There is a new report on global climate change this week that addresses many of the claims being raised against the theory by critics. Despite the overwhelming agreement of the scientific community, people continue to cite anecdotal observations of cool temperatures to refute predictions. The new report crunches the climate numbers and concludes that there is less than 1 chance in 100,000 that global average temperature over the past 60 years would have been as high without human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.
The research published in Climate Risk Management by Philip Kokica, Steven Crimpc, and Mark Howdend is reportedly the first to quantify the probability of historical changes in global temperatures. They directly address the arguments promulgated by climate change critics:
December 2013 was the 346th consecutive month where global land and ocean average surface temperature exceeded the 20th century monthly average, with February 1985 the last time mean temperature fell below this value. Even given these and other extraordinary statistics, public acceptance of human induced climate change and confidence in the supporting science has declined since 2007. The degree of uncertainty as to whether observed climate changes are due to human activity or are part of natural systems fluctuations remains a major stumbling block to effective adaptation action and risk management. Previous approaches to attribute change include qualitative expert-assessment approaches such as used in IPCC reports and use of ‘fingerprinting’ methods based on global climate models. Here we develop an alternative approach which provides a rigorous probabilistic statistical assessment of the link between observed climate changes and human activities in a way that can inform formal climate risk assessment. We construct and validate a time series model of anomalous global temperatures to June 2010, using rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, as well as other causal factors including solar radiation, volcanic forcing and the El Niño Southern Oscillation. When the effect of GHGs is removed, bootstrap simulation of the model reveals that there is less than a one in one hundred thousand chance of observing an unbroken sequence of 304 months (our analysis extends to June 2010) with mean surface temperature exceeding the 20th century average. We also show that one would expect a far greater number of short periods of falling global temperatures (as observed since 1998) if climate change was not occurring. This approach to assessing probabilities of human influence on global temperature could be transferred to other climate variables and extremes allowing enhanced formal risk assessment of climate change.
They note that July 2014 was the 353rd consecutive month in which global land and ocean average surface temperature exceeded the 20th-century monthly average. Notably, anyone born after February 1985 has not lived a single month where the global temperature was below the long-term average for that month. Their analysis put the probability of getting the same run of “warmer-than-average months without the human influence was less than 1 chance in 100,000.”
We identified periods of declining temperature by using a moving 10-year window (1950 to 1959, 1951 to 1960, 1952 to 1961, etc.) through the entire 60-year record. We identified 11 such short time periods where global temperatures declined.
Our analysis showed that in the absence of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, there would have been more than twice as many periods of short-term cooling than are found in the observed data.
It is an interesting paper that I recommend to you. I am obviously already sold on the concept of climate change and strongly disagree with those fighting efforts to control the pollution linked to the change. However, we can have a civil discourse on the subject and I believe that this is a credible report worthy of inclusion in that ongoing debate.
I see the new meme from the old malcontents. “PAID TROLLS!!” Pitiful. Identify the paid trolls. Identify who is paying them. Prove your scurrilous assertion.
Charlton – name names. Don’t just throw garbage out there. If you have proof of paid trolls, put it on the table. Otherwise apologize to the thread for your attack.
And, if you have enough money, you can buy an army of paid trolls to overwhelm any rational discussion on blogs and forums regarding any topic you (the mega-rich polluter) disapprove of, or that might cost you some money. You can even buy pseudoscientists to call real scientists names.
Of course, I don’t ever see the trolls or pseudoscientists offering any credible and reliable scientific evidence that will stand up to independent scientific scrutiny in order to determine the validity of their claims.
RELIABILITY –
Charlton – the field of paleoclimatology is very very small. So small it is incestual. Michael Mann and his associates (minions) have not only dominated the field, they (in a very unscientific manner) have shut the opposition out of publishing in peer-reviewed journals. There is a lot of money involved here. Mann and his minions are getting tons of grants to do research, while shutting out the competition. Michael Mann is to science as Adolf Hitler is to social justice.
Centinel, In general, I would agree with you… and that is how it SHOULD BE….
However, it seems that the Far Right Wing are the biggest deniers of this…
and it seems that the Left Wing in the USA are the ones listening to the Scientists…..
You can NOT deny that in America, this has been politicized….
The Democratic Platform includes wanting to do something about Climate Change… and the Republican Platform wants to ignore all of the studies….
I’m a macro person, the big picture kinda guy. Being a PI it gave me a perspective most people in my profession lacked. Investigators tend to get mired in minutiae. This will be a contentious thread. The reason is something that interests me immensely. You see, there is a juxtaposition of people on both sides of this issue. For the left, climate science is a religion. It has all the characteristics of a religion. Many on the left are secular progressives. This calling fills a void. They have a missionary zeal to save the planet just like religious zealots obsess on saving people’s souls. Their religious leader is a man most consider a buffoon. Like religious leaders he speaks w/ passion. He is not a scientist, hell he wasn’t even a good politician, but he found his calling in the religion of Climate Change. And, like so many religious leaders, he was shown to be a liar, unfaithful, deeply flawed man.
The absolute deniers are on the right and are mostly very religious. They take on the role of an atheist, denying the religion of climate change. They see the buffoon for what he is. They see the zealots as people trying to force the religion of Climate Science down their throats, like some of them try and force their God based religion on others.
Me, I just see the idiocy in the whole juxtaposition, I see it all about control, power and MONEY. I am not an atheist, I believe we owe it to our grandchildren to make common sense changes to help our environment. I recycle. I use cloth grocery sacks[they’re easier to carry!], I walk whenever possible which is a win/win, environmentally and health wise. I reject the draconian changes the religious zealots want. I look upon their “settled science”[science is NEVER settled] as phrenology and eugenics were “settled science” not long ago. Finally, I look upon the religious belief of the Climate Changers as complete arrogance, another characteristic found in religion. We can’t even manage our national parks w/o making them worse. How in the hell do we manage the earth?
Paul… where do you get this idea, that the numbers were changed ????
… The IPCC report on climate was politically massaged before final publication. Numbers were changed. Things included that were not in the original conclusions by the scientists.
justagurl – read the commentators who took place in the first edition, before it was massaged. A couple distanced themselves from the final report saying that it did not represent the results found by the scientists.
Left or right are not relevant in a discussion of science and engineering.
Scandinavia has been doing a GREAT job at reducing it’s dependence on Fossil Fuel…. and at reducing energy consumption, along with keeping the environment clean for future generations…. Sweden, by the way, has a much higher standard of living than the USA…. Japan has also done this…. So, it is countries are able to do this, YOU just have to get to a point where it is important to EVERYBODY, and stop allowing this to be a political issue… it is NOT political…
the ONLY thing that is political about it, is that Liberals believe in it…. so the Right Wing has to be against it…..
It is a RATHER juvenile way of thinking…
Well… that didn’t take long….
Now see here is the core issue too many people. Now that is a real issue and it needs to be addressed raising the standard of living has proven to reduce the birthrate and is a very effective method of solving the problem of too many people.
But rather that discuss the real issue we make up a reason to reduce energy which is counter productive since more energy is required to raise the standard of living. Current policies are reducing energy production which will create an unstable grid and that will lead to conflict. With internal civil problems governments often turn to war and the last time that happened 75 years ago a lot of people died.
I would hope that we have learned something since i was born 73 years ago. but that just doesn’t seem to be the case.
Zarathustra – have to agree. We are in a deep hole and digging furiously.
Michael Mann, Michael Mann, Michael Mann…! Not one mention of Michael Mann in this post, and yet…. How long before someone starts screeching about Al Gore?
BTW, you can’t see what you refuse to look at.
prayerwarrior… We’re Kaput!
Even without global warming in the near future (within the next 20 years) the pollinators, chiefly bees could die out, we could run out of water, run out of food, run out of fuel, lose all the fish in the sea and suffer oxygen depletion in the atmosphere due to damage to the oceans and deforestation. The only thing we are not running out of is people. Of course it is people destroying the environment. So far human beings haven’t worked out how to live without water, food, heat or oxygen. But let’s destroy the environment which we depend on and see what happens. There are some problems you can’t breed your way out of.
Johnathan, You have a great mind and I love reading your legal opinions of which despite being on the right I have great respect for. Climate science is very complex and without understanding the basics one can be easily mislead as i was initially. If you are ever near Cleveland I would be willing to sit down with you and explain the process to you and I’m positive i could put doubt in your belief of what passes for science. Or I could send you some reading your choice.
BTW. in the publish or perish atmosphere of universities, just about anything can get published. There are scientific journals that you can pay to publish your work.
We are the authors of our own demise………..
So, Jonathan, you are fine with Michael Mann and his minions hiding the data for “climate change,” driving out the opposition, literally shutting them out the the publication field? You are aware that the latest meme in global warming is that ‘well, yes, it has not warmed in 19 years, but it is going to change soon.’? How can we have global warming if the global temperature has not risen in 19 years? How can we have global warming when they (climate scientists) were worried about us going into a new Ice Age in the 1950?
I cannot trust data when I cannot see it. And after the emails between the climate scientists were exposed I was really surprised that heads did not roll. However, they not only did not roll, the universities circled the wagons to protect these scientific frauds.
The IPCC report on climate was politically massaged before final publication. Numbers were changed. Things included that were not in the original conclusions by the scientists.
And, since the Mann data is kept from the public and other scientists there is no way to trust the conclusions of anyone else working in the field. Mann has successful held off attempts to get his data through FOIA requests and now has moved universities, so people have to start from scratch.
Now, I am well aware that major climate shifts occur on the planet. We are just coming out of the Little Ice Age. Was this caused by people? We know that several Indian groups dispersed about the same time in the Southwest USA because of a major drought. Did they cause the drought? And, for the moment, let’s assume that climate change is occurring. We do know that that includes a longer growing season, which means more food production. Is this a bad thing for the world?
There is an old adage that number don’t lie but statisticians do.
Although what is said above is technically true it is very misleading. In fact by NASA published numbers there has been NO statistically significant increase in world temperature in the 21st century, This has been dispite CO2 going from around 370 ppm to 400 ppm an 11.1% increase. Based on the IPCC climate models during this same period the temperatures should have gone up by 4.8% so we have a major disconnect between actual measurements and what the models say should be happening.
When any model does not accurately predict what it is designed to do then the model is defective. This is basic science and engineering the field that I work in and all of the great minds of science such as Richard Feynman would be appalled at what passes for science today.
Ohhhh, I can’t wait what the people on the RIGHT have to say about this….
But isn’t it that one chance that makes life interesting? :(.