Next decade 'may see no warming'

[[R_H]]

Next decade 'may see no warming'

The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase, scientists have predicted.

A new computer model developed by German researchers, reported in the journal Nature, suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming.

However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020, they say.

Other climate scientists have welcomed the research, saying it may help societies plan better for the future.

The key to the new prediction is the natural cycle of ocean temperatures called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), which is closely related to the warm currents that bring heat from the tropics to the shores of Europe.

The cause of the oscillation is not well understood, but the cycle appears to come round about every 60 to 70 years.

It may partly explain why temperatures rose in the early years of the last century before beginning to cool in the 1940s.

"One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)," said Noel Keenlyside from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University.

His group's projection diverges from other computer models only for about 15-20 years; after that, the curves come back together and temperatures rise.

"In the long term, radiative forcing (the Earth's energy balance) dominates. But it's important for policymakers to realise the pattern," he told BBC News.

Deep patterns

Modelling of climatic events in the oceans is difficult, simply because there is relatively little data on some of the key processes, such as the meridional overturning circulation (MOC) - sometimes erroneously known as the Gulf Stream - which carries heat northwards in the Atlantic.

Only within the last few years have researchers begun systematically deploying mobile floats and tethered buoys that will, in time, tell us how this circulation is changing.

As a substitute for direct measurements of the MOC, the Kiel team used data going back 50 years from the Labrador Sea, where warm water gives up its heat to the atmosphere and sinks, before returning southward lower in the ocean.

Combining this ocean data with established models of global warming, they were able to generate a stream of model results that mimicked well temperatures observed in the recent past over the north Atlantic, western Europe and North America.

Looking forward, the model projects a weakening of the MOC and a resulting cooling of north Atlantic waters, which will act to keep temperatures in check around the world, much as the warming and cooling associated with El Nino and La Nina in the Pacific bring global consequences.

"We have to take into account that there are uncertainties in our model; but it does suggest a plateauing of temperatures, and then a continued rise," said Dr Keenlyside.

'No distraction'

The projection does not come as a surprise to climate scientists, though it may to a public that has perhaps become used to the idea that the rapid temperature rises seen through the 1990s are a permanent phenomenon.

"We've always known that the climate varies naturally from year to year and decade to decade," said Richard Wood from the UK's Hadley Centre, who reviewed the new research for Nature.

"We expect man-made global warming to be superimposed on those natural variations; and this kind of research is important to make sure we don't get distracted from the longer term changes that will happen in the climate (as a result of greenhouse gas emissions)."

Dr Wood cautions that this kind of modelling is in its infancy; and once data can be brought directly from the Atlantic depths, that may change the view of how the AMO works and what it means for the global climate.

As with the unusually cold weather seen recently in much of the northern hemisphere - linked to La Nina conditions - he emphasises that even if the Kiel model proves correct, it is not an indication that the longer-term climate projections of the IPCC and many other institutions are wrong.

Michael Schlesinger, the US scientist who characterised the AMO in 1994, described the new model as "very exciting".

"No doubt we need to have more data from the deep ocean, and we don't have that at present," the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researcher told BBC News.

"But imagine the payoff of knowing with some certainty what the next 10 years hold in terms of temperature and precipitation - the economic impacts of that would be significant."

[SirNitram]

The deniers will promptly use this to claim it's a sham, just as idiots claim SARS and Avian Flu was a sham because we got lucky.

[FireNexus]

My dad did exactly that just this morning.

[Mayabird]

I said it on LA, and I'll explain here. There's a huge reservoir of cold water in the deep ocean basins dating back to the last Ice Ages. It takes a long time for water to get down there, and a long time for it to all get back up. What this article is saying is that the deep ocean circulation that reaches these reservoirs will be increasing, bringing up this cold water which may serve to counterbalance warming for a little bit.

Of course, that means we'll be using up this reservoir of cold, and once it's gone because today's warm water has reached the bottom, it won't be back until Earth has another Ice Age or two. It also means that the deep ocean will become a reservoir of warmer waters, creating a lag in global warming that would continue to keep temperatures higher even if we're able to get CO2 and methane levels back down because that heat would keep coming back up.

It's like being in a room that's heating up, and then someone opens the door to an adjacent cold room. It might seem that the room is not getting hotter even though you're still producing the same amount of heat (or for Earth, still trapping the heat), but once the cold room heats up then it's right back to warming again.

I also imagined that this is the climate change equivalent of a scientist saying that Archaeopteryx probably isn't the ancestor of modern birds or a real "missing link" and then having some little dumbass Creationist over to the side crowing that this means that evolution isn't real. And the more the scientist tries to explain that this issue is irrelevant to the big overarching theory, the more idiot guy starts yelling at the fence-sitting idiots that it's all false, evolution is a scam, and the evil scientists are trying to pull a fast one on them for some mysterious and nefarious reason.

[Darth Wong]

My dad did exactly that just this morning.

Your father is a moron. I'm so sick of people who think they understand complex scientific models based on a few sound bites. I'll defend scientific models from some of the childish and stupid attacks I see on them, but even though I'm more qualified than the vast majority of the population, this doesn't mean I actually think I have a professional working grasp of them. That I leave to the people specializing in that field. All I claim to have is enough knowledge to see that these kinds of attacks are nonsense.

[Lord MJ]

My dad did exactly that just this morning.

Your father is a moron. I'm so sick of people who think they understand complex scientific models based on a few sound bites. I'll defend scientific models from some of the childish and stupid attacks I see on them, but even though I'm more qualified than the vast majority of the population, this doesn't mean I actually think I have a professional working grasp of them. That I leave to the people specializing in that field. All I claim to have is enough knowledge to see that these kinds of attacks are nonsense.

It would be nice to leave the evaluations of global warming to the scientists. But we live in a culture where people don't like to bow down to scientists. Furthermore I've noticed situations where people are asking "How is there Global Warming, when the Earth is geting colder?" When someone tries to explain the dynamics of weather patterns, etc to them their attitude is "LaLaLa Science Bullshit, LaLaLa." Their attitude is that global warming is a left wing environmentalist political bite, and that scientists "explaining" that the earth is warming up despite cooler temperatures is just an example of a liberal spouting BS to support their political position.

Furthermore in my case, the whole "leave it to the scientists that know what they are talking about" doesn't work since I have debated with alums of Georgia Tech with engineering and science degrees and implying to them that they don't understand the science produces a how shall we say "hostile" reaction on their part.

[Darth Wong]

I don't know how good the engineering and science programs at Georgia Tech are. Standards vary wildly. What I do know is that anyone with a decent science education should know that in a complex environmental system with an enormous thermal capacitance, it would be silly to assume that a gradual long-term heating process should produce a perfectly linear temperature increase.

Especially since "temperature increase" for us means an increase in the atmospheric temperature, which is the only temperature that we care about. But the atmosphere is only part of the system, not the whole system. If they could realize that when they say "temperature", they are only talking about the temperature of one part of a complex system, maybe they could pull their heads out of their asses about this.

[Lord MJ]

I don't know how good the engineering and science programs at Georgia Tech are. Standards vary wildly. What I do know is that anyone with a decent science education should know that in a complex environmental system with an enormous thermal capacitance, it would be silly to assume that a gradual long-term heating process should produce a perfectly linear temperature increase.

Especially since "temperature increase" for us means an increase in the atmospheric temperature, which is the only temperature that we care about. But the atmosphere is only part of the system, not the whole system. If they could realize that when they say "temperature", they are only talking about the temperature of one part of a complex system, maybe they could pull their heads out of their asses about this.

Well from what I understand most of their programs rank among the tops of the world, top 50 at least with some in the top 10.

But I don't think the reason for this hostility to global warming is the quality of science education. The reason is that a large number of the alumni of Tech are conservative republicans. And with conservative republicans, Global warming is a dirty word. What makes it worse is that since they do have scientific degrees they can appeal to their own authority in their attempts to debunk global warming.

I had someone tell me, "I'm an engineer and based on my experience I can't in good conscience say that man made global warming is real. There is no evidence to support it."

[Darth Wong]

Well from what I understand most of their programs rank among the tops of the world, top 50 at least with some in the top 10.

Sounds to me like you've been buying into some school pep talk bullshit. There really isn't any university on Earth for which you can say that "most" of their programs rank so highly. Even the most celebrated universities in the world have their strong suits and their weak ones.

But I don't think the reason for this hostility to global warming is the quality of science education. The reason is that a large number of the alumni of Tech are conservative republicans. And with conservative republicans, Global warming is a dirty word. What makes it worse is that since they do have scientific degrees they can appeal to their own authority in their attempts to debunk global warming.

Well, if you don't have your own background in this field, you are indeed somewhat handicapped in any debate about the subject. At best, you can claim to have done "self-study" on the subject, and quite frankly, people with legitimate educations in a field are generally not inclined to even listen to someone who has Googled himself to glory. It may be that they're not even really paying attention to anything you're saying.

I had someone tell me, "I'm an engineer and based on my experience I can't in good conscience say that man made global warming is real. There is no evidence to support it."

I suspect that if I were to talk to the guy, I'd be able to draw him into a much better debate than you would, simply because he would be forced to accept that my science-related points are based on something other than pure Googling.

[Lord MJ]

Sounds to me like you've been buying into some school pep talk bullshit. There really isn't any university on Earth for which you can say that "most" of their programs rank so highly. Even the most celebrated universities in the world have their strong suits and their weak ones.

Well I need to look at the latest rankings, but I think that the engineering school is the most highly regarded and has the most highly ranked programs at tech with most in the top 50s at least. (probably higher when you think about how many big well regarded engineering schools there are in the US, a much more limited number than other disciplines.) The general science I would say is "decent" in that you can be assured that you have a good scientific education but there are obviously many better schools as far as the sciences go. Also all the rankings I've seen are based on the US and not the world, so obviously the world rankings will differ significantly.

Well, if you don't have your own background in this field, you are indeed somewhat handicapped in any debate about the subject. At best, you can claim to have done "self-study" on the subject, and quite frankly, people with legitimate educations in a field are generally not inclined to even listen to someone who has Googled himself to glory. It may be that they're not even really paying attention to anything you're saying.

You may be right, but I'm afraid the situation is even worse since I've had similar arguments with the same group of people regarding creationism and intelligent design which is also a very political topic. While the number of people that support creation theory is less than the number of people that oppose the idea of global warming, the vitrol is every bit as harsh given that we're talking about people's religions here. One day on a discussion board for the alumni I had the bright idea to say "I can't believe that anyone could get a degree from this school and not only not believe in evolution, but actually believe in creation theory." Well lets just say that wasn't well received. Even the people that were on the evolution side jumped on me for saying that.

This of course can be explained away both by the religious scientist phenomenon, and the fact that well we are talking about the American south here. If you come in a creationist it is likely that you will exit a creationist.

I suspect that if I were to talk to the guy, I'd be able to draw him into a much better debate than you would, simply because he would be forced to accept that my science-related points are based on something other than pure Googling.

Conceded.

I would guess that the majority of people that I've talked to only had bachelor's degrees, doubt many of them had higher level degrees. If that's even relevant. I was a computer science major so I really have no idea of the depth of education that a bachelors in most engineering subjects (other than a high level of electrical and computer engineering) confers.

[Darth Wong]

I can't speak to a modern bachelor's degree. It's been 15 years since I got mine, and times have changed over that period. When I graduated, it was quite normal to get a Bachelor's degree and then be considered well-qualified unless you wanted to go into research work. Nowadays, it seems like everyone needs to get a Master's degree in order to be taken seriously. I get the distinct and disquieting impression that rampant credentialism has eroded the standards across the board, right across North America.

I've read a few articles on the trend, and there have been some major changes over the last 15 years, particularly with respect to fail rates. As the Coddled Generation entered the university system, they and their well-off parents wanted the system to continue coddling them, and they were willing to use their money to pressure the schools into honouring this expectation. I must confess that I have a pretty pessimistic outlook about current education trends. We seem to be grooming a generation of well-credentialed idiots.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

I can't speak to a modern bachelor's degree. It's been 15 years since I got mine, and times have changed over that period. When I graduated, it was quite normal to get a Bachelor's degree and then be considered well-qualified unless you wanted to go into research work. Nowadays, it seems like everyone needs to get a Master's degree in order to be taken seriously. I get the distinct and disquieting impression that rampant credentialism has eroded the standards across the board, right across North America.

I've read a few articles on the trend, and there have been some major changes over the last 15 years, particularly with respect to fail rates. As the Coddled Generation entered the university system, they and their well-off parents wanted the system to continue coddling them, and they were willing to use their money to pressure the schools into honouring this expectation. I must confess that I have a pretty pessimistic outlook about current education trends. We seem to be grooming a generation of well-credentialed idiots.

Having no research aspirations I nonetheless find myself with the ambition to gain an Engineer's Degree, midway between a Masters and a Doctorate in the United States, which is considered the highest point in a practicing engineer's education--I suspect that right there is a rather big difference from 15 years ago. Who needed it, before? Now it seems, well, a Masters is necessary, certainly, but even more than that ideal to be as competitive as possible in the workplace.

That said, Amy went to and graduated from Georgia Tech, and in her memory there were a few of these mocked Republican students who denied things in class (always at least one), but the teachers were excellent and the school maintained itself with utterly brutal rigor.

[Gil Hamilton]

I can't speak to a modern bachelor's degree. It's been 15 years since I got mine, and times have changed over that period. When I graduated, it was quite normal to get a Bachelor's degree and then be considered well-qualified unless you wanted to go into research work. Nowadays, it seems like everyone needs to get a Master's degree in order to be taken seriously. I get the distinct and disquieting impression that rampant credentialism has eroded the standards across the board, right across North America.

I've read a few articles on the trend, and there have been some major changes over the last 15 years, particularly with respect to fail rates. As the Coddled Generation entered the university system, they and their well-off parents wanted the system to continue coddling them, and they were willing to use their money to pressure the schools into honouring this expectation. I must confess that I have a pretty pessimistic outlook about current education trends. We seem to be grooming a generation of well-credentialed idiots.

This is pretty much true. On top of it, people pursue Master's not because it makes them any more qualified for a job (half the time, they get a job and have to be immediately retrained in order to do it, which it really doesn't matter what letters you have), but because you are automatically paid more.

That's something that kind of bothers me that when I get my B.S. in Chemistry next yet, unless I've networked enough and someone gives me a large break, my diploma is pretty much worth the paper its printed on unless I go to graduate school... at which point my diploma is worth only slightly more than that unless I've networked and someone gives me a break. It is SOMEWHAT more pressing to get your Masters in Chemistry because "Chemistry" is a term so broad that it is virtually meaningless as to what you are doing, so going to graduate school and spending another couple years specializing and researching helps, but half of it really is just having the piece of paper to get your foot in the door at a certain point. Any outfit that requires chemists is going to do it there way and doesn't expect you to be specifically trained, just educated so you can be trained in their procedures and labwork. I've been that you get good and become an expert by working, not by sitting courses at school, no matter how good the school.

[Darth Wong]

The biggest problem is that none of the educational institutions have an incentive to do anything about it. They get more money the longer you're in school, after all.

The impetus for change has to come from parents and industry, and neither seems interested. Industry doesn't care whether it took someone 7 years to get the education that people used to get in 4 or 5. It only makes them more desperate for a job, to pay back their even larger student loans. That makes them easier to intimidate. And parents are too fucking stupid to realize what they're doing to their own kids when they harangue teachers rather than children for bad grades.

[Mayabird]

This of course can be explained away both by the religious scientist phenomenon, and the fact that well we are talking about the American south here. If you come in a creationist it is likely that you will exit a creationist.

Biology graduate here, and biologists are known for being the most atheistic of all the scientists (something like 90% are atheists, probably because biologists are forced to see just how messed up living things are, how very many stupid things can go wrong, and if you're not in denial there's a very nifty and elegant explanation for all of it called evolution that handles everything without needing extraneous parts, like a supernatural idiot who breaks Vitamin C synthesizing genes in humans so we can get scurvy, unlike most other mammals, and the whole vestibular system. Now where was I?)

But we're still talking about the South here, where much of the student body comes from, so while the professors for the most part aren't believers (heck, the first sponsor of the Campus Atheists club, which I helped start in a small way, was a biology prof) much of the student body comes in as believers. Remember my story about how my high school biology teacher told my class that anyone who doesn't believe in literal Genesis goes to hell. That's the kind of people who enter. Probably a lot have a crisis of faith or come to their senses, but there will be twerps like the ones in my classes who utterly refuse to see it, and even if they barely squeak by in their classes, they still get a degree. It pains me to think that Idiot Boy (also a jackass who picked on the Serbian prof and crowed when she couldn't answer one of his questions immediately - English wasn't her first language. It probably wasn't even her second language. Of course she has trouble answering! ) in my evolution class probably has a B.S. in biology now, and is using it for authority when he makes his stupid claims about evolution being false.

And this is biology, where it's painfully obvious (we did experiments in intro bio labs, for goodness sakes!) and you really have to work hard to keep from seeing the logic. Engineers can probably get away with not seeing anything about how messed up the human body, the genome, and so on is and live in comfortable denial about evolution. It doesn't effect their ability to work on, say, circuits, and they won't have to take biology anyway - physics and chemistry, yes, but not biology.

And even if they did get some exposure, a lot of religious people, especially the fundamentalists, have a huge capacity for double-think so long as it doesn't impinge on them every day. They could be designing insulation systems and never transfer the thought to global warming because they don't want to believe it. [I do wonder if there are any systems engineers that run evolutionary algorithms while still being creationists. That'd just crack me up. And make me cry on the inside.]

The evolution deniers that go to medical school and become doctors scare me the most, but that's a story for another day. A true story that makes me cry on the inside, or did, until I fled from Georgia.


As for Georgia Tech, yeah, the engineering programs are highly regarded, the sciences are not great but decent, don't know where architecture ranks, the liberal arts programs are small and suck but nobody cares about them because they're all fake majors anyway and everyone knows it, and then there's management where all the athletes and people who can't cope in real majors go. (As the saying goes, "E-mag, re-mag, three-mag, D-mag, oh-my-god-why-me-mag, management." Did they have that while you were in school, MJ?)

I did sometimes wonder about the rigor, though. Flunkout rates were dropping over the years. The Powers That Be claimed it was because they were getting better quality students. This could be, if they had a bigger pool of applicants, so they could get good students from as far away as Singapore (my freshman roommate was from there) instead of just having to fill the slots with the best that Georgia has to offer. It could also be that a lot of them were going to management instead of flunking out. Maybe a combination. And how much of the difficulty was actually hard courses and not just really crappy professors? I had several astoundingly bad professors in engineering before I changed majors. Not only could they not teach, but they didn't want to, and even told us so. I don't know if I learned anything in those courses.

There were also things like the intro Physics courses where several professors had their own lectures, but everybody took the same test. Different lectures under different professors came back with quite different average GPAs. And there was always talk about how some professors are better lecturers/teachers/people than others. I wasn't there, so I wouldn't know if it was *harder* back in the day, but they had better professors.

[madd0ct0r]

So global warming largely delayed for up to 15-20years?

Fantastic. We'll have a chance to get sorted out. Hopefully Peak oil will have passed and so renewables will be starting to roll out.

Even if the world defaults back to coal (quite likely), it still gives us enough time to start bring current research into mass production.

It also means that the current generation of leaders will have moved on. There are less GW absolute - deniers as you get closer to 18.
At least, I really, really hope so.

[FireNexus]

My dad did exactly that just this morning.

Your father is a moron. I'm so sick of people who think they understand complex scientific models based on a few sound bites. I'll defend scientific models from some of the childish and stupid attacks I see on them, but even though I'm more qualified than the vast majority of the population, this doesn't mean I actually think I have a professional working grasp of them. That I leave to the people specializing in that field. All I claim to have is enough knowledge to see that these kinds of attacks are nonsense.

I completely agree with you. I tried once to use the analogy of an auto mechanic, and having ten of them look at your vehicle and tell you your brake rotors are warped and need to be fixed. The whole "don't listen to the scientists" attitude is like ignoring them and continuing to ride your brakes until they finally fail.

I can't remember his exact response, but it was definitely stupid.

[Erik von Nein]

Oh, great. There goes my field of research. Aside from the deep sea vents in the world this is totally going to destroy almost all life at that depth.