There are three main points/opinions/issues I’d like to explore, which are all interrelated:
- The traditional way in which feedbacks have been diagnosed from observational data has very likely misled us about the existence of positive feedbacks in the climate system.
- Our new analyses of satellite observations of intraseasonal oscillations suggest negative cloud feedbacks, supporting Lindzen’s Infrared Iris hypothesis.
- I am increasingly convinced that understanding precipitation systems is the key to understanding climate sensitivity.
Unfortunately, the three of these represents too much material to present today. Since the second (Infrared Iris) results were just published by us in GRL (August 9, 2007), it would seem to be the logical one for me to discuss before the others. But the first issue is, in some sense, much more important and fundamental, and will help us put the newly published results in a more meaningful context.
So, for now, I’m going to discuss just the first issue (potential biases in feedback diagnosis) and then maybe Roger will have me back to continue with the second and third issues.
What you are about to read is, I believe, more than a little alarming. And maybe someone here will even point out the obvious error in my analysis that will render my conclusions silly and meaningless. After all, that would save me the effort of writing and submitting our next journal article, wouldn’t it? So, let’s forge ahead with the first, feedback diagnosis issue.
The Feedback Concern
Feedbacks are at the heart of most disagreements over how serious man-induced global warming and climate change will be. To the climate community, a feedback is by definition a RESULT of surface temperature change. For instance, low cloud cover decreasing with surface warming would be a positive feedback on the temperature change by letting more shortwave solar radiation in.
But what never seems to be addressed is the question: What caused the temperature change in the first place? How do we know that the low cloud cover decreased as a response to the surface warming, rather than the other way around?
For awhile, a few people had me convinced that this question doesn’t really matter. After all, cause and effect are all jumbled up in the climate system, so what’s the point of trying to separate them? Just build the climate models, and see if they behave the way we observe in nature, right?
Well, that’s true – but I think I can demonstrate that the way we have been doing that comparison is seriously misleading.
Feedbacks from observational data have traditionally been diagnosed by plotting the co-variability between top-of-atmosphere radiation budget changes and surface temperature changes, after the data have been averaged to monthly, seasonal, or annual time scales. The justification for this averaging has always remained a little muddy, but from what I can gather, researchers think that it helps to approach a quasi-equilibrium state in the climate system.
The trouble with this approach, though, is that when we average observational data to seasonal or annual time scales in our attempts to diagnose feedbacks, it turns out that there are a variety of very different physical ways to get the very same statistical relationships. (Be patient with me here, I’ll demonstrate this below).
In particular, ANY non-feedback cloud variations that cause surface temperature to change will, necessarily, look like a positive feedback — even if no feedback exists. And the time averaging that everyone employs actually destroys all evidence that could have indicated to us that we were misinterpreting the data.
I am not the first one to discuss this issue, although the way I am expressing it might be different. Graham Stephen’s 2005 J. Climate review paper on cloud feedbacks (if you read carefully) was implying the same thing. Similarly, Aires and Rossow (2003 QJRMS) presented a new method of diagnosing feedbacks, arguing that one needs to go to very short time scales in our diagnostics to have any hope of providing meaningful validation for climate models.
But the issue has not been well articulated, and I fear that many climate scientists simply haven’t understood what these few investigators were trying to get across to us. For instance, Stephens spent a lot of time discussing how clouds are very dependent upon aspects of the atmospheric circulation, not just upon surface temperature, but it took me a while before I realized the practical importance of what he was saying.
Stephens was pointing out that our diagnosis of what has caused a certain relationship in observational data depends entirely upon on how we view the climate “system�. In other words, it matters a lot what we think is causing what. Again, once you have averaged the data to seasonal or annual time scales, you have destroyed most of the information that would have allowed you to diagnose what kind of system you are looking at.
More recently, a 2006 J. Climate paper by Forster and Gregory presented equations to allow us to discuss individual terms in feedback analysis; theirs is the most thorough treatment I’m aware of in this regard. But they made a critical assumption – a claim – that sounded good at first, but upon a little reflection, I find it can not be supported. In fact, it was a single sentence that ends up totally changing the analysis of feedbacks.
Forster and Gregory included a term to represent internal variability – appropriately called an “X� term – but they claimed that, to the extent that any internal variability was uncorrelated to surface temperature change, it would not corrupt the regression slope when plotting radiation changes versus temperature changes. In other words, we’d still diagnose a good feedback number, even in the presence of internal variability.
Well, while that statement is literally true, the assumption that any internally-caused fluctuations in the radiation budget would be uncorrelated with surface temperature is not true. It is the radiation changes that CAUSE temperature change – the two cannot be uncorrelated!
So far, what I have presented is admittedly hand waving, and all of the above-mentioned investigators also addressed the problem in a hand-waving fashion. So, what to do? How do we quantitatively demonstrate something in simple terms that is also physically realistic?
I know! Let’s build a model!
A Simple Model Demonstration
So, Danny Braswell and I built a simple energy balance model based upon the global-average vertical energy flux diagram that is famously attributed to Trenberth. But our model has some enhancements. It has three time-dependent temperature equations, for (1) the ocean surface, (2) a lower atmospheric temperature that radiates downward, and (3) an upper atmospheric temperature that radiates out to space. We gave it a swamp ocean with ten times the heat capacity of the atmosphere (about 190 m deep). We found that the model equilibrates to a new energy balance state in about 5 years after an imbalance in any of the terms is imposed.
In order to demonstrate elements of the problem, we need up to three sources of temperature variability. We chose the following: (1) daily random non-cloud SST forcing (e.g. from evaporation), (2) daily random cloud forcing, and (3) cloud feedbacks on any surface temperature changes.
With these three sources of variability, we discovered we could get a wide variety of model behaviors, so I decided that we had to constrain our simulations to physically realistic ranges.
To do this, I computed from 6 years of Terra CERES tropical radiation budget data that the standard deviation of 30 day anomalies in tropical oceanic reflected shortwave (SW) was about 1.3 W m-2. So, we made model runs where the SW variability (from all cloud variations, no matter the source) produced similar 30-day statistics.
The following is a 30 year plot from one run, forced only with daily random cloud variations, and no cloud feedback. Note that yearly, and even decadal, variability in the surface temperature occurs in a random walk fashion, but one that is constrained to meander around the equilibrium SST value of 288 K (the value which is consistent with Trenberth’s energy balance numbers).
Now, when we plot this model run’s output of SW variability versus surface temperature variability (365 day averages), we get a diagnosed “feedbackâ€? parameter of -1.4 W m-2 K-1. This is very close to the average of what the IPCC AR4 models produce for their SW cloud feedback — even though we haven’t yet imposed a feedback in the model!
Furthermore, note that the explained variance is relatively low. This is just like what has been reported for “feedbacks� diagnosed from observational data (Forster and Gregory, 2006 J. Climate). In contrast, when the source of the SW variability in the model is specified to be through cloud feedback, the explained variance is always very high.
In other words, it appears that low explained variance is evidence of non-feedback cloud forcing, as opposed to cloud feedback.
Finally, we also find that there is NO WAY to get anywhere near a 30 day s.d. of 1.3 W m-2 in SW variability out of the model with only cloud feedback. You must invoke non-feedback sources of cloud variability.
In other words, the large amount of variability in the CERES SW data argues for a non-feedback cloud source of SST variability.
After running many different combinations of model forcings and feedbacks, we concluded the following: To the extent that non-feedback cloud sources of SST variations occur, they ALWAYS lead to positive bias in diagnosed “feedback�. The bias is especially strong if the real cloud feedback is negative, and can easily obscure a negative cloud feedback with a diagnosed “false positive�. Note that the reason the bias is always in the direction of positive feedback is because the alternative is energetically impossible (you can’t force an SST increase by reducing SW input into the ocean).
This is indeed the general behavior I expected to find, but I needed a simple model demonstration to convince myself.
Pinatubo: A Negative Feedback “Unmasked�?
Now, what we really need in the climate system is some big, non-cloud source of radiative forcing, where the cloud feedback signal is not so contaminated by the obscuring effect of cloud forcing. The only good example we have of this during the satellite era is the cooling after the 1991 eruption of Mt. Pinatubo.
And guess what? The SW cloud feedback calculation from the Pinatubo-caused variability in Forster and Gregory was – surprise, surprise! – anomalously negative, rather than positive like all of their other examples of feedback diagnosed from interannual variability!
Conclusion
I think it is time to provoke some serious discussion and reconsideration regarding what we think we know about feedbacks in the real climate system, and therefore about climate sensitivity. While I’ve used the example of low cloud SW feedback, the potential problem exists with any kind of feedback.
For instance, everyone believes that water vapor feedback is positive, and conceptually justifies this by saying that a warmer surface causes more water to evaporate. But evaporation is only half the story in explaining the equilibrium concentration of atmospheric water vapor; precipitation is the other half. What if a decrease in precipitation efficiency is, instead, the cause of the surface warming, by not removing as much water vapor from the atmosphere? Then, it would be the water vapor increase driving the surface temperature change, and this would push the (unknown) diagnosed water vapor feedback in the positive direction.
Of course, researchers still have no clue about what control precipitation efficiency, although our new GRL paper suggests that, at least in the case of tropical intraseasonal oscillations, it increases with tropospheric warming.
What I fear is that we have been fooling ourselves with what we thought was positive cloud feedback in observational data, when in fact what we have been seeing was mostly non-feedback cloud “forcing� of surface temperature. In order to have any hope of ferreting out feedback signals, we must stop averaging observational data to long time scales, and instead examine short time-scale behavior. This is why our GRL paper addressed daily variability.
Will this guarantee that we will be able to observationally estimate feedbacks? No. It all depends upon how strong they are relative to other non-feedback forcings.
It seems like this whole issue should have been explored by someone else that I’m not aware of, and maybe someone here can point me in that direction. But I think that a simple model demonstration, like the one I’ve briefly presented, is the only way to convincingly demonstrate, in a quantitative fashion, how much of a problem this issue might be to the observational determination of climate sensitivity.
I’ve always been dubious about the fact that the climate system seems to only have positive feedbacks (wrt warming) and no negative ones. I don’t know much at all about the climate system, but there is one reason to suspect that negative feedbacks are stronger than the positive ones. Generally, systems with strong positive feedbacks are very unstable. OTOH, the climate system seems to be very stable.
If there really were all of these positive feedbacks, then one anomalously warm year might have caused runaway heating. And even if not, you would expect several years for the warming to subside. Instead, we see fairly moderate, almost random walk, changes in temperature.
Maybe my lack of /real/ knowledge of the climate system allows me to believe something so simple, but it’s what makes sense to me.
–t
Comment by Tim G — August 14, 2007 @ 7:58 am
I am trying to read this very carefully because I think in large measure the argument is distilling much of the commonsense skepticism about global warming: namely intraday variability, interday variability, interseason variability are all driven by the sun, i.e., radiation - at least to us laymen. Moreover the scope of this variability is extraordinarily large compared to interyear variability. Hence all models surely need to start with variations in radiation and if this occurs, as it does, by the hour then the models need to reflect this. Moreover, given the role that humidity and cloud cover play and the fact that these have significant intraday variability, Roy seems to have put his finger on a key issue: the unit of analysis makes a difference and interyear analysis may be leading us to a complete misread of the dynamics.
Do I have this right?
Now I need to go back and read the article more carefully.
Comment by Bernie — August 14, 2007 @ 9:17 am
Hi Dr. Spencer, this is indeed fascinating. A few observations I’ve made over the years which seem to be in synch. Firstly, in seeming complimentarity with the noted demise of tropical cirrus, an increase in low and mid level cloudiness in the wet dry tropical places I am personally most familiar with. This is anecdotal, personal observation, not peer reviewed. Seemingly an area to properly explore further via scientific study. Secondly, the revelation that the oceans in general feature vast semi persistent coverage by stratocumulus, which may be increasing as a result of aerosols and dust. All of these, if true, would seem to be negative feedbacks or wide band filters.
Comment by SteveSadlov — August 14, 2007 @ 10:22 am
Roy,
I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of years now from a latent heat perspective, and although it seems obvious to me, maybe I’m off track. Average global rainfall is about a meter per year. According to Trenberth, latent heat removes 77 w/m^2 from the surface. That’s evaporation of 1 meter per year. So far so good. Assuming cloudiness is directly proportional (I know it’s not linearly) to precipitation, a one percent increase in low clouds gives about a one (0.77, but who are we kidding with the extra precision?) percent increase in latent heat removal from the surface, which equals, all other things being equal which of course they’re not, one percent change in sensible heat at the surface.
This is all without albedo effects.
Then, we need to consider that the more water vapor (molar weight 18) the more convection, correct?
Does this make sense?
Comment by Steve Hemphill — August 14, 2007 @ 10:52 am
Use 911 to test feedback
Recommend using the step function change of grounding all US planes on 911 to test climate models for upper atmospheric vapor and dust feedback loops.
Comment by DLH — August 14, 2007 @ 11:00 am
My goodness yes, this really is more than a little alarming. Congratulations, you’ve managed a combination of logic, insight and empirical understanding which is very rare. You might be refuted, but this must set the agenda in modelling for quite some time until its either proved or disproved. We may one day remember what we were doing the day we first read this.
Comment by anon — August 14, 2007 @ 11:08 am
A very thought provoking post. I noted in Science mag a couple of weeks ago - Wentz, F.J., Ricciardulli, L., Hilburn, K. and Mears, C. 2007. How much more rain will global warming bring? Science 317: 233-235, the claim was again made, that over the past 20 years, evaporation has equalled preciptation. How does that fit in with a large positive feedback from water vapour?
I’ve often wondered about a balancing negative feedback that has prevented run-away warming throughout the earth’s geological history. As Nir Shaviv has pointed out:
“It turns out that the CO2 temperature correlation (from ice cores) can be used to say one thing about the temperature effects of CO2 variations. It can be used to place an upper limit on the temperature sensitivity to CO2. The reason is that if CO2 has a large effect, the positive feedback from any temperature change would drive an additional temperature change which could render the climate system unstable, something which luckily isn’t the case. We can calculate this critical feedback relatively easily, and thus place an upper limit on the temperature sensitivity….Since we know that the climate system is stable (we don’t get runaway conditions like on Venus, nor did we ever have them)….”
http://www.sciencebits.com/IceCoreTruth
Comment by Paul Biggs — August 14, 2007 @ 11:13 am
I don’t know whether you’re “right” or not, but the modeling exercise is a very useful way to explore what things would look like if you were. Good job.
Comment by TCO — August 14, 2007 @ 11:27 am
P.s. I’m very concerned that the politicized and defensive nature of the Gavin Schmidt types will not allow them to consider your exercise freely, as the sort of thing worth thinking about. They will just view it as a threat. Something to counter-attack or dismiss or say it’s already been considered. Rather than as a useful thought starter for deeper consideration of the system’s possible characteristics.
Comment by TCO — August 14, 2007 @ 11:30 am
Bernie: I think that part of the confusion has to do with the use of the term feedback. Perhaps using the terms direct and indirect would be better. When I travel faster in my car, there is a direct impact on fuel efficiency from the increased air friction. But there are also indirect effects from the tuning of the engine to work best at a certain RPM, from the division of other loads (lights, etc.) over more or less time, from increased cooling of the air conditioner condenser, etc. etc. These effects can be positive or negative or even have maxima on their own (or certainly in combination).
Comment by TCO — August 14, 2007 @ 11:35 am
TCO:
Thanks for the comment. I guess my attention was drawn to the unit of analysis Dr. Spencer seemed to focus on and its implications for the specificity of the model - in addition to the feedback/direct/indirect effects.
IMO, the unit of analysis issue that Spencer raises here is more akin to measuring fuel efficiency on an annual basis and ignoring the fact that the air conditioner being on reduces fuel efficiency. The latter as a significant contributor will jump out at you as soon as you measure mileage on a month by month basis. Once you have changed the period of measurement, further analysis will then reveal a discontinuity when gas stations change over from winter to summer fuel mix! The breaking the mileage data to a day by day basis, you will have a chance to spot the difference of city and highway driving (your speed variable). Second by second analysis and you can see the effects of acceleration (your RPM variable). The model based on an annual assessment of mileage has important missing variable(s).
I have still to work through the model to understand the notion of feedback that is being described.
Finally, I think you are right that many like Gavin will react first and consider much later. The discussion should be interesting.
Comment by Bernie — August 14, 2007 @ 12:31 pm
One would have hoped that these important, basic issues were sorted out before everyone started crying wolf.
Comment by jae — August 14, 2007 @ 12:39 pm
Have you ever seen the work done by Kacser, H. & Burns, J.A. (1973)(1973). “The control of flux.” Symp. Soc. Exp. Biol. 27, 65-104.
Then all the subsequent work on (metabolic) control theory?
I find it odd that after more than three decades flux control theory has not been applied to climate research. The concept of “elasticities” and using steady state analysis should apply to climate changes very nicely.
Comment by DocMartyn — August 14, 2007 @ 1:35 pm
Testability of external forcing functions?
As a non-climatologist, is this another way of describing phase changes between components of a larger system vs noise and the impacts of averaging systems over various times?
Does this mean that an outside forcing function that is not included in your simple model equations would behave as such a “non-feedback cloud source of SST variability”?
Could you use this to test for the occurrence of an external forcing function by its impact on your variability measures?
If so, would this be a method to check for structural possibility of Svenmark’s Cosmoclimatology vs sun spot cycle and distinguishing between them?
e.g. Initially try an external function of sun spot/solar wind regulation of cosmic rays which in turn control clouds? - Then for the long term variation of clouds with cosmic rays?
See:
title=”Cosmoclimatology”>
title=”Svensmark: Cosmoclimatology a new theory emerges”>
Comment by DLH — August 14, 2007 @ 2:09 pm
Yesterday, with regard to aerosols, I wrote:
Is this not what is being proposed here… that there are offsets [negative feedbacks] as well as the positive feedbacks so often cited by those who predict runaway global warming?
Of course, the question was greeted by this:
Insinuate that any questioning of “proper thinking” is a result of being old, feeble-minded, and anti-scientific.
Comment by Bruce Hall — August 14, 2007 @ 2:11 pm
Steve
More water vapor will decrease the air density but increase its specific heat capacity and change the thermal diffusivity.
Svensmark notes major differences in high vs low level clouds, and consequently on the temperature changes and trends at different altitudes as well as different latitudes and between the northern and southern hemispheres. The differences in these trends should be able to distinguish between different types of forcing, their magnitude and whether they are “positive” or “negative”.
Comment by DLH — August 14, 2007 @ 2:22 pm
Re #15: Yes, Bruce, and we can be confident that Roy gets his full quota of “rational discussion” in his capacity as Rush Limbaugh’s (volunteer?)house climatologist. This article by RP Jr. may be of interest. The headline is poignant, no?
On the science, clouds are tricky and I don’t claim to have the expertise to fully understand what Roy is proposing, let alone critique it. There are people who frankly are understood to know a lot more about this stuff than Roy does (e.g. Fu and Wielicki), and I’m confident we’ll be hearing from someone like that soon. Short of that sort of formal response (which will probably require at least a few months to get published), I’m going to ask Andrew Dessler to have a look at this. Hopefully he’ll be willing to blog something.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 14, 2007 @ 2:53 pm
Re: #17
Whether or not someone has a particular political bias should be irrelevant. If Roy Spencer’s analysis is faulty, then the proper response is an analysis to refute… or improve… it. This is supposed to be climate science, not political science, so further comments about politics are really nothing more than juvenile attempts at distraction.
It would be enlightening to hear from any others who can move away from model suppositions and demonstrate “real world” observations and analysis that clarify and verify positions.
Comment by Bruce Hall — August 14, 2007 @ 3:51 pm
Re #15: Yes, Bruce, and we can be confident that Roy gets his full quota of “rational discussion� in his capacity as Rush Limbaugh’s (volunteer?)house climatologist. This article by RP Jr. may be of interest. The headline is poignant, no?
I take it that you reject Newton’s work, since it is reported in Wikipedia that:
If Roy starts claiming expertise in Evolutionary Biology or proposing mechanisms for the existence of life on Earth, then I will take note of his creationist views, but they do not seem relevant to Climate Science and they do not preclude him from being able to do good work in that area.
Your mentioning it has the smell of an ad hominem attack to me.
Comment by Richard Sharpe — August 14, 2007 @ 4:09 pm
How large was the impact of the 1991-1992 Kuwaiti Oil Fires in terms of soot and CO2 emissions? Was the magnitude large enough that the forcing could be modelled in a similar fashion?
Comment by Bill F — August 14, 2007 @ 4:51 pm
RE 17: Thank you, Steve B., for making such relevant comments. It demonstrates so clearly your understanding of climate issues and your level of intelligence. Was it by design?
Comment by Darwin — August 14, 2007 @ 4:51 pm
This is a good place to remind people that Karner also deduced the climate system is dominated by negative feedbacks. His abstract:
On nonstationarity and antipersistency in global temperature series
O. Ka¨rner
Tartu Observatory, ToËœravere, Estonia
Received 19 December 2001; revised 1 April 2002; accepted 10 April 2002; published XX Month 2002.
[1] Statistical analysis is carried out for satellite-based global daily tropospheric and stratospheric temperature anomaly and solar irradiance data sets. Behavior of the series appears to be nonstationary with stationary daily increments. Estimating long-range dependence between the increments reveals a remarkable difference between the two temperature series. Global average tropospheric temperature anomaly behaves similarly to the solar irradiance anomaly. Their daily increments show antipersistency for scales longer than 2 months. The property points at a cumulative negative feedback in the Earth climate system governing the tropospheric variability during the last 22 years. The result emphasizes a dominating role of the solar irradiance variability in variations of the tropospheric temperature and gives no support to the theory of anthropogenic climate change. The global average stratospheric temperature anomaly proceeds like a 1-dim random walk at least up to 11 years, allowing good presentation by means of the autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) models for monthly series.
Full paper at http://www.aai.ee/~olavi/2001JD002024u.pdf
Comment by Douglas Hoyt — August 14, 2007 @ 4:59 pm
Re: 17
Steve Bloom
Your default use of the ad hom and drive-by smear is revolting and getting very tiresome.
Why so very, very afraid that just like Svensmark, Spencer may have come up with an experimental model that actually demonstrates something? Is it because it’s a model that is repeatable, with its inputs and formula there for all to see and verify? Is it because that’s the way we were taught to practice science, before cherry picking proxies and withholding archived data came into vogue?
Comment by tetris — August 14, 2007 @ 5:01 pm
One thought jumped out at me. There’s an old joke:
“If you have one foot on a block of ice and one in a hot frying pan, on the average your comfortable”.
Given the use of average temperatures on even a daily basis how would a model predict thunderstorms, or any circulation driven by surface heating during the day? I would think this would have a large effect on heat transport from the surface to the upper atmosphere.
Comment by BarryW — August 14, 2007 @ 5:26 pm
Re #17: Steve Bloom. You struck a low blow to Dr. Spencer. Why don’t you criticize Sir John Theodore Houghton or Al Gore’s religious beliefs? The last time I checked, both held themselves out to be devout religious people.
Your attach smells. RP2’s editorial on Dr. Spencer was written because he realized some of your ilk would use the public expression of Spencer’s religious faith as fodder to discredit his very important scientific contributions. What ashame Pielke Jr. was right.
Comment by Bryan — August 14, 2007 @ 5:32 pm
Today 8/14/07 near Boston.
At 9am 66F and absolutly clear (no clouds).
At 4pm 75F and many low level bright white clouds (more than 50% of the sky).
At 7pm 70F and an almost clear sky (less than 2% clouds).
This seems to me to be negative feedback. Water evaporates - forms clouds - clouds reflect sunlight - earth heats less - then when sun is less intense the clouds disipate
It doesn’t prove that negative feedback predominates but it is a good example of negative feedback in climate.
Comment by jim w — August 14, 2007 @ 6:23 pm
My suggestion is that every person has to make a deliberate decision to ignore Steve Bloom - period.
Don’t reply to anything he writes - ever.
You might have to check first to see who a comment is by, if it’s him bypass it.
He’s toxic, shun him. It’s been honestly earned. And everyone will have better discussions without him.
On the specific topic of this thread, I applaud Mr. Spenser for his work.
Comment by Robert in Calgary — August 14, 2007 @ 6:32 pm
Steve B. – The Prometheus weblog that you list with respect to Roy Spencer’s views on a religious issue was made since it was recognized that detractors of views on climate science that do not conform to their particular views would use his religious perspective to inappropriately dismiss his scientific research rather than discuss its merits. You have confirmed that weblog’s view of the consequences of making such a religious statement.
I hope you, and all others; however, will instead discuss the merits of Dr. Spencer’s weblog, as it is a very valuable contribution to the scientific discussion of climate science. We look forward to two further weblogs on Climate Science from this excellent internationally respected scientist.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 14, 2007 @ 7:05 pm
I find the Creationism worrying. Of course if he’s got a point, then he’s got a point. But if I’m rushed for time and need to do an evaluation, then the reputation of the scientist comes into my decision-making calculus. And, well…a creationist? Doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy.
Comment by TCO — August 14, 2007 @ 7:38 pm
Hi all:
Interesting comments, I must say. Good thing I’ve developed a thick skin in recent years.
I presented some of my recent work at a NASA team meeting here in Missoula today…about 50 in attendance. No one faulted my analysis, so I’m still waiting.
I’ve discussed our Infrared Iris results on several occasions with Bruce Wielicki, who I consider a friend. His main objection on the Iris results is that I should be averaging to long time scales. This is partly why I have pursued this issue about time averaging, as it just did not sit well with me, and it led to the results that I posted here (in greatly abbreviated form).
What’s interesting in this business is that most of the modelers and thosewho defend high climate sensitivity are not meterologists, but physiciasts of various flavors. While physicists are usually better computationally that meteorologists, it seems they think in overly simplistic terms about the climate system. Meterorologists are more open to the idea of restoring forces (negative feedbacks) that dominate the system.
We also had a discussion here today about the fact that climate people have only been “dabbling” in feedbacks. There are whole journals devoted to feedbacks, and yet climate researchers still think in the simplest of terms on the subject.
These are just some musings after a busy day.
-Roy
Comment by Roy W. Spencer — August 14, 2007 @ 8:12 pm
Re #22: Be serious, Doug. Even you know that Karners’s stuff was a dead end, and why. Did he ever update his stuff to account for the most recent major correction in the UAH MSU material, and did he ever solve the problem of not being able to account for abrupt change (as in, e.g., the present behavior of the Arctic sea ice)? In fact, it’s a little difficult to reconcile something so basic as deglaciations with his ideas, isn’t it?
Re #28: Roger, saying he’s internationally respected doesn’t make it so. His history of scientific errors combined with his political advocacy of AGW denialism lead me to the opposite conclusion. Add to that the CCSP report bait-and-switch (announced at the Marshall Institute of all places), the Limbaugh association and now this attempt to revive the thoroughly discredited “iris” idea (an endeavor in which I suspect he’s technically out of his depth), and I begin to have a hard time imagining what more he could do to lose respect. Regarding your son’s post, I think the part of the message you missed is that the ID column was Roy’s way of saying he no longer cares what the mass of his scientific colleagues think of him. Don’t blame me for pointing it out.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 14, 2007 @ 10:28 pm
//”For instance, everyone believes that water vapor feedback is positive, and conceptually justifies this by saying that a warmer surface causes more water to evaporate. But evaporation is only half the story in explaining the equilibrium concentration of atmospheric water vapor; precipitation is the other half. What if a decrease in precipitation efficiency is, instead, the cause of the surface warming”//
Wouldn’t we have seen a significant decrease in precipitation over the last few decades to account for this, or are you referring to possible future trends? The NOAA here (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html#Q5) show precipitation trends increasing since 1900 along with temperatures. What in turn is causing decreased precipitation? What implications does this have for, say, Soden et al (2005), Wentz et al. (2007)
Comment by Chris — August 14, 2007 @ 10:35 pm
Wouldn’t we have seen decreased precipitation over the last few decades if this is true? What implications does this have for, say, Soden et al (2005), and newer studies showing increased precipitation for future trends (ie Wentz et al 2007)? What in turn would be causing the precipitation trend changes?
Comment by Chris — August 14, 2007 @ 10:38 pm
I was coming to a similar conclusion from a different point of view while thinking of how to instrument the climate system to get real data quickly. I have been running it as a thought experiment for the last few days.
I came to the conclusion: lots of correlated sensors reading out at high frequency (once or twice a minute).
Then try to make sense of short term correlations (days). Once we understand those go on to longer time scales.
I came to this conclusion before running in to this piece.
Comment by M. Simon — August 14, 2007 @ 11:44 pm
Re #29 TCO: What I find worrying is the condescention and ad hominem attacks you and Mr. Bloom display here and elswhere seem to have become a staple of pro-AGW science. Frankly, if this is the best defence the AGW side can muster… it doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy.
Comment by Barry B. — August 14, 2007 @ 11:55 pm
Let me add that I have blogged it:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2007/08/feedbacks-misdiagnosed.html
and
http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2007/08/feedbacks_misdi.html
and
http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2007/08/feedbacks-misdiagnosed.html
I greatly simplify the science (suitable to my audience) and have a coda of politics.
Great bit of detective work! Pinatubo! Outstanding.
And just to keep every one honest - I am a believer in Something myself - however I think Creationism is without foundation. That alters not one whit my estimation of this work.
Simon
Comment by M. Simon — August 15, 2007 @ 2:09 am
Chris:
No, a decrease in precipitation efficiency leads to an equilibrium increase in total precipitation, like Wentz recently published (BTW, he’s at our meeting here in Missoula, too…he’s very intriqued by my results and he says he’s had the same reservations about feedbacks).
A decrease in precipitation efficicncy, by definition, leads to a more humid atmosphere, which is a warmer atmosphere, which has more precipitation/evaporation.
-Roy
Comment by Roy W. Spencer — August 15, 2007 @ 5:56 am
On another site, TCO has a habit of refering to anyone who doesn’t have a couple of climate science degrees as being part of the Hoi Polloi.
Comment by MarkW — August 15, 2007 @ 6:33 am
It is commonly said that, as we only have one climate, it is impossible to do experiments on it. However, one has been done and might well tie in with this feedback model.
20% of the earth’s surface is covered in stratocumulus cloud, albedo around 40. The albedo of the ocean is very low, not far from 0 at a decent angle of incidence. The Earth’s albedo is falling. If one removes Folland and Parker’s bucket correction then NH SSTs show a steady rise of about .14 deg/decade from 1910 except for the WWII blip which, I contend, is caused by the spilling of millions of tons of oil onto the Atlantic and, to a lesser extent, the Pacific.
Lighthouse data should enable us to correct the 20th century NH SST record. Smoydzin and Glasow on sea salt aerosols and organic surface films can be combined with another recent paper (I’ve lost the reference) which studied droplet production from bubbles in seawater (they used natural and artificial seawater and I’d love to ask them what they did to clean up their samples and what happened when they didn’t — however, climate scientists must get very weary with global warming nutters e-mailing them) and Salter, Latham et al’s paper on albedo enhancement. Combining this data will give a ballpark figure for SST warming caused by oil film pollution of the ocean surface and consequent stratocumulus reduction.
An idea of the results of adding CCNs (cloud condensation nuclei) to a deficient area can be found if you search NASA’s images for ship tracks. It is easy to imagine the reverse, starving the atmosphere of CCNs.
Palle/’s study (EOS 2006, sorry, can’t do accents) suggests that solar forcing increase caused by albedo drop in the 20 years from 1983 to 2003 is 7 watts/m^2. 7 watts! What’s CO2 forcing for the last century again? 2? 3?
The numbers should fall out if the Kreigesmarine effect is real. If it is, Alf’s your Nobel*.
Oil spills reduce cloud cover. Even the sump drips from the car parked on your drive end up on the ocean surface. You would do more to save the planet by driving an oil-tight SUV than any amount of switching off televisions or boiling water by the cup. Oil-covered seas produce fewer salt particles and thus less stratocu. The ocean warms.
Prediction: in areas where gyres concentrate organic oil and surfactant films, the ocean will have warmed faster.
Prediction: the Kreigesmarine effect will break down at a certain windspeed, meaning that the warming will not occur in areas with continuous high windspeeds.
JF
*I’d like an invitation to the ceremony, please.
Comment by Julian Flood — August 15, 2007 @ 6:40 am
I am confused I thought almost all forcings could be either positive or negative (like water vapour forming clouds, can be either). I thought that the whole point of AGW was that CO2 (and maybe some other ghg’s) were ONLY positive, and this is what was freaking people out, they were worried because we were increasing the amount of positive feedback components. Am I wrong in this understanding?
Comment by Nathan — August 15, 2007 @ 6:44 am
As an analytical chemist I learned that there is always a danger in “conditioning” data before performing the calculations that provide the results. This essay reiterates the point that such pre-conditioning introduces biases that often (actually, ‘usually’) go unrecognized. I am glad to see this observation applied to climate modelling. The best data regressions apply a theoretically justifiable mathematical relationship (not just a simple multivariate parametric equation) to the actual raw observations (not some post-processed ‘average’ or logarithm or whatever).
Comment by tadchem — August 15, 2007 @ 8:10 am
RE #32/33, also keep in mind that there are other factors which can significantly affect precipitation, such as irrigation and aerosols.
Comment by Michael Jankowski — August 15, 2007 @ 8:35 am
Hi Nathan:
You are confusing the direct effect of CO2 increase (about 1 deg. C of warming at doubling), with the feedback effect (the 1 deg. direct warming causes OTHER changes that either reduce (negative feedback) or amplify (positive feedbacks) that 1 deg. warming.
Comment by Roy W. Spencer — August 15, 2007 @ 8:46 am
There is absolutely no doubt about it that all cloud cover is a negative feedback. This thread has been brought to my attention and I haven’t been in this part of the ether for a long time so forgive me if I cross-post:
DOVER SEZ:
GMB, I hope you’ve noticed the recent work of Spencer, et al that suggests that clouds may possiblly be negative as opposed to positive feedbacks which contradicts the assumption of most climate modelers….
SO I SEZ:
No I didn’t notice it. But they DEFINITELY are. I worked it out inductively last year.
You see it was thought that the higher ones were coolers and the lower ones were warmers but thats quite wrong.
All clouds are net coolers as soon as you shift your focus to the oceanic heat budget and away from the atmospheric temperature.
See at the moment we are between solar cycles and there’s no sunspots. So we expect that there will be more cloud cover right now.
So the milder winter here down South is a false indication. Since the cloud cover at night and in the mornings will make the average temperature of the lower troposphere warmer.
But all the time its draining the heat budget out of the ocean. Since we assume around about the same cloud cover at night as during the day.
The ocean is giving up its warmth and yet the clouds are letting that warmth tarry in the lower troposphere a little longer.
But the imbedded heat within the ocean is being drained.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
THE LITTLE ICE AGE.
At the outbreak of the little ice age there were months and years of heavy rains. But it wasn’t cold though the suns activities had receded some years before that.
Those were the years when the clouds rained like they were in a hurry. Like they just wanted to do what they had to do and go home.
But then came the cold and the drought. Only in transition are these two lesser horsemen not correlated together.
First the clouds came and they washed away all the crops and robbed the heat from the ocean.
Then the cold and drought came and nothing would grow. People dead on the roads. Piled up like Auschwitz. Thieves hung outside the towns walls.
Heads on sticks and flies walking across sightless eyes. And the peasant-farmers… they’ve eaten all the seeds two winters ago.
A warm earth is a good thing despite what these taxeaters are telling you.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
But the damage is done when its raining yet warm at nights.
The rain is where water vapour turns to ice and radiates latent energy in all directions but since the air is thin up there most of it will escape the troposphere.
Once the warmth is lost to a new strata its as good as lost in space.
So the climate scientists had it all wrong.
Water vapour is the oceans sweating. And the amount of it coming off the oceans is due to the heat-energy-budget of the upper oceans.
When there is much cloud formation there will be more rain hence more energy radiated into space. And less punched into the ocean because the clouds block out the sun.
We need to forget the greenhouse effect and start thinking about real greenhouses.
Real greenhouses work independent of CO2.
They work on principles of strata and heat budgets:
http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2007/05/21/venus-post-part-ii-greenhouse-effect-versus-actual-greenhouses/
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 15, 2007 @ 8:49 am
What Gerlich and Tscheuschner has found is little bit different:
“It is shown that this effect neither has experimental nor theoretical foundations and must be considered as fictitious,” the report states, adding that “The claim that CO2 emissions give rise to anthropogenic [manmade] climate changes has no physical basis.”
Noting that “there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects” the report adds “there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet,” disproving the contention that a fictional average global temperature proves that the planet is warming.
The report is based on hard facts, written by scientists for scientists: “The atmospheric greenhouse effect, an idea that authors trace back to the traditional works of Fourier 1824, Tyndall 1861, and Arrhenius 1896, and is still supported in global climatology, essentially describes a fictitious mechanism in which a planetary atmosphere acts as a heat pump driven by an environment that is radiatively interacting with, but radiatively equilibrated to, the atmospheric system.
“According to the second law of thermodynamics, such a planetary machine can never exist. Nevertheless, in almost all texts of global climatology and in a widespread secondary literature it is taken for granted that such mechanism is real and stands on a firm scientific foundation”
Comment by Antero — August 15, 2007 @ 8:57 am
Nathan,
If CO2 forcing does not get amplified by the water vapor amplifier it is still real. It is just small. If the feedback is negative it will be reduced.
So you have roughly 3 areas to look at
1. Amplified by positive feedback
2. Not amplified
3. Reduced by negative feedback
For all you engineers out there I am using amplified in its common not engineering sense.
Comment by M. Simon — August 15, 2007 @ 9:00 am
Mr. Bloom,
You appear to feel readers should be aware of Mr. Spencer’s beliefs/background/affiliations etc.
Fair enough. I think Mr. Spencer has nothing to hide and believes his work will stand or fall on it’s own merits.
How about you? Are you willing to provide readers with a full disclose of your beliefs/background/affiliations etc.
My understanding is that you are a paid manager of a large environmental group. Is this true? What is your compensation? Is it fair to say your compensation is related to the environmental groups revenue? Do you think the groups revenues are related to the public perception of a AGW crisis?
Comment by charlesH — August 15, 2007 @ 9:34 am
“Noting that “there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effectsâ€? the report adds “there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet,â€? disproving the contention that a fictional average global temperature proves that the planet is warming.”
Antero.
This is the first time I’ve seen a quote which suggests that these guys are looking at this science fraud from virtually the exact-same angle I am.
Some of those statements look a little bit too sweeping. But these here are crazy times and one need not place all caveats and clarifications on ones rap every time one goes to speak out against this energy-deprivation-crusade.
You got a link to these guys?
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 15, 2007 @ 11:32 am
Forget 49. I found it. And the cool thing is that from the date its clear that I can’t be accused of plagiarism on my blog.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 15, 2007 @ 11:39 am
Below is an interesting posting on one possible postive feed-back and “rapid climate change”:
The thawing of vast stretches of Canadian permafrost — widely seen as a “ticking time bomb” of climate change because of its expected liberation of billions of tonnes of pent-up methane and carbon dioxide — may be much less of a threat than previously believed, according to a new U.S. study of freshly unfrozen peat lands across Western Canada’s northern frontier.
Although the melting of underlying permafrost will release huge amounts of the greenhouse gases blamed for fueling global warming, researchers who sampled three sites in boreal Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba have discovered that the warmer, softer, wetter soil that results also promotes the growth of new mosses that capture and store about as much carbon from the atmosphere as the thawed ground releases.
PAPER ABSTRACT - Blackwell Synergy, Global Change Biology
The disappearance of relict permafrost in boreal north America: Effects on peatland carbon storage and fluxes
* M. R. TURETSKY**Departments of Plant Biology and Fisheries and Wildlife, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA, ,
* R. K. WIEDER††Department of Biology, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA, ,
* D. H. VITT‡‡Department of Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL, USA, ,
* R. J. EVANS§§National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, USA,
* K. D. SCOTT††Department of Biology, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA,
*
*Departments of Plant Biology and Fisheries and Wildlife, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA, †Department of Biology, Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA, ‡Department of Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL, USA, §National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, CO, USA
Correspondence: Merritt Turetsky, tel. +517 353 5554, fax +517 353 1926, e-mail: mrt@msu.edu
Abstract
Boreal peatlands in Canada have harbored relict permafrost since the Little Ice Age due to the strong insulating properties of peat. Ongoing climate change has triggered widespread degradation of localized permafrost in peatlands across continental Canada. Here, we explore the influence of differing permafrost regimes (bogs with no surface permafrost, localized permafrost features with surface permafrost, and internal lawns representing areas of permafrost degradation) on rates of peat accumulation at the southernmost limit of permafrost in continental Canada. Net organic matter accumulation generally was greater in unfrozen bogs and internal lawns than in the permafrost landforms, suggesting that surface permafrost inhibits peat accumulation and that degradation of surface permafrost stimulates net carbon storage in peatlands. To determine whether differences in substrate quality across permafrost regimes control trace gas emissions to the atmosphere, we used a reciprocal transplant study to experimentally evaluate environmental versus substrate controls on carbon emissions from bog, internal lawn, and permafrost peat. Emissions of CO2 were highest from peat incubated in the localized permafrost feature, suggesting that slow organic matter accumulation rates are due, at least in part, to rapid decomposition in surface permafrost peat. Emissions of CH4 were greatest from peat incubated in the internal lawn, regardless of peat type. Localized permafrost features in peatlands represent relict surface permafrost in disequilibrium with the current climate of boreal North America, and therefore are extremely sensitive to ongoing and future climate change. Our results suggest that the loss of surface permafrost in peatlands increases net carbon storage as peat, though in terms of radiative forcing, increased CH4 emissions to the atmosphere will partially or even completely offset this enhanced peatland carbon sink for at least 70 years following permafrost degradation.
Comment by Dr Gareth John Evans — August 15, 2007 @ 12:42 pm
I am not a scientist, but I like to read all I can on the ‘global warming/climate change’ situation. This includes cyphering through articles that make no sense when relating to watts per meter or the albeido effect, among many others.
What I can make sense of, however, is that there are clearly many factors that drive our planetary systems, indeed, many of which you scientists have still to work out or discover–for instance newly dicovered and released information about ocean currents and effects of aerosols on planetary warming or cooling.
That people say the ’science is settled’ reflects on their own ignorance of science, which is to continually recheck and reprove.
That there are Steve Blooms of the world does not suprise me, and further it does not surprise me that people like Steve Bloom will attack not just the issue, but the person.
What I find difficult to understand though is why, in the many millenia in which warming has been taking place, and glaciers have been receeding, and habitats have been changing, and extinctions have been occuring, and new life has been forming, and sea levels have been rising, and deserts have been forming, and so on…, why are we attributing these changes to human activity in the present sense.
The answer comes not from scientific research into the climate(which has been and will continue to change, no matter what we do), but into scientific research into the human ego. All of us, as egocentric humans need to grasp our own insignificance in this scheme and realize that nature has been very effective at killing and creating, without us present and with us present, with us gone it will continue.
Now, it is very apparent that we have much to learn from open debate and not snide sophmoric rants into hidden agendas.
Thank you Roy Spencer, and thank you to the rest of the scientist that keep open the debate.
Shame on you Steve Bloom who wants to limit this discussion, and who will obviously not open himself to the scrutiny that he insists upon others.
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 15, 2007 @ 12:46 pm
Mr. Bloom,
Is the the political advocacy or the political advocacy in opposition to the AGW viewpoint that makes one’s view suspect. If it is the former, then most AGW advocates, particularly Hansen, are suspect. If it is the latter, then it says more about the critic than it does about the “denier.”
Your posts consistently take the personal attack and broadly trash the science. Others on this website, in particular, often disagree with the scientific views put forth, but they are able to do so with specificity and in a professional scientific manner. As a layperson I find those views far more informative than broad comments such as “it is widely accepted or the science is solid,” that you have made. Claims that one can “only” understand climate models if one spends years with them on a daily basis suspect. Science requires openness and repeatability.
Comment by Frank R — August 15, 2007 @ 1:04 pm
RE: #50 - For that matter, I would be most interested to see any accurate, overall, metric, either globally or regionally, depicting non seasonal permafrost thawing in non disturbed ground. Most of what I have seen is strictly anecdotal “evidence” consisting of photos showing thawing at road cuts, excavations or under pavement and buildings. Naturally, all of these things cause permafrost to locally recede, and when it becomes dramatic, all I can say is “doh!”
Comment by SteveSadlov — August 15, 2007 @ 1:26 pm
The religous convictions of the investigator certainly matter in this case, because his religious convictions (Intelligent Design) have already driven him to deny established science (Darwinian theory). This speaks to his judgement on matters of science in a way that being a
Protestant do not.
Comment by bigcitylib — August 15, 2007 @ 1:41 pm
Big City Lib- What “Big City” would that be? Smeartown? Adhomville? Your choice to evaluate peer-reviewed science by the religious views of one of the authors is about as bad as it gets. You and Steve Bloom give us progressives a giant black eye. Big city? Big something, that is for sure!
Comment by Chet Atkins — August 15, 2007 @ 2:33 pm
I do not deny that my worldview affects how I approach problems, but so does the worldview of those who think the climate system is fragile. We all aprroach problems with our biases and preconceived notions.
But my worldview has never overridden anything that I think has been convincingly demonstrated from science. The problem is, there are some sciences that depend a great deal on imagination, and in which alternate models are possible explanations for what is observed.
Rejection of the possibility a designer is an emotional position, and I think that the practice of science should lead us wherever it will. I know I was convinced based upon the science, but it took about a year of near-daily study on the subject for me to reach that point.
There are even famous evolutionists who also admit that both evolution and ID are belief systems, neither of which can be proved.
To claim otherwise only reveals the ignorance of the one who claims it, for they either (1) have not investigated BOTH sides of the issue, in depth, for themselves, or (2) have their own religious bias that they can not get beyond.
This is the last I will comment on this issue on this blog, because the debate just goes on forever…been there, done that.
Comment by Roy W. Spencer — August 15, 2007 @ 2:34 pm
Re #54: bigcitylib:
“Christians and other religious people believe that we’ve been put on the earth to look after it. Creation is not just important to us, we believe also it is important to God and that the rest of creation has an importance of its own…”
Sir John Theodore Houghton
Now please inform us bigcitylib, how the religious views of Sir John differ from those of Roy Spencer. Why do Houghton’s religious beliefs not also disqualify his science arguments? By your logic, since he also believes in intellegent design, his ideas on human-caused global warming theory are all suspect. That is just plain post modern intellectual garbage.
Your attempt to bring this up is a very ugly and bigoted smokescreen because you (an others) cannot and will not engage in a rational discussion of the important scientific merrits of Dr. Spencer’s ideas. You seem more interested in perpetuating a certain propaganda than really learning about the science. Your comments amount to slander.
Please be advised however, that science is a methodology which allows us to search for truth (often different truths from those searched for in theology). So regardless of your personal opinions, the best evidence and most well-reasoned ideas usually win the day in science. Dr. Spencer’s scientific ideas form a very sound hypothesis.
Comment by Bryan — August 15, 2007 @ 2:51 pm
The religous convictions of the investigator certainly matter in this case, because his religious convictions (Intelligent Design) have already driven him to deny established science (Darwinian theory). This speaks to his judgement on matters of science in a way that being a
Protestant do not.”
of course the above statement is silly. What is important is whether his analysis presented above is correct or not. If it is correct, then it doesn’t matter whether his judgment in other areas of science is correct or not.
Comment by pPaulD — August 15, 2007 @ 2:57 pm
Roy Spencer,
is it possible there is a false dichotomy here in that both feedbacks are allowed? a decrease in precipitation efficiency leads to warming which can amplfy the traditional amplification of water vapor. I had thought Lindzen’s main contention was that that atmospheric circulation patterns in the tropics could dry, rather than moisten the upper troposphere which was rejected by Brian Soden and colleagues and NOAA.
Based solely on paleoclimatology I think the idea CO2 increasing 3x or 4x can’t lead to drastic changes in absurd (PETM, end cretacious, etc) as well as other feedbacks (ice-albedo) and decline in natural sinks (saturation of the ocean, see Le Quere et al 2007, and deforestation).
Comment by Chris — August 15, 2007 @ 3:26 pm
Intelligent design was proven to be false twenty three years before it was even postulated. Now, you might be convinced that Intelligent design was a modern discovery - although the Discovery Institute that came up with Intelligent Design see it as a way of getting Religion taught in Schools. Anyway, Intelligent Design or “The Argument for the Existence of God From Design” as it has been known for the past few hundred years was put forward by Archbishop Paley to prove god exists. Unfortunately it after Locke had put forward and demolished the same argument. Intelligent Design is a strategy of the radical religious right wing fundamentalists to prevent education. This is a discredited theory that they thought was so old that people had forgotten about it. It points at a thing and says oh look I recognise a pattern therefore the pattern must have been designed. The same theory can be applied as follows: oh look I see no pattern therefore there is no designer. The existence of random numbers disproves the existence of intelligent design.
It is an absurd theory.
Comment by Chris — August 15, 2007 @ 3:28 pm
Don’t confuse well-supported theory with scientific law, bigcitylib; don’t assume the incompatibility of evolutionary evidence and intelligent design; and never confuse scientific refutation with ad hominem attack. Dr. Spencer put forward a hypothesis and begged for someone to poke holes in it because he’s not sure it holds together. Many have made intelligent scientific (or lay) comments, questions and suggestions in response. Two have ignored the merits of the hypothesis and gone straight for the throat of the hypothesizer. Which approach advances the understanding of the obviously *not* settle science?
Comment by Danno Farrington — August 15, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
simply BRILLIANT retort, Chris.
Comment by Roy W. Spencer — August 15, 2007 @ 3:47 pm
What is truly absurd, is that CO2, which comprises
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 15, 2007 @ 4:03 pm
This essay draws on the experience of using “models” in semiconductor processing. Although it does not address the specific topic addressed by Dr. Spencer, it does point to the danger of relying solely numerical models without verifying experimental evidence.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/02/numerical_models_integrated_ci.html
Comment by Frank R — August 15, 2007 @ 4:18 pm
Excellent look at the “feedback gap” in climatology! Many unscrupulous scientists will publish whatever brings in the big grants, and we certainly see that in big “rockstar” climatology these days.
Too many people such as Chris look at intelligent design as a backdoor attempt to prove creationism. To the contrary, nothing would disprove conventional monotheistic religion and creationism more thoroughly than true intelligent design!
The problem is that humans are not intelligent enough to detect traces of true intelligence in the universe–which would almost certainly not be caused by anything resembling a biblical god. But if we could detect such, we could disprove all of the world’s god-requiring religions in one fell swoop!
Comment by Steffan de Blum — August 15, 2007 @ 4:20 pm
Re 60: So you don’t believe in God. I’m an agnostic and I really don’t care, at least when it comes to a discussion on this thread. I do resent how Steve B, BCL and now you want the debate to devolve into a discussion of religious belief. And on that score I have only one thing to add, and this is that man was conceived in sin and born in corruption so there is always something. RP Warren novel attacked McCarthyism, which it would be wise for you youngsters to become acquainted with. Anything about ID or my namesakes “Theory,” (not law — we have no laws in science since Einstein blew up some of Newton’s) seems to me to be off topic. The question I am concerned with here is the nature of the negative feedbacks from warmth — natural or CO2 induced. Somebody says precipitation efficiency and I think more rain; they say Iris and I see hurricanes. In layman’s terms, what do positive feedbacks for temperature increase and negative feedbacks counteracting such increase amount to?
Comment by Darwin — August 15, 2007 @ 4:57 pm
#57 As far as I know, Mr. Houghton has not suggested that time be given over in American classrooms to teach American children that Evolutionary theory and the theory that a bearded sky-monster did it all should both be taught as a matter of faith.
#58 You’re right, but there are only 24 hours in the day and if I am going to try and wade through papers filled with graphs and etc. I am going to avoid those written by people who are willing to argue that a bearded sky-monster and etc. because I would judge them a likely waste of time. That’s just common sense. There are all sorts of people advancing all sorts of theses these days.
Comment by bigcitylib — August 15, 2007 @ 5:17 pm
Steffan,
there is a distinct difference between creationism/ID and the existence of God(s). God is crucial for creationism/ID but Creationism/ID is not crucial for God. Evolution is a simple fact of biology: things change. There is not a lot to understand but it comes with a vast array of details. For example, when the niche changes, those living things that are best adapted to the changed niche will survive. Unfortunately, much like Copernicus and Tyco Brahe and Bruno and Gallileo, the concept of change is anathema to many who believe in a certain kind of religion.
I have no problem with the existence of God. I have a big problem with the ID movement such as Behe et al., the discovery institute, on pandas and people- all of which have a much different take on what ID is than you do. Behe would have no problem with astrology and alchemy and such as being called science- he said so at the Dover Trial. ID is the same thing; it is unfalsifiable, it does not give us observations and assessments of reality and cannot be experimented or give us predictions as to future phenomena. It is simply not science. It is as good as scientology. Even if it is true, it isn’t science, but it isn’t true because it falls apart logically. Science can evidence against it and philosophy can disprove it- whichever approach you wish.
and the whole irreducibly complex stuff…no
Comment by Chris — August 15, 2007 @ 5:49 pm
All - please focus on the science issue that Roy has presented in his weblog.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 15, 2007 @ 6:03 pm
Re#40 etc.
Thanks Roy I think I understand. So you are proposing that the feedback system is dominated by negative feedbacks? What does that look like long-term? Does it mean that the Earth trends towards colder climate or that any ‘attempt’ to change the climate is quickly reduced by these feedbacks? If say the Earth were to start to get colder would positive feedbacks kick in to ’stop it’.
How does this account for the speed at which the climate has left ice-ages during the current cycle? It seems there is rapid warming warming leaving an ice-age followed by slow cooling, would we have had that rapid warming if negative feedbacks dominated?
Very interesting discussion though, and am surprised that there aren’t any studies on the magnitude of the various feedback systems.
Comment by Nathan — August 15, 2007 @ 7:02 pm
Roy,
“Note that the reason the bias is always in the direction of positive feedback is because the alternative is energetically impossible (you can’t force an SST increase by reducing SW input into the ocean).”
Have you tried introducing a lag in your model between the SW and cloud formation? That way you can have for a while at least increasing SST while reducing SW input into the ocean, though it would not be the cause. The amount of lag appropriate would need to be experimentally determined and I expect in a weather system it will also be variable.
It has been to long, for me, to present it mathematically but personal (I might add uncomfortable) experience has been that unless this lag due to thermal inertia and feedback delay is properly dealt with in a control system the customer’s product gets burnt rather than cooked or dried.
Comment by Jan Pompe — August 15, 2007 @ 7:07 pm
Yes, the science please. Discussing Darwinism vs. Intelligent Design is beyond the scope of life on Earth. They can coexist, despite pigheaded arguments to the contrary. We can’t even put all physics together.
It could be like my dogs arguing over whether or not I am the greatest hunter that ever lived when I get back from the grocery store…
Comment by Steve Hemphill — August 15, 2007 @ 8:10 pm
While we’re on the subject of feedbacks we should also consider ice-albedo and deforestation and saturation of CO2 in the ocean, etc. I see no reason to doubt water vapor exerts a positive feedback and also that under specific conditions with respect to precipitation and changes in cloud cover, and generally at a regional scale, cooling can occur. Another feedback to consider now-
Apparently there has been little study thus far to the effects of increased tropospheric ozone on plants, which in turn has implications for land-carbon storage. The new study by Sitch et al. (2007) shows the impact of the biosphere from increased O3 could double the effective radiative forcing as CO2 accumulates and the land-carbon sink is suppressed.( Nature 448, 791-794 )
With respect to observation, as I continue to see reports coming in current “projections” which are off seem to be replaced by more alarming rather than more conservative estimates. See here for example-
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5825/709
Antarctic ice melting faster than predicted-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201712.html
Arctic ice retreating more rapidly-
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2007/seaice.shtml
Comment by Chris — August 15, 2007 @ 8:12 pm
In post # 55, Chet Atkins asked:
=”Big City Lib- What “Big Cityâ€? would that be? Smeartown? Adhomville?”=
It’s even worse then that Chet. bigcitylib is from Toronto.
And in post # 67 bigcitylib said:
==”As far as I know, Mr. Houghton has not suggested that time be given over in American classrooms to teach American children that Evolutionary theory and the theory that a bearded sky-monster did it all should both be taught as a matter of faith.”==
As far as you know bigcitylib, neither has Roy Spencer advocated ID classroom instruction.
As for the “bearded sky-monster”, Newton, Galileo and Einstein amongst others believed it existed.
Comment by Paul G. — August 15, 2007 @ 8:19 pm
RE #43
I also thought that CO2 acted as a positive feedback as increasing CO2 lead to more CO2 (from other sinks).
Is this not true?
Comment by Nathan — August 15, 2007 @ 9:32 pm
At the risk of directly disobeying our kind host, I wish to speak in defense of Dr. Spencer, who has been subject to unfair ridicule and insult here and in the years following the correction to the C & S satellite analysis research. Will Hansen and Schmidt suffer a relentless personal smear campaign after the GISS error correction? At worst they will be accused by the skeptics of bias and lack of scientific rigor and will enjoy one ringing defense after another from their fawning legion of Starbucks slurpers.
The cosmological views of Dr. Spencer are entirely irrelevant to the scientific inquiry and thesis he proposes. The insipid and small-minded commentary in lieu of debate here has been pulled directly from the totalitarian’s crude toolbox. When a visceral reaction arises in response, it isn’t a chorus of oil company stooges. Its just that we despise the Goon Squad.
Lastly, I will not go off topic to describe the my sense of wonder in 11th grade bio upon opening a foetal pig and seeing the grand architecture therein revealed, my curiosity about the organizing force behind such structured complexity and the mechanism whereby the random and entropic universe reduced itself to perfection. I see nothing inconsistent in believing in natural selection and the “force that through the green fuse drives the flower”. If you are incapable of sustaining this dichotomy, you might want to ask when exactly the flame of curiosity got snuffed out in your life.
Comment by hswiseman — August 15, 2007 @ 11:44 pm
#70,
You are confusing the sign of the feed back with the direction of the response.
Negative feed back - if the system goes above the set point the feed back will tend to pull it back
if the system goes below the set point the feed back will tend to push it up.
With positive feedback a system going above the set point will be driven farther above the set point. etc.
Negative feedback systems tend to be stable. Positive feedback systems unstable.
It is also possible to have a positive feed back subsystem in an overall stable system. We call those oscillators. However, since this is not control theory in one easy lesson, I’ll stop before I get into more trouble.
Comment by M. Simon — August 16, 2007 @ 3:06 am
#73 Nathan,
Did you read the article? Roy thinks it is negative and provides evidence.
You know, like start at the top of the page and work your way down. There are some nice colored pictures at the top of the page. Another way to recognize it is to scroll up until you can’t go any farther.
Comment by M. Simon — August 16, 2007 @ 3:10 am
#77 should refer to #75 Nathan,
Comment by M. Simon — August 16, 2007 @ 3:12 am
#73 Chris says:
I see no reason to doubt water vapor exerts a positive feedback
Read Roy’s article again.
Explain the stability of the system.
The stability of the system and your positive feedback hypothesis are not commensurate.
For the last few million years we have seen that the system is stable at a warm level and then trips to a cool level. Followed by a tripping to a warm level.
Wouldn’t it be good to find out what causes those shifts?
BTW the water vapor in the atmosphere acts like the vapor in a heat pipe. Vaporization and condensation is a very efficient way to conduct heat.
Comment by M. Simon — August 16, 2007 @ 3:29 am
re 75:
The “CO2 boilingeffect” is only 10 ppm per degree C, so it isn’t a runaway effect.
Comment by Hans Erren — August 16, 2007 @ 4:11 am
Re #73,
You have to consider that “under specific conditions” could give a larger feedback than the basic water vapor forcing (or “feedback”, if you want to temporally restrict definitions artificially). Consider the limit - if the entire earth was covered in clouds. Would the surface be cooler or warmer then?
Before you go off about Venus, remember your thermodynamics that the lapse rate on Venus is the same as on Earth - and any other planet for that matter. It’s just a question of how much atmosphere there is. We’re talking about albedo.
On a side note, one of the best illustrations I’ve seen is the question of what would happen to the temperature of the surface of Earth if the mass of the atmosphere suddenly doubled?
Comment by Steve Hemphill — August 16, 2007 @ 5:18 am
Paul G.
Now you know better:
http://www.techcentralstation.com/080805I.html
Comment by bigcitylib — August 16, 2007 @ 6:09 am
Ref #71:
This sounds reasonable to me, and could be likened to inertia in a moving object- if the force is removed (or lessened), it takes time for the object to decelerate or stop. In this case, the ocean’s stored heat energy would be the majority of the inertia for the climate when the SW radiation is lessened.
My question for Dr Pielke / Dr Spencer is whether this contradicts the hypothesis put forth that there is no delay reference earlier “pipeline” comments in this weblog. Perhaps I am remembering this out of context, but thought I would ask…
Comment by Rejean Gagnon — August 16, 2007 @ 7:10 am
The long-term history of the climate suggests the feedbacks are, indeed, stabilizing factors. Despite widely varying forcings and albedo over the past 500 million years, Earth’s climate seems to stay in the +/- 6C range (from today) with the majority of the period being about 2C warmer than today.
All that water on the planet, with it’s ability to store heat, move heat and cold, evaporate, produce clouds, reflect the sun’s energy, form ice, and precipitate is most likely that stabilizing factor.
Comment by John Willit — August 16, 2007 @ 7:31 am
Rejean – When scientists refer to warming that is still in the “pipeline�, they are referring to temperature. Warming is used imprecisely in the vernacular. Temperature increase to a new equilibrium takes time after a radiative or other heat input is changed. The lag (i.e. the pipeline) depends of the mass of the object in which the heat is being added. However, warming is actually defined as an accumulation of Joules. There is no lag (and no pipeline) when using this measure of heat.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 16, 2007 @ 7:49 am
re: 76
I agree with you. I try to follow the science to best of my ability, and Spencer’s looked an interesting viewpoint and I was looking forward to an interesting debate.
Then it seems the thread was hi-jacked for an ad hominem attack that comes down to the mind-boggling claim that if a scientist believes in a God figure, his/her research is not to be taken seriously.
If you believe in a God figure, you are not likely to believe that random chance created life on earth, it would be inconsistent.
Such an attack is cheap, insulting and completely out of place. Should we be surprised that it was Steve Bloom who brought it up?
When you can’t beat the argument, try to beat the man? I fear we could see more and more of that in the future, on a more general level. I think it was in Pielke Jr’s blog (linked above) where it was quoted how realclimate have already used this ad hom “argument” twice against Mr. Spencer.
(apologies for another off-topic post)
Comment by Buddenbrook — August 16, 2007 @ 8:13 am
The feedback and “warming in the pipeline” clarifications of M. Simon and Roger are correct.
It ssems to me that in the climate sensitivity business it is difficult to prove anything. All we have in the real climate system during the period of the instrumental record is short-term variability, and we are trying to figure out long-term sensitivity to increasing CO2.
Keeping this in mind, our negative feedback results in the GRL study (I’ll submit a blog entry on that work to Roger soon) are intriguing, but don’t prove a net negative feedback on global warming.
But I do believe the behavior IS contrary to climate model behavior, and the only way I know of to see how it MIGHT affect global warming is to get the models to behave in the same way for short-term variability, then see how much global warming they produce.
Comment by Roy W. Spencer — August 16, 2007 @ 9:31 am
That the earth has exhibited climate stability over a certain range of oscillations through its history suggests that the feedbacks sum to negative. But that does not prove that they would stay negative if they passed some critical point. It makes a lot of sense to me to try to learn more about the details of each of the feedback mechanisms so that we can better understand if there is a “tipping point” and where it might be. The (IMO irrational) fear of further studies must stem from the idea that any suggestion that we don’t know everything we need to know will undermine the objective of drastic global immediate political action.
If we ever accept the idea that we already know everything we need to know science will be dead.
Comment by allanj — August 16, 2007 @ 9:40 am
73. Lets go through this one at a time.
“While we’re on the subject of feedbacks we should also consider ice-albedo and deforestation and saturation of CO2 in the ocean….”
1. ICE ALBEDO.
My contention is that the oceanic-atmospheric system would be almost perfectly dominated by negative feedbacks but for two factors . And this is the position of Antarctica and the fact that the North Pole is surrounded by land.
You see I see sea-ice as the NEGATIVE feedback par excellence. Its the great insulator. The wind blows hard along the water and can assist evaporation even when the water is cold. That has a refrigerant effect and if the water vapour gets to one day be rain the act of going from vapour to ice will transport much heat out into space.
Only when the Northern Ice gets so far as to inhibit the Gulf Stream would I consider that oceanic ice is about the most magnificent negative feedback there is.
Sea ice stops all that wind-assisted evaporation. Insulates warmth. The thinner ice even lets the suns warmth through and locks it in. Perfect negative feedback.
Its a magnificent planet we are on really. Way too cold in this time period. But truly magnificent.
As to positive feeback via melting ice on the very high mountains I would see that as small potatoes. Because its high up. And so the extra energy that the mountain absorbs… Well thats not going to make much difference in terms of the extra energy retained making it all the way down and lodging itself in the oceans. A bit like lighting a candle on the top of the Empire State Building and worrying that the basement will overheat.
But ice accumulating on land is an whole other matter. This is a heat regulation fault with Gaia I think. Simply that the land is so near the Poles.
2. Deforestation.
Let not your heart be troubled. We are REFORESTING. Such is the power of CO2 that as much forests as we bulldoze and burn in the tropics far more is growing back elsewhere that the total weight of biota is growing at a magnificent clip.
3. Saturation of CO2 in the oceans.
I’ve never seen this mentioned in terms of greenhouse before. But liquid water is such a groovy greenhouse substance that I cannot imagine it making a difference. But what good news if true that CO2 is saturating the oceans. So much more life. The tropics particularly are starved of life since the water is usually too warm to hold that much CO2 and O2. I’d be interested in anyone coming up with information as to whether extra CO2 in the water can have some sort of enhanced warming effect. A wonderful thing if true for our typically frozen planet. But since liquid water is itself a magnificent greehouse substance I just cannot see the extra CO2 absorbed in it making any difference. Am willing to be turned around on this.
” I see no reason to doubt water vapor exerts a positive feedback and also that under specific conditions with respect to precipitation and changes in cloud cover, and generally at a regional scale, cooling can occur. Another feedback to consider now-”
Well in the immediate sense water vapour is the chief warmer of the lower troposphere. But in terms of heat accumulating over decades IT TOO is a negative feedback. Short-term its positive yes. But long-term it has to be negative since when it rains all that latent heat released when water vapour turns to ice…… well much of it will be radiated up and will be lost in space.
Its halfway out of the troposphere already. Its up where the air is thin. So one just has to assume that though the latent heat radiates in all directions most of it will quickly be lost to space.
This is why I see water vapour as the oceans sweating. And the positive feedback being short-term only… so that long-term extra water vapour is not an accumulator of energy but a dissapator.
“Apparently there has been little study thus far to the effects of increased tropospheric ozone on plants, which in turn has implications for land-carbon storage.”
Thats not a big problem. We can reduce ozone release from industry without destroying industrial civilisation. Its restrictions on CO2-release that are crazy and unnaceptable since CO2 is a postivie externality and its production is central to wealth-creation.
“The new study by Sitch et al. (2007) shows the impact of the biosphere from increased O3 could double the effective radiative forcing as CO2 accumulates and the land-carbon sink is suppressed.( Nature 448, 791-794 )”
Just not relevant to what we are talking about. A conflation of issues to confuse people.
“With respect to observation, as I continue to see reports coming in current “projectionsâ€? which are off seem to be replaced by more alarming rather than more conservative estimates. See here for example-
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5825/709”
Yeah. Just leftist energy-deprivation-crusade crazy-talk. Science-mag is notorious for this. Its science is so bad you wonder if its even a magazine.
“Antarctic ice melting faster than predicted-
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201712.html”
The Antarctic is ACCUMULATING ICE. Antartica is such a drain on the energy of the planet entire.
That we have been systematically cooling for 55 million years makes me think that the position of Antarctica is actually robbing the earth of heat and probably all the way down to the core.
“Arctic ice retreating more rapidly-
http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2007/seaice.shtml”
True enough. Sadly its not going to last. Its related to the systematic increase in the oceanic heat budget throughout the twentieth century thanks to the most active period of solar activity for likely 8000 years.
But its also related to the oceanic rythms. You can trace the Northern ebb and flow of ice on the decadal level by sussing out which PHASE the North Atlantic Oscillation or alternatively the Pacific Decadal oscillation is in.
And its a very sad thing but once this changes phase again the hurricanes will die down in the Gulf and the ice will thicken and expand up North.
It would be good if we were rid of that North Pole ice for quits.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 16, 2007 @ 10:30 am
Re #50: Bear in mind that this study was limited to boreal (forested) areas. Would those mosses grow that way out in the open tundra? OTOH, the forested areas will tend to expand northward into those open areas as things warm. On the yet other hand, the boreal forest is itself very vulnerable to disease and fire under warming temperatures.
Re #65: Roger and Dallas, is the use of sock puppets (I assume by Sadlov in this case) acceptable on this blog? I have no problem with anonymity, but IMHO contributors should stick with a single name.
Re #76: Starbucks? I don’t think so. Peet’s, of course!
BTW, hs, if you would pay the tiniest bit of attention to the facts, you would know that Gavin has never worked on the temperature data. The particular mistake wasn’t made personally by Hansen, for that matter, although he is certainly in charge. Bear in mind that GISS is a rather large organization (as these things go), with on the order of a hundred scientists.
Re #80: We know what causes the shifts, that being orbital changes (Milankovitch cycles). The question is more one of figuring out what changes occurred to allow the orbital changes (which have been ongoing) to tip us into the Pleistocene glacial cycle some 2 million yerars ago. Likely the change was something rather subtle, the ocean current shift resulting from the closure of the Central American seaway probably being the best candidate. The GHGs we are adding to the atmosphere are rather less subtle by comparison. (And see my response to #84 below.)
In general, I think what Chris and Nathan are trying to point out is that it’s a little odd to make an argument for a mechanism that will maintain climate in something like the present state since that state is very unusual. If it’s too weak to resist Milankovitch cycles, why would it be able to oversome GHG forcing? Speaking of Milankovitch cycles, there are more subtle ones as in the Holocene thermal maximum or the less-extensive Little Ice Age. Roy and his co-authors need to explain why the proposed effect didn’t damp those off.
Re #81: The larger concern regarding ocean CO2 isn’t the outgassing of what’s already been absorbed so much as that the absorption of emissions will cease. IIRC something like half of anthropogenic emissions have been taken up by the oceans.
Re #85: “Despite widely varying forcings and albedo over the past 500 million years, Earth’s climate seems to stay in the +/- 6C range (from today) with the majority of the period being about 2C warmer than today.” I don’t think that’s at all right. While some interglacials have been 2C warmer than the present one, recall that at least 75% of that 500 million years has been ice free. Temps in the range of 10C greater than present have been extensive. The last 2 million years of the Pleistocene glaciations have been a unique or nearly unique period in the Phanerozoic. This raises the question of whether it’s reasonable based on the paleo evidence to think of the present glacial climate regime (either 800,000 or 2 million years, depending on how it’s considered) as stable in any sense.
Re #86: I don’t understand what you’re saying here,, Roger. Since Joules also accumulate until the system reaches equilibrium, why wouldn’t that be considered a lag?
Re #89: Of course during the Phanerozoic there has been stability within some very broad parameters, but that’s involved temperature swings on the order of 30C.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 16, 2007 @ 10:56 am
RE: #77 - RE: Oscillators. ENSO, AMO, AO, PDO, etc.
Comment by SteveSadlov — August 16, 2007 @ 11:16 am
Also see this article regarding near-term climate tipping points.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 16, 2007 @ 11:21 am
RE; #85 - Here is a thesis. The various oscillators / clocks in the system play a key role in keeping the system from dying (e.g. assuming a much lower overall energy state). I seriously doubt that the system has a runaway bias. I strongly suspect it’s the opposite. Instead of debating about the negatives, whatever they are, from having CO2 at 400, 500 or even over 1000PPM, we should be debating how low it can go before we reach a crisis. That is the big, big, long term picture. We must either figure this out, and at somepoint, perhaps intervene, or, get serious about intragalactic migration. These are the debates we need to have, right now, we are wasting our time and energy as a species arguing over the petty and insignificant. Don’t think Venus, think Mars. Mars may be a portent of our future.
Comment by SteveSadlov — August 16, 2007 @ 11:22 am
Steve B. – Re #86, there is no lag with Joules since if the radiative imbalance goes to zero, no further Joules accumulate. We just need to monitor the amount of Joules at any time. With temperature, diagnosing the radiative imbalance is much more difficult since the mass of the system accumulating the heat determines the lag, and water vapor can confound the interpretation.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 16, 2007 @ 12:20 pm
allanj — August 16, 2007 @ 9:40 am,
Yes. It is way more important to find out what trips (electrical terminology) us into an ice age rather than worrying about a few deg C from CO2.
The idea of a rainy period that lasts a long time (40 days and 40 nights - LOL) once the energy input declines is a very interesting one. It makes sense if you consider water vapor and not radiation the major outgoing heat transfer mechanism.
Vapor heat transfer is very efficient. Its equivalent conductivity is hundreds of times better than the best metals. In fact if our atmosphere didn’t vary pressure with altitude I’d bet that on a vertical scale (esp above water) it would be nearly isothermal.
It is probably one of the reasons you can count on the lapse rate.
Comment by M. Simon — August 16, 2007 @ 12:53 pm
#93 Steve B.,
That article was really scary.
Twenty-three feet rise in seal level? Catastrophic. At the current rate of rise that will take over 4,500 years.
BTW I note that the article was based on guesses by
entrail readersclimate scientists.Lots of guesses on what the tripping point might be in the positive direction. No mention of what it might be the other way. Fair and balanced.
As one commenter put it - funding guaranteed for another year.
Comment by M. Simon — August 16, 2007 @ 1:07 pm
Re #97: And we can be confident that rates will not increase as we add energy to the system? Interesting. Similiarly, it takes some real creativity to imagine that under present circumstances we should worry as much about negative tipping points as positive ones. Do you have any basis for thinking either of these is true aside from an appeal to your own incredulity?
As many commenters have put it — unfettered fossil duel sales for another year.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 16, 2007 @ 2:48 pm
I am in total agreement this is far too complex a subject for anyone to treat it as simply as we do. Just looking at one aspect of the system (clouds, seas, glaciers, atmosphere, sun, etc) and just that one thing is incredibly complex, then you start blending them? Sheesh! I think I came up with 16 factors for amount of glacier mass, just on its own as a topic. I wouldn’t be surprised of anything, and I think Roy is on to something here, for sure.
If you trace everything back, there’s two possible answers for “where everything comes from in the first place” and neither can be proven or explained. So which one you pick and for what reasons is a non-issue.
Comment by Mike Nee — August 16, 2007 @ 4:27 pm
RE 90
//”My contention is that the oceanic-atmospheric system would be almost perfectly dominated by negative feedbacks but for two factors . And this is the position of Antarctica and the fact that the North Pole is surrounded by land.”//
Contentions are fine but they should be backed by the scientific literature. I would suggest you look at the concept of water vs. ice albedo. In the Arctic, warming melts sufficient ice to change the surface from ice (which reflects sunlight) to liquid water and land (which absorbs light). But the Northern Hemisphere warms faster than the Southern Hemisphere because it contains most of the Earth’s land mass.
See here- http://acia.cicero.uio.no/factsheets/1_arctic_climate_trends.pdf
It is this set of positive feedbacks strongly responsible for polar amplifiation
http://acia.cicero.uio.no/factsheets/1_arctic_climate_trends.pdf
//”The wind blows hard along the water and can assist evaporation even when the water is cold. That has a refrigerant effect and if the water vapour gets to one day be rain the act of going from vapour to ice will transport much heat out into space….”//
I’m not understanding what you’re getting at; can you reference me to something? I think you are working with the premise ice absorbs rather than reflects sunlight, this is not correct.
No offense, but I didn’t see anything in point 1 which made much sense. I’d much rather you link me to peer-revewed or sources from scientific organziations which support a negative ice-albedo feedback.
2. Deforestation.
//”Let not your heart be troubled. We are REFORESTING. Such is the power of CO2 that as much forests as we bulldoze and burn in the tropics far more is growing back elsewhere that the total weight of biota is growing at a magnificent clip.”//
I’ve not seen recent trends in biomass; could you reference me?” Moreover, even Mr. Pielke has literature here pertaining to agriculture/land use.
Interesting graph- http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7f/Oldgrowth3.jpg
3. Saturation of CO2 in the oceans.
//”But what good news if true that CO2 is saturating the oceans. So much more life.”//
The effect is the weakening of the ocean at absorbing carbon which leaves more into the atmosphere. See “Saturation of the Southern Ocean CO2 Sink Due to Recent Climate Change” from Le Quere et al (2007)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1136188v1
As far as better life, not according to Orr et al (2005) and this page from the Royal Society
http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/displaypagedoc.asp?id=13539
It is suggested that southern oceans and pacific will become toxic to organisms with calcium carbonate shells after about 2050. CO2 mixes with H20 to form various thing, one thing is carbonic acid which is neutralized by other buffers which weaken as CO2 increases. The already reduction of 0.1 pH demonstrates this. This will have a drastic effect on ecosystems and food chains (including baleen whales who scoop them up in large amounts). Corals will be affected from the tropics to high latitudes. It is projected the pH of oceans may drop from about 8.2 to 7.7 by 2100.
� I see no reason to doubt water vapor exerts a positive feedback and also that under specific conditions with respect to precipitation and changes in cloud cover, and generally at a regional scale, cooling can occur. Another feedback to consider now-�
Well in the immediate sense water vapour is the chief warmer of the lower troposphere. But in terms of heat accumulating over decades IT TOO is a negative feedback. Short-term its positive yes. But long-term it has to be negative since when it rains all that latent heat released when water vapour turns to ice…… well much of it will be radiated up and will be lost in space.
I’d say relatively little rain turns to ice. This whole thing is a contentious point. As the climate warms in response to increases in other greenhouse gases such as CO2, the concentrations of water vapor are expected to increase (See Rind et al., 1991; A. Del Genio et al., 1994; Kiehl and Trenberth, 1997 {on the energy budget}; Held and Soden, 2000). Because warmer air can hold more water, this implies that global warming results in an increase in the amount of heat trapped by water vapor, fueling additional warming (see Soden et al., 2005 which I think destroys Lindzen’s argument that concentrations in the upper troposphere might actually decrease in a warmer climate, because of simplified treatment of convection and cloud-related processes, etc).
Its halfway out of the troposphere already. Its up where the air is thin. So one just has to assume that though the latent heat radiates in all directions most of it will quickly be lost to space.
//”why is everything over your entire post being lost into space? Unfortunately, this is exactly what increased CO2 is preventing IR from doing. The planet as a whole is now taking in more energy than it radiates.” This is also not the case with all the water vapor, etc//
“The new study by Sitch et al. (2007) shows the impact of the biosphere from increased O3 could double the effective radiative forcing as CO2 accumulates and the land-carbon sink is suppressed.( Nature 448, 791-794 )�
//”Just not relevant to what we are talking about. A conflation of issues to confuse people.”//
I’m going over feedbacks. It is a feedback, so I think we should consider it.
//”Yeah. Just leftist energy-deprivation-crusade crazy-talk. Science-mag is notorious for this. Its science is so bad you wonder if its even a magazine.”//
Science magazine? Are you serious?
//”The Antarctic is ACCUMULATING ICE. Antartica is such a drain on the energy of the planet entire.”//
There is increasing concern about rising sea levels resulting from melting in the West Antarctic ice sheet and Arctic ice sheet (the arctic warms much faster than antarctica). Some of the confusion stems from failure to distinguish between West Antarctica, the area of serious concern, and East Antarctica. An article in Science by Davis et al. (June, 2005, p 1898-2001) states that data from satellite radar altimetry indicates that the East Antarctic ice-sheet interior increased in mass by 45 [+ or -] 7 billion metric tons per year from 1992 to 2003 due to increased precipitation caused by warming temperatures in the region, which also appears to be the case for the relatively few glaciers where accumulation is faster than ablation. See Thomas R., et al., 2004 regarding the West Antarctica glacier discharge: See again- warmer cliamte, more water vapor, more precipitation. The ideas before this blog by Mr. Spencer are still cogent.
//”That we have been systematically cooling for 55 million years makes me think that the position of Antarctica is actually robbing the earth of heat and probably all the way down to the core.”//
Um…yea…damn that thief. However, decline in CO2 concentration, changes in ocean circulation, continental shift, solar activity, etc are all reasons for decrease in temp. Formation of ice sheets generally follows from this but also contrinutes a feedback as ice reflects solar light.
See graph- http://img2.putfile.com/main/6/17800370218.jpg (IPCC, 2007)
//”thanks to the most active period of solar activity for likely 8000 years.”//
The sun argument is for a whole new topic but it has been well studied and doesn’t account for modern day warming trends over the decades next to acumulating CO2 trends and other human activity
Comment by Chris — August 16, 2007 @ 5:05 pm
Re 98-
Yes, we know what skeptics get for Christmas
…coal
Comment by Chris — August 16, 2007 @ 5:06 pm
fixed second link, I re-copied the same one*
http://www.iarc.uaf.edu/research/projects/feedbacks_polar_amp.php?dlink=Introduction
Comment by Chris — August 16, 2007 @ 5:09 pm
Re:#96
“In fact if our atmosphere didn’t vary pressure with altitude I’d bet that on a vertical scale (esp above water) it would be nearly isothermal.”
As the lapse rate is determined primarily by adiabatic expansion, heat transfer by water vapor would not be required to have a constant pressure atmosphere be isothermal. But then you’re talking about a balloon, not a planetary atmosphere.
Comment by DeWitt Payne — August 16, 2007 @ 5:10 pm
“Contentions are fine but they should be backed by the scientific literature.”
No they shouldn’t. They have to be backed by reasoned argument and the data. Back to epistemology class for you.
If you yourself have some data that contradicts any contention of mine do let me know.
But no-one yet has come up with any evidence that could support even $1 being spend reducing CO2 release.
This is a fraud movement. We know this because you don’t have any evidence for the likelihood of catastrophic warming. Nor do you have any evidence for the idea that a little bit of human-induced-warming is a bad thing during a brutal and pulverising ice age.
This is the most idiotic fraud to come out of the world of science ever. Note that your alleged rebuttals don’t even hint at positive evidence for your alarmist thesis. Rather the whole deal is supposed to rest on make-believe-falsification of what the other fellow says.
So all your leftist crowd ends up sounding like that most malign of all michelin-men: Tim Lambert.
This is what we are after Chris:
1. Evidence for the likelihood of catastrophic warming.
2. Evidence for the idea that a little bit of human-induced-warming is a bad thing during a brutal and pulverising ice age.
GO!!!!
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 16, 2007 @ 5:17 pm
“The effect is the weakening of the ocean at absorbing carbon which leaves more into the atmosphere. See “Saturation of the Southern Ocean CO2 Sink Due to Recent Climate Changeâ€? from Le Quere et al (2007)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1136188v1”
Good news if true. But what is their rate of change? In fact the ocean quite literally CANNOT be saturated. Since it just leads to carbon-rain out of the system. The carbon rains down to the bottom of the ocean never to be seen again for hundreds of millions of years.
“It is suggested that southern oceans and pacific will become toxic to organisms with calcium carbonate shells after about 2050. CO2 mixes with H20 to form various thing, one thing is carbonic acid which is neutralized by other buffers which weaken as CO2 increases. The already reduction of 0.1 pH demonstrates this. This will have a drastic effect on ecosystems and food chains (including baleen whales who scoop them up in large amounts). Corals will be affected from the tropics to high latitudes. It is projected the pH of oceans may drop from about 8.2 to 7.7 by 2100.”
Unmitigated nonsense and lies. And note that the oceans aren’t getting “more acidic”. Rather they are getting less alkaline. Hardly a tragedy and likely to be magnificently beneficial to life if the rate of change is low.
You can’t change the PH in the lab overnight and make inferences about what would happen if the same change were performed over hundreds of critter generations. This is anti-science clap-trap.
What I said about Antarctica stands so no problem there. The liars just focus on those parts of Antarctica that are losing ice and don’t mention the parts that are gaining.
The rest makes no difference to the basic COOLING trend. So isn’t relevant and isn’t evidence for the likelihood of catastrophic warming which does not exist.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 16, 2007 @ 5:30 pm
“Um…yea…damn that thief. However, decline in CO2 concentration, changes in ocean circulation, continental shift, solar activity, etc are all reasons for decrease in temp.”
Declines in solar activity? Over the last 55 million years?
I’ve got news for you. Solar activity has increased since then. Yes changes in ocean circulation is the big thing here. But this is the result of Antarctica moving over the South Pole. So thats my thesis exactly.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 16, 2007 @ 5:35 pm
#
“Contentions are fine but they should be backed by the scientific literature.�
//”No they shouldn’t. They have to be backed by reasoned argument and the data. Back to epistemology class for you.”//
This is not epistemology, this is science. Philosophy is about proof, science is not. Science is about a hypothesis. Science is about the balance of evidence. When giving claims which appear controversial you should be able to show the basis behind your claim. Something “making sense” is not good enough which is essentially what a reasoned argument is. Many hypothesis’ in science “make sense” but upon experiment have been falsified. Hence the intro to the scientific method in your 9th grade class.
//”If you yourself have some data that contradicts any contention of mine do let me know.”//
I’ve supplied it. Go over the links and references. I hope even people that don’t agree with me can clearly see I’ve constructed a much better argument than you almsot simply because I have shown references. You can’t just make up something that sounds right to you and present it as an argument. In this reply, you’ve simply talked around everything and jumped topics to the likelihood of catastrophic warming rather than address any of what I said or the references provided.
//”But no-one yet has come up with any evidence that could support even $1 being spend reducing CO2 release.”//
What?
//”This is a fraud movement. We know this because you don’t have any evidence for the likelihood of catastrophic warming. Nor do you have any evidence for the idea that a little bit of human-induced-warming is a bad thing during a brutal and pulverising ice age.”//
We are in an interglacial, not a glacial period. I wasn’t aware this was brutal and pulverising since humans have adapted to stable conditions since civilization. I’m assuming you mean brutal and pulverising with respect to “us.” Clearly, we are in no such period. Global temperatures have not been higher in thousands of years and thousands of other species are simply not suited to such
//”This is the most idiotic fraud to come out of the world of science ever. Note that your alleged rebuttals don’t even hint at positive evidence for your alarmist thesis. Rather the whole deal is supposed to rest on make-believe-falsification of what the other fellow says.”//
Because I’ve never presented an alarmist thesis. I was arguing one completely different topic and you just presupposed this was the equivalent of me believing an apocalypse will occur.
//”So all your leftist crowd ends up sounding like that most malign of all michelin-men: Tim Lambert.”//
I guess you still have to fall back on the politics card when the science is over your head
//”This is what we are after Chris:
1. Evidence for the likelihood of catastrophic warming.”//
First, let’s define catastrophic warming. What would be catastrophic to you? 3 degrees? 6 degrees? I will set what I feel to be catastrophic at about 3-4 degrees. This is well within the estimates by the IPCC and countless other sources. See- http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Global_Warming_Predictions_png
Now I guess like everyone else here except maybe Steve Bloom you can think the IPCC is a big political conspiracy to get funding for the envi-nazis.
//”2. Evidence for the idea that a little bit of human-induced-warming is a bad thing during a brutal and pulverising ice age.”//
Already addressed.
Comment by Chris — August 16, 2007 @ 6:26 pm
Look I could just repost the first 100 again!!!!!
Because you haven’t successfully contradicted a damn thing I said.
If you aren’t smart enough don’t bother. Or try harder. Try again. Everything I said in 100 stands.
Where is your evidence for the likelihood of catastrophic warming?
YOU DON’T HAVE IT.
Where is your evidence that a little human-induced-warming is a BAD thing during a brutal and pulverising ice age?
YOU DIDN’T PROVIDE IT.
Now concentrate a bit will you? You are making a fool of yourself. Its like you are parrotting nonsense from Coby Becks book of lame excuses for the lack of evidence.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 16, 2007 @ 7:00 pm
RE: #105 - Has so called ocean acidification even been demonstrated at all? I’ve seem some fairly spectacular claims of ability to do repeatable ocean pH measurements of tenths and even hundreths of a pH, call me a skeptic. Taking pH readings of ocean water is not as trivial as it may seem. There are lots of ionic species, and of course, there is the temperature factor. Local variations, due to inputs from land, and, known non homogeneity of ocean water, exceed the discrimination ability of most field measurement techniques, especially if one insists on incorporating Gage R&R / MSA into the sampling. Definitely non trivial. So when I see someone claim they have measured pH decline of the oceans, I say, take me out there and show me how you got your data!
Comment by SteveSadlov — August 16, 2007 @ 7:03 pm
Just to clear up the terminology. We are in an ice age and have been for the last 39 million years. In the last 3 million years we have been in a particularly brutal phase of it.
This ice age is currently broken up into glacial and interglacial periods. The glacial periods are very short-lasting comparatively. There is no question but that we are in a brutal and pulverising ice age.
This global-warming fraud is therefore the most massive case of lemming-like wrong-way-Corriganism that taxeating parasites have ever come up with.
It is just THAT stupid.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 16, 2007 @ 7:19 pm
Re #78
Chill out M. Simon ease off with the sarcasm as it serves no purpose here. I am just curious. I found the article he wrote difficult to understand and was trying to understand, sometimes people ask questions just to find an answer not provoke.
Also note that the climate we enjoy in the Holocene is very different to the climate that has prevailed over most of the Earth’s history. So to say that the Earth should just drift back to some norm due to negative feedbacks is misleading, our time is not the norm.
And to say that ice ages are ‘brutal’ to humans is also misleading as Homo Sapiens hasn’t lived in any other climate. I have seen estimations of Cretaceous and earlier climes that were around 10 degrees hotter. This would not be pleasant, AGW isn’t a nice trip to the Bahamas.
Comment by Nathan — August 16, 2007 @ 7:20 pm
#95 Roger,
I agree that if radiative balance goes to zero that no further Joules accumulate. But how are the Joules monitored in the real world if not temperature measurement, and it doesn’t really become interesting until temperature or temperature difference do their work.
For instance the feedback due to clouds, whatever the sign, doesn’t actually become feedback until the heat has lifted the vapour into the atmosphere in sufficient quantity to become cloud.
I’m just wondering what if anything is being done to address this or if it’s simply too hard.
Comment by Jan Pompe — August 16, 2007 @ 9:59 pm
Re# 103 “determined primarily by adiabatic expansion”. Can someone explain this to me. When I model rising air the only way I can match the temperature/height relation is to use isentropic expansion not adiabatic. This means the air is either losing enthalpy or doing work. Explanation?
Comment by Gary — August 16, 2007 @ 10:04 pm
Jan Pompe – Thanks for your question.
To measure Joules, the mass involved is needed along with the temperature, and in the atmosphere, also the portion of the heat in the water.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 17, 2007 @ 12:07 am
The tenor of some of the comments is starting to deteriorate again. I have posted this time but will not in the future if this persists. Please keep your comments civil even when you strongly disagree with another comment.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 17, 2007 @ 12:14 am
Re 109
Calculations are based on measurements of the surface oceans and our knowledge of ocean chemistry. You can see details on some studies here:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v425/n6956/full/425365a.html
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2004/2004GB002247.shtml
This 0.1 decrease of pH change still corresponds to about a 30% increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions. Because of Henry’s law as atmospheric CO2 increases so will the CO2 increase in oceans. The basic mechanisms of the chemical reaction of CO2 to carbonic acid and neutralizing buffers are well understood. You can read the literature on it.
http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk/displaypagedoc.asp?id=13539
http://pangea.stanford.edu/research/Oceans/GES205/Caldeira_Science_Anthropogenic%20Carbon%20and%20ocean%20pH.pdf
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7059/abs/nature04095.html
Comment by Chris — August 17, 2007 @ 1:44 am
RE: 111 -
Apart from Dr. Spencer’s original post & discussion actually related to, that’s the most sensible thing I’ve read in this long, bitter thread. Thank you.
Nothing arouses quite like religion, eh? Heed my advice from other threads & Don’t Feed the Troll (or Toxic Troll, as one contributor almost put it). Thought I had the Bloomster pegged as a hopelessly clueless volunteer AGW water carrier - how else to explain his dogged forays into hostile territory; always getting shot to hell? - and this incident seemed to confirm it beyond any doubt. But then another poster asks if he’s a paid hack for some Enviro-lobby group and once again, clarity dawns: He’s a paid water-carrier; a hired-gun. He hasn’t denied it; not even responded, which in politics means the accusation is true. Much more sensible. Not chronically, doggedly clueless; just a mercenary doing his job.
Comment by PaddikJ — August 17, 2007 @ 5:49 am
New on the internet today at http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDc0MTY2NmVlOWNiNjc4ODk0NGUzMDE2YTRlMjMxNzc=
Overturning the “Consensus” in One Fell Swoop [Joel Schwartz]
New research from Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Lab concludes that the Earth’s climate is only about one-third as sensitive to carbon dioxide as the IPCC assumes. Schwartz’s study is “in press� at the Journal of Geophysical Research and you can download a preprint of the study here.
According to Schwartz’s results, which are based on the empirical relationship between trends in surface temperature and ocean heat content, doubling the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere would result in a 1.1oC increase in average temperature (0.1–2.1oC, two standard deviation uncertainty range). Schwartz’s result is 63% lower than the IPCC’s estimate of 3oC for a doubling of CO2 (2.0–4.5oC, 2SD range).
Right now we’re about 41% above the estimated pre-industrial CO2 level of 270 ppm. At the current rate of increase of about 0.55% per year, CO2 will double around 2070. Based on Schwartz’s results, we should expect about a 0.6oC additional increase in temperature between now and 2070 due to this additional CO2. That doesn’t seem particularly alarming.
A couple of other interesting implications of Schwartz’s results:
Aerosols have a relatively small effect on temperature. A doubling of CO2 has an estimated climate “forcing� of 2.7 watts per square centimeter (W/cm2). In contrast, actual aerosol concentrations during the 20th Century had a forcing of -0.3 W/cm2 with a large uncertainty range that could mean either net cooling or net warming from aerosols.
The response time, or “time constant�, of the climate to greenhouse gas forcing is relatively small—only five years. In other words, there’s hardly any additional warming “in the pipeline� from previous greenhouse gas emissions. This is in contrast to the IPCC, which predicts that the Earth’s average temperature will rise an additional 0.6oC during the 21st Century even if greenhouse gas concentrations stopped increasing.
Schwartz is careful to include the appropriate caveats to his results. But he also shows that his estimates are consistent with much of the previous literature on the subject. His study also has the virtue of relying largely on empirical measurements of actual climate behavior during the 20th Century, rather than on climate models.
Stephen Schwartz is a pretty mainstream climate scientist. Yet along with dozens of other studies in the scientific literature, his new study belies Al Gore’s claim that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate catastrophism.
Indeed, if Schwartz’s results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC’s scientific “consensus�, the environmentalists’ climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world’s environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?
———————————
Just one comment of mine. Schwartz gets a response time of 5 years. Back in 1979, I published a paper showing the climate response time was 4-5 years, based upon solar forcing. A quick response time is consistent with a low climate sensitivity.
My 1979 paper:
Hoyt, D. V., 1979. Variations in sunspot structure and climate . Climatic Change, 2, 79-92.
Comment by Douglas Hoyt — August 17, 2007 @ 6:15 am
“And to say that ice ages are ‘brutal’ to humans is also misleading as Homo Sapiens hasn’t lived in any other climate. I have seen estimations of Cretaceous and earlier climes that were around 10 degrees hotter. This would not be pleasant, AGW isn’t a nice trip to the Bahamas.”
Totally wrong.
We live in a brutal and pulverising ice age. This is very well known. And your haven’t brought any evidence against this.
It is the existence of this periodic stress that made us the very unique creature that we are.
And in fact most evolution could be considered to be pumping-holocaust-evolution.
Your inference doesn’t follow at all and it really quite moronic.
We live in a brutal and pulverising ice age. There is simply no denying this. And the fact that we live in a brutal and pulversing ice age is THE CENTRAL AND STARTING POINT OF THE GLOBAL WARMING TO DEBATE.
To even so much as say otherwise is to confess to terminal irrationality.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 17, 2007 @ 10:37 am
“This 0.1 decrease of pH change still corresponds to about a 30% increase in the concentration of hydrogen ions. Because of Henry’s law as atmospheric CO2 increases so will the CO2 increase in oceans. The basic mechanisms of the chemical reaction of CO2 to carbonic acid and neutralizing buffers are well understood. You can read the literature on it.”
And none of it is relevant to anything at all.
It is just incredibly dishonest to call reducing the alkalinity of the ocean……… “ACIDIFICATION”…
It would be more honest to call it “NEUTRALISATION”. Or we might say we are making the oceans less corrosive.
This is pseudo-revelations talk these leftist nutballs are up too.
LO…. FOR VERILY IT CAN BE SEEN THAT THE SEAS WILL RISE AND THEY WILL TURN TO ACID.
Cut their taxeating funds off. I’ve seen enough already.
In your quote the claim is made that the oceans alkalinity has been moderated one click. THE HORROR THE HORROR.
A priori thats a good thing. But the claim that came after that was highly dishonest.
“It is projected the pH of oceans may drop from about 8.2 to 7.7 by 2100.â€?
They don’t have evidence for this!!!! This is typical lying and alarmism. And note they hide the implausibility of this by not telling us how long it took to go from 8.3-8.2.
Imagine getting uptight that we were making the ocean less corrosive?
Just incredible.
And completely parallel to the same dishonesty on matters climatic. Because instead of saying that we may be reducing the alkalinity of the oceans they claim to the general public that we are turning the oceans to acid.
And instead of emphasising that we may be delaying the onset of a horrific glaciation that could be devastating to all terrestrial life…… They instead say that we might be sending things on an upward spiral to overheating.
There is simply no room for this minute-in, minute-out dishonesty in science.
The ecologists record is clear.
Any claim they make has to be considered dishonest until proved otherwise.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 17, 2007 @ 10:56 am
RE: #116- I’ll be a bit more blunt. I challenge the assertion that a reliable measurement with sufficient accuracy to descriminate a 0.1 pH decrease is possible. One person may collect data, crunch the numbers and present a 0.1 pH decrease. The next person, using an identical technique, using an identical network of collection locations, repeats the excersise and gets a 0.1 pH increase. Are you at all familiar with the concept of measurement systems analysis (MSA)?
Comment by SteveSadlov — August 17, 2007 @ 10:56 am
“I have seen estimations of Cretaceous and earlier climes that were around 10 degrees hotter. This would not be pleasant, AGW isn’t a nice trip to the Bahamas.”
Quite wrong. Firstly we cannot expect anything like this sort of mitigation coming from such scant additions to CO2 for such a short time period.
Secondly if we got an extra 10 degrees average global temperature from out of extra greenhouse alone…… (as opposed to a more powerful sun) then it would be magnificently more comfortable for both man and nature.
Since it would mean that virtually the entire difference was coming from reductions in the heat differentials.
The heat differentials would be reduced between summer and winter… between night and day…. between the Poles and the equator.
Making the situation far more comfortable for terrestrial life.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 17, 2007 @ 11:04 am
I was posting a question about sonde stations and the measurements used for the iris research here: http://www.climatesci.org/2007/08/15/important-new-paper-on-cloud-precipitation-interactions-by-roy-spencer-and-colleagues/#postcomment.
As long as I have not received an answer, I’ll assume the research biased, as the a very large part of the sonde stations are situated at the hottest tropical oceans.
Preben
Comment by Preben Soeberg — August 17, 2007 @ 12:19 pm
“Aerosols have a relatively small effect on temperature. A doubling of CO2 has an estimated climate “forcingâ€? of 2.7 watts per square centimeter (W/cm2). In contrast, actual aerosol concentrations during the 20th Century had a forcing of -0.3 W/cm2 with a large uncertainty range that could mean either net cooling or net warming from aerosols.”
I would dispute the plausibility of the assumptions behind this statement based on the positioning of the increase or decrease of joules.
If I have multi-level-basements at my joint and only one heater… Supposing I want to keep my family warm in the house proper and also am worried about keeping my various basement workshops warm in the winter.
Supposing also my walls are perfect insulators but the ceilings seperating the basements are pretty standard.
Clearly I’m going to get more duty from my single heater by putting my heater in one of the lower basements.
You see the warmth of the sun has to be forced down deep into the ocean and then it rises up again.
The deeper the joules go the more cululative warming I can get. On our planet only the oceans and perhaps the earth itself can be thought to be able to retain enough energy for cumulative warming.
Hence we should way overate the effects of the aerosols and diminish the effect of the CO2 (if initially we start with watts-per-square-metre assumptions) unless we live atop some really high mountain.
We need a more down-and-up model.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 17, 2007 @ 12:27 pm
“actual aerosol concentrations during the 20th Century had a forcing of -0.3 W/cm2 with a large uncertainty range that could mean either net cooling or net warming from aerosols.â€?
Most of measurements I have seen show warming by black carbon aerosols dominating over cooling by sulfate aerosols, so I lean towards +0.3 W/m2 warming, implying that the climate sensitivity is lower than what Schwartz says.
BTW, the “-0.3 W/cm2″ must be a misprint that should read as -0.3 W/m2.
Comment by Douglas Hoyt — August 17, 2007 @ 1:16 pm
#116–Chris—-4 of 5 of your links charge a premium to be viewed–wonderful…., the article that did not cost money to view stated–“Owing to a paucity of relevant
observations,we have a limited understanding
of the effects of pH reduction on marine
biota.â€?—-What do you make of this?? I take it as this article is GUESSING at their own conclusion. A position that the article itself says in no uncertain terms.
Chris, do you even read the links that you so fatuously quote???
I find it very telling that you, Bloom, and bigcitylib abstract all of your knowledge from others’ work, while most others are giving the product of their work.
Please answer–if we are in an ‘intergalcial’ period, is it not a given that planetary temperatures will rise? And, that glaciers will receed, etc, etc.? Why all of the fuss over these issues if indeed this is a natural course of the period in which we live?
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 17, 2007 @ 1:59 pm
Re #117: PJ, this is a science blog. I like rhetorical/political flourishes as well as the next person, but you’ll notice that in my case those are interleaved with lots of linked references to and discussions of the contents of papers. Funny, you don’t seem to like doing that even though you post frequently. FYI there’s a term for that sort of behavior in the context of a blog like this, and you seem to know what it is.
Now, once again for the record (and pay attention, since I’m only willing to do ths once a year or so):
Several years ago when I was commenting frequently over at Climate Audit, somebody (Steve Hemphill IIRC) decided to google me, and figured out that I might be the Steve Bloom (there are a surprising number of Steve Blooms out there) who was noted at the time as a member of the Sierra Club California Executive Committee. Aha, they said, a *paid* position. Well, no, it turns out, as the most minimal of fact-checking would have established, and after a while I corrected the misapprehension. As is typical for denialists, the incorrect assertion went into permanent memory and the correction went down the memory hole. Periodically it gets raised again, and I make a point of not correcting it very soon so that I can use it as a demonstration of how very much denialists dislike checking facts and will just keep on repeating appealing fabrications.
Further for the record, while I have done paid environmental work, it was for a total of about a year about thirty years ago, and not for the Sierra Club. I do volunteer quite a bit, and not just for the Club. My comments here and elsewhere in the climate blogosphere are not in behalf of the Club.
Until next year.
Re #118: Oh, Doug, Doug, Doug. I started reading that paper and after the first few paragraphs figured out that it was basically a thought experiment. Sure enough, at the end it says:
“Finally, as the present analysis rests on a simple single-compartment energy balance model, the question
must inevitably arise whether the rather obdurate climate system might be amenable to determination of its key properties through empirical analysis based on such a simple model. In response to that question it might have to be said that it remains to be seen. In this context it is hoped that the present study might stimulate further work along these lines with more complex models. It might also prove valuable to apply the present analysis approach to the output of global climate models to ascertain the fidelity with which these models reproduce ‘whole Earth’ properties of the climate system such as are empirically determined here. Ultimately of course the climate models are essential to provide much more refined projections of climate change than would be available from the global mean quantities that result from an analysis of the present sort. Still it would seem that empirical examination of these global mean quantities – effective heat capacity, time constant, and sensitivity – can usefully constrain climate models and thereby help to identify means for improving the confidence in these models.”
Re #s 119/120/122: Roger and Dallas, it is perhaps beginning to dawn on you why GB is banned or heavily censored elsewhere.
Re #121: Whatever you do, Steve, as with the Arctic River dams and the UHI “greenhouse” (and that’s just on this blog in the last few days), please continue the seat-of-the-pants speculation and make no attempt to check the facts. I’m guessing that in this particular case doing so would take maybe half an hour, and clearly you have better things to do. Also, has it occurred to you that “the power of large numbers” would allow for highly accurate overall ocean pH figures to be developed even if your assertion about the accuracy of individual readings was true?
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 17, 2007 @ 2:00 pm
RE: 118 Doug Hoyt; thanks for the alert. Always enjoy Scwhartz’s crisp, cogent analyses.
Intelligent Designer forgive me; I’m about to ignore my own admonition and feed a troll, this one on the “skeptical” side of the aisle (quote-skeptical-unquote because he can be fairly described as a knee-jerk Denier, not really a skeptic). I promise I’ll only do it this once, but I think the record should show that he does not speak for most Skeptics:
RE: Various Graeme Birds: As all Skeptics, Climate or otherwise, are aware, bald assertion does not equal reality, no matter how often repeated. The increasing use of this tactic, along with the Argument From Scientific Authority, are what, more than anything else, have convinced me that the skeptical camp is on the most likely path to understanding. The AGW camp is hopelessly dug-in (or perhaps painted-in-a-corner would be the better image); the Denialist faction is still flexible - “Let’s see what the data are saying” - and responsive.
For Intelligent Designer’s sake, man, get educated; at the moment you’re just the Bloomster’s Other in the Denialist camp (embrace this term; wear it proudly), just providing ammunition to the AGW Crusade, and worse, from a strictly literary POV, you’re repeating yourself: “Brutal and pulverising ice age” is a fine, vivid phrase, but dims quickly w/ over-use. Everyone who’s gotten past The Gray Hag’s & Newsweek’s nonsense knows that we’re in a (very temporary) inter-glacial, which, if previous cycles are any indication, is scheduled to end soon. But the entire epoch of Homo Civilis is contained in this tiny inter-glacial - “The Long Summer”;* with the possible exception of Titanic passengers, we know nothing of Brutal and Pulverising. Please try to grasp this.
The outright falsehoods are too numerous to list here - I give you just the most outrageous:
“Stunning” & “breathtaking” don’t begin to describe the ignorance on display here. Make it your highest priority to learn a little planet-scale thermodynamics and discover why.
Lastly - and to All - please avoid political put-downs; avoid politics, period. We study Nature; we seek comprehension. Nature is indifferent to human bickering. Politics delays comprehension.
Forgive the long-windedness; Nathan 111 covered most of the above in one succinct paragraph. It’s still the most sensible thing I’ve encountered in this thread.
*For a brief, one-volume history of the Holocene, you could do worse than Brain Fagan’s “The Long Summer.” His companion volume “The Little Ice Age” is also recommended. Both suffer only from the Archaeologist/Anthropologist’s annoying habit of making necessary conjectures, but then presenting those conjectures as established fact.
Comment by B Phife — August 17, 2007 @ 2:16 pm
Arrghhh!!!
125 was me. No, conspiracy buffs, I am not cultivating MPS; I was just having fun in my early posting attempts, experimenting as it were.
If it’s possible, I would not object if the Moderator wanted to re-name those few B. Phife entries to PaddikJ. And I will try to be more careful in future posts not to let my computer fill in my Mayberry alter-ego.
Comment by PaddikJ — August 17, 2007 @ 2:32 pm
Re:#113
“This means the air is either losing enthalpy or doing work. Explanation?”
Are you correcting for the gravitational potential energy change caused by raising a mass of air to a higher altitude? Try reading the lecture notes on Physical Meteorologyhere.
Comment by DeWitt Payne — August 17, 2007 @ 2:32 pm
Link didn’t work. Forgot to close quotes.
Physical Meteorology lecture notes
Comment by DeWitt Payne — August 17, 2007 @ 2:34 pm
Arrghhh x 2!!
This should be 127, not 126. The original 125 went missing as soon as I posted the current 125.
What’s going on? I spent my entire-and-then-some lunch hour composing the original 125! (and did not save a copy) I weep.
Oh, well. Now I know to compose in Word or something, save, and then paste here.
Comment by PaddikJ — August 17, 2007 @ 2:41 pm
All climate models are basically just thought experiments based on prejudices and assumptions that are not proven and parameterizations that are not accurate.
The empirical determinations of climate sensitivity are always less than bottom-up modeled claims.
Comment by Douglas Hoyt — August 17, 2007 @ 3:35 pm
Must have been a spate of posts vying for limited bandwidth. The correct sequence now is: 128, 129, and forget 132.
Apologies to the Bloomster; you’re no longer in the pockets of the Evil Environmental Empire (yes, Virginia, I’m being facetious - I’m still a proud member of a few); in my mind at least, and my memory for these things is very good. Unless something changes, you’ll never again read a similar suggestion from me. However, these things do tend to take on a life of their own, so it’s silly to lay that at the doorstep of the Deniers, Believers, or Holy Rollers, for that matter.
But: Ad-Hom smears against Spencer & others are still despicable; at very best, a distraction. OTOH, your snarks are well-used and blunt, and have little effect. I suspect that most just skim over them.
“This is a science blog.”
Well, Duh. Thanks for the heads up, but linking to articles & other blogs is no more intrinsically “scientific” than raising known questions & issues for discussion, which, if you pay a little closer attention, has been my approach. Also suggest you bring a little more independent and critical attitude to those beloved P-R’d papers of yours, say, the one on arctic temps & sea ice extents you recently cited in another thread. Parse it very carefully and you will not find much that supports your usual positions. Actually, careful parsing is not req’d - just read the conclusions (and yes, Virginia, I did carefully read the whole thing). Reading is wonderful, but reading w/out comprehension, or worse, parsing only for those tidbits which support your biases, is a waste of time.
Had I the time, patience & puckishness to frequent Grist, which, I believe, invented the “Troll” category, I would accept the designation and wear it proudly. Indeed, source considered, would take it as high praise:
“We’re GOOD, EDU-cated, en-LIGHT-ened people, doing IMPORTANT work; and those nasty trolls - all they do is ask pesky, inconvenient questions and try to distract us from the IMPORTANT work we do. Why can’t they stay under the bridge and leave us GOOD, enLIGHTened people alone? And that Steve McIntyre - he’s the worst troll of them all. Why can’t that awful little man leave the GREAT, enLIGHTened James Hansen alone and stop pestering him with all those silly numbers? Doesn’t he realize what IMPORTANT work Hansen’s doing? He’s trying to SAVE THE PLANET, WHICH - OH MY GAAWWWWWD! - WE’RE JUST RUINING!! I’m so upset - I’d better go get a Latte’ to calm my sensitive nerves.”
Was that rhetorical enough?
Comment by PaddikJ — August 17, 2007 @ 4:28 pm
Re #133: “The empirical determinations of climate sensitivity are always less than bottom-up modeled claims.” Hrrm? Always?
Re #134: The author of the Arctic temps paper concluded by saying (a little tendentiously, and of course this is my phrasing) that while both anthropogenic and natural influences have been in play, he didn’t think his results were helpful in terms of detection and attribution. That was unsurprising in the extreme, but perhaps he was worried about being misquoted. You do know where D+As have been done, right? Also, you might try focusing more on the guts of the paper next time; then you would have noticed, e.g., that the phrase “sea ice” didn’t even appear in the paper. BTW, I didn’t discuss those guts because my purpose in citing the paper was just to show that Arctic surface air temperatures have in fact been sharply warming since several commenters here had made unsourced claims otherwise. Thus your comment that it “doesn’t support (my) usual positions” is nonsense.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 17, 2007 @ 5:28 pm
“I have seen estimations of Cretaceous and earlier climes that were around 10 degrees hotter. This would not be pleasant, AGW isn’t a nice trip to the Bahamas.�
Its not going to take much to dispel this myth as well as put to rest the nonsense attendant upon my perfectly correct counterassertion.
Wiki is no authority on contentious issues. But I don’t think the Cretaceous is all that heated yet.
From Wiki:
“The planet may not have been much warmer on average than it had been during the Triassic or Jurassic periods, but it had a gentler temperature gradient from the equator to the poles.”
http://www.ualr.edu/ersc/Mosasaur/page3.html
“The Cretaceous Period had a climate that was radically different than any climate since that time. Temperatures on Earth were warmer with none below freezing, which meant no glaciers and less seasonal characteristics. Flora and fauna thrived around the polar regions as well as the equator.”
“In general, the climate of the Cretaceous Period was much warmer than at present, perhaps the warmest on a worldwide basis than at any other time during the Phanerozoic Eon. The climate was also more equable in that the temperature difference between the poles and the Equator was about one-half that of the present. Floral evidence suggests that tropical to subtropical conditions existed as far as 45° N, and temperate conditions extended to the poles.”
You see. The extra temperature coming from greenhouse (and not from a hotter sun) would be mild and non-threatening. And it would manifest, almost exclusively, in reductions in heat differentials. Great for man and nature.
Of course this is all fantasy-talk in that the best we can hope for from industrial-CO2 is a mitigation of cooling.
I just do not know why people want to try this dishonest bluffing and obstructionism on………. outside the bubble-worlds of Gristmill, Deltoid and Realclimate.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 17, 2007 @ 5:45 pm
*For a brief, one-volume history of the Holocene, you could do worse than Brain Fagan’s “The Long Summer.â€? His companion volume “The Little Ice Ageâ€? is also recommended.”
I’ve read both these books and have ‘The Long Summer” to hand. You are in no position to be using the bluffoonery of setting me homework as a distraction from your poor reasoning. It appears you have not absorbed the information from your own recomendations.
One thing that stands out from these two books and from the facts more generally is that a warmer planet is a wetter, milder and more comfortable planet.
Of course it is too much to hope for that we can warm the planet. The context is simply that we might reduce its nasty cooling and the droughts and extreme weather events that come with that.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 17, 2007 @ 5:57 pm
The new paper by Stephen Schwartz here calculates a low (0.30 K/(W m-2) climate sensitivity. It may be worth a separate thread.
Comment by DeWitt Payne — August 17, 2007 @ 6:48 pm
Re #131. Thanks, DeWitt. Potential energy changes are not a large factor in process engineering modelling. Just using the models that I know to shed some light on the processes occurring under “climate”.
Comment by Gary Wilson — August 17, 2007 @ 6:49 pm
RE: #127 - No offense Steve B, but I suspect that my point regarding pH is a bit over your head. Actually, my point is not really even about pH, it’s about something more general. Measurement Systems Analysis, aka, Gage R & R. It is surprising how many scientists and engineers use weak arguments, including your “large numbers” one, to avoid doing the right thing. And yes, I do have better things to do, such as, my day job making “low carbon footprint” products and selling them to millions of suckers.
Comment by SteveSadlov — August 17, 2007 @ 6:56 pm
#114
Roger thanks for your answer. It was silly of me, coming from process control perspective, for any given situation the mass is known and constant and there of course the temperature is a direct proxy for the energy in the system. I can now see how this will not work the same for conditions in the wild.
Comment by Jan Pompe — August 17, 2007 @ 7:09 pm
“Most of measurements I have seen show warming by black carbon aerosols dominating over cooling by sulfate aerosols, so I lean towards +0.3 W/m2 warming, implying that the climate sensitivity is lower than what Schwartz says.”
Douglas. I think all serious (ie non-alarmist) climate scientists here should examine the paradigms they are operating under.
Because I am virtually certain that the above statement must be wrong. If we go with a paradigm that emphasises heat-budgets, strata and the down-up tragectory of joules from the sun…… over the currently bi-partisan dominant paradigm which emphasises spectroscopy and watts-per-square-metre……
….then we would have to assume that all aerosols, black and white, are reducing the amount of energy being punched deep into the ocean.
Furthermore these aerosols, regardless of colour, will have a tendency to promote condensation thus removing water vapour from the air. And on top of that they may even promote rain… sending latent heat up to higher strata where it will be more quickly lost to space.
Surely we are due for a paradigm shift here. When both sides are bogged down in controversy and the sensible side harbours any amount of unresolved question-marks then its probably a sign that the paradigm needs to shift for the scales to fall from everyones eyes.
Consider the case of a deep outdoor swimming pool. Lets make it ten metres deep. Putting a black pool cover on it would seem to reduce the pools albedo. And putting the cover on at night will hold some of the warmth in.
But the black pool cover will make for a freezing pool if it is left in place during the daytime. Albedo is overated. Only the top few inches of the pool will be warm but its heat energy-budget overall will be severely reduced.
Seen from this perspective all aerosols regardless of colour and all clouds regardless of height….. though they may seem to, in the immediate sense, keep the air warm….. they all will be reducing the heat budget of the oceans.
Not only is everybody labouring under a sub-optimal paradigm. But with the exception of Roger and a few others everyone is emphasising the wrong metric.
Only the ocean and perhaps the earth itself has the specific heat capacity for CUMULATIVE warming of the sort that is relevant to the global warming debate.
If you work through the logic of a strata, heat budgets and down-up-joules paradigm……. I think you will quickly see that virtually all unresolved issues immediately look resolveable.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 17, 2007 @ 7:24 pm
Re 126
If you wish for full texts I can e-mail them to you. You can generally e-mail the authors as well. Many of these articles are not immediately available to everyone on the internet without subscription and I understand it can be difficult to access them but they are also direct information and far more reliable than, say, news articles and secondary sources. You can find information from those to support any postion, from the Earth being flat, to Global wArming not happening, to Global warming going to whipe everyone out tomorrow morning.
As far as the period we are in, there is no denying we are in an interglacial anymore than there is question we are in the year 2007. Global Warming is not significant to the Earth, it is only significant to those who have inhabited the Earth after evolving to relatively stable conditions, stable pH levels, stable environments, etc. Changes in these things can be disastrous to many creatures, and granted, supply opportunity to new ones. As we are typically human-centric, I think a global warming of 3-6 degrees is very bad for “us” but may be great for some other species. Environmental changes provide extinctions and opportunity in the ongoing continuum of evolution. No doubt the Earth is a dynamic rather than static mechanism and has endured much worse (Permian extinction) but when we raise bioethical questions such as “should we be warming the planet” it generally boils down to “what do we owe future generations?” “what do we owe thousands of other species” etc. If the world was to warm 6 degrees or worse it would become almost an entirely different planet and inhabitable to many organisms and I do not think humans are entirely suited to such a world either. I think the evidence is overwhelming that we will at least hit the more conservative 3 degree mark by ~2100 and in itself warrants the necessity for action. I understand people disagree with me; that is fine.
Comment by Chris — August 17, 2007 @ 8:46 pm
Re #137
I think you have been taking what I was saying out of context. The point I was making was that THIS climate (the one we currently enjoy - and one I enjoy a lot at 32 degrees South) is not the norm, this is an unusual time we enjoy. Most of the Earth’s history was much hotter. SO to say that negative feedbacks will blessedly stop AGW and prevent the world from getting warmer is flawed, as the world tends towards warmer climate. Over the course of the Earth’s history the sun has steadily warmed, yet the Earth’s climate fluctuates. Something else is at play, yes? The Earth was a lot warmer in almost every other period, and yet the sun was cooler. The point I am making is that the Earth tends towards a warmer climate. A warmer climate is the norm, if you like. Read any geology book, google paleoclimatology, there is so much info on this. Try http://www.scotese.com (I think).
Now we don’t know what impact higher temperatures have on humans as humans weren’t around when temperatures we higher. We as a species have been around for about 200-300 000 years (or less, I can’t recall). If you look at the temperature constructions over that time you can see this time is around the warmest. Just saying “oh we all like it warm” doesn’t mean our society will automatically bloom like some tropical flower. And to say that it would be “great for man and nature” is simplistic, the species that existed then and now are vastly different! There was a mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous and another at about 55 million (probably caused by… Warming…). Who knows what will happen, will cows cope? Who knows?
Comment by Nathan — August 17, 2007 @ 11:12 pm
Graeme Bird — August 17, 2007 @ 5:57 pm says approximately:
“A warmer planet is a wetter planet.”
If what Roy S. says is correct that would make sense.
Esp if evaporation/condensation (i.e. the heat pipe) is the main means of heat transport.
Comment by M. Simon — August 18, 2007 @ 12:41 am
#143 Chris,
Men have been on the Earth when glaciers covered a lot of the land.
Is that what you mean by stability?
There are reports in the historical record of periods with no glaciers (or very few) you know historical as in reported by men.
Is that what you mean by stability?
Men live in places where temperatures vary by 50 deg C in a year.
Is that the stability you had in mind?
Men live in places where 20 deg C variation from day to night is not unusual.
Is that the stability you were referring to?
I’m looking real hard for stability, I don’t see much.
I do see properties of the system that tend to keep the oscillations bounded and tend to maintain the averages. I just don’t see a lot of stability. In fact if you want oscillations you must have instability. The rotation of the Earth helps in that respect.
If I were to describe the system through the last few hundred thousand years it looks like a chaotic oscillator with two strange attractors. The switch in an out of glaciation looks like some kind of Schmidt trigger function. Between the switching points the feedbacks look roughly linear in the “cold zone” (if I recall the graphs correctly).
Also note that the previous “warm” periods were short pulses. Our warm era has lasted for 10K years. Unusual.
I’d like to keep it going for a while longer.
Comment by M. Simon — August 18, 2007 @ 3:22 am
Re #140: Oh what the hell, here ya go. Scroll down for the Nature paper; the methods are discussed in the supplement.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 18, 2007 @ 3:30 am
“As far as the period we are in, there is no denying we are in an interglacial anymore than there is question we are in the year 2007.”
Why bring this level of dishonesty into the discussion?
What you are doing here is accusing someone saying that we are not in an interglacial. Ice ages consist of interglacials and glacial periods. Hence not only are we in a brutal and pulverising ice age. But being as we are in an interglacial then the context is that the only way for our temperature to go is down.
So instead of talking about whether CO2 will cause us to overheat the context is whether CO2 will mitigate any of the cooling.
“Global Warming is not significant to the Earth, it is only significant to those who have inhabited the Earth after evolving to relatively stable conditions, stable pH levels, stable environments, etc. Changes in these things can be disastrous to many creatures, and granted, supply opportunity to new ones.”
None of this is true and its as though you’ve stooged yourself about 5 times over. The last 3 million years may have been the most UNSTABLE climatic period since the rise of microscopic life. And what are you worrying about warming for when we are in a brutal and pulverising ice age???
Have you gone quite mad? Being in an interglacial within a brutal and pulverising ice age means that the only way for the temperature to go is down. And CO2, if we are most fortunate, can do nothing but mitigate this.
So what is all this talk of 3 degrees or 6 degrees? If it came from greenhouse and not from the sun it would be a good thing. But the point is its pure fantasy-talk.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
“SO to say that negative feedbacks will blessedly stop AGW and prevent the world from getting warmer is flawed, as the world tends towards warmer climate”
What time period are you talking about? No its not true that this world is hard-wired for warmth. This is a shockingly cold planet when not in interglacial. The circumstances which could return us to pre-ice-age conditions are not there. You’d have to move Antarctica a thousand kilometres in the direction of the Atlantic just for starters.
Nathan do you have any sort of notion as to the time periods you are talking about? The relevant time period to suss out what our planets natural tendencies are is the last three million years since North and South America fused.
It is VERY clear that during that time period the earth has been like a damn freezer for most of that time. Thats the starting point of the global warming debate. A debate that would not have dragged on so long if it weren’t for leftist dishonesty and the institutional hunt for funding.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 18, 2007 @ 2:43 pm
re 143…
Thank you Chris for your response. It seems your question begs an answer from yourself…”should we be warming the planet”…? Or rephrase…”are we warming the planet?”
Now, in your own words you have placed this ‘warming’ in the hands of a natural course of planetary cycles, why then do you continue with the “human-centric” (what I term ‘ego-centric’) thought pattern that there is anything we can do about this very natural phenomenon? Especially when the pervading thought pattern is that CO2 is driving this heat wave.—How do you balance 3-4ppm of CO2 as a driver of heat against 97% atmospheric water vapor?—you, and the Steve Blooms of the world don’t make any sense.
Now, when the whole argument, er..discussion, boils down, it is a matter of natural vs. anthropogenic—and you have clearly made the case for natural in your comments on #143.
“what do we owe future generations”(?)…–which future generations? Yours, or the ones in Africa, Asia, South America or other ‘developing’ continents and countries? Because if you alarmists had your druthers, the people of the developing continents and countries would be the most ill-affected and the only thing ‘we’ would be fostering for our ‘future generations’ would be hatred for ‘us’ as a result of ‘our’ not leaving any oportunity for them.—Think geo-political a little more than forcing and albedo and you might draw these conclusions as well.
ANYONE TO ANSWER, Please…
What are the relative factors of CO2 input from natural forest fires worldwide as compared to human fossil fuel usage?
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 20, 2007 @ 10:14 am
>>>”which future generations? Yours, or the ones in Africa, Asia, South America or other ‘developing’ continents and countries? Because if you alarmists had your druthers, the people of the developing continents and countries would be the most ill-affected and the only thing ‘we’ would be fostering for our ‘future generations’ would be hatred for ‘us’ as a result of ‘our’ not leaving any oportunity for them.—Think geo-political a little more than forcing and albedo and you might draw these conclusions as well.”
This is somewhat confusing. I imagine my children and grandchildren will be among the most mildly affected by global climate change. But all the places you have mentioned will be ravaged by increasing drought, disease and sea level rise. Think only of Bangladesh–already impoverished–dealing with increased sea level and tens of thousands of refugees. To say that those concerned about global warming have not thought through geo-political matters is absurd. The admonition to ignore science tacked on the end is equally troubling.
>>>”How do you balance 3-4ppm of CO2 as a driver of heat against 97% atmospheric water vapor?”
3-4ppm per year, added on every year. It’s misleading to phrase the problem the way you have. You might say “Bobby only ingests 20ppb of lead each year compared to a hundred gallons of water.” But Bobby will still suffer the effects of lead poisoning.
Comment by Boris — August 20, 2007 @ 1:24 pm
re 150..
You have lapsed in your judgment of my statement. That developing countries, indeed, the planet, are facing rigors of climate change is NATURE TAKING ITS COURSE. (PERIOD) No more, no less.
If, as a result of unfounded alarmism, countries decide to take into action climate changing practices, we face alienating those that are not at the developed level as of this date. Keeping countries from developing infrastructure, ie-power plants, is a very serious matter.
Now, I said 3-4ppm, I meant 3-400ppm, I am sorry for that mistake. And my point is very simple, weigh the balance of 3-400ppm CO2 with 97% atmospheric wator vapor—I get a nil effect—of course, I am no scientist, but that is why I am reading this and many other sights—to gather first hand data from people who do know what they are talking about, so I can weed through the political and ego-centric algore’s of the world, who would not only hype himself as creator of the internet, but savior of our planet.(?!?!?)
If you would read back to #143, the man states it plain as day, we are facing NATURAL phenomenon.
Let us not compound our Bangledeshi neighbors problems by forcing them into impractical ‘planet saving,’ AGW curbing measures, when in fact the planet is not warming as a result of their, or our, influence upon it.
BTW, I would never tell any person to ‘ignore’ science, and I never inferred it either.
Do you have an answer for my question:
What are the relative factors of CO2 input from natural forest fires worldwide as compared to human fossil fuel usage?
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 20, 2007 @ 3:09 pm
Re #148
Graeme please read what I wrote again. And yes I understand the time scales - I am a geologist.
Now If I recall we were discussing the Cretaceous, and now all of a sudden we have to discuss the last 3-5 million years. Posting ‘aggressively’ only suggests to me you feel somehow threated and need to attack.
Anyway, yes the last 3-5 million years have mostly been like a freezer. But why has it been like a freezer? Is it Milankovitch cycles coupled with Antarctica at the south pole? Is it the land locking if a sea at the north pole? I doubt that the significant event of the last 3-5 million years, the docking of North and south America made the ice age worse. It created the Gulf Stream yes? Read the Wikipedia entry on ice ages, it’s most informative. I would suggest that the time scale should extend back to around 40 million when the current ice-ages started. And humans have lived in the last few hundred thousand years of that freezer. We are ice-age animals. There is nothing ‘brutal and pulverizing’ about it. And what does that mean anyway, and it’s strange how you keep repeating it.
Remember too, that in earlier periods of the Earth’s history the sun was cooler and the Earth hotter. The majority of the Earth’s history, by far, more than 90% of it, was hotter than now. The Earth is normally hotter. The reason it is cold is due to a whole range of conditions that are not common. Now don’t confuse this with the idea that I think the Earth is going to suddenly get that hot again. I believe it will warm but not to the extent of the Cretaceous. I was just noting that it is unusual for the Earth to be so cold, and this coincides with our existence. Hardly such a bad thing.
I am confused by your conspiracy theory too, what exactly is going on? Can you explain it in more detail? What is a ‘leftist’?
Comment by Nathan — August 20, 2007 @ 7:25 pm
“I doubt that the significant event of the last 3-5 million years, the docking of North and south America made the ice age worse.”
Well it did. It created the situation of near permanent ice at the North Pole and changed the glaciation-cycle from about 40 000 years to about 100 000 years sending the average temperature ever-lower.
And it was bound to do so by increasing the resistance to circulation.
“Posting ‘aggressively’ only suggests to me you feel somehow threated and need to attack.”
You have got to be joking. I was offended by the sloppiness of your argument. You were claiming that our planet is naturally much warmer. Yet your time-scale is just irrelevant. Since this global warming fraud is ultimately a policy debate…………… harking back to 40 million years ago minimum is hardly relevant.
Because our layout and circumstances today is such that we are living on a planet with a one-way-cooling bias.
It wasn’t the case 60 million years ago. And it might not be the case 60 million years from now. But this is hardly relevant to the decisions we make today.
Whereas how we react when our short-lived interglacials start sliding away from us is most relevant.
Our interglacial has been deteriorating for 5 or 6 thousand years now.
Its obvious then that any human-induced warming we can get hold of must be a good thing. It cannot NOT be a good thing.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 20, 2007 @ 10:13 pm
“And humans have lived in the last few hundred thousand years of that freezer. We are ice-age animals. There is nothing ‘brutal and pulverizing’ about it. ”
What do you think caused us to EVOLVE?
It was a series of pulsating holocausts that caused us to evolve. You cannot believe what you are saying. Chicago 1 km under ice is nothing that you can evolve comfortably to.
Australia one big anti-cyclonic system that throws topsoil all the way to New Zealand is not a fun thing.
We evolved in the ice age means we were slaughtered and cut off from eachother in the ice age. It doesn’t mean we find miles and miles of ice a comfortable environment.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 20, 2007 @ 10:19 pm
Re #152: IIRC the closure of the Central American seaway about 6my ago is thought to have tipped the climate by cooling the North Pacific. Had not various other factors been in place, first and foremost a continent at the South Pole, that wouldn’t have happened. The chief lesson seems to be that a pretty considerable confluence of factors that are not normally all present at once had to be in order for the Pleistocene to happen at all. The scientists who study deep climate seem to think that as a result it won’t take much to push the planet back out of the Pleistocene.
If one stops and considers, the only thing that’s really fundamentally changed about this planet’s circumstances since much warmer times circa 100my ago is that solar irradiance has increased on the order of .6% (which is considerable as these things go). Notwithstanding that other events conspired to make the planet almost uniquely cold relative to the Phanerozoic (the last 550my), none of those are permanent.
This is a detail, but note that the Pleistocene proper didn’t start until about 3my ago. 4 to 5my ago was still the warmish Pliocene (although starting to cool).
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 21, 2007 @ 2:33 am
There is a polarizing tendency in the debate where you can take one scenario that slimly fits your bias and ignore others that manifestly don’t. The main problem of Bangladesh comes from living in a river delta. Like all deltas they have opportunities and dangers; good fishing, flash floods, diseases. If you build your house on stilts as everyone sensible should do in a delta then a few cm rise (on average) a century are utterly insignificant. They actually have to deal now with sudden surges of several metres, followed by devastating landslides but that is more to do with being in a delta in the first place and cutting down all the nearby trees. A more affluent country can build dykes and pumps to keep water out, (which of course is sometimes not enough when the maintenance budget is cut) and use fuels other than wood. Let there be no doubt whatsoever that what the poorer countries really need is the money to lift them out of poverty and the good government to use it wisely.
Comment by JamesG — August 21, 2007 @ 6:31 am
I hope this question is not sophomoric, but is there any data on how much of the 300-400ppm of atmospheric CO2 is as a result of forest fires?
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 21, 2007 @ 8:59 am
BTW I don’t think the evaporation/condensation cycle in the atmosphere is an art conditioner.
It ia a Heat Pipe.
Comment by M. Simon — August 21, 2007 @ 10:28 am
It is not an “art conditioner”. It is an air conditioner.
Comment by M. Simon — August 21, 2007 @ 10:30 am
“The scientists who study deep climate seem to think that as a result it won’t take much to push the planet back out of the Pleistocene.”
Get it right Bloom. The scientists who study this don’t think so at all because its not a credible idea.
You are talking about science workers. Like your buds at Goddard. ‘Science workers’ I think was the phrase you were looking for.
Robert H Goddard must be spinning in his grave like a rotiserie chicken.
Here is the great man and American original.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Goddard_(scientist)
And look what has become of his legacy:
http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2007/05/20/the-goddard-institute-the-curse-of-the-lone-paradigm/
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 21, 2007 @ 1:31 pm
“Notwithstanding that other events conspired to make the planet almost uniquely cold relative to the Phanerozoic (the last 550my), none of those are permanent.”
WHAT?(T.F.)???????
Listen to me Bloom. The Antarctica is moving towards the Atlantic at only 1cm a year. Thats a century just for one metre. Thats ten thousand years for a football field. A hundred thousand years gets you a kilometre and it won’t make a stitch of difference.
And I don’t think North and South America look like ripping apart in your lifetime do you?
Just how long is the long-term planning horizon?
Do you practise this sort of stuff in the mirror?
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 21, 2007 @ 1:55 pm
Re #157: Not a lot IIRC, but I think those numbers aren’t hard to locate. Try the CDIAC or the AR4 first, but it should be easy to find something via Google Scholar. Forest fires get a lot of research attention.
Re #160: It can be. Pigeons are a factor as well, at least if we’re talking bronze statuary.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 21, 2007 @ 2:14 pm
#162…Thanks for the research insight…now possible that you should do some more research(?!?!)(you and the rest of the AGW EDITED)…..Two pages into your suggested links I find that in 1997 up to 40% of CO2 released into the atmosphere was from this one forest fire…..
“Extrapolating these estimates to Indonesia as a whole, we estimate that between 0.81 and 2.57 Gt of carbon were released to the atmosphere in 1997 as a result of burning peat and vegetation in Indonesia. This is equivalent to 13-40% of the mean annual global carbon emissions from fossil fuels, and contributed greatly to the largest annual increase in atmospheric CO(2) concentration detected since records began in 1957 (ref. 1).”
(http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=12422213&dopt=Citation)
I really do not understand how you AGW EDITED insist that humans and our usage of fossil fuels is the main contributor to rising CO2 levels, when on one search I find this article. All of this AGW scare, are you proud of yourself??
Growing up in the early 80’s, I was dogged by fears of acid rain, no more oil by the 2000’s, etc., etc…None of it true.
Now you EDITED don’t have anything to hide behind because information is not vaulted up for only a few ‘valued’ scientists to peruse, it is openly available to all!!!—-How much more info will I find if I continue to search google scholar for “forest fires and atmospheric co2″???
Please Bloom you are really being counter-productive, you should spend your time validating even one point of your supposed AGW data, BTW, if you could do it you could win some big money for it!!
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 21, 2007 @ 3:09 pm
“Re #160: It can be. Pigeons are a factor as well, at least if we’re talking bronze statuary. ”
The happy face won’t help you. The fact is if we are interested in science we are interested in evidence.
Evidence. Not peer review. Not some DELETED assertion of consensus. We want evidence and the alarmist side of the argument is an evidence-free-zone. A belligerent evidence-free-zone at that.
If you had a point to the contrary of what I was saying lets see it. Otherwise lets see you campaigning for liquified-coal.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 21, 2007 @ 7:48 pm
Re #158: According to Trenberth’s model, 78 W/m2 are removed from the surface by latent heat transfer and 24 W/m2 by sensible heat transfer. If we adjust his model and set latent heat to zero, the surface temperature increases by 11.58K. If we set both latent and sensible heat to zero, the surface temperature increases by 14.89K. The term “air conditioner” seems accurate to me.
Comment by Jim Masterson — August 21, 2007 @ 7:57 pm
re #154
Crikey Graeme, calm down. You give yourself a stroke. why is a sloppy argument so ‘offensive’ - I think you are talking yourself a little too seriously. Why do you insist on using such flowering language, like “brutal”, “pulverising”, “holocaust” - it’s all meaningless.
I think you need to realise that people posting here are not policy makers. Mostly we are interested in having a civil discussion and learning about the climate. You, it would seem, have already made you mind up so why are you here? It would seem you are here to just tell people who think otherwise that they are fools. As far as I can see that’s the least convincing argument - science is a discussion, not a diatribe. Where is your evidence that warming would be great? You have provided nothing.
The ice age extended the range of grasslands, which is what helped us evolve. All the foods we eat are based in grasslands. We didn’t evolve near Chicago. Sure our range has extended because of recent warming, but you can’t say that further warming will just make life even better.
“We evolved in the ice age means we were slaughtered and cut off from each other in the ice age. It doesn’t mean we find miles and miles of ice a comfortable environment.”
That is simply wrong, we didn’t evolve near the ice sheets. We evoled in Africa, which developed extensive grassy plains, we moved out of Africa and then moved through asia and Australasia. We didn’t go near the ice sheets. We moved into Europe and The Americas after the ice sheets retreated.
Why do you think the interglacial was deteriorating for 5 to 6 thousand years? How do you demonstrate that? I have heard this interglacial could exist for a few more thousand years. Are you saying that coal usage has blessedly saved us from an ice age? So, CO2 won’t heat the Earth, but it will save us from an ice age… That doesn’t really make sense.
As for the climate in past ages, it is VERY important. It shows how the climate is influenced by various factors; tectonics, the sun, atmospheric composition, albedo etc. It is a perfect way of showing that the warming we currently experience isn’t solely attributable to the sun. The BIGGEST changes over the last few thousand years are all attributable to Humans. Be it land clearing, increased CO2 or whatever.
Comment by Nathan — August 21, 2007 @ 9:55 pm
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/1997/96GL03950.shtml
Try that. I can’t read the full text, but we can see that the closing of the isthmus of Panama had varying effects depending on where you live.
Comment by Nathan — August 21, 2007 @ 10:27 pm
When did ‘monger’ become a bad word?????
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 22, 2007 @ 7:51 am
RE: #159 - I agree. That is a proper analogy.
Comment by SteveSadlov — August 22, 2007 @ 11:50 am
“The ice age extended the range of grasslands, which is what helped us evolve. All the foods we eat are based in grasslands. We didn’t evolve near Chicago.”
Grasslands helped people evolve. What is this? Grassland-magic?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is not the first time that stick-weilding gangster bipedals descended down from the trees to dominate their at first larger competitors.
The first time was the early dinosaurs.
Now those early dinosaurs took the world by storm but the world was really just one big continent. If you look at their evolution from after they took over, these stick-weilding gangster bipedals… their evolution as to their outer-forms or outward appearance… their evolution appears to be very slow.
Stick-weilding bipedal gangsterism no doubt being a successful niche.
Anyhow the giant continent broke up and the heretofore bipedals now seperated took on many forms.
But why didn’t extended dinosaur family evolve large-brained bipedals from out of all that diversity?
Lack of grasslands? I don’t THINKso.
You see evolution is difficult. Its a tough process. And you need partial-but-not-total isolation within the species for it to happen.
If you have total isolation for too long you’ll have a split and two or more different species will arise through genetic drift.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A small animals scurries up a tree to get away from predators… Now we have the partial-isolation and subjection to a like-adaptive stress by all the partially-isolated of that species.
They have to get used to living in the trees for the first time. But living in the trees isolates them somewhat. Yet they are subjected to the same competitive stresses.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
A four-legged animal flourishes everywhere until a new predator emerges and the species gets slaughtered mercillesly….
… Except for those who quite by accident run into a river to get away from the predator.
Now these innovators who ran into the rivers all over the place and into the surf. These guys are now partially but not totally isolated and they are subjected to a LIKE competitive stress in the new environment.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Now in our case, like the early dinosaurs before us, we were stick-weilding gangster bipedals.
We took over and dominated animals far larger.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Twenty-something glacial cycles in three million years. Each time the same pattern.
THE PATTERN OF HUMAN EVOLUTION THESE LAST 3 MILLION YEARS.
We spread out everywhere and our population becomes almost to hunter-gatherer saturation.
Just in time for the white wall of death to come and slash our population to pieces. Starve us off and isolate us, one clan from the other, for at least 60 000 years apiece.
We are so attrited that the fossil record scantly records the existence of the survivors cut off from eachother. But 60 000 years later the game will start opening up faster then we can reproduce such will be the sudden abundance.
And then the clans will amalgamate into one species again after suffering from a like adaptive stress from that endless winter. And just as they have re-amalgamated on comes the next long-night of the white-wall-of-death.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The case of a four-legged animal evolving to whales, hippos and dolphins I will call:
1. New Niche Morphing Evolution.
But the case of hominids evolving to Homo-Sapiens I will call:
2.Pulsing-Holocaust Evolution.
And its pulsing holocause evolution that is the norm and not the exception.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
But lets put that all aside. Have some bloody sense man. Ice ages are not nice. A warmer world is a kinder, wetter, less harsh world. And only ocean-life gains from a glaciation.
You must be a really sheltered character or laying on some leftist play-dumb-and-win JIVE.
Try and think what it is you would eat if you had to live on a giant glacier?
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 22, 2007 @ 2:49 pm
Re #163: Is it so painful and upsetting to do a little research? FYI the huge fires that year were very unusual and so say little about long-term CO2 contribution. The long-term trend information isn’t hard to find if you’ll just spend a little more time on it.
Re #164: My little joke wasn’t about your comment at all. Bear in mind that the numbering of recent comments sometimes changes.
Re #167: A quick Google Scholar finds this new paper, so apparently not everyone agrees that the seaway closure was the major factor. Increased axial tilt seems like the obvious candidate, but someone must have looked at that already (although maybe all these authors are saying is it hasn’t been modeled). In any case these results don’t seem to be comprehensive. Note the convenient reference links for anyone who wants to look into this farther.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 22, 2007 @ 5:10 pm
171 Increasing the resistance to circulation will cumulatively cool things DIRECTLY via Stefan-Boltzmans law. This becomes obvious is you disaggregate the situation and take a marginalist approach. Thats about the first thing I recognised when looking into this fraud.
“Increased axial tilt seems like the obvious candidate…”
What do you mean by that and when did this increased axial tilt come about? Have you any reason to believe there was some increase in the axial tilt???
North and South America fused and you start talking about some increase in axial tilt. No it was because North and South America fused. Unless you found some increased-axial-tilt evidence.
http://graemebird.wordpress.com/2006/11/19/marginal-analysis-and-global-coolingwarming/
Instead of saying… “Graeme you were right all along” you pull this axial tilt rabbit out of a hat.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 22, 2007 @ 9:10 pm
“Why do you think the interglacial was deteriorating for 5 to 6 thousand years? How do you demonstrate that? I have heard this interglacial could exist for a few more thousand years. Are you saying that coal usage has blessedly saved us from an ice age? So, CO2 won’t heat the Earth, but it will save us from an ice age… That doesn’t really make sense.”
Look. Attempt not to be stupid. Another glaciation will be horrible and destructive despite all your make-believe. So if CO2 helps warm the earth then that cannot-NOT be a good thing.
Does it make sense NOW?
Try and combat your brainwashing will you. Its you thats not making any sense. Now I don’t seriously think that CO2 can do the whole job of holding back the white wall of death but every little bit of warming helps and we ought not be flippant or defeatist about this.
Solar brightness varies a lot over time. But the slide from optimal Malinkovitch conditions about six thousand years ago has lead to an average downward trend in temperatures by about .25 degrees Celsius every thousand years.
Of course its hard to know or demonstrate this with the leftist campaign of villification and Lamberting going on round the clock. And the nonsense coming out of places like Goddard. But heretofore its always been understood that the Holocene optimum lasted from about 8,000 to 5,000 years ago and its been downhill since then.
We have extended bursts of solar strength 8,000 years ago…. Just over 1000 years ago…. and in the 20th century…..
With the high solar activity 8000 years ago and the Malinkovitch optimum about 6000 years ago…. if this is accepted without all this “Lamberting” that goes on then the holocene optimum lasting from 8,000-5,000 years ago makes perfect sense and isn’t the least bit mysterious.
Now when you have massively powerful periods of solar activity like the twentieth century….. when you have this then the only way to go is down.
You see the increase in the solar activity took us way ABOVE the Malinkovitch downward-trendline of negative .25 degrees per thousand years.
So if you were a stock-picker, and not a true believer, then you would place all bets on a massive fall back down towards that trendline coming on pretty soon depending on how long it takes the oceans to cool.
Obviously any little-bitty-bit of warming CO2 is doing is therefore a good thing under the circumstances and no gift-horse to be acting so ungrateful over.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 22, 2007 @ 9:29 pm
Re# 170 etc by Mr Bird
Human’s haven’t existed outside of an ice-age. An interglacial is part of an ice-age, just a warmer bit. Just because interglacials are nice, doesn’t mean making it warmer will be nicer.
Maybe if you read about Human evolution you would understand the role of grasslands, start with Wikipedia, search under “Human Evolution”.
Apparently Wikipedia disagrees with you on the Milankovitch cycle thing too:
“The amount of solar radiation (insolation) in the Northern Hemisphere at 65°N seems to be related to occurrence of an ice age. Astronomical calculations show that 65°N summer insolation should increase gradually over the next 25,000 years, and that no declines in 65°N summer insolation sufficient to cause an ice age are expected in the next 50,000 - 100,000 years.”
and try this: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/297/5585/1287
So, who do you expect me to believe? The leftist, vilifying authors at Wiki - or you?
As I said before, by claiming I am stupid you make me doubt you more.
Your argument may prove more compelling without the name-calling too. Appealing to dichotomies makes me think your thought processes may be shallow. Dichotomies don’t really exist. There are no “true-believers” everyone believes something slightly different. I find it strange that you somehow know what I believe.
I won’t be replying anymore, but I will read your response
Comment by Nathan — August 23, 2007 @ 3:42 am
Regardless of whether I believe in the merit of some of what Mr Bird is saying or not, his comments do need some editing.
Please feel free to edit this comment out as you do, as it holds no value in scientific terms.
Mr Bird, if you would be so kind as to present your hypotheses/evidence without the ad hominem attacks.
Comment by Rejean Gagnon — August 23, 2007 @ 11:05 am
#171…, I have no problem researching. My point, as you seem to have missed, is that on cursory examination I find one fire that was responsible for up to 40% of atmospheric CO2 in 1997 alone. And while this one fire was “huge,” what would be the combined effect of all forest fires world wide on a yearly basis? Would it be around 40%? If so, AGW seems a bit overreaching in that there are natural phenomenon contributing almost as much, if not more, atmospheric CO2 as humans. Curiously, something you AGW people have made no mention toward as it simply does not fit your baseless argument.
BTW, still waiting for your one shred of AGW proof……………………….??…………………………..??…………………………..??……………….
I don’t know how old you are, or how long you have been a scientist, but if your age fits, I would be willing to bet everything I have that you were in the ‘global cooling’ camp in the 70’s. The camp that cried the US population would be around 22 million by 2000 as a result of this ‘global cooling,’ furthering the cry, “IF WE DON’T ACT NOW.” How scary, how unfounded, and how untrue. Most reminiscent of your current cry.
Please stop crying, you and algore are scaring people on the basis of MODELS that leave 80% of the equation out.
WHY?
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 23, 2007 @ 11:43 am
“So, who do you expect me to believe? The leftist, vilifying authors at Wiki - or you?”
Don’t believe wiki. Thats just Stoat, Lambert and all these other extremists going through and buggering it cross-referenced.
How old are you?
You never met a leftist before?
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 23, 2007 @ 11:44 am
Re #176: If researching the longer-term numbers is so easy, why haven’t you done it? BTW, in order to place the forest fire CO2 contribution in context, you’ll have to learn about the behavior of all of the sources and sinks, natural and anthropogenic. If you do so, you will learn why the statements “anthropogenic CO2 emissions are responsible for 100% of the increase in atmospheric CO2 level” and “anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a comparatively small fraction of total CO2 emissions” are not contradictory. RC has some good basic articles on this subject. But as you are clearly not in a learning mood, I’ll leave it at that.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 23, 2007 @ 4:24 pm
It doesn’t really matter if the CO2 comes from the forest fire or industry. The point to remember is that extra-CO2 is GOOD!!!! and obviously so and no evidence stands to the contrary of this fact for which we have untold evidence.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 23, 2007 @ 5:25 pm
RE: #179 - As we stand teetering at the precipice of the next glacial cycle, at very least, we need to be open to the possibility that AGW may actually be a slight (albeit, eventually, ineffective) mitigation mechanism. My biggest fear, though, is that people may be getting lulled into complacency vis a vis killer ice.
Comment by SteveSadlov — August 23, 2007 @ 7:33 pm
The point to remember is that extra-CO2 is GOOD!!!! and obviously so and no evidence stands to the contrary of this fact for which we have untold evidence.
Um, no.
Comment by Dan — August 23, 2007 @ 8:02 pm
“RE: #179 - As we stand teetering at the precipice of the next glacial cycle, at very least, we need to be open to the possibility that AGW may actually be a slight (albeit, eventually, ineffective) mitigation mechanism.”
Open to the possibility? But Steve. You understate your case. For surely this looks like the only hypothesis consistent with all that is known so far.
If this hypothesis is not right it will be a major breakthrough. Because surprises that contradict all that is known before shed a great deal of light on things.
But barring any surprises in fact your thesis which is the same as my own is the ONLY sensible thesis and all the others are pure idiocy and an embarrassment.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 24, 2007 @ 8:22 am
Dans links. Just as I thought. The first one supports my thesis in its concrete facts and not Dans. And the second one is merely ridiculous.
They are to do with agriculuture which is vastly enhanced by extra CO2. And anyone getting in the way of that is killing an indeterminate amount of faceless people since making food more expensive then it has to be is an evil crime against humanity.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 24, 2007 @ 8:28 am
#178….Quite contrarily, I am always in a learning mood. You see, I just do not have the time to devote to researching so many things and properly defer to experts on such matters. However, and, I do thank you for your help on research material. (Please do tell me what “RC” stands for.)
Currently, myself and a few partners are establishing oil palm sugar cane plantations on over 200,000 hectares in various locations in Mexico, to produce biodiesel and ethanol. And thus my time for research is very limited.
While I believe that it is important for us, as humans, to curb our dependence on fossil fuels and to be better than good stewards of our environment, I simply can not believe, as NO ONE has substantiated, that humans are responsible for global climate change. After having read this thread, I find my position corroborated by many learned professionals of Science, which by the way is in ABSOLUTE CONTRADICTION to any current media reporting stating that the ‘CONSENSUS’ of scientists believe not only that humans are causing climate change, but that if we do not act now we are all doomed.—-Very remniscent of the Global Cooling spector of the 70’s.
So, now where I am putting my money where your mouth is, I prefer not to scare people into changing their pardigms of energy consumption, but rather I seek to inform people properly and allow them to make the choice–not out of fear but out of conscious and reasoned deliberation.
You choose to scare by falsfication. VERY BAD.
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 24, 2007 @ 8:49 am
oil palm AND sugar cane
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 24, 2007 @ 8:50 am
falsification
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 24, 2007 @ 8:57 am
Re #182: Real Climate. BTW, you are aware that Roger is in the general agreement with the climate science “consensus” as expressed by the IPCC?
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 24, 2007 @ 3:10 pm
Steve B. - I am sorry, but I disagree with the IPCC on a number of issues, so please be specific which topics you are referring to.
Comment by Roger Pielke Sr. — August 24, 2007 @ 4:53 pm
Re #188: That’s why I said “general.” I seem to remember your agreeing to something along those lines some time back, albeit after a certain amount of arm-twisting. But that was with regard to the TAR, so maybe it’s time to ask where you stand with respect to the general conclusions of the AR4. Probably it’s reasonable to consider the amber boxes in the SPM to be those general conclusions, so I’ve pasted them below in order. Which do you disagree with?
“Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and now far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years (see Figure SPM.1). The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due primarily to fossil fuel use and land use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture.
“The understanding of anthropogenic warming and cooling influences on climate has improved since the TAR, leading to very high confidence7 that the global average net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming, with a radiative forcing of +1.6 [+0.6 to +2.4] W m–2 (see Figure SPM.2).
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level (see Figure SPM.3).
“At continental, regional and ocean basin scales, numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed. These include changes in arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves and the intensity of tropical cyclones.
“Some aspects of climate have not been observed to change.
“Palaeoclimatic information supports the interpretation
that the warmth of the last half century is unusual in at least the previous 1,300 years. The last time the polar regions were significantly warmer than present for an extended period (about 125,000 years ago), reductions in polar ice volume led to 4 to 6 m of sea level rise. {6.4, 6.6}
“Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.12 This is an advance since the TAR’s conclusion that “most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrationsâ€?. Discernible human influences now extend to other aspects of climate, including ocean warming, continental-average temperatures, temperature extremes and wind patterns (see Figure SPM.4 and Table SPM.2).
“Analysis of climate models together with constraints from observations enables an assessed likely range to be given for climate sensitivity for the first time and provides increased confidence in the understanding of the climate system response to radiative forcing.
“For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios. Even if the concentrations of all greenhouse gases and aerosols had been kept constant at year 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected.
“Continued greenhouse gas emissions at or above current rates would cause further warming and induce many changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that would very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century.
“There is now higher confidence in projected patterns of warming and other regional-scale features, including changes in wind patterns, precipitation and some aspects of extremes and of ice.
“Anthropogenic warming and sea level rise would continue for centuries due to the time scales associated with climate processes and feedbacks, even if greenhouse gas concentrations were to be stabilised.”
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 24, 2007 @ 7:25 pm
187. Lets just see some evidence Mr Bloom. End the full-spectrum evidence filibuster.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 25, 2007 @ 12:08 am
SteveBloom…just curious…how about your response to the article which we are all respondents to, particularly:
“1.The traditional way in which feedbacks have been diagnosed from observational data has very likely misled us about the existence of positive feedbacks in the climate system.”
“2.Our new analyses of satellite observations of intraseasonal oscillations suggest negative cloud feedbacks, supporting Lindzen’s Infrared Iris hypothesis.”
“3.I am increasingly convinced that understanding precipitation systems is the key to understanding climate sensitivity.”
Instead of any ad hominem attacks, let us all get the value of your research which would disprove what Dr. Spencer has stated. If you can not disprove it, please do state your disagreements.
Either way, try to be productive with your time.
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 27, 2007 @ 11:46 am
Re #191: Gaelan, I tried to get somebody qualified to do a refutation of this stuff, to which their response was (paraphrasing) “Roy Spencer? Why bother?” If there’s anything actually worth responding to here, I expect we’ll see something in the literature soon enough. If on the other hand the view of the field is that these ideas are trivially wrong, they may simply be ignored. Roy is after all operating out of his field here. As for the part of it that is in his field (the satellite data), it won’t be long before we see what RSS has to say.
Comment by Steve Bloom — August 28, 2007 @ 3:59 pm
If that was his answer then clearly he wasn’t qualified was he.
You really are a gullible fellow now Bloom aren’t you. Over at Goddard and realclimate their just a bunch of leftist fraudsters. And if they had a case they now stand to win $100 000 if they can come up with any evidence for CO2-induced catastrophic warming.
There is just no chance of anybody winning that prize such is the magnitude of the stupidity involved in this most appalling of science-frauds.
Comment by Graeme Bird — August 29, 2007 @ 7:37 am
Steve B. Please provide us with a link to the somebody who you paraphrased. If not, then this is just blowing smoke, in which you attempt to hand wave an invalidation of the subject and its author. Even if you have a link your statements are still embarrassing for yourself and those you paraphrase.
In reading a number of your post on other blogs it appears to me you are mostly ignored. Could it be that this is the real reason for their indifference to your request - they are simply trying to ignore you wishing you would go away.
Embarrassing!
Comment by Bob T. — August 29, 2007 @ 8:01 am
Actually I agree with most of what is in the points from the IPCC you list in 189 Steve. There are a few inconsistencies and a couple things I think they are overstating though (or being incredibly vague to the point they may as well just say “This is a political and nuanced way to say something without saying anything other than the obvious (or anything at all).”).
I don’t disagree a) there’s more c02 according to the measurements b) probably getting warmer according to the measurements c) a—>b is probably the case from the science side of it. .1 to .2 a decade, maybe not, but the last 30 was .17 and the last 10 .21/decade so if it continues, sure. Meaning of the anomalies? Maybe not so meaningful, but that’s what they are. Trend continues? Probably.
Okay. Some numbers would be nice, but I can’t disagree with that.
Probably. “would cause further warming” is taking for granted it’s causation, and I don’t take that for granted that it’s true. “many changes” and “very likely be larger” is pretty vague also. CYA talk.
But what happened to the “land use changes” and agrigculture parts? (which I why I put in that first paragraph) That’s the most important part of this (and I believe the main cause of any warming).
125,000 years ago? How long did it take for the sea levels to go up 4-6m, and why do you think it will do that again? Or that we won’t be able to stop it if it does. Could you be a little more vague as to what it means? Besides, the planet is different now. And that last time, was that during an interglacial? I know what they’re implying, but geez, come on.
Comment by Mike Nee — August 29, 2007 @ 12:11 pm
Oooops, missing something there. Let me attempt again…
Actually I agree with most of what is in the points from the IPCC you list in 189 Steve. There are a few inconsistencies and a couple things I think they are overstating though (or being incredibly vague to the point they may as well just say “This is a political and nuanced way to say something without saying anything other than the obvious (or anything at all).”).
I don’t disagree a) there’s more c02 according to the measurements b) probably getting warmer according to the measurements c) a—>b is probably the case.
.1 to .2 a decade, maybe not, but the last 30 was .17 and the last 10 .21/decade. Trend continues? Probably. Meaning of the anomalies? Maybe not so meaningful, but that’s what they are.
Okay. Some numbers would be nice, but I can’t disagree with that.
Probably. “would cause further warming” is taking for granted it’s causation, and I don’t take that for granted that it’s true. “many changes” and “very likely be larger” is pretty vague also. CYA talk.
But what happened to the “land use changes” and agrigculture parts? (which I why I put in that first paragraph) That’s the most important part of this (and I believe the main cause of any warming).
Higher? Higher than what? From .00001% to .00002%? From 10% to 25%? What? Then you have to get to, is this a bad thing? Pretty meaningless statement. Too vague. “Stuff is going to happen.”
I don’t agree with the correlation, I think they’re overstating here also. Even if you correlate the surface to the entire system, absolute SST readings per decade have risen far less than land temps anomalies. They’re taking too much for granted there.
125,000 years ago? How long did it take for the sea levels to go up 4-6m, and why do you think it will do that again? Or that we won’t be able to stop it if it does. Could you be a little more vague as to what it means? Besides, the planet is different now. And that last time, was that during an interglacial? I know what they’re implying, but geez, come on.
And this part is just too obvious: “Palaeoclimatic information supports the interpretation” or “The stuff we looked at makes us think that this is probably the case, we reckon.”
Comment by Mike Nee — August 29, 2007 @ 1:08 pm
Bah. Only the top sentence at the end is a quote. I closed it with “/blockquotes”, doh!
Comment by Mike Nee — August 29, 2007 @ 4:22 pm
Bob T.-you took the words out of my mouth with reference to SteveBloom.
SteveBloom–name some people whom you asked to opine upon this article.
Not only do your arguments not make any sense, but your attempt not to argue doesn’t make any sense.
Comment by Gaelan Clark — August 31, 2007 @ 12:06 am