What's the bet this stays relatively low-profile? Couldn't have anything hindering the climate change hysterics, could we?

Pope of MMAGW - Al Gore.

If that happens - no more juicy grants of public money and you get called names by the likes of the BBC. Then you get Eco Mentalists setting fire to your geraniums ansd daubing red paint on your granny....

Far safer to deny the planetary cooling (reality since 1998) and claim that we'll all be eaten by enormous Dragons unless we switch to 800cc Japanese Micro Cars by 2036 and three Quarters.

Remember we only have 24 seconds to save the planet...oops!

... how a paper on a Tropical North Atlantic phenomenon morphs into an explanation for the warming of the whole Atlantic.

Worthy of the legendary Steve Goddard himself.

That by cleaning dust, smog, etc. we are actually contributing to Global Warming. ..So which is worse for the environment: Smog, or Climate Change?

"Evan and his collaborators at Wisconsin and the NOAA produced their figures by combining satellite dust data with Atlantic temperature records over the last 26 years."

I can show that over the same period, violent crime figures in Peterborough also correlate to this dataset.

Does lack of dust or warmer seawater cause violence in Peterborough?

Correlation is not necessarily cause.

From the conclusion (behind the paywall):

Don't want to copy and paste too much to avoid copyright restrictions, but the final sentence reads:

"...a reduction in Atlantic dust cover of 40-60% under a doubled carbon dioxide climate (33), which, based on model runs with an equivalent reduction of the mean dust forcing, could result in an additional 0.3-0.4°C warming of the northern tropical Atlantic."

I.e. The Northen tropical atlantic is warmer than that predicted by the Global Circulation Models.

I'm getting kinda tired of the reg beating this dead horse. The science is done guys, GW is happening - move on. Or stick to what you know, which is IT/Tech and leave the GW conspiracy theories to the other right wing nutjobs out there.

As an aside though, wouldn't this suggest that temperatures should have been much higher pre-industrialisation? Which they patently were not.....

.... we just gotta wait for the global warmers to pop their heads up and stamp on it and it won't ever be heard again.

Those of us who DID read the article noticed that nowhere did it say GW was not happening; it merely said that a specific case of local warming was not directly correlated to the overall global warming effect, but much more closely related to the level of atmospheric dust.

News flash: climate is MUCH more complicated than a simple equation, and it's very common for certain variables to have a greater effect on local areas that the mean overall global temperature.

Perhaps you commentards should strive to understand an issue before claiming authority.

Paris - because she likes dirt / sucking etc.

I'm a right-wing "nut job" and I like to read this stuff

"I can show that over the same period, violent crime figures in Peterborough also correlate to this dataset. Does lack of dust or warmer seawater cause violence in Peterborough?"

Oh, don't be stupid! It's obviously the other way around.

So either we need some volcanoes to go off big time or I need to broom out the man cave more often.

Open access version of paper is available at http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/~amatoe/

El Reg's spin makes two major errors:

1. Confusing local trend studies with global trends.

This paper specifically deals with the North Atlantic. The authors clearly state that temperatures are higher than those predicted by CO2 forcing models by a further 0.3C.

2. Confusing short-term with long-term

The paper specifically talks about decadal variations, not the long-term CO2 forcing.

@Time:

Here's the last few paragraphs in full -

"Over the last 30-years temperatures in other tropical ocean basins have been rising steadily, but at a slower rate than the Atlantic (31). At the same time projections of surface temperature increases under a doubled carbon dioxide climate suggest that the Atlantic should be warming at a rate slower than the other observations (32). We suggest this apparent disconnect between observations and models may be due to the influence of Atlantic dust cover. Our results imply that since dust plays a role in modulating tropical North Atlantic Ocean temperature, projections of these temperatures under various global warming scenarios by general circulation models should account for long-term changes in dust loadings. This is especially critical as studies have estimated a reduction in Atlantic dust cover of 40-60% under a doubled carbon dioxide climate (33), which, based on model runs with an equivalent reduction of the mean dust forcing, could result in an additional 0.3-0.4°C warming of the northern tropical Atlantic."

"Nuke a volcano, especially one that produces lots of dust." Umm, didn't the scientologists try that one a long time ago?

Flames 'cause it looks like a scientologist in a volcano.

Each time I come back to this it seems there is *another* bit of the real world that *somehow* was left out of the general circulation models people use. Failing that they are incorporated by some kind of fudge factor. My list to date is

1) Heat reflectivity due to poor (non existent apparently) cloud modelling. 1st I saw of this was Byte special edition on Forth (researcher using it to model clouds, but said its difficult) in c1984. 20 years later, still a bit tricky.

2) Cloud formation control by increased/decreased sunspot activity seeding upper atmsophere with solar particles acting as nucleation sites for water droplet formation.

3) Global dimming due to aerosols produced by aircraft engines at c40Ktf. Definitive comparision was only possible on 12th September 2001, when all US commercial jets were grounded. An impossible experiment to carry out under normal circumstances. So probably not included in any model before the next decade.

4) Disagreement on how to handle heat island FX caused by urbanisation of area surrounding weather stations. Are any stations immune? If so what happens when you run models with just those? Is it possible to do so and get any kind of sensible result?

5) and now dust levels also affecting heat retention and reflection.

And lets not forget most models seem to use a 3d rectangular grid. Only some use shapes which actually map onto a sphere in the first place and few if any (AFAIK) note the 21mile high equatorial bulge

*refining* general circulation models *implies* finding the sources of *systematic* error and modelling their underlying physics (and chemistry in some cases), not leaving them as *fudge * factors to be twiddled by *experts*. This refinement process does not appear to be happening. The Grids have got finer, the speed has increased (but is that due to the improved hardware?) but I get no sense of any eagerness to nail down the uncertainties. Why does Knuth's comment about premature optimisation being the root of most programming ills come to mind?

I keep hearing its a chaotic system, the butterfly effect, strange attractors blah blah. I can't shake the feeling they have created a "Doctrine of impotence" as Dr RV Jones put it. The modellers do not believe they can improve certain aspects of their models, so won't try.

I do believe we have an effect on the environment. Its not our scale, its the systems sensitivity. Like the PPM impurities in silicon that trigger orders of magnitude changes in resistance that make semiconductors possible.

But remember El Reg, London is a port city. If you end up going to work by canoe the actual causes might be a bit academic. I hope your not located in the basement.

cirby said: "You might want to back off of that "science is done" bit - even Al Gore is starting to back off of a lot of his claims. Several slides have disappeared from his famous global warming PowerPoint show, "

Al Gore used Keynote, not PowerPoint. That's why he was able to be so persuasive. But I suppose in that case he should have used Persuasion, by Aldus.

by this Global Warming, now called (for some obscure reason) , Climate Change, then we will be subjected to----

Earth destroying Asteroids

Super Volcanoes

Mega Tsunamis

Necrotising Fasciitis

Ebola epidemics

MRSA (super bug)

Ben Laden and other terrorists

Nuclear Power Stations blowing up

Alien Invasions

There is no end to what the Mass Media can dream up.

Will dream of Paris , and not worry any more.

Nighty Night