Global increase of warmer years is no accident
January 9, 2009Between 1880 and 2006 the average global annual temperature was about 15°C. However, in the years after 1990 the frequency of years when this average value was exceeded increased.
The GKSS Research Centre, Germany, asks: is it an accident that the warmest 13 years were observed after 1990, or does this increased frequency indicate an external influence?
With the help of the so called "Monte-Carlo-Simulation" the coastal researchers Dr. Eduardo Zorita and Professor Hans von Storch at the GKSS-Research Centre together with Professor Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern estimated that it is extremely unlikely that the frequency of warm record years after 1990 could be an accident and concluded that it is rather influenced by a external driver.
The fact that the 13 warmest years since 1880 could have accured by accident after 1990 corresponds to a likelihood of no more than 1:10 000.
These likelihood can be illustrated by using the game of chance "heads or tails": the likelihood is the same as 14 heads in a row.
"In order to understand and statistically analyse the climate system and its interaction between the ocean, land, atmosphere and human activity, the comparison with a game of chance is no longer sufficient.
The natural sequence of warm and cold years no longer functions according to the simple principle of "zero or one", explains the GKSS scientist Dr. Eduardo Zorita about the challenges of his calculations, because the climate system possesses some inertia.
An example: After a warm year milder years tend to follow, since the oceans have stored some heat. This natural inertia must also be included in the calculations.
"Our study is pure statistical nature and can not attribute the increase of warm years to individual factors, but is in full agreement with the results of the IPCC that the increased emission of green house gases is mainly responsible for the most recent global warming", says Zorita in summary.
Paper: Original title of publication Zorita, E., T. F. Stocker, and H. von Storch (2008), How unusual is the recent series of warm years?, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35, L24706, doi:10.1029/2008GL036228
Source: Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres
Jun 03, 2009 |
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This is a rather poor statement. Climate isn't a game of chance. There are forces at work that sum to create climate. At best this is obfuscation and completely irrelevant to climate. Statistical probability does not make science. If there's a driver that's causing warming we'll find it through research and experimentation, not through hash tables and chance.
Let's say you enjoy vanilla ice cream, you're a bad driver, easily distracted, have 3 sisters, and live with your parents.
You show up in the ER with glass from a windshield in your face and the ambulance states you were hit by a car walking across the street. I take a look at your personality and determine that because you like vanilla ice cream you were hit by a car.
The hypothetical is an exageration to get the point across. If you don't do an examination of the factors at play you cannot do a statistical analysis and pick one factor as the reason for the observations.
Don't be the last person that "gets" the AGW joke. All your friends and family have already figured it out.
You, of course, won't object because that would be alarmist!
First, the best data comes from satellites but that is not long enough to tell us much. That said, it does tell us some inconvenient facts. One clear fact is that the two hemispheres show trends of different slopes, which suggests that the idea of some GHG driven relatively homogeneous 'global' warming phenomenon is likely invalid. Another clear fact is that the middle troposphere, where global warming should be faster than on the surface, is missing the signature predicted by the GHG theory. This means if that if really do have some unusual warming it is unlikely to be explained by GHG theory.
Of course, it is difficult to talk about warming when the past ten years of American data is showing that there was no warming over the past decade. That same data shows that the four of the warmest years as shown by the instrumental record were in the 1930s while only three of the warmest years were in the 1990s. I suggest that this data should lead to questions about the accuracy of data from places where standards are lower and budgets for measuring temperatures are much lower.
Another issue is the bias that is built into the instrumental record. Sadly, measurements are often influenced by artificial sources and most stations do not meet quality sources. The audit results shown at www.surfacestations.org indicate that less than 15% of the stations can be classified as Class 1 or Class 2 and that the bulk of the stations are near artificial heat sources that bias the readings to the high side by more than 2C. The data from these stations do not indicate that the adjustments are sufficient to offset the external effects that lead to higher readings.
What I find interesting is Lubos Motl's argument against the claim that we are seeing anything out of the ordinary when we look at local temperature readings. You and find the argument at http://motls.blog...009.html but I have pulled out the relevant parts and reproduced it below.
Lubos Motl wrote the following:
"A frequent question is whether the repeated record low temperatures imply that global warming either doesn't exist or it is not serious. Of course that they do. Assume that the temperature in your city is a linearly increasing function of time, "Temp Slope x Time", plus fluctuations that are randomly distributed with the standard deviation "SD".
If you get the opportunity to prove that the linear trend in your city exists at the five-sigma confidence level, i.e. that the net warming since 1900 or so has exceeded five times the natural oscillation "SD", then it also means that the probability that you get a cold extreme for a certain day will be dropping faster than exponentially: like the Gaussian.
Assuming that the "systematic" global warming accumulated by the linear trend exceeds five times the noise "SD", which is really necessary for proving that the linear trend in your city is more than noise according to the physics standards, the probability that you measure a new cold weather record should drop roughly one million times (!): check basic articles about the normal distribution and how large fraction of a Gaussian lies below minus five sigma. It is less than 1 part per million.
Such a dramatic decrease of the frequency of record cold temperatures is clearly not happening because the record cold temperatures seem to be as frequent as they were in the past. More precisely, their frequency should be naturally decreasing with the growing temperature records (with time).
If you study the global mean temperature rather than the local temperatures, you obviously increase the signal-to-noise ratio because a large part of the noise gets averaged out (but not all of it). However, at the same moment, the conclusions derived from the global mean temperature are also much less relevant for any particular city in the world.
Every city should actually care about their own temperature, because they can only be affected through it. And for the local temperature, the accumulated warming from the linear trend is much smaller than the unavoidable interannual fluctuations which is why the underlying warming trend is completely irrelevant for every single rational human being in the world."
Wow... that's like "heads" coming up 14 times in a row!!!!
This study is purely statistical in nature and makes no sense whatsoever, just like the one in the article.
Pollution = bad
CO2 = good
This study is simply lacking in every respect. Any database that has been showing a very slow rise over any period of time will naturally have the highest values at the end, even if the last few values have fallen slightly.
The temperatures have risen a fraction of a degree in the last hundred years. the last few years they have slightly fallen. The study above is, frankly, a joke.
I don't know how old you are, but I'm going to say 21. The last four years of your life have been the largest numbers. Now what are the odds of that happening?
Let's be clear, we're not saying that the study has no merit.
We're saying that the second following line is in error considering the fact that this is, as you said, very basic.
This part is completely acceptable and accurate.
This part is not. You can't say the first part then immediately change your story and point to GHG's.
Arguing the science of climate observations and projections is one thing, but arguing against the irrational causality of a carbon tax is a matter of moral justice. How does taking more money from people and giving it to another group of people affect the weather on earth?
Can anyone demonstrate the causality of this taxation against climate for me?
A statement like the above wouldn't be allowed to stand in a freshman science course. A seven year old would see the logic error. What kind of lame publication is this "Space and Earth science"?
It might be time to consider a career change.
http://www.physor...961.html
Don't wait until the music stops... they moved ALL the chairs!
Because it isn't. It's strong observational and statistical evidence of warming due to an unspecified factor or factors, not necessarily any one factor in particular. As there was no specific factor examined.
From the article :
Interesting.... CO2 ppm is at its highest average level in a decade...2008 has been marked as the COLDEST winter of the 21st century.
Last year, China had their worst winter in 50-100 years. It snowed in Las Vegas, NV, shutting down many locations, this year. It has snowed in Malibu, CA, for the last three years in a row.
Yep, I'm now convinced. Mankind is turning the planet into another Venus! We're all going to die! Oh wait...we're all going to die anyway. And, shouldn't it be getting warmer instead of cooler? :)
http://www.number...ying.htm
Anyone who still believes that Global Warming will have catastrophic effects has been brainwashed. Your friends, family and neighbors already know it is not catastrophic. That's why prices have NOT dropped on sea or bayside properties. That's why people are starting new families.
If you know some poor soul who still believes that Global Warming is a killer, do the right thing and offer comfort.
Don't be one of the last few of the frightened and deluded. Wake up and live. The lie is over.
http://scienceand...ling.pdf
You know, most of us aren't fightened by global warming. Just because we believe in a problem doesn't mean we lose sleep at night wondering when the world will end. We're not children, hiding from the scary thunder.
90s the sun was most active sun spots
check 2008 sun low activity temperatures drop world wide
has nothing to do with humans
So, tell me about the magical explanation of the warming trend predating the nineties.
Besides it is cold weather that kills.
http://www.csccc....t_23.pdf
Time of plenty? What part of the last two centuries have been times of plenty based on warm weather? In the last two decades, temperatures have risen, yet for some strange reason conditions haven't gotten much better. If anything, we are worse off now.
And you are correct, cold weather kills. Warm weather is also quite the killer. Take a look at the recent flooding of the Pacific Northwest, brought on by the early and abnormaly quick melting of mountain snow. Or look at any drought. How about hurricanes? They need warmer weather to form.
Hurricanes need both warm and cold air to form. Get rid of the cold air and there will be less hurricanes. One could see that as an argument for helping warming along. Nonetheless, winter 2008 has been slated the coldest winter of the 21st century. The 1° C rise in average global temperatures over the last decade was undone this year. Ice packs in the Arctic have increased, as have those in Antartica. China had its worst winter in 50-100 years. It has snowed in Malibu, California, three years in a row. Yep, I'm convinced. Humans are warming the planet--in opposite world!
Exactly!
Theo, could you point to a significant change that we have an established baseline for? I haven't seen any real change and would like an example for reference.
Because it isn't. It's strong observational and statistical evidence of warming due to an unspecified factor or factors, not necessarily any one factor in particular. As there was no specific factor examined.
From the article :
This raises 2 questions:
1) What is the applicability of Monte-Carlo simulations to systems that are chaos driven? I would think that the simulation would only work for systems of finite, albeit large, degrees of freedom instead of what appears to be infinite degrees of freedom.
2) What determines the random or pseudo-random inputs? And over what interval of time? The interval in this article seems to indicate that they have limited themselves to the period after the last mini-ice age instead of since the last ice age or the Holocene climate optimum. If they did this, what would the output be?
Why the warmest, of course.
specificaly. In the last two centuries, what times of plenty can reasonably be attributed to abnormaly warm climate.
Warmer weather in the arctic, leading to the noticable melting of the sea ice. Dryer weather in Central America, resulting in an interesting migration of species to higher altitudes and the gradual death of flora. That lovely drought in Georgia. Worse fires do to dryer forest floors and a curious increase in arson. I can't speak for the rest of the states, but we've gotten less and less snow along with warmer and warmer winters here. I'm sure I could find more, but I get distracted when I go searching for data online.
this is not magic
u check sun activity and global warming cooling trends u find miror imagine
even a stupid kid can get it u should be smarter then taht
just see 2008 almost no sun spots global termperatures droped world wide
video for more maleable undestanding
http://www.youtub...PV01uyRs
Which has happened cyclically for the past several thousand years.That lovely drought in Georgia can be directly linked to a failure in the man made irrigation systems of the region. As for the increased forest fires we've had forest fires yearly for the past 50 years in California. Ever since we stopped agressive logging we've seen this increase. As for here, I'm not sure where here is for you. For me here has received record snow fall, record rainfall, and abnormally cooler summers for the past 15 years. Here is Northeastern US for me.
A lot of those changes you've described could be written off to the PDO or the el nino, la nina cycles as well as the shifts in the jet stream that have been observed for the past century. It's not necessarily climate change per say that's causing these occurances.
Also don't neglect the ability of news to travel immediately which up until the past 8 years or so never really happened. Local news used to be jsut local news. Well now local news is the entire country, so the increases in reported natural events aren't going up, they're just being reported to the public more often.
I hate to say "go look at the data" but take an aspect that has been attributed to Global warming and see if the predictions have held accurate. In most cases you'll see no change or marginal change within variation.
A great example is the hurricane foolishness. ACE is stable. Hasn't really gone down outside of variation and it certainly has not gone up to any sort of significant degree.
If you examine all the natural disasters that are killing 10,000 here and 12,000 there,l even jsut a few years ago, this exact same pattern would kill several hundred thousand, and in the case of some instacnes, namely He basin flooding in China (another thing attributed to global warming) in the 40's there were a reported 1.5 million people killed by a flash flood. In the 80s, no one died and the flood was of the exact intensity as recorded of the prior floods according to residents who has lived through both occurances.
Don't discount the swing of the media and the birth of the satellite age in finding these statistics.
We used to have to fly a plane out into the atlantic to look for hurricanes, now a 10 year old can spot them as they form on the internet.
Significant change in global weather? For the colder. That is not what the so-called climatologists predicted, now is it?
The so-called climatologists predicted increased heating of the planet until the gulf stream was diverted by conditions caused by heavy glacier melt in Iceland, which would then create sudden catastrophic cold conditions. That never happened, now did it?
No, instead we get a gradual decrease in temperatures globally over a period of several years, one that this year undid the global average temperature rises of the last decade.
In fact, I remember back to the 1970s when climatologists were scaring the public with the news that we were headed toward a new ice age. Never happened. Then, they told us that things were going to get unbearably hot because of our emissions. Have you not noticed that our CO2 levels have gone up over the last three years while our global temparatures have fallen during the same period? I have been monitoring them for several years and have been watching the trends.
Here is something else of interest. Astronomers have watched the stars for many years and have noticed a trend in the same class stars as our Sun. They get brighter over time. They say that Earth will become uninhabitable in a million years as a result of such changes in our own Sun. But, what if they are wrong on the timeline? It would not be the first time. What if the time is nearer than we think?
At any rate, the evidence is turning against AGW theory. It should be getting hotter, not colder.
Significant change in global weather? For the colder. That is not what the so-called climatologists predicted, now is it?
The so-called climatologists predicted increased heating of the planet until the gulf stream was diverted by conditions caused by heavy glacier melt in Iceland, which would then create sudden catastrophic cold conditions. That never happened, now did it?
No, instead we get a gradual decrease in temperatures globally over a period of several years, one that this year undid the global average temperature rises of the last decade.
In fact, I remember back to the 1970s when climatologists were scaring the public with the news that we were headed toward a new ice age. Never happened. Then, they told us that things were going to get unbearably hot because of our emissions. Have you not noticed that our CO2 levels have gone up over the last three years while our global temparatures have fallen during the same period? I have been monitoring them for several years and have been watching the trends.
Here is something else of interest. Astronomers have watched the stars for many years and have noticed a trend in the same class stars as our Sun. They get brighter over time. They say that Earth will become uninhabitable in a million years as a result of such changes in our own Sun. But, what if they are wrong on the timeline? It would not be the first time. What if the time is nearer than we think?
At any rate, the evidence is turning against AGW theory. It should be getting hotter, not colder.
But we have the locals to tell us it's way wramer up there than it really should be. If all was going just swell up their, the fauna wouldn't be facing extinction.
I know about the yearly foret fires. Not only does the smoke billow straight into my valley every year, but many of my friends and family are out there trying to put them out. It's not the lack of logging, it's the lack of moisture. The fires spread very quickly do to all the dry tinder lying around. That's why the fires have been increasingly dangerous. The cause of more frequent fires, I think, is mainly arsonists and chain smokers.
Yea, I've been watching the weather in the East. Hasn't looked all that pretty, really. I'm on the West coast, and it has been warmer and warmer every year. We got just over 60 today when we're normally surprised if it gets above 50 in January. We've seen a steady decrease in mountain snowfall, our main source of fresh water and best source of entertainment for us skiers. Of course, I'm not surprised by your weather. An overall warming is going to have a change in weather patterns in all extremes. Since the warming isn't uniform, there are temperature differences that cause new pressure systems yadda yadda.
No, nor is it what has been observed. It has gotten warmer. Even though 2008 was the coldest in the last decade, it was still much warmer than it was two decades ago and beyond.
try closer to a billion. And it won't be because of brightness. Our sun will eventually run out of lighter elements to use as nuclear fuel and will gradually become large and cooler as it switches to the heavier fuels. The radius will expand to just around Earth's orbit and we will become very dead. Assuming we are till around, of course. The sun will not get significantly brighter than it is now until long after that when it becomes a white dwarf. The sun is already burning it's most efficient fuel and will only become less energetic untill it shrinks to the size New York. Go learn about basic astrophysics before trying to use it to disprove another theory.
And the fact that that region, by all rights, was a desert before we piped massive amounts of water into it.
Yeah I can't really speak to this one as I haven't seen the weather in Cali myself. I can say that there have been many research papers that are attributing your current weather changes to the PDO, however, I can't speak to their merit as I haven't read many of them.
Actually there's new research stating that stars like our Sun ramp up their hydrogen fusion as they age becomming brighter and hotter. It is, of course, theory only.
According to the numbers provided by the EPA, polar bears are generaly in decline due to reduction in sea ice. In some isolated areas, there has been an increase. I honestly don't know the seal populations, but I do know that polar bears use sea ice to hunt from and are suffering due to loss of habitat.
The California forests?
I assume you are refering to Pacific Decadal Ossillation, not Petroleum Developement Omen. I haven't read in depth, but from what I've seen I'm a little skeptic. It relies on an extended El Nino period, which I don't really see happening. We have some affects, but not enough to legitimately claim that that's what's going on.
Do you know who did the research? I'd like to know exactly how they think that works. The only thing I can think of that could drive that would be the hygrogen concentrating towards the center of the star with the heavier elements pressing in from the outside. But it would stand to reason that the heavier elements would be drawn toward the center more and end up reducing the pressure on the hydrogen.
dont ignore it
watch and learn
truth shall set u free
http://www.youtub..._XxiKLcY&feature=channel