Discussion > Annual,Decadal and Centennial Climate Variations are Mostly Irelevant.
This question seems to be about what collection of sequential weather events constitutes a "Climate".
That seems to be an arbitrary question unless you can define a reason for considering that duration.
Me? I define the minimum period for a climate in terms of infrastructure lifetime. The infrastructure we build ought to be resilient for the weather events it will (probably) experience.
But that's because I'm looking at the question from a practical / policy viewpoint.
From a pure science viewpoint a millennia or two may be appropriate due to the resolution of the proxies.
And from an ecological viewpoint you can combine the two approaches and choose a period between the lifetime of the main organisms under study (for evolutionary purposes) and the proxies that measure them.
In summary: "Climate" means what I want it to mean when I want it to mean it.
M Courtney
You got straight to the heart of my point ^.^
All considerations of past climate whether based on ice cores or sediment layers have such low resolution that our current pause would not even register. However in say the ice cores we see real trends in CO2 and temperature which continue for thousands of years or more, we do not see periods like the pause. Our understanding of The Pause may point in a totally opposite direction to what becomes the long term climate record of this period, which is the correct guide?
Dung
In the context of Holocene climate change both the late 20th century warming and the pause are irrelevant. The Holocene cooling trend has now lasted at least 4000 years and our "warmest ever " year of 2010 or 2014 had a temperature almost the same as the cool centuries around the Holocene "climatic optimum " of 6-8000 thousand years ago.
Paleoclimate Buff
Dung,
If your definitional threshold of climate were to be applied, then we could cancel nearly 100% of the climate consensus claims, concerns, positions and policies.
hunter
hunter
If you look at a graph of global temp over time, say 100 years; the graph is all over the place. It is not possible to look at the 100 year graph and know what the overall trend will be for the 10,000 years surrounding it, or for the 1,000 years surrounding it. It is probably only in the 10,000 year graph that you detect meaningful trends but there is no way to determine those trends until you can look back at it.
Today the warmists are leading us by the nose, just throwing meaningless questions and information at us and trying to stop us seeing reality, It is just like the behaviour of our trolls. We treat the information we are thrown like kids at Christmas who receive a new toy to play with.
Got to go watch Arsenal ^.^
Dung
I suggest for instance that 'The Pause' signifies nothing unless it coincidentally manages to be part of an expected Little Ice Age' repeat. What happens over a hundred year period is not normally relevant to any discussion of climate.