Please consider NASA Sees Climate Cooling Trend Thanks to Low Sun Activity.
“We see a cooling trend,” said Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”
The new data is coming from NASA’s Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry or SABER instrument, which is onboard the space agency’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite. SABER monitors infrared radiation from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a vital role in the energy output of our thermosphere, the very top level of our atmosphere.
“The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” said Mlynczak, who is the associate principal investigator for SABER.
The new NASA findings are in line with studies released by UC-San Diego and Northumbria University in Great Britain last year, both of which predict a Grand Solar Minimum in coming decades due to low sunspot activity. Both studies predicted sun activity similar to the Maunder Minimum of the mid-17th to early 18th centuries, which coincided to a time known as the Little Ice Age, during which temperatures were much lower than those of today.
If all of this seems as if NASA is contradicting itself, you’re right — sort of. After all, NASA also reported last week that Arctic sea ice was at its sixth lowest level since measuring began. Isn’t that a sure sign of global warming?
All any of this “proves” is that we have, at best, a cursory understanding of Earth’s incredibly complex climate system. So when mainstream media and carbon-credit salesman Al Gore breathlessly warn you that we must do something about climate change, it’s all right to step back, take a deep breath, and realize that we don’t have the knowledge, skill or resources to have much effect on the Earth’s climate.
Incredibly Complex Systems
See the problem? Alarmists take one variable, CO2 that is only a tiny part of extremely long cycles and make projections far into to the future based off it.
When I was in grade school, the alarmists were worried about global cooling. Amusingly, I recall discussing in science class the need to put soot on the arctic ice to melt it to stop the advance of glaciers.
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report said we have only 12 years left to save the planet. It triggered the usual frantic and ridiculous reactions.
NBC News offered this gem: “A last-ditch global warming fix? A man-made ‘volcanic’ eruption” to cool the planet.” Its article proclaimed, “Scientists and some environmentalists believe nations might have to mimic volcanic gases as a last-ditch effort to protect Earth from extreme warming.”
Geo-engineering: Ignoring the Consequences
Watts Up With That discusses Geo-Engineering: Ignoring the Consequences.
From 1940 to almost 1980, the average global temperature went down. Political concerns and the alleged scientific consensus focused on global cooling. Alarmists said it could be the end of agriculture and civilization. Journalist Lowell Ponte wrote in his 1976 book, The Cooling.
The problem then was – and still is now – that people are educated in the false philosophy of uniformitarianism: the misguided belief that conditions always were and always will be as they are now, and any natural changes will occur over long periods of time.
Consequently, most people did not understand that the cooling was part of the natural cycle of climate variability, or that changes are often huge and sudden. Just 18,000 years ago we were at the peak of an Ice Age. Then, most of the ice melted and sea levels rose 150 meters (490 feet), because it was warmer for almost all of the last 10,000 years than it is today.
During the cooling “danger,” geo-engineering proposals included:
* building a dam across the Bering Straits to block cold Arctic water, to warm the North Pacific and the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere;
* dumping black soot on the Arctic ice cap to promote melting;
* adding carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere to raise global temperatures.
“Taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” as advocated by the IPCC in its October 8 news conference, is also foolish. Historic records show that, at about 410 parts per million (ppm), the level of CO2 supposedly in the atmosphere now, we are near the lowest in the last 280 million years. As plants evolved over that time, the average level was 1200 ppm. That is why commercial greenhouses boost CO2 to that level to increase plant growth and yields by a factor of four.
The IPCC has been wrong in every prediction it’s made since 1990. It would be a grave error to use its latest forecasts as the excuse to engage in geo-engineering experiments with the only planet we have.
Global Warming Errs Badly
Next, please consider Extreme weather not proof of global warming, NASA on global cooling
To understand the great confusion about global warming or climate change, my most lucid guide has been Dr. Richard Lindzen — a former Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at MIT and member of the US National Academy of Sciences — and his now famous lecture for the Global Warming Policy Foundation last October 8.
In just a number of segments of his lecture, Dr. Lindzen crystallized for me why the church of global warming errs so badly in its dogma.
Global warming promoters fostered the popular public perception of the science of climate change as quite simple. It is that here’s one phenomenon to be explained (“global average temperature,” or GAT, which, says Lindzen, is a thoroughly unscientific concept). And there’s one explanation for it: the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
GAT is only one of many important phenomena to measure in the climate system, and CO2 is only one of many factors that influence both GAT and all the other phenomena.
CO2’s role in controlling GAT is at most perhaps 2 percent, yet climate alarmists think of it as the “control knob.”
Most people readily confuse weather (short-term, local-scale temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind, cloudiness, and more) with climate (long-term, large-scale of each) and think weather phenomena are driven by climate phenomena; they aren’t.
Consequently, as Lindzen says, the currently popular narrative concerning this system is this: The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged temperature change, and is primarily controlled by the 1 to 2 percent perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable — carbon dioxide — among many variables of comparable importance.
Big Chill
Did You Know the Greatest Two-Year Global Cooling Event Just Took Place?
Would it surprise you to learn the greatest global two-year cooling event of the last century just occurred? From February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available) global average temperatures dropped 0.56°C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47°C—also during the global warming era. All the data in this essay come from GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Temperature Analysis (GISTEMP). NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (dataset accessed 2018-04-11 at ). This is the standard source used in most journalistic reporting of global average temperatures.
The 2016-18 Big Chill was composed of two Little Chills, the biggest five month drop ever (February to June 2016) and the fourth biggest (February to June 2017). A similar event from February to June 2018 would bring global average temperatures below the 1980s average. February 2018 was colder than February 1998. If someone is tempted to argue that the reason for recent record cooling periods is that global temperatures are getting more volatile, it’s not true. The volatility of monthly global average temperatures since 2000 is only two-thirds what it was from 1880 to 1999.
None of this argues against global warming. The 1950s was the last decade cooler than the previous decade, the next five decades were all warmer on average than the decade before. Two year cooling cycles, even if they set records, are statistical noise compared to the long-term trend.
My point is that statistical cooling outliers garner no media attention. The global average temperature numbers come out monthly. If they show a new hottest year on record, that’s a big story. If they show a big increase over the previous month, or the same month in the previous year, that’s a story. If they represent a sequence of warming months or years, that’s a story. When they show cooling of any sort—and there have been more cooling months than warming months since anthropogenic warming began—there’s no story.
Bombarded With Garbage
Of course you did not know that unless you follow NASA, Real Clear Markets, or Watts Up With That.
Meanwhile, everyone is constantly bombarded with total garbage like Al Gore’s claim Migrant Caravans are Victims of Global Warming.
And of course, the media is fawning all over AOC’s “New Green Deal” hype as she too is a believer the World Will End in 12 Years if we don’t address climate change.
The Guardian and the Intercept are both happy to promote this nonsense as of course the entirety of mainstream media.
Alarm Bells
When I was in grade school we had major alarm bells over global cooling. In high school it was population growth. Then came food shortages followed by peak oil.
Now the crisis du jour is global warming.
It’s always about something!
CO2 Derangement Symptom
Watts Up With That accurately labels global warming hysteria as the CO2 Derangement Syndrome.
That’s an excellent synopsis of the current state of affairs so please give it a good look.
Finally, even if you still believe man-made global warming is a threat, please ponder the notion that governments will not do anything sensible about it.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I think a more interesting play is insurance companies and how they are pricing in climate variability. Maybe nothing yet but will be interesting to see.
What is more troubling is the current Anthropocene extinction event. If you turn everything into housing and farms and shrink wild spaces around the globe then you will get unintended consequences.
The Malthusian Doom mongers have been wrong since 1800, and will continue to be wrong
Nothing attracts the disciples of climate change quite like an article questioning the climate change religion.
“Pure blasphemy I tell you! How dare anyone not take up my cause!”
Pffft, booooring. Play your own hand of cards and walk the talk. But leave the rest of us alone to live our lives. I’m so tired of the fake outrage, the identity politics (deniers vs. believers) and people trying to force me to take up a cause on their behalf.
If you look at the main outcome of the climate change religion and how it has organized itself into an extortion racket, you should be able to quickly understand what the intention was in the first place. An easy racket.
Yes. A consumption based economy will do us all in at some point. It is like in planet of the apes where mankind destroys himself. These things do go in long cycles. Even our existence. Recently an object entered our solar system and continues to violate the laws of inertia and physics and behave like a giant spaceship. We will find out in about 70 years what it is. If we are around that long.
Trump knows his days are numbered . At some point the economy will crater in the next 2 years and he will be gone. We are at 110% debt to GDP now and rising. Extending and pretending can only work for so long.
The horrific wildfires blowing throughout America’s western states and California, in particular, have raised the concern of many people as to the type of situations we may see in the future. It has become obvious that our busy world often overlooks and even discounts these events that may prove to be the “canary in the coal mine.”
If mankind is in any way responsible for climate change it will take years or even decades to make a difference after we alter our lifestyles. Sadly, efforts and pain to reset our course will not take place until the pain becomes unbearable, More on this subject in the article below.
Up here in western Canada, we had a lot of fires in the past couple of years, but a lot of them were from idiots throwing cigarettes out of car windows, leaving campfires unattended, or lightning.
At the end of the day, government mismanagement of our vast forests a contributor. We had a decade of pine beetle killed trees standing dead in the forest and a poor plan to manage it by harvesting and a lack of controlled burns.
The end result was a decade of fuel built-up in the forests waiting for the right idiot to come along and start the fire, or for mother nature to throw the match for us. Well we got both of those things, and a bunch of large fires. And although the alarmists got it wrong with man-made climate change being the cause, they got it half right with ‘man’ being involved as described above.
Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get
Robert Heinlein
Yes lets argue some more about global warming… forget the fact that the oceans are being poisoned with particulate plastic, that the insects are dying or that zooplankton concentrations are declining while sea life has been ingesting mercury for decades. Forget the fact that people living in cities are more likely to get emphysema or that we all live with some form of lead poisoning. Clearly the tonnes of crap we spew into the atmosphere and environment are doing no harm at all.
Maybe we should consider the big picture instead of fixating on numerical minutia… the problem is simple: Too much pollution, too many people on a planet that is ultimately too small to handle it all.
This one say it all pretty much:
Mish, I recall the same hysteria in Earth Science back in the late 70’s. Peak oil and annew ice age were true scientific facts pushed by the public schools. Any scientific argument against the paranoid rantings of people who wish to steal our money is put down as “quack science” as someone stated here in a different comment section. I am starting to believe Americans are either brain-washed or perhaps just too lazy to study the data themselves. Perhaps they just do not understand scientific methods. They are blinded by science…
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false” sayeth William Casey when Director of CIA under RR. So who owns the CIA?
You flat earthers are hilarious. I know, it’s only true if you want it to be. How about you debating this with your local high school science teacher? You could post it on Youtube for everyone to watch.
Nice Non Sequitur!
Cool: smaller gov good for climate?
After browsing through the comments, here is my observation. Progressives tend to believe in climate change (previously global warming, or even global cooling a few decades ago). Conservatives/libertarians tend to be skeptic.
My conclusion – climate change is like a religion. If you dare to be different, you will be silenced by the *mob*. And I see a *mob* here.
“governments will not do anything sensible about it”
The best way to deal with the dangers of nature shall continue to be what it has always been: industry and production. Fossil fuels will be keeping people warm tonight — regulations, not so much.
I just saw on the evening news tonight a 20 second piece that claims that congenital heart defects are caused by climate change, though the mechanism hasn’t yet been identified. SCIENCE!!!
I think the earth is a bit less than 6000 years old, and shaped like a tortoise shell.
Heretic! Everyone knows that Sir Bedevere proved the Earth to be banana shaped before joining King Arthur on his quest for the Holy Grail.
Realist: You describe how science should work. As Yogi Berra said “In theory, theory and practice are the same, in practice they aren’t.” From personal experience, here is how it works:
Manager:”Our customer wants to know if we can measure X. Can we do it?”
Scientist:”Yes we can, but only under conditions Y and Z. But, those aren’t the customer’s conditions.”
Manager:”Take data that shows we can make the measurement.”
Scientist:”OK, but it can only be done under conditions Y and Z.”
later…
Scientist:”Here is the data taken under conditions Y and Z.”
Manager:”This looks really good. I’ll give it to the customer.”
And off the data goes, bereft of any reference to conditions Y and Z.
This crap happens anywhere that money or power are involved, which is everywhere. Always go back to the original research. See if the experimental conditions are relevant to the case to which they are applied. See who sponsored the research and decide if the results are self-serving. BEWARE.
A few years ago the source code to one of the climate models got released on Wikileaks. In that there were comments about reducing the effect of a couple of very warm years around 1943. This was because these years reduced the slope of the temperature rise. Don’t try to tell me that this sort of thing doesn’t happen in science.
Be a Realist
You’re absolutely right. The ones making outlandish claims seldom show their work. The articles I’ve read that explain in detail how they arrived at their conclusions, show a much more benign result from global warming.
Been there, done that.
Nice story. Not science.
Ocasio is Obamas replacement if you haven’t noticed. I fully expect her to be be running for president. She doesn’t know anything except for how to .run her mouth which is very dangerous. Just like Obama. She showed up with the UN’s agenda 21 2030 papers stuffed in her back pocket. We better figure out a way to get out in front of this one. I am 100% serious.
You can’t be president until you’re 35. So she can be president starting in Jan 2025. My hunch is her statements about global warming have eliminated any chance of her being elected. The earth will be the same in 2024 as it is now and she’ll look like an abject moron for her statements.
I pray you’re right but with a bunch of poor people wanting handouts they might overlook the other bs.
Global warming is real. All things being equal, if you add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere, things will warm up. So far, the warming has been about 1C(1.8F). Nothing to get alarmed over. And far less than what’s been predicted by the global warming fear mongers. Who, I suspect, have little actual understanding of the thermodynamics of black bodies. Because if they did, they could easily see that their predictions are absurd from very simple calculations.
Their worst case scenario is a runaway greenhouse effect where global warming produce more greenhouse gasses that lead to more global warming etc… . A positive feedback loop. But what they fail to recognize is that as the earths surface warms, it will emit more infrared radiation that will far outweigh any effect from a runaway greenhouse event. Blackbodies emit radiation in proportion to their absolute surface temperature to the 4th power. Maybe if they took graduate level classes in heat transfer and/or thermodynamics, like I have, instead of meteorology, they would understand this.
“. But what they fail to recognize is that as the earths surface warms, it will emit more infrared radiation that will far outweigh any effect from a runaway greenhouse event.”
Firstly, nice way to try to frame the argument as fear-mongering – but this is real science and reality, and reality doesn’t care for sophistry.
Secondly, your claim is that scientists of many disciplines have been looking at this subject for decades in detail yet you have managed to identify a fundamental flaw in their reasoning that they have never thought of: you have a rather high opinion of yourself. I’ll bet if some random uneducated and inexperienced member of the public walked into an operating theater when you were being prepped and told the surgeons “hold my beer, I’ve got this, you guys don’t even know that you are meant to operate on the groin region for brain surgery”, you’d be screaming about trusting the experts.
There are many scientists who agree with me. Ones from places like MIT and Berkeley who are real physicists. They don’t get headlines. It’s the outliers who predict doom and gloom who get the press. The ones who don’t show their algorithms or how they came to their conclusions. Because if they did, it would quickly be shot down.
The notion that global warming is settled is complete nonsense.
The vast, vast majority of scientists support the findings of climate science. Not the catastrophic stories that the well-funded FUD machine tries to claim they propose, but the findings documented in the IPCC reports.
Most agree global warming is happening. What they don’t agree on is how it will manifest itself. I personally see a leveling off in temperatures over the next few decades. Not a hyperbolic jump. And we may have stronger hurricanes, but, it won’t be catastrophic. I think the long term benefits of greater food production and calmer weather overall will offset some of the detrimental effects.
So, if your worshipped climate scientists (I take it you haven’t read much on topic by yourself and just believe anything these guys in media say) were wrong when predicting global cooling, how can you be so sure that they are right this time?
Btw, do you even know that there were periods when Earth was much warmer than today? Your climate gurus in MSM didn’t tell you that, I suppose.
I have read extensively on climate science, and know how much I don’t know and how much more people who have studied the subject for decades know. The basics are pretty simple, and the basics are enough to understand the key forcing factors and the evidence that supports them.
I also know that we cannot be sure that the Earth’s climate is linear – Venus could well be an example of what happens when a planetary climate encounters a non-linear event, or a combination of factors combine to produce a positive feedback situation that may be difficult or impossible to recover from.
Within our linear understanding we can make predictions. Despite the fervent efforts of the well-funded FUD campaigns to the contrary, most of the predictions are well within boundary estimates, and the models are strong and getting stronger.
This is, of course, an economic disaster for any organization or country that has trillions of dollars in fossil fuel reserves. These countries and organizations have spent a small fraction of a small fraction turning science into a political football for you to play with.
You can either study the research with an open mind and come to your own conclusions about it to the best of your ability, or you can take somebody else’s opinion. If you take somebody else’s opinion you should look at their motives and see if there are reasons why they might want you to believe what is convenient for them.
Remember, a lot of the early understanding of climate science came from oil companies, who then adopted the tobacco company methods to discredit it.
I hear many deniers claim that scientists are motivated by money, however for anybody who knows scientists, this is mostly laughable, and usually the deniers end up claiming a grand conspiracy, one that has spanned over 150 years, is global in reach, and includes many branches of science, most outside of the funding sources for climate science. In other words, highly implausible to the point of risible.
Scientists are people like everybody else. They can be motivated by money, career making, or they may be afraid to go against the so-called consensus. Finally, they can make mistakes, because we still don’t know exact mechanism of how climate really works and changes.
My main point is that while climate is definitely changing, it’s perfectly normal. We’re still below the highest levels of temperature of the Medieval Warm Period, and during only the last 10 thousand years there were periods of consistently warmer weather than then. There is no such thing as long term climatic normals. The climate was warmer in 20 century than in 19 century, and in 17 century it was much much colder than in any period mentioned above.
So, humans can either adapt to the new conditions, like they always did in the past, or spend their lives fighting the war they cannot win.
Plants grow faster when there’s more co2, so we have a built in feedback system to prevent a greenhouse.
Seemed like everything was fine until the VW Dieselgate Scandal, and all those nitric oxide emitting cars were banned.
Different interpretation of the same story although from ten years ago…
Martin Armstrong had been posting for a long time that the global warming crowd were barking up the wrong tree and that it was global cooling that we need to worried about now. He talks of crop failure and food shortage that could arise due to that. Now that it is the cooling that is of concern these global warming crowd will simply turn around and say that this is what they have been saying all along. I am in St. Funogas’s camp.
Too much science today is about proving the desired result. I wouldn’t expect to get a job at any government funded climate institute if I didn’t already support the desired conclusion. It is absolutely amazing what feeding your family does to your outlook.
Martin Armstrong? You gotta be kidding. He’s a convicted felon and professional conman. Just read his page on Wikipedia! This is the guy you get your science from?
Be that as it may, I do follow his blog and he has been saying it is global cooling that one needs to be worried about and not global warming. It does not mean I get my science from this guy. But color me skeptic when it comes to global warming more so because politicians like Gore are championing it. I do not believe any politician (from present crop) will do the right thing so I feel that opposite of what they champion is likely to be good.
Excellent comments from Curious Cat and St. Funogas
Please read them and think!
This is getting old. You have good insights into one subject area, and I congratulate you on that.
But to think that one strength extrapolates to every other subject is weak minded and thus you get multiple people trying to tell you to stick to your knitting and stop pretending you are any smarter than anybody else.
Time to grow up intellectually. It is a sign of strength to admit you are clueless about a subject and then to learn how to evaluate rigor in others.
Mish, I’d be happy to argue this issue with you on email, and perhaps help you understand.
Mish – your point is well taken. Here’s a great book that talks about why so many extreme theories are publicized and why so many scientific papers turn out to be irreproducible. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s human nature.
First, I have no opinion one way or the other about man-caused global warming, I’ve never taken the time to look into both sides of the story. Someday I will. But in the meantime, I wish the Global Warming Church members would stop calling everyone who does not belong to their cult “Deniers”. Most of us are actually Don’t Give a Shitters. Which is why I haven’t looked at the data yet.
Global Warming is ultimately, and solely, about CONTROL and the latest fad to scare me into giving up my freedoms. So whether global warming is man caused, or man-assisted, or completely Mother Nature doing her best, I don’t care. Nobody is going to use it as an excuse to get me to give up my liberties until they point a gun at my head. Global warming is just the latest craze to drive the sheep into a frenzy so we divide ourselves into pros and cons, bashing each other’s heads in while the Elitists who run this planet get away with murder. It’s fear mongering at its best; there is no better way to control the masses than fear.
The few die-hard global warmers I know are hypocrites. I can give them a long list of things they could do to decrease their carbon footprint in a big way, but it’s far too inconvenient. Amish and Mennonites have a very tiny carbon footprint and Global Warming Church members would do well to emulate their lifestyle. But that’s far too inconvenient. So those of you telling the rest of us to decrease our carbon footprint while your own is so huge, I call you all hypocrites. Americans have enjoyed a high lifestyle for generations and now that it’s the former Third World’s turn, you want to deny them all the toys and luxuries you had. Hypocrisy to the max.
Mother Nature was doing just fine before Man came along and she’ll continue doing just fine long after we’re gone. We are just another of her curious experiments and we’ll go extinct someday just like the other 99% of her experiments. Will I give up one ounce of my freedom to to try to delay the inevitable? Hell no. As individuals, Humans are the greatest thing that ever happened to this planet. As a species, we are such completely hopeless sheep that the sooner we go extinct, the better.
LOL Mish delves into climate change denialism with a grade-school level attempt to conflate temperatures at the edge of space with temperatures at ground level (where we live.) I saw this particular claim debunked at least a month ago if not longer. This reminds me of that idiot Republican presidential candidate who decided the Egyptians built the pyramids to store grain.
Stick to systems (e.g. the economy) you just mostly don’t understand Mish, instead of making a fool of yourself with systems that are completely beyond your knowledge.
And biomass, windmills and solar panels to the rescue. Total madness.
The first problem with the controversy is rarely discussed: that the “global average temperature” is not even a thing, it is a statistic — a massively derivative statistic of measurements which have significant margins of error. The idea that tiny variations in this one statistic can tell us anything significant about the changing state of an entire planet borders on the absurd.
I got that idea from scientists, rude one.
Mish,
I don’t see a link to the source for “NASA Sees Climate Cooling Trend Thanks to Low Sun Activity”. The quoted comments could easily be taken out of context. Can you verify the accuracy of those comments?
“The New American” looks like a Republican propaganda site, and probably isn’t credible.
I agree with you that the global warming narrative is pure BS, but if we want to convince believers, the science presented needs to be solid.
Have you ever shared about this with Chris Martenson?
I stopped reading his otherwise very good blog a long time ago because of all the climate change BS. I suspect too that his peak oil narrative is wrong, just because I know how he thinks, though I have no evidence to support my assumption.
I modified the ending by adding one hyphenated word “man-made”
Yeah, I come here for the latest group-think. Decades around high performance computing and useless climate models has left me yearning for the simple answer. Finally, Al Gore has it. He even invented the internet.
Mish, you’re deeply, deeply wrong on this. You are a smart guy, so take the time to understand what a green house gas really is and how it works. If you really understood that, you wouldn’t be quoting the folks you’re quoting. And you’d know why you shouldn’t be.
Sadly, this is a waste of pixels. Mish is convinced that his “research” on Watts Up makes him smarter than people who have spent all their lives studying climate and working with people who have studied adjunct fields.
If a climate scientist spouted off nonsense about the economy, quoting a nonsense web site, and misconstruing or misunderstanding e.g. the Fed, Mish would be huffing and puffing.
Yet, duped by well funded FUD, he spouts on, riling up the weak-minded, about his (mis)understanding of climate science.
Sad.
Wot themonosynaptic said ↓
If a PhD, or any degree, conferred anchoring and confirmation bias immunity, I’d take the holders a lot more seriously…if they bring data. What I see them with, however, is advanced skills in data mining and spin. One day, the story is that ocean temperature has risen 0.18 degree F in the past century. The next day, it’s “precipitous increases in ocean temperature.” I pretty much stopped paying attention to them all after watching Bill Gray being shouted down a few years back by teen college students rebuking him for not toeing their academe handler’s partyline on global warming.
The data sets and articles are all available to the public. Quite a chore to go through it, but what exactly do you mean with “bring the data”?
I’ll make it simple. Just give me a model that predicts carbon dioxide does something that, say, water vapor doesn’t, and actually produces that effect predictably. All models are wrong, but some models are useful. I’ve not seen a useful climate model showing co2 as a problem in 50+ years of looking.
But about all that extreme weather stuff? Not so much. Have a peek at the data in this well done cited summary.
Congratulations Mish. Quoting a news rag without scientific standing, getting some cherry-picked half-baked story (what will be the effect of thermospheric cooling 500km up on the ocean and ground temperatures in the near term??). All the mythical talking points are hit on the way: the Maunder minimum (not global), the anecdotal “it used to be global cooling”, IPCC models are always wrong (they are in fact quit accurate), etc etc. The effect of solar activity cycles has long ago been studied and quantified by astronomers and physicists.
So sorry you are poorly trained in the sciences to be taken in by charlatans.
You may want to look at the real NASA site for info.
This site discusses how Martin’s discussion was taken out of context.
Trained as a chemist, I am comfortable with the greenhouse theory. The increase in CO2 was so well documented, I don’t know of any credible source who disputes that most of the contribution is from man.
I personally think we need to be more concerned about methane. It is increasing like CO2 and in the short term, is approximately 80x more effective at trapping IR than CO2. Methane is being released as the arctic warms (along with agricultural activity).
I am of the opinion that we will not stop the 2 C climate warming by the turn of the century. When I really worry, I think that enough methane could be released quickly enough to start run away warming (say like Alexandria OC).
However, real climate scientists believe it is very unlikely we will have runaway climate change. So take comfort that real climate scientists do believe it is unlikely we will have a runaway climate event (does unlikely mean 1 in 100 chance? Better odds then the lotto).
The other great news is how the oceans had absorbed most of the CO2. The pH shift has been enough to stress shell fish and coral.
You may have cold weather right now from the vortex, but we are only in the negative teens (Celsius). We used to have cold snaps -40 about 30 years ago. Then we had cold snaps of -30. Now are cold snaps are -20.
Don’t listen to my anecdotal information, read work from people educated in this area if you want to form a learned opinion.
Direct from the iflscience article: “The Sun simply does not have that large an effect on our climate compared to human activity.”
How that statement can be written and the rest not taken with a huge grain of salt?
The “Sun” here is obviously short-hand for variability in solar radiation due to various cycles such as sun spot activity etc.
Put a windmill in front of AOC’s mouth and the hot air will power the entire DC area.
I don’t think it is accurate to say there was a consensus on global cooling. There were some of course, but not 98%. In any case, they fixed the global cooling problem by reducing the pollution that was blocking the sun.
I’m no Global Warmist, but the NASA guys are talking about cooling of the thermosphere. They haven’t talked about cooling of the lower layers of the atmosphere. “The New American” is pulling a dirty trick.
My immediate thought as well.
If lower atmospheric layers trap outbound infrared radiation to a greater extent than before, couldn’t that even help cool the thermosphere (I’m just mindlessly speculating….)?
The fundamental problem with the “global warming” hysteria, still remains though: It just doesn’t matter. The Earth was once much, much warmer,then much, much colder, than today. Repeatedly. With no earth destroying effects.
Back in the early days of the “Global Warming” craze, some people who should have, and now do, known better, were voicing concerns about a self reinforcing, runaway system rendering the earth somewhat like Venus. That would kind of suck. And perhaps be worth ditching the SUV in order to prevent.
But nowadays, noone even considers this an even semi realistic fear. Leaving even +-10 degree Celsius global average temp variations rather unexciting, as far as planet ending scare stories are concerned. If people thinks it’s getting too hot, just move North. There’s plenty of space between the hockey pucks in both Canuckistan and Siberia.
” If people thinks it’s getting too hot, just move North. There’s plenty of space between the hockey pucks in both Canuckistan and Siberia”
Billions of people? At what cost?
Actually, yes, the border between the troposphere and the stratosphere shifts, and stratospheric cooling does take place due to CO² trapping infra-red. This article is talking about the temperature 500 km high. Nowhere does it attempt to state what the influence will be on the troposhere, which is where we live and measure temperatures. In fact, 97% of the heat is trapped by the ocean, so it’s not actually the air temperature but the ocean heat content (and El-Nino cycling) affecting our weather and the temperature.
Americans can only influence one government to address CO2 production directly: The government of the USA. But the biggest producers of CO2 are China and India. Are we able to persuade them to forgo their dreams of a third world lifestyle? Those two countries alone dwarf our carbon footprint even now.
Will we be able to likewise suppress the yearnings of the peoples of Africa and South America as well? There is better chance that we could design an exercise program for pigs that will get them to fly!
Should Americans reduce their CO2 emissions to zero (A silly idea as we would have to stop breathing) even then it wouldn’t come close to solving the trend. If this is the case, all efforts and treasure spent on CO2 reduction would be better allocated to mitigation of the effects of climate change that will inevitably unfold.
If I remember correctly, China has only recently overtaken CO2 emissions (last decade) from the USA. I don’t believe India is close yet, though their emissions are growing very quickly. Now, how do emissions compare on a per capita basis? Tough to make a good comparison, but the G7 countries are still the leaders.
Just looking at China per capita and they really did climb significantly since 2000. Fortunately, they are starting to move away from fossil fuel for electrical generation and investing in electrical car technology.
Mitigation is something to strive for. However, in a country like Bangladesh, it probably isn’t much of an option.
BS. USA has been the biggest contributor of CO². Per capita emissions by the USA are many times that of China. And China has built out the most renewable energy the past 5 years by a huge margin.
Control knob indeed. There is a control knob and it is being studiously ignored by the chicken little climate crowd: The Sun. Anyone wanting to know earth temperature trends need look no further than Mar’s polar ice cap: If it’s growing, we’re cooling and if it’s shrinking, we’re warming, but there’s no fun and little grant money in it. Better action in hyping an atmospheric trace gas moving from 0.25% to 0.4% during the industrial age. Now you’re cooking with gas!
Actually, the ocean temperature is what affects the weather most, as well as El Nino cycling, for the time frames we are looking at. The ocean’s heat content has gained precipitously the past decades.
“Better action in hyping an atmospheric trace gas moving from 0.25% to 0.4% during the industrial age. “
And yet that tiny fraction of the atmosphere holds almost all of its warmth. Without that tiny fraction, we all freeze to death!
Hi Mish, climate scientist here! The temperature effect of this low solar activity is primarily felt in the far upper reaches of the outer atmosphere, and is not expected to have any effect on the surface temperatures we experience. So, yes global warming will continue despite what you and Fox News say. Please stick to economics and leave real science to the scientist!
“So, yes global warming will continue despite what you and Fox News say. Please stick to economics and leave real science to the scientist!”
So how come you scientists did not predict the new record long period without a major hurricane hitting the U.S.? No advance prediction of Polar Vortexes either. Just excuses, since they have been happening recently.