Did GW really stop in 1998?

[hydrashok75]

I rather doubt it.

My understanding was that 2005 was the hottest year on record, but the Freepers are up in arms about this article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html

Seems to me their sample size is ridiculous, but I am continually distressed by the lack of the general public's willingness to understand the difference between climate and weather.

[Lasher]

1. Are the ice caps still receeding?

I keep hearing the polar bears don't have much ice left to stand on. Is the sea ice freezing back now?

[Viking12]

2. Carter dismantled...

"Due to some unaccountable oversight, Carter did not include a graph of global average temperature from CRU. Let me show you what it looks like:



It's obvious to anyone who looks at the graph that temperatures have not been static for the past eight years, but have continued to increase steadily. The only way you could contrive a decreasing trend is if you just looked at the two years 1998 and 2005 (the warmest and second warmest years ever recorded in the CRU data) and ignored everything else."

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2006/04/a_picture_is_worth_a_thousand.php#more

On edit: The balck line in the graph represents a 5-year running average. Although only 3 months have passed, 2006 is shaping up to challenge the mark for warmest year on record.

[GeorgeGist]

4. You nailed before I could ...

Thank Al Gore for the internet.

[skids]

13. Besides...

...haven't these people ever taken a high school chem/physics class? If they had, they'd have done an experiment something like this:

Imagine a 1 gm ice cube, well below 0°C. If we begin to heat it, the temperature will rise uniformly to zero. Then an amazing thing happens... rather than get warmer, the cube will begin to melt. We will have to ut in a full 335 joules of heat energy simply to melt the cube, not raising its temperature even a fraction of a degree. Upon melting, the ice cube (by now, 1 gm of water) will continue to warm steadily until it reaches 100°C. Here it ceases to change temperature, but merely begins to boil. This time it takes a whopping 2255 joules to boil a single gram of water! Upon turning completely into steam the water again steadily rises in temperature.

http://www2.corvallis.k12.or.us/chs/departments/science/physics/data/chaps/ch14.html

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. There are different things going on here.

Maybe the average world temperature has remained steady for the past few years. Climate change doesn't depend on consistent slow increase of temperature.

If the summer is 2 degrees hotter, and the winter 2 degrees colder, there is no change in the average temperature. But that two degrees hotter increases the melt rate of the arctic ice pack, and the two degrees colder inhibits the fall of snow which replenishes the ice pack, resulting in a continually diminishing ice pack. This diminishing ice pack decreases the albedo of the polar region, allowing the arctic waters to absorb more solar energy. Suddenly, we have a surge in temperatures in the arctic.

You might note that the end of the article says he is a geologist, not a climatologist. The two disciplines are only marginally connected. Geologists deal in time frames of hundreds of thousands of years, not decades or hundreds of years.

I always wonder about the agendas of scientists who make pronouncements outside their fields.

[phantom power]

5. GW is just getting up a good head of steam.

The positive feedback mechanisms are all kicking into high gear now. Methane release from thawing permafrost, albedo decrease from disappearing ice, forest die-backs, it's all coming together.

THC shutdown is beginning to look like the best possible outcome.

[jrw14125]

6. I had to de-bunk this one yesterday:

First, note that his writing is distributed (ie: funded) by Lavoisier Group, which is "concerned about the cost of Kyoto to Australia's resource-intensive economy." - http://www.spinwatch.org/modules.php?name=News&file=art...

His premise in the op/ed is that global warming actually *stopped* in 1998 - he states that the years after that were cooler.

Of course *he leaves out 2005* which was tied with 1998 for the warmest year ON RECORD.

He also fails to mention that 2002 and 2003 were the 2nd and 3rd warmest years ON RECORD.

He also fails to mention that the last 3 5-year periods are the warmest ON RECORD.

No mention of the heatwaves in 2001 and 2002 that killed 10s of thousands of people.

No mention that since 1980, the earth has experienced 19 of its 20 hottest years ON RECORD.

No mention of the increasing rate of polar cap and glacial melting (which only increasingly fuels the feedback loop b/c dark water absorbs more heat while ice reflects 90% of the suns rays back into space).

Oh, and did I mention that I'm not a scientist, but it only took me 2 minutes on the website of the organization from which he pulls his facts out of his a$$, to figure out that this info was available to him, and that the organization's reports clearly demonstrate the spike in teperature for 2005?

1998 0.4920 0.0047
2005 0.5223 0.0051
(http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk /)

Exxon should be so proud.

[Dogmudgeon]

7. Bob Carter: Geologist

I suppose "psychogeologist" might be better, since he has rocks in his head.

--p!

[Dead_Parrot]

8. That was a very impressive article

That someone can be so coherent, whilst being so utterly full of shit, requires a level of denial beyond the most optimistic ostrich. I think I might frame that.

[struggle4progress]

9. Telegraph is a rightwing rag, sorta like the Washington Times.

Stories appearing there often appear nowhere else. My advice: don't ever cite 'em if you can help it.

[Dead_Parrot]

10. I just had the pleasure...

of a reading a Torygraph op-ed in my local rag, explaining why dropping nukes on Iran was OK if it stopped them dropping nukes. Brought me out in a rash.

[phantom power]

11. Gee, I bet they think they're the first geniuses to think that one up, too

[Dead_Parrot]

12. Pushkin thought of it last week

Pushkin being - of course - my aged, deaf and incontinent cat. He seems to have a good head start over the right-wing press on most issues (and believe me, he's good at issues)