 In a post last week entitled “Debate vs. Demonization“ we
questioned the tendency on the part of global warming alarmists to
demonize anyone who wishes to question the reality, the scope, the
causes, or the prescriptions for global warming. We referenced one
recent exchange between Dr. Roger Pielke Sr., a renowned climatologist
who has raised such questions, and one of his detractors. In this
exchange, the person who had attacked Pielke made the following
statement:
“At the risk of talking science, Dr. Pielke takes specific
exception to my reporting of the average global temperature over the
past 10 years. I hate to get into duelling graphics, in part because it
would encourage people to think that Pielke’s choice of graphs is
relevant, but here is the UK MET office Hadley Centre’s most recent record of global average temperature. To the degree that this might be considered a discussion about science, I stand my ground.”
If you click on this link, the graph you see is not terribly
ambivalent. Temperatures are shown to be rising, and if all you knew
was how to read a bar graph, and had no reason to doubt the veracity of
the data, it would be alarming. So I asked Dr. Pielke to provide
background on the Hadley Centre’s data, and here is his response:
On the data plotted at:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/obsdata/
They present land surface data back to 1850 with all of the
problems (including warm biases) with such information as we
summarized, for example, in our JGR paper, Pielke Sr., R.A., C. Davey,
D. Niyogi, S. Fall, J. Steinweg-Woods, K. Hubbard, X. Lin, M. Cai,
Y.-K. Lim, H. Li, J. Nielsen-Gammon, K. Gallo, R. Hale, R. Mahmood, S.
Foster, R.T. McNider, and P. Blanken, 2007:
Unresolved issues with the assessment of multi-decadal global land surface temperature trends.
J. Geophys. Res., 112, D24S08, doi:10.1029/2006JD008229.
Also refer to our GRL paper, Lin, X., R.A. Pielke Sr., K.G. Hubbard, K.C. Crawford, M. A. Shafer, and T. Matsui, 2007: An examination of 1997-2007 surface layer temperature trends at two heights in Oklahoma.
Geophys. Res. Letts., 34, L24705, doi:10.1029/2007GL031652.
On the ocean surface temperatures, there are also a set of
problems as reported recently, for example, by David Thompson and in
the CCSP report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends.
More importantly for your discussion, is the absence of further
temperature increase (even with the warm biases with the surface data)
in the last 7 years.
A more robust data set is:
http://www.ssmi.com/msu/msu_data_description.html
[Figure 7] which accurately diagnoses the tropospheric temperatures
back to 1979. In Figure 7 see, for example, the plot for TLT where
there is even a global cooling recently.
Anyone who thinks the truth about climate change matters should take
a look at sources Pielke references; especially the data on the SSMI
website (above), Figure 7 in particular, which will appear if you
scroll about 3/4 of the way to the bottom of the page. In Figure 7
there are four graphs of temperature data, each of them corresponding
to a given altitude, including a trend line for each. The first two
graphs depict temperature sensor data for the Lower Troposphere
(altitudes up to 5,000 meters) and Middle Troposphere (5,000 to 10,000
meters), and show a warming trend of .169 C/decade and .096 C/decade,
respectively. This equates to a 1.0 C rise every 60 years and every
104 years, respectively. But both of these graphs show a significant
drop in temperatures in the last few years.
The next two graphs depict temperature data and trend lines for the
lower stratosphere (15,000 to 25,000 meters) and the
troposphere/stratosphere (10,000 to 15,000 meters). The graph for the
lower stratosphere shows a cooling trend of -.019 C/decade, and the
graph for the troposphere/stratosphere shows a cooling trend of -.334
C/decade. Returning to Pielke’s response:
The discussions of the global surface temperature trend issue by Roger Pielke Jr. are also insightful:
Visually Pleasing Temperature Adjustments
Real Climate on Meaningless Temperature Adjustments
Does the IPCC Main Conclusion Need to be Revisited?
See also the discussions of this issue at:
Do IPCC Projections Falsify?, and
IPCC Central Tendency of 2C/century: Still rejected
as well as Lucia’a other postings on this on her website:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/.
The question is, will anyone read this material if they already have made up their minds?
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