As crops are months behind planting schedule because of the cold weather.
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Tai-Chi Policy 
You never know….warming can lead to increased variability, which can often cause late springs. Changes in wind and ocean currents can also cause regional cooling. At the very least, a cold spring does not disprove climate change.
I’d love you to come check out my blog, which has to do exclusively with climate change, especially how it relates to ideas such as credibility and risk management. Link on my username. Thanks!
Yes, but on the other hand, the sun’s showing unexpectedly low activity, which would explain the cool temperatures, as well as the warmer temperatures we had a few years back. In fact, the scientists who have claimed that the entire effect was from solar activity and NOT from AGW, or even GW, have predicted that these next several years would be cool ones. So if their prediction is the one coming true, what does that tell you about the relative merits of the theories?
Here’s a quick article that explains how we know it’s greenhouse-gas induced:
Click to access Pew%20Center_Global%20Fingerprints_3.06.pdf
The sun certainly has an effect on our climate, but it’s not the driving force right now. Patterns we’re observing, such as nights warming as fast as days, winter warming as fast as summer, the upper atmosphere cooling while the lower atmosphere warms, and the poles warming faster than the equator are all signs of warming due to greenhouse gases.
And that study is out of date in several key areas. Antarctic ice only in balance? No, Antarctic ice had record coverage in the past couple of years. Meanwhile, they ignore that glacier fields are actually growing in just as many locations as they’re retreating, and completely overlook that disregard the fact that it is drought, not heat, that is responsible for most of the glacier fields that are in retreat.
I could go on, but my main point is that solar cycles are one of the main causes of weather variability, and are being disregarded as an effect by many global warming scientists, while they explain much of what is currently going on with our climate. Meanwhile, global warming is a theory that even the overly optimistic IPCC report claimed would be hardly observable for about a hundred years, and yet every little current effect is blamed on global warming, from Katrina (which all the hurricane experts said had nothing whatsoever to do with global warming) to every other doom-mongering scenario.
Solar cycles are certainly a cause of weather variability. But they are short-term, not long-term. There is no sort of upward or downward trend they are following that could be changing the energy balance of the Earth.
When you say the Antarctic ice had record coverage, do you mean that it covered the widest area? Surface area doesn’t really give an account of energy balance. You have to look at the overall volume of the ice, especially the old-age ice (there’s probably a more technical term out there….) to see what the changes are. The very surface gives no indication.
Many of the growing glaciers are also due to moisture changes. Areas that were previously too cold for the air to hold precipitation have now warmed up enough for some snow to fall. But the temperatures are still cold enough for the snow to stay frozen, so it builds up and the glaciers advance.
Where in the IPCC report did they claim the warming would be unobservable for 100 years?
Finally, I think you’re confusing the scientists with the enviro-nuts who dress up as polar bears and protest. It is not possible to tie an event like Katrina to global warming – nobody can prove it wouldn’t have happened otherwise. People who tell you otherwise are just trying to lobby. However, the probablility of such an event goes way up with warming. Katrina is an example of what we might expect with warming temperatures, even if that was not the cause.
The other point is that direct observation shows that the sun is at a particularly low output right now, and has been at some interesting points in its solar cycles in recent years. Even the most die hard global warming scientist cannot refute that fact, and also should not refute that solar energy affects our weather, as it is in fact a key point in the entire global warming theory! Since that is the case, shouldn’t research be done to clarify which effects, and what percentage of them, are actually caused by solar cycles? To deny that the sun is having an effect on the local weather seems very naive and short-sighted.
And you’re talking about effects such as various parts of the planet warming? What sort of climate news have you been reading for the past several years? Apart from North America, most of the world has been experiencing record cold for the past year or two.
“Solar cycles are certainly a cause of weather variability. But they are short-term, not long-term”
Ah, that’s where the definition gets a bit blurry. Solar cycles effect weather both on a year by year sort of scale, which account for the warm climate we had a couple of years ago and the cool climate we have this year and for the next several years, and also on a decades long basis (as solar cycles are about 11 years long, and also occur in sets of about 3), which account for the 70s being cool, the late 90s and early 2000s and the 1930s being the warmest years on recent record to date (You do know that the warmest year was 1938, not 2002, right?), even though that was before the bulk of our greenhouse gas release.
Nobody is denying the fact that solar energy has an effect on local weather. But climatology is the study of long-term trends, not daily or yearly weather. A summary of the radiative forcings can be found on page 4 of this report: http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf
The past year or two have been slightly cooler, but nowhere near record-breaking (regionally perhaps – I’d still be interested to know where, and which records were broken – but not globally, which is what matters in the energy balance of the Earth). Two years is still considered to be weather, and natural variability – it simply isn’t long enough to change conclusions of long-term trends.
The past few years were cooler mainly due to La Nina, as well as the solar minimum. Both of those factors are expected to reverse shortly. As you can see here – http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A.lrg.gif – 2008 (the last year on the graph) was slightly cooler than the previous years (I believe it’s the 10th or 11th warmest year on record?) but when you look at the overall picture, smoothing out the bumps and oscillations which are inevitable, the trend is definitely upward. A great video to show how GISS, and similar graphical data, needs long-term trend lines and conclusions is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y15UGhhRd6M
Keep in mind that the scientists of the world have, no doubt, considered all of these objections, and addressed them in relation to climate change. These are smart people. But they’re still saying that climate change is real, anthropogenic, and greenhouse-gas induced – over 97% of publishing climatologists agree with that conclusion (Doran and Zimmerman, 2009) and no professional scientific organization in the world refutes it. What does that tell you?
They could be right. They could be ignorant. Or they could be lying.
Which of these three outcomes seems most likely?
How sure are you? What if you were wrong?
Are you willing to gamble that the entire scientific community is incompetent or lying?
Are you willing to bet your life, your civilization, and your species on it?
Because that’s we might be doing, if we ignore this problem.
You can read more about sunspots here: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
They certainly have been accounted for by scientists when they look at temperature data (perhaps you’re right, they’re sort of long-term, but they always balance out) and they cannot explain the current warming by themselves. I’d be interested to see a peer-reviewed article that argued otherwise.
The warmest year on record was 2005. Where are you getting your data?
Sorry, one more :) I found another video which relates to sunspots and temperature. The correlation works pretty well until about 1980. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Sf_UIQYc20 The sunspot part starts at about 2:40, but the whole video is good.
Here: http://prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/08-14-2007/0004645546&EDATE=
That’s the NASA press release that explains the error in their data. It was a bug in their system, actually caused by y2k – one of the few places y2k was actually a bug: http://www.dailytech.com/Blogger+finds+Y2K+bug+in+NASA+Climate+Data/article8383.htm
As for the record cold, you are right that I only have local effects, not any global effect, so I won’t bother linking them. However, they were local effects for pretty large areas, such as entire continents in the southern hemisphere.
“They could be right. They could be ignorant. Or they could be lying.”
They could be also be wrong. You’re treating science as a religion, it’s not. Less than 97% of publishing climatologists agree, from studies I’ve seen, but science isn’t a democracy. It’s not how many votes you have, but who’s right that is important. There are many significant climatologists who disagree with the standard opinion as well.
Unfortunately, I am at work currently and so do not have the name of the IPCC report that lists their prediction for global trends, regardless, the significant effects from global warming are several hundred years off. Mild global warming (anything up to about a degree or so) is even projected to be helpful in some ways, as it helps us consume less fuel in winter, and have more success with our agriculture.
Am I willing to bet my life, civilization, and species on it? I’m not denying that global warming is an effect that we need to keep an eye on through the future, but I know that the earth has warmed before during certain periods (such as the medieval warm period) and we still don’t have a good understanding of why, or how it cooled back down – or of many of the natural processes that cause the earth to warm and cool (such as the massive release of methane from Siberian permafrost melting, an effect that absolutely dwarfs our own efforts). We also have no idea which geoengineering efforts would act to reverse, rather than delay, the actual effects of whatever global environmental footprint we’ve had. Meanwhile, every dollar we spend on global warming is a dollar we’re not spending fighting poverty, malaria, corruption, drinking water issues, and a whole host of other issues which save human lives directly, right now. The 2000 Copenhagen consensus had the best scientists of every issue (including from the IPCC) present their best and worst case scenarios for each millenium issue, and the economists on the panel concluded that every dollar spent fighting malaria returned $7 to the world economy in 50 years, which could then be spent on whatever issue was a priority, while every dollar invested in global warming wouldn’t even return on its investment for 200 years. An analysis which is summarized excellently in this book: