Joe Bastardi
© WeatherbellJoe Bastardi
Joe Bastardi of weatherbell.com/ kindly took the time to write a comment, and so I think it deserves being upgraded to a post. It's one whole semester of meteorology summed up (edited by PG)!

Here's the problem globally: We continue to dwell on temperatures in the Arctic and ignore the fact that it's a natural cyclical distortion because the planet wobbles on its axis and has much more water in the southern hemisphere, and more land in the north. So there is an eternal search for a balance that can never be attained. It can only go back and forth. Think about it. While CO2 warmists are yelling and screaming about the Arctic melting, the southern hemisphere ice is expanding. We are now told the deep water is warming (what bullocks, it does this every time the PDO has been warm. What will happen over the next 20 years is the southern hemisphere sea ice will retreat and the northern hemisphere will advance once the AMO turns cold. We just can actually observe it now from above with satellites.

There is so much lunacy in their argument, they don't even realize global ACE drop is because of the distortion; instead they scream about warming causing increased activity, when in reality globally it has gone the other way. Until such time someone can show me that there is less OUTGOING RADIATION than incoming, there is no "warming" going on. There is no trapping of heat. Physically all CO2 can do is add its 0.4 to 0.7°C to the 33°C of the blanket gases that were wonderfully placed there and made the Earth's temps reasonably livable, in spite of the variations that have to happen because of the system's design.

Oceans are partly driving the climate

The whole CO2 argument is tiresome and absurd. The unmoved mover is the sun. The system below responds to the variations in the sun with a lag. The "warming" was because when the oceans went into their warm cycle (remember there is far greater "energy" in warm water than in cold dry air), the natural response had to be a warming in the north - where there is more land- because equatorial ocean warming increases the transport of warm humid air northward. That air has to then warm areas where there is dry air. If you dry out warm humid air, then you warm the air temperature if the wet bulb is constant. So there is warming over the continents, BUT IT ONLY CONTINUES UNTIL THE OCEANS HAVE ADDED THEIR INPUT. The leveling off of temps is completely consistent with an atmosphere that has absorbed the heat from the warming cycles of the oceans that occurred in tandem from 1995-2007 (warm PDO was 1978-2007, warm AMO 1995 till present, but it will shift).

The other way around - low ACE indicates warming

The increase in the southern hemisphere's ice cap is more impressive than Arctic melt because the cold source is the continent of Antarctica, and for the ice to expand it had to have been colder in the areas where it expanded, which is over water. This is much harder to do than warming up dry, cold Arctic air. Now we see the response. This is entirely natural. I argued at the Heartland Conference that the global ACE drop and the southern hemisphere ice show that this is merely a distortion that will turn around and go the other way. The cooling tropical Pacific means naturally the ACE lowers since most of our tropical activity comes from the Pacific. But the Atlantic, still in the warm AMO, takes up the slack. Tropical cyclones are major energy transporters and balancing mechanisms for the atmosphere. If there is no need to balance out (cooling Pacific, warmer in the north), then the ACE drops. Amazingly the OPPOSITE of what people are yelling about is the sign of the so-called warming. In fact as the Arctic areas start to cool and the AMO backs away from the warm cycle, we are likely to see the ACE come back up again, as the "need" for more Pacific cyclones will reappear.

CO2 is too trivial of a factor

The major problem is the people driving this train refuse to humble themselves to the majesty of the atmosphere. The sheer weight of numbers against CO2 causing this is staggering. The oceans have 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere, CO2 1/2500th of the gas blanket that makes our Earth livable, man - according to the US Dept of Energy - is only responsible for 1/20th of that, meaning 1/50,000th of the air is "man-made". Actually it's merely man-recycled, for there has been no introduction of new CO2 to the system that I know of. What we've put into the air has always been a part of the system, it's just recycled.

Does anyone know of some magic spaceship that came and increased the amount of CO2 inherent to the global system (fossil fuels for instance, come from sources that have always been on the planet)? So we are asked to believe that we are changing all this. Though a gross over-simplification, if the 1/2500th of the blanket gases is contributing 0.4 to 0.7°C to the wonderful 33°C which elevate the average temperature to 288°K instead of a frigid 255°K, and man is responsible for only 1/20th of that, then perhaps our contribution to the global temp is...0.035°C.

Since some consider me a neanderthal, let's do what neanderthals love to do...compete for survival. Let's simply measure the temperature by objective satellite over the next 20-30 years as the PDO remains cold and the AMO flips. Let's measure the temperature and see if by 2030, the 5-year running mean is not back to where we were.

Quiet sun is a wild card - poses a threat

The explanation to all this is no different than you sitting in a sauna. Turn up the thermostat (natural ocean cycles) and it will heat until it reaches what the thermostat dictates. Arguing that turning on the light (the CO2 influence) is what heated the sauna is absurd. The wild card in this is the sun, which I am concerned is going to be a much bigger problem (believe me with the lunacy of the energy policies globally, a return to my temps is already a huge problem in itself, but the sun falling asleep would be worse). My ideas, which are not new, are basic climate cycle theory and were accepted before people decided they had to save the planet. They explain perfectly this chart:

Sun chart
© Unknown
To those who want to argue "natural variability" is hiding the warming, a) you didn't tell us that before your models went busting badly, and b) are you saying without CO2 we would already be back in the Victorian era of temps? To those who say there is hidden heat and that a gas (which is only 1/2500th of an atmosphere in which the most prominent GHG is water vapor, and with oceans that have 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere) is somehow controlling all this (recall that we once had an ice age at 7000 ppm co2) you live in a fantasy world.

Then again, men who have the fantasy of saving the planet by controlling others are indeed in their own world. It's up to those grappling with the real facts to make sure that the world we live in is one that promotes freedom and the betterment of mankind, and not one controlled by those who believe they are superior to everyone else. This is where the real battle is, and not with a trace gas that has little if anything to do with the climate of a planet created and designed the way it was. - J.B.