Drought?

[Guest]

No drop, just a less substantial increase from the year before.

[Wayne SW/MO]

No drop, just a less substantial increase from the year before.

And that has no importance in the problem? Why, if was slower by a substantial margin then I would think it would be important to know why, if the aim is to slow the growth.

All these "it doesn't matter" answers are typical cop outs when something bends the common conception and can't be addressed with a real answer. Whatever reduced the rise those years might be important, but given the fact it's virtually impossible to contribute them to man they must be ignored.

'87 was the 5th highest, 5 years later '92 is the 2nd lowest???

[Gavin]

Thanks for all the charts and graphs. They make it pretty clear.

1) The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere IS increasing on an annual basis.

2) The rate of increase varies, but the rate of increase appears to be trending upward.

Who knows what caused the dips in the 3 low years, but somebody smarter needs to provide and explanation.

A drop in the rate of increase is a good start...but I think the real goal is stable or decreasing amounts of C02 in the atmosphere. I dont know how to do that, and I'm not giving up my car.....If you buy in somebody is gonna have to figure out a way to eliminate 3-4ppm of CO2 emissions on an annual basis.

[Tim Smith]

I spent a great deal of my working life troubleshooting electrical problems and one of the standards was consistency in the problem. If it wasn't there then it needed to be identified and its relationship to the problem resolved. So..................???????????????

What happened in '92 or 99', why the big drop in those two years?

Well it's reassuring to learn you're applying a mechanical template to the problem. That's the wrong template, but that's the kind of error you'll fall into when you try to plug it into biological parameters so at I can at least buy into your sincerity.

The planet is not a circuit board. There are biological systems at work here and those are too complex to expect to explain 100% of the variance in them. Ever. Still, once you've explained over 50% of the variance, you've got a model that's useful for predictions. Basic biological principles like the effect of nutrients on productivity only explain 50% of the variability in productivity in lakes but they're still used effectively to manage lakes. From decades of experience with regression analysis, I can tell you the graph you're citing explains well over 90% of the variability in carbon levels over the last 50 years. If it's less than 95% I would be shocked.

The numbers you're looking at are mostly RESIDUAL variance left over after the over all increase has been subtracted from the raw numbers.

The bottom line point is that the graph is still incredibly regular and heading upward.

Some slop (unexplained variance) is inevitable. We know what the influence of the drivers is on the system as a whole but no one will be able to say, ever, with 100% certainty exactly what next year's temperatures will be.

92 was the Pinotubo year...ash in the atmosphere reduced productivity and cooled the planet considerably that year. Most events from 92 are anamolous to some degree. 99, I don't know but some one else might know. The data is in the models, along with solar influences, volcanic activity, and all the other things that are known to influence climate.

[jdmidwest]

Unfortunately, we are currently in a period of global warming, its JULY. Come this fall, we will have global cooling, at least in this portion of longitude north of the equator.

Sunspots.

[Al Agnew]

The assertion somewhere above, which has been repeated over and over by the anti-global warming crowd, is that there has been no warming since 1998 (or in the last 14 years, or whatever). This is a perfect example of taking accurate data and spinning it to suit your purposes. I checked the data (you can find the graphs in several places on the net). If you took the average yearly global temps between 1850 and 1920, when overall there was little change, and averaged all those years together to get a "baseline" global temp from before the industrial revolution got into full swing, let's call that average temperature 0.0 degrees Celcius. Between 1920 and 1940, the global temps gradually rose to 0.4 degrees C. From 1940 to 1975, there was little overall change...temps remained, on average, somewhere around that 0.3-0.4 degrees C. Then starting around 1975, there was a sharp rise, gradually moving up to 0.7 degrees C. But also, consider that in any given year during those periods after 1920, the temps could be up to 0.3 degrees or so above or below average for the period.

So that brings us up to 1990. Remember that by about this time, temps were running, on average, about 0.7 degrees C above what they had been from 1850 to 1920. Now, there are four different groups measuring global temps, and their figures are almost always slightly different from each other in any given year, due to differences in measuring. So here's the data from 1990 on, from lowest to highest reading from the four sources:

1990--0.65-0.69 degrees C

1991--0.60-0.68

1992--0.46-0.51 (Mount Pinatubo had a huge effect on climate that year)

1993--0.46-0.54 (still feeling the effects of Pinatubo's eruption the year before)

1994--0.56-0.60 (beginning to climb back to pre-Pinatubo)

1995--0.68-0.72

1996--0.52-0.62 (an anomalous cool year)

1997--0.74-0.79 (now back to climbing temps)

1998--0.90-0.92 (an anomalous warm year--but this is the year that the deniers use as their baseline!)

1999--0.65-0.72 (within normal yearly variations during the climb in temps)

2000--0.64-0.70 (no climb from the last few years, but again within normal yearly variations)

2001--0.80-0.83 (back to the rising temp trend)

2002--0.86-0.89 (cooking now)

2003--0.86-0.89 (still cooking)

2004--0.81-0.85 (not rising, but still cooking)

2005--0.87-0.95 (rising again)

2006--0.83-0.89 (hanging in there)

2007--0.80-0.91 (rising a bit)

2008--0.71-0.78 (what passes for an anomalous cool year these days)

2009--0.84-0.89 (cooking again)

2010--0.90-0.96 (and here we beat the 1997 record)

That was the last year that was shown in the graphs I was looking at. So yeah, it took 12 years to beat 1997. BUT, if you took out 1997 from the 1990s, AND threw out the two Pinatubo years, the years would have ranged from 0.60 to 0.79, with the decade average being around 0.68 or so. Then if you took the decade from 2001 to 2010, the figures ranged from 0.71 to 0.96, with the average being about 0.86. And keep in mind that during that decade, several of those yearly temps were among the hottest years ever recorded. So while only one year from 1998 to 2010 beat 1997, that DECADE was considerably hotter than the decade of the 1990s.

[Outside Bend]

And that has no importance in the problem? Why, if was slower by a substantial margin then I would think it would be important to know why, if the aim is to slow the growth.

All these "it doesn't matter" answers are typical cop outs when something bends the common conception and can't be addressed with a real answer. Whatever reduced the rise those years might be important, but given the fact it's virtually impossible to contribute them to man they must be ignored.

'87 was the 5th highest, 5 years later '92 is the 2nd lowest???

Climate scientists don't look at what happened in one year vs. another Wayne, they're looking at changes over a much broader timescale. You're right that the events are anomalies, and you're right that it'd be interesting to know what caused them. But the presence of those anomalies doesn't alter the long-term trend, which is what climate scientists are looking at in the first place.

[jdmidwest]

Climate scientists don't look at what happened in one year vs. another Wayne, they're looking at changes over a much broader timescale. You're right that the events are anomalies, and you're right that it'd be interesting to know what caused them. But the presence of those anomalies doesn't alter the long-term trend, which is what climate scientists are looking at in the first place.

No, they don't really look at it over a long period of time. They adjust the scale to fit their needs. Earth has changed many times in the last 3 billion years. We have been in a period of global warming since the last Ice Age. Before that, it was a big cool down.

I don't deny we are getting warmer, we have been since the Ice Age. I think it is arrogant on the part of man to think that they can change the cycles of the earth at this stage of the game and our present intelligence level.....

Nature will run its course.

Now if you want to claim your part in the scheme of things, call it pollution. That what it has been called in the past. Attack it that way, people would be far less offensive.

[Justin Spencer]

No, they don't really look at it over a long period of time. They adjust the scale to fit their needs. Earth has changed many times in the last 3 billion years. We have been in a period of global warming since the last Ice Age. Before that, it was a big cool down.

I don't deny we are getting warmer, we have been since the Ice Age. I think it is arrogant on the part of man to think that they can change the cycles of the earth at this stage of the game and our present intelligence level.....

Nature will run its course.

Now if you want to claim your part in the scheme of things, call it pollution. That what it has been called in the past. Attack it that way, people would be far less offensive.

So you are saying keep polluting and let the earth kill us off?

[Tim Smith]

No, they don't really look at it over a long period of time. They adjust the scale to fit their needs. Earth has changed many times in the last 3 billion years. We have been in a period of global warming since the last Ice Age. Before that, it was a big cool down.

I don't deny we are getting warmer, we have been since the Ice Age. I think it is arrogant on the part of man to think that they can change the cycles of the earth at this stage of the game and our present intelligence level.....

Nature will run its course.

Now if you want to claim your part in the scheme of things, call it pollution. That what it has been called in the past. Attack it that way, people would be far less offensive.

Not sure I understand your subtext here, JD.

If you're saying humans are too insignificant to affect climate, the data doesn't really bear that out. Even before people were unleashing accumulated eons of carbon deposits, the biota apparently had an effect on climate. If you're saying we can't control OURSELVES, and the current issue with greenhouses gases are a form of pollution, then we have some common ground and that makes a lot of sense to me based on what the numbers show.

If you mean the 2nd option, then yes, it's an open question if we'll have the intelligence to side-step this problem and that's really where the real debate exists.

Maybe I'm just getting my hopes up for nothing though...since you seem to be buying into the "science makes things up" conspiracy nonsense here...

No, they don't really look at it over a long period of time. They adjust the scale to fit their needs.