Julie Walsh

"Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously." Dr. Phil Chapman wrote in The Australian on April 23. "All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead."

Chapman neither can be caricatured as a greedy oil-company lobbyist nor dismissed as a flat-Earther. He was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology staff physicist, NASA's first Australian-born astronaut, and Apollo 14's Mission Scientist.

Snooze button

by Julie Walsh on May 2, 2008

Apparently the spin du jour on the Nature paper referenced serially, below, is that “Nature” – the Mother, not the magazine – “has given Earth a break” for (surprise!) “the next ten years” (what is it with these people and the number 10?).

 

So Al Gore’s Doomsday Clock has a snooze button. Who knew?

Driving around today I wondered how bad the traffic would be if humans had increased their population since 1950 nearly fivefold — as has happened over that span with the apparently soon-to-be-declared "endangered" polar bear — instead of the mere sub-threefold we've experienced.

I'm just saying. One man's population bomb, explosion, epidemic, etc. is another's threat of extinction, harkening back to P.J. O'Rourke's distillation of the population nags' philosophy as "just enough of them, way too many of you and me."

Isn’t it curious?

by Julie Walsh on May 1, 2008

DavidWhitehouse.com

Isn't it curious. Isn't the self-correcting nature of science wonderful to
behold?

Not long ago anyone who looked at the global annual temperature data and
disrespectfully pointed out that it might actually be significant that the
world hasn't become warmer since 1998, was dismissed as foolish and accused
of seeing what they wanted to see in the data.

Then if they had the affrontery to point out that that even the UK's Met Office agreed that the annual data between 2001-7 was an impeccable flat line they were told they were completely wrong as such things were obviously only year-on-year variability (as an unscientific environmental 'activist' dammed my speculations in the New Statesman about the same topic whilst at the same time implying I was lying).

Ten years is too short a period to tell what is going on, they said, conveniently forgetting, if they ever knew, that the IPCC itself was established after less than ten years of global warming data. It seems that ten years is enough to be significant if the data says the right thing!

Then some righteous journalists rushed to get the 'truth' out about the flat line because, as they said, 'sceptics' were already using it to ask questions.

Strange then, that over the past few weeks we have seen from many sources people tryin to explain this 'year-on-year' statistical variability by tangible physical effects although so far such are straining to explain the data.

The impeccable flat line in global average temperatures since 2001 we were told earlier this year by the Met Office will continue throughout 2008 because of the cooling effect of La Nina. Now we are told in a Nature paper that the cooling effect of the Atlantic will extend this flat line, and possibly even point it downwards between now and 2015. They say the Pacific will stay unchanged though as we saw on CCNet yesterday there are other scientists who say that the Pacific will get colder over the same period.

So much for those TV commentators who several years ago pontificated that the 'science is settled.'

Also curious is that over the next decade man-made global warming will be
cancelled out by natural cycles. It's nice that Mother Nature (not the
journal) is helping us this way but it does beg the question as to whether
the man-made effect was all that significant if it can be nullified this
way. What else could this unsettled science find to cool us down? Then there
are speculations about the effect of the downturn in solar activity.

In Medieval times if a hypothesis, such as the heliocentric idea, disagreed
with the consensus, then it was interpreted as being a convenient
mathematical trick taken only to 'preserve the appearances' and not an
indication of physical reality.

Who today, I wonder, will history judge as preserving the appearances?

Avril Doyle of Ireland, who based on my past interaction with her I would describe as otherwise a generally sound Member of the European Parliament, offered another in a series of what Americans continue to miss–flagrant admissions and warning flags against doing a particularly reckless thing to ourselves.

As reported in Greenwire (subscription required), she referred to the notion of a trade war against countries reluctant to adopt the spectacularly "successful" EU Emissions Trading Scheme, a form of which all three candidates for president here endorse:

“‘[The trade war option is] very much Plan B,’ said Doyle. ‘We don’t even want to discuss it. … It's just on the top shelf there so the rest of the world knows we’re not going to destroy our economies without them coming on board and helping us.”

Now, we know their Kyotophilia has made them all millionaires from selling windmills to each other. So why in the world would Ms. Doyle say such a thing?

Oh well. Let's do it, too. A folly completely unburdened by any promise of impacting our cooling climate, to be sure. But, as Cyrano might say, "what a gesture!"

From CO2Sceptics.com

As I understand it the solar effect on climate has been discounted by the climate modellers because the variation in total solar irradiance between the peak and the trough of a single eleven year (approximately) solar cycle seems far too small to make any difference to global temperature.

There are a number of problems with their assumption as follows:-

The concept of total solar irradiance is purely a convenient construct. We do not know all the different mechanisms by which the sun can have an influence on global temperature either directly or indirectly. The use of the word "total" is therefore misleading. Even the concept of irradiance is vague and maybe incomplete.

The fact is that in the real observed world over centuries cooler weather has been seen to occur at a similar time to longer less active solar cycles and warmer weather similarly occurs with shorter more active solar cycles. If total solar irradiance does not seem to account for it that is no reason to ignore the phenomenon yet the modellers and the IPCC do so. I assume that the reason they ignore it is because, being unaware of the cause of the observed phenomenon, they have no numbers representing it to feed into the models. Their model output should therefore be qualified by an admission that at least one substantial observable real world phenomenon has been wholly omitted. Unfortunately for them that would render the models useless for policy making purposes.

The IPCC and the modellers do recently seem to have come to accept the influence of the EL NINO/ LA NINA cycle as a warming/cooling process. However they currently regard it as a purely redistributive mechanism rather than one which could actually be part of a driving mechanism. They would be in error if variations in solar energy input to the Earth operated a switch between the predominance over time of either EL NINO or LA NINA.

The variation between peaks and troughs in the solar cycle may be very small but if continued over long periods the effects could soon accumulate. If, say, the difference is only 1% then if a reduction or increase in incoming solar energy continues for many years, perhaps over several solar cycles, then it is the cumulative effect that should be considered and that could well be substantial over a number of decades.

There could also be other unknown mechanisms driven by solar changes that exaggerate the effect of small variations in total solar irradiance. A current possibility being investigated is a suggested link between cosmic ray flux and cloudiness. The flux varies depending on the energy from the sun and may drive cloudiness changes.

It is possible that over the millennia the earth has become a very accurate "thermometer" in terms of its reaction to solar heat or other forms of solar energy input. The entirety of the global heat budget may be very sensitive to solar changes. Over millions of years the earth has arrived at a temperature balanced between incoming solar energy and outgoing radiation of energy to space. The balance could well be much finer than we have so far realised. There are certainly no available figures that describe the sensitivity of the global temperature to variations in solar input and without knowing that level of sensitivity as a first step I fail to see how we can know anything useful about the sensitivity of the Earth to other influences.