Finally, I'll leave you with the words of a noted global warming proponent and researcher:
"Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and âwe expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,â(TM) the Hadley Centre group writes. Researchers agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer." - Richard Kerr, Science (2009)
So, we'll see...2009 is already five long years in the past, and the pause shows no sign of stopping at this point...
What pause? The one you've been hearing about on denialist websites? How about instead of hearsay, we actually look at the data?
Green is the mean global temp for the last 15 years, red is the 15 year trend line
That's why you should get your information from legitimate scientists. The 15 year trend is warmer, as you can see from the global mean temperature data.
An additional point, legitimate scientists know that yearly variations make a 15 year sample unreasonably small. Real scientists examine all available data, not merely anomalous fragment-of-the-day that happens to fit the story they want to tell. Real scientists look at 50 or 100 year trend lines, and all other available evidence.
And most importantly, real scientists obey THE LAWS OF PHYSICS. Sunlight comes in through the atmosphere, hits the ground, turns into infrared thermal radiation, and that infrared thermal radiation is blocked from escaping by CO2. Only crackpots deny basic laws of physics, only a crackpot could deny the effect is real. There is currently about 3,000 gigatonnes of CO2 in the entire Earth's atmosphere, and and humans are adding 30-odd gigatonnes per year. CO2 levels are up 42% since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and at our current rate CO2 levels will have doubled around 2050.
The natural levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases already generate a 50 degree F warming effect. (That's what generally keeps us out of an ice-age.) Most of that effect is due to water vapor, but gases like CO2 and methane have an independent warming effect because they block different infrared frequencies.
First of all, volcanic activity has been low for a couple of decades now. The last VEI 6 or larger eruption was Mt. Pinatubo in 1991.
There has been exactly ONE VEI event above 5 in the last hundred years. The fact that it was in 1991 would, if anything, make it recent and "above normal". Not that it really matters, because it only affects temperatures for a year or two. All you've really done is point out that the warming trend over the last 15 years *isn't* distorted by any volcanic activity in that period.
Furthermore, it's conspiracy-theory logic to suggest either (A) the global scientific community is deliberately excluding volcanic activity from their their analysis, or (B) the entire global scientific community is utterly brain-damaged-stupid that none of them ever bothered to consider volcanic activity in their analysis.
So, it is in fact quite surprising if you're a devotee of climate alarmism to see temperatures stabilize like this.
There's absolutely nothing surprising. Temperatures haven't stabilized. There is no pause. There has been a warming trend of the last 15 years. And as I demonstrated in my last post, it's trivially easy for a crank to cherry pick data points and manufacture totally fake "pauses" or "cooling periods". You did look at and understand the graph I posted before, right?
I understand there are theories regarding this heat hiding in the deep ocean somehow (rather in violation of entropy it seems)
They aren't "theories". They are measurements.
You know, legitimate climate scientists going out with scientific instruments and collecting real-world sea-temperature measurements to do legitimate reliable science.
Ocean temperatures have been rising. In fact ocean temperatures have been rising much more smoothly than surface temperatures because the ocean is far more massive (and thus far more temperature-stable) than the atmosphere.
Scientists haven't been integrating the ocean warming data into the global surface temperature data because they don't yet have enough from enough wide-spread locations to combine it into a global data set. Real scientists are responsible, cautious, and conservative in how they handle and make claims about their data. Unlike denialist cranks who who latch onto any anomalous or misinterpretable data point that seems to fit what they want to believe.
As for entropy, please don't wander off into some creationist-style bizarre interpretation of entropy, and what it prohibits. When you have warm water above cool water, and you increase the mixing of the layers, the top layer gets cooler and the lower layer gets warmer. Mixing transfers some of the thermal energy transfers down. There's no violation of entropy, no violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. There's absolutely nothing mysterious or remotely unusual about heat flowing from a warm place to a cooler place at varying rates.
Events like En Nino and La Nina can vary the amount of mixing between ocean layers. Changes in ocean currents can vary the rate of mixing between layers. Changes in the rate of arctic/antarctic melt water flowing into the ocean can change the rate of mixing between ocean layers. All of which influences the amount of heat that sits in the uppermost layer.
When mixing is below average heat from the sun warms the surface water layers. A warmer ocean surface results in more of the heat going into the surface level atmosphere, which then affects land surface temperatures. When ocean mixing is greater than average more of the surface heat is transferred down to deeper ocean layers, surface waters are cooler, less of the heat ends up in the surface atmosphere, and you get shifts in weather patterns and generally cooler land surface temperatures. This is why El Nino and La Nina are significant factors in global weather patterns... shifts in ocean currents and mixing alter heat transfer between the ocean and atmosphere.
and others than try to explain the satellite temperature measurements away by various hand waving.
Satellite temperature measurements completely confirm global warming. The only people trying to explain away the satellite data are the denialists. Those satellite measurements are virtually identical to ground measurements, and those satellite measurements show the earth is warming.
-
