This piece in the Financial Post encapsulates all the problems for the climate alarmists, even their forecast of 2014 being the hottest year (by one hundredth of a degree C) may have been premature. The recent cold weather may just push it down. The article by Lawrence Solomen makes happy reading for us climate realists - soon we may all have to join the realist camp. Who will be the deniers then?
Is it really smart money to bet against the greenhouse effect and decades of solid math and physics?
ReplyDeleteFirst, a question: Since the article doesn't appeal to any science to explain the rise in temperatures over the past few decades, does that mean the author's theory falls apart if/when temperature records are broken in the next few years by a non-negligible amount? So the entire theory against "alarmist" rests on whether a year's high temp record is broken? Whether it is broken this year or not is hardly science. Neither is it very logical to cherry-pick 1998 when calculating a representative trend nor to fail to see that the models, which use the most sophisticated set of calculations humans have ever applied to try and model the climate, don't claim to have the resolution of only a decade and a half yet still have had temps stay (if barely) within their expected 95% confidence levels.
[FWIW, I think there is a good chance the record will be broken this year by a non-neglible amount (a hunch on my part based on trends of NOAA data), but I was still curious about a theory apparently based on short timespan records, which are oblivious to internal weather variations.]
I'd also like to point out that satellites don't measure ground temps but average over a much larger portion of the atmosphere, and are maintained by a very few sources so can be considered less reliable, especially since the processing required is much more advanced than reading thermometers. Out of curiousity as well, what will Lawrence Solomon believe if/when even the satellite data shows one of the next few years to be the warmest on record?
As for ice extent around Antarctica, that is not the same as ice volume, which is what matters since only volume directly corresponds to the quantity of heat absorbed/lost (and assuming we ignore the rest of the earth system). If you have a low extent/cover ice cube and it melts and then refreezes (eg, when adding a certain amount of heat and then removing it), you will end up with a lot more icy surface area even while the volume could possibly have stayed the same. Again, it isn't science/logical to appeal to ice surface area (extent is even more shaky) rather than volume. [Ice surface area is important as goes the albedo, but this is ultimately dependent on ice volume.]