Re: [asa] FW: Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

A point that will stick out glaringly to many is, "The January global land surface average was below the 20th century mean...." How seriously is the man in the street going to take GW if you have a month whose average temperature is below the average for the entire last century?

How much more convincing it would have been for the GW case if one or more of the "20000 climate scientists who affirm anthropogenic GW" would have predicted this temperature drop and notified the public that it was about to happen. Did anyone do so? If one or more climate models actually predicted this, then the public case for anthropogenic GW as a serious development is strengthened. Explaining the drop afterwards provides no support for those models; and the entire case for changing our lives and the economy in order to halt GW rests on predictions from those models.

"Draconian...government programs" cannot be implemented in a democracy without support of a sufficient number of citizens. I'm not confident it's possible to get that number on board before it's too late--assuming the dire predictions are valid. IMO it will never happen unless the climate models establish a record for correct predictions. It's not terribly convincing, if you detect a trend, to predict that the trend will continue. It would be much more convincing to accurately predict departures from the trend, which January '08 was. If no one tried to predict it, or if it wasn't possible to predict it, that's an important opportunity lost, and all us laypersons can continue to assume the climate models have not been put to significant test.

As a professional Earth scientist for 25 years, I am unable to accept predictions from any Earth science model as truth. The predictions may go in the direction of truth, and they must figure in our deliberations, but unless the model has established a sound record of accuracy and successfully predicted things different from existing trends, we should not take any action of major consequence in response to its predictions.

Don

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Rich Blinne<mailto:rich.blinne@gmail.com>
  To: Randy Isaac<mailto:randyisaac@comcast.net>
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu<mailto:asa@calvin.edu>
  Sent: Wednesday, February 27, 2008 1:42 PM
  Subject: Re: [asa] FW: Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling

  It all depends on whether you are talking about Hadley Center anomalies (UEA-CRU) which are baseline 1961-1990 or NOAA Climate Prediction Center anomalies which are baseline 1901-2000. Since the story in question used the former I did my analysis based on the HadCrut3v data set. NOAA had a better English description of what was going on for January 08 and that was why I referenced them. You can check my work by finding the data set here:

  http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt<http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt>

  The story used the non-variance adjusted data which can be found here:

  http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt<http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt>

  FAQs for the CRU data is here:
  http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#faq<http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#faq>

  On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 2:08 PM, Randy Isaac <randyisaac@comcast.net<mailto:randyisaac@comcast.net>> wrote:

    Rich,
      Help me understand this a bit better. You said "The anomaly is to the average of 1961-1990" but the link you provided says "The January global land surface average was below the 20th century mean for the first time since 1982." and the more detailed link on that page says:

    "Estimates of mean monthly global surface temperatures are given below with respect to the 20th century average (1901-2000). The figures are based on 1961-1990 estimates from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit <http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/good-bye.pl?src=http://www.cru.uea.acuk/index.html&code=ncdc>(UEA-CRU). The recently derived 1961-1990 global monthly surface temperature averages represent, in our opinion, the best absolute estimates of global mean temperature and were compiled at UEA-CRU by M. New, P.D. Jones, D.E. Parker and others ."

    So I'm confused. Which is it, an anomaly to 1901-2000 or to 1961-1990?

    Randy

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Received on Fri Feb 29 02:48:08 2008