date: Mon Feb 12 16:33:31 2001 from: Keith Briffa subject: Fwd: Re: Hockey Sticks again to: t.Osborn@uea.ac.uk From: Onar Åm To: "Douglas V Hoyt" , "John L. Daly" , "Chick Keller" Cc: "P. Dietze" , , "Michael E Mann" , , , "Thomas Crowley" , "Phil Jones" , , , , , "McKitrick" , "Bjarnason" , "Harry Priem" , , , "Martin Manning" , "Albert Arking" , "Sallie Baliunas" , "Jack Barrett" <100436.3604@compuserve.com>, "Sonja Boehmer-Cristianse" , "Nigel Calder" , "John Christy" , , , , "Myron Ebell" , "Ellsaesser" , "John Emsley" , "Jim Goodridge" , , "Peter Holle" , "W. S. Hughes" , Wibjörn Karlén , "Chick Keller" , , "KIrill Kondratyev" , "Dr. Theodor Landscheidt" , "Ross McKitrick" , "omcshane" , "Pat Michaels" , , "David M. Ritson" , , "Tom Segalstad" , "Fred Singer" , "Roy Spencer" , "Hartwig Volz" , "Gerd-Rainer Weber" , , "Rosanne D'Arrigo" , Subject: Re: Hockey Sticks again Date: Mon, 12 Feb 2001 03:47:50 +0100 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2919.6700 > Studies have shown that about 8% of the year-to-year temperature variance at > a typical location can be said to be in common with the global temperature > variations. If half is natural and half is greenhouse warming, then a global > warming advocate could argue 4% of the yearly local variations are > anthropogenic. If 30 Kyotos are needed to reduce the 4% to 0%, then one > Kyoto only effects 0.13% of the year to year variations. This is just > another statement that the Kyoto Protocol would have no measureable > benefits. Doug, if the 8% figure is accurate (and not itself a meaningless average!) then this argument alone crushes almost all arguments for preventive actions. It leaves only one meaningful argument left in favor of preventive actions, namely rising sea levels, and that's a problem we can wait 50 years before we need to address. I'm surprised that this line of reasoning has not received more attention. Once you realize that it's not anthropogenic climate change per se we need to quantify, but the degree to which it is noticable in various time scales on the background of natural climate noise, it all becomes so obvious. The very fact that IPCC has struggled for 10 years now to show with some degree of certainty that we have changed the GLOBAL climate is very revealing, because if there is problems detecting a human fingerprint in the global average climate, how hard must it not be to detect it on a local scale which is far more noisy? Onar. -- Dr. Keith Briffa, Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, NR4 7TJ, United Kingdom Phone: +44-1603-593909 Fax: +44-1603-507784