Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Hansen: "5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade"; also "The one major wild card in projections of future climate change is the unmeasured climate forcing due to aerosol changes and their effects on clouds"

New Jim Hansen: Temps flat for a decade, warming is slowing: Natural variability to blame | JunkScience.com
But “background” — i.e., imaginary — global warming is still occurring, says Hansen.

[Jim Hansen's new paper]
From the paper above:
The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing...The annual increment in the greenhouse gas forcing (Fig. 5) has declined from about 0.05 W/m2 in the 1980s to about 0.35 W/m2 in recent years [With the fate of the planet allegedly hinging on this number, Hansen is off by a factor of 10 here when reading numbers from his own graph.  He means .035, not .35]...The one major wild card in projections of future climate change is the unmeasured climate forcing due to aerosol changes and their effects on clouds. Anecdotal information indicates that particulate air pollution has increased in regions with increasing coal burning, but assessment of the climate forcing requires global measurement of detailed physical properties of the aerosols. The one satellite mission that was capable of making measurements with the required detail and accuracy was lost via a launch failure, and as yet there are no plans for a repllacement mission with the needed capabilities

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