Now is the time to demand that natural variability be the focus of the U.S. Government’s climate change research program.
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A so-called climate scientist, isn’t. The complexity of measuring the global temperature to a ridiculous .1C is problematic at best. To assume current climate is normal or abnormal requires at the least a knowledge of past history going back thousands and millions of years which is necessarily sketchy to say the least. A strong understanding of geology, paleontology and anthropology is required. To understand solar effects requires atomic physics (see CERN developments) and astrophysics. We have barely scratched the surface and to listen to a bunch of grant puppies, driven by a political agenda, declare with certainty that the science is settled, is banal.
The hockey stick was a result of extreme cherry-picking tree rings which, by the way, do not show temperature, but moisture. Plant growth shows the presence of moisture, not temperature.
Pyeatte,
The hockey stick attempts to model average GLOBAL temperatures. The medieval warming period was local to the regions around the North Atlantic, and possibly to the northwest coast of Africa – thus, it did not have a great effect on average global temperatures.
The Little Ice Age might show a downward crook in the handle of the hockey stick — which would make the blade a more dramatic departure from the norm, rather than a less dramatic departure.
About Plimer — what leads you to take him as your authority on the subject of climate change? He is not a climate scientist. If you wanted to consult an authoritative work about brain surgery, would you choose one written by a brain surgeon — or by an obstetrician?
Ian Plimer is professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide and is also a geologist. The problem with the “hockey stick” is it ignores the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age which completely changes the shape.
Pyeatte,
Has nothing really happened outside the range of natural variablity?
According to Lonnie Thompson of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University, over 90% of the Earth’s glaciers are shrinking. He should know — he’s seen most of them. Thompson’s specialty is taking ice cores from high-altitude tropical glaciers, to measure the change in the amount of atmospheric CO2 over the decades and centuries. Most of his work has been done in the Peruvian Andes, where over the past 30+ years he has seen the glaciers shrink as the atmospheric CO2 rises. He also says that the indigenous peoples who have lived in the upper Andes for centuries are being forced off the mountain tops as their source of water, the glaciers, disappears — and as the moss on which their alpacas depend for food dies off.
Glaciers come and go with the ice ages, without human causation, but they have never disappeared as rapidly as they have been recently, as we can see from photographs taken year by year since the 1970s — a period of time that corresponds, oddly enough, with the blade of the hockey stick.
I’ll check out Ian Plimer’s book, but I prefer to read books about climate science that were written by climate scientists, and not by mining engineers.
You AGW guys seem to have an air a desperation to you arguments. Nothing has happened outside the range of natural variability. When you check the historical record you must actually go Way back, and 2003 does not hack it. Texas droughts are quite common. I don’t want to belabor the point but check the 1930s. Check the last 1500 years (the “hockey stick” is wrong). Read Plimer’s book (it is readable).
Pyeatte,
What grant “system”? Grants come from a large variety of sources. Have you examined them all? Do you know for a fact that all grants awarded by this “system” require that research simply affirm a given conclusion?
Have you read any of the scientific papers produced under this “system”? If you had, you would see that a great deal of attention is given to natural variability, and that most scientists came only very slowly to the conclusion that what we are seeing is outside the boundaries of natural variability — after examining the scientific evidence of natural variability.
And can’t we see without our own eyes that things outside the boundaries of natural variability are starting to happen? The 2003 heat wave that killed tens of thousands of people in Europe was an unprecedented extreme statistical anomaly; the Northwest Passage has become easily navigable in the summer; the year of Katrina was the first hurricane season to produce four, let alone three, storms of the highest intensity; Texas and Western Australia are suffering record-setting droughts, and Texas has been battling wildfires of unprecedented size.
And outside my window, the leaves have been falling off the maple tree brown, shrivelled, and curled in upon themselves. The weathermen say that this is because it has been staying warm at night; we need cold nights to get our usual calendar-perfect New England foliage. In my almost 40 years of living in New England, I have never before seen foliage like this. And, BTW, warm nights, according to those fraudulent computer models, will be one of the first manifestations of global warming
The grant system defines the parameters for the grant and they specify that human activity be considered as the cause of climate change. The truth is human activity, is at most, a minor factor while natural variation is over-powering. The politicians set the rules for getting grant money and they demand a certain result. Very corrupt system we have for climate research.
Natural variability has always been a subject of climate change research. It has been studied intensively to determine whether the changes in climate can be accounted for as an effect of natural variability, or whether these changes are outside of what can be accounted for on that score. (Almost all scientists who have studied this question have concluded that the changes occurring now are outside of what can be accounted for by natural variability.)
To say or imply that natural variability has not been taken into account by research on climate change is — well, pretty bold.
It is about time to get some honesty in climate research. An incredible amount of money has been wasted chasing a political agenda and corrupting scientific research to the point where people do not trust what comes out of the effort.
Remember back in high school when we first learned to string big lofty-sounding words together in seemingly coherent and persuasive essays? Only to revisit our youthful expressions of brilliance years later, after we had learned better, and sheepishly tuck them away out of public view. The Executive Summary and following statement of strategic objectives reminds me of that high school level of academic quality.
Even the opening introduction, “Every day, governments, organizations, and individuals make long-term decisions worth billions of dollars that affect many lives.” smacks of high school, echo chamber, radical wanna-be, ameturism, espoused by frustrated educators incapable of earning a living in an actual workforce where performance and accountability are a basic expectation.
It’s hard to even take this seriously, but I’ll try.
My comment was submitted.
I believe it is time to consider natural variability as the main cause of climate change. it is also time to invest much more effort in actual measurements of this complex, chaotic and misunderstood system.