Tipsy From Tipping Points

Remember how every year is a "tipping point" with global warming? The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has put together a list of just a few of them:

  • "Global Warming Tipping Point Close?"--headline, ClimateArk.com, Jan. 27, 2004
  • "Warming Hits 'Tipping Point' "--headline, Guardian, Aug. 11, 2005
  • "Earth at the Tipping Point: Global Warming Heats Up"--headline, Time, March 26, 2006
  • "Global Warming 'Tipping Points' Reached, Scientist Says"--headline,NationalGeographic.com, Dec. 14, 2007
  • "Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near on Global Warming"--headline, Puffington Host, June 23, 2008
  • "Global Warming: Those Tipping Points Are Closer Than You Think"--headline, WSJ.com, April 29, 2009
  • "Have We Reached the Tipping Point for Planet Earth?"--video title, StudioTalk.tv, May 11, 2010
  • "Must-Read Hansen and Sato Paper: We Are at a Climate Tipping Point That, Once Crossed, Enables Multi-Meter Sea Level Rise This Century"--headline, ThinkProgress.org, Jan. 20, 2011
  • "Earth: Have We Reached an Environmental Tipping Point?"--headline, BBC website, June 15, 2012
  • "In spite of the continued released [sic] of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it's an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point."--Al Gore, interview with Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2013

As far as I know, the earliest reference to global warming "tipping points" was in 1989. I did Google and Bing searches yesterday evening and there are more than one hundred alleged tipping points over the last 20 years.

Take, for example, the December, 2007, tipping point reference from National Geographic. Here are world temperatures (the same ones used by Al Gore's friends at the IPCC) since 2000:
See any accelerating upward trend since January, 2008?

Plus, there is no upward temperature trend (actually, it is downward) since we passed 400 ppm in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It, too, was supposed to produce an acceleration in the rate of warming.


This is ridiculous. 

By any definition of the scientific method of advancing a hypothesis (i.e., a given tipping point exists) and measuring the results (lack of the predicted acceleration of warming) the tipping point hypothesis is falsified. 

Global warming, more and more, has become a matter of 'faith,' not science.

"I may frequently be wrong, but am never in doubt."
        -- Sir George Jessel

Comments


  1. Average global temperature history since 1975 is like a hill. We went up the hill from 1975 to 2001 where the average global temperature trend reached a plateau (per the average of the five government agencies that publicly report average global temperature anomalies). The average global temperature trend since 2001 has been flat to slightly declining but is on the plateau at the top of the hill. Claiming that the hill is highest at its top is not very profound. The temperature trend has started to decline but the decline will be slow; about 0.1 K per decade for the planet, approximately twice that fast for land areas.

    A licensed mechanical engineer (retired) who has been researching this issue (unfunded) for 6 years, and in the process discovered what actually caused global warming and why it ended, has four papers on the web that you may find of interest. They provide some eye-opening insight on the cause of change to average global temperature and why it has stopped warming. The papers are straight-forward calculations (not just theory) using readily available data up to May, 2013.

    The first one is 'Global warming made simple' at http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com It shows, with simple thermal radiation calculations, how a tiny change in the amount of low-altitude clouds could account for half of the average global temperature change in the 20th century, and what could have caused that tiny cloud change. (The other half of the temperature change is from net average natural ocean oscillation which is dominated by the PDO)

    The second paper is 'Natural Climate change has been hiding in plain sight' at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html . This paper presents a simple equation that, using a single external forcing, calculates average global temperatures since they have been accurately measured world wide (about 1895) with an accuracy of 90%, irrespective of whether the influence of CO2 is included or not. The equation uses a proxy which is the time-integral of sunspot numbers (the external forcing). A graph is included which shows the calculated trajectory overlaid on measurements.

    Change to the level of atmospheric CO2 has had no significant effect on average global temperature.

    The time-integral of sunspot numbers since 1610 which is shown at http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/01/blog-post_23.html corroborates the significance of this factor.

    A third paper, ‘The End of Global Warming’ at http://endofgw.blogspot.com/ expands recent (since 1996) measurements and includes a graph showing the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising average global temperature.

    The fourth paper http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com/ exposes some of the mistakes that have been made by the ‘Consensus’ and the IPCC

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