Wednesday, May 08, 2013




The current Warmist "explanation" of the temperature plateau of recent years

Below you have it:  The greedy deep ocean is gobbling up all the heat.  The warming is somehow bypassing the surface of both the land and the oceans and building up in the ocean deeps.  It is an extraordinarily improbable theory.  How does the warming slip past both the land and the ocean surface?  And does not warm water rise?  According to the ordinary laws of physics, it should be the surface where you find all the heat.  No wonder it is only a few "dyed-in-the-wool" Warmists who are pushing this one

There are periods when the ocean heats up more quickly than the surface, and other periods when the surface heats up more quickly than the oceans. Right now we're in a period of fast ocean warming and overall, global warming is continuing at a very fast pace.

The confusion on this subject lies in the fact that only about 2 percent of global warming is used in heating air, whereas about 90 percent of global warming goes into heating the oceans (the rest heats ice and land masses). But humans live at the Earth's surface, and thus we tend to focus on surface temperatures. Over the past 10–15 years, Earth's surface temperature has continued to rise, but slowly. At the same time, the warming of the oceans – and the warming of the Earth as a whole – has accelerated.

This was the conclusion of a scientific paper I co-authored last year, in which our team found more overall global warming (of the oceans, air, land, and ice combined) over the past 15 years than during the prior 15 years. Just recently, another paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters found that the warming of the oceans since the turn of the century has been the most sustained in the past 50 years. They also found that, consistent with my team's research, about 30% of overall global warming has gone into the deep oceans below 700 meters due to changing wind patterns and ocean currents. This accelerated deep ocean warming is also unprecedented in the past 50 years.

We often hear from the media that the (surface air) warming has slowed or paused over the past 15 years. This isn't a puzzle; climate scientists are well aware of several contributing factors, as a recent Reuters article – "Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown" – eventually discussed. The accelerated warming of the oceans is likely the main contributor.

During years with La Niña events, more heat is transferred to the oceans, and surface temperatures are relatively cool as a result. The opposite is true during El Niño years. During the 1990s, there were more El Niño than La Niña events, which resulted in more surface air warming. One of the strongest El Niño events of the century happened in 1998, which not coincidentally was 15 years ago.

When people say 'no warming in 15 years', they're cherry picking the timeframe to begin in an abnormally hot year. It's like arguing that your car must have broken down because it hasn't moved in the 15 seconds while you've been stopped at a red light. The argument selects a short timeframe that's not representative of the whole.

Since 2000, there has been a preponderance of La Niña events, which has acted to temporarily bury more global warming in the oceans. A new study published in Nature Climate Change found that by taking into account the short-term changes caused by factors like El Niño and La Niña cycles, they could accurately forecast the slowed warming at the surface several years in advance. The paper concluded:

    "Our results hence point at the key role of the ocean heat uptake in the recent warming slowdown."

More HERE




Melanie Phillips reflects





Scientists hint that global cooling is the new pollution risk

Just in time for the cooler spring that has swept the nation — complete with unseasonal snow in the Rockies region — scientists with the University of Manchester said pollution actually brings on climate cooling, not warming.

The logic is that manmade pollutants make clouds brighter, and that impacts how sunlight is allowed to shine — and that brings about cooler temps, scientists say, TG Daily reported.

“We discovered that organic compounds such as those formed from forest emissions or from vehicle exhausts, affect the number of droplets in a cloud and hence its brightness, so affecting climate,” said one study author, Gordon McFiggans, from the University of Manchester's School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences, in TD Daily.

The findings come as various regions around the nation are reporting near-record low temperatures for the spring months.

The Star-Telegram in Texas, for instance, reported that Friday brought record lows of 39 degrees. And in both March and April, temperatures for the North Texas region hit the lowest levels in three years. More than a foot of snow fell in the Rockies region last week, and Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin were also hit with record snowfall levels for May over the past few days

SOURCE




Anybody see any problems with 24 unelected people behind closed doors allocating $100 billion of public climate hoax money each year?

UN climate fund risks becoming 'a closed bank', warns NGO

    It is estimated that by 2020 it will be channelling US$100 billion a year in climate finance to developing countries – to help arrest the advance of climate change whilst adjusting to its effects.
    ...
    The 24 men and women at the GCF’s helm could emerge as a new brand of world leaders.

    They are not democratically elected, yet will be managing vast sums of public money, destined for projects that will in some way or other affect all of us.
    ...
    The March board meeting took place at Germany’s Foreign Office, a tightly guarded building with a strict door policy – UNFCCC-accredited organisations only.

    Present were the board, their alternates and advisers, and four additional participants – two so-called active observers representing civil society – one from developing countries and developed countries respectively – and two from the private sector...Active observers – each acting in the name of half of the world’s citizenry – received key official documents a day or two in advance.

SOURCE



Not much has changed in polar bear country since the sea ice maximum

Lots of ice everywhere – even in Hudson Bay. A bit less ice in the Barents Sea (north of Norway) than there was two months ago at the sea ice maximum March 15 (see Fig. 1 below compared to the extent at May 5 in Fig. 2: both from NSIDC). But there is still quite a bit around Svalbard – that group of islands between NE Greenland and NW Norway (see Fig. 3 below a MASIE image, where this situation is more apparent).

Polar bears are eating and mating at this time of year – and right now, they have a huge, circumpolar ice platform for those activities.

More HERE  (See the original for graphics etc.)



Australia: Small taxpayers suffer because of bad carbon tax bet.  Lifting the tax-free threshold would have greatly helped the poor

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet has confirmed the 2015 tax cut associated with the carbon trading scheme will not go ahead because of the drop in the carbon price in Europe.

Mr Combet says the Government know thinks the carbon price will not be as high as the $29 per tonne originally forecast.

He says that means there will not be a need to increase the tax free threshold as promised.

"Those tax cuts were were to be in the order of a $1.59 per week for most people earning up to $80,000 a year," he said.

"I say they're deferred, because when the carbon price rises again in the future, those tax cuts will still be implemented at that point in time.

Last month the price of carbon in Europe plunged as much as 45 per cent after the European Parliament rejected an emergency plan that would have forced companies to pay more for polluting.

Carbon permits dropped to as little as 2.63 euros ($3.34) a tonne, and German power prices for next year fell to their lowest level since 2007.

At the time Mr Combet said the upcoming budget would need to take the EU price plunge into account.

SOURCE

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1 comment:

John A said...

Climate Change... For years we have been told that the warming 1970-2000 was due to human activity, notably coal-oil-gas burning. Now that a 15 year plateau or cooling is being more widely recognized, humans must still somehow bear the blame. The answer? Increased coal-oil-gas burning (mainly China and India) causes cooling! Hansen (among others) says so!

I do think we humans can affect climate to some degree, but not [yet] as much as other [natural] influences. The idea that we are more powerful than our Sun has always seemed to be asinine hubris.