Cold Weather

why is the current La Nina cooler than the last La Nina (1999)?

NASA GISS say

The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. 2007 tied 1998, which had leapt a remarkable 0.2°C above the prior record with the help of the “El Niño of the century”. (Emphasis added)

You say that the last La Niña was in 1999. Wikipedia says:

The last La Niña was a minor one, and occurred 2000-2001.

Why was 1998 so strong? Personally I don’t know. Why was 1998 statistically the same in the US as 1934? All I know is that there was a warm blob on North America in the 1930s, on less than 2% of the planet.

But most importantly, starting from some average of 1998 and 1999 is as arbitrary as starting from 1998. And any trend line drawn over the last 10 years alone is about the weather not about climate.

1997/98 was an El Nino and there are good physical reasons to conclude that the planet is likely to be warmer during such an episode. With a temperature anomaly of up to 4C in the Eastern Pacific, 1998 certainly was anomalously warm. This year (July to June), as a La Nina, I would expect to be a bit cooler than it otherwise would have been.

Picking 1998 as the starting year from which to judge a trend, when it was the daisy sticking well above the level of the (quickly growing) grass, is legerdemain in statistical terms. Global temperature is currently increasing somewhere between 0.24 and 0.28C per decade (different data sets, so there is a sampling error).

Anyone in a research institution who is qualified in science or statistics and who maintains that the data suggests global cooling or even no trends from 1998 should be immediately made to hand back the keys to their office. That would put a few Australian academics and emeritus profs on the street.

Those who are willing to repeat such guff must have all their statements treated with the utmost caution, because who knows where such credulity may lead one?

The Australian Government is committed to decisive action on climate change, to transform a current threat into an opportunity. As the driest inhabited continent in the world, Australia is more vulnerable to climate change than almost any other developed nation and we need a comprehensive plan to facilitate population growth.

To whooooo!!

Btw - the blurb for the Aust 2020 climate change section says something about adapting our economy to facilitate population growth.

I give up.

Lovelock was saying we’ve tipped and was called a doom-monger.

In November 2007 Hansen was saying that we passed tipping points on large ice sheet disintegration, significant sea level rises and species loss when we were in the 300-350 ppm zone. Logically we should get back to the lower end of that band if we want to preserve the world as we knew it. Remember that CO2 hasn’t been over 300 ppm for a million years and 125K years ago we had sea levels 4-6 metres higher than now.

In his Iowa testimony Hansen says flat out that long-term climate sensitivity (for 560 ppm) is 6C at the midpoint. That means complete deglaciation (70 metres sea-leve rise) and the kind of planet Lovelock was talking about (inhabitable from about Melbourne south, if it’s still there!).

Ronald Wright in his Short History of Civilisation said we started to use the planet unsustainably in net terms some time in the 1970s, around the time when the Club of Rome report came out. On population this graph illustrates where we’re at.

You might find it interesting to wade through this long thread which has themes on the Club of Rome thing (as well as Malthus). Apparently Limits to Growth was not as far off the mark as popularly assumed.

I was taught the findings of the Club of Rome at high school in 1975 or so. I think there is a narrow cohort of 45 - 46 year olds who have no trouble accepting climate change science. The syllabus was obviously changed shortly thereafter, because nobody else seems to be worried.

The elephant in the room has always been human population. However to even broach the subject is to be met with immediate suspicion. Misanthropy is the usual charge, ironically. (Nevertheless human population cannot be turned around quickly and 35 years later we no longer have time for anything except quick solutions.)

China is well ahead of what we should be aiming for.

Hmmm - that’s bad then, Brian. Add to that, that by 2050, we will have the equivalent of two more China’s in global human population, and we ain’t looking too pretty.

Meanwhile governments are still nowhere near being brave enough to tell their constituents that material consumption must be cut deeply. Alternative technology will not fly our current overly consumptive economies. Not soon enough anyway.
But saying such makes me a doom-monger or millenarian etc!! Apparently the only mature perspective comes through rose-coloured glasses.

The wide-spread denialism - even at such gatherings as this - is almost hard to believe. It is text-book. Everybody still thinks we can have our cake and eat it too. A touching faith indeed.

The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Niño-La Niña cycle.

In the last 5 years the solar irradiance has been in its down-phase.

This pic gives you the positive and negative forcings for the past 250 years. If China and India stopped churning out industrial aerosols we’d be in a fair bit of trouble.

Bear in mind that half the climate effects of any emissions take up to 25 years to play out. The other half play out over a few centuries.

You might find it interesting to wade through this long thread which has themes on the Club of Rome thing (as well as Malthus). Apparently Limits to Growth was not as far off the mark as popularly assumed.

wbb, I don’t have the Chinese and the world average for GHG emissions to hand, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were similar. China is well ahead of what we should be aiming for.

China, Indonesia, Brazil, Russia and India are the 2nd (possibly 1st), 3rd, 4th, 5th and 7th largest emitters respectively according to a list quoted in Garnaut’s interim report.

If the world’s population polluted at the Chinese per capita level how much of a decrease in global emissions would we see?

How much of Indonesian emissions are directly under the control of Australia and other importing countries of Indonesian forestry products? Indonesian GHGs can be reduced by countries like Australia very quickly without help from Jakarta.

Would anyone like to comment on this article.

Aidan, it’s not an article - it’s just a blog post by a naughty boy.

Tricking people into believing that climate change is a hoax is a sad lonely sport for a particularly nerdish type of sociopath nowadays.

as linked to from Tim Lambert’s blog, the trend is +0.181K per decade and you are cherry picking because you start with 1998, an anomalously warm year due to El Nino.

Complete lack of any upward trend in temperature for a decade

This claim is fraudulent, caused by cherry picking the data as can be seen here

Kinda looks different that way, eh?