Oh dear, Joe Romm again torturing the numbers until they confess. That graph employs the most advantageous manipulation available (a 10 year running average) to hide the fact that if you fit a line through the recent temperature record you have to go back more than a decade to show any warming trend, eg check out RSS and UAH satellite records (the least controversial global temperature records). http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/LT-UAH-versus-RSS.gif
That is not to say that there is no warming or CO2 driven greenhouse effect, all indications and trends suggest that temperature is rising at about 0.8-1°C per century, and has been since the end of the little ice age 150-200 years ago (rather inconvenient since CO2 only started rising significantly after WW2), but there are also huge natural oceanic cyclic circulation variations (AMO+PDO) with roughly 60 year period that overwhelm that underlying trend so that there was rapid heating in 1920's-1940's (same rate as 80's-90's), followed by slight cooling 50's-70's (even as atmospheric CO2 levels started to rise rapidly), warming again 80's-90's followed by no change for last 10-15 years. Based on that underlying trend it will probably start to rise again in another 10-20 years, but by then the issue of CO2 thermaggedon will probably be long forgotten as a serious political issue. http://www.climate-skeptic.com/images/2008/09/18/pdo.gif The dirty secret of catastrophic anthropogenic CO2 warming is that it makes a massive assumption about the magnitude of water vapour feedbacks that are presumed to magnify CO2's effects by 3-5 times. Those assumptions developed on the basis that they produced the best model fits to the rapid warming of the late 90's, but since then there is mounting evidence and analysis (not to mention the ongoing and glaring predictive failures of those models) to suggest that this figure is more likely in the range of 1-2, which effectively negates the catastrophic scenarios touted. There are also a ton of other wild-assed guesses going into the models about the effects of other historical influences like soot and sulphur from dirty coal burning in the 20th century for which no actual data or means to test assumptions exists, and for which 'data' and magnitude of influence are first assumed then fiddled to try and match climate models to historical temperature data, all while ignoring the most massive and least understood component - oceanic circulation cycles. In effect it amounts to a modern re-hash of Astrology - trying to match observations to an assumed causative factor, without ever proving the strength of that causative link, and while ignoring other strongly correlated factors (like solar cycles, oceanic cycles, even orbital cycles that drive ice ages). This is the same mushy thinking that previously gave the world such scientific wonders as phrenology, homeopathy and religion. IPCC climate models also do not explain why the temperature was rising before CO2 started rising after WW2, nor why the world was at a similar temperature or hotter during the medieval warm period, the roman warm period and the minoan warm period, or why the dark ages cooling or 15-18th century little ice age occurred, or why temperatures have been (on average) gradually falling for the last 10000 years since the start of the current inter-glacial period (the holocene). Climatology is a young science that has a very long way to go before we can rely upon the predictions it makes. There are myriad good reasons to cut down on fossil fuel use, but danger from climate change is not in that list. On 28 March 2012 14:28, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > Not good. See: > > thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/24/451239/manmade-climate-change-accelerated-in-2001-2010-world-meteorological-organization-reports > > This came to my attention because someone linked a response to > LENR-CANR.org. > > - Jed >
