Although the current red-herring of the slight global cooling trend has been addressed in many threads, it is brought up enough by GW deniers that I believe a full thread is needed to dismiss this falsehood.
You mean, there are people that still haven't figured out that it's the SUN that has the greatest impact on our climate???
It's really quite simple : Sun heats up, solar system heats up... Sun produces less energy, solar system cools...
According to the vast majority of climate scientists, the planet is heating up.
Not for a number of years it hasn't.
Scientists have concluded that this appears to be the result of increased human emissions of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, which trap heat near the surface of Earth.
In spite of the fact that the GW catastrophists have a humbling 0% accuracy in their predictions to date.
However, some information sources — blogs, websites, media articles and other voices — highlight that the planet has been cooling since a peak in global temperature in 1998. This cooling is only part of the picture, according to a JPL climate scientist and a recent study that has looked at the world's temperature record over the past century or more.
So the 'consensus' is down to 1 scientist???
In their recently published research paper entitled "Is the climate warming or cooling?", David Easterling of the U.S. National Climate Data Center and Michael Wehner of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory show that naturally occurring periods of no warming or even slight cooling can easily be part of a longer-term pattern of global warming.
So, instead of doing like they did after the 70's when they realized that we were NOT going into an ice age, and changed their tune to 'global warming will boil us all alive'... this time our scientist friend is telling us that the earth is still catastrophically heating because of carbon dioxide... just that over the past 10+ years is just a flawed few datapoints that don't really reflect the true warming trend???
I don't know about anyone else, but this guy really does sound like he's blaming the climate for not suiting his predictions... rather then accepting that his interpretation was flawed.
These temperature plateaus, or cooling spells, can be attributed to natural climate variability,
The whole 'global warming' debate should have ended here... 'natural climate variability' I mean seriously, we don't have climate models that can predict the weather 7 days out with anything more then a 50% accuracy, yet they claim they can predict the environmental catastrophy 10-20-100 years down the road.
explains Josh Willis, a climate scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. and a recent recipient of the 2009 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. "Natural variability refers to naturally-occurring fluctuations or events that change Earth's climate on time scales ranging from years to decades. Big volcanic eruptions, for instance, can cause cooling that lasts for several years. When a volcano erupts, it blasts dust into the upper atmosphere where it reflects sunlight and cools the planet, a bit like a natural umbrella."
I can't disagree with this one... though, even NASA some years back published a study which linked the heating / cooling trends to solar activity... NASA probably didn't tell this scientist about that one.
He goes on, "There are also all kinds of natural fluctuations that sometimes cause warming, sometimes cooling." Ocean changes, for instance, can have a big impact on the world's temperature. One example that Willis cites is the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a pattern of warmer and cooler surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean that can last between 10 and 30 years.
Also true... but this means that oceans have a bigger impact then human production of the same things attributed to warming... funny that it's the oceans production of CO2 which is the greates producer which shoot out CO2 up to several hundred years AFTER the heating.
Another important example is El Niño, which is an abnormal warming of surface ocean waters in the eastern tropical Pacific that happens every three to eight years and can affect global temperatures for a year or two. Between 1997 and 1998, there was an unusually strong El Niño, and this caused 1998 to be one of the hottest years on record (Figure 1). When Easterling and Wehner dropped the 1998 temperature spike from the data altogether, and zoomed in on the readings from 1999 to 2008, they saw a strong warming trend over this period. But when the 1998 measurement is included in the data, it looks as if there is no overall warming between 1998 and 2008 at all.
The authors say that it is easy to 'cherry-pick' a period to reinforce a particular point of view. "Claims that global warming is not occurring that are derived from a cooling observed over short time periods ignore natural variability and are misleading."[/quote]
Gotta love this quote... it's essentially saying that if you don't buy into our theory it's because you ignore natural variability... but global warming will still kill us all.
What you have to look at, says Willis, is the long-term temperature readings that have been collected over the past century — which is exactly what Easterling and Wehner do in their study. Over that sort of time scale, global warming becomes apparent from observations of both our atmosphere and our ocean, which are intimately linked pieces of the climate puzzle.
Even a century is NOT long enough to determine catastrophic warming... there have been times in earths history HOTTER then we see today, and what do you know... it was a great BENEFIT to humanity to live in such a warm climate.
As Willis explains, global warming is a long-term process. "Despite the fact it's been warmer and cooler at different times in the last 10 years, there's no part of the last 10 years that isn't warmer than the temperatures we saw 100 years ago."
This is so clearly cherry picked information I shouldn't even have to point it out directly.
Assuming our greenhouse gas emissions continue at their present levels with little reduction, existing climate forecasts suggest that our planet will warm by about 4° C (7.2° F) by the end of the 21st century. Although scientists continue to study the nuances of Earth's climate, the link between carbon emissions, global warming and sea level rise over the past century is clear. Even if our global carbon emissions began to fall tomorrow, Earth would continue to warm for some time due to the inertia of the climate system6.
Not a word about the SUN... You want 'climate change'... 40degrees in the morning can turn to 90 degrees by midday... I can guarantee it's not 'carbon dioxide' that creates that heat as much as the sun's energy throughout the day.
"In the next century it's definitely going to get warmer," Willis says. "You don't need a crystal ball or fancy climate model to say that. Just look at the sea level and temperature records from the past 100 years — they're all going up." Likewise, Easterling and Wehner's work reminds us that understanding climate change — one of the most important challenges we face today — requires a long-term view. "Unlike people," says Willis, "the climate has a very long memory."
Well thank you professor... too bad you're stuck on the 100 year trend, when the 500 year, 1000 year, and 100 000 year trends would speak differently.
Thanks GW enthusiast for the 'debunk' I'm utterly convinced... now I will help institute a carbon tax to make sure that you gotta pay government 20$ a day for the priveledge of 'breathing' that will ONLY affect the US... don't worry, if you don't have the money to pay your breathing tax, a swat team will be over to take care of the situation, so don't worry.
