
Climate scientists say 2008 will be coolest year of decade - gibsonf1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/05/climate-change-weather
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gibsonf1
_Assuming the final figure is close to 14.3C then 2008 will be the tenth
hottest year on record. The hottest was 1998 - which included a very strong El
Niño event - followed by 2005, 2003 and 2002._

Doesn't this mean that we actually have a multi-year cooling trend since 1998?
And more importantly, how is this cooling trend explained by the man-made Co2
theory of increasing global warming?

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kingkongrevenge
Yes. The satellite data shows a global cooling trend since 1998.

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DanielBMarkham
During this same time, the amount of CO2 production increased as never before.

But there's a link between CO2 and temperature. At least that's what they say.

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yan
If there's no immediate, overtly measurable change in temperature, then
obviously the tons of CO2 aren't doing anything negative. Also, the scientists
working on climate change should just stop wasting their time; can't they see
that all of their results and research can just be countered with a witty
remark and an observation any seven year old can make? They obviously have an
agenda.

Anyway, I find it impossible to have these conversations as they are more
ideology than facts. Once a political movement hijacks an idea, it stops being
scientific and starts being a conviction shared by all those in the movement.

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DanielBMarkham
Arguably there can be a relation. We have 140 years of somewhat-quality data,
and the last decade shows a counter-indication to a correlation. One could
argue an increasing base with variance based on sunspot cycles. Or one could
argue just sunspot cycles as the cause of change. Or carrier pigeons.

It's an interesting area of study, precisely because there are so many
unknowns, sarcasm or not.

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jerf
"It's an interesting area of study, precisely because there are so many
unknowns, sarcasm or not."

Actually, that's why I've become a AGW skeptic.

Remember, the AGW religion is not that "mankind has an effect on climate".
Chaos theory guarantees that everything has _an_ effect on climate. The AGW
hysteria is that mankind's contribution _dominates_ everything else and that
we're looking at massive (2C+) warming on a relatively short timescale.

Admitting that mankind's signal can be masked by natural variations already
means that mankind's signal, rather than dominating, is merely one of many
other signals that have an effect, and that already logically means two
things: It caps the effect our signal can be having, and it means that thanks
to the fact that there are "so many unknowns", it means that the hypothesis
that we're hardly having any effect at all remains at a significant
probability of being true.

Even admitting that our signal can be masked takes out the worst-case
hysteria. "Mankind has less effect on the climate than natural vulcanism by an
order of magnitude" hardly says "spend trillions of dollars and break your
economies to prevent that effect" to me.

"Watts up with That" earlier this year posted the predictions made by the IPCC
from a few years ago, and showed that we're on the verge of falling off the
bottom of their confidence interval this year, and if next year is even flat
(let alone cooler) we will. If we do fall off the bottom next year, that
doesn't mean that "natural variations are masking the global warming signal".
It means "You guys didn't predict these variations, therefore your models are
just plain _wrong_ , and therefore your models may not be referenced for the
purposes of extracting a putative 'global warming signal'."

Wrong models = wrong science. It does not equal "science that's still right if
you just look hard enough". If climate scientists ten years ago couldn't
predict a cooling event, then they are in absolutely no position to be
predicting 100 years in advance, no matter how much they babble on. That's not
just common sense, it's _science_ too, no matter how many words they throw at
you.

Truthfully, judging science from the outside isn't that hard if you stick to
"Did your predictions come true?" "Predictions are hard!" isn't a defense when
your predictions fail; they still failed.

Keep an eye out over the next couple of years. If they stay cold or get
colder, write AGW off until they radically, _radically_ improve their science.
The uncertainty will simply be too low to worry about when we have plenty of
real problems (like the Pacific dead zone or overfishing or...) to worry
about. If AGW is false, it is _actively_ harming the environment with
opportunity cost.

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DanielBMarkham
Great reply.

I don't know if you've played around with complex Cellular Automata models,
like those used in climate modeling, but the default behavior most of the time
is the runaway condition. I can't help but wonder if some really smart people
aren't playing games with CA where they don't understand the nature of the
beast they are working with. That would explain why every model predicts
wildly increasing temps. It's an artifact of the modeling technique.

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bdfh42
Still blathering on about human induced climate change though - sigh. Climate
change is surely inevitable and has always been with us.

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DanielBMarkham
_...And 2008 would have been a scorcher in Charles Dickens's time..._

Somehow I don't think .6 degrees more qualifies as a "scorcher" For an article
that attacks possible future over interpretation of the data, it seems
hyperbole is okay as long as its politically correct hyperbole.

