Good stuff...
... looks like it's based on actual scientific work (getting and analysing samples) rather than creating fancy computer models.
Real science then, rather than play science! East Anglia Uni - take note!
Global warming will not cause 'permanent El Niño'
Boffins in Blighty have said that global warming and retreating Arctic sea ice cover is unlikely to result in a so-called "permanent El Niño" state in the Pacific, nor cause similar major weather-changing shifts in the behaviour of the Atlantic ocean. The possibility of such major changes in the world's weather has been …
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Monday 14th February 2011 14:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
re: Yawn
I find that this "TECH website" is one of the few places where you can see reporting about Climate Change aka Global Warming that isn't just duckspeak. Possibly because it *is* tech based, and therefore more inclined to be sceptical of claims until the evidence has been examined (e.g. see North East Passage story last year).
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Wednesday 16th February 2011 09:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Really?
ACC articles are always very anti in stance, very low on science and very obviously lacking in comments (as they aren't allowed - funny that, coming from someone who claims that all environmentalists are trying to stifle debate for monetary gain).
None of that leads to a mature and responsible examination of data. Just more commentards' penises flapping in the breeze. Commentards who think that they can instantly divine the Truth of the Universe just because they code for a living (in most cases, work on a helpdesk or in management for a living).
Here we have the rare opportunity of an ACC article with comments allowed. Oh look, it's not actually an article that "disproves" ACC or even tries to disclaim it at all. In an attempt to appear "researchy" it has links at the bottom. To a press-release and an abstract. Very sciency. I feel like it must be true. I don't have to check any of the data or anything now. There's a fucking abstract. The science is practically in my house, I can almost feel it, helping the wife in the kitchen and making my kids grow up big and strong.
When El Reg allows comments on all its ACC articles so people with relevant knowledge and experience can pick apart the flawed methodologies for your disbelieving eyes ... it will have moved beyond the duckspeak you think it doesn't exhibit.
And look. Our climate is a non-linear system. It has non-constant external factors. If the future trajectory through phase space of such a system could be determined so accurately from its past, they'd have closed the research book on non-linear dynamics.
Lots of room for doubt.
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Monday 14th February 2011 14:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Joe K
Dude, with respect, how can climate change not be tech related?
Tech is needed to collect climate data and then process, model and predict scenarios based on the data - without the levels of tech we have it would be next to impossible to determine what was happening globally* and then what can / should / must / must not be done about it.
Tech is also presumably the main cause of AGW, and arguably the best method for mitigation. Not just big tech like planes and trains and cars, oh my! but also more insidious things like switches, routers, hard disks and consumer kit that all sucks up leccy which causes carbon to be set free.
Also, on a more social-economic level the [likely] lifestyle changes needed to reverse the levels of carbons in the atmosphere would have a very serious and direct impact on our lives, ranging from how convenient things are for us (cars / fridges / aircon / entertainment systems etc) through how we spend our free time (I cannot walk to Benidorm for example) to how long we live (hospitals are really bad energy consumers) and what our quality of health would be (colder houses, availability of fresh fruit & veg out of season and so on). Obviously if AGW is not entirely accurate then these sacrifices would be in vain.
*Just look at the debate about the medieval warm period or the fact that 2010 was globally one of the warmest on record whilst the UK and USA were significantly colder than normal. Climate readings only from the UK/USA would give a different interpretation of the situation.
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Monday 14th February 2011 14:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
We don need no steeenkin titles
But does this mean the end of the illuminati running around like chicken little screaming that the sky is going to fall in next Wednesday or in a billion years whatever?
How ever will we cope without the 'it's end of the world ist's'. Does this mean a mass outbreak of sanity? Can we have all our green taxes back please?
As an aside perhaps a lay preacher of the warmist cult can explain how taxing the bejaysus out of little old ladies etc directly makes the bad thing go away? Especially if the income isn't ringfenced or spent on any mitigation whatsoever. I've always wondered about that.
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Monday 14th February 2011 23:28 GMT Anonymous Coward
No you have answered a question thats not been asked
Perhaps your religion is composed of the easily influenced and hard of understanding?
Question is how does the movement of small green bits of paper spent entirely on things OTHER than bad thing mitigation, have ANY effect on the bad thing?
Take your time.
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Monday 14th February 2011 14:41 GMT Scott Broukell
Yes, but ....
what bothers me is the effect of polar ice melt on the NADW (North Atlantic Deep Water) mass, or Conveyor, which keeps north west Europe from freezing up, a la Younger Dryas period and before. There is little doubt that this was a lot weaker during the last glacial period that Britain suffered, which ties in nicely to yer typical pre-glacial warming periods - which are well documented and which I believe we are well into now.
Mankinds emissions are pretty piffling compared to the quantities of greenhouse gases that can be emitted during intense volcanic eruptions - as the earth tries to adjust it's core temperature. We ain't not nothing so special other than some scabby bugs clinging to this marvelous crust that hosts our endeavors. The forces that brought our host into being and continue to shape her blue/green loveliness, completely dwarf any imaginings we can possibly have about being 'special' or, indeed, able to make any sort of difference to what those forces have in store for us.
What we can do is learn how to adapt to those circumstances, quickly, clean up our back yard, keep it that way and live sustainable and probably nomadic lives for a long while. No doubt our population will have been much reduced when the time to 'move' comes as a consequence of war, disease, famine and lack of drinking water - so that will mean we are in better shape as a whole.
Mines the one with 'The End is Nigh - but we can continue if we adapt and use our gray matter' on the back.
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Monday 14th February 2011 14:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Them some nice juicy cherries
Hopefully this is the case... however being pro-science means viewing results in the same manner whether they agree your own personal politics or not.
In El Reg's case, it seems massively suspicious that suddenly trust is put in this solitary paper and its authors... when previously voluminous screeds have been held in contempt.
If this paper was stating the exact opposite... then I'd have expected derision; chicken little statements and talk of cherry picking...
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Monday 14th February 2011 15:38 GMT Identity
Let me get this straight...
We're going back to the Cretaceous period, when I believe there were no humans about, to show that climate has huge cycles? Mastery of the obvious, I call it. BUT, 100 years (an insignificant amount of time, geologically) is pretty well permanent for any given human...
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Tuesday 15th February 2011 10:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Thought About IT
Sceptical Science" is actually a "Warmist" site. Please do visit it. While you are there, have a look at #72 "Around 97% of climate experts agree that humans are causing global warming."
They have pulled the link to the supporting paper on that page but you can still find it from their front page under "There is no consensus". If you are curious, you can read the paper cited (Doran 2009) and discover that "97%" is actually 75 out of 77, the 77 being selected from the original survey of 10,257 Earth Scientists as the ones who gave the right percentage in their answers - I think they were the ones who were mates of Prof. Jones. And there's plenty more like this.
The questions were carefully selected too. I expect that most educated folk would agree that people have made the world warmer than it otherwise would be. Better questions would be "how much warmer?" and "Is that a bad thing?".
Please don't believe me (nor El Reg) - but please do your own research and make your own mind up. Have a look at e.g Climate Audit or Bishop Hill or Watts Up With That. It's your money that's part of the billions being siphoned off to protect us from "Climate Change". And the people raking in all that cash aren't going to tell you that it's a bit of a scam ;-)
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Monday 14th February 2011 21:51 GMT Mark Jan
You've found a paper that agrees with your point of view...
...as opposed to those papers published by the University of East Anglia which won't even release their unadjusted raw data. There's good science for you, based on "adjusted" figures as opposed to empirical data. How can such papers be properly peer reviewed without the empirical data being made available?
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Tuesday 15th February 2011 10:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Mark
You can't use raw data from human observation, satellites, unmanned weather stations etc. etc. this is for several reasons:
1) Satellites drift out of callibration, you have to recallibrate them once the data is on earth
2) None of the measurements will conform to the same grid, so you need to plot averages onto a grid in order that the data are useful.
3) Manned readings tend to be slightly out, due to human error, so this needs to be taken into account
4) Some readings cover differing time periods, so this needs to be taken into account
It's actually quite a lot more complicated than this, you could look into it to try and learn about it, but I suspect that - like all AGW deniers, you'll just repeat your opinion that all data worked on should be raw, again and again...
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Thursday 17th February 2011 13:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
@AC @Mark
Interesting leap of logic there; he's an AGW denier because he quite rightly points out that the UEA have not released either their raw data or the methods they applied to that data to reach the conclusions they have made.
That means that no-one can check their methodology or calculations and *that* is what makes the paper suspect.
If someone says to me that the world is going to end my first question to them would likely be "What makes you say that?". If they show me a paper with X+Y=End of world, I would then ask them to show me where they got "X" and "Y".
If there answer is either "It's a secret" or "It's too complicated for you to understand", then I would place them in a similar category to the man in the high street with the "End is Nigh" sandwich board because for all I know they may have made up X and Y or made a mistake getting from the raw data to X and Y.
That doesn't mean I don't understand (or "believe" if you prefer) that the world is going to end, it just means that I am not convinced by that particular argument.
Questioning poor scientific methods is always a good idea and especially so if we are to have the slightest hope of doing the right thing to correct a global problem (assuming that is even possible).
(You can use the same arguments if the conclusion is "The world is not going to end", but people generally tend to assume that is the case anyway and so would not instinctively use the appropriate rigor.)
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Tuesday 15th February 2011 10:44 GMT efeffess
Deniers and Assenters of AGW/ACC == same result
My particular beef is with humankind's continuing lack of understanding of humankind's lack of understanding of our planet's climate.
Things started cooling down in 1998, and should start warming up in a year or two with the already-noted 14-year cycle. In 2026, cooling should start up again. If things don't go as planned, we'll hopefully have some new data to explain the discrepancy.
It's been determined that mankind has had an effect on climate change (see http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110124074009.htm and http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/02/110202072216.htm). What's not known is how much of an effect has been had, simply because we are unable to reliably predict what will continue to happen even in the near future. There are still too many variables, particularly regarding (but by no means limited to) our sun's recent dead period and how that will affect the cyclic progression of our climate.
Considering how vast the field of climatology is, though, it's safe to say most people posting comments to climatology reports on El Reg are laymens at best, this poster included. Have a go for an hour or so through http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/earth_climate/climate/ and then, as an 'expert', explain how climatology works.
(As a side note, people using the term 'denier' out of its proper, historical context should be rounded up and shot with balls of their own shit. Such a term is an insult to the honest sceptic.)
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Tuesday 15th February 2011 10:26 GMT Count_of_undolpho
In continent
In the Cretaceous Period the continents hadn't come together into their present form. The Oceans were completely different in regards to size and currents. The weather patterns therefore, must have been different to the present day as well.
In light of this I'm not sure how much the conclusions drawn in this paper appertain to our present situation. Though I'm all for not having a permanent El Nino.
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Tuesday 15th February 2011 12:28 GMT Fred Mbogo
Permanent El Niño?!
F*ck no!
Merciless rainfall from Oct. to Jan. caused a month-wide water outage (the lake from which we draw our water to purify is WAY too muddy) in my country.
Sure, part of the blame lays with us meatbags for allowing people to settle and defoliate within 1 Km of our local waterways which caused intense erosion which led to large amounts of sediments to be deposited on the lake courtesy of madame rain.
Water should be a national security issue together with the water basin flora that supports it.
I had a point somewhere, I just need to remember what it was.
Because Skynet would give us the easiest answer to this conundrum.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
