Another factor that wasn't mentioned: urban heat island. Location of thermometers was a major factor in changes in temperature record in the last century. Entrapped by developing cities, many recording stations acquired artificial increases. This is reasonable, and nothing to be ashamed of. It is also difficult to document, but is truly evident. The additional heat of cities increased the temperature record much more than it actually increased the heat of the globe. That was an acceleration, with the pause coming when many stations were retired in favor of satellite monitors.
The slowdown suggests that high levels of warming are unlikely. Ben Santer said 17 years should be enough time to detect a warming signal above natural variation. Pauses of this length in climate models are unlikely, and even more unlikely in higher warming models. Comparisons to past pauses is not as good as the CO2 effect is smaller then.(Yes I am conceding an effect from CO2, shocker).
When did global warming start? Was it in the last 100 years or did it predate humans? Would humans be here if there was no global warming? Now if your asking if humans are making global warming worse that's another question. There need to be an honest look into it where labels like "denier or skeptic" aren't thrown around just to try to shut people up. The job of science is to find the truth. The job of government is politics which has nothing to do with finding the truth.
I know. You have to wait 17, no 25, no 40, no 90 years to establish a cooling trend. A warming pattern only has to last 40, no 20, no 10, no 5 years to establish a trend. Even then you still may not see the trend until AFTER the data is manipulated in a way that makes the trend obvious (decreasing past temps and increasing newer ones).
This is how those stupid denialists view trends.
"In recent years, the increase in near-surface global annual mean temperatures has emerged asconsiderably smaller than many had expected. We investigate whether this can be explained by contemporary climate change scenarios. In contrast to earlier analyses for a ten-year period that indicated consistency between models and observations at the 5% confidence level, we find that the continued warming stagnation over fifteen years, from 1998 -2012, is no longer consistent with model projections even at the 2% confidence level."
I put that in quotes because I didn't write it. Here are some of the qualifications of the person who did:
- Professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg
- Director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the Helmholtz Research Centre
- Member of the advisory boards of the journals Journal of Climate and Annals of Geophysics.
- Lead Author, IPCC WGII
-PhD in Meteorology
Here is his position on AGW: "Based on the scientific evidence, I am convinced that we are facing anthropogenic climate change brought about by the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere."
______________________________________...
Chem Flunky: "that this is simply how climate works"
PhD in Meteorology with 40 years experience: “Climate science is no longer certain like it was a few years earlier“.
Have you ever considered that you might be a denialist?
If that is really simply how it works, how have all the models failed entirely to predict the current 17 year pause ???
"Skeptics" don't seem so much to have a problem recognizing cyclical changes as the do in recognizing cyclical changes imposed on a trend.
Pauses can be easily seen in this link.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics...
Bonafide skeptical scientists understood a hundred years ago already the difference between annual or decadal changes and long term century or millennium changes in temperature and weather/climate patterns. http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timel...
The mountain range of science done since then http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index... has eliminated scientific skepticism about the basic mechanisms of AGW (there are tons of skepticism about details). The only legitimate and honest use of the word "skeptic" in the context of your question is put it IN QUOTES, to show that it is fake skepticism, not real skepticism, and even that would be redundant because the fake skeptics are deniers.
If you want to distinguish between gradations of denial, or between denying versus being uninformed, you should bother to find a way to do so without insulting a century of scientists who WERE (and by trade OUGHT to be) skeptical, by misapplying that designation to anti-science con artists and crackpots.
http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/...
How long will it be for you greenies to admit you are seeing things and the sky isn't falling?
Quote by Will Happer, Princeton University physicist, former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy: “I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism....I have spent a long research career studying physics that is closely related to the greenhouse effect....Fears about man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science. The earth's climate is changing now, as it always has. There is no evidence that the changes differ in any qualitative way from those of the past.”
Real scientists don't see things that aren't there.
Because CO2 is by no means the only influence on average surface temperature, and because there are cyclical factors such as PDO and ENSO that tend to be stronger than AGW (though, by their cyclical nature, *not* causing any trended warming or cooling), the normal pattern that we should expect from AGW is periods of relatively rapid warming, interspersed with periods of little or no warming, or even cooling. For that matter, it is likely to be a very long time, if ever, before we get anywhere close to a point where contemporary winter temperatures in temperate zones near summer temperatures of 100 and change years ago. These cyclical changes aren't going to stop happening just because there is a new directional forcing. Most denialists have stopped arguing that the continued existence of cold winters means that AGW isn't happening (though you'll still get the occasional "I just shoveled 3 inches of global warming off my driveway" joke and the like), but every "long-term" (10-15 years) pause, slowdown, or reversal seems to bring out cries of "If there was any warming, it's stopped now".
So, how many pause/accelerate/pause/accelerate cycles do you think we'll need before the majority of skeptics and denialists realize that this is simply how climate works, and not an indicator that predictions of warming are somehow false? Does anyone who knows anything about climate expect continual, uninterrupted surface warming under any marginally complicated climate model? Any other thoughts?
