IF NASA AND NOAA ARE RIGHT - THAT 2010 WAS THE HOTTEST YEAR EVAH!, THEN WHAT PLANET IS FRANCE ON?HERE:
2010 was the coldest year France has seen in two decades, according to Météo France.
Meteorologists say the average temperature was 0.3°C below average between 1971 and 2000, making it the coldest since 1990, on a par with 1996.
The temperatures last winter (2009-10) helped to pull down the average: the winter was 1.2°C below the 1971-2000 average and the past two winters saw more snow than any in the past 30 years.
AGW = TFBS. AND BY BS I DO MEAN LIES.
1/15/11 UPDATE: MORE "RECORD COLD" POSTS HERE - JUST SCROLL DOWN.
1/15/11 UPDATE #2: FOR THE MORONS FROM BOB CESCA:
There no such thing as AGW, there is no such thing as global temperature.
Global temperature is a heuristic device. Climate alarmists commit the fallacy of the misplaced concreteness (REIFICATION) when they treat AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE as if it was real.
Need proof? HERE: NOAA'n NASA's numbers for each year differ from the UK Met's. WHY? Because they are all constructs. They Earth is not a body like er um.. YOUR BODY and the Earth has no ass*ole to sick a thermometer into and so AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE is a man0made construct subject to MANY manipulations such as ...WHERE THE THERMOMETERS ARE.
And another thing:
Climate Change is natural. Reuters recently published an article based on CRAP from AGW alarmists which argued that Rome fell because of climate change. Well, er um there were NO SUV's back then and mankind contributed ZILCH man-made CO2... yet there was.. er um... CLIMATE CHANGE! Gee, I wonder what caused it? Could it be NATURAL!?
Yes.
AND ANOTHER THING: Nothing about the recent warming period is significantly different from earlier ones (such as the Medieval Warm Period) - as those who proved the Hockey Stick was BS have shown over and over again. ( See HERE and HERE.)
AND ANOTHER THING: To you left-wing dupes and AGW alarmists who have left idiotic and snide'n snarky comments here informing me that France is SMALLER than the Earth - as if that somehow was dispositive of my post. I hate to remind you AGAIN that global temperature is a construct based on FINITE and DISCREET measurements and what is more many are from SELECTED/SELECTIVE weather stations which are highly biased in favor of warming.
And hee's a little info for the snarky alarmists who think I'm a stupid rethuglican: I have a Masters degree from a major university - earned in a year and a half - and have been a registered Dem since 1974 - and I also used to be a socialist and a believer in AGW.
I saw the light.
You all can too! START HERE.
THEN GO HERE.
"HERE IS A LIST OF CLIMATE DENIERS":
FOR THOSE WHO THINK THAT ONLY STUPID PUDDINGHEADS ARE SKEPTICS, HERE IS A LIST OF DENIERS:
- Dr. Edward Wegman—former chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences—demolishes the famous “hockey stick” graph that launched the global warming panic.
- Dr. David Bromwich—president of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology—says “it’s hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now.”
- Prof. Paul Reiter—Chief of Insects and Infectious Diseases at the famed Pasteur Institute—says “no major scientist with any long record in this field” accepts Al Gore’s claim that global warming spreads mosquito-borne diseases.
- Prof. Hendrik Tennekes—former director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute—states “there exists no sound theoretical framework for climate predictability studies” used for global warming forecasts.
- Dr. Christopher Landsea—past chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones—says “there are no known scientific studies that show a conclusive physical link between global warming and observed hurricane frequency and intensity.”
- Dr. Antonino Zichichi—one of the world’s foremost physicists, former president of the European Physical Society, who discovered nuclear antimatter—calls global warming models “incoherent and invalid.”
- Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski—world-renowned expert on the ancient ice cores used in climate research—says the U.N. “based its global-warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false.”
- Prof. Tom V. Segalstad—head of the Geological Museum, University of Oslo—says “most leading geologists” know the U.N.’s views “of Earth processes are implausible.”
- Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu-founding director of the International Arctic Research Center, twice named one of the “1,000 Most Cited Scientists,” says much “Arctic warming during the last half of the last century is due to natural change.”
- Dr. Claude Allegre—member, U.S. National Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Science, he was among the first to sound the alarm on the dangers of global warming. His view now: “The cause of this climate change is unknown.”
- Dr. Richard Lindzen--Professor of Meteorology at M.I.T., member, the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, says global warming alarmists “are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right.”
- Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov--head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science’s Pulkovo Observatory and of the International Space Station's Astrometria project says “the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."
- Dr. Richard Tol--Principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, at Carnegie Mellon University, calls the most influential global warming report of all time “preposterous . . . alarmist and incompetent."
- Dr. Sami Solanki--director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who argues that changes in the Sun’s state, not human activity, may be the principal cause of global warming: "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."
- Prof. Freeman Dyson—one of the world’s most eminent physicists says the models used to justify global warming alarmism are “full of fudge factors” and “do not begin to describe the real world.”
- Dr. Eigils Friis-Christensen--director of the Danish National Space Centre, vice-president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, who argues that changes in the Sun’s behavior could account for most of the warming attributed by the UN to man-made CO2.
THESE GUYS ARE EVERY BIT AS SMART AND SERIOUS AND WELL-TRAINED AND RESPECTED AS THE CRU FOLKS USED TO BE!
MORE: The Climate Science Isn't Settled - Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.
The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.
That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called "climate forcing."
There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.
The IPCC's Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages. It is, of course, impossible to accurately summarize the 1,000-page assessment in just 20 pages; at the very least, nuances and caveats have to be omitted. However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim.
The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.
But even if the IPCC's iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.
There is some evidence of a positive feedback effect for water vapor in cloud-free regions, but a major part of any water-vapor feedback would have to acknowledge that cloud-free areas are always changing, and this remains an unknown. At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks.
The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today's. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the "Early Faint Sun Paradox."
For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.
There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.
The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.
Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.
Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.
This was written by Mr. Lindzen - a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
LINDZEN'S BIO:
Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Professor Lindzen is a dynamical meteorologist with interests in the broad topics of climate, planetary waves, monsoon meteorology, planetary atmospheres, and hydrodynamic instability. His research involves studies of the role of the tropics in mid-latitude weather and global heat transport, the moisture budget and its role in global change, the origins of ice ages, seasonal effects in atmospheric transport, stratospheric waves, and the observational determination of climate sensitivity. He has made major contributions to the development of the current theory for the Hadley Circulation, which dominates the atmospheric transport of heat and momentum from the tropics to higher latitudes, and has advanced the understanding of the role of small scale gravity waves in producing the reversal of global temperature gradients at the mesopause, and provided accepted explanations for atmospheric tides and the quasi-biennial oscillation of the tropical stratosphere. He pioneered the study of how ozone photochemistry, radiative transfer and dynamics interact with each other. He is currently studying what determines the pole to equator temperature difference, the nonlinear equilibration of baroclinic instability and the contribution of such instabilities to global heat transport. He has also been developing a new approach to air-sea interaction in the tropics, and is actively involved in parameterizing the role of cumulus convection in heating and drying the atmosphere and in generating upper level cirrus clouds. He has developed models for the Earth's climate with specific concern for the stability of the ice caps, the sensitivity to increases in CO2, the origin of the 100,000 year cycle in glaciation, and the maintenance of regional variations in climate. Prof. Lindzen is a recipient of the AMS's Meisinger, and Charney Awards, the AGU's Macelwane Medal, and the Leo Huss Walin Prize. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. He is a corresponding member of the NAS Committee on Human Rights, and has been a member of the NRC Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate and the Council of the AMS. He has also been a consultant to the Global Modeling and Simulation Group at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, and a Distinguished Visiting Scientist at California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. (Ph.D., '64, S.M., '61, A.B., '60, Harvard University)
CV
MORE HERE.
AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURE DOESN'T EVEN REALLY EXIST; EXCERPT:Conclusion
There is no global temperature. The reasons lie in the properties of the equation of state governing local thermodynamic equilibrium, and the implications cannot be avoided by substituting statistics for physics.
Since temperature is an intensive variable, the total temperature is meaningless in terms of the system being measured, and hence any one simple average has no necessary meaning.
Neither does temperature have a constant proportional relationship with energy or other extensive thermodynamic properties.
Averages of the Earth’s temperature field are thus devoid of a physical context which would indicate how they are to be interpreted, or what meaning can be attached to changes in their levels, up or down.
Statistics cannot stand in as a replacement for the missing physics because data alone are context-free. Assuming a context only leads to paradoxes such as simultaneous warming and cooling in the same system based on arbitrary choice in some free parameter.
Considering even a restrictive class of admissible coordinate transformations yields families of averaging rules that likewise generate opposite trends in the same data, and by implication indicating contradictory rankings of years in terms of warmth.
The physics provides no guidance as to which interpretation of the data is warranted.
Since arbitrary indexes are being used to measure a physically non-existent quantity, it is not surprising that different formulae yield different results with no apparent way to select among them.
The purpose of this paper was to explain the fundamental meaninglessness of so-called global temperature data. The problem can be (and has been) happily ignored in the name of the empirical study of climate. But nature is not obliged to respect our statistical conventions and conceptual shortcuts. Debates over the levels and trends in so-called global temperatures will continue interminably, as will disputes over the significance of these things for the human experience of climate, until some physical basis is established for the meaningful measurement of climate variables, if indeed that is even possible.
It may happen that one particular average will one day prove to stand out with some special physical significance. However, that is not so today. The burden rests with those who calculate these statistics to prove their logic and value in terms of the governing dynamical equations, let alone the wider, less technical, contexts in which they are commonly encountered.
End of story.
