Well, that's something. No real references, no source given, but it at least makes it clear what you're talking about.
Some colleagues and I recently ran a few tests using the data to see what patterns might appear. The results: Even allowing for lagging and cumulative effects, it is hard--really hard--to find any correlation between global temperature changes and fluctuations in energy consumption and industrial activity. The well-known relationships between solar cycles and temperature are easy to pick out, but once you control for them, any effect of energy consumption and industry disappears in the background noise.
This is confusing short term fluctuations and long term trends. Nobody is looking for short-term climate changes due to changes in greenhouse gas output. The effect is cumulative, the long term trend is up, and the gases come out of the atmosphere on a very long time scale. I don't know if anybody has tried to correlate atmospheric CO2 levels with fluctuations in industrial output either, in terms of year-to-year levels, but the trend is clear. Has atmospheric CO2 concentration ever shown a decline? It might have from time to time, probably due to measurement noise. Long term? I don't think so.
The solar cycle is something else entirely, an 11 year cycle that's well known and has been studied a lot. The temperature dependencies are stronger than expected, true, based on measurements of the solar constant. But it's a periodic effect, something that needs to be understood better, but not something that makes the greenhouse effect impossible to understand.
No correlation has yet to be found between human energy consumption and atmospheric temperature. We have good data back to the late 1800s.
A very good correlation has been found between sun spot activity and global temperature.
That's a terse summary of a terse summary. Nobody expects to be able to make sense of short term climate fluctuations, it's a very noisy signal. Nobody, to my knowledge, expects a temporary decline in industrial activity or energy usage to cause a drop in temperature, or more directly, a drop in atmospheric CO2- at best, they might find a temporary slowing in the rate of CO2 increase. But the physics behind greenhouse warming is pretty well understood, on a number of levels. Climatology is not so well understood, but postulating some magic stabilization in the face of forcing from greenhouse gases is counterintuitive.
But again, I don't think it matters that much on the political level. I don't expect anything to be done, the international treaties without enforcement measures won't mean much at budget time, and the energy companies know how to spend their lobbying money effectively. Plus, it will be pretty hard for the industrialized west to get developing countries to stabilize energy use when their use is still quite low compared to the first world. The real experiment will continue, I just hope it doesn't blow up in our faces.
Cheers, Dan. |
