NASA and the IPCC sea level predictions

[glockmail]

....We all get CO2 is a greenhouse gas. What they are skeptical of is the idea that man is the predominant cause of the recent warming trend. ..... Quit being an Al Gore parrott screaming THE CO2, THE CO2, THE CO2.

This is exactly consistent with the AMS statement, and one the greenies choose to ignore.

 

[Old Rocks]

So your new excuse, as a non-scientist, now that I have provided a link to actual skeptical peer reviewed information is that it is laughable? Why do you attribute this 'laughableness' to Inhoffe? All that is being done is providing links to peer reviewed material on the subject. Don't shoot the messenger dude.

And when did I say CO2 was not a greenhouse gas? Again you assume causations where there is none. Yes there are many skeptics. Are they skeptical of the idea that CO2 is a greenhouse gas? No. We all get CO2 is a greenhouse gas. What they are skeptical of is the idea that man is the predominant cause of the recent warming trend. I say recent because again it is on the record that there has been no real warming in the past 10 years. What they are not claimng, as you are and the AGW nut jobs, is that CO2 is not the primary cause and that there are many, many other variables. It's you folks that need to get with the evidence and advance your perception just as the science of climate change has advanced. Quit being an Al Gore parrott screaming THE CO2, THE CO2, THE CO2.

The article was a very good article. What was laughable was that you were using it to state that CO2 is not the primary driver today. It states that the primary driver in the glaciations is the Milankovic Cycles. And the the key feedback is CO2. Now, if we add CO2, we get more heat. Simple physics, worked out by Svante Arnnhenius in 1896. This article in no way supported your or Inhofe's position that the CO2 that we have put into the atmosphere is harmless.

We have seen you denial of reality freaks go from "there is no warming happening" in the 1990s to "well, yes there is, but man has nothing to do with it". You are just as wrong now as you were then.

 

[glockmail]

...

We have seen you denial of reality freaks go from "there is no warming happening" in the 1990s to "well, yes there is, but man has nothing to do with it". You are just as wrong now as you were then.

In the 1970's the greenies (the real denial of reality freaks) were saying that man was causing global cooling.

 

[Bern80]

The article was a very good article. What was laughable was that you were using it to state that CO2 is not the primary driver today. It states that the primary driver in the glaciations is the Milankovic Cycles. And the the key feedback is CO2. Now, if we add CO2, we get more heat. Simple physics, worked out by Svante Arnnhenius in 1896. This article in no way supported your or Inhofe's position that the CO2 that we have put into the atmosphere is harmless.

We have seen you denial of reality freaks go from "there is no warming happening" in the 1990s to "well, yes there is, but man has nothing to do with it". You are just as wrong now as you were then.

The very article you quoted from one of the skeptics stated that CO2 is not the primary driver. Are you disagreeing with him? He said it is definately a factor, but those are two different things.

If CO2 is the primary driver of all warming someone needs to explain what non-primary driver has allowed the earth to NOT warm in the last 10 years.

 

[Old Rocks]

In the 1970's the greenies (the real denial of reality freaks) were saying that man was causing global cooling.

Another crock. Here are the facts;

The 1975 US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Report
UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE CHANGE: A program for action
Review by W M Connolley
This little-read report appears to serve as a useful summary of the state of opinion at the time (aside: I was prompted to read this by someone who thought the report supported the ice-age-was-predicted threoy [1]: as all too often happens, the report when actually read does no such thing...), which opinion was (my summary) "we can't predict climate yet, we need more research".
I know of only two places where this report is referred to in "current" debate (you know others? good: mail me: [email protected]): the page from the Cato Institute (discussed on the main page, the main quote from which is "There was even a report by the National Research Council of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reaching its usual ambiguous conclusions"), and in a page from sepp [remember, children, a link from this page does not imply endorsement of the contents...], an excerpt from which is below:

From http://www.sepp.org/glwarm/sciaddheat.html http://www.sepp.org/key issues/glwarm/sciaddheat.html:


But this exaggerated concern about global warming contrasts sharply with an earlier NAS/NRC report, "Understanding Climate Change: A Program for Action." There, in 1975, the NAS "experts" exhibited the same hysterical fears—-this time, however, asserting a "finite possibility that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the Earth within the next 100 years."
The 1975 NAS panel claimed to have good reason for their fears: Global temperatures had been in steady decline since the 1940s. They considered the preceding period of warming, between 1860 and 1940, as "unusual," following as it did the "Little Ice Age," which had lasted from 1430 to 1850.


This is a gross misrepresentation of the 1975 NAS report; the Cato summary is more accurate.

But anyway, what about the report itself...?
Ah yes, I'm glad you asked. OK, the SEPP stuff about hysterical fears is nonsense, the report is a calm, mannered assessment of the science
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/nas-1975.html

If you would ever bother to even do the slightest research, you would not be such a damned talking point sheep.

 

[Old Rocks]

Last 10 years the warmest ever due to climate change
Source: Copyright 2008, Evening Standard
Date: December 16, 2008
Byline: Jack Lefley
Original URL




THE 10 warmest years on record have all been since 1997 because of man-made climate change, scientists revealed today.

Global warming has pushed the world's temperature up by more than 0.7C, said the Met Office, as it unveiled figures that show the dramatic effect of human influence on the Earth's climate. In a new report, it says this year will be the tenth warmest worldwide since records began in 1850, with a global mean temperature of 14.3C.

This would have been "exceptionally unusual" just a few years ago, but is now "quite normal," say climate scientists. Dr Peter Stott from the Met Office said: "Human influence, particularly emission of greenhouse gases, has greatly increased the chance of having such warm years.

"Comparing observations with the expected response to man-made and natural drivers of climate change it is shown that global temperature is now more than 0.7 degrees centigrade warmer than if humans were not altering the climate."

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change has said a global temperature increase of 1C may be beneficial for some regions, but warned that any greater increases could result in extensive coral bleaching.

It suggests there will be increasing damage with warming of between 1C and 3C, leading to rising sea levels and risks of large scale irreversible system disruption.

Today's figures show that in the last eight years alone, the global temperature has risen by 0.2C, compared with the average for the previous decade.

The research confirms the past decade was the warmest ever recorded. In addition the ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 1997.

The warmest, in 2005, was an average of 14.76C. This year's average global temperature of 14.3C was 0.31C above the 1961-90 average.

Dr Myles Allen from the Climate Dynamics group at Oxford University added: "Globally this year would have been considered warm, even as recently as the 1970s or 1980s, but a scorcher for our Victorian ancestors."

The figures are calculated for the World Meteorological Organization by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia. They use data from more than 3,000 land-based weather stations across the world. They also measure sea surface temperatures from merchant and naval ships.

This year's warming was more pronounced in the northern hemisphere, which scientists believe is warming faster than the south because a greater proportion of it is land rather than sea, with landmasses reacting faster to conditions in the atmosphere.

In the north, the mean temperature was 0.51C above average and in the south, it was 0.11C above average.

Even though 2008 was hot by comparison with previous decades, climate scientists say these temperatures were lower than would be expected because of La Nina, a weather phenomenon that typically coincides with cooler global temperatures.



Copyright 2008, Evening Standardhttp://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=113455

 

[glockmail]

....

If you would ever bother to even do the slightest research, you would not be such a damned talking point sheep.

From your link (the one that wasn't broken):

One approach to forecasting the natural long-term climate trend is to estimate the time constants of response necessary to explain the observed phase relationships between orbital variation and climatic change, and then to use those time constants in the exponential-response model. When such a model is applied to Vernekar's (39) astronomical projections, the results indicate that the long-term trend over the next 20,000 years is towards extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation and cooler climate (80).

 

[Old Rocks]

From your link (the one that wasn't broken):

Long term trend, over 20,000 years. Yes, that is the Milankovic Cycles. But the amount of GHGs we have put into the atmosphere may well change even that long range forecast. It has certainly changed the short range forecast. The total melting of the North Polar Cap in the summer, maybe before 2030. The primary thrust of the 1975 National Academy paper was that at that time we did not have enough information, and enough observations, to say with any certainty what the climate was doing. The problem needed more study, was their primary conclusion. Well, it has had more and intensive study, and the present overwhelming scientific consensus is that the warming is accelerating, a clear and present danger, and the primary driver of it is man generated GHGs.

 

[glockmail]

Again, your post claimed that the 70's scientist thought the world was cooling, not heating up.

 

[Chris]

Again, your post claimed that the 70's scientist thought the world was cooling, not heating up.

So what?

We keep increasing the amount of GHGs everyday and the North Polar Ice Cap is melting. Soon the methane locked in the tundra will be released, and we will reach a tipping point.

 

[Old Rocks]

Again, your post claimed that the 70's scientist thought the world was cooling, not heating up.

No, it did not. It stated that in the short term, with the knowledge they had at that time, they gave it a 5% chance of cooling, and even then, were primarily worried about warming. Read the whole paper with some comprehension, don't just search for out of context sentences or paragraphs to cherry pick, and make your silly political statements with.

 

[glockmail]

So what?

We keep increasing the amount of GHGs everyday and the North Polar Ice Cap is melting. Soon the methane locked in the tundra will be released, and we will reach a tipping point.

If there's methane in the tundra then it will be a good source of natural gas. Use it to make electricity.

 

[glockmail]

No, it did not. It stated that in the short term, with the knowledge they had at that time, they gave it a 5% chance of cooling, and even then, were primarily worried about warming. Read the whole paper with some comprehension, don't just search for out of context sentences or paragraphs to cherry pick, and make your silly political statements with.

I read the whole blog. Two of the links didn't work. It's really just one man's opinion anyway.

 

[Old Rocks]

Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No
If you can find me a reference saying otherwise, I'll put it here.

A couple of the SCOPE reports (13 and 27, from memory) are worth a look. NEW! [2005/01] RealClimate post - this may be a slightly more comprehensible intro to this subject.

NEW! [2004/11/10] National Geographic, 1976

[2004/07/09] Flohn, 1979, Quat Res

[2004/04/20] A climate book by H H Lamb (or bits of one)

[2004/01/02] Short note on the 1970 SCEP report.

[2004/02/07] Misc stuff from non science journals (so far only holds a newsweek 1975 article).

[2004/01/02] Short note on the 1970 SCEP report.


[2003/08/26] World Climate Conference, 1979 (esp Hare).

[2003/08/08] Kukla and Matthews, Science, 1972.

[2003/06/17] Stephen Schneider, The Genesis Strategy (I've only just got round to uploading it)

[2003/05/03] Howorth, 1905

[2003/04/16] G.J. Kukla, Nature, 253, 600-3, 1975: "Missing link between Milankovitch and climate"

[2002/09/26] Quaternary Research, 1972: "The end of the present interglacial"

[2002/04/25] Some notes from Imbrie&Imbrie, 1980

[21/12/2001] Asimov: from a lecture in 1974

[04/09/2001] Lowell Ponte: the cooling. An analysis

[04/09/2001] A look at chapter 16 of Imbrie and Imbrie: Ice ages: solving the mystery

[30/06/2001] Review of the not-very famous US National Academy of Sciences 1975 Report

[28/06/2001] An article by Alison George, based on a talk I gave, in the Grauniad, or I have archived it here. Its not actually terribly clear: some time I must rant about journalists...

To clarify a little: I am interested in "Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's by scientists, in scientific journals?". That means articles in scientific journals and reputable books. I am not particularly interested in what appeared in the popular press or on TV and do not intend to discuss it here (but see context), since I do not regard these as reliable sources for scientific information.
Note that many of the oh-there-was-an-ice-age-predicted type articles tend to focus on non-science articles for their sources: newsweek, for example. This is cheating on their part. Newsweek isn't science, of course. If newsweek was quoting peer-reviewed journals, then they should go back to those.

We also need to know what we mean by "imminent". Since the question arises in the context of the greenhouse gas/climate change debate, "imminent" is a timescale comparable to greenhouse-type timescales: ie, the next century or so. See below for my take on long-term predictions.

Comments, clarifications and corrections to this page are welcome see comments or mail [email protected].



If you think you have a new reference that may be interesting, please send it to me. I don't guarantee to check it out immeadiately: you will need to have patience. However, I will list all outstanding references below: Just in: these 2 both mention a 1972 letter, amongst other things. Interesting! I haven't read them properly yet.

http://www.meteohistory.org/2004polling_preprints/docs/abstracts/reeves&etal_abstract.pdf
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/ESER/People/yinon/courses/climate_variability_lecture.pdf (seems to be dead; the wayback machine obliges)



The purpose of this page is to provide a counter to the mythology that "journals were stuffed full of articles predicting an imminent ice age in the '70's". An article by the John Birch Society seems to be an example of the kind of thing [oops, they've changed the page! I should have copied the old one... happily, JS points me to: the web.archive.org's archive of it] (see also "The New Australian", or Frontiers of Freedom [local cache]), and it even appears in milder form in the 1999 Reith lectures. The relevance of this claim is that "greenhouse sceptics" are fond of claiming that "all scientists" were predicting cooling a decade ago and now they've switched to warming. However, closer probing reveals few of these articles.

The argument has two very seperate strands: the "orbital-forcing" strand, wherein the cooling was to occur as a result of variations in the Earths orbit around the sun, and the "aerosols" strand, which supposed cooling in response to a massive increase in the aerosol loading of the atmosphere. In fact there is a variant of the first idea, rapid climate change during interglacials, see Flohn, 1979.

Let me say now that I have no quarrel with the large volume of perfectly sensible scientific literature that examines the Milankovich hypothesis and the probable connection between orbital forcing and past glaciations. The coincidence of the periods of the orbital forcing and the ice ages seems so close that (in common with received opinion on this subject) I believe that orbital variations have caused the ice age timing over the last, say, 3 Myr. Hays et al, Science, v194, #4270, p1121, 10/Dec/1976 is an excellent paper on this subject (see below). It is worth pointing out, though, that although the coincidence in timing virtually compels belief in the connection, there is still a problem in that the strongest response (at 100 kyr) corresponds to the weakest forcing, and as far as I am aware this problem has not been resolved. Nor do I take issue with the contention that, in the absence of anthropogenic forcing, it is natural to predict a gradual return to ice age conditions in the future (though quite how long that might be is uncertain. The "all interglacials last 10 kyr" (or 12, or whatever) idea is wrong. Various sources (Loutre and Berger) say that due to the predicted orbital configurations, the prediction (in the absence of anthro forcing) is for this interglacial to last 50 kyr or more. Jan Hollan has a page showing some nice graphs about that at No soon Ice Age, says astronomy. What I do assert, though, is that predictions for the immediate future (immediate in this context being the next few centuries) need to include anthropogenic forcing from CO2 increases in order to be meaningful, and that people were aware of this in the 1970's. Simple efforts to combine anthropogenic and Milankovich forcings are confounded by the problem mentioned above, and I believe (no ref. available) that current radiative forcing from CO2 release already exceeds that from Milankovich forcing. Any attempt, made in the light of todays knowledge, to predict the likely course of climate for the next several thousand years would need to include an assumption/prediction/model of future CO2 levels, which at the moment seems impossible over that time span.
Science-type stuff

 

[Old Rocks]

I read the whole blog. Two of the links didn't work. It's really just one man's opinion anyway.

The article it is based on was the opinion of the National Academies of Science of the United States. That is a lot of scientists with one or more Phds behind their names.

 

[glockmail]

The article it is based on was the opinion of the National Academies of Science of the United States. That is a lot of scientists with one or more Phds behind their names.

Obviously, according to your link, they had differing opinions. One was that man-made pollution was causing the earth to cool.

 

[Old Rocks]

Glock, you really need to do a little research on the relationship of aerosols, and warming. Here is a good place to start.

http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2004/dai_complete_20041026.pdf

 

[glockmail]

I'll let the so-called scientists who get paid for it do the research. I'm only interested in the bottom line, looking at political motivations, and deciding what makes sense. I'd be willing to stipulate that man made CO2 may be increasing world-wide temperatures, then act on a cautious and appropriate path. However, the fact that most of the greenies who believe this stuff are also adamantly opposed to nuclear power- and use political means to stop it- tells me that the whole global warming thing is politically motivated mumbo-jumbo.

 

[Old Rocks]

I'll let the so-called scientists who get paid for it do the research. I'm only interested in the bottom line, looking at political motivations, and deciding what makes sense. I'd be willing to stipulate that man made CO2 may be increasing world-wide temperatures, then act on a cautious and appropriate path. However, the fact that most of the greenies who believe this stuff are also adamantly opposed to nuclear power- and use political means to stop it- tells me that the whole global warming thing is politically motivated mumbo-jumbo.

And you don't know what you are talking about. The primary problem with nuclear power is the cost. Nuclear is a good ballast, but the alternatives, wind and geothermal is much cheaper. Solar, as soon as the manufacturing catchs up to demand, will also be cheaper. Most environmental organizations are fine with nuclear, provided there is more oversight than at Three Mile Island. There are even nuclear plants on the drawing boards that would use the existing nuclear waste for power. And the waste would be almost harmless in as little as five years.

There are many options and paths to real sustainable energy that does not create GHGs. Now that we will have a real scientist at the head of Energy, we will see some of these explored. Like Thermal Solar. Solar energy 24-7. Like using slow currents to power coastal areas. Many, many other areas of interest.

 

[glockmail]

And you don't know what you are talking about. The primary problem with nuclear power is the cost. .....

Actually, I do. When I lived in Upstate NY NiMo told us our rates were so high because they had a lot of nuclear power. When I moved to NC Duke Energy told us our rates were so low because they had a lot of nuclear power. Properly run nukes are among the least expensive producers of electricity over their life cycles. The reason that costs are high at all is because of unions, but more importantly greenies who use lawsuits and politicians to shut down projects.

Perhaps it is you who don't know what you are talking about.