgresseth decency, it degenerates into
insolence and impiety. --Tillotson.
[1913 Webster]

2. (Biol.) To fall off from the normal quality or the healthy
structure of its kind; to become of a lower type.
[1913 Webster]

============

HTH

Dave

Thanks!

I prefer American Heritage myself, but that was incorrect usage.

It is the denigration that leads to the degeneration.

 

[Dancing David]

I understand that and he is correct. That's why I said he was commenting on wrong methods that were actually being used (otherwise, why write on the subject he wrote on - Answer - Apparently "climate scientists" don't know or understand the concepts).

You were doing well!

Please avoid these comments like the one I bolded. Discuss the errors if you wish but avoid the promotion of your political aganda, you have a lot to contribute but avoid this.

Temperature is the wrong metric for the condition of the planet, heat content is the correct metric, and one does not parallel the other. The heat content of the oceans is 2000x that of the atmosphere, and the cryosphere acts as a set of huge "batteries".

Re read my prior post. I suggest reasonable methods around the problem, which do not require computation of a global mean temperature, and which are relevant to the question of the thread.

Please avoid the snarky stuff, restate your methods and clarify them, please.

 

[a_unique_person]

Nasa GISS explaining what they do http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/

 

[mhaze]

You were doing well!

Please avoid these comments like the one I bolded. Discuss the errors if you wish but avoid the promotion of your political aganda, you have a lot to contribute but avoid this.


Please avoid the snarky stuff, restate your methods and clarify them, please.

Welcome to snarkyville.

It's pretty simple. Just look carefully at available data sets and evaluate them within the limits of their method, precision and error bounds. Don't try to combine them into some grandiose "global temperature" scheme, particularly with different measuring techniques of different precision.

Going back more than 1000-2000 years, the data becomes very sparse geographically. For the period of time 1000 years and less, there's quite a bit of data from all over the globe. Now here is a study that covers 7,500 years in Finland (one location only, note):

Blog discussion, with links to technical articles.

The tree ring data in Figure 1 were smoothed using a 100-year sliding window; Figure 2 is for the last 1,300 years showing each summer and smoothings at the decadal, multi-decadal, centennial, and multi-centennial time frames. In describing the results, Timonen et al. write “The warmest and coldest reconstructed 250-year periods occurred AD 931-1180 and AD 1601-1850. These periods overlap with the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA). The coldest and warmest of all reconstructed 100-year periods occurred AD 1587-1686 and AD 1895-1994, respectively.”
​

One of the conclusions:

“The most significant cycles in our supra-long chronology range from 30 to 95 years (30-32, 37, 47-49, 81-85 and 95 years). We hypothesize that the climate during the last 500 years has had a varying cyclic pattern of 60 – 95 years. Our two models predicting natural climatic variation for the rest of this century lean on this judgment.”
​

 

[Dancing David]

Welcome to snarkyville.

It's pretty simple. Just look carefully at available data sets and evaluate them within the limits of their method, precision and error bounds. Don't try to combine them into some grandiose "global temperature" scheme, particularly with different measuring techniques of different precision.

You can do better than this, your political agneda is showing, if you don't like meta analysis then say so and avoid your appeals to emotion.

Going back more than 1000-2000 years, the data becomes very sparse geographically. For the period of time 1000 years and less, there's quite a bit of data from all over the globe. Now here is a study that covers 7,500 years in Finland (one location only, note):

Blog discussion, with links to technical articles.

The tree ring data in Figure 1 were smoothed using a 100-year sliding window; Figure 2 is for the last 1,300 years showing each summer and smoothings at the decadal, multi-decadal, centennial, and multi-centennial time frames. In describing the results, Timonen et al. write “The warmest and coldest reconstructed 250-year periods occurred AD 931-1180 and AD 1601-1850. These periods overlap with the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA). The coldest and warmest of all reconstructed 100-year periods occurred AD 1587-1686 and AD 1895-1994, respectively.”
​

One of the conclusions:

“The most significant cycles in our supra-long chronology range from 30 to 95 years (30-32, 37, 47-49, 81-85 and 95 years). We hypothesize that the climate during the last 500 years has had a varying cyclic pattern of 60 – 95 years. Our two models predicting natural climatic variation for the rest of this century lean on this judgment.”
​

[qimg]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/imagehosting/thum_142244866729a48a4a.png[/qimg]

Yeah I know, that is like the sudy you have shown before, which is fine, but the goal is to discuss climate on large scales.

We can talk about the possible integration of sperate areas and questions about how the may or may not be a global correspondence between the 'Little Ice Age' and the 'Medieval Warming Period' and other areas of the globe.

So you have data on one area in Finland that is great!

(Is world climate report the only place to access the paper on the web?)

How does it relate to the rest of th world?

 

[Dancing David]

Here is some data, which Mhaze should feel to critique the methods of if they wish:

But it is a start,
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/recons.html

 

[mhaze]

You can do better than this, your political agneda is showing, if you don't like meta analysis then say so and avoid your appeals to emotion.
Yeah I know, that is like the sudy you have shown before, which is fine, but the goal is to discuss climate on large scales.

We can talk about the possible integration of sperate areas and questions about how the may or may not be a global correspondence between the 'Little Ice Age' and the 'Medieval Warming Period' and other areas of the globe....

Really? Now your political agenda and bias is showing. You just got through saying no hockey stick, and now you want to talk about .... the hockey stick...You can do better than this.

avoid your appeals to emotion:

Yes, indeed these constitute appeals to emotion:

• Welcome to snarkyville.
• look carefully at available data sets
• and evaluate them within the limits of their method, precision and error bounds.
• Don't try to combine them into some grandiose "global temperature" scheme, particularly with different measuring techniques of different precision.
• Going back more than 1000-2000 years, the data becomes very sparse geographically.
• For the period of time 1000 years and less, there's quite a bit of data from all over the globe.
• Now here is a study that covers 7,500 years in Finland (one location only, note):

With appeals to emotion such as these, who needs any math, logical reasoning or scientific method?

 

[lomiller]

It seems to me that the baseline is very important.

What data and evidence leads you to make the above statements?

I am not disagreeing with them, I am asking what they are?

Is there some particular element you disagree with? Most of that seems pretty uncontroversial and undeserving a citation. After all, while citations are definitely a good thing, demanding them for trivial issues, or issues no one disputes is counterproductive to a good discussion.
Some information on the last 5 million years
http://www.maureenraymo.com/2005_Lisiecki+Raymo.pdf

Some information on longer climate trends may be found here
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/jan18/Zachosetal.pdf

There are other factors than the CO₂ while that one is VERY impotant.

I believe that AGW is real and that it is likely related to CO₂ emissions. However there are other factors as well:
-the increase in sunspot activity suggest something very interesting
-a lack of really messy volcanos as well.

Just a pet peeve but sunspots certainly do not cause any climate changes on earth. They seem to be related to solar activity which can have an effect on the Earths climate of course.

Keep in mind, however, as demonstrated in another recent thread the sun is in fact very stable and the changes in energy output associated with changes in sunspots is tiny, usually on the order of 0.1% or less. This does not represent enough energy to heat or cool the planet on a decadal scale because of the massive thermal inertia of the oceans. Over a longer timescale and when amplified by internal climate effects like water vapor feedback you can get noticeable changes in global temperature, but the heat capacity of the oceans makes this very slow relative to current changes.

That shows a lack of understanding of history, what led to the extinction of the megafauna in North America/ (Hint: temperature cycles that ran hundreds of years.)

For attribution of climate change since 1900 you can get a good idea of attribution from this paper:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/publications/meehl_additivity.pdf

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution_png
Has a summary along with some other useful information (all cited)

Actually there is no consensus on exactly what caused the extinction of the mega-fauna at the end of the last ice age.

Drought is a major climate shift , is it not?

Not a global one, no. When one place has a drought people can move barring issues with national borders. When you have widespread upheaval there is no place to move to.

 

[mhaze]

-the increase in sunspot activity suggest something very interesting
-a lack of really messy volcanos as well.
Just a pet peeve but sunspots certainly do not cause any climate changes on earth. They seem to be related to solar activity which can have an effect on the Earths climate of course.

Keep in mind, however, as demonstrated in another recent thread the sun is in fact very stable and the changes in energy output associated with changes in sunspots is tiny, usually on the order of 0.1% or less. This does not represent enough energy to heat or cool the planet on a decadal scale because of the massive thermal inertia of the oceans. Over a longer timescale and when amplified by internal climate effects like water vapor feedback you can get noticeable changes in global temperature, but the heat capacity of the oceans makes this very slow relative to current changes.

-the increase in sunspot activity suggest something very interesting

I think you mean that in reverse? That recently, the sun is quite dormant?

Also, Lomiller, it is somewhat wrong state your conclusions from the other thread as if they were valid, while they were rebutted on the other thread, and for which I am still waiting for your counter argument, if you have one.

Now stating them as an opinion only, of course that is another matter.

Just a pet peeve but sunspots certainly do not cause any climate changes on earth. They seem to be related to solar activity which can have an effect on the Earths climate of course.

Clearly this would explain why climate scientists routinely defilter the approximate 11 year solar cycle when they try to look at causative factors in climate.

 

[lomiller]

Also, Lomiller, it is somewhat wrong state your conclusions from the other thread as if they were valid, while they were rebutted on the other thread, and for which I am still waiting for your counter argument, if you have one.

It’s also somewhat wrong to imply there was some sort of rebuttal when none acutely occurred. I believe it was the rest of us who are still waiting on your decision to accept the amplification effect of water vapor feedback.

 

[Dancing David]

Really? Now your political agenda and bias is showing. You just got through saying no hockey stick, and now you want to talk about .... the hockey stick...You can do better than this.



Yes, indeed these constitute appeals to emotion:

• Welcome to snarkyville.
• look carefully at available data sets
• and evaluate them within the limits of their method, precision and error bounds.
• Don't try to combine them into some grandiose "global temperature" scheme, particularly with different measuring techniques of different precision.
• Going back more than 1000-2000 years, the data becomes very sparse geographically.
• For the period of time 1000 years and less, there's quite a bit of data from all over the globe.
• Now here is a study that covers 7,500 years in Finland (one location only, note):

With appeals to emotion such as these, who needs any math, logical reasoning or scientific method?

Mhaze if you wish to ignore my request that you avoid the emotional usage of loaded wrods that is your issue, and the bogus claim of my political bias is just amazing, you are one great spinner.

I have said that there appears to be accelerated warming, but I have also said that the correlation to CO₂ while present is not the only force. I also already mentioned the very strong potential that solar activity is on the increase, if sunspot number is related to radiance, which I haven't done more than a brief read on..

So whatever your problem is and you need to engage in something other than debate and discussion, please take it some place else.

you are doing very well in this thread and I anticipate that you are capable of making statement without all the spin and nonsense that is unrelated to the topic at hand.

"grandiose "global temperature" scheme" was what I would label an appeal to emotion.

 

[Dancing David]

Is there some particular element you disagree with? Most of that seems pretty uncontroversial and undeserving a citation. After all, while citations are definitely a good thing, demanding them for trivial issues, or issues no one disputes is counterproductive to a good discussion.

Excuse me? Take your 'demanding' and 'trivial' out of the phrase and it is reasonable. I set the parameters for this thread in the OP, if you do not like it, then don't post in it.

Do you have some assumption that this is not a sceptic bulletin board and that what you consider to be common knowledge is some sort of given? I am asking that we discuss the historical baseline for the temperature and other possible climate changes.

If you do not want to be part of this discussion because it is counter productive, then don't post in this thread.
If you feel that there is a coomobn agreement on something that is great, but if you feel you don't want to explain the basis for it , that is fine by me. I probably even would agree with you on it.

But that is not an actual discussion involving critical thinking, is it.

I suggest you read any of the thread on Arp or 'Plasma Cosmology' just to get a baseline what bad and good discussion can look like.

No where have I said that AGW is NOT occuring, I have in fact stated that I personaly feel it is related to CO₂ levels but that there are also other components.

Some information on the last 5 million years
http://www.maureenraymo.com/2005_Lisiecki+Raymo.pdf

Some information on longer climate trends may be found here
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/jan18/Zachosetal.pdf





Just a pet peeve but sunspots certainly do not cause any climate changes on earth. They seem to be related to solar activity which can have an effect on the Earths climate of course.

perhaps you over read my statement?

they are considered to be a proxy for solar activity, and since flares are harder to trach they may not be as accurate.

I have many pet peeves as well.

Keep in mind, however, as demonstrated in another recent thread the sun is in fact very stable and the changes in energy output associated with changes in sunspots is tiny, usually on the order of 0.1% or less.

That is huge amount of energy, thank the deity or non-deity of your choice!

This does not represent enough energy to heat or cool the planet on a decadal scale because of the massive thermal inertia of the oceans. Over a longer timescale and when amplified by internal climate effects like water vapor feedback you can get noticeable changes in global temperature, but the heat capacity of the oceans makes this very slow relative to current changes.

i am not up on the math in the models and theories, so I could not say, but that is a huge amount of thermal energy we are talking about.

i am a pluralist, I don't like monocausative theories without verification.

For attribution of climate change since 1900 you can get a good idea of attribution from this paper:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/publications/meehl_additivity.pdf

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution_png
Has a summary along with some other useful information (all cited)

Actually there is no consensus on exactly what caused the extinction of the mega-fauna at the end of the last ice age.

No but the very rapid cycles in local temperature change are a likely candidtae, the one I hate is "Humans did it."

Not a global one, no. When one place has a drought people can move barring issues with national borders. When you have widespread upheaval there is no place to move to.

I don't know drough can effect very large areas, and transportation involves access and politics.

Point taken, even if I disagree.

 

[mhaze]

Mhaze if you wish to ignore my request that you avoid the emotional usage of loaded wrods that is your issue, and the bogus claim of my political bias is just amazing, you are one great spinner.

I have said that there appears to be accelerated warming, but I have also said that the correlation to CO₂ while present is not the only force. I also already mentioned the very strong potential that solar activity is on the increase, if sunspot number is related to radiance, which I haven't done more than a brief read on..

So whatever your problem is and you need to engage in something other than debate and discussion, please take it some place else.

you are doing very well in this thread and I anticipate that you are capable of making statement without all the spin and nonsense that is unrelated to the topic at hand.

"grandiose "global temperature" scheme" was what I would label an appeal to emotion.

Sidestepping the issue of MWP and LIA (integral to hockey stick) noted.

? (+MWP+LIA+HS) or (-MWP-LIA-HS), take your pick.

 

[Dancing David]

It’s also somewhat wrong to imply there was some sort of rebuttal when none acutely occurred. I believe it was the rest of us who are still waiting on your decision to accept the amplification effect of water vapor feedback.

-the increase in sunspot activity suggest something very interesting

I think you mean that in reverse? That recently, the sun is quite dormant?

Also, Lomiller, it is somewhat wrong state your conclusions from the other thread as if they were valid, while they were rebutted on the other thread, and for which I am still waiting for your counter argument, if you have one.

Now stating them as an opinion only, of course that is another matter.


Clearly this would explain why climate scientists routinely defilter the approximate 11 year solar cycle when they try to look at causative factors in climate.

Gentlepeople, thank you for your civility but please rehash the issues or leave it alnone.

Some of us have not been involved in your prior arguments.

 

[Dancing David]

The level of soalr radiance and the sunspot issue is a great one to discuss, i am very new to it, except for some schooling from Olga Sofer-Babyshev twenty one years ago, I am very willing to learn more.

I am a geek about things like this:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/home.html

and I am somewhat okay with this (but have reservations, due to my lack of knowledge):
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a000000/a002300/a002320/index.html

but is seems there is no shallow end to the pool:
http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/advsearch.cgi?query=solar+radiation&req=search

 

[lomiller]

Gentlepeople, thank you for your civility but please rehash the issues or leave it alnone.

Some of us have not been involved in your prior arguments.

There here is the summary version.

At the earths distance from the Sun it receives ~1365 W/m^2 and this does vary with the number of sunspots but only by 0.5W/m^2. (1 W/m^ peek to peek)

This means an extra 9 X10^15 J of energy in the high half of the cycle and a loss of 9 X 10^15 J in the low half of the cycle. Peak to peak, that’s a swing of ~2X10^16 J.

However, the top 100m of the ocean (all that can really warm/cool in a given year) takes 2X10^18 J of energy to raise/cool by 1 deg C so you can’t get more then 0.01 deg cooling from the change in solar energy alone. Even with a 3X amplification due to water vapor feedback this is a really small value.

If you get a change that is sustained over the course of several decades it can become measurable, and this is precisely what happened in the early 1900’s. Even then, however, much lower greenhouse gas levels of that period are required to fully explain all the warming that occurred.

 

[mhaze]

There here is the summary version.

At the earths distance from the Sun it receives ~1365 W/m^2 and this does vary with the number of sunspots but only by 0.5W/m^2. (1 W/m^ peek to peek)

This means an extra 9 X10^15 J of energy in the high half of the cycle and a loss of 9 X 10^15 J in the low half of the cycle. Peak to peak, that’s a swing of ~2X10^16 J.

However, the top 100m of the ocean (all that can really warm/cool in a given year) takes 2X10^18 J of energy to raise/cool by 1 deg C so you can’t get more then 0.01 deg cooling from the change in solar energy alone. Even with a 3X amplification due to water vapor feedback this is a really small value.

If you get a change that is sustained over the course of several decades it can become measurable, and this is precisely what happened in the early 1900’s. Even then, however, much lower greenhouse gas levels of that period are required to fully explain all the warming that occurred.

Lomiller, leaving aside several noted errors that you haven't responded to (who knows, maybe you didn't even see them, things are such a mess around here) I'm afraid that where your argument is going to lead is rather conclusively towards greenhouse gas not being capable of warming the oceans, therefore the dominant items influencing atmospheric temperatures are solar and ocean heat retainage or release.

Otherwise, can IR heat the oceans?

 

[drkitten]

I am NOT saying that global warming is not occuring, I am trying to have a discussion without the politics.

It seems to me that the baseline is very important.

I'm not sure what "baseline" you're looking for. The temperature that methane-breathing anaerobic bacteria found congenial millions of years ago has little to do with what life on earth today expects; there's that whole "oxygen is now a major component of the atmosphere" that renders comparisons irrelevant.

But by the same token, the temperature that nomadic hunter-gatherers found congenial 50,000 years ago is also irrelevant; there's that whole "harvesting crops" things upon which the current human population relies --- and plants are notoriously non-migratory. ([python]"Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?"[/python])

I'm fairly confident that if global average temperature rose 20 degrees, that wouldn't destroy life on earth. Thermophiliac bacteria and possibly tropical fish would probably love it. But I'd be surprised if human civilization could survive it.

What kind of baseline are you looking for? Remember that human civilization is less than 10,000 years old, and large-scale cultivation is much more recent (and fragile) than that.

 

[Dancing David]

I'm not sure what "baseline" you're looking for. The temperature that methane-breathing anaerobic bacteria found congenial millions of years ago has little to do with what life on earth today expects; there's that whole "oxygen is now a major component of the atmosphere" that renders comparisons irrelevant.

i would say that a baseline is going to be rather short for accuracy of solar radiance and much longer for other.

I just feel that before I can understand the current trends in the multivariate fashion, it would help to know what has happened in the apst. I think that 65 million years is a little long for an accurate baseline, so i would settle for about 5 million. But the accuracy at those scales is going to be lacking, so the last four glacial cycles is what i will probably settle for.

But by the same token, the temperature that nomadic hunter-gatherers found congenial 50,000 years ago is also irrelevant; there's that whole "harvesting crops" things upon which the current human population relies --- and plants are notoriously non-migratory. ([python]"Are you suggesting that coconuts migrate?"[/python])

It depends on the strength of the twine and the cooperation of the swallows.

I am sure Sir Bellevedear would have something to say on AGW.

the range of temperatures for industrial crops is rather narrow, but i think that rainfall is more likely to be an issue, it is the one that concerns me. I love the spring and summer we are having so far, 1988 was something i would rather never see again.

i don't think that the models are accurate enough to give a real specific answer right now, 20-50 years from now would be better.

I'm fairly confident that if global average temperature rose 20 degrees, that wouldn't destroy life on earth. Thermophiliac bacteria and possibly tropical fish would probably love it. But I'd be surprised if human civilization could survive it.

What kind of baseline are you looking for? Remember that human civilization is less than 10,000 years old, and large-scale cultivation is much more recent (and fragile) than that.

Again that depends on how you define civilization, I like what i have and would hate to go back even one hundred years in technology.

I am just trying to learn what I can and will have to ignore the politics. I have a little old knowledge and want to learn more. Most of the stuff i studied is rather dated by now.