It's an old technique in the 'global warming' industry that's been used before - and it's about as authoritative as 'hide the decline' was in its day.
As the article says: "...understanding global temperature trends requires a long-term perspective", and viewing the NASA reference in terms of the geologic temperature record might provide a better base for comparisons. Perhaps NASA should practice what they preach?
JAAMOI, what is the correct level for atmospheric CO2 on which we should be spending our trillions trying to attain?
You've managed to put your finger on a key point. Concern about climate change is about what happens on human timescales, not geological timescales. Most children born today - at least in Western countries - are likely to be alive in 2100 and beyond. So the state of the earth in
2100 and for their children out to 2200 is what's vitally important - food to eat, water to drink and dry land significantly above current sea level to live.
The difference between human and geological timescales is, let's say, a million times - it's the same ratio as between 20 seconds and a lifetime. Will the earth survive? Yes, of course, as it has for the past
4B years. For a significant % of humanity, including your family, the answer is much less clear. The urgency is about stopping what is happening in the next 100-200 years, not in 50,000 or one million or 50 million years. Think human timescales!
Indeed. We hear a great deal about 'save the planet' these days. I understand the sentiment but what is really meant is 'save the human race'. The planet is very capable of looking after itself and will do so long after human life is gone. Even 100-200 years may be an optimistically long time-span. The next 50 years or so may well see nature causing some very big problems for what we consider to be our 'civilisation'. Whatever changes are already locked into the climate system as a result of the increased concentration of CO2 look to me very likely to happen. I doubt if there's now any chance of stopping them. The lifestyle changes that would be necessary are almost certainly politically and socially unacceptable.
+1, although IMHO any decent scientist would not just be looking at data back to 1800, they would be looking at 10,000 year and million year (and longer) timescales as well.
What I find profoundly depressing is that so much of the media coverage, which presumably comes from press releases aimed at something like the average IQ, only ever looks at a few decades.
An advantage that many of us here have, with our ~70 year perspective, is that we knew people in the 50's and 60's who themselves had a 70 year perspective. So, in the cold grey damp summers around 1960, all my great aunts and uncles would tell us how much better the summers were when they were our age. But anecdotal evidence from a single lifetime supports the monotonic model which, conveniently, correlates with CO2 levels.
Your final point is a good one. The way I put it is this.
Fossil fuel use has put up carbon dioxide levels
CO2 is a greenhouse gas (but we don't really know the right "curve")
We're talking about targets of 1.5 degrees (but we don't really know what effect this will actually have).
We don't know what CO2 level will lead to 1.5 degrees
We don't know how much CO2 we need to emit to reach that level.
So the only science that is really settled is the first one and the first part of the second.
And far more important because all of the above depend on it, access to reasonably priced energy
Which the greens would deny them absolutely.
They day I will believe advocates of climate change being man made, believe it actually is, is the day they cease from jetting round the world in private jets to conferences, sell all their beachfront properties to buy farms on Alaska and endorse nuclear power stations.
If you think in human timescales then the current increase in global temperature is not significant.
The models used to predict what is going to happen just don't work over human timescales as has been shown in the past..
they didn't get the predictions correct twenty years ago, they didn't get them correct ten years ago either.
It is a requirement of science that predictions are available and are correct to prove a theory so current climate change theory is not proven in scientific terms.
None of the alarming predictions that have been made for several decades have happened so what makes you think the current crop are going to happen?
It is far more likely that climate modellers just don't know what causes things and their assumption are wrong just as they have been in the past, after all they do keep repeating the same things.
The Russians built a climate model a number of decades ago that did match predictions with real data but it has been ignored as it doesn't predict the end of the world BTW.
On 30/07/2019 13:11, Andrew wrote:> On 30/07/2019 11:56, JGD wrote: >> The urgency is about stopping what is happening in the next 100-200 >> years, not in 50,000 or one million or 50 million years. Think human >> timescales! >
Actually, population growth is no longer that acute a problem - we've largely missed the boat on that one. See eg:
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or
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(the same URL shortened).
Certainly an extra 20-30% added to the world population between now and
2100 is not going to help things and if it could be limited that's all to the good, but it's not the killer factor that climate change itself is.
Looks like Africa is main continent where efforts should be focused to encourage smaller family sizes. If that were successful then we might significantly undershoot the 10.9B that's currently projected for 2100 (up from nearly 8B now).
There is no population crisis. The combination of the two most populous countries, India and China arent even self replacing now. Sure, quite a bit of africa is still much more than self replacing, but that?s a small part of the world population wise.
NOT ONE modern first world country is self replacing now if you take out immigration.
Birth rates are dropping EVERYWHERE now except where they are already right down in the noise.
But we handled the massive increase in world population from say 1900 fine and in fact went from periodic famines then to none at all now except where the place has deteriorated into the most obscene levels of civil war and civil chaos or have been stupid enough to let some fool like Kim Jong Il rule the roost. No reason why we can't handle the lower increase till 2100 fine too.
The problem you have with the 100-200 years time-scales is that if you applied it to the LIA, one would swing between squandering a nation's resources battling warming, or battling cooling, depending on where in the LIA you chose as a datum.
This is nicely illustrated by BBCTV's lunchtime news today, in their compulsory Climate Change propaganda slot. Apparently, the ten 'hottest' years have all occurred since 2000, but the coldest three were just after 1900. This is, of course, following the end of the LIA at about that time, and it's little wonder that things have 'warmed' since then. It's what one would expect. Unfortunately the climate change industry's climate models are no help here. as they have failed to model anything, and are a mere illustration of how little we know about the issue currently called 'climate change'.
And thrown in to the 'news' for good measure, the UK's climate is more variable because we are an island nation! There was I believing all these years that our climate was less variable because we are an island!
Global temperature effects during the so-called Little Ice Age are estimated to have been relatively small, maybe 0.5C as a maximum and more likely significantly less than that. (Granted, in some regions like Western Europe there were greater effects, but we're talking about GLOBAL cooling/warming here.)
In contrast, the present warming period shows a global rise of 1C in the past 100-150 years (with something like 0.7C in the past 40 years) and the rise is continuing inexorably at 0.1-0.2C/decade - probably 1.5C by
2050.
So any appeal to the LIA doesn't carry much weight I'm afraid.
However the claim that the top ten warmest years have been in the last
20 years is completely misleading.
Temps over about the last 50 years have done this (ascii graph)..
------------ / / /
----
With fairly big rises in the '70s followed by a long flat spot since about 2000.
So when would the hottest years occur? That right in the last 20 years. So it doesn't really mean a thing other than global warming has slowed almost to a stop despite CO2 continuing to rise at an increasing rate.
So the next question is why didn't the models produced in the '80s predict this?
then can the current models predict what is going to happen over the next ten years?
If they don't are the climate modellers going to actually admit they don't really know why the climate is changing?
I don't know about you, but the five separate curves shown in the middle of the NASA link originally given
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look to me to correlate far too well to be considered "independent".
I wonder how much of the argument that the LIA was "local" is actually down to there being relatively good data for the UK and Europe at that time, but not much for other regions that might have been similarly affected.
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