Here’s a vaguely heretical question that’s been with me for some time: Why is climate change (a better term than global warming) a bad thing? OK, so zones of possible habitation move and suchlike. Some species do worse, some do better, some just have move. Southern Europe gets more desert-y, Northern Europe gets more Mediterranean, oh wait no the Gulf Stream shuts down, or does it. Whatever actually happens, we know from the record that massive changes in all the variables aren’t anything new in the broader scheme of things. It’s been a rollercoaster ride for life as a whole ever since the Cambrian explosion.
And aren’t we supposed to have ‘adaptability’ as our special move? Isn’t that what enabled one particularly bright Rift Valley ape to take over the world? (pace the invertebrates/bacteria/whoever else wins on any specific measure)
Wasn’t so long ago that overpopulation was the big worry. Guess we won’t have to worry about that now, right?
Humans are some of the less vulnerable creatures on the earth with respect to climate change. It would take substantial change to affect us much personally, and if it got to that point human behaviors and laws would change to help correct the issue. Its probably better if it didn’t reach the point where humans were damaged, of course.
The problem currently is twofold: minor climatic change kills off numerous species of plants and animals for no good reason (for arbitrary effects of humanity) and the second more serious issue is that science really doesn’t understand the effects of global warming nor can exactly predict its development. So its a monkey in the gears and who knows what might happen. “Who knows what might happen” is not an acceptable position, especially when its correctable. We’re not looking to experiment with global warming out of a desire to “make humans adapt” or to “correct overpopulation”.
I don’t honestly really care about historical climactic change, at least as some kind of justification for CURRENT climactic change. I don’t take my cues from dinosaurs.
Now, the reason for this UAH update has been made public. One of the more important corrections that needs to be applied to these datasets is one for diurnal drift. The satellites are put in “sun-synchronous” orbits so that they will cross the equator at the same times and locations throughout their service lives. Any imperfection in this sun-synchronous timing will result in an east-west drift that will cause the satellite to measure temperatures at different times of the day. This will in turn cause a spurious warming or cooling in the trend. The NOAA-11 satellite, which operated from 1987 to 1993 had a particularly large diurnal drift correction. Last week a new paper by Mears and Wentz of RSS appeared in Science (Mears & Wentz, 2005) revealing that for some time now, Spencer and Christy have been applying the NOAA-11 diurnal drift correction to their trend calculations with the wrong sign! They’ve been treating that drift as introducing a spurious warming when in fact, it introduces a spurious cooling. Rerunning their analysis with the proper diurnal correction for NOAA-11 alone increased their TLT trend by almost 50 percent.
In other words, the entire controversy over surface vs. troposphere temperature trends, and with it the only potentially credible skeptic argument, boils down to…. a math error!
