An international team of climate scientists led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has confirmed that climate change is "undeniable" and clearly driven by the "human fingerprints" of greenhouse gas emissions. The findings are based on new data that was not reviewed during the most recent 2007 report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The Financial Times reported today that the NOAA study drew on 11 different indicators of climate and "found that each one pointed to a world that was warming owing to the influence of greenhouse gases."
The scientists confirmed that seven of the indicators are rising, including air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, marine air temperature, sea level, ocean heat, humidity, and tropospheric temperature in the “active-weather” layer of the atmosphere closest to the earth’s surface. Four other indicators were declining: Arctic sea ice, glaciers, spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere, and stratospheric temperatures.
The Financial Times quotes Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK Met Office, stating:
“The whole of the climate system is acting in a way consistent with the effects of greenhouse gases. The fingerprints are clear. The glaringly obvious explanation for this is warming from greenhouse gases.”
Glaringly obvious, unless you are a climate skeptic who denies the facts in favor of touting manufactured scandals like "Climategate" -- a mythical tale ginned up by the climate denial machine to further confuse the public about the real dangers of climate change.
Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, told the Financial Times:
“This confirms that while all of this [Climategate] was going on, the earth was continuing to warm. It shows that Climategate was a distraction, because it took the focus off what the science actually says.”
That is exactly what the denial machine intended, and it worked for quite a while, with many reporters writing about the private emails of climate scientists stolen from the University of East Anglia last winter. But when the whole episode was exposed as a baseless attack on scientists that does nothing to undermine scientific knowledge about the real threat of climate change, few reporters found the ink to tell the truth.
Even this new Financial Times article about climate scientists confirming the unequivocal certainty that manmade emissions are warming the globe features multiple quotes from climate skeptics and deniers, including Pat Michaels and Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Why bother to quote the skeptics here in an article about hard scientific evidence? It is their Climategate story that has been thoroughly debunked, not the science. If there is any lesson that came out of Climategate, it is that climate skeptics should be ignored, not continuously quoted.
The deniers' golden egg -- Climategate -- has been proven false. Yet they cling to the myth regardless.
Doesn't that tell us plenty about their "expertise" and motivations?
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1. Factual position / correctly informed persons
Global warming is occurring and it is the direct result of human emission of CO₂ - FACT. All legitimate climate scientists know this to be fact and all scientific organizations endorse the Anthropogenic Climate Change Theory as the only legitimate explanation of the increase in global mean temperature since the Industrial Revolution.
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686?paged=130
2. Dishonest position / Persons who are intentionally misinformers
This category is dominated by, if not comprised exclusively of, the Koch brothers and their vassals.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer
3. Ignorant position / Persons who are misled by #2
1. People who say there is climate change but not by CO2 but by natural Earth forces;
2. People who say there is climate change caused by CO2 and greenhouse gasses increased by humans;
3. People who say there is no climate change, the changes are part of the normal climate;
4. People who say there is climate change caused by deforestation and loss of marine flora due to human activities that deplete the Earth's floral resources.
This writer is of the fourth category.
Rather than focus on CO2, a non-pollutant, focus should be on restoration of forests and marine flora. The climate changes we are experiencing are due to the increase in atmospheric water from loss of ice sheets. Ice losses have been going on since after the peak of the last ice age. This ice have gone up as vapor. Evidence is directly observable: heavy floods from typhoons, thick snowfall, increase in cloud cover without rains.
The restoration of forests will take care of CO2 simultaneous with the ff:
a) more oxygen and less CO2; oxygen cools the atmosphere. Oxygen increase should be an objective in climate change mitigation;
b) forests help store waters into aquifers; instead of waters rushing to waterways to bring flooding; this will also increase drinkable waters;
c) forests work as air filters to trap pollutants in the atmosphere;
d) forests means greater biodiversity;
f) etcetera.
www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/11/co_2-fertilization/
"A few simple calculations indicate that any hypothesized co2 fertilization response is unlikely to offset a significant fraction of projected increases in atmospheric co2 concentration over the next century. At present, about 600 billion tons of carbon are tied up in the above-ground vegetation. About 2-3 times this much is tied up in roots and below ground carbon, which is a more difficult carbon pool to augment. By comparison, scenarios for fossil fuel emissions for the 21st century range from about 600 billion tons (if we can keep total global emissions at current levels) to over 2500 billion tons if the world increases its reliance on combustion of coal as economic growth and population increase dramatically. These numbers clearly indicate that sequestering a significant fraction of projected emissions in vegetation is likely to be very difficult, especially as forests are cleared to make way for agriculture and communities."
www.atmos.umd.edu/~haifee/research/clivar04_c4mip_poster.pdf
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation
VERY FUNNY
http://www.dailygoat.com/?p=2140
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/detect/ice-npole.shtml
NOAA webcams at the north pole.
Frustrating.
To most the climategate episode proved that that the climate change scientists were unable to control their own escalating hot air.
Most people expect scientists to exhibit behavior with visible traits of high integrity and honesty, the climate scientists emails clearly indicate otherwise. The investigating committees of scientists at Penn State and the investigating committee for CRU resoundingly found that the the behavior of the climate scientists was of high integrity, again most non-scientists disagree.
The final solution to this disagreement is to withhold funding from the taxpayers to the scientists. As evidence the US department of energy with held funding. (see United States Halts Gravy Train for British Global Warming Unit.
This is the problem when you do not take responsibility for your own actions, ultimately there are consequences. The consequence here: reduced funding and reduced trust.
Fixed it for you.
Here's the NOAA live camera from the Arctic.....lots of information there.
Above, outside and/or separated from the natural process... sounds a lot like the philosophy of creationists and right winged fundamentalists to me... and how arrogant of these fools to pretend that we know better than nature, especially since we should be racing down-hill toward a 100,000 year long ice age about now, according to the cyclic predictions of the empirically defined Milankovitch cycles.
I wonder why we're still neutral to that?... huh, what a puzzle... hmmmmm... boy are we as stupid as we are arrogant, or what?
Yes, exactly that stupid, like squirrels that cluelessly bury nuts for the long winter, stupid.
400 parts per million of carbon has recently been found to be the Arctic Tipping Point, which could conceivably endanger us all. We are approaching 390 ppm and adding 2 ppm each year. The safe limit is 350 ppm.
According to one scientist, a very thin oil film on the surface of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that could spread from the Gulf, threatens to raise temperatures toward the catastrophic Tipping Point.
A monumental effort on a wartime scale now seems necessary. With enough public support Congress might pass truly effective legislation as a series of smaller Bills.
If the threat is real, renewable energy systems that can be deployed in time should rapidly be produced on a 24/7 basis. The White House, Congress and anyone concerned should check the facts without delay - and if confirmed, do whatever is necessary to make that possible.
See A 5 Point Emergency Program at http://www.aesopinstitute.org
Little known and hard to fathom breakthroughs involving radically new energy technologies can help to supersede petroleum much more rapidly than might be readily understood or easily believed.
See Moving Beyond Oil on the same Aesop Institute website.
If the threat is genuine, Congress and the White House must rapidly initiate the emergency actions needed to avoid a catastrophic loss of life on earth.
Strong public demand can produce that result - let your voice be heard! The lives you save may include your own!
In fact the West before WW2 was desperately trying to avoid the tough decisions that were required to face the emerging threats, or denying the existance of the threats. Once again with climate change we see this denial and paralysis that is preventing us from taking action in time to prevent the worst of climate change's effects.
Jones: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions. Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’
Better warmer than colder: http://www.lewrockwell.com/spl/climategate-video.html
Why is the old CO2 thing rising again! Check out IR absoption of Water and Methane - it swamps the paultry effect the CO2 might have. Easy to see the profound impact of clouds on both day and night temperatures. Anyone can go outside and actually feel the difference between a cloudy day and a sunny day or a cloudy night and clear night. Profound effect on temperature.
Yes, methane is one of the "greenhouse gasses" to which scientists often refer. Another is CO2.
Clouds definitely have an effect, but it is yet unclear whethe rthey are net albedo enhancers (rflect more sun and force a dcrease in T) or whether they trap heat more effectively than the gaseous atmosphere.
probably not important...
Keep working on OLR my man, perhaps you can publish a paper. It will make your mother so proud. I'll be happy to review it before publication. GHood luck.
BTW, I looked att some of the energy balances out there, and there seems to be a lot of noise in each of the channels so it's hard to say what each really is at this time. We needa lot more satellites distributed around in space to really do a good job.
What has surprised me somewhat (didn't pay much attention until you came around) is that so little radiation is retained by the earth. Like 0.9 W/m2 according to Trenberth, I believe. Seems to me that since the T of the ground around me drops rather slowly. Perhaps you can tell me what the temperature profilea s a function of depth into the ground should be for a few scenarios.
I agree the EFFECTS point to AGW. I agree that the error bars are too high for energy balance conclusions.
We CAN see spectral changes due to GHG's - if the changes we see in the spectra due to GHG's are too small to drive the OVERALL behavior of the OLR, then attributing the warming to GHG's is questionable... cause and effect...
"Thus, it appears that change in El Niño intensity is largely responsible for the global
averaged monthly TOA variability during this time period."
So should the global temperature increase over this period be attributed to GHG's if El Niño was driving the energy balance?