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Re: [Phys-L] climate change continues apace



On 01/17/2016 11:26 AM, Forinash III, Kyle wrote:
The AAPT meeting last week had Benjamin Santer (climate scientist who
has testified in Congress) as a plenary speaker. He had (at least)
two interesting points.

1. There is a unique ‘fingerprint’ to the current climate change that
points to humans: the lower atmosphere is warming while the upper
atmosphere is cooling. If warming were due to other influences (sun
activity for example) both lower and upper atmosphere would be
warming. The fact that climate models accurately predict this upper
cooling with lower warming indicate they are correctly modeling what
is happening and that it is caused by added greenhouse gasses from
human activity.

Interesting.

2. The apparent recent slowdown in warming is possibly due to
increased low level volcanic activity resulting in more sulfate
aerosols. Big volcanoes (eg. Penatubo) make obvious changes (cooling)
and are included in climate models but until recently lesser
volcanoes were not accurately accounted for. Including them indicates
that the model predictions may actually be too conservative (they
were only slightly higher than what actually happened during the
“hiatus” but should have been even higher).

Point [2] doesn't make much sense to me. It's explaining something
that doesn't need explaining, because it never existed.

I replotted this figure
https://www.av8n.com/physics/probability-intro.htm#fig-global-t-linear
to include the 1σ error band (shown in green). This makes it obvious
at a glance that there never was a «hiatus». At no time since 1997 was
the monthly data more than 1σ below the long-term trend line.

The recent El Nĩno makes it possible to make an oranges-to-oranges
comparison to the 1997-98 El Nĩno, which makes it obvious to everybody
that there was no «hiatus» ... but the point I have been making for
many many years is that it should have been obvious all along that
there was no hiatus. There was just noise in the data.

Plotting the trend /and the error band/ makes it easy to see what's
expected and what's not.

=============

If you want to understand the current «controversy» about climate
change, consider that there was for 60 years a «controversy» about
putting lead into the environment, in contact with children and
other living things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsssPTsyXYs

Lead in drinking water is bad enough, but most people are in far
more danger from flakes of old lead paint.

There was also a «controversy» about leaded gasoline. I use
«controversy» as a euphemism for systematic lying on an epic
scale.