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Speaking of funny climate stories, did you hear this one?

NASA loses it's rubber ducks

Do you remember that one? NASA dropped a couple hundred rubber ducks into the moulins of a Greenland glacier. The idea was as the glacier melted the ducks would appear floating in the bay, and NASA could then go "Ahaaa..."

Problem is, it didn't happen. They can't find the ducks. If you can somehow go up there, and find one though it worth a 100 bucks a bird.

   

you mean Encana? one of the David Suzuki Foundation contributors.

   

   

I found this to be an interesting coincidence...

   

I'll tell you what though if you'd like to consider whether or not this last cooling year matters, or whether it's possible it may indicate the start of something read this...

Pacific Decadal Oscillation

In particular this bit...



OK now look at that graph again. See where the temperatures start to rise, level, and fall? PDO anybody? The PDO switched into it's cold phase last year. Satellite imagery shows this.

Here's a link to the theory on what that might mean for the next 30 years or so. The two temperature rising trends you see in that graph took place during 2 previous warm phases of the PDO. What a current cool PDO might do under a quiet sun we don't really know yet. We can guess though.

So far with CO2 versus PDO, PDO remains the champ.

   

Except the PDO does not explain the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmpsphere. If this is just a cyclical PDO thing as has presumably gone on for millenia, then the steady state carbon dioxide concentration pattern would be about the same. But evidence suggests we have very high CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere right now, higher than they have been in the past 400,000 years.

   

Check this one out Zip. Tell me what you think.

CO2 Temperature Link

I'm not buying it myself, which may seem odd, because it's from my side of the argument.

The guy claims he can show a 9 month lag between temperatures, and CO2 fluctuations. The data he uses for support seems kind of iffy to me though, and it reminds me of the thing one sees the other side do all the time where they use theoretical concepts to support the original theory rather than the data, like that recent one where the guy uses mathematical adjustments to show an Antarctic warming in spite of the fact the raw data doesn't show that, or using wind shear to show a GHG fingerprint satellite readings don't show, or the theory that although Temps force CO2 over the long scale CO2 then takes over the forcing, in spite of the fact there doesn't seem to be any real data showing that.

Oh, but anyway, if the guy was right, maybe you could show a PDO/CO2 connection. I don't know. I'm not sure it matters myself.

For me it's more like no, we don't see a PDO connection to the steady rise in CO2 over the last half of the 20th century, and the first part of this one, but that actually supports the idea CO2 is pretty lame as a forcer of temperatures whereas the PDO connection to temperatures is obvious.

Temps drop from the 40s to the 70s, yet CO2 rises. Temps level, then drop over the last ten years, still C02 continues to rise. So where's the CO2 temperature connection? On the other hand the PDO warm and cool phases correlate with rises and falls in temperature.

Correlation does not prove cause, of course, but it does possibly imply some sort of connection that needs to be looked at before something which does not immediately show itself to be connected, such as CO2. Or at least that's what I think.

   

I took a look, and to tell you the truth, I just don't have the time to really take it all in right now. I'll take a closer look at it through out the holidays. I think the CO2 is teh crux of the issue for me. In my simple mind, if there's more CO2 there should be higher temperatures, by virtue of the radiative properties of CO2, all other things being equal. The problem wiht my point of view, of course, is that all other things are not equal and everything affects everything else. There's positive feedback (the oceans release more CO2 as they warm) and negative feedback (more CO2 means more plant productivity and thus more CO2 demand). And then there's these cycles within cycles within cycles.

I would expect the PDO to correlate with temperatures. It's a large scale event with important impacts on climate. The CO2 forcing signal would get lost in that on a short time scale.

   

I'm thinking that CO2 has far less impact on climate (at least in the concentrations we've seen in the past 20,000 years) than some people want it to have.

   

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