Citizen Runner wrote:As an aside, when and if you bother to read the technical IPCC stuff I expect you'll be surprised how readily they point out uncertainties, levels of confidence, and shortcomings in the data.
Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised. You are generally right about what I'm asking for. If I've "misjudged" the basis for your opinion, I think that is because you haven't really presented it very clearly. Linking me to a variety of literature sources (and thank you, I do appreciate them) and leaning on the IPCC report doesn't really explain your rationale. That said, in your current post you mention successful hindcasting models, which I presume is a key support in your beliefs (correct me if I'm wrong). I will look at the link with interest. I will warn you though, I am very wary of numerical modelling, having done more than enough of it myself.
On the topic of surface temperatures, I spent a bit more time over the weekend compiling temperature data. I apologize about misrepresenting some of my prior graphs as annual temperature data, they were actually average monthly data for March. The interface I downloaded from Environment Canada to mine their data is an ancient DOS program, and it took some fiddling to understand what it was giving me.
Anyway, I obtained mean monthly data for the full period of record for three sites: Victoria, BC; Chaplin, Sask; and, Charlottetown, PEI. These were chosen "fairly randomly" (which I claim in a very lazy way). I was looking for relatively wide geographic coverage, and selected stations that had ~ 100 years of data, give or take. The data selections are "unbiased" only insofar as I dodn't look at any of the data before settling on these sites.
Anyway, first here is a graph showing Chaplin monthly data for March, June, Sept and December, plus an estimated annual average, obtained by averaging those four months. This will not be a true average of all 12 months, but will be within ~ 0.5-1 degree at worst. I didn't average all 12 months because it's a painful time consuming process to download the data.
I show that just to give a sense of what one site's data look like. I'm using 20 year trailing averages to make the data a bit easier to look at, and to see broad trends.
Now here are the estimated annual temps for the three different sites, with inferred best fit trends:
You'll see 0.5-0.6 deg C/century rise at two of the sites, and a slight decrease at the third (Charlottetown).
Since the "greenhouse gases" started to skyrocket in the mid-1800s, shouldn't we see a dramatic temperature increase sometime soon?
I realize three sites are only three sites and don't demonstrate a lack of warming, but my quick "taking of the temperature" of global warming in Canada (data are readily available online) isn't especially consistent with a dramatic warming effect.
Is there a good summary of observed global temperature increases that shows something markedly different than this?