The crazy climate change obsession that's made the Met Office a menace

• The £200 million-a-year official weather forecaster often gets it wrong
• This week it has admitted there is no evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening
• The Met Office quietly readjusted its temperature projections on its website on Christmas Eve

Daily Mail
James Delingpole
 
Was there ever a government quango quite so useless as the Met Office? 

From its infamous ‘barbecue summer’ washout of 2009 to the snowbound winter it failed to predict in 2010 and the recent forecast-defying floods, our £200 million-a-year official weather forecaster has become a national joke.

But of all its recent embarrassments, none come close to matching the Met Office’s latest one. 

Without fanfare — apparently in the desperate hope no one would notice — it has finally conceded what other scientists have known for ages: there is no evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening.

A chunk of ice is shown drifting after it separated from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf
off the north coast of Ellesmere Island in Canada. The Met Office has conceded
there is no evidence that 'global warming' is happening

The Met Office quietly readjusted its temperature projections on its website on Christmas Eve. 

Until then, it had been confidently predicting temperature rises of at least 0.2 degrees per decade, with a succession of years exceeding even the record-breaking high of 1998.

Its latest chart, however, confirmed in a press release earlier this week, tells a very different story: no more global warming is expected till at least 2017. 

According to Dr David Whitehouse of the independent think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the climbdown couldn’t be more dramatic or more devastating for the Met Office’s credibility. 

‘They’re panicking. All the predictions they’ve been making about man-made global warming these past 20 years have started to come crashing about their ears.’

For two decades the Met Office has acted as Britain’s foremost cheerleader for climate change alarmism. In 2007, its Hadley Centre for climate change research produced a briefing document for the Government claiming its state-of-the-art computer models left no doubt: man-made global warming was a very real threat which needed to be addressed urgently by policy-makers.

‘The Met Office Hadley Centre has the highest concentration of outstanding people who do outstanding work, spanning the breadth of modelling, attribution, and date analysis, of anywhere in the world,’ claimed an expert from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) in the document.

Many in the Government were impressed for, a year later, the 2008 Climate Change Act was passed by an overwhelming majority. 

The act has been described by veteran journalist Christopher Booker as the most expensive legislation in history, committing the government to as much as £734 billion (£18.3 billion a year for the next 40 years) in extra spending to ‘decarbonise’ the economy. 

It is also one of the reasons why our countryside is being ruined by ugly, noisy wind turbines.

But what if carbon dioxide isn’t the culprit for global temperature changes? 

What if all the expensive, economy-ravaging, job-killing, environmentally destructive measures we’ve taken have been a spectacular waste of money?

If so, the Met Office will be attacked for being not just risibly incompetent — but an active menace both to the integrity of science and to the nation’s wellbeing.
Hence its defiant attempts to argue that nothing has changed and it’s business as usual. 

Antarctic Sea Ice Sets Another Record

Forbes

James Taylor

Editor’s note:  An update from the author has been added to this article on September 20, 2012.

Antarctic sea ice set another record this past week, with the most amount of ice ever recorded on day 256 of the calendar year (September 12 of this leap year). Please, nobody tell the mainstream media or they might have to retract some stories and admit they are misrepresenting scientific data.

National Public Radio (NPR) published an article on its website last month claiming, “Ten years ago, a piece of ice the size of Rhode Island disintegrated and melted in the waters off Antarctica. Two other massive ice shelves along the Antarctic Peninsula had suffered similar fates a few years before. The events became poster children for the effects of global warming. … There’s no question that unusually warm air triggered the final demise of these huge chunks of ice.”

NPR failed to mention anywhere in its article that Antarctic sea ice has been growing since satellites first began measuring the ice 33 years ago and the sea ice has been above the 33-year average throughout 2012.

Indeed, none of the mainstream media are covering this important story. A Google News search of the terms Antarctic, sea ice and record turns up not a single article on the Antarctic sea ice record. Amusingly, page after page of Google News results for Antarctic sea ice record show links to news articles breathlessly spreading fear and warning of calamity because Arctic sea ice recently set a 33-year low.

Sea ice around one pole is shrinking while sea ice around another pole is growing. This sure sounds like a global warming crisis to me.

Update:  To provide more perspective on global warming and Antarctica, I would like to update this column with some additional information:

As meteorologist Anthony Watts explains, new data show ice mass is accumulating on the Antarctic continent as well as in the ocean surrounding Antarctica. The new data contradict an assertion by global warming alarmists that the expanding Antarctic sea ice is coming at the expense of a decline in Antarctic continental ice.

The new data also add context to sensationalist media stories about declining ice in small portions of Antarctica, such as portions of West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula (see here, for example). The mainstream media frequently publish stories focusing on ice loss in these two areas, yet the media stories rarely if ever mention that ice is accumulating over the larger area of East Antarctica and that the continent as a whole is gaining snow and ice mass.

Interestingly, a new NASA study finds Antarctica once supported vegetation similar to that of present-day Iceland.

“The southward movements of rain bands associated with a warmer climate in the high-latitude southern hemisphere made the margins of Antarctica less like a polar desert, and more like present-day Iceland,” a co-author of the NASA study reports.

Experts: Global warming means more Antarctic ice

Editors Note: Covering all the bases!

Yahoo News
Seth Borenstein

Here's a stark looking picture for good measure. 

The ice goes on seemingly forever in a white pancake-flat landscape, stretching farther than ever before. And yet in this confounding region of the world, that spreading ice may be a cockeyed signal of man-made climate change, scientists say. This is Antarctica, the polar opposite of the Arctic.

While the North Pole has been losing sea ice over the years, the water nearest the South Pole has been gaining it. Antarctic sea ice hit a record 7.51 million square miles in September. That happened just days after reports of the biggest loss of Arctic sea ice on record.

Climate change skeptics have seized on the Antarctic ice to argue that the globe isn't warming and that scientists are ignoring the southern continent because it's not convenient. But scientists say the skeptics are misinterpreting what's happening and why.

Shifts in wind patterns and the giant ozone hole over the Antarctic this time of year — both related to human activity — are probably behind the increase in ice, experts say. This subtle growth in winter sea ice since scientists began measuring it in 1979 was initially surprising, they say, but makes sense the more it is studied.

"A warming world can have complex and sometimes surprising consequences," researcher Ted Maksym said this week from an Australian research vessel surrounded by Antarctic sea ice. He is with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Many experts agree. Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado adds: "It sounds counterintuitive, but the Antarctic is part of the warming as well." And on a third continent, David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey says that yes, what's happening in Antarctica bears the fingerprints of man-made climate change.

"Scientifically the change is nowhere near as substantial as what we see in the Arctic," says NASA chief scientist Waleed Abdalati, an ice expert. "But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be paying attention to it and shouldn't be talking about it." Sea ice is always melting near one pole while growing around the other. But the overall trend year to year is dramatically less ice in the Arctic and slightly more in the Antarctic.

It's most noticeable in September, when northern ice is at its lowest and southern ice at its highest. For over 30 years, the Arctic in September has been losing an average of 5.7 square miles of sea ice for every square mile gained in Antarctica. Loss of sea ice in the Arctic can affect people in the Northern Hemisphere, causing such things as a higher risk of extreme weather in the U.S. through changes to the jet stream, scientists say. Antarctica's weather peculiarities, on the other hand, don't have much effect on civilization.

At well past midnight in Antarctica, where it's about 3 degrees, Maksym describes in a rare ship-to-shore telephone call from the R.V. Aurora Australis what this extra ice means in terms of climate change. And what it's like to be out studying it for two months, with the nearest city 1,500 miles away.

"It's only you and the penguins," he says. "It's really a strikingly beautiful and stark landscape. Sometimes it's even an eerie kind of landscape."

While the Arctic is open ocean encircled by land, the Antarctic — about 1.5 times the size of the U.S. — is land circled by ocean, leaving more room for sea ice to spread. That geography makes a dramatic difference in the two polar climates.

The Arctic ice responds more directly to warmth. In the Antarctic, the main driver is wind, Maksym and other scientists say. Changes in the strength and motion of winds are now pushing the ice farther north, extending its reach.

Those changes in wind are tied in a complicated way to climate change from greenhouse gases, Maksym and Scambos say. Climate change has created essentially a wall of wind that keeps cool weather bottled up in Antarctica, NASA's Abdalati says.

And the wind works in combination with the ozone hole, the huge gap in Earth's protective ozone layer that usually appears over the South Pole. It's bigger than North America.

It's caused by man-made pollutants chlorine and bromine, which are different from the fossil fuel emissions that cause global warming. The hole makes Antarctica even cooler this time of year because the ozone layer usually absorbs solar radiation, working like a blanket to keep the Earth warm.

And that cooling effect makes the winds near the ground stronger and steadier, pushing the ice outward, Scambos says.

University of Colorado researcher Katherine Leonard, who is on board the ship with Maksym, says in an email that the Antarctic sea ice is also getting snowier because climate change has allowed the air to carry more moisture.

Winter sea ice has grown by about 1 percent a decade in Antarctica. If that sounds small, it's because it's an average. Because the continent is so large, it's a little like lumping together the temperatures of the Maine and California coasts, Vaughan says.

Mark Serreze, director of the snow and ice data center, says computer models have long predicted that Antarctica would not respond as quickly to global warming as other places. Since 1960, the Arctic has warmed the most of the world's regions, and Antarctica has warmed the least, according to NASA data.

Scientists on the cruise with Maksym are spending eight to 12 hours a day on the ice bundled up against the fierce wind with boots that look like Bugs Bunny's feet. It's dangerous work. Cracks in sea ice can form at any time. Just the other day a sudden fissure stranded a team of scientists until an inflatable bridge rescued them. "It's a treacherous landscape," Vaughan says.

BS detectors

Climate Etc.
Judith Curry

Most likely, their bullshit detectors just went on high alert. – Greg Breining

Amidst the many explanations for rational skepticism in the face of consensus ‘truth’ about climate change, the ‘BS detector’ explanation deserves more investigation and discussion

A cool-headed climate conversation with Aerospace legend Burt Rutan describes a rational BS detection process.  If you don’t know who Bert Rutan is, see his Wikipedia bio.  Some excerpts:

Even though I’ve been very busy throughout my entire career developing and flight-testing airplanes for the Air Force, I’ve always pursued other research hobbies in my time away from work. Since I’m very accustomed to analyzing a lot of data, about three or four years ago many alarmist claims by some climate scientists caught my attention. Since this is such an important topic, I began to look into it firsthand.

Although I have no climate science credentials, I do have considerable expertise in processing and presenting data. I have also had extensive opportunities to observe how other people present data and use it to make their points. There is a rampant tendency in any industry where someone is trying to sell something with a bunch of data, where they cherry pick a little bit…bias a little bit. This becomes quite easy when there is an enormous amount of data to cherry pick from.

The first thing that got my attention, a lot of people’s attention, was statements that the entire planet is heading towards a future climate catastrophe that is attributable to human carbon dioxide emissions. So I decided to take a look at that and just see if this conclusion was arrived at ethically. It’s obviously an extremely important issue which has gotten a huge amount of media attention.  I was particularly concerned because the proposed solutions will have enormous impacts upon costs of energy, which of course, will increase costs of everything.

Many people seem to get much of their information from what they see in newspapers. I may be considerably different, in that I always like to look at both sides of things that I take special interest in. So when I decided to look closely at the anthropogenic [man-made] global warming crisis claims, I avoided focusing on media reports, and instead, went directly to available raw climate data. The intent was to see if that data might just as reasonably be interpreted differently.

Then, what really drew me into the subject, was when I found that I couldn’t obtain the raw data that I was looking for. I was shocked to find that there were actually climate scientists who wouldn’t share the raw data, but would only share their conclusions in summary graphs that were used to prove their various theories about planet warming. In fact I began to smell something really bad, and the worse that smell got, the deeper I looked.

I even read Al Gore’s book, which was very enlightening…but not in a good way. When you look for data to back up his claims, you immediately discover that they are totally unsubstantiated. This was frankly astonishing because analyzing data is something I’m very good at. All my professional life I have been analyzing complex flight test data, interpreting it and presenting it. Something that I always did in flight test is to make a chart that shows every bit of the data, and only then, decide later on the basis of real observed results which parts of the data were valid.

What I’m doing really, is just put out all of the data I can in order to enable anyone to look at everything before arriving at a conclusion. If someone forms a conclusion at the onset, they can always find and focus only on data that supports their theory.

Larry, I wasn’t really taken back so much by the hostile responses.  I expected some of that.  But later when I decided to answer some of the more than 150 comments posted at the Scholars and Rogues website, I was surprised that I was often attacked in a very personal way which denigrated my intelligence and accused me of bias. I have no reason to have any bias. Some said I was obviously being paid for by oil companies, which seemed like a joke.  If you go through and read my responses you will find that I did so with hard data that alarmists will not publish. But they don’t hesitate to publish personal attacks.

Larry, I’ve done all I plan to do on this for now, and have moved on to other interests. This debate will all get sorted out, and I am confident it will be for the better.  When I started, I strongly believed that the debate needed me because I didn’t see anyone out there really looking at the data the way an engineer looks at.  Now I see that other people are doing this, including climate scientists and non-scientists the world over by the tens of thousands, people who are actually looking at the real data just like I have. I still follow the status of the debate, and occasionally comment on it.

Whether or not you agree with Rutan’s interpretation and analysis of climate data, the approach that he has taken provides a classical example of a BS detector in action.

Conspiracy theorists (?)

The latest ‘explanation’ for lack of belief in the IPCC consensus ‘truth’ is that these non believers are conspiracy theorists.  See Stephan Lewandowsky’s editorial Evidence is overrated if you are a conspiracy theorist.  Lewandowsky’s ‘evidence’ was a scammed internet survey.  Bloggers such as Steve McIntyre,Anthony Watts, BishopHill, Lucia, JoNova are all over this, and have exposed the scam (note: there are multiple posts on each of these blogs).  BS detection in action.  While I have used the term ‘auditors’ for deep investigations of problems with climate data, BS detection seems much more apt for this particular issue.

Lew, get a clew.  I hope this experience with the skeptical bloggers has revealed what they are really all about, as they have revealed YOUR conspiracy by finding a really big pile.

The ‘conspiracy’ among green climate bloggers  has been further revealed by the leak of John Cook’s secret forum (link).  SkepticalScience seems to becoming the ringleader for conspiratorial activities by the green climate bloggers.  All this is high entertainment for those of us who follow the climate blog wars.  But take a step back, and consider how bad this makes you look, and how poorly it reflects on the science and ’cause’ that you are trying to defend.

Motivated (?) reasoning

Reflecting on this general topic has led me to a new insight, or at least to a new hypothesis.  Serious social scientists have identified a split (liberal vs conservative) in terms of support vs skepticism of the climate change argument, with the conservative skeptics being generally more educated on the topic.  How to explain this, other than motivated reasoning by the conservatives?

Here is an alternative hypothesis:  the motivation reasoning is on the other side, the liberal defenders of the CAGW consensus.   Once the ‘consensus’ argument stepped beyond climate science into the realm of ‘dangerous’ impacts and ‘solutions’ involving global changes in governance and energy policy, BS detectors were triggered in people who didn’t share that motivation.

Excellent Example of "Bait and Switch" Style Propaganda Giving CO2-Driven Climate Science a Free Pass

Editor's Note:  Maybe you could help me out here because this is what I’ve seen so far.

Another hot summer (in some areas, record colds in others), no money for infrastructure and the refusal to perform controlled burns gives us lots of tasty forest fires.

Massive solar flares this summer get no press.

CO2 levels are down this year.  Another study offers substantive finding related to the lack of a link between CO2 and global temps.

Last July, we’ve learned that Arctic ice has hit substantial cycles worse than this one from a supreme Russian sample source.

We get this theme from Obama making some vague statement about a “hoax”.  What precisely is he talking about?

Here's a typical article aimed at confusing the issue.

The goal seems two-fold:

Confuse people about the phenomenon of "Climate Change" by referring to dissent about actual warming trend.

Re-Enforce the connection between the warming trend and rising CO2 levels, whether it exists or not.

"According to a recent report, climate change skepticism is funded by a few big industries, primarily the Koch brothers."

They somehow think we are stupid enough to buy into such a paradigm.  The assumption is that we somehow lack the intellectual capacity to negotiate the attempts by industry funded nonprofits to bullshit us.

There does indeed seem to be a lack of intellectual capacity.

This gross misconception of CO2 driven warming has found its base in the premise that people can't negotiate scientific data or examine the information themselves and instead need to be told what to think about what they are looking at.

Never before has so many parties weighed in on CO2 driven climate change with absolutely no look at the IPCC reports, CERN/CLOUD studies, or both sets of climate-gate emails and the figures they are wrestling with.

Set up Google alerts for "Climate Change" and "Global Warming" to get an idea of the massive propaganda campaign being foisted with this bait and switch technique.

For example, you'll only see feeble-minded Koch shills like Mueller paraded out with such fanfare.  Forget the recent defectors that went the other direction: Lindzen, Lovelock and Vahrenholdt.  No spot for them on "Democracy Now!"

Now they are beginning the sales pitch for geo-engineering.

This will be pushed along with carbon derivatives/taxes in a rush to implement policy regardless of where the science truly leads us. Years from now, it will turn out that they have been spraying us with similar chemicals for years and the excuse presented is how our benevolent, heroic, eugenicist, overseers had the good insight to spray us despite ourselves.

"The debate is over!"  Remember?

We have a slap on the wrist to BP for destroying the Gulf of Mexico's food supply and radioactive water continually being added to the Pacific.

What's on the agenda at the DNC?  Exactly.

Brings a whole new dimension to the term "ineffectual".

The recurring theme in the following article can be discovered everywhere:

"Can't you feel the heat?  Don't soil your pretty head with with information that could lead to some rudimentary level of critical analysis.  Trust us.  It's man-made.  Trust our experts..."





The Elephant We’re All Inside Of

ABC News
Bill Blakemore

Junk Journalism on Climate, or Too Big to Cover?
———–
Nature’s Edge Notebook #35

Observation, Analysis, Reflection, New Questions

A number of the world’s professional climate scientists are perplexed by — and in some cases furious with — American news directors.

“Malpractice!” is typical of the charges this reporter has heard highly respected climate experts level — privately, off the record — at my professional colleagues over the past few years.

Complaints include what seems to the scientists a willful omission of overwhelming evidence the new droughts and floods are worsened by man made global warming, and unquestioning repetition, gullible at best, of transparent anti-science propaganda credibly reported to be funded by fossil fuel interests and anti-regulation allies.

As scientific reports about the speedy advance and devastating impacts of man made global warming have grown steadily more alarming, surveys have shown most mainstream American news organizations covering it less and less over the past two years.

Even during this hot summer, when inescapable bad news about the warming climate from around the United States and the world has forced its way into main stream media coverage, it has usually been reported only in a reactive and literal event-coverage sort of way.

There’s been little of the persistent probing analysis and regular coverage scientists say is urgently needed for a grave planet-wide crisis — reporting of the kind surveys show there was much more of in mainstream coverage up until two years ago.

Why this decline in persistent coverage?

It seems unlikely to last; all responsibly sourced reports from around the world — “as solid as science ever gets,” say eminent climate scientists — suggest the increasing impacts will soon force news directors to offer more coverage and explanatory reporting to a public that will appreciate getting it.
It may be that many of our mainstream news directors are, in effect, in the final stages of getting their act together as they get ready to cover this unprecedented story.

Elements that have stalled American coverage appear to include a cynical disinformation and intimidation campaign — as reported in detail by a handful of professional journalists and academics including Steve Coll, Naomi Oreskes, Erik Conway, and Ross Gelbspan (as we’ve reported before on Nature’s Edge) paid for, so the reporting says, by multinational fossil fuel companies, often based in the United States, that are fighting a rear-guard action to prevent inevitable regulation on carbon emissions as long as possible.

‘A Crime Against Humanity’

A number of climate scientists have told this reporter they agree with those, including NASA scientist James Hansen, who charge fossil fuel CEOs are thus guilty of a “crime against humanity,” given the calamity that unregulated greenhouse emissions are quickly bringing on.

But there’s another aspect of the global warming story that is challenging and upsetting everyone — fossil fuel CEOs, environmental activists, presidents, high school teachers, their students, bus drivers, economists, cartoonists, chefs, Kansas wheat farmers and Chinese rice farmers, MIT philosophers, amateur chess players… and political strategists in every party.

That aspect is its scale.

At this point in reporting this story, this reporter feels it may be helpful to simply stop for a moment and focus briefly on this one, most obvious and unprecedented aspect of this story.
It may be psychologically helpful simply to name it — to recognize the full size and complexity of this problem.

One reason — though not an excuse — for journalistic hesitation on this story may well have been that, in its unprecedented immensity, it is simply so psychologically daunting.
This reporter would respectfully suggest that any reporter who hasn’t felt this hasn’t been paying attention.

And there is still hardly a day, after eight years covering it, that I don’t find myself being pulled once again back out of natural, even healthy, denial about it.

Psychologists Charles B. Strozier and Robert J. Lifton report finding what they call a sort of pragmatic “professional numbing” in several professions that deal with traumatic or frightening events or information.

The Elephant We’re All Inside Of… and a New 4th Category of News

Shading the earth could combat global warming: Study

Editor's Note: Why the insistence that Global Warming is driven by CO2 levels? Here is the sales pitch for geoengineering to offset the effects of "global warming". This will be pushed along with carbon derivatives/taxes in a rush to implement policy regardless of where the science truly leads us. Years from now, it will turn out that they have been spraying us with similar chemicals for years and the excuse presented is how our benevolent, heroic, eugenicist, overseers had the good insight to spray us despite ourselves. Years from now, they truth will leak out but, by then, it will be only so much paper.

eai

Transporting materials into the stratosphere that can reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth could lower the effects of global climate change, a new study has found.

Researchers from the US found that the basic technology to transport solar geoengineering materials in the atmosphere currently exists and could be assembled and implemented in a number of different forms for less than USD 5 billion a year.

Put into context, the cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions is currently estimated as roughly USD 200 to 2000 billion.

Currently, a technique of geoengineering called Solar radiation management seeks to reflect sunlight and thus reduce global warming.

It creates stratospheric sulfur aerosols but the study found that it was not a preferred strategy as reducing incident sunlight does nothing at all to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

It also did not address the issue of oceans acidification.

The researchers noted that other research has shown that the effects of solar radiation management are not uniform, and would cause different temperature and precipitation changes in different countries.

"As economists are beginning to explore the role of several types of geoengineering, it is important that a cost analysis of SRM is carried out. The basic feasibility of SRM with current technology is still being disputed and some political scientists and policy makers are concerned about unilateral action," co-author of the study, Professor Jay Apt, said in a statement.

In the study, the researchers, from Aurora Flight Sciences, Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University, performed an engineering cost analysis on six systems capable of delivering 1-5 million metric tonnes of material to altitudes of 18-30 km.

It included an existing aircraft, a new airplane designed to perform at altitudes up to 30 km, a new hybrid airship, rockets, guns and suspended pipes carrying gas or slurry to inject the particles into the atmosphere.

Based on existing research into solar radiation management, the researchers performed their cost analyses for systems that could deliver around one million tonnes of aerosols each year at an altitude between 18 and 25 km and between a latitude range of 30°N and 30°S.

The study concluded that using aircraft is easily within the current capabilities of aerospace engineering, manufacturing and operations.

The development of new, specialised aircraft appeared to be the cheapest option, with costs of around USD 1 to USD 2 billion a year; existing aircraft would be more expensive as they are not optimised for high altitudes and would need considerable and expensive modifications to do so.

The study was published in journal Environmental Research Letters.

New blockbuster paper finds man-made CO2 is not the driver of global warming

The Hockey Shtick

An important new paper published today in Global and Planetary Change finds that changes in CO2 follow rather than lead global air surface temperature and that "CO₂ released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO₂" The paper finds the "overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere," in other words, the opposite of claims by global warming alarmists that CO2 in the atmosphere drives land and ocean temperatures. Instead, just as in the ice cores, CO2 levels are found to be a lagging effect of ocean warming, not significantly related to man-made emissions, and not the driver of warming. Prior research has shown infrared radiation from greenhouse gases is incapable of warming the oceans, only shortwave radiation from the Sun is capable of penetrating and heating the oceans and thereby driving global surface temperatures. 

The highlights of the paper are:

► The overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere. 

► Changes in global atmospheric CO₂ are lagging about 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature. 

► Changes in global atmospheric CO₂ are lagging 9.5-10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. 

► Changes in global atmospheric CO₂ are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature. 

► Changes in ocean temperatures appear to explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO₂ since January 1980. 

► CO₂ released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO₂, and changes in atmospheric CO₂ are not tracking changes in human emissions.

Figure 1: Annual temperature change of global ocean temperatures, global surface temperature and atmospheric CO2 December 1981 - December 2011. (Blue is the sea surface, red is the global surface temperature, green is CO2 level in the atmosphere). We see that the change in ocean temperatures (blue) occur systematically before changes in CO2 (green).

The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature

• Ole Humlum^a, b, 
 
• Kjell Stordahl^c, 
 
• Jan-Erik Solheim^d

• ^a Department of Geosciences, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 1047 Blindern, N-0316 Oslo, Norway
• ^b Department of Geology, University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), P.O. Box 156, N-9171 Longyearbyen, Svalbard, Norway
• ^c Telenor Norway, Finance, N-1331 Fornebu, Norway
• ^d Department of Physics and Technology, University of Tromsø, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway

• http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gloplacha.2012.08.008, 
• 
  

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ABSTRACT

Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO₂ variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO₂, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO₂.In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets; 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO₂ data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO₂, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO₂ always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO₂ and temperature is found for CO₂ lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5-10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature. The correlation between changes in ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO₂ is high, but do not explain all observed changes.

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Highlights

► The overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO₂ are lagging about 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO₂ are lagging 9.5-10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO₂ are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature. ► Changes in ocean temperatures appear to explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO₂ since January 1980. ► CO₂ released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO₂, and changes in atmospheric CO₂ are not tracking changes in human emissions.