How many years does a cooling trend need to be before you believe Global Warming has stopped?

The Scientific consensus for determining a trend would be increasing average temperatures over a 5 year period. However this has changed because "global warming" is more political than scientific.

We're going to have to see a greater depth of cold where even the most ardent believer of "global warming" is not able to refute the evidence that it is cooling.

I could be wrong but I feel climate change is something that has been going on since the dawn of time. nothing new. I also have a theory that just like water is a constant(same amount in varying forms always) so too are the elements(in their varying forms). In that there is no such thing as reduction but there is the possibility of conversion. So - although all the talk is about global warming - I feel this is a perpetuated fallacy. Quite possibly in a few hundred years we would be talking about the extremes cold snap. Earth moves, as such a slight changes in positioning would account for weather changes - some areas are actually cooler than they were where others are warmer - this says to me we have moved on our axis. As to holes in the ozone layer - we didn't know they were there until we found them! Perhaps they were always there! Some sort of release value maybe?

I don't believe there is a correlation with the sunspot activity either.

There has been a lot of confusion about this recently, largely because of scientific studies being misreported.

Climate models until more recently have not shown short term climatic fluctuations, such as La Niña, El Niño and Sun spot cycles. The reason being you need to model long term factors before this data can be input.

This is a graph from a model where pacific decadal oscillations (lasting anomalies in pacific surface temprature*) have been taken into account, the green line shows the forecast made by combining this data, the black line shows the forecast without PDOs being taken into account. The purple line labled 'stabilization' models a climate where CO2 does not advance beyond its 2000 level.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/fi...

This graph predicts some offsetting of the man-made contribution to the greenhouse effect for a couple of years. It does not predict that the warming trend will not continue or that it will be less severe then previously anticipated.

Re, sun spots, PDO comment, what i have tried to show you is why you get a better correlation to actual temperature pattern when these trends are taken into acount, * i also mentioned La Niña and El Niño specifically because we have been experiencing a particually strong La Niña recently which some skeptics are parading as evidence of a cooling trend.

This website gives a better explaination of this:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Is-Pacific-Decadal...

Sun spots don't offer a good explaination of warming over the past 3 decades, where is the evidence to show a correlation between sunspots the recent warming trend?

If an explaination that didn't involving an advancing greenhouse effect proved to be a better explaination of temperature changes i would except that as evidence man made greenhouse gas emmisions are not effecting the climate.

http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pd...

When you said “before you believe”, are you referring to the population in general?

I mean, let’s face it, as long as the mainstream media covers up the truth, the majority will never believe Global Warming is gone. The media will keep saying this cooling trend is just a different manifestation of global warming and they’ll try to hold on to that as long as they can.

There will be a time when the cooling is so obvious that they won’t be able to continue with the cover up or they’ll risk loosing total credibility from its followers (a.k.a. the majority of the population). That time can be in a couple of years or even earlier if we experience some kind of extraordinary event.

The mainstream media already lost credibility among some people, being myself one of them, but it’s just a minority, for now.

I telecommute rather some the time. Have a hybrid vehicle. CFL bulbs everywhere in the abode. decreased length of backyard to shrink mowing (have very large lot that was once mowed often). decreased thermostat settings (positioned on greater beneficial layer of clothing) and have it timed to shrink pointless heating. do not use air-conditioning in summer season. Recycle. working with an inventor who has patented a gadget to noticeably shrink heating capacity waste in older place of living homes making use of correct boilers.

Get a life , I live on the treeline. North of where I currently reside by some 2500+ miles are the remains of fossilized tropical trees some with trunks in excess of 1 meter across. The earths temperature is constantly in flux. Warming here,cooling there so all the worry about temperature is futile. Something we should be concerned with is how all the "so-called" clean mega hydro projects are affecting ocean temps. Have you ever noticed that the more salt in water the colder it has to be to form ice,saltier water also holds cold longer. Taking all this into consideration,don't you think this has an impact on ocean currents?

It is not so much the nominal number of years, it is the ability to explain the year to year warming and cooling. For example, we know that we get greater global temperatures in El Nino years and lower temperatures in La Nina years. The warmest ever recorded was 1998, a strong El Nino year. In 2007 and 2008 we've had strong La Ninas and temperatures have been a little lower reflecting fluctuations exactly as expected. In La Ninas, colder water in the Pacific is pushed to the surface, causing lower measured temperatures (as the cold water absorbs more heat). Despite the La Nina, 2008 is the 10th warmest year ever recorded. 10-year periods of fluctuations are predicted. There are normal fluctuations within the overall warming trend. All long term pointers still indicate rapidly increasing temperatures. (Rapid is 1 to 1.5 degrees C per decade. It doen't mean it's hotter this year than last.)

When we see the Hollywood Hills and Hollywood sign covered by snow, then perhaps some people would start questioning their deep strong Global Warming believes.

Temperatures would have to remain flat and there would have to be no demonstrable increase in net ocean heat content over perhaps 40 years for me to think that the radiative forcing from CO2 was being offset by some other radiative cooling process.

However, a better question (and one that is far more defensible in a scientific sense) is that if the overall pattern is a large temperature increase over 30-40 years followed by 10-20 years of flat or slightly decreasing temperatures so that over the full cycle there is an increase in temperature, how many of those cycles does there need to be for *you* to admit the long-term trend is upwards?

Edit: In order to stop talking nonsense about cyclic phenomena driving trends, memorize this simple equation:

cycles != trends

In order to make a sensible argument, you have to show how sunspot cycles would drive an overall increase in temperature. What increased? Well, I hear you all mumble, "PDO!" "Sunspots!" "Cosmic rays!" but *none* of those things show a trend that could have driven the increase in temperature we've seen over the last 35 years. Cycles exist, but you need to find a *trend*.

I get completely you skeptics are scared out of your skins by the implications of anthropogenically forced climate change. And well you should be. But suspending logic and reason in the face of fear is tribalism, and it is time to stop reasoning like primitives and face the problem.

You wait until Al Gore and his oil investments tell you it has stopped. Of course this oil market crash is really going to hit Al Gore in the pocket book as once again his artificial scarcity scheming for profits have been blown wide open.