Ok, one by one.
Sunspots.
"Data is presented only for the period 1850 to present. This is a time period of normal 11 year average sunspot cycles. This does nothing to analyze the affects of longer periods of solar quiescence"
Systematic records of sunspot activity were kept only from 1850 on.
Now for the science part. Even if good data existed from 1600 to 1850, if the hypothesis "increasing sunspot activity increases temperature" is rejected over the past 150 years, it should stay rejected. This goes back to how science works. If one has the statistical power to reject a hypothesis over 150 years, then even if there was a cold period and low sunspot activity somtime in the past, you shouldn't accept the null hypothesis. In laymans terms, either its true or not. It can't be false now, true then. Has to be statistically valid now, statistically valid then.
On to sea temperature.
"Seas should be heating up, they are definitively NOT-"
So I read your link, at at the bottom there's the conclusion that the authors of the study draw.
"Trenberth and Willis agree that a few mild years have no effect on the long-term trend of global warming"
So how do record low temperatures somewhere, a year or two of average sea temperature, etc, jive with global warming? Warming means hotter, right? So if something somewhere isn't hotter, than means global warming is bunk, right?
Actually global warming trends allow, even predict times, places, and even years, when temperatures can be avg. not warmer.
Here's a simplified explanation of the math involved.
Say you are producing the blades for the turbofan of a jet engine and you wonder if they are coming out with a more obtuse angle that they are spec'd for. How would you establish a trend? Ideally you'd already have information about the mean angle and the variance from when the machine is working properly (time a). You can then collect random blades from time b and compare them to time a. You would expect that the mean and variance of blades from time b would overlap with those of time a. If they don't then you have a case that something has changed. To reject the hypothesis that they are the same, you'd have to demonstrate that blades from time b are significantly (significance can be derived from variance and sample size) different than time a. However, even a rigorous test of significance allows (even predicts!), that a certain % of blades from time b will be more like blades from time a. Why, because most phenomen contain variance. The same is true for climate. So really, this argument goes for Shasta as well. You'd expect some glaciers to stay the same, some, like Shasta, to grow, but that the mean to be statistically different than 20 or 30 years ago (and it is).
Here's a more comprehensive picture of sea temperature over time (complete with statistics!)
ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu
Troposphere.
So the first question has to be..."Do we toss out all the other data because data from one latitude, and one altitude isn't warming along with everything else?" Seems silly, and furthemore, you should be aware that satellites don't actually measure the temperature of the atmosphere. Really, how could they? Temperature is inferred and modeled, and therein lies quite a few sources of error.
Antartica: "IT's NOT WARMIN:"
Reread your article. It is warming, just not as fast as some of the models. You're also leaving out other parts of the article, namely that a huge chunk of the antartic warmed faster than predicted. Also, the ozone layer (er, lack of it) has had a significant contribution to temperature in the antartic (namely, cooling it). And finally, here's what the author of that study says about what to conclude from it.
"The findings of the study don't call into question model projections for other parts of the globe, the models are really doing quite a good job at simulating the 20th-century changes over the six inhabited continents"
Glaciers:
Shasta's glacier is getting bigger? Ok, so? What about the rest of the worlds glaciers and sea ice? Take a look at break up dates, freeze dates, spring volumes, etc. All of these observed data, not models.
ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu
Finally, sometims a picture sums things up nicely.
whyfiles.org
Personally, I don't think we should really rush into any sort of global warming frenzy. It's pretty unlikely that anything but a global effort is going to slow down carbon emissions, and since Asia would sit out such global efforts, it wouldn't realy matter what Europe and the US did. Sea levels will rise some, we'll have some areas with drought, but probably more arable land in northern latitudes. All this will unfold over hundreds of years and we'll have given up using coal and petroleum long before global warming is something of huge consequence. I'm only posting because I don't like to see science tossed around so recklessly. About 1/3 of my portfolio is in energy atm, which is more than I have in alternate energy so I try to stay pretty practical about it all.
Given my investments in alt energy, I'd just be happy if somebody would levy a tax on fossilfuel enough to pay for the health consequences of smog, mercury, soot, etc. Those are subsidized external costs that shouldn't be. |
