| | | Hi mindmeld; Re: "And what about our ice core records that go back hundreds of thousands of years? This is what cracks me up. You guys take a 15 year period and think that proves your point. We're talking about very long term trends here.";
You make a good point here. Fortunately it's in favor of my side of the argument, LOL.
The longest ice core record analyzed so far is from Greenland. It goes back long enough that it includes the Eemian. The analysis was published this year in the most prestigious journal on the planet, Nature. The Eemian was the previous interglacial. That is, it was the warm time before the most recent ice age. The paper shows that even though Greenland was much warmer then, and even though those warm temperatures lasted 6000 years, Greenland's ice cap was stable and did not slide into the ocean. This ended a lot of leftist fantasies about sea level rise being a threat due to Greenland:
Eemian Interglacial Reconstructed From a Greenland Folded Ice Core
NEEM Community
Nature 493, 489-494, January 2013
Efforts to extract a Greenland ice core with a complete record of the Eemian interglacial (130,000 to 115,000 years ago) have until now been unsuccessful. The response of the Greenland ice sheet to the warmer-than-present climate of the Eemian has thus remained unclear. Here we present the new North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (‘NEEM’) ice core and show only a modest ice-sheet response to the strong warming in the early Eemian. We reconstructed the Eemian record from folded ice using globally homogeneous parameters known from dated Greenland and Antarctic ice-core records. On the basis of water stable isotopes, NEEM surface temperatures after the onset of the Eemian (126,000 years ago) peaked at 8?±?4 degrees Celsius above the mean of the past millennium, followed by a gradual cooling that was probably driven by the decreasing summer insolation. Between 128,000 and 122,000 years ago, the thickness of the northwest Greenland ice sheet decreased by 400?±?250 metres, reaching surface elevations 122,000 years ago of 130?±?300 metres lower than the present. Extensive surface melt occurred at the NEEM site during the Eemian, a phenomenon witnessed when melt layers formed again at NEEM during the exceptional heat of July 2012. With additional warming, surface melt might become more common in the future.
nature.com
Now the above article is *big* science. It has an incredibly long list of authors. This was an expensive undertaking. And in addition to showing that Greenland's ice cap is stable, it also shows what every long term high frequency accurate estimate of climate has shown, that climate has always fluctuated wildly.
In other words, the "hockey stick" to the small extent that there is one, is not an exceptional period in the Earth's history. These things happen all the time. What's new this time is that we have enough temperature measurements to say that it's happening.
Re: "When you look at the long trends and you see stable trends, until the industrial revolution started and then you start to see a hockey stick, then you know the process has become unstable and that a new variable has been introduce. It's classic statistics."
If you deny that temperatures have been stable for the past 17 years you're denying a fact that is well accepted in the climate community. It's so well accepted that it's addressed as a fact in the IPCC report which suggests, among other things, that it could be caused by the models being tuned to be too sensitive to CO2.
Now if you admit the "pause" in temperatures you can no longer argue that the temperatures before 1998 were significant. If you claim that those 17 years are a statistical aberration then you have to admit the possibility that the roughly 17-year warming trend that preceded those 17 years was also a statistical aberration. But it is precisely those years that were used to prove that CO2 had a large effect on the climate. It was the temperature record from 1981 to 1998 that made the science "settled" in 1998. If you want to say that we can't be bothered with looking at 17-year histories, well lo and behold, you've just cut the nuts off of your own argument in favor of CAGW from back in 1998, when the thermometers were on your side, LOL.
Your side is basically hosed on this. The only thing you can hope for is that the temperature measurements will continue their upward climb. And hey, temperatures are very difficult to predict. Who knows what will happen in the future? You could get lucky. Of course there's also the old statistical adage of "regression towards mean". Did I mention that we're setting snowfall records in the US already?
-- Carl
P.S. Regarding the hockey stick, amateurs (LOL) showed that the statistics used for the first hockey stick were flawed and would create a hockey stick out of random data. The response by the idiots was to publish a lot more papers that also show hockey sticks. These presumably also had bad statistics or other errors and they've been picked apart in the skeptic community. But it doesn't matter any more.
No one is bothering to argue about hockey sticks because the temperature pause broke all of them the same way.
I think it's hilarious that the left will simultaneously argue that (a) the hockey sticks are accurate while at the same time pushing alternative explanations like (b) the heat went into the oceans. Okay, if the heat went into the oceans, how could the hockey stick be accurate?
You're like the criminal accused of stealing the watch. His excuse is that he never even saw the watch, it was given to him as a gift, he paid for it but lost the receipt, and besides, it didn't work anyway. This is how you go to jail and this is why the mainstream media is beginning to abandon warming alarmism. Your explanations are incompatible with themselves. It's clear that it is a political issue and that you guys will say absolutely anything to make a political point. You really don't care about the science or anything truthful. It's not like you're the "boy who cried wolf". You're the boy who cried nonsense. |
|
