A REALLY Inconvenient Truth: Dan Miller

You know, the most important point I was making here is that this entirely unqualified electrical engineer took the concept of uncertainty in the models being twice as great as thought...and made this stupid video in which he basically treats the highest possible scenarios from the IPCC as the absolute minimum scenario. This is absolutely absurd because uncertainty doesn't change the general prediction at all, just the spread. Since the observed warming rate is only about .5C-.7C per century...anyone with sense (I'm excluding you alarmists here, obviously) should rightfully assume that, problem solved, the reason the warming rate is nowhere near the predictions is because they had some values wrong and sensitivity is likely low.

AGW denialists bloggers spend a great deal of time making up non-stories in the bogusphere for their armies of sycophantic idiots to spread climate drivel around the blogosphere. Yet they don't do any science. They just spread FUD about the science that they are ideologically opposed to or that their paymasters find inconvenient.

Untrue! The data shows the earth isn't cooling.

You've learned bad habits from your blogger deceiver. Dishonesty, deceit and recycling denialist garbage!

Why did you dishonestly cherry-picked a super El Nino and thereby enabling you to claim an entirely bogus downward trend? You ignored the rolling average [short term climate trends are used by those who wish to deceive].


http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/te...ure/nhshgl.gif
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif

Is the recent 'cooling trend' real or denialist drivel?
All the years from 2000 to 2008 have been in the top 14 warmest years on record, still warming. If you look at:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatec.../slowdown.html

Either the IPCC scientists are literally the greatest scientists ever known or they're just a bunch of fools that have failed upward in a climate of alarmism. All models are suspect when not all information is known. Fitting it to the past means noting, its the ability to predict that's important. ALL HIGH WARMING MODELS HAVE FAILED! Burn that into your mind. The fact that they picked up the pieces and refitted them means NOTHING.

The last set of IPCC models..failure! Back before this solar minimum a group of scientists came up with a model that they had beautifully fit to the past history of the sunspot cycle. They predicted a 50% increase...failure! Financial models, failure! The models of the gulf stream just over the past week or so. Even the crash test models based on some of the oldest physics we have needed to be tuned and retweaked for years by physically smashing cars over and over and over and over until they ACTUALLY approximated the crashes fairly well.

...and of course, you STILL have the problem of us having never seen a hint of warming greater than .2C/decade, much less nearly .1C PER YEAR you're suggesting. How do you justify a decade of no increase when .2C/decade was "unprecedented" and greater than any possible natural shift when the 1C/decade assertion necessarily requires about 1C of natural variation. (especially with that dramatic loss of ice to add to the feedback)


[quote]2007 was dramatically low, but this year was the 3rd lowest on record. It would be great if it would recover, but high temperatures in the Arctic combined with more dark water absorbing sunlight up there means the Arctic will be mostly ice free in the summer in 20 to 30 years or even sooner.

Ah yes, the old double standard of short term trends that show cooling being "weather" but long term trends being "climate". Tell me feedback boy. If the arctic is so damned warm and the feedback from the ice is so strong, how has the ice managed to increase by about half a million square miles each year for the past two years?

I don't think you quite understand that albedo of water at the poles and summer sea ice is radically different. The ACTUAL difference between albedo of ice and water is more like 60/40. Summer ice usually has pools of water on its surface. That's why you see a little notch in the satellite records as ice approaches its minimum, they had to change processing to deal with the surface pools...and albedo at the poles is higher anyway because of the angles of the light.


And the world is warmer...so the heck what? We have thermometers, my friend...melting ice is a useless metric for such things. It is an OUTRIGHT LIE to claim that the streams are fed by the persistent glaciers and that they will stop should the glaciers go away. If anything global warming has given them a temporary INCREASE in available water but it will simply return to normal levels after.



I said the anomaly (which is different for different measures) but none show more than .5C warming since 1940. GISS used to for 1998 but Hansen took some off the top as an adjustment (which as I've pointed out, increased the linearity of the data)

[quote]As I mention in the talk, man-made pollution reflects some sunlight away which cools the earth. Without that pollution, global warming would be about twice (+1.6C) what is is already.[quote]

This is PURE SPECULATION! Not only that it is well documented that aerosols would cause significant warming in the arctic/antarctic. Of course, there's no heavy industry near the antarctic...but then, neither is there a temperature increase. Also...it turns out most of the warming in the arctic ACTUALLY showed up in the previous warming period...and that it cooled right back down again during the cool period. The arctic warming since the 40's is actually quite a lot lower.


And the greenland melt has simply gone in little surges. Its a nonlinear system. In fact the stuff that's melted (glaciers, not the ice sheet) was laid down in the little ice age. The center of greenland on the other hand is growing...and accounts for far more ice than has melted. The same goes for the antarctic. Ice has melted at the edges but is growing faster (volume) in the center.


Ah yes, real climate...home of censorship and people like Michael Mann...who SHOULD have lost his job over his blatant manipulation of the data. And don't talk about "contrarian arguments" like some snooty guy that actually has any real data. You have no actual data. It's all conjecture based on unverified models at the best, disproven models at the worst.

Updated studies from climate scientists do indicate a much warmer future than the 2007 IPCC report predicted. In fact, I had lunch with one of the IPCC scientists who did some of the modeling work for the 2007 report and she said based on her updated work, she thinks, with business as usual, the temperature will rise 6C or more this century! Also, the MIT Study released this year (shown in the talk) gives a 50% chance of a 5C rise. I never claim to be a climate scientist. I'm only reporting what they say and, unlike you, I believe them.

2008 was the 8th warmest year on record, hardly reaching an anomaly of zero. And ocean temperatures this past June were the warmest ever.

2007 was dramatically low, but this year was the 3rd lowest on record. It would be great if it would recover, but high temperatures in the Arctic combined with more dark water absorbing sunlight up there means the Arctic will be mostly ice free in the summer in 20 to 30 years or even sooner.


I don't know why you think the Larsen B ice shelf has collapsed 3 times.


The fact is that glaciers worldwide are melting at a high rate. That means that all the melt is not from seasonal ice. The fact that mountains have streams does not negate the fact about melting glaciers.

Actually, the temperature has gone up about +0.8C so far. As I mention in the talk, man-made pollution reflects some sunlight away which cools the earth. Without that pollution, global warming would be about twice (+1.6C) what is is already. Sea level rise has been somewhat constant so far, but that's because we are not yet dealing with a rapid collapse (not melting) of the Greenland and/or West Antarctic ice sheets.

For those of you that are following this thread and are either tired (like me) or confused by the back and forth, please visit some of the following sites:

Real Climate’s Responses to Common Contrarian Arguments

New Scientist’s Climate Change: A Guide for the Perplexed

http://climateprogress.org/ - A great blog for up to date information

Climate Place - My site... has more links and other information.

OK, First of all the bulk of scientists that believe in anthropogenic global warming DO NOT believe its going to hit a 4C anomaly. Second, this dude is an electrical engineer (if you'd bother to check his credentials) so don't go playing the "scientist" card with me. HE is the one that's waaaaay out on a limb. The IPCC report and most models (most of which are entirely discredited and by criteria specified in the models themselves!) all suggest far lower scenarios like 2C by 2100 and 18cm of sea level rise. Of course, they still didn't guess low enough to meet reality


Indeed it is, the behavior of the climate has changed in recent years from one of increasing temperatures to leveling off to decreasing temperatures. The temperature in 2008 spiked so low it almost reached an anomaly of zero. If a La Nina forms after this El Nino it will likely spike to the same levels or lower. Ironically everything now seems to be shedding heat. There's nowhere left for the "heat in the pipe". Ocean heat content has actually been dropping and it's just made a HUGE drop. The climate has changed alright...to one of cooling. More low temperature records are being set now than warm.

Problem is the ice increased from 1945 to 1980. BUT, we have no good records of the earlier part of the period (the peak of the last warm period) so we have no idea how bad it was then. One thing you probably aren't aware of is that most ACTUAL scientists have now owned up to the fact that the 2007 minimum was just a fluke. The ice was hit by unusual storms and persistent winds/currents just took it all out to sea.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporat...20091015b.html

It's been growing ever since and while the warmistas love to say "oh, but it's younger and thiner"... well no $#!+ sherlock, it's only 2 years old!!!! At current rates of increase the summer minimum will be back to normal by 2010 or 2011 at the latest. You should also be questioning your own impartiality when citing arctic sea ice extents...when antarctic sea ice extent MORE than compensated for the losses in the north.

Ironically the ice shelf you mentioned has been reported to have collapsed...THREE TIMES! Now this electrical engineer seems to believe that ice that's partly floating is somehow holding back an ice sheet that is sitting on solid ground...do you see the problem here?

(1) they're not going as fast as you've been told and that's why the indian government told the world to go screw themselves on this carbon reduction nonsense. (2) Essentially ALL the ice flowing down any mountain...is from seasonal ice. Go find a tall mountain and you'll find a stream coming off it, glacier or not. There are no glaciers on the mountains near my home...yet the rivers never stopped flowing from the mountains even during a year long drought. Funny that.

[quote]I did not say that sea level will rise 75 feet this century, but that the sea was that high the last time CO2 levels were as high as they are now.[quote]
And here again you're apparently claiming to know the actual sensitivity. The problem is the climate is ignoring all of these scientists. We have only gone up .5C over a 60 year period for a 100ppm increase. Rates of sea level rise fluctuate somewhat but have remained pretty much constant for the whole of the period of warming after the little ice age. At current rates it will be about 18cm

I do too, but the current idiotic policies ignore the facts. The fact is we're warming much slower than predicted. Hansen for example has given 4 predictions and each time reality actually turned away. The last one he gave was in line with the warming of the 80s and 90s (which would lead to a total anomaly by 2100 of 2C) but as before, temperatures turned away...this time dropping. Do yourself a favor and read some skeptic websites with an open mind.

While I wish you were right, wishing doesn't make it so. Climate change is happening right now. The summer Arctic ice cover is about half gone. The permafrost is melting. Australia, Africa, and other places are being walloped now and the Southwest U.S. is next. All your comments are about applying linear models to recent data and saying it can't get very bad. But the world, unfortunately, does not work that way. Feedback mechanisms can create very non-linear changes. An ice sheet the size of Rhode Island disintegrated in a few days in 2005. Glaciers in the Himalayas that provide water for over 2 billion people will be mostly gone in 30 to 40 years. Climate scientists tell us that there is a 95% chance that, on the path we're on, temperatures will be 3.5C or higher at the end of the century.

Not acting because you don't trust scientists is not prudent. If a doctor tells you that you have cancer and you need chemotherapy, are you going to go to your car mechanic for advice? I hope not.

I did not say that sea level will rise 75 feet this century (I think it will rise 5~6 feet this century which is enough of a catastrophe), but that the sea was that high the last time CO2 levels were as high as they are now. Once the sea starts rising, it will keep rising for centuries or millennia to come. I think we should consider future generations (including our children and grandchildren) when we decide what to do about CO2.

"Depending on which you use"...unfortunately the only one that shows this behavior is GISS. If you will check the history of the GISS temperature record you will find that it has REPEATEDLY changed. Hansen has lowered 1998 and raised 2005/2007 retroactively. This behavior should raise all kinds of red flags but everyone ignores it. His history of "adjustments" (some almost 100 years back) always increase the linearity of the temperature record...VERY suspicious.

As for the these 5F-10F (2.7C-5.5C) higher temperatures, it saddens me that the world is full of people like yourself, who are so utterly oblivious to the consequences of your own claims. I have already pointed out that if the forcing were sufficient to raise temperatures 3-5C there would be no way for temperatures to go down or even remain stable. The forcing necessary is so incredibly high that we would be setting new highs every other year. Natural variation just isn't sufficient to cover a .3C-.5C increase per decade (unless you're saying the warming of the 80's and 90's was well within the range of normal variation).

And again...if you're going to cite a sort of thermal inertia that needs to be overcome as a reason for the delay you need to take into account that the CO2 forcing has been building up an increasing deficit in the radiative balance which would mean the warming from the 80s and 90s couldn't have been mostly from CO2. Given the timelines, amounts of fossil fuels, etc...it is simply not possible for sensitivity to be high enough or for the environment to react fast enough (in the event that it just takes time) for warming to reach 4C or more. Either we'll run out of fuel and the CO2 levels will fall before the oceans can warm or sensitivity is far too low for CO2 to cause a 4C increase.

This is my point, the doomsday scenarios fall apart under scrutiny. Maybe 2C is possible at the outside but the actual rate of warming is about .7C per century is possible but such a high rate has not been observed. From end of the last warm period to this warm period plateau, a 60 year period, we've only had .5C of warming. You are arguing for something that you have zero verifiable evidence for. Everything you use (like the relationship between CO2 and temperature 15 million years ago) are counter indicated by current data.

Oh and BTW at current rates of sea level rise, it would take 11000 years for the level to go up by 75 feet, 500 years just to reach the 2 meters suggested by some (but even within 500 years, CO2 levels would have peaked and already fallen significantly again)

To Lloyd Burt:

Your claim that the Earth is cooling is just plain wrong. 1998 was a very warm year due to a very strong El Nino condition so many deniers use that data point to claim it has cooled since then, but you and they are focusing on the noise around the long-term trend. See:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...warming-pause/

Actually, depending on the data set you use, 2005 may have been the warmest year every and this year's June to August period was the warmest ever. As I said in my talk, as the La Nina and solar minimum effects go away, it is very likely that the warmest year ever will occur in the next couple of years.

The rest of your comments about limits to warming, etc. are also wrong. According to a recent paper in the journal Science, the last time CO2 was as high as it is NOW was 15 million years ago and temperatures were 5 to 10F warmer than today and sea levels were 75 to 120 feet higher than today. And CO2 continues to rise dramatically!

It takes centuries to warm up? You're the one who's blind. You people give us nothing but hand waving and excuses. As someone points out each of your supposed pieces of evidence is wrong you just point to all the others and say "ah, but you're missing these"...even though all the others have also been shown to be wrong. Its a gigantic, logical fallacy, circle jerk.

Supposedly the sun can't be responsible for more than about .2C of warming/cooling, yet this relatively weak amount of warming/cooling shows up within a single year of the minimum. Where the heck is the thermal inertia there?

According to you guys the warming was "unprecedented" and could not be explained by natural variations...yet now you stand behind this guy who claims warming at least twice as high as that warming...yet the earth COOLS. Thermal inertia in the presence of ever-increasing forcing means the signal should become more and more obvious, not less...and it still means the temperature should rise, not fall.

See, its not that you alarmists claim warming. Its the fact that you claim additional warming that has never been seen. Its always lurking just beyond anyone's ability to find it...in the tropical troposphere, in the weather patterns, in the depths of the oceans, in the melting ice...but time and time again when we turn over that far off stone we find nothing and you just make up new excuses.

You are misinformed

In fact it's perfectly obvious that you get your nonsense from WUWT - or what a load of Bull

Utter rubbish. The heat capacity of the oceans means that warming will take centuries or longer to stabilise. The fact is that coastal climates are modified by the presence of the oceans. Even sizeable lakes have an effect.

As the ocean warms it will destabilise the clathrates, which will cause additional warming. As soils warm and the permafrost melts, more carbon will be released. Heat percolates only slowly through soil.

This is already being seen.

I'm not going to argue with you any further:

There are none so blind as thos who will not see!