Thanks for your comment. But, it is not just atmospheric temperatures that are falling. The oceans have cooled each of the last four years and sea levels have been falling — significantly — the last two.

The temperature trend I was speaking of is from 1997 to 2008 (I am omitting the 1998 El Nino spike).

It is interesting to note world temperatures were cooler in June, 2008 (when Hansen made his 20th anniversary appearance before Congress) than they were in June, 1988.

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are higher now than in recent human history. If the IPCC's case is correct, temperatures would have been soaring over the past decade. In fact, the opposite is true.

The switch to the cold phase of the PDO and the "blank sun" (which has continued since my post above, just click on the link) seem to be better correlated to atmospheric temperatures and the earth's heat content than CO2.

This is why I strongly recommend holding off on legislation and regulation at this time. Congress hates to admit mistakes. Otherwise, we may have to live with bad policy for decades.

Mike

Be sure you define your word "trend" carefully. As you and/or others have noted this link for global temperature anomaly measurements:

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/uah_may_08.png

I see the temperature "trend" from January 2007 to May 2008 (16 months) indicating a drop of 0.774 C. If that is your "trend," then in May 2020 (160 months from 1/07), the temperature anomaly would be -7.74 C! Trying to use some-term trends to make long-term statements is a poor methodology in science/math. If I used the same analogy from month 220 to month 232 (1998 peak), the delta would be +0.95 C, i.e. +9.5 C per decade! As you can tell, using a short-term "trend" from a chart that looks like a seismograph print-out is unrealistic.

As Lisa mentioned, while it is easy to identify small issues, i.e. heat island, faulty equipment, other blips in the data, if the overall long-term trend is less ambiguous, I'd tend to look at that data. A 12-18 month string might be useful to predict the next 1-3 months, while a 10-20 year data set can help to justify longer projections, etc. In this case, a 5-year or 10-year moving average as the Nature article used helps to dampen the "noise" in their 40 year data set (1960s – 2000, then predictions).

Drew

What would it take to change your mind about the current trend in earth's temperatures?

Mike

Did you read what your link says about the solar situation?

It says, "If the sun were to remain "stuck" in its present minimum for several decades, as has been suggested (e.g., Independent story) in analogy to the solar Maunder Minimum of the seventeenth century, that negative forcing would be balanced by a 5-year increase of GHGs. Thus, in the current era of rapidly increasing GHGs, such solar variations cannot have a substantial impact on long-term global warming trends. Furthermore, recent sighting of the first sunspot of reversed polarity (reported Jan. 4 by, e.g., SpaceWeather.com and NOAA) signifies that the ~ 4-year period of increasing solar irradiance is about to get underway."

Oops. That Jan. 4 reverse polarity sunspot did NOT signal the end of Cycle 23 and "The Blank Sun" continues (see: http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_igr/512/ ), contrary to NASA's predictions. Falling temperatures (see link already posted) also continue with no sign of solar Cycle 24 at present.

The oceans are NOT warming. The ARGOS probes have proven that. Even Dr. Josh Willis of NASA (a warmer) concedes the oceans are cooling, although he says it is "not significant."

The urban heat island problem is real but the worse effect is the change in instrumentation used by the NWS and foreign governments starting in the 1990's. Go to: http://surfacestations.org/ and page down to see two nearby stations with radically different temperature histories due to a flawed instrument and poor siting. Because these instruments were installed in the 1990's when the warming (supposedly) accelerated, it is hard to know how much of the warming is real (I believe some actual warming occurred) and how much is defective measurement caused by defective instrumentation.

It may be fine to contend that the current cooling is "not significant" or "won't last." Neither of us knows. But to keep arguing the earth is warming, at present, is just silly and its certainly bad science.

Please see our post about why short term cooling does not disprove long-term global warming. Also, scientists can explain the short-term cooling: a strong La Nina and the Sun reaching a natural minimum. And yet 2007 was still one of the warmest years on record.

Scientists are aware of and take great pains to deal with the complexities of temperature records. Check out RealClimate's post about urban heat islands.

Different groups process the data in different ways, but in the end, all of these independent methods show warming. And urban heat islands can't explain why the oceans are warming or why the sparsely populated Arctic is warming faster than the global average.

The "blank sun" continues:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/mdi_igr/512/

here is scientific data for my statement… check out this link…a significant number of reporting stations in the U.S are not within NOAA standards….we can't even trust the data. http://www.surfacestations.org/ note this guy is not pushing an agenda but wants to find the truth about station temperature readings which is at the heart of your GW arguments.

Whatever the outcome, everyone agrees that the study is exciting because modeling short-term variation is the new frontier in climate science.

No confusion here.

With regard to the ten year lagged average for the HadCRUT data, you are correct. However, those averages lag behind the recent cooling. The fact is that current temperatures are – significantly — below what was forecast (see below).

You are correct that the climate models are "not meant to predict weather" but that is exactly what they do. As previously stated, the meteorological "guts" of climate models are the same as the day-to-day meteorological forecast models. The theory is, assuming both a meteorologically correct and unbiased model, that over a long period of time the 'weather' forecast errors will average out leaving a picture of future climate.

The problem is: Are the models unbiased? The answer is "probably not" but we do not know for sure because they have not been sufficiently verified in "climate forecast" mode.

"Pastcasting," (i.e., running a climate model forward from some time in the past to see if it accurately captured what occurred) while useful in constructing a model, is not close to sufficient to validate a climate model. Models must be robustly tested in "forecast" mode (i.e., make a five year forecast and compare it to what actually occurred). There has been almost no forecast validation.

We know (see some of Pielke Jr.'s and Lucia's recent work) many of the IPCC scenarios have "overforecast" the observed warming (i.e., forecast more warming than actually occurred) the last decade. We know that recent atmospheric events have differed rather significantly from what more recent models scenarios have forecast. Here is Lucia's graph, which I urge our readers to view: rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/gmt_testnoextra.jpg . Of course, this is not conclusive. However, it should give one pause before putting too much faith in the predictive ability of the climate models.

This may account for some of the large difference in perception of the state of climate sciences between meteorologists and others. We are intimately familiar with the limitations of the models and their predictive ability.

Therefore, I stand by my opinion that the statement "We’re going to see a lot of warming in coming decades" is highly speculative."

Mike