blizzard1024

How so? I have been studying this topic for 30 years and have an MS in atmospheric science. I have conversed with top minds in radiative transfer and the whole CO2 leading to catastrophic dangerous warming is just not accurate. It doesn't fit with the paleo records. It does fit with the radiative transfer. it doesn't make sense with the feedbacks...I can go on.... What is your scientific opinion?

How can you say this? How do you know it is not natural warming? CO2 is a minor GHG. The IPCC is a political organization with an agenda. You can't call that real unbiased science. That's my scientific opinion. I will respect yours. I am sorry if I come off strong. It seems that you have to on these forums or you get compared to holocaust deniers which really is a massive insult to me on a personal level.

Scientists know what the ocean temperatures were 100 to 150 years ago before large scale buoys and especially since before the satellite era. I call BS. Come on. Its conjecture that far back. Plus the Little Ice Age ended in the 1800s. A natural warming trend could be occurring anyway. You must involve climate models to "prove" CO2 increases are the primary component of global warming. That is NOT science. Its models. I have been working with atmospheric models for 30+ years and they are a crude representation of the atmosphere. It boils down to computer models getting non-linear chaotic feedbacks correct. This is extremely problematic. If you believe the feedbacks from these models, you believe in significant global warming. That is a leap of faith. CO2 never controlled the climate during the last several glaciations as it passively follows the temperature records. So why all of the sudden does it control the climate now? Plus if we had a very sensitive climate system dominated by positive feedbacks, any shock to the system in the past would have shifted the climate either to extreme warm or an ice earth. That has not happened. CO2 is a minor GHG with a small absorption band centered around 15 microns. water vapor and clouds are the primary and dominate GHGs. Ocean currents as well are really important aspects of climate. CO2 not so much. sorry. that is what the science really says. The climate "scientists" or activists have ruined this branch of science by being political. I will add that these activists are a danger to the planet. By abandoning fossil fuels, the world goes into a deep depression, poverty becomes even more rampant. With poverty comes environmental destruction because people get desperate. Look at Haiti. Solar panels and wind farms everywhere are destroying natural habitats. This "save the planet" hype is ruining natural habitats and is a threat to the environment. A small warming of 1-2C will not wreck the Earth if it even occurs. The insanity.

In the desert climates, the influence of UHI is larger since there are fewer clouds with stronger direct insolation. Pavement makes a big difference. Plus adding lawns, and vegetation leads to more water vapor which holds more heat in. There is no doubt the SW US temperature records are seriously affected by the recent rapid population changes. The surface records are seriously contaminated.

Looks at Nogales, AZ which has a Mexican counterpart....again a large increase in population. This NO doubt contributes to the UHI. The minimum temperatures come up more than the maximums.

All these places have been settled recently which leads to warmer temperatures. UHI is not only in big cities. There has been a mass migration to the SW US the last few decades and this itself is causing temperature rises. So a normally warm summer pattern becomes record breaking because of UHI. You can't blame in on CO2.

Here are Phoenix's yearly average low temperatures... Here is the population growth.... Here are the average highs and you can see a slower growth which makes sense. More people equals more grass, lawn watering and more water vapor. This is NOT climate change. Pretty obvious. let's get back to science and stop with the hype and propaganda.

It is the development, UHI that is leading to warmer conditions in Phoenix. Come on. Its not "climate change". Globally this summer had anomalies ranging from .43 to .44C worldwide which is pretty small. Yes this is using the UAH satellite temperature record which is the most accurate by far. RSS artificially inflated their temperatures around 2015 to get in line with the flawed and adjusted (upward) surface records. The Earth has warmed since the late 1970s, a known cool period in the 20th century when the satellite record began. We are back to where we were in the 1930s, 40s and 50s globally. Before that we have no idea since temperatures were taken differently with respect to time, and instrumentation. Also SSTs back then were terrible. Let's hype everything up. That is what the world does these days!

Could it be the Taal Volcano for the stratosphere? It wasn't anything like Pintatubo but it could have some smaller effect.

see https://www.drroyspencer.com/2020/03/australia-bushfire-smoke-now-warming-the-lower-stratosphere/ This might explain this. wow....that's a lot of smoke!

UAH Temperatures really warm February! http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/ .+76C February 2020 and no major El Nino. Wow.

Appreciate your polite response. Can you show me where you are finding this temperature data for the Arctic pre-1950s? If you have done this on another thread I apologize. I am just curious because like ocean SSTs in the far regions of the world, I have a hard time comparing such old data in the Arctic versus the more comprehensive data of today. Below is the Hadcrut Arctic temperatures I posted. It shows that the Arctic is a little warmer now than in the 1940s but not by much, not enough to decimate the sea ice. Of course this is the HADCRUT dataset which does have its biases...

Infilled data has a lot of problems.... see climate etc. blog. Plus before 1930 the variability doesn't look right....it changes to less inter annual variability. Something doesn't look right here in my opinion....

One more thing on Skeptical Science, they use the heavily warm-biased GISS temp dataset and then match it to a reanalysis data to reconstruct Arctic temperatures. Reanalysis data for the Arctic has been shown to unreliable for long term temperature trends... see https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/era40 Hence no real conclusions can be made with the present arctic warmth vs the 1930s....

I am very skeptical of any climate model for this problem which all of these studies rely on. Bengtsson et al. [2004] states "This study suggests that natural variability is a likely cause, with reduced sea ice cover being crucial for the warming." But the data does not show this. You can't have it both ways. Either sea ice was amazingly steady in the Arctic despite warmer temperatures in the 1930s and then started falling when the temperatures fell from the 1950s to 1970s or indeed as Bengtsson et al. [2004] suggest sea ice was lower in the 1930s which makes more sense suggesting that sea ice is cyclical in coverage based on arctic temperatures and ocean temperatures (as the AMO would suggest)...

Strong El Nino's warm the planet, this leads to a warmer Arctic. A warmer Arctic winter leads to less sea ice volume which makes it more susceptible to melt. Lingering planetary warmth leads to a slow recovery this fall. If we didn't have the strong el nino that peaked last winter/early spring I doubt the sea ice would have been so low in the winter-spring time frame and recovery slow this fall. Also the Little Ice Age peaked between 1600 and 1800 roughly so we have warmed out of this in the 1900s. The 20th century and early 21st century are not out of the bounds of the last several thousand years based on paleo data. So that is why I state that there is nothing unusual about today's climate. The Holocene climatic "optimum" was warmer than today based on pollen samples from cores 6000-8000 years ago. That is pretty well accepted. So again it has been warmer in the present Holocene so we are within the bounds of the climate of this most recent interglacial.

I respect your opinion and appreciate your polite response. The biggest confusion in my mind and others with my viewpoint is how can the Arctic have warm temperatures in the 1930s similar to today's and yet the sea ice does not response and drop. This is counter intuitive. See With falling Arctic temperatures between the 1930s and 1970s, sea ice minimums in the summer time frame are falling. This does not make any sense. Please advise. I am all ears...

I respect your opinion and appreciate your polite response. The biggest confusion in my mind and others with my viewpoint is how can the Arctic have warm temperatures in the 1930s similar to today's and yet the sea ice does not response and drop. This is counter intuitive. See With falling Arctic temperatures between the 1930s and 1970s, sea ice minimums in the summer time frame are falling. This does not make any sense. Please advise. I am all ears...

The AMO has been in the warm phase since the late 1990s so little by little sea ice coverage shrinks. Then this year we had a strong El Nino and hence a low sea ice year. We only have about 40 years worth of reliable sea ice coverage data and the satellite monitoring began during a known cool period in the 20th century when sea ice likely was at a maximum in coverage. So we are seeing the downward trend of a cyclical process. And the Vize, Russia observation is just weather, not climate. There has been tremendous cold in Asia this fall. The average global temperature from the satellites is around +.4C which is not that big of a deal and we are in a cooling trend as the effects of the strong El Nino fade. There is nothing unusual about our current climate. CO2 may be leadling to some of the observed warming but climate scientists, in my opinion, underestimate the natural variability of our climate system.

Arctic sea ice likely has been low and declining because of the warm phase of the AMO which started in the 1990s and is still peaking. Notice from the diagram below that the cold phase of the AMO was in the 1970s when satellites began measuring sea ice accurately Hence waters going into the Arctic Basin from the north Atlantic have been warmer than normal. Thus sea ice is affected and Arctic temperatures are higher, sea ice lower. Once this reverses sea ice will recover in the Arctic Basin and Arctic temperatures will fall off again. This is strong evidence that the sea ice is cyclical and related to the AMO. This years warmth as seen from the reanalysis data and even the more accurate satellite data is related to the very strong El Nino we just had and there is a lag effect. Land temperatures have fallen about 1C since peaking from this El Nino. So its all downhill from here. Also remember that reanalysis data, especially in the Arctic regions is unreliable, and even the satellite data is not as good for the Arctic because of the skewed angle of the satellite at our high latitudes.

That's very interesting. So are global methane levels expected to rise dramatically soon? I saw a talk on climate change recently by Dr. Dressler and he stated that methane levels have risen sharply over the past 100 years or so but have stabilized (for now) and we don't quite understand all the processes that govern its atmospheric concentrations. He did not focus on this much. It was more of a sidebar in his talk.

Maybe I am sticking my head in where it does not belong(yeah...probably) as I am NOT an expert on methane and this subject matter. So I am all ears here. My question is: weren't summers warmer in the Arctic during the Holocene Climatic Optimum 6-8 thousand YBP? This is what was in my climo course in 2008 so if it has been refuted over the past 4-5 years then fine. Please give me the reference. But if it still holds, is there evidence of excessive methane leaks in any kind of paleo data from this time period? That would be interesting because the climate did not warm much more and in fact cooled after this, as orbital parameters began to look more like what we have today. Also it was postulated during this time period that summer sea ice probably melted away and was seasonal. Polar bears still survived. The orbital variations (I believe precessional tilt) were favoring higher summer temperatures in the Arctic and NH 6-8K YBP. My point is that we may be looking at natural variations from a warming climate which are always exaggerated in the NH polar regions. That is a paleoclimatology fact. So any warming trend will be much higher in the NH polar regions and there is some breaking mechanism (unknown) that slow or negates the trend in methane releases. The earth has warmed rapidly in the past and the methane "death spiral" did not occur.

why would you call the passenger pigeon a walmart bird? There were estimated to be so many of them that they would literally darken the sky when they migrated through. Now wouldn't that be awesome if we could see something like that? anyway, this is not a bird forum...sorry I brought that in. It pains me to see majestic eagles mangled by wind farms that's all. and yes it is an emotional thing. so let's stick to methane and climate change and science. facts. and what we perceive as truth.

The automobile when it become popular back in the 1950s and 60s is postulated to have wiped out certain species of birds...and they have stabilized at much lower levels now. Cats too have wiped out a bunch of species and they are now steady at a much lower level of population. Large buildings in cities have wiped out many species and they are steady at much lower levels. Cell towers also the same...and now wind farms. It is just nickeling and diming species downward and downward population wise. I have seen it over the last 30 years and it is one more threat. Birds are doomed in the long run...or at least the biodiversity in birds. we will always have the "walmart" birds... starlings, pigeons, house sparrows, and a few others. sad. let's get back on topic.

That is an ad hominiem attack. Rush Limbaugh is a right wing wacko who is a big reason why our middle class is buying into the BS that lowering taxes on wealthy will solve our problems. He is disgusting. Just because I view things differently than the mainstream climate folks...and still yet believe in GHG climate change... still invites such attacks. By the way, I am an operational meteorologist for 21 years published many papers on weather...have a MS in meteorology too and have taken many climate courses including one recently at the graduate level just to learn... not for any degree. And oh yeah...I got an A and was the top student in the class. I have been monitoring our climate since the 80s. So don't write me off as a non climate scientist. I understand to a very high degree how the atmosphere and climate system works including radiative tranfer. My GPA for my BS was 3.92 and for my MS was 3.95 while working a full time job and raising kids and I went to PSU a very tough program!!! I also authored a landmark paper on forecasting heavy snowstorms that still gets referenced today. So don't write me off as just a meteorologist that knows squat about climate. That is condescending. I remember when all the meteorologist who couldn't hack the hard core math changed majors and became climatology majors back in the 80s! It is a lot different now and there are very very smart people working in climo studies. So I take nothing away from their intelligence now...it is totally different. Some of the best and brightest students go into climate studies and there is heavy duty math now.... Also I am an avid bird watcher and it kills me to see all these wind farms ruining habitat and killing many many birds. There are very inefficient and not able to sustain themselves without government subsidies. Yes I don't agree with the mining practice either and that pisses me off too. But coal, oil and natural gas is the way to go for now until a better cost effective alternative is available unless we want too go back to the 1800s....many many people would suffer and die. I know some of the radical left would like to see the earth's population crash...humans are the scourge or cancer of the Earth according to them. So let climate change happen and kills billions.... Man is this f'ed up.... you people have no clue what cutting back CO2 emissions would do to the world's economy and our standard of living. I want my kids to enjoy a middle class existence not excessive just what they need. anyway...this is a feudal argument.