Two koi shiver under the ice in my frozen FLORIDA fishpond this morning! Our remote temperature sensor reads 23ºF, but it is located under the eves and so subject to an "urban heat island" effect. It is probably colder, perhaps 22ºF or less, more than ten degrees below freezing. [Click images for larger versions] The past week or two has been the coldest since we moved to The Villages in Central Florida in 2003. Some really tough swimmers still do laps in the heated outdoor pools, but our water aerobics classes have been suspended. I've been able to do some bicycling, but with frozen fingers under my gloves.
My talk at the local Philosophy Club on "Explaining Away Climategate" is scheduled for this friday. Great timing! Almost as good as the Copenhagen Climate Conference blizzard that forced President Obama to return early to a blizzard in Washington, DC.
Ira Glickstein
CentralCoastRick says:
ReplyDeleteThis might not fit into your talk format, but I was struck by Latif's comment quoted in the dailymail yesterday: ‘The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling.’
Dr. Mojib Latif does climate research in Germany and was featured in many of the climategate emails and was a co-author of the 4th IPCC assessment report and many earlier contributions.
But only 2 months ago (November 22, 2009) NPR interviewed him and he assured the NPR victims that: "Dr. LATIF: We are not getting hotter but not colder either, and so, you know, the situation is more or less steady, but this is nothing unusual."
He may be most recognizable to the casual climate reader as the guy that said his studies demonstrated that there might be "one or even two decades of cooler temperatures." (Nature 453 (7191): 84-99. 2008) His paper explains that the heating is continuing - but ocean circulation is masking it.
(This is of interest too since it's recently being openly discussed that the ocean heat stored is far below model predictions.)
What I especially love is the quick ability of the 'team' members to grasp every outcome as something that their models are compatible with.
Temperature not going up to follow CO2?
No problem - it's just weather and it might take 10 or 20 years to catch back up! You should really fund my studies in the meantime!!!
If a downturn only lasts a year and not 10?
Hey, we told you it wouldn't last - our models said so!
Ira: I posted a note here yesterday as 'anonymous' - perhaps half the time the website does not like my google identity even though I can immediately sign into my profle at google and verify that my password hasn't changed. I take this to likely be a noobie operator error.
ReplyDeleteRick (AKA "Anonymous"), perhaps your "noobie operator error" was that your fingers were too close to the keys :^)?
ReplyDeleteNo problem for you (or any other reasonable Commenter) posting as "Anonymous" (except that it may take a day for me to Moderate and Approve it).
I'm sorry Google is having technical problems. It was like that when I first got an Apple II home computer back in the 1970's. Things seemed quite intermittent for the first month or so, and then, I guess, the computer got used to my typing style and started to behave correctly (almost) all the time. Stick with us here at the Blog and all will smooth out :^)
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Thanks for the link to Dr. Latif's climate change points: As a partial "Lukewarmer" I happen to agree with him. I hope (and predict) we will get several weak Sunspot cycles over the coming decades to stabilize the warming and perhaps give us some cooling. (-0.2ºC to -0.3ºC would be nice.) If that happens, I predict the CO2 will continue to rise, but at a reduced rate a decade from now.
A few decades of stabilization will give us time to get our climate measuring stations up to NASA level #1, 30m to 100m from any artificial heat source, so we can more accurately measure the cooling/warming. It will also give us the time to develop an economically viable and technically reasonable program to reduce our dependence upon fossil fuels (and unstable foreign sources).
As a conservative, I do not think it is wise to raise atmospheric Carbon gas levels at a high rate, even if it turns out (as I predict it will) that climate change is relatively insensitive to Carbon gasses.
Ira Glickstein