For people who want more action on global warming, an inconvenient truth has arisen over the last decade: Annual average temperatures stayed relatively flat globally — and dropped in the United States and Oregon — despite mankind’s growing release of greenhouse gases.
The hiatus in temperature increases may be contributing to higher public skepticism about warming, particularly in the United States. But it hasn’t changed most climate researchers’ opinions of likely substantial human-caused warming this century from releases of carbon dioxide and other gases.
It occurs at the high-end of a 100-year-long warming trend and follows record, El Niño-fueled highs in 1998, notes Phil Mote of Oregon State University, who headlines a global warming presentation Tuesday before the Oregon chapter of the American Meteorological Society.
The presentation by Mote and two other Oregon researchers comes after a panel of skeptics of manmade global warming presented to the Oregon chapter in January.
“We are at a level where it’s a whole lot warmer than it used to be,” Mote says. “The physical explanations are pretty convincing on why there has been a pause in global warming, and we have no reason to think it will last much longer.”
Skeptics say the lack of temperature increases should heighten doubts about projections of severe warming. Computer climate models didn’t predict the hiatus, notes Portland meteorologist Chuck Wiese, among the scientists who presented in January.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s still warm compared to earlier periods,” Wiese says. “The whole idea was it would get warmer as C02 went up. This is a very severe contradiction to everything they put in their climate (computer) code and they modeled.”
To claim a global warming hiatus is to presume that global warming (as claimed) was occurring in the first place. Empirically the global surface temperature record is indistinguishable from one due to stochastic fluctuations on diurnal/annual/decadal/multidecadal scales.
When attempting to extrapolate from measurements it is important to use the most complete and weighted set of measurements available. Even then, one should limit extrapolations to no more than one-half a period of any periodic fluctuation detectable in the data set.
There is another difficulty. The satellite data (from 1979 to present) shows very limited warming (a small fraction of a degree), while CO2 sampling data shows the CO2 levels have risen about 15% over the same period.
If a 100% increase in CO2 is supposed to cause catastrophe, shouldn’t a 15% increase at least lead to significant and easily observable effects?
As an interested layman, I see the argument for climate change catastrophe to be “everybody agrees” while the hockey stick has been completely debunked and the factor of 3 enhancement to CO2′s effect is in doubt. If the factor of 3 applied to any warming, then it would be off to the races for any statistical anomaly as happens in harmonic oscillators.
“…dropped in the United States and Oregon.”
Sometimes Oregon seems like a foreign country, but they are part of the US, nicht wahr? > ; }