Skeptical of skeptics, the US interdepartmental survey of international expert opinion was only the first stage in the study of prospective climate change to 2000. As noted in my earlier posting, the responses to the survey questionnaires were used to construct five possible climate scenarios for the year 2000, each with a specified “probability” of occurrence. The scenarios were reviewed by climatologists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at Boulder, Colorado in consultations with project staff. As reported in Global 2000, “The details and the conditional probabilities of [the] end scenarios ... reflect the judgments of more people than the limited number of panelists who responded to the questionnaires along the lines of these scenarios. The review process, which essentially strengthened the data bases of the end scenarios, resulted in significant changes to only one of them, the large cooling scenario” (Global 2000, vol. 3, p. 189).

Here is a further extract from the description of the “large global cooling” scenario, which was assessed as having a probability of occurrence of 10%:

“The north polar latitudes, marked by an expansion of arctic sea ice and snow cover ... had cooled by about 2 deg C since the early 1970s... The large global cooling trend was also reflected in a significant decrease in the length of the growing season in the higher middle latitudes and a substantial increase in the variability in the length of the growing season from year to year. By the year 2000, it was also raining less in the higher middle and subtropical latitudes... Precipitation also became more variable. The westerlies showed a pronounced shift [which] brought brief, yet severe ... droughts as well as well as severe cold spells (including early and late killing frosts) in the lower middle latitudes. The higher middle latitudes, particularly Canada, from which the westerlies and their associated storm tracks were displaced, suffered an increasing incidence of long-term drought and winter cold ... "

Cont...

"The center and intensity of the Asiatic monsoon changed dramatically between the late 1970s and the turn of the century. The frequency of monsoon failure in northwest India increased to such an extent that the last decade of the 20th century bore a resemblance to the period from 1900 to 1925. Droughts were also more frequent in the Sahel region of Africa.”

The description of the Case III (Cooling) scenario in the Global 2000 study, which was assessed as having a probability of occurrence of 25%, included the following:

“This ... scenario leads to a global temperature decrease of 0.5 deg. C, with 1 deg. C cooling in the higher and middle latitudes and smaller changes near the equator. Precipitation amounts decrease, and month to month and year to year variability increases... Monsoon failures would become more frequent and severe in India, and the Sahel would experience more frequent severe droughts. Wheat yields in Canada and the Soviet Union would be reduced, but other key crops would not be severely affected. The demand for energy would increase ... [This] might also result from attempts to relideve drought effects in densely populated areas by producing water in massive desalinations programs. Forested areas at higher latitudes of the Northern hemisphere would become less accessible, and grow more slowly.”

Cont...

Richard Castles writes back to me saying:
"I don’t. I haven’t doubted or challenged your figures from the BOM."

He does not get it. These are not *MY* figures from the BOM. This is a statement from the BOM which says 2006 was the hottest Canberra year. (http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/annual/act/summary.shtml)

Note how with a simple pronoun, he tries to devalue the information published by the BOM as just one persons view. I keep pointing out that global warming skeptics are forced to either lie or mislead in order to make their arguments.

Let's go to the other topic that Richard Castles uses to distract. Global cooling did not grab the public attention because the world was not cooling and did not cool. How simple is that to understand?

Response to Alison71:
Please stop quoting from a 27 year-old report. Who cares?

David, that is a desperate response. Clearly, when I said "your figures from the BOM", I was referring to the figures that you presented FROM THE BOM. (A reiteration to all: they are FROM THE BOM, not David's personal thermometer.) Nothing indicates I thought they were 'yours', and only someone with poor comprehension skills or deliberately trying to mislead would suggest otherwise.

"Global cooling did not grab the public attention because the world was not cooling and did not cool. How simple is that to understand?"

Too simple even for the IPCC, apparently, whose views you are now also in conflict with. See:

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-1.htm

It is easy when you are misinformed to accuse others of deception.

Richard, those graphs don't show a cooling trend. They show a small dent in an overwhelmingly large warming trend.

Surely you must be able to see that those graphs are absolutely smothered in noise - the averaged trend line looks like it is covered in hair. But if you zoom out a little further, the two temperature drops you're making so much fuss about (in the mid-40s and mid-60s) look the same - like a bit of aberrant noise hair on the larger trend graph.

It's all about scale:

1. Day and night cycle through hot and cold.
2. Summer and winter cycle through hot and cold.
3. Ocean currents and conveyors, ocean flora, and other factors also cycle the water, oxygen, and carbon through cycles that drive hot and cold over decades, centuries, and millennia.

You can choose to latch onto "trends" at any of these scales, but the moment you take them out of this very complex context and start making blanket declarations, as you just did then - you are misusing the data.

While we're here, Richard, I'd just like to add something else:

You talk about how Climate Change is the first global issue of the Internet Age. I don't know how far into this age you consider us to be, but I feel like we're almost a decade in, and I heard a lot more noise about climate change *off-line* in the 90s than I did on the internet of 1996 through 2005.

Meanwhile, the internet has been much more interested in several other global issues. Here's a hopelessly incomplete 10 year braindump of grouped buzzwords:

1) September 11 2001, theocracy, terrorism, pre-emptive military action, jihad, detention.
2) SARS, bird flu, and other pandemics.
3) Copyright law, piracy, patent legislation.
4) Genetic research and reproductive rights (GMO food, cloning, stem cell research).
5) Economic globalisation.
6) The redefinition of a new global culture and its key subcultures and philosophies (the most notable being Open Source, its software and its encyclopedias).
7) The internet versus the courts (pornography, censorship, net neutrality).
8) The constant background noise of crap buzzwords like "Paris Hilton".

Maybe I've been on a different internet to everyone else, but I honestly think dozens of other issues have dominated the attention of the mainstream internet, before climate change found its (probably fleeting) moment.