The rise in global temperatures since 1880 closely correlates with increases in postal charges, sparking alarm that CO2 has been usurped as the main driver of climate change.
SOURCES: NCDC global temperatures, Law Dome & Mauna Loa CO2 levels, US postal charges, Andrew Dart. The link to cite for this image.
Back in 1885 it cost 2 cents to post a letter. Who would have thought that as postal charges climbed by 40 cents through the next 120 years, that global temperatures would mirror that rise in timing and slope and gain almost one full degree?
Ominously, US Post is set to raise the charges 2c to 44c on May 11, 2009. Postal Action Network (PAN) has already sprung into existence this afternoon and plans to produce a boycott campaign of the new 44c Homer Simpson stamps. Overworked postal workers are enthusiastic. Homer Simpson is reported to have said “Give me the number for 911.”
Barbara Boxer, majority Chairman of the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, immediately set up an inquiry, announcing that all future changes in price for US post must be approved by the EPA. “We’ll need a full environmental impact statement. We can’t just let global damage be done willy nilly on the basis of some arbitrary postal expenses committee’s need to balance the books. No other government service has to balance their budget, why should US Post?”
President Obama immediately convened a task force at the Federal Reserve to loan $450 billion to US Post to keep prices constant until 3400 A.D..
Tuvalu promptly announced they would cut their postal charges in half ‘just in case’. They are asking for donations in order to keep their postal service running, but are considering shifting to carrier pigeons.
The mechanism is far from clear. Professor Chrichton-Boots from the Chicago Schools of Economics, cautioned that US Post prices are a good proxy for inflation, and that it may be inflation that is really behind the recent change in climate. He admitted it was puzzling that there appears to have been global temperature changes for 3-5 billion years before the advent of either US Postal services, or inflation. “You would think the planetary climate would have been stable.” But Harvard social researchers are calling for funding for archaeological digs to find postage stamps from the precambrian. “It’s under-researched”. US Post said this type of finding would be very important but, if any stamps were found, they would be unable to honor them: “Since at the time, the US didn’t exist, in government, in theory, or even as a landmass”.
A spokesman from US Post pointed out that the ‘Forever’ series of stamps (which cost 41c, but are ‘good forever, regardless of price rises’) are anti-inflationary. They were issued in 2007 which “may explain the cooler weather since then”*.
Critics pointed out that correlation is not causation, and “you can produce a link between any two monotonically rising lines on a graph”. The newly formed UN Intergovernmental Panel on Postal Changes called them deniers, while Jim Hansen from NASA pronounced that executives from The Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service should be jailed henceforth and also retrospectively.
The Russians (Pochta Rossii) announced they would lift the cost of letters from 10 roubles to 100, effective from Monday. “Siberia is too cold”.
*(As a curious aside, the Forever stamps may have been the US Government’s most successful investment tool in recent times, gaining 14% in value since 2007, while the Dow and everything else, lost over 40%. Thus proving that the US Federal Reserve could better maintain US purchasing power parity if they switched the world’s Reserve Currency from US Dollars to “Forever Stamps”. )
I love it! Makes as much sense as CO2! š
60
Based upon popular, prevailing “wisdom”, such a correlation is nearly impossible to refute.
Too bad humans don’t live longer, because the correlation between increased climate temperature and Albert Gore’s waist line may also yield even more evidence. Wait — they’ve already linked global warming to fat people. Nevermind.
40
I am not entirely convinced by this as I notice that while postal charges are continuing to rise, temperatures are now beginning to fall. I think it is wrong to concentrate on just one variable. Sceptics unite!
30
I can see, er-a, hear it now, “Stamp out stamps!” Maybe the long term answer is to use “Partial Post.”
30
Thank you, JoAnne, for cheering me up, all of the AGW maelstrom has made me a bit blue of late, I must say.
I believe the Homer Simpson character creator, Mr Groening, is in fact an AGW sceptic – which, if true, comes as good news to me.
20
Very nice, Joanne. Thanks a lot, it is great to have a giggle.
40
This is a great observation! Think of all of the other synergistic issues this could be linked with. Federal Budget vs Temp, Number of Federal Laws vs Temp, and EPA Regulations vs Temp. The list could be endless.
Wouldn’t it be great if the EPA had a regulation limiting the number of regulations to combat global warming? Think of the infinite circles that loop would cause. Since science has been banished within the EPA no one would be educated enough to get them out of it. Why they would all starve to death from fear of doing something!
Keep up the good work.
20
If this were true and the answer to climate change were to lower postal rates, anyone want to bet that climate change would suddenly stop being a big deal?
10
Look at that “elbow” in the early 70’s…so it’s all the fault of Nixon and Ford???
10
From a quick eyeball of the graph, stamp prices appear to have risen faster than the temperature. The US Govt should put stamp prices on hold immediately, until temps catch up.
It would appear that it is the slower rise in CO2 which is keeping the temp response constrained. Emit more CO2 to keep temps down and prevent global warming/climate change!
Next graph: temp vs hog belly futures?
10
[…] Graph “proves” global warming is due to US Postal Service charges. CO2 is in the clear. […]
10
Well,go fish!! Maybe this is what the Alarmists will trying to say along but doing thru the “Fast Track” behind the scenes just like Congress just did with Health Care.
[email protected]>
Great Post Jo!
10
That settles it. I am using nothing but email from now on!
Unless it is only the price and not the usage of stamps, then I am powerless.
10
[…] by postage stamp increase May 2nd, 2009 Goto comments Leave a comment If you doubt it, see the proof, with statistics and all […]
10
Joanne, you have been remiss. There is a much more exact correlation than the mere price of postage stamps. The rise in global temperatures is directly proportional to the gas emitted by the saintly Albert Gore throughout his lifetime. On his demise, it will be immediately necessary to preserve his remains cryogenically or the fiery apocalypse will be upon us.
10
[…] OH SHIT! THE CAUSE OF GLOBAL WARMING! Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges | JoNova […]
10
A must read:
Climate Science in A Tornado by George F. Will
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/26/AR2009022602906.html
10
The check is in the post.
10
This article raises a number of serious points. We know that correlation does not imply causation. The linkage between stamp prices and global temperatures may be causal (either or both ways), may be incidental, or may come from a common cause. The article suggests anything other than an incidental relationship is absurd. I beg to differ.
I suggest that there is a common cause acting here. Money supply. The quantity of money in circulation directly affects prices and also directly affects economic activity. The economic activity causes changes in the composition of the atmosphere (particulates/aerosols/CO2/etc). The US money supply was relatively stable prior to the establishment of central banking in 1913. The economy expanded rapidly through 1930 before The Depression. In 1980’s under Reagan, deficit spending expanded the money supply (and economy) much further. You will note that the postal charges and temperature graphs change gradients around these times. In short, postal prices and anthropogenic global warming have the common cause of monetary expansion.
10
The net scientific use of this article is nil. This is a straw-man argument at best, which does not refute the decades of scientific data, research and findings of this very real phenomenon.
If you were actually presenting something of scientific value, it is likely that it would be published in a scientific journal after passing through rounds of peer review. I’m sorry, but articles about Homer Simpson postage stamps will never be published by any serious journal as evidence, they will however entertain the credulous, dumbed-down intellects of armchair science sceptics.
19
We’re enjoying a net cooling here in Alabama and much of the rest of the US. Makes the whole man’s-CO2-is-causing-the-climate-to-warm seem like a joke. Tornadoes and severe storms, even seaons full of tornados and severe storms, are nothing unprecedented, but they usually happen a good bit earlier, or much later in the year. The empirical evidence suggests a substantial net cooling.
Given correlative argument constantly thrown in the mix, postal charges and other human activities have much correlations to a supposed “warming climate” than do man’s CO2 emissions.
10
Noun,
Delighted you could join us.
Really, seriously, you don’t think Nature or Science would go for this? I’m shocked.
Since you have such a good handle on scientific papers and the …“the decades of scientific data, research and findings of this very real phenomenon”. We’d be most grateful if you could post that ONE paper with observational evidence supporting the case for carbon that no one seems to be able to find.
JoNova
60
Splendid response, JoAnne Nova – I am very appreciative that that you maintain this web site and the “Skeptics Guide.”
Applause, applause.
By the way, who keeps posting items as in #16?
And whatever for?
(Perhaps the second question has no sensible answer.)
10
Delightful, but response #20 made my day. Noun must be algore, just look at how stately he refutes the well thought out logic of postal warming.
20
Oh please, Ron, Adelbert Gorp isn’t THAT eloquent.
10
[…] the Mises Economics blog, Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges. The rise in global temperatures since 1880 closely correlates with increases in postal charges, […]
10
[…] the years can be directly correlated to the rise in US Postage Stamp rates.Ā Read the article, Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges, for proof of this alarming trend. (HT: Jeffrey Tucker) This entry was posted in posts and tagged […]
10
The real reason for Global Warming, is because of “ALL THE HOT AIR”, in Washington from the Politicians who speak from both sides of their mounts and say nothing, but hurt the American Taxpayers and our kids and grandkid as well as the Elderly who are unable to work anymore!!!!!
10
Thanks for your expedient response JoNova. I find it puzzling that you have the ability to write authoritatively about a scientific topic, yet are not able to perform the basic research to investigate the fundamental tenets of such a topic. This does not bode well for the credibility of your refutation!
Never mind, I will happily do your ground-work for you if it means putting you on the right path:
P. E. Martin and E. F. Barker (University of Michigan), 1932: The Infrared Absorption Spectrum of Carbon Dioxide, American Physical Society.
Moeller, F. (University of Munich), 1963: THE INFLUENCE OF CHANGES IN THE CO2 CONCENTRATION IN AIR ON THE RADIATION BALANCE OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE AND ON THE CLIMATE, Journal of Geophysical Research.
Syukuro Manabe, Richard T. Wetherald (Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/NOAA, Princeton University, Princeton), 1974: The Effects of Doubling the CO2 Concentration on the climate of a General Circulation Model, Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.
Peter M. Cox, Richard A. Betts, Chris D. Jones, Steven A. Spall, Ian J. Totterdell, 2000: Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model. Nature, 184-187.
Cooke, W.F., C. Liousse, H. Cashier, and J. Feichter, 1999: Construction of a 1 x 1 fossil fuel emission dataset for carbonaceuous aerosol and implementation and radiative impact in the ECHAM-4 model. Journal of Geophysical Research, 104, 22137-22162.
Crowley, T.J., 2000: Causes of climate change over the past 1000 years. Science, 289(5477), 270-277.
Forest, D.J., P.H. Stone, and A.P. Sokolov, 2006: Estimated PDFs of climate system properties including natural and anthropogenic forcings. Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01705.
13
Dear Noun:
Cool it.
JoAnne is obviously familiar with the references you cite and enough more to fill six quarto volumes.
Neither you, nor the humourless Al Gore doublessly, would find any more humour in what JoAnne has written than I would find edification in any references you list.
Therefore the efforts, then, have been wasted symmetrically on either.
A tragedy? No.
20
Dear Noun,
thanks for your quick reply.
Are you aware though that of the 7 papers, 1 is a lab test, and 5 are from models – (which is just a fancy form of ‘opinion’). Possibly Moeller et al contains the holy grail – observational evidence from studies of The Planet. But I can’t find it anywhere. Presumably – since it’s from 1963, there would be many repeats of it that are newer and more detailed? Surely the evidence of man-made climate change has been replicated since 1963, when the planet was cooling, despite the extra CO2?
Martin et al: LAB test
Moeller F. (University of Munich), 1963: THE INFLUENCE OF CHANGES IN THE CO2 CONCENTRATION IN AIR ON THE RADIATION BALANCE OF THE EARTHāS SURFACE AND ON THE CLIMATE, Journal of Geophysical Research.
I can’t find a copy of this paper anywhere. Please link us to the copy you’ve read. (You have read it haven’t you?)
Syukuro et al: MODEL
Cox et al: MODEL
Cooke et al: MODEL
Crowley,et al: MODEL -( Not only that, but they ‘rule out’ causes we know and figure the rest is all CO2. Argumentum ad ignorantium. There are possibly many other causes we don’t ‘know’. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/289/5477/270)
Forest et al: MODEL
It seems my refutation, and my reputation as a researcher are quite intact. Thanks for your concern.
JoNova
50
For Heaven’s sake, models are every bit as good as (or better than) reality, for people who like the outcome.
Science fiction used to entertain the weak minded, until AGW became the rage, when numerous dubious “authorities” pronounced it valid.
Perhaps if the “Star Trek” series would return with some more plausible plots and characters with more than a single dimension this would solve the “climate crisis” in some people’s minds.
20
Oh come now Joanne, we tried that with ole Boris. What we’ll get is lots of handwaving, sidestepping, misdirection and studies that don’t support the assertions or of which Noun has only read the abstract.
These guys are very predictable. But you are very sweet to humor him.
BTW, the two US Air Force weather guys I work with (one of whom has a PhD in atmospheric physics) are still laughing about Boris’ clinging to MODTRAN radiative codes as proof of anything.
40
Krueger,
Boris will keep his faith in AGW until Captain Kirk proclaims it a joke.
20
Noun is polite, so I don’t mind answering his points at all. And there are undoubtedly new people reading this thread who are not aware of how powerful the question “Where’s the evidence” can be.
I mean, really, we can’t get angry at the thousands of people out there who: 1/ assume that well funded government departments have looked thoroughly at the evidence; AND 2/ expect that these governments also know what evidence is; AND 3/ that scientific journals would publish papers which don’t break rules of logic in the abstracts…
It’s reasonable for people to expect all these three points occur. But it’s not reasonable for them to keep believing it, when none of said authorities can provide empirical evidence when asked politely.
I’m hoping more sceptics will learn to ask the question.
Of course, we can have fun after the fact, if people who can’t provide evidence keep believing the committees. That of course, is right up there in logic and reasoning stakes with religious obedience. It’s fine, if you want to find spiritual guidance, peace of mind, or absolution, but not so useful if you want to change the weather.
20
I find it disturbing though that the AGW crowd often takes what is obviously humorous satire and feels compelled to it into something more serious. No sense of humor these guys. Gotta learn to laugh once in a while! š
BTW, did you see the one about the inverse correlation to declining pirate population and increased temperatures? That one even works with the recent increase in pirates and the decline in temperatures. Methinks these kinds of satires will only grow as the fraud is further exposed.
20
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10
Thse satires are not as funny as the real jokes proposed to “get rid” of CO2 in the air: 50,000 hectare algae ponds! Dump 10,000 tons of iron sulphate in the South Atlantic to promote plankton growth! Giant CO2 scrubbers dotting the lanscape (rather, defacing the landscape) like wind turbines!
There is DEFINITELY a correlation between increased CO2 in the air and soft mindedness. Regrettably, this has caused the already soft minded to be reduced to imbeciles [a certain Prince of England comes to mind]
20
There are plenty of empirical estimates of climate sensitivity:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity.htm
10
Boris don’t you see that these empirical estimates have decomposed innumerable other factors that influence the climate to say what the influence of CO2 on the climate is?
That is – they modelled the climate, amidst a myriad of influences that could not be so decomposed from the observations.
It’s the time factors involved, and in every simgle last one of these calculations, I can give an equally valid statistical argument that CO2 was not observed within the stochastic variations.
Boris, virtually no one who reads these pages is going to believe a thing about the validity of AGW and I regret to say there is no additional information you can add to change that. People have already reasoned this out for themselves.
Some people have pronounced AGW theory valid because it is “peer-reviewed.”
Oh yeah? Well I didn’t review it, and I’m a peer, and if I had reviewed it one would look for it in the same places one would search for used toilet tissue.
10
Which famous scientist said that the earth’s climate cannot be truthfully, adequately modelled toward real conclusions, because it’s too complex?
For local weather events, different models regularly produce very different outcomes.
10
[…] Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges | JoNova ; […]
10
[…] See original here: Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges | JoNova […]
10
Boris,
From your writing I would guess you are a younger person; maybe 22-32 years of age, and you have been inculucated for a fairly significant fraction of your life with AGW, so the idea seems familiar and natural to you.
Most of the die-hard skeptics (like me) are older, and it is sad for me to witness a younger generation profoundly duped by AGW, and this is mostly the result of the influence of politicians and a very leftist media.
Why not do something a little differently than your friends and associates – and become a skeptic?
Some very talented younger people are or have turned skeptic – such as the young investigator award winner, Niv Shirav of Israel.
So you’d be in very good company, and besides, it is a lot easier to defend the obvious than it is to defend an obvious charade.
10
[…] Here is the original post: Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges | JoNova […]
10
I’m new to this site, found it very interesting. I might be completely out of subject but I just wonder even if it appears that all of you are right, that man’s CO2 emissions don’t affect global warming what is the negative effects of all the CO2 missions reductions strategies that have been proposed so far?
What I see is a net reduction in the use of carbon-based energies (is that wrong?), an economic system that has to cope with yet a new variable (the CO2).
Finally about the scientif values of all the articles proving that man CO2 emissions are causing the global warming, I agree they can’t be use as the truth. Actually I never heard anybody referring to them as the absolutely truth but using them as indicators that something might be wrong and then based on the “Precaution Principle” act about it.
I’m really looking forward to read your comments.
PS My maternal language is french so let me apologize for the level of my english writing
10
[…] Here is the original post: Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges | JoNova […]
10
Ian,
Thanks for your inquiry.
At risk of being accused of providing “Ad Hominem” information, here’s some food for thought:
Trillions of consumer dollars are to be transferred; not by the virtue of markets wherein suppliers provide what we really want or need; but by force of laws that drive up costs and compel consumers to buy inneffective products and services; all for the sake of what is most likely a non-problem or an unknown.
Throughout man’s history, chicanery like the global warming context has been used to dupe populations into submitting themselves to the whims of authority. Even recent history will give you an idea how narcissists seek power and use it to abuse populations.
The unabrogated right to question authorities, their vested interests and their planned outcomes is a necessary component in healthy states. Looking at the personalities and veracious claims of global warming proponents, it’s easy to understand the context is the establishment’s means to determine who prospers and who pays, by writ of law.
It’s very important to question Albert Gore, Maurice Strong, the World Bank, UN members and other “leaders” in order to understand their motives. Doing so, you will learn they have substantial vested interests in these outcomes, aligning economies for their sake rather than the planets.
Global warming has co-opted genuine earth science.
10
Boris #38: “There are plenty of empirical estimates of climate sensitivity”
Empirical means ‘by observation’. How do you observe an estimate? Watch out: Here comes another empirical estimate rolling past. They’re light fluffy things, hard to catch, and they’ve been known to spontaneously evaporate if you look at them too long. (Like a slow version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.)
The empirical estimates that knocked on my door last, were a lot lower than the IPCC ones, but which empirical estimates are real, and which ones are illusory?
10
Joanne,
You make an estimate based on observations. That’s what an empirical estimate is.
Empirical estimates center around the IPCC’s central values of 3C per CO2 doubling. But the empirical estimates have larger confidence intervals, especially on the high side, than the IPCC models.
In any case, they actually exist, so no use pretending they don’t anymore.
10
Ian
we can be “precautionary” – but how far do we want to take that?
At the expense of destroying ourselves? – because everybody needs fossil fuel in some way to live.
If you have an automobile, are you going to say “I will not use automobiles because using automobiles can be dangerous on the road?”
No. In some cases, especially if one is going to transport something, the automobile has to be used because a person cannot carry it themselves.
Are we going to use solar and wind power in place of fossil fuel? No. Worldwide, solar and wind contribute much less than a half a percent of all energy used, and increasing that tenfold would still make it under five per cent.
Besides, who would pay for it? Governments?
No. Governments have no money either, because there is a recession, and that means businesses are not making money for Governments to tax business anyway.
Best thing to do is to get rid of the stupid AGW idea altogether and move along to fix economies.
10
The “precautionary principle” might be good in some cases, but if the proposed remedies will cause untold human suffering and even death, all based on something that *might* be happening, shouldn’t the precautionary principle tilt us back towards the other way, towards not taking such drastic “remedies”?
20
Ian #42: You ask a fair question – but we’ve been sold a line with The Precautionary Principle. There is no such ‘principle’, because ultimately every action (or lack thereof) has some effect. Carbon based fuels have provided almost all our energy since before history began. We’re reduced that dependence to ‘only’ 80% of all our energy in the last 50 years. So chopping it further by another 20% is no small feat. It’s possible, yes, and if the world really was in danger, we should throw everything at it, risk lives, and wear the pain. But there isn’t any evidence from The Planet that anyone can point to that says we are in trouble. There IS evidence that the world has warmed, but not that carbon was the cause. There is evidence in THE LAB, and from MODELS designed to find a link, that carbon could be a problem, but we’ve looked through 500 million years of history and no one can find an example where carbon caused temperatures to rise. Look at any long term graph and there is no good correlation (except a backwards one). This is theory versus the real world and the theory is crashing and burning.
If we make energy more expensive (which we have to do if we are forcing people to use non-fossil fuels) the people who will suffer the most pain are in the third world. Poor mums will be less able to afford all the things energy brings us – clean boiled water to drink, fresh food, heating, electric lights to teach kids to read, air conditioning in schools to help kids learn, school buses to pick kids up… I could go on and on and on… there’s almost nothing that we have or use that wouldn’t be more expensive. OK for us. Deadly for the poor.
How many people are we willing to starve for the sake of an unproven theory?
Good news, the Skeptics Handbook is being translated into French. That will help you understand more of the skeptical side of things if you want to follow this up.
10
After Item 41, I’m talking to the wind,
So I go back to the take no prisoners howler role, because among alarmists, reason has no value.
Reason has no role.
10
Boris – if estimates from complex computer models can be ’empirical’ then what isn’t empirical? Cartoon characters of politicians are ‘estimates’ of real people. Are they real themselves? Sure! They’re a Real Cartoon. But they don’t vote in congress. So They Don’t Count.
Asking for empirical evidence (observations from the Real World) becomes meaningless if you allow people to make assumptions multiplied by guesses and raised to the power of 15 other estimates and call that “An observation.” The only thing we’re observing is the socio political state of modellers mental processes. Climate Models are Opinions. They may be expert opinions, but opinions do occasionally collapse in a flaming heap.
Climate models are not The Planet.
20
Just when I was ready to blame it on cow flatulence, this new theory shows it’s ugly head. I always suspected the mailman did it, and now it appears to be true š
10
I wish there was some legal means to seek redress from from alarmists for making me feel like vomiting all over the floor.
20
After reading your reply to my comments I manage to pinpoint one major problems in using less or no fossil-fuel energy is it will make energy more expansive and therefore hurting the poor/third world countries.
This is a legitimate fear, the thing is tough how keeping using fossil-fuel at the same rate is helping them? Since the world-wide use of fossil fuel the gap between the richest countries and the poorest one kept growing. Not mentionning the war for oil the fact that the worldwide reserves are depleting. I may be an ideologist but I found the CDM a great way to help those countries. Well much better then forcing them to accept our way of life to ensure the control of their oil ressources.
As for the knight of the climate change battle (aka Al Gore and company) having economic interest in the climate change business? Where’s the problem? Isn’t always been the same? Isn’t the oil business have done the same for the last century? The common man and woman will never be in a position of power.
10
Joanne,
The science is irrelevant.
I appreciate everybody’s effort to address the truth about “climate change” or “global warming” supposedly caused by us consumers. But educating the public about what little we know will not affect the lemmings’ jump from the cliff. To them it’s true because the TV tells them so.
I’ve been through this with MTBE and vehicle emission testing here in Alabama: When possible political kickbacks and inside, pre-determined deals were exposed, the promulgators shrank away like Dracula from sunlight.
“Climate change” has never really been about the climate or the environment, and it never will be. It’s about changing political climates and financial climates, forming an oligarchy.
You must address the financial and political motives of the folks pushing the hype. Therein also lies a reason to dismiss the “precautionary measure”, because climate alarmists’ reason-to-be is a red herring.
10
Ian,
Ever hear of the Pew Charitable Trust? Please, “google” to find information on their membership, their motives, their goals. You may be alarmed by the number of energy companies involved. Then again, they are among the interests who stand to profit (take your money by force of law) the most.
It’s ugly.
10
I am a science dunce* and only came here because I was reading the Planet Gore blog at NRO, but I would like to say that Joanne/JoNova has totally won me over with here pwnage of Noun. I like it when global warming zealots are rightfully put in their place as cultists and dunderheads. š
*I may be a science dunce, but I completely understand the economic effects of global warming.
10
<if estimates from complex computer models can be āempiricalā then what isnāt empirical?
These estimates are independent of computer models, so your criticism of models doesn’t apply here.
Just one example, based on the surface response to the solar cycle:
http://www.amath.washington.edu/research/articles/Tung/journals/solar-jgr.pdf
10
It’s model independent but it isn’t assumption independent, Boris,
and when you vary the assumptions, the result changes.
Just like the models.
Wow! This is an AWESOME day! May 5! A milestone!
This is the day that Boris finally admitted AGW was nothing more than somebody’s interpretation, and that a thousand other interpretations are equally valid,
then Boris moved out of his mom’s basement, threw out his Star Trek toys, and got a real job,other than free-lance volunteer work for Greenpiece!
10
That’s why there is a range for climate sensitivity. Maybe if you stopped throwing out vapid insults, you’d realize this.
10
I don’t think Boris gets it.
I keep thinking about the Maunder Minimum &
the Little Ice Age.
IF you want to talk about “observations,”
the period from 1650ā1850 was preceded by the
Medieval Warm Period.
This just may be a similar occurrence, part of a natural cycle so long that we (modern humanity) don’t have sufficient historical data to accurately assess the actual extent of the phenomenon.
Considering that the history of the thermometer begins in the 17th-century, it is impossible to ascertain even the relatively recent historical past, in terms of what constitutes or establishes an historical climatic standard for global temperature.
IF we’re entering another period of solar minimum, similar to the Maunder Minimum, & the governments of the world use this hysteria in an attempt to “reduce global warming,” we may finally see those 1970’s predictions of “the coming Ice Age” fulfilled.
At last, Man triumphs over Nature.
NOT!
j
10
So you have kneecapped my theory that Global Warming correlates with the use of Microsoft PowerPoint.
If you get the chance buy this book, released in NZ 27/4/09 “Air Con” by Ian Wishart.
http://www.investigatemagazine.com/newshop/enter.html
It is a very good read.
10
The Medieval Warm Period, Ohhh Nooo, produced 60% more food worldwide. I’m looking forward to a 3 degree centigrade rise. I’d also like to get a “I Love Global Warming” bumper sticker to put on my big truck that I park in the employee parking at my job at the Post Office.
10
Yes indeed the value changes when the assumptions are varied, Boris, and if you think about it, one of the primary assumptions is that climate sensitivity is positive, dropping that assumption, it is meaningful to say
the climate sensitivity to the doubling of carbon dioxide in the air ranges from -3 to +3 Kelvin per watt
and guess what the average value of the climate sensitivity turns out to be.
Come on and be a skeptic, Boris! We like to laugh and have fun. Now you must admit that Skeptics seem a much more interesting bunch than global warmers, wouldn’t you say?
10
whoops – meant to put the units on the inverse of lambda as watt per Kevin
[soft shoe dance]
10
Brian,
Thanks for the invite.
However, climate sensitivity cannot be negative–then you would be saying that warming causes cooling.
Nor can climate sensitivity be zero. That implies a system that cannot change. And we know the climate can change.
Finally, climate sensitivity is extremely unlikely to be dominated by negative feedback (i.e. below 1.1C), which would make the climate very difficult to change and require enormous forcings to explain the ice ages. It also doesn’t fit with observations of volcanic cooling and even twentieth century warming.
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Huh? Vocanic cooling is dust, Boris – what’s that have to do with climate sensitivity?
Climate sensitivity is positive by HUMAN definition. You know as well as I do, that obervationally from decadal data regression – climate sensitivity can turn out to be negative.
How many other people have invited you to be a skeptic this week?
Why not take up the invitation?
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Came across your site by way of NRO, and after a lousy start to the day reading this post was a welcome relief. š
I was taught that only by knowing how something functions can a model be built of that something. What sort of model is built from assumptions? They need to find a better word to describe their “pin the tail on the donkey” antics.
Thanks.
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Yes, but you can measure a range for feedbacks by observing a volcanic cooling episode.
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Well then Boris – I guess your preferred value of climate sensitivity is Schwartz’s.
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“Nor can climate sensitivity be zero. That implies a system that cannot change. And we know the climate can change.”
Hold onto your hat Boris. Climate sensitivity refers to carbon dioxide’s effect on the climate. If it were ‘zero’ the climate might still change – it could just possibly be affected by solar magnetic effects, solar irradiance, orbital changes, interstellar dust, land-use changes, cloud cover, glaciation, deglaciation, albedo, aliens, air-conditioners near NOAA thermometers, and who-the-heck-knows what else.
But I agree with you that climate sensitivity of carbon is a positive non-zero number. The question is whether it’s significant.
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Joanne,
Perhaps the issue is that the weather is controlled by the definition of words according to Boris. After all, that is the post modern way. Reality isn’t real. Its determined by consensus. A consensus of the people who are unable to know anything BECAUSE they cannot know everything, everywhere, for all times, and all circumstances. They have only one absolute: there are no absolutes. That leads them to the conclusion that proof of anything is not possible and, more importantly, proof is not necessary. All they need to do is make arbitrary assertions and its reality’s responsibility to obey. Especially when enough of them make the same assertion often enough and loudly enough.
There is one thing I don’t know. How can a sum of zeros, no matter how numerous, add up to anything but zero? By my simple understanding of things, a consensus of opinions from those who can’t know anything adds up to no information about anything but the summation of zero information content opinions. Believing otherwise is believing in magic. Its interesting to note that magic really is inoperative in this universe in spite of the Harry Potter books and movies.
Boris, you keep on believing in magic. Perhaps if you do it often enough, long enough, and sincerely enough, it might work for you. Even though it hasn’t for anyone since the first someone.
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My perspective is somewhat different, and with a little luck I might be able to explain myself clearly.
When Yang and Lee examined the “theta-tau” elementary particle mystery, the “consensus” was that the two particles were distinct BECAUSE the two particles arose from interactions for which parity was not preserved if the two particles were not distinct entities. Other than that, the two particles appeared to be indistinguishable.
Then Yang and Lee simply dropped the assumption that parity was conserved in weak interactions – and guess what, the assumption turned out to be wrong.
[The reason why this is so remains a mystery.]
The same thing may be said about climate sensitivity. By a HUMAN definition, the value is always positive.
But the atmosphere doesn’t care what a human definition is. The atmosphere simply responds to various changes. If the atmosphere responded in such a way to doubling of carbon dioxide in the air that resulted in increased reflective cloud cover – and if one did not KNOW or ASSUME that a priori – then by simply examining data alone, all other things being equal, one would conclude that the climate sensitivity was negative and there is no escaping that conclusion.
My own thoughts about it are as follows: The value is not defined, because there is no direct observational method to calculate it. The value is INFERRED from data BASED ON ASSUMPTIONS that MIGHT NOT BE CORRECT.
Until proven otherwise, “climate sensitivity” remains for me a quantity buried in the random and determinate, persistent and ubiquitous, noise in the influences upon the climate – on an annual, decadal, and century basis. At this point, attempts to “weed it out” of the data simply involves the use of assumptions that might not be valid.
A parallel (but not completely analogous) example might be, consider a value of mechanical action (product of energy and time, which is also independent of the motion of the observer) that is less than the Planck constant.
Sure I can THINK of a value of action smaller than Planck’s quantum of action, but in the physical world, it is meaningless because there is no way to ever OBSERVE such a value in a physical interaction.
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But if climate sensitivity is zero, then all those possible forcings you mentioned would have the same negative feedbacks to overcome that CO2 wold have in a zero CS world.
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In #78, drop the word “might’ and insert the word “would”
Droning on ad nauseam, CS doesn’t
HAVE TO BE positive, negative, zero, or anything else.
When I play chess with children (people under 20 or so) – I always let them win. I haven’t had a chess match (yet) with a young person who I couldn’t easily defeat (it doesn’t mean that such chess wizards aren’t out there).
That philosophy doesn’t apply for me, here.
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I would like to see the data underlying the graph so that I can run a regression. I don’t believe anything without R-squareds and t-statistics.
For the literal-minded out there, the above is tongue-in-cheek. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t love to see the data and run the regressions. It would be great for stats classes, and especially with respect to the issue of the meaning of “statistical significance”.
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Re the earlier comment about the new book Air Con by Ian Wishart, I understand it is being released in Australia next week, so it might be worthwhile asking your local bookshop to get some in. I saw on one Google for it that John Reed Book Distributors in Sydney are handling it.
Professor Bob Carter gave it high praise according to the book’s website:
http://briefingroom.typepad.com/the_briefing_room/2009/05/climate-expert-calls-air-con-the-definitive-book.html
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Two points.
1) We aren’t looking for the causal link between increasing temperature and atmospheric CO[sub]2[/sub]concentration, because we already have it. It is the greenhouse effect. Of course since CO[sub]2[/sub] concentration is increasing there will be a correlation between temperature and any other monotonically increasing series.
2) Recall that the climate’s response to an increase in greenhouse takes a long time. 60% of the total response is reached in 30 to 40 years. So on time scales of centuries, a high CO[sub]2[/sub]to temperature correlation is expected, but on time scales of months, such as those shown on the graph, a very low CO[sub]2[/sub] to temperature correlation would be expected.
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On a scale of centuries, the only thing observed is CO2 increases following warming periods, within a 200-800 year time lag.
We all know where that CO2 came from.
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Acad,
if you’re serious I’ll email you a copy of the excel sheet I used – with sources – so you can do the R2 correlation and all the regressions you like.
There’s no secret data on this side of the scientific fence, and I’m always interested in more information…
Robin: 1/ Just because there’s a ‘causal link’ which is proven in the Lab, that doesn’t mean that other forces out in the real world don’t overwhelm this effect. (Indeed on every time scale that appears to occur).
2/ The scale here is 128 years and temp rises and falls mostly due to other factors. The Co2 turning points, and temperature turning points, don’t correlate well. The models don’t know what those ‘other’ factors are, yet the PR team from the Alarmists keep scaling graphs of CO2 vs Temp in a way that makes the lines look highly correlated. Plenty of people think the alarmists are right because of graphs like this one. As you agree – that’s flawed reasoning. The alarmists shouldn’t promote these graphs.
3/ “60% of the total response takes 30 years?” Would that be a computer model estimate based on dozens of assumptions, guesses and other estimates?
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Boris said: “But if climate sensitivity is zero, then all those possible forcings you mentioned would have the same negative feedbacks to overcome that CO2 wold have in a zero CS world.”
You’re frying the concept of climate sensitivity. It will help if you use the correct phrase “climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide”. There is no such thing as “climate sensitivity of all causes put together”. Mixing the two up is screwing your head.
I know it’s hard, but dozens of different forcings are working on the climate all at once and in their own cycles, and with their own turning points. Unravelling this multifactorial pool of known and unknown effects is – pardon the language – Damn Difficult.
To stop us wasting time discussing something that doesn’t exist, please don’t mention the phrase “Climate sensitivity” again without also adding “of carbon dioxide” or of “methane” or of something.
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Brian wrote: “On a scale of centuries, the only thing observed is CO2 increases following warming periods, within a 200-800 year time lag.”
That’s not the only thing that’s observed. One other think that is observed is a very strong correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature. One other thing that is observed is the warming periods at the end of glaciations are 5000 or 6000 years of the most rapid warming in the ice core record, taking global temperatures from the coldest they reach almost monotonically to the warmest that they reach – strong evidence of a CO2/temperature increase feedback loop.
Neither is it always observed. The current warming and the warming at the end of the younger dryas both were preceded by the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Brian wrote: “We all know where that CO2 came from.”
Here I must confess that I don’t. The options are the ocean and the terrestrial biosphere. I guess because organic carbon is strongly depleted in carbon-13 you could tell from isotope ratios of CO2 trapped in ice cores which source was more dominant. I guess someone has done the work to find out which. Which was it? And was it worked out by carbon isotope ratios?
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addendum re: CO2 and temperature increase.
Analysis of the last glacial maximum, (which is the one most precisely known from ice cores), constrain the climate sensitivity to the range 1.2Ā°C ā 4.3Ā°C (and thus almost
identical to the IPCC estimate.)
According to this paper:
Climate sensitivity estimated from ensemble simulations of glacial climate
Schneider von Deimling et al. Climate Dynamics (2006). DOI 10.1007/s00382-006-0126-8
http://www.pik-potsdam.de/~stefan/Publications/Journals/Schneider_etal_ClimDyn_2006.pdf
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Robin, there’s no evidence that a greenhose gas other than water ever warmed any portion of the Earth.
Not unless you’ve found something that I haven’t in the 30 years that I’ve looked for it.
The source of CO2 after a warming period is the ocean, mostly. That’s because CO2 is less soluble in warm water than cold.
The situation is complicated by the diffusional gradient in deep ocean water, competing with the decreased solubility as a function of salinity
Oh skip it. The bottom line is, CO2 follows warming periods, and if it didn’t, nobody would be arguning a thing about CO2 causing global warming.
That’s where we’re at. Global warmers don’t like it, but facts don’t play favorites.
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Jo wrote: “Robin: 1/ Just because thereās a ācausal linkā which is proven in the Lab, that doesnāt mean that other forces out in the real world donāt overwhelm this effect.”
Thanks for the response!
Yes, the anthropogenic global warming only represents about 0.02Ā°C per year. This is, as you point out, overwhelmed by many things.
Jo wrote: “(Indeed on every time scale that appears to occur).”
Well, I was looking at this paper that the Australian Bureau Meteorology have up on their website: http://www.bom.gov.au/bmrc/clfor/cfstaff/jma/meehl_additivity.pdf
Of The total warming since 1950 is about 0.5Ā°C, and the authors (using the US department of Energy’s climate model), find that the contribution due to greenhouse gas increase over that time seems to be about 0.7Ā°C, so on that time scale, it is the overwhelming contributor.
Jo wrote: “2/ The scale here is 128 years and temp rises and falls mostly due to other factors. The Co2 turning points, and temperature turning points, donāt correlate well.”
This is undoubtedly true. Only the temperature rise since 1970 is currently generally attributed to the anthropogenic greenhouse effect. And that is punctuated by volcanic forcing and by the El-Nino southern oscillation. The effect of the sunspot cycles can probably also be seen, although this is also swamped by the other effects.
But notice my original point – because the climate takes a few decades to respond to an increase in CO2, you wouldn’t expect the temperature turning points to align with the CO2 turning points. In the rare case where the effect is not swamped by other factors, you would expect the temperature to turn slowly over the following 30 or 40 years. (Or 25 to 50 years for 60% of the effect to have occurred, to precisely quote one estimate from the scientific literature.)
Jo wrote: “The models donāt know what those āotherā factors are…”
The paper linked above is one of many in the scientific literature that does a break down of the causes of temperature. I think they do an okay job of showing what the other factors are. Sulphate cooling. Volcanic forcing and solar forcing are the big ones, after greenhouse forcing.
It is certainly true that they are imperfect. The size of the 98 El Nino remains poorly modelled in most models. The model in the paper over estimates volcanic cooling, and the temperature record does step outside the errors in the late 1910s, the mid 1940s and the late 1950s. But this isn’t evidence that they don’t know what the ‘other’ factors are. It might be that they are just imprecise at modelling such a complicated system, possibly because of limitations of the cell size combined with the mathematical awkwardness of chaotic systems.
Jo wrote: “3/ ā60% of the total response takes 30 years?ā Would that be a computer model estimate based on dozens of assumptions, guesses and other estimates?”
You can make such an estimate from a climate model, but that one was not. It was from earth radiation budget data. It is an estimate with a wide error. 25-50 years. The error is due to the error in the climate sensitivity (to a doubling of CO2).
The paper in which that estimate is made, if you are interested in reading it (and have the time) is here: http://meteora.ucsd.edu/cap/pdffiles/Hansen-04-29-05.pdf
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Brian Valentine Wrote: “Robin, thereās no evidence that a greenhose gas other than water ever warmed any portion of the Earth.”
Hi Brian!
Thanks also for the response, but we may struggle to find the common ground with that statement.
I wonder if we can agree that if you increase the concentration of a greenhouse gas, then you will increase the greenhouse effect?
Brian Valentine Wrote: “The source of CO2 after a warming period is the ocean, mostly. Thatās because CO2 is less soluble in warm water than cold.”
Yes. Is this true of all gasses? In high school chemistry they said that solubility generally increased with temperature, and this seems to be the case with dissolving sugar in coffee.
Brian Valentine Wrote: “Oh skip it. The bottom line is, CO2 follows warming periods, and if it didnāt, nobody would be arguning a thing about CO2 causing global warming.”
The CO2 increase coincides with the warming (for the most part):
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/luethi2008/fig2.jpg
(Which is an image from this paper: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/luethi2008/luethi2008.html)
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Robin wrote:
Q1/ “Of The total warming since 1950 is about 0.5Ā°C, and the authors (using the US department of Energyās climate model), find that the contribution due to greenhouse gas increase over that time seems to be about 0.7Ā°C, so on that time scale, it is the overwhelming contributor.”
And lets finish the sentence: “it is the overwhelming contributor… according to unproven, unverified climate models, which are based on opinions and estimates by people who wouldn’t have a job if carbon wasn’t a problem.”
Climate models prove nothing except that if you give smart guys with computers a lot of money they can come up with any number between -3 and 11 degrees, and look pretty convincing and authoritative, especially when no one understands what went on inside the black box of their complex model because it’s not public, and no one is paid to audit them. (Note – even if they were public and people were paid to audit them, I don’t think it really makes much difference. The climate is so complex, we don’t have a chance with our pathetically inadequate understanding of how it works to be able to predict it yet.)
Q 2/ The correlation from post 1970 warming… again, the 30-40 year thing is another modelled guess. No experimental evidence to back it up. Perhaps the 1979 -1999 warming was due to CO2, but why has the warming stopped? (Models don’t know). Isn’t it an odd coincidence that temperatures have gone up and down every 30 years since 1880 (see the Akasufo graph ), and they appear to be still oscillating on a 30 year trend? (Almost like carbon makes no difference at all?)
The climate models don’t include solar-magnetic effects despite them having an excellent correlation (who knows what else they don’t include). The models can’t predict el nino or la nina effects. None – NONE – of the models correctly predicted that temperatures would not rise post 2001 – 2009. If models can’t get the five year averages working in The First Five Years, why would we follow them out to 2100??? Are we on drugs?
Q3/ As per the Hansen paper and other non-model estimates. What’s the difference? It’s still calculated by taking assumptions, multiplying it by estimates and raising it to the power of a good guess. That someone did it with a hand calculator instead of a computer doesn’t make it more certain. Only one assumption has to be wrong for the whole caboodle to fall in a hole.
I don’t mean any of that disrespectfully. I like that you are asking reasonable questions in a friendly tone, but models (and hand calculated theoretical estimates) are not empirical evidence, even if they worked, which they don’t.
Theory has to agree with real world data, not the other way around.
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The feedbacks in the climate system respond to warming (or cooling), not to specific forcings. The water vapor feedback is not going to be highly positive for CO2 and negative for solar or anything like that.
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Still making up your own definitions, eh Boris? Been around this tree already and clearly you’ve learned nothing.
āA climate feedback is an internal climate process that amplifies or dampens the climate response to a specific forcing.ā (Radiative Forcing Climate Change: Expanding the Concept and Addressing Uncertainties, p. 2, National Academies Press, 2005)(italics mine)
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Or if you prefer the IPCC definition:
In English, that means a feedback responds to a specific forcing.
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Boris, I thought we got over these humps and you became a skeptic.
No?
A mistaken impression on my part?
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ON CO2 solubility in water
Yes Robin, usually things get more soluble in hotter water, but not carbon. It is released by the oceans as they warm, that’s probably why there is an 800 year cycle after temperatures rise. It takes about that long for all the water in all the world’s oceans to do one full lap of the planet. (ie, the really deep water takes a long time to recirculate and warm up and release it’s CO2).
See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/21/recent-ocean-heat-and-mlo-co2-trends/
http://www.co2web.info/Oceans-and-CO2_EngrsAust_Apr08.pdf
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To bore everyone, here’s some subtle details about the Way the World Actually Works.
The solubilty of most solids in liquids increases with temperature. There are a few strange exceptions.
It is generally not possible to decide a priori when gases will increase or decrease their solubility in liquids with increasing temperature.
To understand why, consider the dissolution of gases in liquids as a two step process:
1. The gas condenses in the liquid
2. The condensed gas dissolves in the liquid.
The direction of solubility of gases in liquids with temperature depends on the overall sign of the free energy change of the two steps, combined.
It may turn out that the sign of the free energy change of step 1 is large and positive, which is not offset by a negative value of step 2, the overall free energy change is then positive, and the solubility of the gas in the liquid will decrease with temperature.
The reverse is true when the overall change in free energy change is negative.
This subtlety is not usually discussed correctly in general chemistry courses, it is picked up in a course like Physical Chemistry
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Joanne Nova Wrote: ‘And lets finish the sentence: “it is the overwhelming contributorā¦ according to unproven, unverified climate models, which are based on opinions and estimates by people who wouldnāt have a job if carbon wasnāt a problem.”‘
Gee, Jo, that’s a strong claim.
On what basis do you call the Department of Energy’s PCM “unverified”? Did it not undergo the hindcasting by which Climate Models are verified?
And I do question your confidence that the employment of Meehl and Washington would be at any risk, no matter what the results climate research discovers. Meehl has been at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado since 1973, and is somewhat renowned. He won the Editor’s Award, Journal of Climate, American Meteorological Society, in 1999, the Editor’s Citation, Geophysical Research Letters, American Geophysical Union, 2006, and The Jule G. Charney Award of the American Meteorological Society, this year. Google scholar has him the lead author on a dozen papers with over 100 citations. Washington is, if anything, more renowned. He joined the NCAR in 1963, and is a head of the Climate Change research section. He is a Fellow of the AMS and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and from 1991 to 1995 he was a member of the AAAS Board of Directors. They would hardly be the first guys to lose their jobs even if the NCAR were downsized.
The Australian author, Julie Arblaster, was studying the El Nino at the time of the paper, a valuable line of research even if it isn’t connected to climate change, because of the devastation in Indonesia and Malaysia, and to a lesser extent Australia due to fires from the 1998 El Nino.
So I think that at least most of the Authors of this paper had research areas not under threat by climate change findings or serious job security by virtue of seniority and accumulated respect. (Accumulated, in part, by not ever having found to have falsified research.)
Joanne Nova Wrote:”Climate models prove nothing except that if you give smart guys with computers a lot of money they can come up with any number between -3 and 11 degrees, and look pretty convincing and authoritative, especially when no one understands what went on inside the black box of their complex model because itās not public, and no one is paid to audit them.”
Again Jo, I’m not certain that you could accurately call the DOE PCM a “black box” or “not public”. The atmospheric component at the time of the paper was the NCAR’s CCM3.2, the source code for which can still be downloaded from here. You can look at it, see what it does, compile it, and if you’ve got a lot of processing power or time, run it.
The Ocean, Sea Ice, and River transport components are described (with references) <a href=”http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/pcm/”here.
So I think that this particular model was (and is) fairly open and public.
Joanne Nova Wrote:”The climate is so complex, we donāt have a chance with our pathetically inadequate understanding of how it works to be able to predict it yet.”
There is no doubt that the models are imperfect, especially on a regional scale. Herein lies the greatest cause for alarm. We are affecting the global climate, and even the best experts don’t know what it will do to any ecological systems or farmland.
Joanne Nova Wrote:”The correlation from post 1970 warmingā¦ again, the 30-40 year thing is another modelled guess.”
I did indeed make a mistake there. Upon re-reading that part of the paper, I see that the 25-50 years is directly due to estimates of climate sensitivity (due to a doubling of CO2), not as I claimed, calculated from the Earth’s radiation budget.
But there are many estimates of the climate sensitivity that are independent of general circulation models. (Including the Hansen paper on radiation budget, but also including estimates from observational evidence, An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity, , and from paleoclimatic evidence, on various time scales. Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries. Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years.)
Although we don’t seem to be able to constrain the climate sensitivity more than about 1.5Ā°C to 4.5Ā°C per doubling of CO2, there are multiple independent lines of evidence that show that it is in that ballpark. And so the 25 to 50 years is also in the correct ballpark. (And fairly intuitive, I think, if you think about how long it would take the ocean temperature and sea ice to respond to an increase in a greenhouse gas.)
Joanne Nova Wrote:”…but why has the warming stopped? (Models donāt know).”
I don’t think that the data supports the claim that the warming has stopped. There have been drops of the same magnitude (0.15 of a degree) in every decade since the 1950s. (Similar conclusions are in the scientific literature: We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longerāterm warming. )
Significant to me is that the average temperature for this decade so far is 0.19Ā°C warmer than the average for the 1990s. This is the fastest decade on decade warming on record.
But it was predicted by models in 2007 that 2008 and 2009 would not break the 1998 record. “Our system predicts that internal variability will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.” Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model, August 2007.
Joanne Nova Wrote:”Isnāt it an odd coincidence that temperatures have gone up and down every 30 years since 1880 (see the Akasufo graph ), and they appear to be still oscillating on a 30 year trend? (Almost like carbon makes no difference at all?)”
That graph does show a warming. It is attributed to “recovery from the little ice age”, which is not a forcing mentioned in the IPCC reports. How does a cool period up to 1850 cause a warming throughout the 20th century?
Joanne Nova Wrote:”The climate models donāt include solar-magnetic effects despite them having an excellent correlation”
What is a solar-magnetic effect?
Joanne Nova Wrote:”The models canāt predict el nino or la nina effects.”
They can be (and certainly the Hadley centre one is) poor at reproducing the size of the ENSO. I was aware earlier in the year of some Australian research that was overturning ideas about the cause of the ENSO, so it might be that this will improve in the near future.
Joanne Nova Wrote:”As per the Hansen paper and other non-model estimates. Whatās the difference? Itās still calculated by taking assumptions, multiplying it by estimates and raising it to the power of a good guess. That someone did it with a hand calculator instead of a computer doesnāt make it more certain. Only one assumption has to be wrong for the whole caboodle to fall in a hole.”
Well I would say that reproducibility of climate sensitivity from independent evidence does add reliability to estimates. And I would say that if you think that they might be wrong, then you should be advocating additional caution to that proposed by the IPCC, not less.
Noting that the climate sensitivity might be as high as 5 or 6 Ā°C (Albeit with a lower probability than about 3Ā°C), is a terrifying thought, and I at least have confidence in scientific estimates of the upper bound that you donāt seem to share.
Joanne Nova Wrote:”I donāt mean any of that disrespectfully. I like that you are asking reasonable questions in a friendly tone …”
And respect to you too. I am impressed and surprised that a line of questioning counter to the editorial position of this site has been tolerated for more than a post.
Joanne Nova Wrote:”…, but models (and hand calculated theoretical estimates) are not empirical evidence, even if they worked, which they donāt.”
Which is why I mention the empirical evidence from observations, from earth radiation budget data, from ice cores and from paleoclimate reconstructions. There are other approaches too. In 2003 there was an interesting paper that used a neural net in place of a climate model. It predicted much greater warming than climate models (equivalent to a climate sensitivity of about 5Ā°C per doubling).
And while one should be cautious of the meta-analysis, there have been ones of observational rather than modelled data, to get at the climate sensitivity, and this has produced some claims that the upper bound can be confidently reduced to about 4.5Ā°C per doubling of CO2.
“We then survey some recent attempts to estimate climate sensitivity using several different approaches: the global temperature trend over the last century; short-term cooling following volcanic eruptions; the climate at the Last Glacial Maximum; modern climatological patterns; and the global temperature change in the Maunder Minimum. These estimates are based on independent observations and widely varying physical phenomena: the heat balance of a warming planet; the feedbacks involved in short-term radiative perturbations; and quasi-equilibrium climate states under different boundary conditions.” Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity.
So while I think that models are an important tool, and probably the best way we have of estimating the future climate under various emission scenarios, I agree that they are susceptible to being wrong … and it has been noted in the scientific literature that their agreement with observations is better that what is expected from their estimates of error, which suggests that the agreement might be partly spurious. (See: Why are climate models reproducing the observed global surface warming so well?).
However, I think that we can trust observational evidence, and that does seem to be pointing in the same general direction.
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Thanks Jo and Brian.
So we should be expecting a large outgassing of CO2 from the oceans soon? I guess that this is expected to ameliorate oceanic acidification and exacerbate the greenhouse effect.
Brian: To continue to try to find the common ground re CO2 and warming, do we agree that increasing the atmospheric concentration of a greenhouse gas will increase the greenhouse effect?
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I get a little tired of the “didn’t use a model” argument by AGWers when referencing studies while attempting to produce empirical proof.
If you write a mathematical equation to describe something, that is a model.
The assertion that they “did not use models” by the likes of Boris, Robin and others trying to demonstrate empirical proof is only correct in the very narrow definition of complex multi-line computer model.
The complex multi-line computer models General Circulation Models (GCMs), relied heavily upon in IPCC reports, are a constructed of hundreds or more mathematical models (equations) of various climate system components.
To describe a system with a mathematical model, one usually needs to have an idea of how to describe that system in plain spoken language first. There are almost always assumptions either implied or stated explicitly when creating a mathematical model.
For example: I have a system that consists of one apple. If I add an apple, my system has two apples.
Mathematically that system can be expressed by:
1 + 1 = 2.
That is a model.
We do not know with certainty all the components of our climate system. Some components we can see: clouds, but we fail to model them because they are not well understood, as admitted by the IPCC.
Since we do not know with certainty all the parts, we make assumptions. Even for the parts we think we know, we don’t necessarily know the mechanisms (What switches PDO, AMO, ENSO for example. We know they switch between warm and cold phases, but we don’t understand the trigger.)
Even “observations” like temperature fed into the GCMs are frequently the product of other models with their own sets of assumptions and a great deal of statistical “magic” and data infilling because the record isn’t complete. The GISS temperature anomaly is model output and a frequent “observation” plugged into GCMs.
Every equation (model) within the broader construct of a GCM carries its own set of assumptions and the overall GCM has its assumptions on top of all the assumptions inherent within it.
Read the reports (not the abstracts) and turn the pages. You will find mathematical expressions of what the authors are trying to describe. Those mathematical equations are MODELS. Within the verbiage of these reports you will find most of the explicit assumptions, but you may also find some assumptions that are implicit in the construct of the equation written to describe the system.
For example, if I use linear regression to describe the observations of CO2 and temperature wherein I have an observation of increasing CO2 and an observation of increasing temperature, I have assumed linearity even if I didn’t state it as an explicit assumption.
The assumption made by the AGW crowd in the above example is that one causes the other, just because our regression showed a correlation. But as the humorous post demonstrated, there are lots of things that can be correlated to increased temperatures.
The main point of the original post being therefore that correlation does not necessarily equal causality.
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An outgassing of CO2 should occur if the oceans got warmer. My understanding is that they have not got any warmer. I also understand that the relationship between the concentration of a greenhouse gas and its effect on temperature is logarithmic and so most of the warming has been caused by the present level and very little extra warming will occur due to extra gas.
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Robin, “Expecting an outgassing soon?” It’s not quite the point. The oceans have been outgassing CO2 (and soaking it up) every day for billions of years. It’s not like it’s just about to start.
If the Co2 that was released had a big positive feedback then sometime 400 million years ago or so, the world would have heated once and gone runaway greenhouse. Yes, there probably is some positive reinforcement, but the crucial question is whether it’s big enough to matter or too small to measure.
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Which greenhouse gas?
You are making assumptions about all other components of the climate system. Namely that any effect resulting from an increase in a GHG occurs in the absence of any other forcing, or that all other forcings/feedbacks will enhance the assumed warming, or that GHG increase will simply overwhelm all other forcings/feedbacks.
Bad assumption. To date, unsupported by observation.
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Robin, we’re already the CO2 from the oceans, emergin from the LIA.
Go back and read 77 if you want, or don’t if you don’t want to.
Robin are you being sincere? Or are you just horsing around while trying to trip somebody up?
JoAnne get a lot of such “comics” writing on her web log.
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we are already seeing CO2 from the oceans, emerging from the LIA
typos
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JLKrueger wrote:
The GISS temperature anomaly is model output and a frequent āobservationā plugged into GCMs.
I’m pretty sure that a GCM doesn’t take a time series of global mean surface temperature as an input.
The temperature of each cell is calculated from the previous temperature, and the physical processes that would change that, including conduction and convection from adjacent cells, and interaction with radiation from the sun and from the earth, and also evaporation and condensation.
JLKrueger wrote:
The assumption made by the AGW crowd in the above example is that one causes the other, just because our regression showed a correlation. But as the humorous post demonstrated, there are lots of things that can be correlated to increased temperatures.
I think that the causal link between increasing greenhouse gas concentration and global mean surface temperature is not based on noticing the correlation, but by understanding the mechanism, which is the greenhouse effect.
I think that that is an equation.
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Joanne wrote:
Robin, āExpecting an outgassing soon?ā Itās not quite the point. The oceans have been outgassing CO2 (and soaking it up) every day for billions of years. Itās not like itās just about to start.
Of course. But the oceans are a very significant net carbon sink. And this has been good and bad. Good because it has removed some of the carbon from the atmosphere, but bad because the resulting acidification is damaging oceanic ecosystems.
But net sourcing or sinking is the only thing that matters on a global scale. If a molecule of CO2
If the Co2 that was released had a big positive feedback then sometime 400 million years ago or so, the world would have heated once and gone runaway greenhouse.
I think that this is essentially the mechanism of the end of the glaciation periods that have occurred about every 100,000 years or so recently. Of course it does not runaway indefinitely, because the oceans don’t have an infinite amount of CO2 to release. But certainly the end of glaciations show strong monotonic warming for a solid 5000 years.
Yes, there probably is some positive reinforcement, but the crucial question is whether itās big enough to matter or too small to measure.
Yes, that is the crucial question.
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JLKrueger:
Which greenhouse gas?
Well how about any greenhouse gas that is not at saturation?
You are making assumptions about all other components of the climate system. Namely that any effect resulting from an increase in a GHG occurs in the absence of any other forcing, or that all other forcings/feedbacks will enhance the assumed warming, or that GHG increase will simply overwhelm all other forcings/feedbacks.
I don’t think that I’m making any such assumptions yet. Because I’m new here today, and I think the first thing to do is find the common ground.
I’m not talking about feedback yet, and I’m not talking about other forcings yet, and neither am I yet comparing the relative effect on climate of various forcings.
But there is a greenhouse effect, for without it, the earth would be 33Ā°C cooler. And I claim that the greenhouse effect is caused by greenhouse gasses, and that increasing the concentration of one of them would increase the greenhouse effect. And that strikes me as powerfully non-controversial, and I wondered if that might be the common ground.
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You are using a theory/hypothesis in an attempt to prove causality. All you have is a hypothesis which you are assuming is correct. And again, you are assuming it is the only or overpowering mechanism in the entire system.
Bad assumption, still not proven by observation.
Equations describing mechanisms and systems are MODELS.
Your statement is incorrect on its face. Since we don’t have measured temperatures for each cell, raw temperature data isn’t used. Anomalies are used and they are produced for each cell including those for which we have no actual measurements by statistical infilling. Everything you described for each cell in the grid is a model and each one includes assumptions.
GISS provides a global gridded temperature anomaly (not raw data) in three binary datasets for users needing temperature data for modeling purposes.
Of course since the modelers refuse to share datasets, complete methodology and code, we are forced to make assumptions about the models too.
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Derek Tipp wrote:
An outgassing of CO2 should occur if the oceans got warmer. My understanding is that they have not got any warmer.
My understanding is that they have got warmer.
See: Ocean warming on the rise
And that thermal expansion is the cause of the lion’s share of sea level rise:
What am I missing?
I also understand that the relationship between the concentration of a greenhouse gas and its effect on temperature is logarithmic…
This is true. This is why climate sensitivity is expressed as a temperature change per doubling of CO2 – because this figure is nearer to constant.
… and so most of the warming has been caused by the present level and very little extra warming will occur due to extra gas.
Well current CO2 concentrations are only about 385 parts per million in the atmosphere, so it can still double another 11 times.
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Brian Valentine wrote:
Robin, weāre already the CO2 from the oceans, emergin from the LIA.
Go back and read 77 if you want, or donāt if you donāt want to.
Thanks Brian. What is 77? I can’t see any numbers on these posts.
Robin are you being sincere? Or are you just horsing around while trying to trip somebody up?
I’m not sure what you’re referring to. I’m trying to be polite, and I’m having some trouble with this interface. I made an extensive response to Jo, which has disappeared, (possibly by being too extensive), and I thought I was following the instructions for posting images correctly, but I’m clearly not.
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JLKrueger wrote:
You are using a theory/hypothesis in an attempt to prove causality. All you have is a hypothesis which you are assuming is correct. And again, you are assuming it is the only or overpowering mechanism in the entire system.
Do I correctly understand that you don’t believe in the greenhouse effect?
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Here is a link which shows that recent research has shown that the oceans are apparently not getting warmer.
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Joanna – thanks for the data.
I ran the numbers and your theory holds up well. The R2 for the period 1880-2008 is 0.72, which means that US postal rates explain 72% of the variation in global temperature over the period. The strength of the relationship is due to the fact that both exhibit a “hockey stick” shape, with the blade starting about the same time, as of course makes sense since our theory (whatever it is) posits that that will happen. Furthermore, the t-statistic on the coefficient for the postal rates is 18.2, which is statistically significant at well beyond the 0.1% significance level, let alone the usual 5% level. Unambiguously, there is an infinitesimal probability that we could have gotten this result by chance. I believe that the world has every right in the light of this scientific evidence to demand that the US and the Obama administration solve global warming by bringing the Post Office and its pricing practices under control.
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JLKrueger also wrote:
Equations describing mechanisms and systems are MODELS.
Not in the normal use of the words. But what’s in semantics? A rose by another name would smell as sweet.
Your statement is incorrect on its face. Since we donāt have measured temperatures for each cell, raw temperature data isnāt used.
You don’t have to have a measured temperature for each cell, it is calculated at each step.
To initialise a model, you need to enter at state for the whole model, and this is usually done by making a WAG, and then running the model under constant forcing until it reaches a reasonable equilibrium, then using that as the initial state.
GISS provides a global gridded temperature anomaly (not raw data) in three binary datasets for users needing temperature data for modeling purposes.
Do they? It must be for initialising the model. Note that this is no good for a model with a different grid, so this is for people running the GISS model.
Of course since the modelers refuse to share datasets, complete methodology and code, we are forced to make assumptions about the models too.
Giss results and methodology are available from this journal article:
Model documentation, including the ModelE specification and results from three standard configurations, is given in the following journal article:
Schmidt, G.A., R. Ruedy, J.E. Hansen, I. Aleinov, N. Bell, M. Bauer, S. Bauer, B. Cairns, V. Canuto, Y. Cheng, A. Del Genio, G. Faluvegi, A.D. Friend, T.M. Hall, Y. Hu, M. Kelley, N.Y. Kiang, D. Koch, A.A. Lacis, J. Lerner, K.K. Lo, R.L. Miller, L. Nazarenko, V. Oinas, Ja. Perlwitz, Ju. Perlwitz, D. Rind, A. Romanou, G.L. Russell, Mki. Sato, D.T. Shindell, P.H. Stone, S. Sun, N. Tausnev, D. Thresher, and M.-S. Yao 2006. Present day atmospheric simulations using GISS ModelE: Comparison to in-situ, satellite and reanalysis data. J. Climate 19, 153-192.
The code is available for perusal or download from this link
They also have a reference manual:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/modelE.html
FAQ:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/FAQ.html
and “How To” document:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/HOWTO.html
on the NASA webpages.
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That’s what’s wrong with your line of reasoning. You can’t simply ignore all other parts of the climate system by locking on GHGs and greenhouse effect. They don’t work in isolation except in a computer simulation or a laboratory.
The mean temperature on Mars (virtually no greenhouse gases) is about -65Ā°C. Let’s see, 33Ā°C cooler on Earth would equate to roughly
-19Ā°C (a nice spring day in the Arctic).
You are making assumptions because you are assuming that nothing else happens when you increase the GHG except an increase in greenhouse effect.
The assumed climate response to the increase in GHG is warming. That is how an increase in “greenhouse effect” can be measured (observation). That seems to work in models and a lab, but not so well in the real world. Virtually every study theorizing the “greenhouse effect” makes an assumption along the lines of “everything else being constant.” Bad assumption, everything isn’t constant.
An assumption does not have to be explicit to be there. So far your assumptions are implicit.
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How are you defining normal use when we are talking mathematical approximations of real world systems?
You don’t have a measured temperature at each step and you definitely donāt have a measured temperature for each cell. So at least on that last bit we are in agreement. The temperature, part of the system state, had to get initialized somewhere first. After initialization, you calculate it during the run based on assumptions about responses.
Wild Ass Guess, eh? You mean like really BOLD ASSUMPTION! Sorta why models are not evidence.
Gee, and that would give me lots of confidence in the modelās predictive accuracy.
Unless you put it through another statistical transform to adjust it to a different grid, though I don’t know why anyone would want to do that. If it’s being used in the initialization step, modelers will likely want to use a grid that will be friendly to one or more of the available datasets. No sense reinventing the wheel.
We are making assumptions about the details that probably do not apply to all models.
What, you think I donāt know about the links you provided? Gavin and the boys are constantly being tagged on ModelE and how they arenāt answering questions or providing complete information.
To quote from the so-called reference manual:
āThis document is a short description of what GISS ModelE does and gives some references and descriptions of how it does it. Hopefully this will eventually morph into a full technical paper given enough time and resources!ā
Aināt there yet as far as being all that useful unless you are an āinsider.ā
You claimed to be new, but clearly you specifically meant ānew to JoNova.ā Your comments went from ānovice exploringā to got the “Real Climate” and “Open Mind” lines down pat real fast. Going that fast to ModelE ain’t a rookie move.
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Just put JL down for denying the greenhouse effect exists. It will save you a lot of time.
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zzzzzzz
Huh? Did somebody say something?
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Isn’t IR the be all and end all?
Is it true that sunlight reflected off the moon is stronger than IR emitted downwards by GHGs, or does something else cause the instruments to be overwhelmed by it? Does this mean the moonlight is a more significant than the returned IR? We mortals need to know so we can control lunar emissions if need be.
OWWOOOO.
š
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Derek Tipp Wrote:
Here is a link which shows that recent research has shown that the oceans are apparently not getting warmer.
Thanks for that link, Derek, I wasn’t aware of that paper.
I did a bit of googling to see if the discrepancy between this cooling and the continued sea level rise has been resolved … and it turns out that it has.
The cooling is not real. It was a consequence of bad data from some of the buoys and from some of the expendable bathythermographs.
NASA has a write up about the drama ,a href = “http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/OceanCooling/page3.php”>here.
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That link again:
NASA has a write up about the drama here.
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Third time lucky: here
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[…] Shock: Global temperatures driven by US Postal Charges | JoNova (tags: statistics climate change post.office USPS price carbon evironment parody satire) […]
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JLKrueger wrote: Thatās whatās wrong with your line of reasoning. You canāt simply ignore all other parts of the climate system by locking on GHGs and greenhouse effect. They donāt work in isolation except in a computer simulation or a laboratory.
Is that so?
What about an increase in solar irradiance then?
Would you say that that could increase or decrease the temperature of the earth? Or would that increase the temperature?
JLKrueger wrote:The mean temperature on Mars (virtually no greenhouse gases) is about -65Ā°C. Letās see, 33Ā°C cooler on Earth would equate to roughly -19Ā°C (a nice spring day in the Arctic).
Yes, about that. The black body temperature of the Earth would be about -18Ā°C, I believe.
It was Joseph Fourier in 1824 that first noticed the discrepancy, and proposed that the atmosphere causes additional warming.
JLKrueger wrote:Wild Ass Guess, eh? You mean like really BOLD ASSUMPTION! Sorta why models are not evidence.
Gee, and that would give me lots of confidence in the modelās predictive accuracy.
Well, not really. It comes out in the wash when you run the model for a bit. If you’ve stuck a too low a value for the temperature or humidity in a given cell, the modelled processes of conduction and convection and evaporation and condensation correct this to a more correct value if you let the model run for a few centuries.
JLKrueger wrote:You are making assumptions because you are assuming that nothing else happens when you increase the GHG except an increase in greenhouse effect.
Not at all, there are certainly feedback effects. The direct effect of a doubling of CO2 is to raise temperatures only about 1Ā°C. However observational evidence from ice core histories, from paleoclimateic histories from radiation budget data, from the response to large volcanic eruptions and from ocean heat content measurements show it to be more than that. Probably about 3Ā°C.
But a feedback can’t eliminate the effect of the thing that caused the feedback, because of the nature of a feedback. If the cause is completely eliminated, so is the feedback.
But this is going to turn into a completely non productive mud-slinging match if we fail to find any common ground to build upon, and it would be nice if I could get you on side in that endeavour.
It seems at least that you accept that the greenhouse effect works in the lab. Can we put it out there that we agree on this?
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It seems at least that you accept that the greenhouse effect works in the lab. Can we put it out there that we agree on this?
Negative, guy. It doesn’t even work in FURNACES, at least, not as how you are interpreting the “greenhouse” effect
I put together tables of radiation greybody emissivities for water, CO2, air mixtures for use in calculating radiant heat transfer in the presence of participating gases, these emissivities are used as weights in partial sums over the total radiant heat transfer per unit of area.
If the “greenhouse” effect was evident in any of this, one would identify ADDITIONAL heat transfer THAT COULDN’T be accounted for by the simple identification of the IR spectra of water and cabon dioxide, together with the overlaps of each molecule, taken separately.
If you want to play “greenhouse” there are a number of alarmist websites out where you can chat all day with people who fantasize about the world coming to an abrupt end unless Greenpiece takes over the world
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JLKrueger wrote: What, you think I donāt know about the links you provided?
I’m sure I don’t know yet what sort of things that you are aware of.
I do think, though, that the code, at least, is available online for many of the models used in high profile papers.
JLKrueger wrote: To quote from the so-called reference manual:
āThis document is a short description of what GISS ModelE does and gives some references and descriptions of how it does it. Hopefully this will eventually morph into a full technical paper given enough time and resources!ā
Okay, I accept your point that it’s not complete.
I find the time and resources reason perfectly credible. Research scientists can be poor bookkeepers.
JLKrueger wrote: You claimed to be new, but clearly you specifically meant ānew to JoNova.ā Your comments went from ānovice exploringā to got the āReal Climateā and āOpen Mindā lines down pat real fast. Going that fast to ModelE aināt a rookie move.
I was discussing with Jo about the Meehl et al. paper that calculated a decomposition of the climate signal into parts due to various forcings, and the atmospheric model that they used is also available for download, so I wondered if the NASA GISS code was too.
I googled, and it was.
I don’t read Realclimate but have one of their articles bookmarked. A four year old one explaining why water vapour is correctly treated as a feedback. (This one.)
I have dabbled at openmind, and find good statistics compelling, but often beyond me.
But certainly I have an interest in climate change, and some experience in modelling (not in a climate context).
I read the journal Nature’s climate change webpages more regularly than either. Do you read that? I find it a good source of information about current research and analysis. (Nature Reports: Climate Change.)
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Joanne Nova Wrote: ‘And lets finish the sentence: āit is the overwhelming contributorā¦ according to unproven, unverified climate models, which are based on opinions and estimates by people who wouldnāt have a job if carbon wasnāt a problem.ā’
Why do you call the Department of Energy’s PCM “unverified”? Did it not undergo hindcasting?
And I do question whether the employment of Meehl and Washington would be at any risk, no matter what the results climate research discovers. Meehl has been at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado since 1973, and is somewhat renowned. He won the Editor’s Award, Journal of Climate, American Meteorological Society, in 1999, the Editor’s Citation, Geophysical Research Letters, American Geophysical Union, 2006, and The Jule G. Charney Award of the American Meteorological Society, this year. Google scholar has him the lead author on a dozen papers with over 100 citations. Washington is, if anything, more renowned. He joined the NCAR in 1963, and is a head of the Climate Change research section. He is a Fellow of the AMS and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and from 1991 to 1995 he was a member of the AAAS Board of Directors.
I don’t think that either of these two would lose their jobs even if the NCAR were downsized.
The Australian author, Julie Arblaster, was studying the El Nino at the time of the paper, a valuable line of research even if it isn’t connected to climate change, because of the devastation in Indonesia and Malaysia, and to a lesser extent Australia due to fires from the 1998 El Nino.
So I think that at least most of the Authors of this paper had research areas not under threat by climate change findings or serious job security by virtue of seniority and accumulated respect. (Accumulated, in part, by not ever having found to have falsified research.)
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Brian Valentine wrote: “Negative, guy. It doesnāt even work in FURNACES, at least, not as how you are interpreting the āgreenhouseā effect.”
How should I interpret the greenhouse effect, such that it does work in furnaces?
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Why do you call the Department of Energyās PCM āunverifiedā?
Because I happen to work there, guy.
BWAHAAHAAHAAA
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Brian Valentine wrote: “If the āgreenhouseā effect was evident in any of this, one would identify ADDITIONAL heat transfer THAT COULDNāT be accounted for by the simple identification of the IR spectra of water and cabon dioxide, together with the overlaps of each molecule, taken separately.”
I don’t think that that’s the case. The spectra of CO,sub>2 and any other greenhouse gasses) fully account for their action as a greenhouse gas.
If the spectra of a gas is such that is is more transparent to frequencies that have a high power spectral density in sunlight than frequencies that have a high spectral density in radiated IR from the earth, then it is a greenhouse gas … It lets energy in to the atmosphere, but slows its escape.
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typo: The spectra of CO2 and any other greenhouse gas, fully accounts for their action as a greenhouse gas.
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You have a very funny view of the way the world works, Robin.
You’re not the first person to confuse “heat capacity” with “IR absorption”.
Why can’t alarmists go work on some practical and useful problem, that could actually benefit mankind?
Here’s a couple of suggestions:
– Eliminate an element from the periodic table. Chlorine proved a bit too much for the Green Scene, so set your sights a little lower this time.
– Figure out a way to carry out radiant mass transfer like they do in Star Trek. Now THAT would be something that people could really USE!!!!
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Brian Valentine wrote:”Because I happen to work there, guy.”
Are you the Brian Valentine in the Industrial Technology Program?
Is the PCM not verified with hindcasting?
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Not as it stands, no
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Brian Valentine wrote: “You have a very funny view of the way the world works, Robin.
Youāre not the first person to confuse āheat capacityā with āIR absorptionā.”
I think we’re having a disconnect here. Could you explain what you mean by confusing heat capacity with IR absorption, because I don’t think I’m doing that.
And I do think that a greenhouse gas is a greenhouse gas because of it’s absorption spectrum, not because of its heat capacity.
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Brian Valentine wrote: “Not as it stands, no”
What’s the problem, as it stands?
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Wherewolfe Wrote:
“Isnāt IR the be all and end all?
Is it true that sunlight reflected off the moon is stronger than IR emitted downwards by GHGs, or does something else cause the instruments to be overwhelmed by it?”
The intensity of the reflected IR due to the greenhouse effect is about 320 W/m2. The intensity of the reflected light from even a full moon is about 0.001 W/m2.
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Joanne Nova Wrote:”Climate models prove nothing except that if you give smart guys with computers a lot of money they can come up with any number between -3 and 11 degrees, and look pretty convincing and authoritative, especially when no one understands what went on inside the black box of their complex model because itās not public, and no one is paid to audit them.”
I’m not certain that you could accurately call the DOE PCM a “black box” or “not public”. The atmospheric component at the time of the paper was the NCAR’s CCM3.2, the source code for which can still be downloaded from here. You can look at it, see what it does, compile it, and if you’ve got a lot of processing power or time, run it.
The Ocean, Sea Ice, and River transport components are described (with references) here.
So I think that this particular model was (and is) fairly open and public.
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Joanne Nova Wrote:”The climate is so complex, we donāt have a chance with our pathetically inadequate understanding of how it works to be able to predict it yet.”
There is no doubt that the models are imperfect, especially on a regional scale. Herein lies the greatest cause for alarm. We are affecting the global climate, and even the best experts don’t know what it will do to any ecological systems or farmland.
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Look at it this way.
Humid nights are warmer than nights with low humidity. That’s because the water vapor is reflecting the radiant heat of the cooling Earth back down to the Earth.
All over the Earth, there is so much water vapor in the air that, on the average, the Earth is some 30 Celsius degrees warmer than it would be if water vapor wasn’t present at all.
Is this heat there forever? No, eventually the water condenses someplace, and the heat is dissipated, at longer wavelengths still, wich is absorbed by nothing.
Now consider CO2 in the atmosphere. By itself, the effect is neglible (we have heard it said, by iteslf, is responsible for one degree average rise in temperature.) But it cannot be so measured, for the natural variablity in the total amount of water vapor at any given time is much larger than that, so it is meaningless to talk about it.
So we come up with the idea of water “feedback” from CO2. This is supposed to increase the temperature further, by putting more water in the air.
But how? How is this working any different than the Sun? Why does this act differently then the air with water vapor alone, which we know will condense and the average air temperature stay the same?
Does CO2 have the special property of “holding” heat somehow and this “held” heat is transferred to water as some “held” heat?
Hopefully not, because if you think about it, water vapor “feedback” FROM ITSELF would have permanently saturated the air since day 1 of an Earth with liquid water present.
So there you are, Robin, with an explanation of “greenhouse” gases which are nothing like “greenhouses” in which people grow tomatoes in the winter.
Gotta get back to other things. I’m gonna let Krueger take over this escapade – assuming he isn’t comatose from boredom or dispair.
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Brian Valentine wrote: Humid nights are warmer than nights with low humidity. Thatās because the water vapor is reflecting the radiant heat of the cooling Earth back down to the Earth.
Yes!
Brian Valentine wrote: All over the Earth, there is so much water vapor in the air that, on the average, the Earth is some 30 Celsius degrees warmer than it would be if water vapor wasnāt present at all.
Well, some 12Ā°C, or 22Ā°C if you count clouds as water vapour.
Brian Valentine wrote: Is this heat there forever? No, eventually the water condenses someplace, and the heat is dissipated, at longer wavelengths still, wich is absorbed by nothing.
Why is the heat at longer wavelengths still?
Brian Valentine wrote: Now consider CO2 in the atmosphere. By itself, the effect is neglible (we have heard it said, by iteslf, is responsible for one degree average rise in temperature.)
The one degree is for a doubling of CO2. It is responsible for more like 3Ā°C by itself.
Brian Valentine wrote: But it cannot be so measured, for the natural variablity in the total amount of water vapor at any given time is much larger than that, so it is meaningless to talk about it.
It still has an effect over and above the water vapour. (And a far greater one in the absence of water vapour, because the overlap with water vapour is strong).
So I think that it can be measured, and it is meaningful to talk about it.
Brian Valentine wrote: So we come up with the idea of water āfeedbackā from CO2. This is supposed to increase the temperature further, by putting more water in the air.
Right. A world that is 3Ā°C warmer has more water vapour in the air, because evaporation is greater and because the air can hold more water.
Brian Valentine wrote: But how? How is this working any different than the Sun?
The sun will also increase the water vapour in the air, yes.
Brian Valentine wrote: Why does this act differently then the air with water vapor alone, which we know will condense and the average air temperature stay the same?
The air temperature won’t revert back to the 22Ā°C cooler when the water vapour condenses. The heat due to the greenhouse effect dissipates slowly. So the average air temperature will very much not stay the same.
Brian Valentine wrote: Does CO2 have the special property of āholdingā heat somehow and this āheldā heat is transferred to water as some āheldā heat?
No, it is simply opaque to certain frequencies of IR radiation. So IR of that frequency does not get out through the atmosphere very well.
Brian Valentine wrote: Hopefully not, because if you think about it, water vapor āfeedbackā FROM ITSELF would have permanently saturated the air since day 1 of an Earth with liquid water present.
On the other hand it can rain, which clears the air of water vapour arbitrarily quickly.
Brian Valentine wrote: So there you are, Robin, with an explanation of āgreenhouseā gases which are nothing like āgreenhousesā in which people grow tomatoes in the winter.
The mechanism is certainly different, but it is similar in that the greenhouse is warm not because it has a greater energy in, but because the rate of energy escaping is reduced.
As it is with the greenhouse effect.
Brian Valentine wrote: Gotta get back to other things. Iām gonna let Krueger take over this escapade – assuming he isnāt comatose from boredom or dispair.
It’s been interesting trying to understand your position, Brian.
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Joanne Nova Wrote:”The correlation from post 1970 warmingā¦ again, the 30-40 year thing is another modelled guess.”
I did indeed make a mistake there. Upon re-reading that part of the paper, I see that the 25-50 years is directly due to estimates of climate sensitivity (due to a doubling of CO2), not as I claimed, calculated from the Earth’s radiation budget.
But, on the other hand, there are many estimates of the climate sensitivity that are independent of general circulation models. (Including the Hansen paper on radiation budget, but also including estimates from observational evidence, An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity, , and from paleoclimatic evidence, on various time scales. Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries. Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years.)
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Typo:
Including the Hansen paper on radiation budget, but also including estimates from observational evidence, An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity, and from paleoclimatic evidence, on various time scales. Climate sensitivity constrained by temperature reconstructions over the past seven centuries. Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years
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Although we don’t seem to be able to constrain the climate sensitivity more than about 1.5Ā°C to 4.5Ā°C per doubling of CO2, there are multiple independent lines of evidence that show that it is in that ballpark. And so the 25 to 50 years is also in the correct ballpark. (And fairly intuitive, I think, if you think about how long it would take the ocean temperature and sea ice to respond to an increase in a greenhouse gas.)
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Is that so, Robin?
Is that how greenhouses work, Robin?
Fun Fact: Did you know that glass is diathermanous to all thermal wavelengs of EM radiation?
Do a damn heat radiant heat transfer calculation of air at a composition of 750 ppm CO2 and see if your 3 degrees makes any more sense than a 3 degree increase from a dog howling at the Moon
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Joanne Nova Wrote:”…but why has the warming stopped? (Models donāt know).”
I don’t think that the data supports the claim that the warming has stopped. There have been drops of the same magnitude (0.15 of a degree) in every decade since the 1950s. (Similar conclusions are in the scientific literature: We show that the climate over the 21st century can and likely will produce periods of a decade or two where the globally averaged surface air temperature shows no trend or even slight cooling in the presence of longerāterm warming. )
Significant to me is that the average temperature for this decade so far is 0.19Ā°C warmer than the average for the 1990s. This is the fastest decade on decade warming on record.
But it was predicted by models in 2007 that 2008 and 2009 would not break the 1998 record. “Our system predicts that internal variability will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.” Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model, August 2007.
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Joanne Nova Wrote:”Isnāt it an odd coincidence that temperatures have gone up and down every 30 years since 1880 (see the Akasufo graph ), and they appear to be still oscillating on a 30 year trend? (Almost like carbon makes no difference at all?)”
That graph does show a warming. It is attributed to “recovery from the little ice age”, which is not a forcing mentioned in the IPCC reports. How does a cool period up to 1850 cause a warming throughout the 20th century?
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Joanne Nova Wrote:”The climate models donāt include solar-magnetic effects despite them having an excellent correlationā
What is a solar-magnetic effect?
Joanne Nova Wrote:”The models canāt predict el nino or la nina effects.ā
They can be (and certainly the Hadley centre one is) poor at reproducing the size of the ENSO. I was aware earlier in the year of some Australian research that was overturning ideas about the cause of the ENSO, so it might be that this will improve in the near future.
Joanne Nova Wrote:”As per the Hansen paper and other non-model estimates. Whatās the difference? Itās still calculated by taking assumptions, multiplying it by estimates and raising it to the power of a good guess. That someone did it with a hand calculator instead of a computer doesnāt make it more certain. Only one assumption has to be wrong for the whole caboodle to fall in a hole.ā
Well I would say that reproducibility of climate sensitivity from independent evidence does add reliability to estimates. And I would say that if you think that they might be wrong, then you should be advocating additional caution to that proposed by the IPCC, not less.
Noting that the climate sensitivity might be as high as 5 or 6 Ā°C (Albeit with a lower probability than about 3Ā°C), is already terrifying for me, and I at least have confidence in scientific estimates of the upper bound that you donāt seem to share.
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Joanne Nova Wrote:”I donāt mean any of that disrespectfully. I like that you are asking reasonable questions in a friendly toneā
And respect to you too. I am impressed and surprised that a line of questioning counter to the editorial position of this site has been tolerated for more than a post.
Joanne Nova Wrote:”, but models (and hand calculated theoretical estimates) are not empirical evidence, even if they worked, which they donāt. ā
Which is why I mention the empirical evidence from observations, from earth radiation budget data, from ice cores and from paleoclimate reconstructions. There are other approaches too. In 2003 there was an interesting paper that used a neural net in place of a climate model. It predicted much greater warming than climate models (equivalent to a climate sensitivity of about 5Ā°C per doubling).
(http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/knutti/papers/knutti03cd.pdf)
And while one should be cautious of the meta-analysis, there have been ones of observational rather than modelled data, to get at the climate sensitivity, and this has produced some claims that the upper bound can be confidently reduced to about 4.5Ā°C per doubling of CO2.
(http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/GRL_sensitivity.pdf)
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Quick question for the poseurs out there:
How can you spot a fraud?
They use language like “while one should be cautious of the meta-analysis …”
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Brian Valentine wrote: “Quick question for the poseurs out there:
How can you spot a fraud?
They use language like āwhile one should be cautious of the meta-analysis ā¦ā”
How why would a fraud want to be cautious of meta analysis, while a non fraud would not be cautious of meta analysis?
It is genuinely difficult to combine data from different studies with different methodologies as is done it the paper. Results can be wrong by combining data from studies of different qualities, and by publication bias.
It occurred to me that publication bias might be the reason for the bimodal shape of the posterior PDF for climate sensitivity in this paper.
By which I mean that papers that estimated climate sensitivity to be about 2.8 were considered less interesting than very low or very high values, and so this paper underestimates the probability of climate sensitivity about there.
And in what way can I possibly be a fraud?
You you think that I actually agree with climate scepticism, and are pretending to agree with the scientific view for some personal gain?
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Hmm, I don’t think I should have risen to the bait.
The guidelines are no insults, and no statements about motivations, as well as no swearing. Your post 152 only manages to not swear.
I am being civil to you, and addressing the issue genuinely and intellectually. And I am making an effort to follow the site guidelines.
Furthermore I am attempting to use the expertise here to increase my understanding of global warming.
Now you have suggested that I could “Do a damn heat radiant heat transfer calculation of air at a composition of 750 ppm CO2 and see if your 3 degrees makes any more sense than a 3 degree increase from a dog howling at the Moon”.
I don’t know what that means, but if you think it would be enlightening, I would be happy for you to walk me through one.
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Brian Valentine wrote:
“Is that so, Robin?
Is that how greenhouses work, Robin?
Fun Fact: Did you know that glass is diathermanous to all thermal wavelengs of EM radiation?”
Yes. A glass greenhouse works by a different mechanism. The heat loss is slowed by slowing loss by convection rather than loss by radiation.
Brian Valentine wrote:”Do a damn heat radiant heat transfer calculation of air at a composition of 750 ppm CO2 and see if your 3 degrees makes any more sense than a 3 degree increase from a dog howling at the Moon”
What does a “damn heat radiant heat transfer calculation of air at a composition of 750 ppm CO2” calculate, and how is it calculated?
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It means, that a 3 degree increase increase in temperature from a 750 ppm CO2 mixture in the air is not possible.
Can you carry out ordinary radiant heat transfer calculations, invloving participating gases in enclosures, and so forth?
I find it remarkable how many people can spew out sophisticated sounding knowledge of radiant properties of the atmosphere, and when questioned about their true knowledge of radiant heat transfer, turn out to be quite clueless as to how calculations are actually done.
To me, this is what shows itself as the poseur of sophisticated theory.
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Brian Valentine: “It means, that a 3 degree increase increase in temperature from a 750 ppm CO2 mixture in the air is not possible.
Can you carry out ordinary radiant heat transfer calculations, invloving participating gases in enclosures, and so forth?”
No, but I’m increasingly eager to learn. How do I do that?
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Now, your willingness to learn, rather than your eagerness to impress others with what you know, is what truly impresses me.
A good place to start, is a good book on the subject, and the textbook, “Thermal Radiation Heat Transfer,” by Siegel and Howell, which I have used to teach, is an excellent book to start.
Depending on your background, getting through the book would take you about six months of serious work, and if you are serious, I would guide you how you might approach it.
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Brian Valentine wrote:
“Now, your willingness to learn, rather than your eagerness to impress others with what you know, is what truly impresses me.
A good place to start, is a good book on the subject, and the textbook, āThermal Radiation Heat Transfer,ā by Siegel and Howell, which I have used to teach, is an excellent book to start.
Depending on your background, getting through the book would take you about six months of serious work, and if you are serious, I would guide you how you might approach it.”
Okay. Perhaps you could do a worked example with that 750 ppm atmosphere that you were talking about above, while I wait for the book to arrive?
What exactly are we calculating the heat transfer between here?
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Between the surface of the Earth and the Heaventree hung with humid nightblue fruit.*
[outer space.]
Get the book, and we’ll start with some simpler things first.
*description of the cosmos from James Joyce, Ulysses
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Is that textbook going to teach that only water vapor is a greenhouse gas? Apparently that’s what Brian believes.
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No, the book will teach that 750 ppm CO2 in a mixture of air and 1% water vapor has very little influence on radiant heat transfer between 260 and 350 Kelvin degrees
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Brian Valentine: “Get the book, and weāll start with some simpler things first.”
Okay, I’m looking at the table of contents of the book. There doesn’t seem to be anything on the absorption spectra of translucent media.
What part do we look at to calculate the required properties of 750ppm air compared to 385 ppm air?
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Brian Valentine: “Get the book, and weāll start with some simpler things first.”
Also if you could post the equation that we intend to be able to solve at the end of this exercise, so that we can look at it and discuss which terms are affected by humidity and CO2 concentration, that would be a good beginning motivation.
It would also do a lot for my confidence that you know what you’re talking about.
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Why would you expect to find a chapter on translucent media in a text book on radiant heat transfer?
Perhaps you could enlighten me on that.
If you plan to learn quantum mechanics from a text, for example, and quantum mechanics is new to you, are you going to start with a chapter on how to make near-field approximations to the Born equation?
No, you would start with Chapter 1, would you not?
Maybe it’s just me, although you seem to have a condescending tone.
I will let others be the judge of that, since you have made your remarks public.
I’m not a big fan of attempts to condescend, and BS has even less appeal to me.
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Brian Valentine wrote:”Why would you expect to find a chapter on translucent media in a text book on radiant heat transfer?”
Well, Chapter 12 is on translucent media. You tell me why it’s there.
I was perusing the contents to see where I should start reading to find out about calculating radiative transfer through the atmosphere. I thought that since we are considering heat loss to the atmosphere during transmission, translucent media would be the one to look at.
Any real pointers you could give would be nice.
Brian Valentine wrote: “If you plan to learn quantum mechanics from a text, for example, and quantum mechanics is new to you, are you going to start with a chapter on how to make near-field approximations to the Born equation?”
Okay, there are two problems that I was trying to address with that question. One is the motivation one. How will reading this text help me understand the greenhouse effect?
This would be clearer if you would post this “damn heat radiant heat transfer calculation of air at a composition of 750 ppm CO2” that you find it “remarkable” how many people “spew[ing] out sophisticated sounding knowledge of radiant properties of the atmosphere” can’t solve.
The other is authority. You apparently have a low opinion of people who cant solve a damn heat radiant heat transfer calculation of air at a composition of 750 ppm CO2″. So I raise a very serious question:
I don’t ask can you solve it, I merely ask can you write it down?
I ask because I begin to suspect that you can’t. (Which may be related to the condescending tone that you are picking up on).
But don’t fear, you can win back my assumption of respect by simply posting this equation, and being able to discuss which terms are affected by humidity and CO2 concentration.
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Brian Valentine:
Also, I don’t think you answered my question about heat capacity and absorption spectra.
Did you know that it is the absorption spectrum of a gas that makes it a greenhouse gas, not its heat capacity?
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Don’t worry, I found an online tool for calculating transmission through the atmosphere.
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/cgimodels/radiation.html
750 ppm CO2 compared with the pre-industrial 270 ppm CO2 yields about 3.4 W/m2 less radiation out.
That’s just a little over 1Ā°C of warming (without feedbacks).
That would be the greenhouse effect.
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Whilst most scientists, mathematicians, hobbyists, profiteers, journalists, comperes and politicians are apportioning blame to decimal places based on assumption, opinion and earning money, morals be damned, a request to look beyond minutiae is not unreasonable. A good place to start would be to have a fact.
Will/do we have an insignificant net influence on the climate with ACO2 emissions?
We can’t know how little the effect is without a lot more knowledge of the various unknowns like how much ACO2 stays in the air for how long, H2O atm. volume, variability and feedback values, ocean floor gas and heat emissions/cycles/effects, ocean and atm. oscillations and current variations/effects, super volcano eruption dates and effect/duration, net solar and extra terrestrial influence, biomass response and influence, aersol types/volume effects, tech. advances, farming advances, Earth girth, axial wobble influence and variation and a whole lot more. It doesn’t need a rocket science to understand that.
What will it be in 2100, ice age, tropical age, as we are now? I go with predicting this year will be near enough the same as last and this century ditto plus ~0.5 C for glacial emergence. I have as much chance of being right as as any forecaster.
“… even this small discrepancy, of less than 0.1 percent, completely changed the end result.”
Lorenz.
IR emission stable or decreasing? CO2 ~0.038% + 0.0001 to 0.0003% per annum. WV a highly variable 2-4% absorbing not only in a more energetic part of the spectrum but also in a much greater range.
Temperature variation can’t be predicted by CO2 levels over any time period in any era. How can it be considered significant?
š
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The word “translucent” refers to partial transmitance of visible light, media that transmits thermal IR radiation is either diathermanous, or it is participating.
At least that’s the terminology Siegel and Howell and everybody else I have ever heard use.
In the edition of Siegel and Howell that I have, ch 12 is radiation in the presence of other modes of energy transfer, and maybe some new edition of their book refers to translucent media, or if it doesn’t, maybe you could write it for them.
Approximation for IR transfer through non-isothermal diffuse grey gases one typically uses are the Curtis-Gordon and the zoning methods, and I’m not going to go any farther with that.
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I like the thinking in the original post. Almost any increasing or decreasing value can be linked to global warming (or not as the case may be). I was particularly impressed lately by worldclimatereport’s blog that linked any one of the carbon footprint calculators to an average of the GCMs so that you could work out how much temperature increase could be avoided if the appropriate carbon reduction action was taken. If this info was more widely known then this debate would evaporate in less time than it takes Jim Hansen to say “death trains”.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2009/04/30/what-you-cant-do-about-global-warming/
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Brian got pwned, as the kids say. š
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YOU again?
I thought you became a skeptic and went out and campaigned against the carbon tax.
Aren’t you the “Boris” who keeps writing on Eli’s blog about what a turkey he is?
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Here is an article that sets out a test by which the CO2 theory can be tested – by the amount of heat retained in the oceans. It is a compelling read, though it does contain some maths which will be dificult for less advanced mathematicians. Here is one small extract from its findings:
“In brief, we know of no mechanism by which vast amounts of āmissingā heat can be hidden, transferred, or absorbed within the earthās system. The only reasonable conclusion-call it a null hypothesis-is that heat is no longer accumulating in the climate system and there is no longer a radiative imbalance caused by anthropogenic forcing. This not only demonstrates that the IPCC models are failing to accurately predict global warming, but also presents a serious challenge to the integrity of the AGW hypothesis.”
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Robin asks me to write down a single equation to solve, which would be used to calculate IR radiation through the Earth’s atmosphere.
No problemo, here it is:
Div q = 0
where q is the heat flux vector.
There you are, Robin, memorize that, and people will call you an Atmospheric Physics Wizard!
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So, this is where today’s education system has brought us.
Evidently he never solved a radiant heat transfer problem in his life, has no interest in solving any, and he’s an “expert” on “global warming.”
Well, as Socrates once remarked, “with today’s youth the way they are, civilisation cannot possibly last for two more generations.”
Each day I identify more with that old goat; right now I’m about the same age he was when he died
(carrying out his death sentence himself, which to me was his demonstration that no one controlled him but himself)
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Sorry, this is off topic but I believe it represents a major breach in the establisment case. A leading climate scientist says that controlling co2 won’t change the climate. There can only be one inference
We can’t solve global warming says climate change professor
Can we solve climate change? No we can’t, according to a leading climate change professor.
Mike Hulme professor of Climate Change at East Anglia University reckons we are heading up a “dead end” by putting climate change science at the top of the political agenda.
…..
“It is rather hubristic to think we can actually control climate. Climate change is the new human condition we have to live with. Let’s accept this is the new reality.
“Don’t construct the problem in a way which means we cannot have a solution which is the way I think we have got it constructed at the moment.”
http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/science/2009/04/we-cant-solve-global-warming-s.html
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Same guy.
In this BBC interview, Professor Mike Hulme of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change says in reply to the proposition that “In the worst case scenario, we’ll perish”. “Well yes, that’s an interpretation or a judgement on the evidence; the evidence from science is very clear we are altering climate, quite what the significance is, of course a lot of other factors come into play”
mp3
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/gw/humeradio4.mp3
Full interview
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8022000/8022297.stm
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My first comment disappeared so I will repeat it. Hulme is a leading climate scientist.
*************
We can’t solve global warming says climate change professor
Can we solve climate change? No we can’t, according to a leading climate change professor.
Mike Hulme professor of Climate Change at East Anglia University reckons we are heading up a “dead end” by putting climate change science at the top of the political agenda.
.
“It is rather hubristic to think we can actually control climate. Climate change is the new human condition we have to live with. Let’s accept this is the new reality.
“Don’t construct the problem in a way which means we cannot have a solution which is the way I think we have got it constructed at the moment.”
http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/science/2009/04/we-cant-solve-global-warming-s.html
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Identification of a fraud, Item# 2
They use a pseudonym on the internet because they are too weak to say their own name aloud in public.
What do you think, Robin?
Does that identify a coward or a fraud?
Both, actually. Looking at the historical record, we find them to be one and the same thing.
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“Does that identify a coward or a fraud?”
Ah, the inevitable attack on anonymity, as if it mattered to the argument.
And maybe you should think about consulting a text that deals with radiative transfer in the atmosphere. Would you like me to recommend one for you?
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er, thanks, Boris, that would be, real great.
Seems Siegel and Howell, as well as Chandrasekhar, forgot all about THE ATMOSPHERE
Can you believe it?
You ought to write to them and tell them.
[don’t tell them I sent you]
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By the way thanks to Eric for describing Hulme’s assessment.
Hulme should know – he has been saying the same thing to the British government since the Thatcher government.
He’s a nice guy, I met him once – he is the target of a lot of criticism from Hadley Centre, but they have never demonstrated him to be wrong.
And Hulme uses HADLEY data to back up what he says.
On dealing with climate change, Professor Carter has said, roughly, that people can invest in $100Mn to build a dam with certain results, or they can lose $1Bn or more in revenue from lost industrial activity with uncertain results, and there really is no argument about practical ways of dealing with climate change.
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Brian Valentine wrote:
Siegel and Howell seem to be using it to refer to partial transmittance of thermal radiation, and seem to consider a participating gas an example of a translucent medium, according to my reading of it:
From “Thermal Radiation Heat Transfer
By Robert Siegel, John R. Howell”:
12-1 Introduction (pp 501, fourth edition)
Radiation exchange between solid surfaces without any emitting, absorbing. and/or scattering medium between them is treated in Chaps 5-10. The addition of having a radiatively participating gas or other translucent medium between the surfaces can be included by building on this foundation.
Perhaps the meaning of “translucent” has changed a little over the years.
Brian Valentine wrote:
Do they include absorbance as a function of wavelength, such as is significant in the greenhouse effect?
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Primary colors.
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I don’t have the 4th edition I have the first where the word “translucent” appears as “attenuating” so they must have changed their minds?
As for the Curtis-Gordon and zoning methods, look them up in the TOC
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What strange things Global Warming has done to Siegel and Howell!
And me.
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JoAnne has asked me to be nice to Robin, so I shall.
Yes Robin, these methodologies include absorbance as a function of wavelength, in all the treatments of participating gases, the absorbance has to be identified at the wavelengths (and temperatures) of interest.
In hand calculations of radiation transfer, one usually uses tables that show the absorbance as a function of wavelengths, and carries out the calculations as sums over the wavelengths. There are a number of analytic functions (implicit and explicit) that correct the temperature dependence.
These calculations can be carried out much easier by computer, of course, once the absorbance values have been programmed into the method.
The ANL program uses a modification of the zoning method, which is to say, the atmosphere is broken into a nimber of approximate isothermal sections, and the condition of matched flux is applied at each section.
That is easier than the Curtis-Gordon method, which is implicit in temperature, and the temperature actually has to be estimated to get the heat flux, and the calculations iterated until the temperature and flux values converge to values that don’t change any more with iterations.
Solving the equations of transfer usually involves solving integral equations of the Volterra type by approximations of the kernel.
That sounds real fancy, but it really isn’t, all it means is solving an equation that involves an integral with the function one seeks, by approximating the unknown function with known functions.
Radiant heat transfer calculations, like everything else, are easy once you get the hang of it; if you think about it, all it involves is the conservation of energy written in one form or another.
The calculations don’t even involve the SECOND law of thermodynamics; not directly, anyway – but the Second Law is certainly applied when one has to specify in advance wwhich way the heat is going!
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Okay, thanks for the response Brian.
So it is really these tables that we should look at to understand the consequence of an increase in atmospheric CO2?
Do I correctly understand that your position is that there is no such consequence?
Many other people’s calculations yield that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere results in a drop in radiative flux out of the atmosphere of around 3 W/m2, and this is simply wrong?
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While your being “nice”, I’ll take the opportunity to put an earlier question a third time.
Could you make it a little clearer what you mean by >Youāre not the first person to confuse āheat capacityā with āIR absorptionā.
I have been assuming that we agree that the greenhouse effect is an absorbance spectrum phenomena, not a heat capacity one.
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Thank you, Robin.
The absorbances listed in the tables are specified at a fixed molar composition, of course, and at low concentrations (< 5 mol or volume %), the absorbance is proportional to the (mol weighted) molar concentration.
Even though this relation is linear the overall effect on the heat flux cannot be seen a priori of course because the equations of transfer are highly nonlinear in temperature.
The absolute reduction in the heat flux calculated by any method must first of all be specified to the surface under consideration (i.e., as the disc that the Earth appears to the Sun, or the surface of the sphere as the Earth appears to people); the humidity, and will be strongly influenced by the type and magnitude of cloud cover.
Unfortunately there are no uniformly accepted referenced values for any of these.
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Thanks again for the response, Brian.
I’m not sure I get your meaning yet.
You are talking about the equations being “highly non-linear” in the temperature of the surface (not of the medium)?
I guess a first approximation involving leaving the temperature constant would be interesting.
And by “non-linear” you mean not proportional to temperature (but more proportional to it’s fourth power), as opposed to “non-linear” as in the superposition principle doesn’t apply?
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I don’t understand this either.
Surely where there is absorbance by the atmosphere the divergence of the heat flux would be negative?
So wouldn’t Div q be generally negative where there is a translucent medium?
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I Hulme is arguing at all against the establishment case, and I think that you’re mistaking the meaning.
He is not saying “controlling co2 wonāt change the climate.” He is saying that controlling CO2 is impossible.
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Typo:
If you think that Hulme is arguing at all against the establishment case, then I think that youāre mistaking the meaning.
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Hulme is saying that humans are affecting the climate, so of course this is backed up by Hadley data.
It is interesting that you think that he should know.
He says “I am firmly convinced that humans are indeed altering climate worldwide”. Is this also your view?
Prof. Carter is not like Hulme. He does deny that human activity is affecting the climate, and although he has published such claims in economics journals. (He is a geologist.) And as often seems to be the case with those few percent of scientists that deny AGW, he does have a possible conflict of interest – he is on the research committee of the Institute of Public Affairs, a group that has received funding from corporate interests including oil companies.
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Warning: If you start swiping at Carter, it’s No More Mister Nice Guy
And don’t play “dumb and innocent” and “I didn’t do that” with me, either.
I’ll try to answer your questions, succincly.
From the microscopic theory of matter we know that the vibrational modes of moolecules contribute to the heat capacity to first order in energy. The same is true of absorbances. Of all vibrational modes of CO2 for example, the symmetric and asymmetric stretches are degenerate to the re-radiation, and only one (no-degenerate) bending modes contributes to the near IR re-radiation.
Only the heat flux of a black or grey body can be written explicitly as the difference in fourth powers of absolute temperatures. The kernel of the integral over all wavelengths contributing to the heat flux is non linear (in disguise).
The influence of constants appearing as coefficients of non-linear equations on the solutions can never be seen or identified a priori. That is a fundamental property of non-linear equations.
The linerar combination of linearly independent solutions to linear equations is a solution.
The linear combination of solutions to non-linear equations is not necessarily a solution.
The divergence of any source-free field is zero. CO2 is not a “source” of radiation in the presence of radiation.
The temperature of the air from the Earth to the ground is evaluated as a function of height to obtain the total heat flux from the Earth to outer space.
Hulme agrees with others about the influence of human activity on the climate, the exgtent to which that is so varies with individual, the end result is the same, there is nothing one can do about it. Carter and everybody agrees that the climate changes, and the practical thing one can do, is live with it and adjust to it, rather than try to “stop” it.
And I am not kidding about where I will draw the line with your behaviour.
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Robin, Div q = 0 in equilibrium. If div q < 0, things warm up a bit and so increase their heat emission until div q=0 again. That’s the greenhouse effect!
As for what Mike Hulme is saying, I don’t know, I heard him on the radio and he was really unclear, neither I nor the interviewer got what he was trying to say, so I’d suggest that further discussion of him is pointless.
Regarding Carter, if you want to discuss the science of what he says, fine, but if you are going to just quote the muckspreading you’ve pasted from wikipedia, then that’s out of line with the principles of this blog.
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Okay, thanks again for the response Brian. I’m not sure if you answered the questions.
One in particular was “[Hulme] says “I am firmly convinced that humans are indeed altering climate worldwide”. Is this also your view?”
One of the main PR problems with Islam, is that there is more than one vocal extremist who tolerates not even the slightest inferred slight on Mohammed.
Your prophet who shall not be slighted is … Prof Carter?
I would have thought that Richard Lindzen would have made a better messiah. MIT brings a lot of kudos, and Carter looks a bit too much like a televangelist.
My curiosity at your extreme reaction aside, Prof. Carter has a different opinion to about 97.4% (standard error about 1.8%) of scientists who list climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change. (Source)
In science everyone’s views should be questioned, but views that are counter to the weight of opinion and evidence should be questioned moreso … and they should welcome this questioning, because it is the only acknowledgement that they can hope for, until their results are reproduced. Neither are conflicts of interest irrelevant.
So I’m sorry to offend you but I don’t apologise for questioning Carter (or anyone else’s) views. Perhaps if you were to provide a list of the subjects and people that you will not stand to be questioned, then I could try to avoid questioning them in direct discussion with you. But I think it would be better if you could view questioning as a healthy thing, and leave dogma out of discussions of science.
As to the matter of your post, we’re clearly talking across purposes again. I’m sure that the problem is mostly one of language, but I think that the fastest way to get to a point at which we are communicating is for me to respond to these points as I understand them on reading. The downside is that many of these are flat contradictions of what you have posted.
I hope you can be big enough to respond to “Not unless you think that a sink is a kind of source.” with something like: it looks like you are misunderstanding my meaning of “source”, what is meant is this, rather than “I don’t like your condescending attitude.”
1) The symmetric and asymmetric stretches of CO2 are not degenerate. The asymmetric stretching is 2565 cm-1, whereas the symmetric stretching is 1480 cm-1.
2) There bending modes are degenerate. They are both 526 cm-1.
Okay. Is this what you meant by “highly non-linear”?
There are many kernels of an integral. One for each integral transform. What integral transform are you talking about here? And what is the form of the kernel?
Okay. … Or is that what you meant by “highly non-linear”?
Not unless you think that a sink is a kind of source. Otherwise the divergence of any source free field is only non-positive.
In any case, the air heats up because of the IR radiation. That means that some of the radiation is absorbed. That means that the divergence of the field is negative.
But I would have thought that CO2 was a sink when it absorbs radiation and a source when it re emits it. When either event happens the divergence would not be zero.
Well, the more common belief is that it is possible to reduce fossil fuel use. We will reduce fossil fuel use when it runs out, so we may as well do it now instead of then, and that way we get to keep some biodiversity as well.
“Carter and everybody”???
Did you know that Carter doesn’t believe in AGW, and is therefore very much in stark disagreement with “everybody”?
…
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PaulM wrote:
Okay, that makes sense. Thanks Paul!
I think that he was pretty clear on his acceptance that humans are changing the climate … which seems to be the point that is not accepted by some people here.
And I think that the interviewer not only understood that, but knew it beforehand.
Carter’s extraordinary claim is that the globe isn’t warming. Instrumental evidence complied by NASA and instrumental evidence compiled by the Hadley centre show that the warming from the 1990s to the 2000s (so far) is the strongest decade to decade warming on record. I’m not sure what more could be said about that.
But I don’t think it’s out of line with the principles of this blog to point out a conflict of interest.
Jo, herself did this above in post 92, with reference to GERALD A. MEEHL, WARREN M. WASHINGTON, CASPAR M. AMMANN, JULIE M. ARBLASTER, T. M. L. WIGLEY, AND CLAUDIA TEBALDI.
Now, I personally think that those people would have a job if carbon wasn’t a problem, but the argument by conflict of interest was made by Joanne, and I too think that conflicts of interest are relevant.
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Robin,
I consider myself a teacher, which for me, means that I like to learn, and everybody is my teacher in some way, even the 4-year old girl who lives across the street from me who won’t quit trying to learn to ride a skate board no matter how many times she falls.
I wish I could say that I believed that there was more I could learn from YOU than How to Talk Like a Smart Ass and Condescend to People,
but I don’t want any lessons in that. I’ve seen enough of it in my life.
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Robin, have you read my post no.114 and read the important link there? That article is the silver bullet that really sinks the “CO2 causes catastrophic global warming” theory,along with the lack of the predicted “hotspots” in the atmosphere over the tropics. If those fundamental predictions are wrong – and clearly they are – then the whole theory must go into the bin. Do read that link.
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By the way Paul M, a solution of the steady-state heat transfer problem was outlined, not the transient.
Technical distinction: a system is at equilibrium if it can be isolated and no change in any state variable can be observed over time.
A sytem is at steady state if the assumption about “isolated” cannot be removed.
The Earth certainly cannot be “isolated” (from the Sun) and not observe changes in the variables describing the steady-state.
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[…] I mean, just look at this graph […]
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There are many kernels of an integral. One for each integral transform. What integral transform are you talking about here? And what is the form of the kernel?
b. symmetric
a. Okay, take the kernel and the Jacobian of the transformation, and the question becomes irrelevant.
Theorem:
The following physical quantities, and only the following quantities, are independent of coordinate transformation (and the motion of the observer):
1. Pure number.
2. Entropy. [corollary of 1.]
3. Mechanical action of any physical interaction.
4. The Jacobian of a transformation from one coordinate system to another.
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Robin said :“Now, I personally think that those people would have a job if carbon wasnāt a problem, but the argument by conflict of interest was made by Joanne, and I too think that conflicts of interest are relevant.”
Yes, technically, these people would still have jobs, because they’re smart employable people – I should have said, “they’d have to get a different job”. [Think: retraining, possible relocation, loss of status, competition, lower salary…] Billions of dollars is spent on climate related research each year. Are you suggesting that all the people employed in those related jobs would work just as hard to prove the counter theory? Sure. This situation would be fine if just as much money was thrown into researching other causes of climate, but it ain’t so.
You can’t throw billions at smart people and tell them to ‘find a link’ and then be surprised that they find enough stuff to write 800 page reports. I could write 800 pages on postage stamps if someone paid me enough. But what matters is that they haven’t found empirical evidence. What more can I say (and how many times do I have to say it?)
And about Carter, you said: “Prof. Carter… And as often seems to be the case with those few percent of scientists that deny AGW, he does have a possible conflict of interest – he is on the research committee of the Institute of Public Affairs, a group that has received funding from corporate interests including oil companies.”
Brian, possibly, could have phrased his objection to this better, but he was right to protest. It’s not that Carter is a messiah, it’s that this is a pitiful attempt to smear all non-believer-scientists with the smell of ‘he might know some people who once took oil money’. Ohmigosh – Carter’s on a research committee for an organization that’s a libertarian non-profit, that might have at one time taken 5% of their funding from naughty Exxon, except that Sourcewatch can’t even find any specifics on that and you can be sure they would have looked closely. Is that the best slur you can find? His salary doesn’t depend on it – he’s a university guy. I’m not sure that there would be much money involved, AND he had these views before the IPA approached him (which is one of those funny un-coincidences – how sceptics end up congregated in organisations which are um… skeptical… and that proves something? There’s a big cause and effect gap here. Why would the IPA approach a believer in AGW to offer them honorariums (if that) to speak against AGW?)
No Brian and others object to the broad brush, unresearched, ad hominem attack. You are most welcome to critize his views (with direct quotes would be preferred), but you implied most sceptical scientists are in it for the money, and then failed to even find a real conflict of interest for one. This is clutching at straws.
My point about conflict of interest was aimed generally at modelers. Their status and their current livelihood rests on it. And I didn’t name any specifically. I don’t need too. Where are the large groups of modelers who are paid to find other causes of climate change?
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JoAnne asked me to be “nice to Robin” because JoAnne thought that Robin was “being sincere”
– I had NOT responded so pleasantly prior to JoAnne’s encouagement because it looked to me like Robin’s agenda was to show off and condescend.
My warming to Robin came after Robin’s performance demonstrated that JoAnne’s assessment of Robin appeared to be incorrect.
I’ll revert back to the same intolerance for condescention, because I usually find that people who condescend have very little to actually condescend about.
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Robin, do you think that the hundred thou I receive per year from Exxon for being a denier is enough?
Or do you think I’m overpaid for what I don’t know?
Seriously, my kid acted like Robin until she was about 17.
She’s now 43, and lives with the same behaviour from her 20 year old.
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Derek Tipp wrote:
Yes Derek. I read the link, was surprised and informed by it, googled if there had been a resolution to the discrepancy between the ocean temperature as sea level rise, learned that it was also in discrepancy with satellite Clouds and the Earthās Radiant Energy System data, learned that Willis had then looked at the ocean data, and found two errors, one with the XBTs and one with some of the ARGO floats, and learned that correcting the errors resulted in the disappearance of the ocean cooling.
The correction to the paper (.pdf) reporting the cooling was also published in geophysical research letters.
I thanked you for the article, and linked to middle (and most directly relevant to the correction) page of an in depth write up of the situation here. in my post 122-4.
Did you read that link? The one in post 124 works, and maybe the one in this post does too, but I seem to be a bit rubbish at getting the links right, so I’m only hoping about that.
I think that that particular article is based on inaccurate data that has since been corrected.
It is interesting that models get this wrong. They are also poor with rainfall and wind speeds in the tropics. (At least the Hadley Centre model is). Mean surface temperature is increasingly poorly modelled for increasingly smaller regions. The size of the ENSO is too low. The rapidity of the collapse of the Northern Summer Sea Ice was recently unresolved, and AFAIK still is.
Global mean surface temperature is pretty good though.
But I don’t think that it is true to say that because the models aren’t perfect, therefore global warming isn’t happening. We know that the globe is warming from temperature measurements such as the NASA and Hadley centre ones.
Certainly modelled climate should be recognised as having a greater error than is immediately apparent from current global mean surface temperature hindcasts.
I don’t think that you need to bin the whole thing because of the areas in which they are still inaccurate. They are probably still the best way to estimate the effect of increasing CO2 on the global mean surface temperature. And conservation of energy keeps that particular statistic from going too wild in the models. But certainly independent evidence of the climate sensitivity are important.
Such as some of the ones I cited above in my conversation with Joanne that looked at observational data or paleoclimatic reconstructions or earth radiation budget data or ice core data.
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Sorry, that link to the correction published by Willis in Geophysical Research Letters didn’t go off (again)
Here it is again.
Here (hopefully) is that link to the write up about it at NASA.
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They are [ALL] also poor with rainfall and wind speeds in the tropics.
Meaning the models don’t get the heat transfer right. Right?
Right.
The size of the ENSO is too low. The rapidity of the collapse of the Northern Summer Sea Ice was recently unresolved, and AFAIK still is.
I have been arguing for years that the El Nino and Souther Oscillation are incorrectly coupled. Be that as it may, west wind blew out the perrenial sea ice to the Norwegian Sea, leaving only annual ice that was too thin.
We know that the globe is warming from temperature measurements such as the NASA and Hadley centre ones.
Until 1998 or at least 2001, the globe was warming
Give me some direct evidence that the CO2 greenhouse effect is real sinnce neither you nor I believe in a hot spot near the tropopause between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn
Ladies and Gentelmen: ROBIN is going to end the discussion right now, by being the first person on Earth to answer the last riddle:
[drum roll]
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Thanks for the response again Joanne!
Joanne Nova wrote:
I suspect that even if NCAR was heavily downsized, the first two authors of the Meehl et al. would still be there.
[ I was not referring to any particular people. I was referring to the monopolistic balance of money thrown at one side and not the alternatives. ā JN]
I don’t think that all climate research would stop. It is still an interesting and living field, so it will still have students. Moreover climate still causes natural disasters, so it’s research would attract some funding even in a world without warming.
[But if funding halves in any industry, how is that good for any of the specialist members who work in that industry? Most of them either don’t get the next pay-rise, get sacked, lose some spending power, don’t get the upgrade of equipment they want, or just lose status, because, well, climatology is ‘important’, but if we ‘can’t change the weather’, we are not inviting said experts onto many committees and to as many conferences. It’s impossible to argue that climatologists would prefer to have half the funding. ā JN]
But I guess neither of these points is here nor there, because my genuine objection to this analysis, is that I find it difficult to believe that 97% of climate researchers are falsifying their results to protect their careers. I think that falsifying results will endanger a career in any scientific field.
[ In most scientific fields, if you falsify a big Nature paper you are suddenly cited more often, you are the next in line for a promotion and you find it easier to get grants and larger ones too. You attract better PhD students to help you, you are invited to speak at more conferences, and placed higher on the program. Not so in climate science. The funding is too directed, too monopolistic. Most scientific fields are looking for answers, not looking to prove only one side of a hypothesis. There are a few researchers with jobs who are paid to disprove the hypothesis, and most of them are on SourceWatch or DeSmog being pilloried. This is not how science works. ā JN]
I think that I’m suggesting that some of them would. My feeling is most.
[ When you apply for a grant say, “To study localized air movements over the Californian coast and predict what happens when global warming occurs”, you are not doing atmospheric recalculations of Hansens 1984 paper, you just assume it’s right and focus on San Diego’s odd weather patterns, or the effects of the ocean currents nearby, and figure out what happens if you apply 2-4 degrees of warming. In other words, these people are busy, and they are doing good scientific work, but they are not testing the assumption that CO2 warms the planet. If you so work outside your grant you are not ‘doing your job’ so to speak. These people can be honest and hard working but unless someone funds and rewards (rather than attacks) people for finding holes in the AGW theory: What a surprise, it hardly ever happens, and when it does happen – despite the disincentives we ignore the guys who could be brave whistleblowing hero’s, and instead we bring up a mistake they made on a different thing 10 years ago. ā JN]
I think that not all the research is from specifically funded global warming institutions. There are papers coming from universities and general research institutions. Our own CSIRO doesn’t sack or demote scientists when they are moved from project to project.
[Yes there are ones outside the box, but not many, and they are not rewarded – they are bullied – if they publish counter results. (And a lot of the time it’s very hard for them to publish counter results.) Where is the Department of Solar Influence, or the Institute of Non-Man-Made-Climate-Change? ā JN]
Do you think that all the climate research that goes on all over the world has that directive?
[Yes a lot of it does. I will post on it soon. It’s in the IPCC’s mandate for example. IF CO2 has no influence then the IPCC has no reason to exist. ā JN]
Surely at least Phd theses would often be free of directives such as “find a link”?
Does the observation evidence from the papers I linked in my earlier exchange with you constitute empirical evidence?
[ I must have missed it. None of the papers I saw referred to observational evidence. They pointed at climate models or lab tests. Can you find the comment and I’ll look again? ā JN]
Okay. I’ll take that on board, and I accept your argument about skeptics congregating in organisations that are skeptical. I hadn’t considered that.
[ Thank you. None of the alarmists sites consider it. It’s yet another illogical distractor aimed to leave a bad smell and avert people from the real question that they can’t answer “Where’s the evidence”. I wish more people had your ability to recognize a reasonable point and move on, this debate would be more productive. ā JN]
This point is also fair. But I think that it applies to your next paragraph as well as it does to my comments about Carter.
Point taken though.
[Thanks again. You are proving yourself to be unusual. Fair comment about my para next, except that my point still stands. I mean can you name climate models who are paid to back other causes of climate? I don’t think there is a Centre for Cloud Research that is modeling the weather and would receive more money and kudos if it proved that clouds controlled the weather, nor are there many people who would receive more money and other rewards to model say, solar influences. Svensmark has done some (very successfully), but can’t get enough funding. He had to work from a basement, rig his own gear, and has been ‘put off’ delayed and ‘unhelped’ to use CERN to further his theory. In contrast there are 22 large models of climate that are funded by carbon related money. ā JN]
[You are asking good questions, and it’s useful for me. Probably I should write this up properly as a post on it’s own. Thanks. ā JN]
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Brian Valentine wrote:
Please don’t misquote me. The quote was: “They are also poor with rainfall and wind speeds in the tropics. (At least the Hadley Centre model is).” It is perfectly clear that inserting the word all does not maintain what I said.
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“”quote”” is the name of “quote”
“quote” is a noun or verb containing five letters
quote is a verbatim repetition of somebody’s words identified as a “quote”
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Robin, I got the post number wrong when I referred to 114, I should have put 174. You will see that that link refers to up to date data. You will see that the missing heat in the oceans has continued to date – 6 years! The data is accurate and is confirmed by Professor John Christy. In case of doubt here is the link. Here is one small section of the article:
“In brief, we know of no mechanism by which vast amounts of āmissingā heat can be hidden, transferred, or absorbed within the earthās system. The only reasonable conclusion-call it a null hypothesis-is that heat is no longer accumulating in the climate system and there is no longer a radiative imbalance caused by anthropogenic forcing. This not only demonstrates that the IPCC models are failing to accurately predict global warming, but also presents a serious challenge to the integrity of the AGW hypothesis.” The figures are very clear.
10
Pielke seems to be arguing that this “might be cyclical.”
How could that be true? It would have been seen long ago, since the effect (even diluted) would be a big anamoly to known oscillations.
Heaven only knows when we are going to quit playing the Loch Ness Monster game with AGW.
You can’t see the Loch Ness Monster! Nobody can actually see him, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t there!
He’s hiding!
He’ll come get you one day!!!!!
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Brian – there is evidence of a cyclical change of temperature, though its cause is not understood and may have nothing to do with man. Pielke certainly seems to be on to something worth looking at.
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You mean, subtracting out the known oscillations there is something left over that is periodic?
I’ve been doing that for years, I’ve never seen anything like that, I’m not going to argue with Pielke though
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Brian Valentine wrote:
Better just to take the Fourier transform. Any periodicity will show up without any need to pollute the data by subtracting estimates of responses to known forcings.
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Oh, I have, Robin, FFT of the residual left nothing with any reliable periodic correlation down to at least 6th order.
Good idea though, and additional thoughts or insights would be welcome.
As time passes, and the paucity of actual evidence for AGW becomes smaller still, I hope you will follow your intuition about the veracity of AGW.
People who continue to cling to the idea of AGW with vigourous tenacity seem (to me) to be doing it to convince themselves; almost as if skepticism was a mortal sin.
But you, with what I know to be your endorsement of open thought, would not fall into such an ethical dilemma
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Derek Tipp wrote:
I’ll have a read of it. It looks interesting.
Minor point of order: The IPCC models are not failing because the IPCC doesn’t have any models since the IPCC doesn’t do any research. What they do is report on the state of the science based on all the research that has been done.
From the IPCC mandate:
As an exercise in finding the common ground before we plunge into a discussion of this article, do we agree that the oceans have warmed significantly since the 1970, and particularly strongly 2001-2004?
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I’m staying WAY out of that one!!!
Good night from Arlington, Virginia, USA
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Brian Valentine Qrote:
What’s the 6th order of a Fourier transform mean?
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Plus, I wouldn’t do it on the residual, I’d do it on the raw data.
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f SUB i HAT := SUM FROM (k .eq. 1) TO 6 a f SUB k exp(ikt}
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sightly off – too tired to tyoe good nite
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Robin: I hope you don’t mind. I’ve added inline comments into #212 in reply. I find it faster than cut and pasting, and it makes the flow easier to follow.
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Good summaries, JoAnne!
Robin, may I ask a small favour of you?
Would you read (in his own words) about why the young Isaeli physicist Nir Shaviv became an AGW sceptic?
I wish there were more younger people on board with this – most of the more outspoken sceptics like Carter and me are older
older goats
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You can say it all you like. It doesn’t make it true.
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Boris, isn’t it about time for “Scottie” to beam you back up to the Enterprise?
They’ve probably been looking all over for you.
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Hello Jo, and thanks again for the time you took to make a response to my post.
I started by addressing the points as they were written, but it read back as both too confrontational, and too demanding of your time to respond again.
But I do find that argument that the reason that over 95% of the published scholarly papers only find that the warming (at least since the middle of last century) is anthropogenic because scientists are biased starkly not compelling for a number of reasons:
1) Democracies donāt like global warming. The reason is that it creates an imperative to regulate or tax now for benefits that wonāt occur inside the electoral term. And the evidence is that this is the case.
1 a) Bush administration’s famous interference with science included significant censorship of NASAās GISS on climate change.
1 b) The government review process in the IPCC reports always produces a weakening, not strengthening of the statements. Particularly demanding are the government delegations of USA, China, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
1 c) Government policy on global warming is has all been targeted at appeasing the public, not reducing carbon emissions. No government has ever enacted a policy that reduces fossil fuel supply; only use. In fact there has been a resource rush to exploit resources while the market exists, including government incentives.
So government research bodies (GISS, NCAR, Hadley, CSIRO) can only be under pressure to find against AGW.
2) Science respects most a paradigm shifting paper.
If there was strong evidence that AGW was wrong, every scientist would want to be the one to publish the research (And collect the Nobel Prize). And every academic journal would be clamouring to be the one to publish it. (Once convinced that it is correct, and wonāt blow up in their face).
So academic bodies can only be under pressure to find against global warming.
3) Science disrespects most non reproducible results.
The climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 will one day be much more precisely known. Getting it vastly wrong will be bad for the career, and getting it right will be good.
So individual careers can only be advanced by getting it right, not manipulating data.
4) As a sceptic (in the general sense), I am familiar with the conspiracy theory argument. The guys who think that the government did the 9/11 attacks have a government conspiracy that managed to cover up everything, the guys who think the moon landings were faked have a NASA conspiracy that managed to cover up everything, the guys who think that vaccinations are bad have a big pharma conspiracy that is keeping research under wraps, the people who think that you can run an engine on water have a fossil fuel conspiracy that buys up the patents and keeps them from production.
And evidence to the contrary can always be responded to by invoking a bigger conspiracy involving more people and power.
āThe AAAS supports AGWā => the AAAS does not represent the actual views of scientists but is controlled by a small committee of AGW supporters.
āThe NSA, the NRC, the AGU, the GSA, the AMA, the WHO, the AMS and the WMO also support AGWā => the small controlling committee that doesnāt represent the individual scientists are not insular to one organisation, so all national scientific organisations get polluted at the top by this āgroupthinkā.
āThe LāAccademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Italy, the AcadĆ©mie des sciences, France, and the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher, Germany agree with AGWā => The G8 and the UN are controlled by pro AGW forces that manipulate member science academies across language and cultural barriers, so that they do not represent their membershipās views.
āScholarly papers find that AGW is realā => editors of journals are part of the antiscientific conspiracy, and are foregoing the short term gain of being the one to break the story that AGW has no support, for some nefarious purpose.
For my part, I think that people who seek money and power tend to end up in business or politics, whereas scientists tend to be those who have fallen in love with a subject, and seek truth. I do realise that there is no proof of this because questions can always be responded to with āthatās part of the conspiracyā. But I donāt think that I will ever find the conspiracy argument compelling.
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Joanne Nova wrote:
Of course:
An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity, Journal of Climate (2002). Was the one I meant, but there are others that I liked to that don’t use climate models:
The Climate Sensitivity and Its Components Diagnosed from Earth Radiation Budget Data is another estimate of cliamte sensitivity that is completely independent of climate models.
Using multiple observationally-based constraints to estimate climate sensitivity is a meta analysis of several observationally based papers using Bayesian techniques. (All that prior and posterior probability distribution functions, that one only vaguely remembers from statistics.) (The link is only to a draft … the paper proper is available from Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L06704, doi:10.1029/2005GL025259.)
Another independent approach uses a neural net instead of a climate model:
Probabilistic climate change projections using neural networks
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As I have stated earlier the estimates of cs2xco2 may be model independent – but that doesn’t mean they are assumption independent and it is the same issue with the models – the assumptions that go into them make the results, well, consistent with the assumptions, anyway
I gave a presntation at the 2009 Heartland conference (Deny-a-Palooza!!!) on experimental methods of determination of greenhouse effects of CO2 in the troposphere, paper sumbitted to the j of climatol, if if experiments were actually carried out then some experimental data to settle?) the issue might be available
in a few years
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Robin, Thanks for reposting the papers, again, these are not observational empirical papers. They are not recording formanifera, sediments, isotopes, gases, temperatures, etc etc et al or even horribly complicated tree rings.
An estimate is not something you can see, hold, record, or listen to from the real world.
Thousands of scientists have been looking through the last 500 million years of history and yet none of them have found any observations of a time and place when carbon rose either concurrently or before temperature.
And as for you being unconvinced about conspiracies – 1. I didn’t mention any. 2. I wrote the salary and monopolistic funding issue not as a means of ‘proving’ anything scientific – because it can never do that – but you were asking effectively ‘how can so many scientists be wrong’.I provided a possible explanation why so many can be a/ not paying attention, b/ assuming it’s a problem without checking, and c/actively ignoring things that work against their interests.
Note that it’s using the fallacious argument by authority to prove that AGW exists because “lots of scientists say so”. Science is NOT Democratic. We don’t vote for theories. They are right or wrong, in and of themselves, and independent of our existence. History is replete with examples of mass human belief in things that were wrong.
Scientists listen to the real world. The real world is not saying ‘blame carbon’ because it has given us no examples of significant warming or correlations with turning points.
I repeat – yes carbon is a greenhouse gas. Yes the world has warmed. But the two are not necessarily connected. Carbon could be adding infinitesimally small warming, Or some other factor (eg clouds) could be providing feedback that works against the carbon effect. Either way, the only way to know if carbon matters is to read results from the only life-size expermient there is. The Planet.
I want some output from the real world, not from a highly simplified copy of it.
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“1) Democracies donāt like global warming. “
Hahhaha. Sorry. What governments wouldn’t LOVE a reason to give the governors more power? What better than to ask for more money and have rules to regulate cars, buses, power stations, forestry, farms, factories, mines, and cow flatulence?
“2) Science respects most a paradigm shifting paper.”
Yes of course. And they show that respect by accusing them of taking bribes from oil companies, attacking their religion, calling them names, and magnifiying and exaggerating every single error in anything that person ever did. Righto. That’s respect that we all want to work for.
“3) Science disrespects most non reproducible results.”
You are taking about a perfect world of science. Yes, in an idealized form, where science is done by Spock, and is free of intimidation, bullying, status, pay packets and social exclusion doesn’t matter – yes.
“If there was strong evidence that AGW was wrong, every scientist would want to be the one to publish the research (And collect the Nobel Prize).”
Noooo. Havent you heard? You get nobel prizes for making inaccurate movies interviewing no scientists.
“Bush administrationās famous interference with science included significant censorship of NASAās GISS on climate change.”
Ah yes. Hansen is repressed. He’s only done 1400 or so televised performances.
Yet the 800 year lag has not been properly graphed or published – anywhere.
“1 b) The government review process in the IPCC reports always produces a weakening, not strengthening of the statements. “
Ahhh – which is why they are only “90% sure” we are to blame as of 2007? Don’t think so.
That they keep downgrading sea level forecasts etc is a mere reflection of reality. The evidence has gone against them completely since 1999. They’re only arguing the biggest exaggeration they can get away with.
There is no conspiracy.
But there is no evidence either.
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Joanne Nova wrote:
Well, they come up with an estimate of climate sensitivity from measured data. The instrumental temperature record and the data from the ERBE satellites.
They are independent confirmation of climate sensitivity estimates from general circulation models.
Crikey, Jo. I think you might be mistaken there.
1) The lag is only about 800 years. Since any of the ends of glaciation periods lasts 5000 or 6000 years, every single one of them has atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration rising concurrently with temperature (for 80% of the rise).
2) Because it is well known that the glaciation/interglacial cycles are timed my Milankovitch cycles, which are from orbital properties of the earth, theory demands that CO2 does not cause them. It operates as a positive feedback mechanism. So I strongly suspect that few people were looking through the ice core records for the end of an interglacial period that didn’t have the 800 year lag.
3) Both of the above aside, if someone was looking for a warming strong enough to be timed by ice core, that wasn’t controlled by Milankovitch cycles, in an attempt to find a CO2 rise not lagging a warming, then one of the first ones they should look at would be the end of the younger dryas, because it is recent and a significant rapid warming … and they would have found one right there (to within the error of the relative timing of air and ice samples within a core, which is a couple of centuries).
4) The current warming was also preceded by the CO2 rise. CO2 started rising by 1850-60 (at least), but temperatures didn’t hit the minimum until about 1910.
And that’s a point that we agree on.
No we don’t vote. Theories do become part of our knowledge (and so textbooks) by consensus, which is similar, but slower. There was certainly no election in which thermodynamics became a valid theory, but it is taught in schools because enough scientists agree with it. There is no formalisation of this. Enough scientists simply agree.
Global warming isn’t like a belief in witchcraft. There’s a tested science behind optics, thermodynamics, the greenhouse effect and meteorology. It might be like Newtonian Mechanics, where it is a good approximation in many circumstances by a poor approximation in others. However, if that is the case, then again, precaution is the non-suicidal principle … because it could be a whole lot worse as well as a whole lot better than apparent in the current climatic situation.
Atmospheric Carbon dioxide and temperature are highly correlated in the ice core record.
(see: Covariation of carbon dioxide and temperature from the Vostok ice core after deuterium-excess correction.
“[..] we derive a new estimate for the covariation of COā and temperature, of rĀ² = 0.89 for the past 150 kyr and rĀ² = 0.84 for the period 350ā150 kyr ago.”)
What do you mean by “correlations with turning points”?
That’s perfectly valid, except you need “and” not “or” because without a strong negative feedback the effect of carbon is not infinitesimal. (Although only about 1/3rd of current best estimates).
But running an experiment on the planet should be done with the precautionary principle. We’re in the test-tube, and we’ve got nowhere else to go. Let us buy the insurance of spending 2% of world GDP per year to ameliorate greenhouse emissions in case Stern is right and the cost of adaptation is 20% of world GDP per year. And then if in the event that (counter to all paleocliamtic evidence) it becomes apparent that Lindzen’s iris turns out to be the case, we can then stop spending the 2% and go nuts on the fossil fuels (until they run out).
The copies are certainly not perfect. And we should continue to improve them, and compare them to each other, and the real one.
And our decisions should be made in the understanding that the copies aren’t perfect.
But there is no value in simply ignoring what they say. Especially when they say “if you keep this up you will commit 30% of species to extinction by 2050”. Because if you run that experiment on the real world, you’ll get a more accurate result.
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Robin – have you had an opportunity to look at my link to the work of Dr. Pielke Sr. in my post 215? This paper is very convincing and without an adequate explanation it leaves CO2 in the clear as far as serious global warming is concerned. Here is the link, in case you cannot find it.
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Excellent reply and summary, JoAnne Nova! Euge!
Robin writes,
“But there is no value in simply ignoring what they say. Especially when they say āif you keep this up you will commit 30% of species to extinction by 2050ā³. Because if you run that experiment on the real world, youāll get a more accurate result.”
Oh puhLEASE. That’s some Science Fiction/Barton Levenson/Tim Flannery hyperventelated paranoia not even worthy of someone with INTEREST in science, let alone a scientist.
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Derek Tipp Wrote:
Yes, mate, I’ve looked at it.
But I was going to disagree with some of the premises and methods, and I wanted to get a feel for what common ground we had in order to calibrate my response.
Do we agree that the oceans have warmed significantly since the 1970, and particularly strongly 2001-2004?
(As in do you find the ocean heat content data in this paper: Global ocean heat content 1955ā2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems, S. Levitus, et al. GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, (2009) credible?)
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Brian Valentine wrote:
“Oh puhLEASE. Thatās some Science Fiction/Barton Levenson/Tim Flannery hyperventelated paranoia not even worthy of someone with INTEREST in science, let alone a scientist.”
Leery as I am of trying to re-engage you in meaningful discourse Brian, it was about the centre estimate of a high CO2 emission scenario as published in Nature. Which isn’t known for science fiction, but for being probably the most respected scientific publication in the English language.
Extinction risk from climate change, Thomas et al. NATURE |VOL 427 | 8 JANUARY 2004.
And it seems quite credible given the biodiversity drop over the last few decades, according to recent trends in the WWF’s living planet index:
An epidemic of extinctions: Decimation of life on earth.
Do you have a scientific reason for believing the methods of Thomas et al. to be flawed, or the species tracked by the living planet index non-representative?
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I should add that the paper received a lot of interest from research scientists, having over 1000 papers and publications citing it according to google scholar … about thirty times the average interest even for papers published in that esteemed journal.
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Robin: “Well, they come up with an estimate of climate sensitivity from measured data. “
Righto. Yet another estimate-guesstimate. We don’t know the major driving forces behind climate variations. There is no empirical evidence that carbon makes a significant difference. Agreed? You can’t name any – (but don’t feel bad, the guys at the top of AGW can’t either). I can create all kinds of estimates from all kinds of real observations. It’s not evidence.
Point 4. Current warming was Not preceded by CO2. the globe has been warming since the middle of the Little Ice age: glaciers have been melting since 1800, sea levels have been rising even longer. The world was warmer for most of the last 5000 years and Co2 was lower. There is a poor correlation.
Global warming IS like a belief in witchcraft. Without evidence, without falsifiability, with intimidation, threats, innuendo, bullying and unbacked assumptions, what’s the difference? One uses cauldrons, the other, models.
What do you mean by ācorrelations with turning pointsā?
If a slope correlates, it looks impressive on a graph, but for a cause and effect link nothing beats turning points. Why, because when temps rise, the turning point for carbon follows (usually) hundreds of years later. The same on the downturn (tho the lag is often longer). Turning points show us that temperatures really do drive carbon. The lack of any turning points due to carbon means carbon is not a major driver. It may do minor insignificant stuff, but it it outweighed everytime by Something Else. (And we Don’t know what that something else is.)
Svensmark has a graph of solar cycles and the turning points match the temperatures. Carbon just rises monotonically (in the last 100 years), the correlation is crap (Pardon the language)- no turning points.
The lag in vostok is ‘only’ 800 years. ‘Only?’ Carbon isn’t controlling anything from one year behind, or 10,000 years behind. It’s a cause and effect thing. It comes after.
And yes, I’m aware of the ‘amplification theory’. Whether it is insignificant or significant is speculation – unbacked by evidence. The fact that the temp and co2 graphs rise for 5000 years (and the slope doesn’t obviously change) tells us it could be that CO2 makes very little difference. We can explain the big moves in the graph just by knowing that warming oceans take 800 years to turn over and they release co2. Occam’s razor comes to mind.
“But running an experiment on the planet should be done with the precautionary principle.”
AbSOlutely. I totally agree – which is why I cannot support something that increases the likelyhood of death and disease in the poorest people on earth without some (any) evidence.
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Robin – according to the article the oceans have been cooling since mid 2003. So before 2003 it is agreed that they were warming. Clearly there has been a change since 2003, and that is where the temperature record parts company with a theory that says that we will get continuous warming – in fact alarmists say that warming will increase in line with increases in CO2. Why should the world take massively expensive precautions for a theory which just doesn’t stack up?
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Nicely put, Jo Anne.
Robin would do well to emulate Jo Anne and she would benefit many people by doing so,
regrettably, I don’t think Robin is bold enough to do that, and would prefer to cower in the “consensus”.
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Cower in the consensus, and condescend to people who try to demonstrate what “evidence” looks like. Blah.
Yuck.
Role model behaviour, it isn’t.
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Brian Valentine Wrote:
Do you have a scientific reason for believing the methods of Thomas et al. to be flawed, or the species tracked by the living planet index non-representative?
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Derek Tipp:
May 15th, 2009 at 2:16 am
Yes, I agree with that.
The paper also claims to spot a cooling trend that is different from long term model predictions. The model predictions are predictions of an average warming throughout the sunspot cycle.
Would you agree that solar irradiance would affect the temperature of the oceans?
So that if we were looking at ocean heat content over a shorter period than the (approximately 11 year) sunspot cycle then even without any long term effects we expect an increase if the solar activity increases over the period and a decrease if the solar activity decreases over the period?
And would you also agree that if we want to confidently say “the ocean heat content has decreased” or “the ocean heat content has increased” that the increase or decrease should be more than the experimental error of the measurement?
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Thanks again for taking the time to respond Joanne.
Joanne Nova Wrote:
There is certainly an error associated with these measurements too.
But you seem to be dismissing them as being without information.
I think that independent verification of an estimate using entirely different evidence does add a lot of confidence that the original estimate is in the correct ballpark.
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I have.
To the extent that such extinctions be credible within the advertised 41 year time period from now, there must exist credible evidence that such species are in such limited numbers NOW that THEY ARE ON THE VERGE of extinction, and no such evidence for the number of species considered nearly approaches such numbers.
Otherwise, there must be credible evidence that such changes will occur such that the species CANNOT reproduce under changes that are certain to occur.
(extinction = no longer reproduces)
Guess what. Evolution acts such as to help species survive under changing conditions.
Evolution is an ongoing process, Robin, and hasn’t the slightest notion of Weep and Wail and Hand-Wringing Conjectures of misguided articles appearing in Nature or any where else.
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/end of my saga with Robin.
I’ll let Jo Anne deal with the rest, to the extent that the patience of a human being will permit.
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Sorry to make such a brief response, I mean to address the rest of your post presently. But I shall also answer your question:
Joanne Wrote:
There are multiple lines of empirical evidence that carbon makes a significant difference.
A strong one that I am aware of is with respect to the current warming. We know that of the driving forces behind the climate, the one that has applied the most warming force is carbon dioxide, at about 1.66 W/mĀ². (A graph of radiative forcing components)
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Might as well resign yourself to it, Jo – you and All the Little Beasties are going to die because of Global Warming.
Why? Because Robin says so, that’s why, and with no more than a shred of irrproducible evidence her little graph about Radiative Forcing Components that I could rearrange with a drop of a hat ON THE SAME ASSUMPTIONS used to derive the graph.
Of all the ailments supposedly conncected to AGW, the etiology and incidence of only one morbid condition am I sure is strongly coupled to AGW: paranoid schizophrenia.
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Look at what the communists are claiming NOW
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/environment/pouring-cold-water-on-global-warming-14299972.html
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Brian,
If the dunderheads do manage to force us all out of combustion-driven cars and into something THEY find more amenable to their cause, little doubt man-displaced water vapor will be the next target. Can’t help but wonder who will profit by law.
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Brian Valentine wrote:
So no, you don’t have any scientific evidence that the species tracked by the living planet index non-representative, and furthermore you, without any evidence, claim that the 30% drop in biodiversity that they have measured is not only not correct, but that that number of species aren’t even on the verge of extinction.
You man not be aware that not every species can exist in the temperature and precipitation range that Homo Sapien and Rattus Rattus can.
For instance, a study of 819 species of eucalyptus in Australia found that 53% of sepcies have ranges spanning less that 3Ā°C of mean annual temperature, 41% have a range of less than 2Ā°C and 25% have a range of less than 1Ā°C. So when the regional temperature increases 1Ā°C, 25% of species will probably be displaced from 100% of their current range.
Eucalyptus don’t migrate very fast.
Half of the species lived only in a range the area of a 110km radius circle or less. And Eucs are a very successful family. The median range size for all the worlds species would be considerably smaller than that.
That means that when mean temperatures move 1Ā°C, 25% of eucalyptus will be displaced completely out of their current range.
Climatic Range Sizes of Eucalyptus Species in Relation to Future Climate Change
Geographic and Climatic Range Sizes of Australian Eucalypts and a Test of Rapoport’s Rule
I’m not sure that it’s entirely sensible to suggest that the eucalyptus species evolve into a new species that can handle their new climate.
Now that evolution has been performed in the lab, we have a basis for guessing how long it takes. One of the 12 populations of e. coli evolved to metabolise citrate in only a little over 30,000 generations. Being generous, and using this as the expected number of generations to evolve, even though the presence of the other 11 populations implies that 300,000 might be a better estimate, we can guess how long it would take a eucalypt to evolve.
Now there are a wide range of Eucalyptus, but 6 years is the minimum generation time for some common ones in the wild. So (very conservatively) we need about 200,000 years. Between now and 2050.
I humbly suggest that you might be mistaken on a couple of your points, and that, in fact, the paper’s attention by the thousands of scientists who cited it in their work, did not, as you suggest, read and cite a paper “not even worthy of someone with INTEREST in science, let alone a scientist.”
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zzzzzzzzz
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Awakening momentarily from an awful dream, I happened to think, that the world has warmed, of the order, 1.5 Kelvin degrees over a century.
Now to prove her poing about eucalypti going the way of the sabre-toothed tiger and the 10 penny cup of coffee, ladies and gentlemen, Robin will demonstrate her point by listing at least three species of eucalypti known to have vanished from the face of the Earth over the last century.
[drum roll]
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While we wait for our alarmist to return with a prognosication of the World lasting another thousand months or a mere 100 more, I should like to comment upon the Catlin Arctic Expedition.
I find the British Government CONTEMPTABLE for endorsing this escapade, as if the Artic has suddenly warmed some 20 degrees, unknown to anyone, making the journey no more dangerous than a week in the mountains.
The explorer’s lives were UNJUSTAFIABLY risked as a publicity stunt for Royal Socity fantasies about an Arctic that didn’t exist, together with UNCONSCIONABLE predictions that the explorer’s might have to spend as many as FIVE DAYS IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN WATER WEARING NOTHING BUT THEIR SNOW SUITS
Those who egged them on, including the demented Prince Chuckles, ought to be horse whipped for this demonstration of their OWN egotism.
I admire the explorer’s bravery and I’m glad they were removed from the purgatory safely.
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Brian Valentine said:
Brian, you appear to have missed the point.
It was not that I am familiar with the species of recently extinct Eucalyptus species. It was that small regional temperature or precipitation changes decimate ecological communities. The Eucalypt study was merely an illustrative example of how small species ranges are, that I happened to have on my desk.
You obviously found this point counter intuitive, and you’re not the only one. It is difficult to believe that a species will be out competed outside a annual mean temperature range of 1Ā°C when the diurnal temperature range is ten times that. Unless you know some biology.
But species ranges are smaller than you think, because all the species that you recognise are only the fantastically successful ones. Half of all species have a range of less than about 50 miles, and surprisingly small climate changes to that region puts surprisingly many of the species under extinction pressure.
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Thank you for your very nice reply, Robin.
I realy do admire your persistent search for the truth.
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But Robin, surely it is well known that temperatures have changed significantly more than 1 or 2 degrees over short periods many times in the past in regions of the planet due to natural causes. After those episodes, no doubt some species went extinct, but new species due to inter-breeding have been formed to take their place. That is how the natural world works. It is now clear that the world is cooling as you can see from the evidence from the oceans, contrary to the predictions of somputer climate models.
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Don’t worry, Derek, they’ll adjust the computer models (somehow) to make this appear as if they know this would happen all along.
Then clothe the deception in fancy-sounding and meaningless obsurity, such as
“temperature modulation of near surface Ocean water by mid-zone turbulence monthly exchanging atmospheric heat by convection cells known to arise from the precipitous heating from surface level to those latitudes known to support Benard convection within mid-latitude regions known to respond to matutional changes in temperature on the average larger than annual.”
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Given that there has been a regular cycle of ice ages approximately every 100,000 years, and the temperature variation during these cycles was pretty close to 10 degrees Centigrade (peak-to-peak), I would argue that any organism requiring 200,000 years to adapt to a few degrees change would be well and truly dead by now.
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Thanks for reading my post, Tel!
Tel wrote:
Although deglaciation accompanied by extinctions, the current rate of extinctions is much greater, and the mean global temperature change much smaller (to date), suggesting that trees have generally been able to respond to a deglaciation by migration.
There are a number of reasons why this might not work as well with the current climate change.
1) This climate change is in a new direction. Warming from the top of an interglacial will migrate many species off the top of mountains and the pole end of continents that have had ranges have existed continuously throughout the last million years or so of glaciation cycles.
2) This climate change is very fast. Recent warming has been comfortably over 0.1Ā°C per decade, the current climate change is an order of magnitude faster than the about 0.02Ā°C per decade that is the (in itself very rapid) warming during a deglaciation. Which, depending on your seed dispersal techniques, might be significant.
3) Human land use forming a barrier to migration. Forest movement is easier when the forest is continuous, but problematic if you have to cross a couple of multi-hundred thousand hectares of corn plantations. Or a city.
I certainly don’t attribute all of the recent drop in biodiversity to climate change. Habitat loss and various forms of pollution are probably more major contributors. But some of the have been attributed to climate change (amphibians in particular), so the record shows that species that have survived a couple of glaciations cycles can be made extinct by current climate change.
But certainly if the methods used in the paper that I linked are applied to the last deglaciation they do dramatically overestimate extinctions. And neither does the paper predict extinctions as such. It uses the phrase “committed to extinction” to mean that the species no longer has any viable range.
If its range does not include areas that warm now, it might be because it is attacked by insects, bacteria or fungi, in which case the devastation is rapid and dramatic. Such as we have seen in Canada in recent years by the increasing breeding success of the mountain pine beetle further north than before. If it is outcompeted by a tree, it might be a century or two before it is actually extinct in the wild.
Speaking as an outsider, the climate change driven terrestrial extinctions that are happening in Australia now seem to be prevalently due to changes in precipitation patterns more than due to temperature change directly.
But certainly the time left for subantartic ocean communities can be measured in metres, as temperature predators are sighted each year further south and deeper.
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Derek Tipp wrote:
Partly. But human land use has made the current situation much more dire.
Or doesn’t work, as the recent 30% drop in biodiversity implies.
We are still discussing that point, Derek, and I think that it is not correct. Certainly the claim of cooling over the last 6 years is less than the margin of error in the Willis reference, (the last reference of your linked article). (Here’s the link). If you look at figure 1, I thing you’d be hard pressed to claim that the data definitely shows cooling. (And the paper that I linked to in my previous post on that subject, is more recent still, and shows a continued warming).
Furthermore sea level rise is still ongoing, which is awkward to explain if you claim ocean cooling. (See: CSIRO Sea Level Rise).
And finally, I note that your linked article covers a time period from the warmest part of the last sunspot cycle to the current extended dearth of solar activity. This will underestimate the long term warming trend. So the comparison of this to the increase in heat content projected by models is invalid.
I was hoping you might agree with some of those points?
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Jo Nova Wrote:
Well, yes.
But also the coolest point on the instrumental record was about 1910. I agree that it has been warming since the middle of the LIA, but depending on the time scale you look at it is also possible to claim 1910 or 1970.
1970 is the one after which most of the warming is universally attributed to anthropogenic global warming. (Oreskes’ essay is probably too famous to need linking to, but here it is in case).
I have not heard that the world was warmer for most of the last 5000 years. Do you know where it comes from?
I think that the world was cooler for most, if not all, of the last 5000 years. The mean of these 8 temperature reconstructions from the scholarly literature puts the warmest part of the current interglacial at 0.2 or 0.3Ā°C cooler than current temperatures.
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That post failed until I took out the link to the Oreskes essay, which I wanted as justification of the use of the word “universally”.
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Robin – the problem with our discussion is that we can each quote from different papers that reach opposing conclusions. Willis may say that he now believes his original results were wrong due to instrumental error, but Loehl’s work in 2009 is supposed to have a smaller margin of error and give an even larger heat deficiency in the oceans. You say the sea level is still rising, but apparently Cazenove says “steric sea levels peaked in 2005” and since then “the volume of the oceans has contracted”.
Clearly I am not in a position to say who is correct. Roger Pielke Sr. told me very recently that the conclusions are still correct and the only question is how long the cooling of the oceans will continue. Even this short trend must call into question the CO2 theory – because it shows that other factors are able to cancel it out completely even if it is significant (and there is no proof that it is.
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Observation can only support a known field of results.
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You might want to check the previous interglacial (approx 120000 years ago) which was about 3 degrees warmer than the 1999 reference temperature. There might be PREDICTIONS that we will see 3 degrees of warming in the near future, but so far it hasn’t happened yet.
That certainly is fast. I presume that when you say “recent” you mean the last 100 years or so (since climate change cannot be measured on a smaller scale) implying that it was 10 degrees colder back around 1901. Strangely, no historical record of any glaciation in the leadup to the Great War.
I agree that human land use is a far bigger cause of extinctions than global warming. This makes me think that the finite resource of “Green Politics” should be channeled in more useful directions than attempting to stop CO2 production.
I posit that there is nothing sexy and exciting about mentioning how land clearing for farming is wiping out species, but there is something sexy and exciting about “Saving the Whole World (TM)” from “Terrible Destruction (TM)” caused by runaway greenhouse effect. Thus the Green political movement has been seeking maximum impact, rather than common sense, and the doom sayers are the only Green voice that gets heard anymore. You no doubt have heard of the boy who cried wolf, well the Greenies are ready to learn that lesson over again.
Sadly, the more moderate and sensible Greens (and I put myself in that category) are gonna get whacked by the backlash caused by a bunch of radical fruitloops who have been conned into thinking they are rescuing the world.
Like it or not, the human population is rising, and those humans need food and resources. From this, we can say that they future WILL NOT be the same as the past. Trying to plan for the future by making every attempt to keep it the same as the past is a damn stupid idea, guaranteed to fail. If conservation of species depends on holding the world in some sort of stasis field (always being frightened of change because change is the unknown) then it is likewise guaranteed to fail.
Also, humans can improve the mobility of species. After all we have Eucalyptus growing in Africa and SE Asia as plantations, we also have foxes, rabits and cats in Australia, and wallabies in the US and Europe. Some species hit jackpot, others came out losers. The future will be different to the past. In a rapidly changing environment, general-purpose species are the best adapted, in a slow changing environment, specialist species hold niches better than the generalists. Is there a good reason to offer charity to the specialists once their niche is no longer viable? Would any creature offer charity to us if the roles were reversed?
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They are all grown adults. I find it far more contemptible to treat them as children who are unable to make decisions about their own lives. I do also believe that the organisations sponsoring the expedition should be footing the bill for the rescue (rather than the taxpayer).
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The three were obviously incapable of making sound judgment regarding their own well being, and it is thereby the duty of Government to discourage it strongly, not coax them on, and refuse to be a part of an imbecile publicity stunt that a fool could perceive in advance to be lunacy.
I knew from the moment the “adventure” was announced what they would obviously confront and so would any other non-resident of a psychotic’s fantasy.
They might as well have been launched tied to bouys into the Atlantic to travel trans-Atlantic in the water to “show that global warming had warmed the oceans.”
It IS, however, the Government’s responsibility to rescue a citizen from any predicament, no matter how imbicle the thinking was that landed them in the predicament – the Government can be reimbrsed later if needed by the survivors themselves, or whoever it was who goaded them into a precarious situation.
In this case, it was the Government itself that encouraged this brainless endeavour – and is thereby liable for the cost of saving those who were terribly misguided.
I’m hoping voters will take heed – although they are rather stuck with the Royalty they unfortunately inherited, and they cannot vote the Prince of Wails out of office.
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This would be tantamount to depriving them of their humanity, I will not be party to such nonsense. Government cannot and will not fix the problems of the world by instructing people how to live their lives. Only the person whose life is at risk can be entitled to make the decision that may (or may not) put their life at risk. No one else could ever possibly be qualified.
The duty of government is to protect people from damaging each other; to maintain a reasonable, and simple, system of laws that the citizens can understand and follow; to maintain its own existence against external military threats; and to facilitate commerce. That’s it. The duty of government is absolutely NOT to solve your problems, my problems nor whatever problems the Catlin Arctic Expedition may run into (but I’ll agree in as much as government should not be encouraging such things either, it should be as neutral and uninvolved as possible).
Admittedly, there are many people who do like the idea of government stepping in to solve their problems, which inevitably leads to stuff-ups and political bandwagons such as the AGW rollercoaster.
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By the way, if you go to http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/ you see a number of prominent logos on the front page, such as Nokia, Panasonic, WWF, Caitlin, ECX. These are the organisations who are riding it for publicity, so they should be the ones paying for it (presumably they all voluntarily chose to have their logo up on the site).
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Tel wrote:
Okay. Looking at the same 8 temperature reconstructions from the scholarly literature that I was talking about to Joanne, it looks like:
1) 12,000 years ago the mean global temperature was probably several degrees cooler than now.
2) The warmest part of the interglacial was around 8,000 years ago, and this is probably 0.2 or 0.3Ā°C cooler than 2004, which wasn’t much warmer than 1999.
So I’m not sure that your claim that 12,000 years ago is was warmer than now would have any agreement with current understanding. Do you know where this claim comes from?
Anthropogenic warming only dominates the temperature increase over the last 50 years.
So I was meaning the warming since then.
implying that it was 10 degrees colder back around 1901. Strangely, no historical record of any glaciation in the leadup to the Great War.
No, there’s only been about 10 decades since 1901, so 0.1Ā°C per decade would imply that 1901 was 1Ā°C cooler, not 10Ā°C cooler. Or, to take my actual meaning 1970 was 0.4Ā°C cooler.
The reasons why we should preserve biodiversity is a little outside the scope of a discussion on climate. But briefly, the biggest reason is that we don’t know the ecology precisely enough to know the flow on effects of any given extinction, and any of them might be fatal, or permanently damaging to the health of humans.
There are other arguments that each animal has a unique biochemistry, and each is therefore a resource of study that had academic value and probably medical value. Many of the drugs that medicine uses are from biological origins, and only a fraction of a percent of species have had their biochemistry’s closely studied, so there are probably a dozen cures for cancer out there, and all we have to do is find them before we kill them all.
The most important to me is that they are devastatingly interesting and beautiful, and extinction is a crime against aesthetics.
However you value the resource that is a species, destroying it destroys the resource forever. But certainly the argument that is presented in environmental science is the risk to humans one … which is the strongest one if you’re talking to someone who says “Is there a good reason to offer charity to the specialists once their niche is no longer viable?”, but the far weaker one to anyone with an interest in biology or medicine.
But if you don’t care about biodiversity, you don’t care – and that’s an increasingly prevalent attitude amongst city people with no wilderness oriented hobbies. I wouldn’t put you in any category of green in that case though. Certainly not the “more moderate and sensible” category that you put yourself in.
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Derek Tipp wrote:
Certainly. But perhaps we can also find some common ground about what constitutes a good paper. I think that reasonable handling of errors, and some treatment of the solar cycle when analysing trends over only the falling part of it.
“Energy and the Environment” doesn’t come with a lot of credibility. So I would tend to question that one first when contradicted by the sea level rise data, the earth radiation budget data, and by the geophysical research letters paper looking at the same data.
Excuse my ignorance … who is Cazenove?
I think that it is possible for the .02Ā°C per year warming trend to be swamped by other factors over time periods of less than a sunspot cycle, without forcing a rethink of the effect of CO2. Especially in a time when meltwater from ice could be contributing to the coolness of the measurement of the ocean. As, perhaps, could be inferred by the fact that the error bars are orders of magnitude larger than the measured cooling in the Willis paper.
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“Anthropogenic warming only dominates the temperature increase over the last 50 years.”
– Robin
Only if you are convinced of that explnation, close your eyes to every other logical explanation and refuse to consider any possible valid hypothersis that cannot be dismissed as easily as the AGW idea can be dismissed.
Quite the hallmark of a religious fanatic.
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Incidently, Tel, I hardly consider Government discouragement of hare-brained stunts to be some sort of “micromanagement” of people’s lives.
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Thank you for your very nice compliment about my picture, Jo Anne : )
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Robin: “I think that it is possible for the .02Ā°C per year warming trend to be swamped by other factors over time periods of less than a sunspot cycle, without forcing a rethink of the effect of CO2.”
Please be clear, I have never suggested that just because it’s cooler for a few years that it proves the enhanced greenhouse theory is wrong. The important point is that no one can find any observational evidence, so the theory relies on models or estimates based on a lab test and a lot of assumptions. The recent cool spell is important because none of the models predicted it. It’s another confirmation that Some Mystery Factor is More Important Than Carbon and we don’t know what it is. And the recent non-warming of the oceans is also very important. It’s where the heat is supposedly ‘hidden’. Where else could the ‘extra trapped radiation’ be stored if it’s not in the atmosphere or the oceans? Soil doesn’t make a good heat sink. Maybe there isn’t any extra trapped radiation?
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It appeared to me that Robin was moving toward AGW scepticism, I really did think so, after Joanne had forced Robin to recant a couple of times, at leat partially …
Then my sanguine outlook sank to the same choleric view I had when all this started.
Joanne can try to speed the process up but I think only the passing of time will have any real influence on Robin’s views.
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As far as Naomi Oreskes famous survey goes: 1/ It’s argument by authority. It shows something about the social order ‘climatic scientist’, but not much about The Planet. 2/ Since no one can name THAT paper (the one with evidence that CO2 matters), the Oreskes study will be quoted for years to come – to show how sick our so called ‘peer review system’ was circa 2000-2010.
As I effectively said before, many people studying, say, sloth habitats in antigua, or cranial bypasses in heat-stroke victims, don’t know or care much about detailed calculation of atmospheric physics. These scientists assume Hansen 1984 was right (if they have even heard of that paper). Since hardly anyone is paid or rewarded to find the holes in that paper (or find that other mystery paper with evidence that CO2 has caused global warming) why would we be surprised that scientific researchers have followed the money. I don’t mean that in a malicious way – people who love studying sloths, say, would notice that they stand a chance to get more funding for studying sloths if they use the phrase ‘global warming’ or ‘climate change’. Who can blame them for putting up their hands when money is being offered? Yes thanks.
BTW – The more recent study than Orsekes, found less than half the papers from 2004-2007 endorsed the consensus. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/schulte_two_colmun_fomat.pdf
Only one paper refers to ‘catastropic’ climate change, and as is truly par-for-the-course, it doesn’t offer any evidence.
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I’ve said it before I’ll say it again:
To the “peer-reviewed” argument about demonstrations of validity of AGW, my statement is:
I’m a peer, I didn’t review it and if I did it would have ended up in the loo.
I was a reviewer for US DOE “research” in AGW where I work, I told the people behind this that the efforts were mostly garbage, my objections were mostly over ruled, there is a huge amount of money at stake over this.
Nobody is going to stand up and say “yes I agree this research is useless” if it means that large Federal research grants to National Laboratories will be used for something else and the money transferred elsewhere.
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Joanne Nova Wrote:
Yes, I am pretty clear that that’s your view, Joanne.
(And flat temperature periods of more nearly a whole sunspot cycle have occurred during the current warming, so a six year one is fully unexceptional.)
However Derek was discussing ocean heat content, and that is less affected by “random” variation than mean global surface temperature. I think that the reason for the half-cycle of flat temperatures is a combination of the decreasing solar activity over that time, which would affect the ocean heat content, and the prevalence of the La Nina, which I presume would increase the ocean heat content … Given that it reduces the mean global surface temperature and, to my knowledge, doesn’t affect the earth’s radiation balance.
What sorts of things are “observational evidence” and how do they differ from measurements of the earth’s radiation budget, or measurements of past climate and CO2 concentration from ice cores, or measurements of global temperature after volcanic eruptions?
I think that the technology didn’t exist to do short term predictions in 2001. The papers on that started, to my knowledge, with the Hadley Centre’s DePreSys, in mid 2007. (Newspaper Article) Which did predict that 2008 and 2009 would be not as warm as 1998. (And one assumes that the current extended solar inactivity is providing less solar forcing now than would have been guessed in 2007).
So the last bit of it was predicted.
Perhaps.
But Sea level data does agree with radiation budget data that the oceans are holding the extra heat, and the recent paper on the sea level data does show a continued warming, and the non-warming is swamped by the estimated error of the measurement.
It’s not yet compelling that there has been a non warming.
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Joanne Nova Wrote:
Re 1):
I don’t think that the paper is making an argument for global warming. I think it is showing that, once again, the press is doing a poor job of scientific reporting.
One might get the impression from the popular media that there is both scientific evidence that the current warming is mostly anthropogenic and scientific evidence that the current warming is natural.
But (at least for the sample of papers that had the ISI keywords “Global Climate Change”), the evidence is all that the warming (of the last 50 years) is anthropogenic. I think it is the poor communication of the scientific understanding to the public that this paper is discussing.
I certainly agree that it is not a valid argument that the climate sensitivity is over 1Ā°C per doubling of CO2. (And that hence the response of the climate to current CO2 increases is over 0.5Ā°C).
But I do think that papers that estimate climate sensitivity are.
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It took a long time, but I think Robin MAY have finally came round to scepticism.
I’m not going to put words in her mouth.
However, by the claim,
“I certainly agree that it is not a valid argument that the climate sensitivity is over 1Ā°C per doubling of CO2.”
Robin is EXACTLY at the same point I am (and I’m not a “sceptic” I am a flat out DENIER)
– you see, the cause of such a temperature increase within a 20-year span (let alone 100 years) could never be distinguished amidst the background of white noise constantly influencing the climate.
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Re 2):
For me THAT paper was External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcings, Stott et al, (2000).
Not trying to suggest this is as convincing an argument as more modern papers (such as Meehl et al, (2004) (Known for showing that 20th century climate can be interpreted as approximately linear).) Nor that it was telling for people who are in the field.
But it was the one I read while still wondering if there was anything to this AGW stuff that we keep hearing about in the blogs, and then thinking, yep, there probably is.
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Joanne Wrote:
Yes, I’m still uncompelled by that argument.
The payoff in career, recognition and kudos for finding holes in accepted theory is the greatest that exists in a scientific field. I don’t accept this claim that there is none.
Hmmm, “Energy and the Environment” again. I noticed it is still not on the ISI list of peer reviewed journals. This is not really a paper, it’s an article published by the popular press; which, as has been observedĀ¹ is often at odds with the scientific literature.
[1] Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press
Boykoff and Boykoff, Global Environmental Change 14 (2004) 125ā136
http://environment.yale.edu/climate/pdf/bokkoff_balance_prestige_press.pdf
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Joanne wrote:
Is “catastrophic” the sort of adjective that is expected to be used in scholarly articles? Does it have a well-defined meaning in epidemiology?
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Hmmm, a google scholar search of catastrophic + “global climate change” since 2004 gives 3500 hits. Perhaps it is a more common adjective than I’d thought.
Does anyone know which one Schult found?
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Brian Valentine wrote
Take is as “according to our best scientific understanding” if you like. But its not especially controversial. (Excepting perhaps to a person who doesn’t accept the greenhouse effect at all, [starting with its basis in optics of which we have a very high level of scientific understanding] … but that must be a fairly rare, if not unique animal now.)
But our prior discussion petered out at the greenhouse effect, and I had no idea you thought that there were other “logical explanations” for the warming. What, in your view, are these?
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Brian wrote:
I was merely saying that I don’t use an argument from authority, based on Oreskes’ essay to argue what the climate sensitivity is.
Oreskes’ essay only shows that the scientific an popular press have a vastly different position on climate change.
If I were to discuss what the climate sensitivity is likely to be I would(and have done in this thread), use papers that look at that directly.
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You must have read the article by Dr Akasofu on the emergence from the LIA on this web site, Robin?
And surely you are familiar with the work of the Royal Danish observatory that demonstrated that any warming over the last 50 years could be the result of no other causes than solar variability?
It sounds so boastful and trashy to say, if you accept any value of the climate sensitivity above any value that will result in a degree rise in temperature or more, then you are (still) arguing from authority, because I can tear the analysis that leads to any higher value apart.
Leaving that aside, there are others who can do it too.
Despite all of the labour you have put into your contributions on this web column, I regret to say, that Jo Anne’s “Skeptic’s Handbook” remains undefeated.
That’s that.
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Brian Valentine wrote:
I did read it, Brian.
And I commented earlier in this thread that ārecovery from the little ice ageā is not a forcing mentioned in the IPCC reports.
How does a cool period up to 1850 cause a warming throughout the 20th century? Is this an ongoing ice albedo positive feedback, or an atmospheric CO2 / oceanic carbonic acid positive feedback?
No, that would be a new one on me. But surely this contradicts the some-ongoing-positive feedback from the LIA theory … assuming the LIA doesn’t affect solar variability.
These two can’t both be true. Which one do you think is false?
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The two are mutually exclusive?
And you don’t have a whole lot of faith that the rel position of the Earth’s plane of orbit with respect to the Sun would have verymuch to do the the climate over the time span of the LIA and the emergence from it?
That is to say, the graph from Dr Akasofu has no underlying cause – it’s just some happy accident of some sort?
I first heard of the “greenhouse theory of global warming” in 1965 I think it was; I was 16 years of age and a sophomore in college.
A professor of physical chemistry mentioned the Arrhenius idea to me; it was obscure at the time, because that particular idea had been debunked in the years, 1907-1915.
In response I told him, “that’s nonsense, no one would find that one bit credible” he replied, “yes it is nonsense, isn’t it.”
In all honesty I never believed I would hear of the idea again from anyone.
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Brian Wrote:
That’s what it seems to me.
If the current warming can be attributed to no other causes than solar variability, and the “rel position of the Earthās plane of orbit with respect to the Sun” is another cause than solar variability, then they are mutually exclusive.
What have I missed?
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http://globalwarmingnot.blogtownhall.com/2009/02/03/greenhouse_theory_disproved_a_century_ago.thtml
Not the only one. Actually a series of papers appeared in the Philosophical Magazine over the time period.
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Robin: “What sorts of things are āobservational evidenceā and how do they differ from measurements of the earthās radiation budget, or measurements of past climate and CO2 concentration from ice cores, or measurements of global temperature after volcanic eruptions?”
These things are observational evidence, but none of them support AGW.
I wrote more about what is evidence on: http://joannenova.com.au/2008/10/30/what-is-evidence/
Outgoing radiation has been measured and as far as I know, it showed there was hardly any ‘outgoing radiation’ missing – meaning CO2 didn’t trap much. I hear (as always) that these figures have been contested and adjusted. I have not looked into it closely. It would be good to review both sides of that. I am more and more suspicious though that raw data is constantly being manipulated post hoc, which might be justified, if it wasn’t always in a direction to match the models.
Robin: “Yes, Iām still uncompelled by that argument. [Re: Joanne’s point about monopolostic money and it’s effect on science] The payoff in career, recognition and kudos for finding holes in accepted theory is the greatest that exists in a scientific field. I donāt accept this claim that there is none.”
Sure. Like I’ve already said. Many holes in AGW have been found, the reward is:
http://www.desmogblog.com/directory/vocabulary/3368
http://www.desmogblog.com/ian-plimer
http://www.desmogblog.com/roy-spencer
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Roy_Spencer
http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ron_Christie
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=David_Douglass
You have yet to name a meaningful incentive for any of the people who pointed out mistakes in the IPCC papers, flaws in major graphs that were used ad infinitum, or like Svensmark came up with a theory that has better correlation than CO2. The possibility of ‘fame’ is real but small. The reality of ridicule, harrassment, intimidation, social exclusion, and difficulty being published, is there for all to see, most of it very public, thanks to paid PR blogs like DeSmog.
“Oreskesā essay only shows that the scientific an popular press have a vastly different position on climate change.”
Do tell? Have you got any evidence to support this belief that the press frequently writes that most climate scientists are not believers in AGW? Most people in the street could tell you what the scientific consensus supposedly “is” . Any PR company would be thrilled with that kind of brand recognition.
As for the ‘forcing’ of the recovery from the LIA. I answered this on comment 380 on http://joannenova.com.au/2009/04/03/global-warming-a-classic-case-of-alarmism/#comment-4419
Spuffler #377: āWill the main slope of ārecovery from little ice ageā remain linear?ā
Radiation forcing budgets that add up different factors “we know” is argument from ignorance. There are a universe of possible factors we don’t understand. The excuse that carbon-fills-the-gap is cr..
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Brian G Valentine Wrote:
You find an experiment not involving any CO2 compelling evidence that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas?
… Also do you think the current warming is due to “the rel position of the Earthās plane of orbit with respect to the Sun”, or do you think that the current warming is “the result of no other causes than solar variability”? … or neither.
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Joanne’s labour went (momentarily) unnoticed by Robin it seems.
The question about CO2 is self-explanatory.
I am afraid you’ll have to elaborate about what you mean by “the current warming” – after you have read what Joanne has written.
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Brian Valentine Wrote:
Humour me.
The warming of the last 50 years.
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The article itself explains why, if the supposed greenhouse idea would fail for glass, then it would fail for CO2.
Any warming over the past 50 years is the result of solar variability.
That is superposed on century-scale climate variability responsible for such phenomena as the LIA, which is the result of astronomical influences.
The Earth has not warmed for over a decade, Akasofu and others indicate the periodic variability one would expect on the larger time scales.
Is our time being used productively here – or is our time being used to repeat ourselves so as to wind up exactly where we started?
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Joanne Wrote:
I have already linked to a paper that looks at temperature reconstructions over the past 7 centuries. There are a wide range of data that go into these reconstructions, but if we agree they are observational, then the conclusion (that the 5%-95% CI for climate sensitivity is 1.5-6.2K per doubling) does support AGW, because the increase in CO2 from 270 to 386ppm is Anthropogenic. (In fact anthropogenic emissions are sufficient for about twice that increase, and the oceans and probably the terrestrial biosphere are sinks.)
Now if the climate sensitivity is 1.5 to 6.2 then that increase in CO2 ends up as an increase in mean global surface temperature of 0.77K to 3.20K. Which is probably most of the recent warming.
This seems to be observational evidence supporting AGW.
The scientific community, particularly in subject areas where human life is at stake, quite rightly rip into poor methodology or unreproducible results.
So it is harder to break the status quo in medicine and conflict zone mortality studies. And global warming denial.
And Kudos to The Lancet for eventually publishing (your [then] fellow Perthonians) Warren and Marshall’s letters in 1983. And response was initially very negative, but the results reproducible … and that is key. End result: Nobel Prizes all round for causing a paradigm shift.
Primarily the career scientist’s first motivation: the joy of the search for truth. But also the career benefits and recognition for publishing work that is “right”, when everyone else in making a mistake. Glory and honour. Nobel laureates also have longer life and happiness. In fact recognition is all we seek.
Of course that assumes that they are “right”, and that doesn’t appear to be the informed opinion.
The IPCC reports are the most peer reviewed publications in the history of humanity. If the community doesn’t accept that there were mistakes, then is it possible that there weren’t?
Svensmark’s paper does have a good correlation with temperature, but it doesn’t explain the warming. For that you need CO2. (Because there has been no overall trend in Cosmic Rays over the last 50 years).
But he also released to the press before the paper was published, and the press release concentrated on AGW denial, which was not the focus of the paper, so he got panned for that. A reaction I feel mixed about. I think that communication of science to the public is a valuable service and should be more respected by the scientific community.
Ridicule is a acceptable form of peer review in many cases. Harassment, intimidation, social exclusion, are not. I’ve not heard that Svensmark has suffered these. I have not heard that he (or any other denier) has suffered “difficulty being published”. Do you know of specific examples of this?
Who pays DeSmog?
I’ve got an analysis of the difference between the scientific and prestige popular press in America:
http://research.yale.edu/environment/climate/pdf/bokkoff_balance_prestige_press.pdf
It exists.
This is something of a shortcoming, considering the place that you’re giving this recovery from the little ice age in the argument.
“We really have not idea what” is too ethereal to be a more compelling an explanation for the current warming than the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect has a known physical mechanism and a measurably increasing effect over the time of the recent warming. With both of these you have strong, falsifiable scientific theory. “We really don’t know what” has no known physical mechanism, cannot be shown to be increasing, and is not really a scientific proposition, because it is not falsifiable.
That is not at all the excuse. Carbon does not “fill the gap”. It is the most precisely understood and calculable forcing there. The cloud albedo is the wild card.
There’s nothing “fill the gap” about radiative forcing from carbon dioxide. The equations of absorption are precisely understood, and with modern computing, very precisely solvable. The effect of radiative forcing is an extra 1.7 W/m2 from CO2 increase since the start of the industrial revolution. Denial poster-boy Lindzen will tell you that. (In fact, I heard that he did at the ICCC, did he not? Including a little talk about what common lines of denialism should be avoided for being simply unscientific?)
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Bit of a snippy tone in the last paragraph from the global warming fear-mongering poster girl Robin.
Lindzen has ordered influences on the climate so as to place the effect of influences such as the Iris effect in an order for comparison.
The careful reading of Lindzen shows that he places an upper limit on the climate sensitivity for CO2 to make an ordering – he does not state what, exactly, that value is.
You’re right – humanity IS at stake over the useless worry over gloabl warming and the DETERMINED suffering that will result limiting fossil fuel use.
I don’t think you have a viable argument for the last one, and even if you think you do I don’t want to hear it because it will sound to me like Nazism and it will make me angry.
Thanking you advance,
Brian Valentine PhD PE
PS Do you think all the labour (and money spent on them) of the IPCC and others was money well spent?
How many dipheria shots could that have purchased?
How many water treatment plants could that have financed?
Were the benefits comparable for the money spent?
[Rhetorical questions – keep your answers to your self]
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Today it’s the hare-brained stunts, tomorrow we clean up the gay boys, next week get rid of those whackos smoking a bit of weed, and when we get properly tooled up, it will be brain scans to figure out who is normal, and who is broken (in need of fixing). But one thing never changes, always, always “for their own good” we do this.
If you value independent thinking, then you have to value the loonies as much as the genius, because there’s but a hairline between them, and only afterwards do we recognise the one from the other.
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Tel, I stand corrected, and I thank you
B
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Brian Valentine wrote:
Well it doesn’t fail for CO2.
School children these days can do a similar experiment with a couple of jars, one with air and one with CO2. And the greenhouse effect is quite measurable with high school accuracy thermometers over high school laboratory time periods.
I guess that the effect is swamped in a small greenhouse by the warming caused by the drop in heat loss by convection.
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“School children these days can do a similar experiment with a couple of jars, one with air and one with CO2. And the greenhouse effect is quite measurable with high school accuracy thermometers over high school laboratory time periods.”
Blah.
We know from elementary statistical mechanics that Cv=5R/2 for diatomic gases and Cv=7R/2 for triatomic gases.
This experiment is some more of the same dopey “Mister Polar Bear wants YOU to STOP USING FOSSIL FUEL” elementary school [explitive]
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Mister Polar Bear likes Windmills.
Mister Polar Bear doesn’t like Coal Fired Electricity Power Plants.
Mister Polar Bear likes Al Gore.
Mister Poler Bear doesn’t like Dick Lindzen.
All Mister Polar Bear can do to get people to stop driving cars and to freeze themselves to death is to weep and wail in front of cameras about it – what else can he do?
Mister Polar Bear’s influence is so limited.
Poor Mister Polar Bear.
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I was talking about the previous interglacial (not what we are currently on, the one before). One hundred and twenty thousand years ago.
Egat’s, right you are, I made a power of ten error. I’m not comfortable with the “per decade” units. Fortunately I’m not the only one to blunder like this so we can be embarrassed together š
Just to prove I take responsibility for my mistakes, I demand that Joanne pay me only half what she was paying me before. The other half I offer to you Robin, in gratitude.
Getting back to the point, 50 years is a very tight window for extracting underlaying climate parameters from chaotic weather data. Consider the well understood yearly solar cycle and you have essentially only one valid data point per year, that’s a total of 50 points (in a system that we have already found 11 year cycles, 30 something year cycles, and many longer cycles).
As a quick test, I ran some scans over the Vostok ice-core data sets taking groups of 10 samples (they don’t have a sample for every year, 10 samples strides approx 800 years) and I got a maximum rate of change of 0.09Ā°C per decade and rates between 0.05Ā°C per decade and 0.09Ā°C per decade occur 0.5% of the time (admittedly not often, but lots of that time the earth is locked in a highly stable block of ice and snow, and it isn’t entirely implausible that we are living in an unusual time which would explain the adventurous things going on at the moment).
Then again, repeat the same test with 20 sample blocks (strides of approx 1600 years) and you get a maximum rate of change of 0.036Ā°C per decade — only to be expected, with a bigger window you average out the short-term variability.
Bigger again, 40 sample blocks gives 0.023Ā°C per decade. So tell me, which is the “real” answer? All of them, and none of them because the dataset is chaotic with long term cyclic behaviour. However, from the point of view of extinction and stressing the specialist niche-dwellers, the relatively short 800 year strides should be good enough to represent quite a few generations (once you are dead, it’s cold comfort to know that what killed you was merely a brief anomaly with no long-term statistical significance).
And again for one more different perspective, the Vostok data could contain good old fashioned measurement errors, but then again so could the recent measurements from 50 years ago; when you use such a small time window it greatly amplifies this error.
Wait just a moment. There’s biodiversity in general and there’s defending some particular niche — not the same thing.
In any changing fitness landscape, there will be niches come and niches go, without this we cannot have change at all. One example (amongst many) is the cane toads in Australia, local predators never had a mechanism for dealing with the toad’s poison, but local snakes are evolving smaller heads and larger bodies in order to specifically target the baby toads (less load of poison, no physical defense in a baby toad). The landscape changes and a new niche has opened. Adaptation is fast enough to observe within one human lifespan.
There are also a lot better ways to maintain biodiversity than by attempting to freeze the system state. As you pointed out, for plants long distance transport is a problem and a niche may move over physical distance. Humans are very good at long distance mobility. Humans can cheaply and efficiently transport seeds over arbitrary distance (actually, we often do so by accident). A deliberate seed mobility program would improve diversity at a very low cost.
Now you are no doubt going to tell me that every little region has to be carefully locked up (biologists invariably say this) because mobility allows one species to “invade” the territory of another (as if title deeds had been issued) but species have been invading each other since the dawn of life and I suspect there is a lot more beneficial study of a successful species than a no hoper. To champion some types of diversity while fighting against other types tells me that really diversity is not the objective here, the real driving emotion is fear of change.
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Sorry Tel,
Joanne already owes me your unrecoverd share for the agony of dealing with people like Barton.
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Robin,
Calculating climate sensitivity is not an observation. When you see a sensitive climate go past your door, call me.
You’ve used Argument from Ignorance again. As if CO2 has to make a big difference because of what it does in the lab and that any warming we can’t explain therefore must be due to CO2. It fills the ‘gap’ in our knowledge. It’s a big gap.
You missed my point. I don’t argue that we are definitively recovering from the LIA therefore CO2 is irrelevant. I argue that climate science doesn’t know enough about the climate to model it. The LIA proves that. Since models/calculations/estimations are all the evidence we are ever given, No I Am Still Not Impressed, that people who can’t predict things 5 years in advance, and can’t explain the BIG moves of the last 1000, can’t agree on what the tropospheric temperature is over the last 50 years even though they measured it with hundreds of radiosondes: these are the same people who make giant models predicting the weather 100 years in advance… Sure.
I know this is difficult given the brainwashing our media currently run. But just for a moment, try to imagine another possibility: imagine there is chance that CO2 makes next to no difference. How would we know that it wasn’t Co2 that warmed us up from 1979-1999, when there are other big mysterious factors out there that we don’t track? You hinted before that you know of Lindzens Iris theory – the way clouds and water vapor (with massive greenhouse effects of their own) – change in ways that stop the atmospheric temperature from wildly veering out of control. Like a buffer in chemistry. What if the clouds do negate the effect of warming?
My point about the ‘things we don’t know’, is that since we don’t know what set off the little ice age, how the heck can we know if it stopped – fully or partly, and whether it’s stronger than CO2, whether there are more mysterious opposing forces we don’t know.
You may not find mysterious forces compelling, but I find logic and reason more compelling than believing the witchdoctors who profess to predict a climate they can’t explain. Argument from ignorance is still silly.
Desmog by the way was founded with $300,000 by a guy who was later convicted of money laundering. (Not that that would matter if Desmog made any logical arguments.) They are run by a PR expert. Their blogger team are apparently paid.
And cosmic rays ain’t all the same. If you read Svensmark instead of just his attackers, you would know the difference between high energy and low energy ones, and you’d know that the ones that matter have not been stable for 50 years.
Let me finish this off by returning to the mysterious forces. Yes, the recent warming could be due to carbon, or it could be a coincidence. Can anyone find a time in the last 500 million years when the Earth got Hotter Because Of Co2? No. Therefore, since I have to pick, at the moment, I’m going with ‘coincidence’. Since there is no correlation with turning points that matter, other things correlate better than carbon – almost any other thing – even postage stamps.
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I propose a fact-finding tour where we walk into outback public bars and strike up a conversation along the lines of, “We are some greenies here to help you manage your land and industry.”
On second thoughts, kinetic plastic surgery has it’s drawbacks so I did a beanbag tour of the AEC website instead. Here are the Divisions that delivered the top 10 Green votes (looking at lower house, first preference only), for the 2007 federal election:
Melbourne (VIC) — Inner Metropolitan / Heavy and light engineering, extensive manufacturing, commercial and retail activities (including Melbourne markets and central business district), dockyards, clothing and footwear industries, warehousing and distributing of white goods, building and other general goods.
Sydney (NSW) — Inner Metropolitan / Commercial, financial, retail, merchandising, service, transport, entertainment and shipping industries.
Grayndler (NSW) — Inner Metropolitan / Manufacturing and service industries, engineering works.
Denison (TAS) — Inner Metropolitan / Banking and retail, chocolate and confectionery, catamaran construction, brewery, zinc works, food and timber processing, heavy transport, wholesale trade, engineering works, glass products and port facilities at Hobart.
Batman (VIC) — Inner Metropolitan / Light engineering, textiles, clothing and footwear.
Bass (TAS) — Provincial / Aluminium and ferrous metal smelting, brewery, cattle (dairy and beef) farming, manufacturing, mining, ports and shipping, ship building, timber, tourism, fishing, wineries and wool.
Melbourne Port (VIC) — Inner Metropolitan / Car assembly plants, aircraft parts production, stevedoring and various manufacturing, commercial and retail industries.
Wentworth (NSW) — Inner Metropolitan / Finance, property, service, wholesale and retail trade, tourism, education, sport and recreation.
Richmond (NSW) — Rural / Tourism, commercial fishing, agriculture including dairy, beef cattle, tropical fruits, sugarcane, coffee and macadamia nuts, sugar processing, timber, light engineering, boat building and cottage industries.
Cunningham (NSW) — Provincial / Wollongong is the commercial centre of the Illawarra, servicing tourism, tertiary education, steel production, coal mining, brick manufacturing and textiles.
The only Green rural division is the one containing Nimbin and Byron Bay (lots of alternative lifestylers plus retirees). Bass is a bit mixed but the core of the Green vote is coming from inner-city desk jockies, factory workers who never see the sun, and hipster uni students. Sad but true. It gets sadder… now I’ll post the bottom 10 divisions where the lowest percentage of lower house Green votes were returned in 2007:
Flynn (QLD) — Rural / Primary production including coal, oil, gas, orchards, cotton, grain, cattle and sheep. The Port of Gladstone is a major export facility for the area.
Calare (NSW) — Rural / Mining, mixed farming, fruit, timber, vineyards, meat and wool processing, transport, light engineering, agricultural and pastoral support services.
Capricornia (QLD) — Provincial / Primary production, grains, beef cattle, grazing, fishing, coal mining, meat works, dairy products and tourism.
Murray (VIC) — Rural / Sheep, wheat, dairy and fruit processing industries.
Parkes (NSW) — Rural / Wool, beef, pork, wheat, cotton, oil seed crops, lucerne, fruit, vegetables, dairy cattle, horse, sheep and cattle studs, comprehensive agricultural support services, coal and opal mining, timber, wine growing, light engineering and construction industries.
Kennedy (QLD) — Rural / Mainly primary production including grains (sorghum, sunflowers, wheat), beef cattle, cotton, coal mining, gemstones, sheep, sugar, agricultural services, copper, gold, silver, tin, lead, zinc, uranium, fishing (prawns, crabs, barramundi), marble, tobacco, fruit and vegetables, peanuts, dairy products and tourism.
Maranoa (QLD) — Rural / Mainly primary production including coal, oil, gas, orchards, cotton, grain, cattle and sheep.
Lindsay (NSW) — Outer Metropolitan / Agriculture, farming (dairying, poultry, beef, fruit, vegetables), distilling (saki), construction and service industries, tourism, wholesale and retail trade, building materials, engineering and electrical equipment, textiles, plastic and aluminium products, colour TV manufacturing, pharmaceutical goods and concrete and gravel extraction.
New England (NSW) — Rural / Cattle, sheep, grain, forestry, dairying, oats, maize, fruit, vegetables, tin-mining, bricks, trout hatchery, tourism, concrete pipe works, leather goods, tannery, gemstones, tobacco, lucerne, honey, grain processing, rubber industry, plaster works and concrete.
Chifley (NSW) — Outer Metropolitan / Light manufacturing and service industries.
So why is it that the people who most spend time working on the land (growing plants and animals and living away from the city) are the same people who are least likely to think that Green politics are helping this country? Are they all dumbarse hay seeds, too thick and sunburned to know what’s good for them?
If those guys are useless then what do you intend to do? Maybe drive them all broke with regulations until the family farm goes out the window. Don’t worry, giant agri-business will step up to the plate and and Monsanto would be happy to own all the fertile land in Australia. Who would you prefer to negotiate with, a landowning farming family or a worldwide GE food conglomerate?
Politics is messy stuff, Green problems are hard problems. You need a lot of heart to take on these issues, but you need a lot of brains too.
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From the AEC website, the Divisions that returned the top 10 Green votes (fed lower house, first preference only, 2007):
… and the Divisions that returned the bottom 10 Green votes under the same conditions:
The core of the Green vote is coming from yuppie inner-city desk jockies, factory workers who never see the sun, and hipster uni students. The closer Australians are to the land, the less likely they are to believe our current Green parties are useful.
Dumbarse hay seeds, too thick and sunburned to know what’s good for them? Or maybe they do know something.
Once the family farmers have been driven broke by complex and unworkable regulations, giant agri-business will step up to the plate and and Monsanto would be happy to own all the fertile land in Australia. Who would you prefer to negotiate with, a landowning farming family or a worldwide GE food conglomerate?
Politics is messy stuff, Green problems are hard problems. You need a lot of heart to take on these issues, but you need a lot of brains too.
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So why would a tea-sipping bureaucrat care about the costs of ETS (or any of its ilk) passed along to the family farmer, anyway?
Those people don’t count. They’re just some more scum to worry about.
They don’t really “care about the environment”.
They don’t know how good Solar Power really is.
All they care about is their own survival.
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Possibly a little. It would be a less outlandish observation coming from anyone else on this thread though.
I claim you’ve made a dozen posts at least as snippy, and many of them downright rude on this thread. I wonder how you justify this apparent inconstancy?
Lindzen is the most respected academic the denialist movement has. And his field is atmospheric physics, and he’s a professor at MIT. The bulk of the movement does seem to be retired academics and petroleum geologists.
Climate change 2000 compared to the 1961-1990 mean, caused about 160,000 deaths and 5,500,000 person-years of sickness. This is DETERMINED suffering.
I admire your attempt to shut down the discussion. You are referring to Lindzen talk? I recall reading about it in a write up about the ICCC. I couldn’t find it now on google. Probably I have the wrong guy.
Also re:
The earth has warmed over the last decade. Are you defining “over a decade” as “a time interval starting during the El Nino of 1998”? Because that’s blatant cherry picking.
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Brian Valentine wrote:
You don’t come across as very intellectual, but you say that you consider yourself an educator. What age group do you teach?
The point that I was making was not about the curriculum, but that (despite your claim that using glass settles the argument for CO2), the warming from CO2 is very easy to show:
http://www.espere.net/Unitedkingdom/water/uk_watexpgreenhouse.htm
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Thanks for the response Tel, I enjoy your thinking. (Barring your biodiversity opinions.)
Right. The ice core record does show that that was probably warmer than current temperatures.
And the extinctions to date attributed to climate change are alpine species. <Personal not-expert speculation>It might that these regions experience a more rapid response to greenhouse warming by being physically a long way from the large heat capacity of the oceans.</personal non-expert speculation>
So you would say that claims by Brian and Joanne that there has been a different trend over the past 7 or 8 years about an order of magnitude premature?
It’s a mistake to discard data simply because there is more than one influence on the data. And the mistake is clearer if the influence is cyclic. It can be corrected for like economic or atmospheric CO2 concentration data is. A rising sine wave is not one point, it is a rising sine wave, and although a technique as trivial as a linear regression will obviously stuff up a trend estimation over a single period (depending on phase), there are correct ways to treat this statistically. And the problem disappears if even two cycles are available.
Yes, of course if you take longer averages you shave off the high and low values, because your moving average is a kind of low pass filter.
But there’s two observations to be put out there.
The first regarding short periods of very rapid warming:
This time period includes in the Vostok cores the Younger Dryas … Rapid cooling and later rapid warming, and the period associated with high extinction rates … and also not natural (for terrestrial meanings of “natural”), but (probably) set off by an extraterrestrial impact. (For meanings of “impact” where the object doesn’t impact the ground … an atmospheric explosion of a comet).
The second is that although I mention 0.1Ā°C per decade as though I was talking about a line of best fit through the climate history from now back to 1970, the warming signal can be decomposed into response to different forcings, so the long term trending part can be separated (and projected in a more sophisticated manner than extrapolation of a straight line).
I’m not saying that your argument doesn’t apply, because that’s not what I did. But as us non-climate scientists sit here discussing climate science what we’re looking for is broadly applicable points.
Sure. I think that the temperature proxy is for local temperature, not global. And local temperature is a particularly not great proxy for global temperature.
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Yes. And we should be grateful it wasn’t a lot worse. If we’d had more cold snaps instead of more heat waves there would be more dead people. Heat kills, but cold kills more.
In temperate regions, human mortality and
morbidity tend to show clear maxima in the winter
and secondary maxima in the summer. While the
secondary maxima are more pronounced in regions
with warmer summer climates, as in the southern
U.S. and southern Europe, even in those regions the
secondary maxima are smaller than the winter
maxima. A warming of even 3ĀŗC in the next 100
years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans
because the reduction of wintertime
mortality/morbidity would be several times larger
than the increase in summertime heat stress-related
mortality/morbidity [Laaidi 2006, Keatinge 2000].
Source: http://www.heartland.org/custom/semod_policybot/pdf/22835.pdf p 36/50
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I’m pretty sure that arguing whether biodiversity is important to someone who doesn’t think so is worth any effort. Perhaps we can agree that it’s important to some people?
Again, many people would say that the rarity and uniqueness increases the value of a species.
We don’t seek change on a human time-scale.
Mammals are proportionally under-represented in the tens of thousands of extinctions annually, but since there are probably few undiscovered ones, letās consider them.
The fossil record implies that there should be an natural mammalian extinction every million species years. Faster than that will reduce biodiversity.
At about 5000 known mammalian species, that implies a healthy extinction target should be one every two centuries. Of course, this is probably an unhealthy extinction target in the current environment because reduced genetic diversity from reduced population sizes will reduce speciation rate.
In any case 0 or 1 in anyone’s lifetime is possibly acceptable. That’s not really change, so as you’d notice.
Change on geological times scales is fine.
Sure. In about four species of snake. But small heads is not speciation, so extinctions do matter. And those four species have also suffered a population drop (as has nearly every animal, bar the toads) in the areas the toads have reached … increasing their extinction pressure.
Most people would say that introducing cane toads was a monumental balls-up.
Of course. And this is being done. But itās not always possible in the case of interesting plants. There are two or three species of underground orchid in Australia. Only seen every five years or so, when it puts up a flower. Devastatingly interesting plant. The NSW one has never been successfully planted, and has never been successfully translocated.
Do you?
Why would the proteins of a prevalent species be more likely to be of medical importance that those of a rare one?
And why would the study of a often seen species reveal more secrets than that of one rarely seen?
I would have thought that a the greater diversity of biological solutions would have been the better field of study. Take Australia’s two species of gastric breeding frogs. Clearly some powerfully interesting chemistry going on in the GI tract to turn a digestion chamber into an incubation chamber. Of use to medicine … almost certainly. Will we ever know? Nope. Is this a good thing? … You’ve made up your own mind, and that’s fine.
…
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Joanne Wrote:
Hmmm.
I’m not quite sure where to go with that one Joanne.
I guess obviously, you’re right, calculating a climate sensitivity is not an observation.
The observations are the data from which the climate sensitivity is calculated.
The climate sensitivity is the proof of AGW which is, by these observations is derived. (assuming that it’s over about 1, and depending on how long it takes for the climate system to reach a steady state).
… Again, I’m not sure how to take that either.
You speak as if the positive feedbacks are these big black boxes with no physics.
I can’t say off the top of my head what the numbers are, but I don’t believe you’ve not heard of them. Water vapour is, I understand, the biggie. Ice albedo is also significant. The argument is certainly not that we don’t know what’s causing this warming so it must be CO2, its that CO2 has caused 1.7 W/m, and known feedbacks are collectively about tripling that. (And cloud albedo is still a bit of a wild card, but that’s not argument from ignorance, that’s a large remaining unknown.)
… And your original point was that the 1.7 W/m2 from the post industrial CO2 increase was argument from ignorance, and that is starkly not. That is known, well understood, calculable and uncontroversial even amongst sceptics. (Brian’s unique understanding of the greenhouse effect obviously excepted).
Isn’t that the argument from ignorance?
There certainly is evidence that models don’t produce perfect results. Hindcasting does provide a luke warm sense of confidence, but I think that increasing accuracy is certainly not coming too soon for policymakers.
Is the LIA poorly modelled in hindcasts?
Are you discarding calculations and estimations with models.
I don’t think that models are entirely useless, but to disregard calculations is certainly throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I don’t think that they claim to predict the weather, Joanne.
Then the climate sensitivity would be less than 1Ā°C per doubling. But I have presented a few papers that estimate the CS, not using models, and I can point to several that use models. And the CS over the past 420 million years has been robustly over 1.5, the CS over the past 7 centuries has been something in the range 1.5 to 6.2.
So we’d need a physical explanation for why this iris is suddenly ameliorating the changing greenhouse effect when it has never done it in past … including times with both much less and much more atmospheric CO2 than now.
Which is an argument from ignorance without even proposing a physical mechanism. The CO2 plus feedbacks explanation involves much less ignorance.
Right. And mine is that they can explain it. Greenhouse effect plus feedbacks.
I agree with that.
Okay Joanne, you’re quite right, I haven’t read the paper, and I didn’t know that he had found a trend. On your advice, I’ll have a read of it.
Yes. All of it.
Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years, Royer et al. NATURE (2007)
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Tel wrote:
Agriculture isn’t really an outdoor hobby. It’s outdoor recreation activities, (in fact outdoor recreation in one’ youth) that correlates to environmental sensitivity.
<a href = “http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/newtown_square/publications/technical_reports/pdfs/2004/317papers/bustam317.pdf”ENVIRONMENTAL SENSITIVITY AND
YOUTHFUL PARTICIPATION IN
OUTDOOR RECREATION
I don’t think that it’s any secret that forestry workers and farmers aren’t the best greenies. Their industries are kind of counter to the idea of natural environment preservation, buy using lots of land.
The reason that suicide has become the most popular sport amongst the farmers in NSW is climate change, not regulation.
Negotiate? Probably the GE food conglomerate. A landowning farming family takes a drop in water allowance too personally, because their stake is personal.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t feel sympathy for the farming family. But the amount of water out there has simply dropped, so the land just doesn’t sustain as much farming.
Sure. And the greens have a young voter base because of their left wing economic policy too. The Rudd / Peter Garratt was attractive to a lot of greenies my age, Rudd being about as right as labour right goes, and then some, and Garratt being intelligent and realistic in his speachmaking. (They may wander next election).
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Sorry, broken link:
http://www.fs.fed.us/ne/newtown_square/publications/technical_reports/pdfs/2004/317papers/bustam317.pdf
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Joanne Wrote:
Have you read the paper Joanne?
Impact of regional climate change on human health, Patz et al, NATURE (2005).
It does mention deaths by heat wave … (Which is cardiovascular disease), (12,000 deaths worldwide attributable to climate change from the 1961-1990 mean), but they are not included in the 166,000 deaths, (nor, obviously, the 5,517,000 DALYs, since dead is dead).
The deaths are from changes in rainfall and clean water security mostly. 47,000 deaths from diarrhoea, 2000 from floods (directly), 77,000 from malnutrition, and 27,000 from malaria.
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47,000 deaths from diarrhoea
– Preventable with water treatment plants, requiring more electricity than can be produced with a solar panel
2000 from floods (directly)
– Preventable by building dams, instead of howling about “global warming”
77,000 from malnutrition
– Preventable by learning modern agriculture requiring irrigation, tractors, combines, and exactly zero contribution from global warming “activists”
27,000 from malaria
– Preventable with DDT and not slogans
What age groups do I “educate” Robin?
None at all that comprise closed minds.
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Mister Polar Bear wants me to end the discussion and say goodbye to Robin.
Bye bye, Robin.
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Thanks to Robin for this link
http://www.espere.net/Unitedkingdom/water/uk_watexpgreenhouse.htm
Mister Polar Bear thinks this has more to do with the thermal conductivity of carbon dioxide than the “greenhouse effect.”
Turns out that Mister Polar Bear is actually a sceptic.
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In terms of establishing long term trends and climactic norms, the past 7 or 8 years are a drop in the ocean (obviously). If you flip back a few pages you can find this from David Evans:
I would go along with this as a reasonable description of the century-scale climate during recent centuries. The sunspot cycle of 11 years is very well known and has been extensively studied, yet no one knows exactly when the next cycle will kick over, nor can anyone model the variations in intensity between cycles.
As well as the 11 year sunspot cycle, the “Bruckner cycle” of approx 35 years has also been found in various historical samples (relating to tree growth, etc). The Russian scientist Valentine Makarov measured a 22 year solar cycle in the sun’s magnetic field, and recently two more Russians Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev made substantial wagers betting on 15 years of cooling following a peak back around 2000 AD.
From the point of view of figuring out where we currently sit within these various cycles, the recent 7 or 8 years of cooling are very relevant, but so are a whole bunch of earlier measurements also showing cyclic behaviour. In addition, they are relevant from the political analysis of the situation.
If you pick up the IPCC AR4 “Synthesis Report” (which is the executive summary that all the political hob-nobs read), you will find a total absence of any discussion of solar cycles. Such things either don’t exist, or have nothing to do with climate science, or they are too irrelevant to mention. As a consequence, a great number of our leaders don’t know the first thing about solar cycles and would be stunned to be told that someone can predict 15 years of cooling in the midst of climactic warming.
More than this, the voters don’t understand either. For them, 15 years is longer than the longest thing they can remember. If we have 15 years of cooling, then you can be sure the voters will believe in Global Cooling.
By ignoring the solar cycles and predicting an alarming warming trend, the IPCC were able to attract attention, but at the cost of being very visibly and demonstrably wrong some years down the track. Given the outrageous nature of the IPCC 2007 prediction, it does not take a large window to demonstrate it is wrong, especially when the short-term trend goes in precisely the other direction to what was predicted.
That’s the problem with climate. Even if we did have a brilliantly good working model of the Earth’s climate, it would not provide useful short-term predictions. If you look in IPCC AR4 “Synthesis Report” 2007, Fig 3.1 and Table 3.1 and follow maybe the B2 or A2 scenario for GHG emissions (which is pretty much the “business as usual” scenario and that’s what is happening at the moment) then we should expect between 2 and 3 degrees of warming by 2099. If we get a decade of cooling followed by a few more 30 year cycles, we might barely make 1 degree. Now the IPCC are going to be in a position where no one takes them remotely seriously for 20 years until we are back on the upswing of a cycle. But they did this to themselves with their attention-seeking estimates.
They will no doubt tell everyone that their high estimates were necessary “just as a precaution”, “better safe than sorry” and so on. The problem with Pascal’s Wager is that it equally applies to believing that the world will be ended by a rampage of pink elephants unless we all stick bananas in our ears “just to be on the safe side”. I might for example, argue that it is “good precautionary principle” to cause as much global warming as humanly possible, “just in case” there’s another ice age coming (and the past million years has been MOSTLY ice, so I’ve got substantial data backing me up on that one).
Really though, taking action based on ignorance is as likely to be useful as taking no action, or picking a random action so might as well sin and enjoy yourself, or at very least keep searching for knowledge until we do know what is going on.
The daily cycle and yearly cycle are well understood, we know the physics of the orbit and we have decently accurate sinusoidal models for those effects. You could almost set your watch by it š
The sunspot cycle and other solar harmonic cycles regularly take unexpected and irregular steps. It is only possibly to decompose and compensate for those effects you can accurately model (and predict). Our models of the solar cycles are pretty rough and there’s no easy way to probe inside the sun to see what’s going on (other than when the solar storms hit). On top of that, there are chaotic effects on Earth too, such as El Nino. We don’t have the ability to predict El Nino a few years in advance, so each year we have to just look to see which way it goes. Applying these compensation factors comes down to seat of the pants.
I do think that money would be better spent drilling more ice and testing the Vostok results for reproducibility, than buying yet another supercomputer.
I’m not against taxpayer dollars going into pure research to some degree (I do think that applied research and industrial research should be mostly privately funded), but I’d like to see a lot more measurements and full publication of the raw results (if I’m paying for it, I don’t want it locked up in some secret database).
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People are going to want to eat. If you have a plan based around people not eating then your plan will fail. If you know a method to make more food out of less land and less water (and I mean food that tastes better than tofu), then don’t worry, just make heaps of money with your amazing efficiency improvements and then sponsor any political movement you like.
It may be a short term solar cycle, which is still long term compared with the interest payments that the bank demands.
I’m not going to pretend I fully understand all the problems of rural communities but please at least give them credit for having some understanding of their own problems. For whatever reason, those farmers don’t expect Green politics to help them in any way. They don’t see environmentalism as providing a future for either them or their land.
The way I see it, unless the Green movement can start listening to the rural point of view, and learning to cooperate rather than dictate, it ain’t gonna fly. I’m very nervous that the people who are most enthused on telling other people how to manage their land are those who are without practical experience in those areas themselves — sounds like an accident waiting to happen and ready to take me with it.
Hmmm, central-planned Green politics working with central-planned mega-corp sounds kind of cozy, until corruption becomes the ultimate winner and the mega-corp just routes around you, buying off key government staff. For the corps it’s not personal, it’s just business, and money, and people who might get in the way of business, and money.
Yeah, I find that a bit strange when you consider the track record of Socialist countries and the environment. I knew a guy who did Chemical engineering in the post-Glasnost Soviet states when they were inviting western investment. He told me about a town where they modernised the massive Soviet chemical plants and kicked two thirds of the workers out of a job (automation is much more efficient). After the new plant had run for a while, residents of the town started explaining to him that they had never actually seen the sun before; growing up under the filthy haze of primitive Soviet industry.
You could say the same about China and their coal smog, which they only cleaned up for the Olympics (but China is steadily moving away from the extremes of Socialism and that’s probably good for the whole world).
Cuba have managed to do a lot with not much (the unfair US embargo deserves some share of blame) but by many accounts their forests are much smaller than they used to be and they are still short of food. The Cubans seem a bit better than most Socialist countries at adapting themselves, but they are still struggling, maybe they will turn it around.
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I doubt there is any evidence that evolution works in a steady stream without stops and starts. Obviously human technology has so dramatically changed the scene over the entire earth (just from a mobility perspective alone, not including changes of land use) and human population is growing at an exceptional speed, likewise our deployment of new technology. To pretend somehow that we are still living in the same earth of pre-industrial times is just putting your head in the sand.
Are you going to pretend to have either the means or the stomach to substantially reduce the world population of humans? Without further argument, it ain’t gonna happen. How far will the roller-coaster go? I’m not sure, but probably quite far, so start building plans compatible with at least a mildly probable future.
There’s a lot of stuff to study and far more than we have resources (or incentive) to study it. Unavoidable conclusion: something will miss out and be lost.
As a parallel example, there are human languages going “extinct” at a massive rate because the Internet and mass media provide blanket coverage for the mainstream languages. Should we force people into isolated communities to preserve their pristine culture? If I grew up speaking some microscopic dialect I’d be telling my kids to bloody learn English so they have a chance to do something with their lives. Maybe some old niche language contains a deep insight that would lead to world peace and the dawn of a new age, but too bad `cos it’s gone now (or will be soon). Think of all the hard drives that are going to the trash (or maybe recycling) every day with people’s hopes and dreams on them, maybe one of them contains the answer to the universe, we will never know.
Medicine will always have more to study. They haven’t even come close to understanding the chemistry of a human (which has been looked at a lot more closely), let alone a frog. There’s buckets of DNA out there that no one has decoded yet. Every new discovery leads to more stuff that we need to study so prospective subject matter is not in short supply. If anything, the only way to even scratch the surface is to breed a whole heap more doctors and researchers to actually go and take measurements (i.e. the shortage is on the human side, not the subject material).
This is of course until we get decent protein design software, coupled to a cheap synthesis device (probably only a few decades away), after which we can just go ballistic in simulation land (still we will be ignorant of 99.99% of the natural world) and then crank out so many new medicines that our glorious world leaders will need to tightly restrict these discoveries for our own good (finally we will study our belly buttons to an incredible level of detail because it will be the only safe and government approved activity).
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“… (finally we will study our belly buttons to an incredible level of detail because it will be the only safe and government approved activity).”
Negative. The Government will consider the activity to be symptomatic of extreme Yogindism or pathologically detached Vedic Bhuddism requiring (unelected) commitment to therapy in a Government-approved (or Government-owned) sanatorium.
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Robin #323: Argument from ignorance “is a logical fallacy in which it is claimed that a premise is true only because it has not been proven false”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
(So it’s definition is not as obvious as it sounds).
Climate alarmists use it all the time. They say ‘it must be carbon because we’ve looked at everything else and nothing else explains the warming’. The problem with this is the universe is a big place – if they’ve ‘forgotten’, ‘ignored’ or are unaware of another factor, carbon might just be responsible for next to none of the warming.
The IPCC says (effectively): “we’ve calculated how much warming is due to x y z, and ‘q’ degrees is unexplained, therefore carbon caused all of the ‘q’ degrees we can’t find a better explanation for”.
Maybe carbon did do it, but it’s fallacious reasoning to state things that way. Just because the IPCC use fallacious reasoning doesn’t prove carbon is irrelevant, but it does show they don’t understand logic and reason. That in itself is fairly damning. If carbon is a major driver of temperatures we would see it in the geological records. We don’t.
Svensmarks book “The Chilling Stars” (with Nigel Calder) is the one to read to find out the science as well as the politics.
“The CO2 plus feedbacks explanation involves much less ignorance.”
If only. We are not sure whether water vapor gives a positive or negative feedback. the IPCC assumes it’s positive. If Lindzen or Svensmark or Miskoski (can’t spell it,sorry) are right, then feedback from water vapor could be zero or negative. The missing hotspot pretty much shows that water vapor feedback was not there from 1979-1999. Theoretically water vapor feedback will lift CO2’s warming effect from 1.2 degree to 2.5-3 degrees. It’s majorly important to the IPCC. It’s wildly hard to predict or model. That’s ‘ignorance’, converted into ‘certainty’ via a model. Tho’ technically it’s not argument from ignorance the logically fallacy. It’s just a poor assumption.
“So weād need a physical explanation for why this iris is suddenly ameliorating the changing greenhouse effect when it has never done it in past ā¦ including times with both much less and much more atmospheric CO2 than now.”
No we don’t. That would be good. But any ‘explanation’ is still only a theory. What we need is observational evidence that the Iris theory predicts the climate better than other theories. (And predicts – specifically – patterns of cloud cover as well as temperatures.)
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My view to the climate modelers (and I have told a few)
– get the rainfall patterns correct first, and then I’ll talk to you more about it.
[This id the only indication that intra and exo-atmospheric heat transfer is anywhere near correct.]
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Joanne et al:
There’s no point in arguing for logic or the use of real observation when it comes to the warmists; they’re either pawns or vested players. At this point those financially vested warmists haven’t found a way to incriminate man for causing the sun to radiate too much heat, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they’re working on a way to establish urban heat island and water vapor credit, cap-and-trade systems. Their greed probably has no bounds.
Man’s carbon emissions are the most politically expedient excuse for “greens” to have significant impact on us all — that is, to establish the ability to abscond with a measured amount of our collective and individual wealth by writ of law; like mortgage PMI provided to lawyers who, primarily, do NOTHING to earn the money.
Why stop believing the big lie when doing so will diminish one’s financial imperatives?
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Sounds like some folks need to pull their socks up and start thinking about actually working for a living, David, instead of dreaming up some more ways to rip people off.
There’s enough scam artists (or not so artful) out there already, the advent of the Internet produced some real works of fraud art, we’ve got enough flim-flams as it is now to last us for a while.
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Brian Valentine Wrote:
Interesting thought of Mister Polar Bear’s.
I suspect that conduction won’t make a lot of difference because convection will dominate the distribution of heat in the tanks.
To make a ball-park estimate of the proportion of convective to conductive heat flow, I found this equation for convective heat flow in “Schaum’s outline of theory and problems of beginning physics I”:
H=hAĪT,
Where H a good approximation of the rate of convective flow, A is the area of contact between the gas and the black sheet of cardboard, and ĪT is the temperature difference between the sheet of cardboard and the bulk of the fluid away from the cardboard.
h is the coeffienct of convection, and for air over a horizontal plate it is:
h = 2.49 (ĪT)^(0.25) W/(m2 K)
So if conductive flow dominated, and there was a linear temperature gradient to the top of the tank, half way through the experiment we would get:
H = 2.49*(13)^(0.25) * (0.2)^2 * 13 = about 2.5 W
If the cardboard is about 20cm square.
At the same time conductive heat transfer between the cardboard and the top of the tank would be (Using a cubic tank):
0.024 * (0.2)^2 / 0.2 * 13 = about 0.06 W
Since
Thermal conductivity of air is about 0.024 W/(m K)
Area of the sheet of paper is about (0.2)^2 m
Distance to the top of the tank is about 0.2m
and the temperature difference is about 13 K.
Neglecting heat transfer through the sides of the tank, but it’s a ball-park figure I’m looking for here. It probably should be at least doubled, but convection is still an order of magnitude stronger.
So it seems to me that convection would dominate the heat flow in the tank and that the thermal conductivity of CO2 compared to air wouldn’t make that much difference.
(I’m guessing that convection would also dominate in the CO2 tank, since the thermal conduction is lower, and I’m assuming the coefficient of convection is similar in magnitude to that of air).
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Brian, Robin:
Pardon my lack of experience in the laboratory.
What happened to the temperature of the two samples after the lamps were turned off?
Also, was there an attempt to observe the same two samples exposed to extreme cold? Would the carbon dioxide sample absorb and retain cold longer than the other sample?
With very little exception, the sun does not shine on any specific portion of earth’s surface 24 hours a day: CO2 does not chase the sun’s rays as do flowers in the field, so it cannot constantly absorb heat; conversely, CO2 in the real environment is exposed to numerous and dynamic forces including wind, moisture, dust, unstable compounds, botanicals, etc.
I can only assume CO2 will absorb and retain cold as well as it will absorb and retain warmth — the forcing would “equal out”; but that in Earth’s atmosphere, CO2 tends to sink at a critically low ambient temperature, right? Doesn’t such sinking contribute to the formation of calcium carbonate (aka limestone)?
Common sense says carbon dioxide’s impact on ambient temperature is, indeed, a wash.
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Robin, Mister Polar Bear said it had to do with the thermal conductivity and he did not say it had to do with heat conduction.
We have free or natural convection in the enclusure.
Using dimensionless nomenclature, we have for the instance to hand
dimensionless heat transfer coefficient
Nusselt number = Nu = hL/k
proportional to
Sqrt(Pr)*Sqrt Sqrt(Gr)
Prandtl number = nu/alpha
Grashof muber Gr = g*beta*DELTA(T)*L**3/nu**2
L the free length
beta = 1/T of the average bulk temp of the gas
nu = kinematic viscosity of the gas
alpha = k/(rho*Cp)
rho the average bulk density of the gas
The differences in Nu for the 2 instances arising mainly from the differences in the thermal conductivity k of the gases
Mister Polar Bear is a VERY difficult guy to fool
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Brian Valentine Wrote:
Or (in many cases) a well, requiring a hand pump.
Diarrhoea kills more than that many people in any given fortnight, even if you only count children (for whom the statistics are easier to google for some reason).
Nobody stopped it with coal plants prior to Kyoto. Perhaps the reason for the lack of action isn’t solar panels after all.
Probably not. A certain geology and topography is necessary before you can build a dam. And if you plan to dam the entire length of tropical coast against changing monsoon patterns and sea swell, then Professor Sir Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford’s 20 times for the cost of adaptation to the cost of amelioration will look awfully conservative.
Neither does ‘howling about “global warming”‘ come directly out of funds earmarked for dam building in Pakistan and Central America.
Not necessarily. Those things don’t protect a crop from destruction by floods or storms. Or enduring droughts.
yes, DDT is used for malaria prevention. The range of infection is extending uphill, and these two things are not really related.
And the age of the others?
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I meant to add, you were exactly right about convection, of course, you were right on target.
I was (as far as I know still am), adjunct associate professor of engineering at the University of Maryland.
I have taught thermo, fl meech, stat mech, other course to senior and grad students there
I left mid-semester Spring 2005 to go to Iraq because I hated to war and was sick of complaining about it so I wanted to do something about it.
I didn’t think I would return.
Surprisingly to everyone I did, including the Dean of the College of Engineering, who was not happy that I left mid semester of a course I was teaching.
The Dean has not met with me since my return, I had no tenure there of any sort.
When I talk with him again, I will let you know the outcome.
I think my bitterness over Global Warming Anxiety has a lot to do with my war experience.
You see, I was witness to millions of poor people who would simply die without access to fossil fuel
I returned to the States to keep fighting I guess
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Investment Tip of the Day:
Banking on Nick Stern’s assessment of ANYTHING AT ALL is an EXTREMELY unwise investment.
(Free investment advice, complementary)
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David Walker wrote
The high school experiment didn’t say. If they were left, they would return to room temperature, the air one faster than the CO2 one.
Cold is the absence of heat. You don’t really talk about it being absorbed or retained. If you hung a lump of dry ice over the samples, they would cool down, the CO2 one slower than the air one.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas because it is transparent to the sun’s heat, but blocks the longer wavelengths that are radiated by the earth. It doesn’t absorb the sun’s rays it absorbs the earth’s rays.
This is why the stratosphere has cooled. (There is less heat radiation getting through from below), and why the warming has affected night time and winter time more than say time and summer time. (CO2 slows the rate of cooling, but leaves the rate of warming the same.)
It’s pretty stable. It’s greenhouse properties are a function of the relative energies that it’s electrons can get to. They are similar as long as it remains CO2.
Don’t assume that, mate.
And CO2 is heavier than air but it is pretty well mixed. (Which is just as well. If it all fell we’d all die of CO2 toxicity, which knocks you out at about 8% by volume, and kills at a couple of percent more than that).
Weathering does remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
…
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I will follow up with David to morrow
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Brian Valentine Wrote:
Surely the one is nothing more than a constant that defines the rate of the other.
So if it has to do with thermal conductivity, then it does have to do with heat conduction.
Yes, that’s what I said.
Moreover I said this will dominate. (In fact you’d get an updraught in the middle of the tank, and a downdraught at the edges, mixing the gas into a much more homogeneous temperature than it would take for the thermal conductivity to make a difference.
Okay, so you’ve googled and found the equations. And yes, the nusselt number is the number we want, the ratio of convective to conductive heat transfer.
But I found this when I was googling, and not being in my field, I couldn’t find the relevant numbers for the case of air or CO2 over a horizontal plate.
Which is presumably what happened to you too, since you’ve produced these equations, also without putting in the numbers.
So what?
What are the values of Nu the difference between which you discuss?
My (very simplified and very rough) calculations show Nu to be about 10 or 20, therefore thermal conductivity doesn’t make a lot of difference to the heat loss. The heat in the tank will be mixed by convection, and it’s loss controlled by the conduction only through the glass, plus radiation.
Since the CO2 blocks the radiation, and the conduction through the glass is the same for both tanks, the temperature difference is the greenhouse effect.
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The equations came right outa my head, honey bunny.
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Brian Valentine Wrote:
Well, I apologise for the tone of my previous post then.
I would be interested in what values of numbers for Pr and Gr are in the case of these tanks though, because I’d like to be more confident that this isn’t significantly due to the lower thermal conductivity of CO2.
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ask your mom
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Brian Valentine wrote:
Whoa!
You think it was lack of access to fossil fuels that killed them?
In Iraq?
What about … healthcare, medicine, security from knives, bombs and bullets?
… 24 hours of electricity … water and sewerage infrastructure?
Iraq doesn’t traditionally have low access to fossil fuels. It’s a post invasion phenomenon … I assumed is was cost recovery for the invasion.
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Brian Valentine wrote:
Hmm. Perhaps I should put up a photo.
Not her field, she’s biochemistry.
And I want to know if you’re blagging about knowing what you’re talking about.
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Robin, you are positively charming.
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Tel wrote:
Just explaining why National is not very pro-environment and Greens don’t get much support from the farmers.
Environmental sensitivity is higher amongst those who enjoy the environment as a hobby, and that doesn’t include as a career.
They understand it fine. There’s not enough water. They want to drain the wetlands and use all of the rivers. And I understand that. But the land doesn’t support as many farms as it used to, and killing off rare and to people other than you, valuable ecological communities, will only delay the realisation of that fact. Better to reduce the farming now, and leave the wetland and freshwater ecologies survive.
It’s flys now and again. They’re often a force to be reckoned with in the senate.
I don’t think it is manageable for everyone. Some of the land just has to lie fallow until the climate changes again.
That’s why you need to change your politicians regularly.
And public image including environmental responsibility. Big companies love being environmentally responsible. Their risk lawyers tell them its a good long term plan.
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Tel Wrote:
Wiki suggests that there were only six such years in the 1700, none of them consecutive. (or in the same decade). Do you know where this “every winter” came from?
I would say that we understand something of the mechanism for those, and they’re not cyclic.
I’ve got $5 (Australian) that says they’re going down $10,000 in 2018.
I haven’t heard of this Bruckner cycle though … What causes that?
I think they focus on stuff that’s new since the last report.
Predict? From Solar Cycles?
The SPM said 0.2Ā°C per decade or 0.1Ā°C per decade if emissions stop at 2000 levels. That, AFAIK, is still a good guess.
Okay.
I suspect that we are in a continued warming, and that by the year following a turn in the sunspot cycle we will hit new warming records again. Or earlier if we get another El Nino like 1998.
The common opinion amongst scientists is that the estimates are conservative in terms of emission scenarios and about right in terms of predicted climatic response.
I doubt they will say anything of the sort. Their objective is to review the scientific understanding and report on it. I think that that is what they’ve done. (and then the political review phase waters it down a bit.)
Climate science isn’t really Pascal’s wager. There’s evidence and theory that explains observations, and makes predictions (to a certain range).
Sure. But we’re not taking action based on ignorance to try to limit carbon emissions. We can see that we’re changing the climate, and we can predict what some of the costs of that will be. And we can predict the costs of amelioration to a certain extent (although such predictions always overestimate costs, because industry is much better at finding techniques and technologies than is dreamed of by bureaucrats.)
The cost of amelioration is the cheaper, so we would be stupid not to do that.
And there is a 5% chance that we’re wrong about that, but the change to the economy to fossil fuel technologies will be valuable as fossil fuels become rarer, so there is some benefit from that. Even extending the lifetime of the fossil fuel era is a benefit.
You don’t need to be able to predict to work out what was the causes of the last 50 years of warming. You can use measurements of solar activity. (Or records of sunspot counts, which is a fine proxy)
Sure. Prediction over short time periods is hard.
They’ve got a few points around Antarctica. And Greenland. I wish we could ice core the Sahara.
You want raw ice core data? Dating the air against the ice is very non-trivial. What good would it be?
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Robin, I am certain that you have thoroughly convinced everyone who has read your incantations.
People tend to be enamoured with the arguments of show-off little kids who mock and condescend.
By golly, they’re probably the most persuasive item there is.
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Robin and Brian, those formulas for convective heat transport that you are quoting should be taken with several pinches of salt. There is much disagreement even about the power law, let alone the coefficient. Robin’s ‘Schaum outline’ seems to say it is (Delta T)^(3/4) whereas Brians formula says (Delta T)^(1/4) if I’ve interpreted it right. It depends very much on how large the Grashof (or Rayleigh) number is. If it’s large, as it is in the atmosphere of course, the general concensus seems to favour a 2/7 power law. The flow is highly turbulent, intermittent and irregular.
Convection is a very important heat transfer mechanism in the atmosphere, and it is not handled properly in climate models (if at all).
By the way, I’d like to compliment everybody on the high standard of debate on this blog.
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You are absolutely right Paul, it is the Rayleigh niumber that dominates the whole thing, and the power depends upon configuration mostly, as natural convection is certainly turbulent in most configurations.
Yes the standard of debate on this blog is not a standard of debate is it.
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You make this sound like a zero-sum game, and I don’t think that’s either fair or accurate. Allow me to present a basic difference in philosophy between rural people and greenies that has nothing to with “environmental sensitivity” and everything to do with point of view.
Someone trying to run a business on the land has the basic idea that you buy a piece of land, and you DO SOMETHING with what you have. Take it from what it is, and change it into something that you want it to be. The greenie sees this as consumption, eating the land up like a chocolate bar and then it’s all gone. The greenie wants to get a piece of land and DO NOTHING with it, because they believe that any change of any sort must automatically be worse.
If a farmer owns a piece of land, they have a strong stake in the long term value of that land, and the long term viability of their farm. Of course they must be sensitive to the environment, because if their farm is destroyed, so are they. For this reason they are always looking for ways to improve their land (i.e. change it into something more desirable to humans). The greenies keep telling them that the best possible thing is to do nothing, but experience and common sense keep telling them the opposite.
Farmers don’t have any particular interest in seeing new land opened up for farming, that’s just devaluing the land they already own and exposing them to more competition. They have an interest in finding ways to make better use of water (or other resources), because that gives them a productivity bonus, delivers an edge over competitors who don’t use that particular technique. In turn, increasing the land value.
If farmers genuinely believed that a carbon tax would deliver more rain, they would be onto it in a flash. They don’t trust the greenie mumbo-jumbo for the simple reason that from the rural perspective, greenies have never delivered anything useful — they take, but they don’t give.
Although Australia has plenty of food right now (we have been increasingly depending on imports), on the world scale, food shortages are becoming more and more common. Since a lot of our farming is fuel intensive, I suspect that as fossil fuels run out, food prices in Australia will rise substantially. If I had to go a few days without food to save some frog, then I’d eat the frog, and so would most people. Robin, if you had a few young kids to feed then you would be chopping up the frog to share amongst the family because all the mums who don’t have that instinct hard-wired into their brains have been dead for a long, long time.
What I’m trying to get at here is that the only long-term viable approach to environmentalism is one that rural communities take to heart, and something they can work into their design without devaluing their land, and hopefully something that also boosts their productivity to boot. This is going to involve change, and finding new niches for both ourselves and whatever species we can work with. If you think there is intrinsic value in diversity then you better be finding some practical applications of that, sufficient for a thicky hayseed farmer to understand. It’s also going to involve real research, real results, and no trickery.
The great idea, “Wow! we could really do nothing with this piece of land,” is not a winner.
There’s an excellent example of this conflict of philosophy with the attempt to drop iron fertilization into the oceans. Environmentalists are screaming about how dreadful it is, “We DID SOMTHING! Oh no, the world MIGHT CHANGE! We will all pay for that!” The stupidity of this reaction is that iron fertilization (and probably additional minerals like silicon are going to be required) could provide more food and a carbon sink over a massive scale. Probably there will be some animal somewhere that ends up worse off, but really we have to think about the bigger picture and quite likely the large additional food supply caused by increased photosynthesis on the ocean surface has got to be beneficial overall. At any rate, it makes sense to give it a serious try rather than writing it off out of nothing more than superstition and fear of the unknown.
Another excellent example is “Earth Hour” where everyone lights candles (producing bugger all illumination and heaps of CO2) in the name of saving the environment. Not only is it NOT saving the environment, and a sad wanky exercise in tokenism, but it is drawing strength from a deep neo-Luddite movement of people whose main interest is rejecting technology (turn back the clock to a simpler day where we can all be happy — a simpler day when the earth’s population was 1% of the current figure, and slavery was legal).
They light candles because of the urge to hold a fire in their hands. Doing this in the name of the environment is equally as valid an excuse as doing it in the name of God, or fertility or anything else. This is an act of ritual based on nothing more than superstition and ignorance. Greenies support it because what the greenies see is fealty and obedience and it makes them feel powerful. I’m sick in the guts seeing that Green-politik smugness because nothing good ever comes of promoting ignorance, and the more ignorance you bring to your cause the less your cause is worth.
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Me sick too, Tel.
Real, real, REAL sick.
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Of course I’ll cover your trivial bet. Based on St George Bank’s account keeping fees, the administration overhead is about 130 times more than the winnings. Maybe Jamie Packer can help.
Most of the proposed weather cycles exist as observation only — someone found strong spectral energy at one particular frequency in a time series, but no one knows exactly how it got there or what significance it may have. I believe Bruckner found something like this and put his name to it. You can google for it, there’s lots of articles but I doubt anyone understands the mechanism.
In principle you build up an empirical model based on the time series so far, then figure out what phase you are at in the cycle and go from there. Not perfect, better than nothing. Won’t hold up in the long term, but neither will anything else (I’ll get to that).
You were advocating this so called “precautionary principle” a while back which is just Pascal’s Wager wearing a silly hat. If you’ve changed you mind over the usefulness of any “precautionary principle” then I apologise for banging on a dead issue.
Adaptation has a solid track record of success, global scale geoengineering does not. Besides that, I don’t trust your cost estimates, I suspect you may be biased by your position.
In a non-linear system, there’s no particular reason that subtracting out one component leaves the contribution of the other components. If you can bicycle at 20 kph using two pedals, would it be fair to conclude that you would travel at 10 kph using only one pedal? After all, we can reasonably presume that for the 20 kph measurement equal input power goes into each pedal, thus one pedal must be half power.
Also, a great many lags and delays are known to exist between input and output, when subtracting the input contribution, how do you allow for these?
Chaotic systems are notoriously resistant to traditional Fourier analysis or simple low pass filtering like you might do with a random variable. Inside the sun are rotating layers of ionised gas tangled up with magnetic field lines. The field lines stretch and snap back dragging gas with them, every piece effects every other piece.
http://www.solarviews.com/browse/sun/sunmag.gif
Gives you some rough idea of how complex the “weather” on the surface of the sun is, and note the strong cyclic nature of the overall sunspot intensity… except that the expected sunspots due for around 2010 haven’t started to turn up yet. Things have been exceptionally quiet up there and no one knows why. Bloody chaotic system.
Even more annoying, some very simple chaotic systems will show ultra low-frequency spectral energy (i.e. very long time periods). For example, what causes the 100k year cycles of ice-age and interglacial? Why are the glaciation cycles somewhat different in length but yet somewhat similar in overall shape? Why are we currently overdue for an ice-age?
On a smaller scale to the glaciation cycles, we see faster, smaller 10k year cycles (but the period length does change and the faster cycle is not really consistent). Happens too often to be just random chance, not often enough to be reliable.
The general rule for chaotic systems is that prediction over a short period is easier than a long period. For example, I can create a simple prediction rule that the weather in 5 minutes time at any place on earth will be the same as the current weather at that place on earth. It’s a good predictor, and it’s right for a large percentage of the time. Now and then, it’s completely wrong. Predicting the weather on this day next year is much more difficult.
The temperature on Earth shows a lot of the hallmarks of a fractal object: degrees of self-similarity, some elements of quasi-cyclic behaviour, and new and surprising features at pretty much every timescale we have been able to measure.
If we want to take a climate measurement by averaging a lot of weather measurements (i.e. low pass filter) we need to keep averaging down below the lowest of the lowest frequency spectral energy (sadly, that’s over 100k years). If we want to take a climate measurement by subtracting out the chaotic components we need to be able to understand the full effect of those chaotic components in order to have a meaningful result when we subtract.
I find it hard to trust people telling me that there is secret sauce that they won’t let me see because I wouldn’t understand it anyhow. There’s a principle in science of openness and reproducibility.
With the emphasis on “image”. Big companies love the image of being responsible.
Nokia and Panasonic were happy to whack their logos on the Catlin Arctic Survey and get some “Green Cred (TM)” out of that one.
Consider what really happened though: some advertising exec at Nokia decided they needed something spiffy to look Green. Some business development manager at Nokia approved a budget. Prince Charles ran around waving a bit. Some young people got enthused and went looking for adventure, took a few measurements that could more easily have been taken by automated probes. They got stuck and got rescued and waved some more for the crowds at home.
At no stage did any of the people involved have any solid understanding of what they were doing, either for science, or for the environment. None of the decision-makers had any knowledge about the issues. Complete disconnect between brain and action.
Sadly, the sponsors are all coming out of this with a successful promotion — they got their brand in front of viewers and they got their green tick, and hey, it’s the thought that counts. This is the kicker… no one cares about what was achieved. No one cares because “image” was the objective.
I mean, if you think that’s silly, imagine trying to sell people heavyweight polypropylene bags (soaked in green paint) with the slogan, “Say NO to plastic!”
That’s what corporate advertising budgets will get for you, stunts and games, fodder for fools.
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The Catlin team could have prevented a lot of misery and and a rather ungraceful finale had they paid the least attention to the advice given in my book, How to Get Rich Quick with Frauds and Scams.
In the book, I specifically advise not to waste time with scams that rely on cooperating weather.
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By the way there is a larger reason why corporations spray themselves with rather dreadful coloured green paint.
The reason is fear: They are too cowardly to stand up against the threats of boycotts and other retaliatory actions of hate groups such as Greenpiece.
I really think that such groups have become the KGB of some Western governments.
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Brian,
You’re only half right: Many companies have painted themselves green because they now fully appreciate how to manipulate laws in order to ensure profits. General Electric’s CEO, just this month, made it clear his company aims to profit immensely through mandates involving the healthcare system, at the behest of the federal US government. Immelt went on a tangent about how capitalism will change, perhaps purposely mistaking socialism as capitalism.
Get rid of the mandates, put a moratorium on those pending, and a whole lot of force-pleasing will go away with, hopefully, some bloated and obselete corporate structures.
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Thomas Alva Edison – capitalist, inventor, and founder of the General Electric Corporation, would vomit all over the floor if he knew what a manipulative mess GE has become.
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Tel Wrote:
Well current technologies are such that water removed from the Murray for irrigation is such that that water is unavailable to farmers and fish downstream.
And it is a good idea to try to increase the value of your land, but its value is also tied to climate.
The reason there is no agriculture in the Great Sandy Desert in not that there are no farmers trying to add value to the land, it’s that the climate doesn’t support it. (And there’s no soil, but that’s a medium term function of climate).
So when the climate changes in farmland, it’s not that there’s some greeny saying “hey let’s do nothing with the land”, its the grim reality that without a climate that allows agriculture, there’s nothing that can be done with the land. (That maintains its value).
And farmers are right that reducing emissions won’t revert us to a previous climate. It’s a one way street, because the residency time of atmospheric CO2 is centuries, and even if sequestration technologies become available (and running those economically would require a world market in carbon credits, which looks unlikely at this stage), atmospheric CO2 is in equilibrium with oceanic carbonic acid, and the oceans are ready now to resupply the atmosphere if concentrations drop.
The only question is how much more climate change would you like with that new desert?
And yes, increasing fuel costs will initially increase the cost of the production of food, which may raise the price. (In basic economics what it does is reduce the profit, only reducing supply or increasing demand will raise the price … but Australian farmers are protected from many imports, so probably something in between).
But the economic analysis of climate change has been done, and that’s the cheaper way. Because losing food production to climate change also raises the price of food.
The iron fertilisation experiment has already been carried out on the southern ocean on a smaller scale, by a group including the CSIRO. It wasn’t economic. Doing it on a large scale is dangerous. As dangerous as climate change, because it does the same thing … strongly perturbs biological systems.
And I’m no neo-luddite. We need power generation, we need low carbon emission power generation, and the tested technologies means nuclear and wind in Australia, and we need to increase production to the grid about sevenfold, because we’re going to be moving to electric transport.
I partake in earth hour, because it’s a awareness raising thing, and you can do some kick arse star gazing that night, but I don’t intent to reduce my carbon footprint the required 80-90% to hold the climate steady, by using 80% less power. It has to be generated 80% cleaner.
… And we are centuries away from producing new proteins and recognising their human-biology uses technologically. It’s is way too sophisticated. CJD (the mad cow thinggy), is a normal essential protein that is folded in a way that is pathological and contagious.
Pathological origami of organic molecules. When you can predict all the possible effects like that by modelling a human cell (much less a body), you’ll have the technology to tell the climatic effects in ten years time of flying a kite.
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Last “Earth Hour” I turned all the lights up and played “It Don’t Mean a Thing” on my hi-fi at full volume.
Nobody in my whole neighbourhood dimmed a thing as far as I could tell.
The only thing I am aware of is the sickness I experience even THINKING about greenie weenies, I don’t know if it is some kind of pathology or not nor do I care.
Nor would I try to cure it if I could. As I see it, SOMEBODY has to balance the extremes of Al Gore, Greenpiece, etc
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Allow me to resign from this game before it becomes a war of attrition. Hopefully I’ve been able to explain some of the problems of the current Green movement and why they are their own worst enemy.
The Green movement has done a good job of awareness raising. 20 years ago it made sense to encourage environmental awareness, today the awareness is out there, people have heard about Global Warming.. they may not believe what they are told, but they are aware there’s an issue. Next step is intelligence raising, which has been the next step that so many political movements have stumbled on. There seems to be an upper limit on human understanding, presumably because self deception is such a powerful survival advantage.
I’ll finish up with another $5 wager that after ten years Robin you have more questions and less answers, than you do now. I’m happy to let you be the judge of who wins that bet, should we bother to revisit when the time clocks round.
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I’m sure that Tesla would just nod and say, “Figures.”
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In chess, a play for the pawns is often a winning strategy.
The Devil knows all the best dance steps, but I feel reluctant to criticize someone who makes the most out of the situation they find themselves in.
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I’m not so casual about opportunits.
Self-enrichment is one thing and harming the general public in the process is quite another.
If anyone wonders, “isn’t there anyone out there fighting Greenpiece and similar nefarious misery makers?”
– well yes now you know there is at least one individual.
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Brian et al,
Proudly, I spent the last Earth Hour driving my 1965 Chrysler Newport Convertible powered by a 383HP/727 Torqueflite (automatic). It’s a delightful cruiser, even if it only gets 12 mpg.
Sometime during the summer, I’m going to cruise to Nashville to take what detailed pictures I can of Albert Gore’s palace; then on to Clear Lake to snap his monstrous yacht; finally, I’ll end up in Carthage to see what, if anything, remains of the family estate/rental houses.
Scary to think my family and the Gores share cousins.
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I won’t hold it agin’ ye.
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Tel,
Many of the green players are no longer making the most out the situation they find themselves in; they’re creating perceptions, however illusionary, providing solutions to the problems they perceive, then promulgating the rules to ensure their profitability. Albert Gore is one of the masters of such spin and profit, and anyone who’s honest with him/herself should have a problem with such bad behavior.
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Tel,
One of the greater US Presidents whose statements are now timely and popular is Andrew Jackson. Jackson understood that many of the politicians, lawyers and businessmen in the federal Congress, as well as their aligned friends, wanted a central private bank to help quell the use of foreign specie, to provide for a uniform American currency, and to make themselves filthy stinking rich in the process. Usery and currency were conveniently perceived problems; you know how perceptions are used to make mountains out of mole hills.
Anyway, Jackson was wise to the Congressional philanderers out to exploit us “common” folks, our general lack of knowledge and connections. He said,
“Many of our great men are not content with equal protection and equal privilege, but have besought us to make them richer by act of Congress.”
In other words, he was calling attention to their conspiracy to enrich themselves by force of law, and he rightfully had a problem with it.
Jackson went on to say,
“I believe just laws can make no distinction between rich and poor, and when men of high standing attempt to trample upon the rights of the weak, they are the fittest objects for example and punishment. The great can protect themselves, but the poor and humble require the arm and shield of the law.”
Think about what Jackson said whenever you hear the hype and dogma spilling from the mouths of Albert Gore, Maurice Strong, Jim Immelt, William Yellowtail, etc. In my opinion, their statements make it clear they’re promulgated the rules for us to live and sacrifice by while they get rich. Rackets are illegal.
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And more people need to know who would like to have the Government complicit in fraud and grand larceny, David.
I will yell my fool head off wherever and when ever I can about the green slime conspiracy.
So far I have not been allowed to an Al Gore speech.
I am blacklisted – can you believe it – and of course I would use none but my real name to ask for tickets.
HOLY COW is that guy lucky I have never been in his presence before an audience.
Event security would have their hands full that day with me, guaranteed.
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The last Al Gore speech I attended was October 23, 1992. When I showed up, I was immediately invited to the VIP section by the host’s brother, who happened to be a fellow artist and co-worker. If I didn’t care about him and the aftermath, I would have gladly gone to the VIP section and raised Holy Hades. It would have been a rollicking time!
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I put it that the general public deserve at least three quarters of what they get. They genuinely believe that handing over self-sovereignty to the alliance of greedy big business and greedy big government will save them, and the only thing that you can do with a genuine believer is let them get on and live with the results.
Then again, they probably say the same about me, so I guess we’ll see where it goes. In another 15 to 20 years we will have a generation of self pitying “Emos” trying to figure out how to stop stabbing themselves long enough to run the world, that’s gonna be fun š
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Don’t worry, I know my Libertarian scripture too:
– Sir Josiah Stamp, President of the Bank of England
– Woodrow Wilson
– Benjamin Franklin
But the world is a balance between order and chaos, there’s always power nucleation around some cause of other, and the revolution always gets betrayed. People live hollow lives desperate for something to cling to and the miracles of the Medieval Christ figure seem quaint and embarrassing to a child of the modern age so they cling to something else.
People attracted to the security of authority constantly fret that they world is about to boil into frothing anarchy, people attracted to the sweeping plains of freedom worry about the world freezing into a brick of rigid obedience. I’ll admit it, I do my share of worrying. Getting angry hasn’t helped me yet.
00
Tel #377,
Yer too bitter. Ye diina hae a bit o’sympathy in ye. : )
00
I left one out:
– Jefferson
00
From a consensus of ecoscientists with non-divergent hypothesised theoretical theistic opinions supported by computer models devised where only certain proxy data gathered may be used while considering extremely narrow acceptable outcome based position statements supporting predetermined populous control mechanisms?
00
Quite.
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PaulM, your two posts on this thread have both been informed and informative, as well as being concise and without ad-hominem.
Thanks for sharing your expertise.
PaulM wrote:
Now I thought that the mechanism for the (much maligned) hot spot was convection taking hot humid tropical air up to the tropopause, and then forming clouds, releasing the heat of condensation of the water.
From that understanding I had thought that models generally do model convection (at least at all), and moreover correctly reproduce Hadley cells, (driven, as they are, by convection).
Does your knowledge of heat transfer extend to understanding of what causes the hot spot in models?
Or how models produce Hadley cells without handling convection? (They do tend to produce them. Googling “climate model” and “Hadley cell” produces (amongst other things) this paper:
Hadley cell bias in climate models linked to extratropical eddy stress, that looks at the Hadley cell strength from 17 models.
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Brian Valentine Wrote:
The evidence from the spatial and temporal distribution of the warming is indeed thoroughly convincing that it is greenhouse warming.
Although you don’t really need that evidence, because we know from first principles that if you increase the concentration of a greenhouse gas, you increase the greenhouse effect. Ergo we expect a warming.
Measurement by surface stations, ships and buoys confirm the theory’s prediction of warming. So do measurements by radiosonde. So do measurements from satellite.
Perhaps if you could find something in the post that you disagree with, and constructing a sensible argument, you wouldn’t feel so mocked. And condescended.
These general ad-hominems and disinclination (or disability) to construct an argument, (or clarify any technical aspects of arguments you have made) does attract suspicion of whether you are a show-off with no substance to your claims, Mr Ph.D, former, and as far as you know current, adjunct associate professor of engineering at the University of Maryland.
…
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Robin,
You win. Hands down, you are the mightiest. I acquiesce.
By the way there may be a critical Rayleigh number Ra = GrPr for Hadley cells, in the same way there is a critical Ra for BĆ©nard instability.
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Hah – I already guessed your next statement
“Wouldn’t the onset involve the Reynold’s number Re of the transverse wind velocity?”
Answer – not necessarily. i think above a certain Re the onset is independent of Re
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The evidence from the spatial and temporal distribution of the warming is indeed thoroughly convincing that it is greenhouse warming.
– I must have some sort of illness or personality disorder because it isn’t convincing to me
Although you donāt really need that evidence, because we know from first principles that if you increase the concentration of a greenhouse gas, you increase the greenhouse effect. Ergo we expect a warming.
but but but but but but didn’t we agree that @750 ppm of CO2 the expected increase in temp was about 1.3 deg?
Outline a procedure for me to distinguish THAT 1.3 degree increase from ANY RANDOM OR DETERMINATE variation in annual surface temperature increase UNRELATED to the CO2 variation and I assert:
I will say I was completely wrong to be a denier.
00
[ in my dream world, demonstration of the truth content of the contrapositive would complel you to be skeptical
BUT
this is the real world, and if there is one thing I will never have the power to do, is to change people’s minds once they have made up their minds]
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My conversation with a wheat farmer, driving his lorry truck:
“What to do think of Al Gore and the ‘global warming’ idea?”
“If that ain’t the biggest bunch of [rural slang] I ever heard in my life, then I don’t know what is.”
The man probably never finished elementary school, and even he knows a hoax when he hears it. Plain old common sense is enough for him.
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Brian,
That’s why the discussion should be shifted away from the co-opted science and toward the vested interests promoting global warming alarmism: Doing so will help restore the reputation of the science, expose the frauds and racketeers, and invigorate genuine environmental pursuits.
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Had I said,
“Mister Farmer, there’s people who don’t want to see you make a living farming wheat”
the response would probably have been
“you ain’t tellin’ me nothin'”
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Brian G Valentine Wrote: “By the way there may be a critical Rayleigh number Ra = GrPr for Hadley cells, in the same way there is a critical Ra for BĆ©nard instability.”
Okay.
Can you, as someone who considers themselves an educator, explain what the cause and effects of a Rayleigh number being “critical” are?
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Brian G Valentine wrote: “Hah – I already guessed your next statement
āWouldnāt the onset involve the Reynoldās number Re of the transverse wind velocity?ā
Answer – not necessarily. i think above a certain Re the onset is independent of Re”
Okay, can you, as someone who considers themselves an educator, explain my next statement.
How is Roynold’s number related to transverse wind velocity and in what was does this affect convection?
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Brian G Valentine wrote:”- I must have some sort of illness or personality disorder because it isnāt convincing to me”
No. Interestingly enough it is still convincing.
What do you consider to be the cause of the warming over the last 50 years?
00
See if I can make this brief and comprehensible (probably not)
Benard instability will occur in a shallow dish of liquid heated from the bottom, natureal convection (bouyancy) of course will make the liquid rise, gravity, bring it back down.
At a critical Ra, a hexagonal pattern of convection cells will appear. This is the result of surface tension acting to minimize the surface area over which convection occurs, counter balanced by a liquid motion arising from a surface tension gradient (Marangoni effect).
The size of the cell, and onset of Benard instability, is quite independednt of the surface tension of the liquid (within some margin). Evidently the the only thing that needs to be present is some surface tension at all.
Now we may have a similar effect within the atmosphere, with a emperature gradient replacing almost all the influence of gravity in a liquid (hot air rises).
The effect of the transverse shear, replacing the influence of a surface tension gradient that has been identified as a source of transverse motion in a liquid.
Now for the (omega1 + 1 st = omega1)th time, any global effect on temperature (amidst a myriad of others) must be, as Dr Akasafu has stated, the recovery from the LIA,
and any such thing as that, can only be, astronomical of origin
beware the jabberwok!!!!!!
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Brian G Valentine: “Now we may have a similar effect within the atmosphere, with a emperature gradient replacing almost all the influence of gravity in a liquid (hot air rises).”
How big are these hexagonal cells, in the atmosphere?
How big are they in a shallow dish of liquid of any viscosity?
I don’t understand how a temperature gradient can replace the influence of gravity. Can you (as someone who considers themselves and educator) make that a bit more plain?
Trying to state that more clearly, you think the prime cause of the warming of the last 50 years is galactic cosmic rays seeding less and less clouds?
00
I’m so tired right now, if you have any more questions, you’ll have to ask Sinbad the Sailor or Jinbad the Jailer or Ninbad the Nailer or Binbad the Bailer or Quinbad the Phthailrer or Darkenbad the Bright Dayler
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Brian G Valentine wrote:”but but but but but but didnāt we agree that @750 ppm of CO2 the expected increase in temp was about 1.3 deg?”
Did we?
I didn’t notice that you’d moved your position from there is no greenhouse effect at all.
Did it happen during the discussion of the highschool experiment?
… but no, the direct effect of CO2 is no the expected increase in temperature. The expected increase in temperature includes the feedbacks that one finds in the climate system.
The effect of 750 ppm CO2 compared to pre-industrial levels is about 4.5Ā°C.
(And a group based at MIT says 9 degrees by 2100 – see: http://www.reuters.com/article/mnCarbonEmissions/idUS148975034620090522)
We agree that the greenhouse effect itself will increase temperatures 1.3Ā°C. But that will lower albedo by melting ice, and increase the greenhouse effect further by evaporating water.
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Brian G Valentine Wrote:
Well the point is that if the warming were caused by a decrease in planetary albedo by a decrease in cloud cover, the warming would be more in the day and less in the night, increasing the daily temperature range. This is because the temperature drops very rapidly at night if there are no clouds.
This is the opposite to what is observed, a decrease in daily temperature range.
However the decrease is what is predicted by the greenhouse effect, because this slows the rate of cooling.
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mister barrister, your witness, sir
Ah yes, thank you, my Lord. Some years ago I did consider global diurnal temperature difference decreasing over time to be consistent with a greenhouse effect, and independent of matutinal high temperatures.
The historical record of diurnal temperatures remains spotty however, but more importantly, there are countervailing influences present. To wit:
– Depending upon the emissivity of the surface present, waterās nocturnal evaporation rate from the ever-changing never-changing oceans and lakes may either increase or decrease, the influence of CO2ās radiation overlapping that of water, thereby abating the radiation loss from the liquidās surface to the blackest of voids beyond, thereby decreasing the evaporation rate.
Globally, the effect would be to decrease nocturnal humidity if in fact nocturnal evaporation were decreased over that without CO2 present in the atmosphere, thereby widening the diurnal temperature difference and mostly independently of matutinal high temperature, the waterās surface temperatures being more dependent upon seasonal than daily variation.
– If not so, the increase of evaporation rate by a temperature increase alone would enhance cloud cover, which is not observed.
By all rights a greenhouse effect must increase average matutinal temperatures globally, there being less radiation loss at night, the heat can go nowhere but the oceans or the atmosphere or the good Earth upon which Joshua stood, and thus far, none of these putative sinks have revealed the hidden or somehow purloined heat.
Council for the defence, Sir ā¦
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The expected increase in temperature includes the feedbacks that one finds in the climate system.
The expected increase in temperature includes the feedbacks that Robin wants to find in the climate system.
The expected increase in temperature does not include the feedbacks that Brian Gregory Valentine PhD PE believes to be present in the climate system.
00
Come along now, Robin, I don’t wish to be the Last Man Standing.
I want you to be.
00
Whoever stands last, I officially declare Robin the winner, if I may.
Robin thank you, and I am sincere.
You have taught me that I am no educator of anything, if all that I say isn’t crystal clear and sensible.
With all I say in light of that henceforth, I will remember how you strove for complete clarity, for nothing can be conveyed to be understood, if it isn’t presented clearly.
In the words of Boileau,
C’est-te qu’on conƧonsois bien
S’announce clairment.
Et les mots pour le dire
Arrivent aisement.
[Arts Poetique]
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Brian Valentine wrote:
As one of the world’s top economists, and being, as he is, aware of economic in the developing world, from his time as Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank, Professor Stern’s assessments are worth considering.
Your post has no material basis for this ad-hominem on Stern. Do you have one? Or are you merely trying to lower the level of discussion on this thread for its own sake?
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You are indeed the winner!
Hands down. My cats agree too.
>^. . ^< meow
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
How many years ago was that?
What changed your mind?
What do you mean by “pretty spotty”. Are you claiming that the diurnal temperature range hasn’t decreased?
What changes the emissivity of the surface of an ocean or lake?
What do you mean by “ever-changing never-changing” oceans?
Why would abating the radiation loss from the surface of the ocean decrease the evaporation rate? Wouldn’t it increase it, by leaving the surface warmer?
Well, except where it actually rains the nocturnal humidity would be very close to the diurnal humidity. Water vapour is resident in the atmosphere for an average of about 10 days, and is not dominated by the last 8 hours of evaporation rate.
The winter to summer temperature range has also decreased; another sign that the culprit is the greenhouse effect.
That’s not right. The increase in temperature also keeps more of the atmospheric water in vapour form. Whether or not we expect more clouds with a higher temperature is complicated and controversial. Observations are not outside the range of expectations.
Yes, that’s what I said. And moreover this is confirmed by observations.
00
aggh
When my daughter was about 2, she used to play the “why” game
When she was about 3 she used to do things like attempt to flush a teddy bear down the toilet and then I would be the one asking “why”
I don’t think either of us of ever received a satisfatory answer to our question “why”
So, let me see if I can give some unsatifactory answers to your questions.
– The Pacific Ocean is the Pacific Ocean is the Pacific Ocean, but last month’s Pacific Ocean isn’t this month’s Pacific Ocean for a number of reasons.
– Surely you don’t think that something like the emissivity of a surface of something like an ocean or lake is a statical property that remains constant for the same body of water, let alone has a unique value that can be assigned to every similar body of water
– By “spotty” I mean, incomplete (or not complete enough to draw global conclusions, anyway).
I think the main stumbling block of what I have written, is as follows:
Water on the ground evaporates into the air, by transferring heat, obviously. The enthalpy of vapourisation that must be supplied to water to evaporate it (at a given temperature of the water) comes from the surroundings, normally.
Suppose that water on the ground is warmer than the surrounding air (ususally the case for a large body of water). Can the water still evaporate? Why yes, certainly, at night, the water radiates heat to outer space, which is at an effective temperature of zero Kelvin (or 2.97 degrees Kelvin, if one needs to be fussy).
Exactly how much heat will be radiated, depends on the emissivity of the surface (among other things).
Within certain bands of radiation, CO2 in the air overlaps the absorptions bands of water. Effectively, there is more water present in the atmosphere – as far as (some of the) rsadiation from surface wtater is concerned.
This, thereby, decreases the radiation loss from the water surface at might, and thereby decreases the evaporation of water from the large body of water.
Then we have less surrounding humidity.
Then we have lower nocturnal temperatures.
The effect of CO2 has been to INCREASE the diurnal temperature difference.
This effect must be small, you think.
Not as small as you think, from what I calculate.
Why has no one reported of this before, you wonder.
Life is filled with things that no one, by any chance, thinks about.
I really have to do a lot of things. Please if you like or anyone else, correspond with me directly
[email protected]
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And I want to know if youāre blagging about knowing what youāre talking about.
The answer to your question is yes, most assuredly yes, yes indeed yes, absolutely yes, positively yes, yes I am Yes.
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Kt x p +
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
I’m not sure what that is supposed to explain.
Yes, I would have thought that the emissivity of an ocean would be about constant. Certainly I don’t see a mechanism for a trend in ocean emissivity that explains the decrease in diurnal temperature range.
Well, that wouldn’t cause the observed effect. But again I would have thought that the emissivity of a lake would be similar to that of a sea.
That’s what I thought you meant. I was hoping that by asking about it, you would get that I was giving you the opportunity to back up your speculation with some data or references.
Climate scientists seem to draw global conclusions about it. For example:
“Observed reductions in DTR over the last century are large
and unlikely to be due to natural variability alone.” – Diurnal temperature range as an index of global climate change during the twentieth century
So I think that you’re mistaken about it being “spotty” and “incomplete”.
No, other way around. Decreasing the radiation loss leaves the body of water warmer, which increases the evaporation rate.
As so, more humidity, and higher nocturnal temperatures.
Mate, your calculations don’t have the right sign.
Because no one else made such a trivial error?
…
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Mate, your calculations donāt have the right sign.
Mate, the ocean, and the atmosphere, are what we call “reservoirs” – meaning, that incremental processes of heat addition or removal, small in comparison to the total energy content they contain, leave their temperature
unchanged.
Kt x Q + and mate
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Brian G Valentine:
No, mate, it’s colder at night.
Sea surface temperature is about 1Ā°C cooler, depending on wind. The atmosphere over land, about an order of magnitude more than that.
By what mechanism do you claim that “decreasing the radiation loss from the surface at [n]ight decreases the evaporation of water”?
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
Yeah, it sounded like you were blagging.
Well, that explains why the University of Maryland’s Mech Eng. department’s back issues of its newsletter or News archives don’t mention you.
I thought it was a bit strange that you’d never assisted a student PhD never received any award or recognition, never received any funding, never stood in a photo, even of the CEEE projects in which the DOE was a partner to the university, and were left out of the staff lists on all the back issues 2001-2009 that they have online. (http://www.enme.umd.edu/news/newsletter.html)
And your name never appeared in any of the News Archives. (http://www.enme.umd.edu/news/news_archives.php)
I take it you never were an associate professor?
00
Note to self – never again get into any arguments with anonymous global warmers,
They kick, they howl, they accuse, they use the Internet to show the world what frauds other people are when they don’t come out so well in discussions.
Joanne goes through the routine on a daily basis.
Of course I am in a few CEEE group photos, I don’t know if they are still posted on the site or not. I am standing right next to Mike Ohadi in the photos.
Write to Professor Ohadi to ask when and to what status I worked at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland at College Park.
[email protected]
I’ll bet you won’t, because you seem to me a little too cheesey to me to do something like that.
hee hee hee
ha ha ha
hee hee hee hee hee
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It’s a Great Day for Bananafish!
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Note to bloggers using their correct name:
DON’T TELL LIES ON THE INTERNET!
You can make yourself look awful that way
00
Iāve been through it a thousand times, it is rather routine for me now
-Iāll make a claim about AGW on the Internet
-Anonymous global warming blogger tells me Iām full of [nonsense]
-I demonstrate otherwise
-Anonymous blogger starts denying, ranting, throwing mud, name calling, and everything else but admit they could be wrong.
Advantages to using oneās authentic name to write on the Internet: Eventually, one earns some regard from the opposition, and the attacks and abuse are toned down. For example, Eli Rabett and Tamino and some others do not attack me in web columns
any more
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Brian G Valentine wrote:
I was trying to encourage you to answer the questions that I have put to you, rather than generate another red herring to chase for a few posts.
The most current one being: By what mechanism do you claim that ādecreasing the radiation loss from the surface at [n]ight decreases the evaporation of waterā?
But feel free to answer any of the unanswered above too:
1)Brian Valentine wrote: āNegative, guy. It doesnāt even work in FURNACES, at least, not as how you are interpreting the āgreenhouseā effect.ā
How should I interpret the greenhouse effect, such that it does work in furnaces?
2)Whatās the problem [with validating the PCM by hindcasting], as it stands?
3)Could you explain what you mean by confusing heat capacity with IR absorption [by saying that the greenhouse effect is an absorption spectrum phenomenon], because I donāt think Iām doing that.
4)Brian Valentine wrote: “No, eventually the water condenses someplace, and the heat is dissipated, at longer wavelengths still, wich is absorbed by nothing.”
Why is the heat at longer wavelengths still?
5)Many other peopleās calculations yield that a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere results in a drop in radiative flux out of the atmosphere of around 3 W/m2, and this is simply wrong?
6)Brian Wrote “the equations of transfer are highly nonlinear in temperature.”
By ānon-linearā do you mean not proportional to temperature (but more proportional to itās fourth power), or do you mean ānon-linearā as in the superposition principle doesnāt apply?
7)Brian Wrote “The divergence of any source-free field is zero. CO2 is not a āsourceā of radiation in the presence of radiation.”
PaulM wrote “Div q = 0 in equilibrium. If div q < 0, things warm up a bit and so increase their heat emission until div q=0 again.”
Why did you need Paul to explain this?
8)Brian Wrote “Okay, take the kernel and the Jacobian of the transformation, and the question becomes irrelevant.”
No, the question was what integral transform are you talking about? It’s still relevant because you’re not yet making sense.
9)The Jacobian returns the tangent plane to something doesn’t it. What does taking the Jacobian of an integral transform even mean?
10)ā[Hulme – who you say should know what he’s talking about] says āI am firmly convinced that humans are indeed altering climate worldwideā. Is this also your view?ā
11) Do you believe Dr Akasofu that the current warming is due to the ārel position of the Earthās plane of orbit with respect to the Sunā, or do you believe that the warming is solely attributable to changes in solar irradiance, as per the work of the Royal Danish observatory?
12) Brian wrote “The Earth has not warmed for over a decade”.
The earth has warmed over the last 10 years. What do you mean by “over a decade?”
13) How can you get Bernard instability in the atmosphere? (Given there is no surface tension at the tropopause)
14) Brian wrote “and any such thing as that, can only be, astronomical of origin”
Do you mean that you think that prime cause of the warming of the last 50 years is galactic cosmic rays seeding less and less clouds?
14b) Doesn’t this contradict your claims of 11 that it is entirely changes in solar irradiance, and also due to the “rel position of the Earthās plane of orbit with respect to the Sun”
14c) Did you notice that you’re explanations of the warming are very inconsistent?
15) What are the values of Nu the difference between which you discuss? (In the tanks of the high-school greenhouse effect experiment.)
15a) Brian wrote: “… it had to do with the thermal conductivity and … not … with heat conduction.”
Had you forgotten what “thermal” means, or were you hoping that I had?
You seem to be very apt at avoiding questions, but as the skeptic’s handbook says “As long as the question you asked doesnāt get resolved, repeat it.” So you’ll probably get these again.
Upon your request, I have emailed Prof. Ohadi. I have also emailed the Payroll/Personnel Coordinator at the Department of Engineering of the University of Maryland with the same question.
For good measure I have also emailed the registrar at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to confirm that you have a PhD from there.
I will post if any of these people respond.
The only remaining question is over your position at the DOE.
Your CV at linked in makes the claim that you are a “Mgr, Renewables & Environment industry”, whereas the only Brian Valentine on the DOE phone list, is “General Engineer, Office of the Industrial Technology Program” – specifically petroleum technologies.
Now if I emailed Douglas Kaempf (who looks to be your boss, from the phone list), the Program Manager of the Industrial Technologies Program, would he confirm that you are Program manager, energy efficiency and renewable energy, itself two organisational levels above the Industrial Technology Program?
And have been since June 1986? (Or should I refer you to your post 416?)
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Holy Freakin’ Crap
I could have saved you any time by just emailing my transcript, letter of appointment, etc in the first place
I don’t care who the hell you email Robin, I don’t care what you do, I couldn’t survive if I told lies on the Internet, you seem to survive by being an anonymous (to me) blogger who has set a target on me?
RPI will confirm I am ME 08/1981 and PhD 12/1986
Mike Ohadi will confirm anything I have said
As far as DOE goes, I can email you my personnel folder, if you have the courage to email me with your correct name
Which I will know anyway if you have emailed Mike and have identified yourself
and I am certain, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you are not some little nitwit who would email Mike and try to disguise yourself like you do here
00
Robin, you’re one of the more interesting people who I have become (somewhat) acquainted with.
I am quite flattered, actually, that you have taken so much interest in finding out all you can about me, you are the first, as far as I know, who has probed quite so deeply
(outside of my gov’t background check, and the only thing they know more than you do is my credit report)
Would you like a copy of that?
Be glad to email it to you.
Thanks again for your interest.
Remember: I could not survive if I told lies at all. My credibility wuuld be gone in ten seconds if I did.
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Technical note about DOE terminolgy
I have been “general engineer” since 06/23/1986 at DOE.
Until a reorg in 2004, all “general engineers” were labelled “program managers” bec that is what they did.
The managers were called Division Directors and Office Directors for each Program office.
Since the reorg the div directors are called “supervisors” and the office director is called “program manager” to conform with changing the name of Office of Industrial Technologies to Industrial Technologies Program
Then the former worker “program managers” became “technology managers” which I am now; but my actual Govt job title is “general engineer”
cripes if this makes a difference to anyone.
DOE is a nice outfit to work for, I am very glad to be there
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OK now, any or all discussions with Robin – I hereby cease on Joanne’s website, and I will address no more of her questions nor speak to any more of her remarks.
The only way for Robin to communicate any more about anything with me is to email me personally,
[email protected]
Note: I ignore anonymous or semi-anonymous email.
So Robin cannot claim that I have somehow “written her off” and unilaterally decided to ignore her.
To get back to a more enlightening subject, consider the Earth and the climate system. Of course, the system is approaching a steady state, not an equilibrium, since the Earth is not closed to energy transfer.
Now the entropy of a system is defined away from equilibrium, and there is more than one way to define it.
Above all the second law has to hold for the system, meaning that the entropy of the system, together with the entropy of the surroundings, (i.e., the entropy of the Universe) must increase, at all times, globally –
and the question is, what conditions must hold for the Greenhouse effect so that this condition remains true?
What do you think we’ll find?
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Does Robin really love Brian? Opposites do attract! Maybe robin wants to be convinced through the gentle art of factual persuasion!
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So Dallas – do you think there is a local potential defined for the climate sensitivity?
(ref Prigogine and DeFay)
00
Exchanging fluids to produce the desired outcomes?
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Substituting Brian for Dallas, Brallas, asks Brian a coherent question.
Substituting Dallas for Brian, Dallan, then gets a coherent answer to the question.
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Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
00
You’re too kind.
00
(I had been thinking – Batterham –
No, no, way too young
It will come to me …)
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I was wondering why everyone assumed Robin was female …. š
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I had assumed she I mean he was a female because of a note Joanne sent to me – asking me to be nice to HER.
I therefore thought – Joanne knows of her I mean him and Robin is a female
Her I mean his picture looks familiar – I can’t place her from where I have seen her before
I mean him
sorry
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Did anyone go to the 3rd International Conference on Climate Change yesterday? Oh, wait a minute, it’s still 2nd of June in the US – make that “today”?
00
Apparently a comprehensive new Report was released; “Climate Change Reconsidered”:
http://www.nipccreport.org/
Quote from webpage: “In āClimate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC),ā coauthors Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso and 35 contributors and reviewers present an authoritative and detailed rebuttal of the findings of the United Nationsā Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on which the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress rely for their regulatory proposals.”
The report is downloadable from the website (8,139 kb), or you can spend $154 and buy the paperback version, AND you can donate to help support complimentary distribution of the report!
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Yes but briefly.
Look here http://algorelied.com/ for a video of Professor Singer speaking to the press on America’s ETS
Jeg elsker Heartland!!!
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I have a free copy of NIPCC as a reviewer and will gladly send my free copy to anyone upon request because I have the draught anyway
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Brian wrote
I’m not convinced that you have any credibility. Certainly the discrepancy between your claims of professorship at the University of Maryland and any mention of you on their staff lists has been noted. And frankly, “as far as I know I still am” is not credible deniability. You’ve not been on the staff there at least since the 2005 METRICS, and there is no evidence of you in the 2001, 2003 or 2004 ones; whereas most professors are at least mentioned as the students that they supervise get their PhDs, even if they aren’t involved in any newsworthy research or projects.
As has the discrepancy between your claims of working in “renewables and the environment” when your job description is general engineer, and your field is petroleum technologies.
To my surprise RPI has confirmed that you have a chemical engineering PhD. A petroleum chemist, then, but a PhD nonetheless.
I feel myself warm considerably. How strange. You must have been doing a convincing imitation of someone who is merely blagging. If you have an education though, there is no need for you to avoid the questions that I have put to you, and there is no reason for you to post statements that are plain wrong such as “∇ Ā· q = 0″ when talking about a warming atmosphere or that thermal conductivity is not to do with heat conduction.
Feel welcome to answer some of the 15 questions above, before raising more regarding thermodynamics.
The sun is exporting stacks of entropy to the rest of the universe, so the 2nd law of thermodynamics, vis. puts not constraints on the entropy of the earth in isolation.
BTW, no confirmation to date of you having been a professor at Maryland University. (Not that my e-mail was the sort of thing that I would imagine Prof Ohadi would prioritize actioning, but maybe he has a interest in supporting the petty online squabbles of his alleged colleague.)
00
second try:
The sun is exporting stacks of entropy to the rest of the universe, so the 2nd law of thermodynamics, vis. puts no constraints on the entropy of the earth in isolation.
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—–Original Message—–
From: Brian Valentine [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 10:43 PM
To: ‘[email protected]’
Subject: Hello Mike
Hello Mike
I havenāt spoken to you in a while, I hope your family is well,
Nowrooz Pirooz!
Nowrroz Mubarack.
Are you still in the Middle East?
Mike someone has been inquiring about my work as adjunct associate professor at UM ā possibly named āRobinā.
If you see their message please answer their questions and kindly forward the answer to me
Best
Brian
00
A petroleum chemist?
My PhD thesis was of evaporation, the subject engineering physics, title of my thesis was “Analytic study of evaporation in the interline region”
00
Robin dear I just plain old ain’t answerin’ none o’ yer questions, dear,
I jus’ plain ol’ ain’t!
Die Energie der Welt ein Konstant ist
Die Entropie der Welt sterbt ein Maximum zu.
00
“The sun is exporting stacks of entropy to the rest of the universe.”
Christ, I’m gonna write a book based on THAT one.
00
Robin you don’t have a damned CLUE what you are talking about.
None.
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—–Original Message—–
From: M. M. Ohadi [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Tuesday, June 02, 2009 11:05 PM
To: Brian Valentine; [email protected]
Subject: Re: Hello Brian
Hi Brian:
Sure, will do. Where are you these days? Back in the U.S. and the DOE?
Yes, I am still in the Middle East on leave assignment from the U of Maryland.
Rgds
Mike
00
The office of the registrar at RPI said the subject was chemical engineering.
00
ha ha ha
HAH HAH HA HAH HA HAH HA HA
hah ah ha ha ha ha
hah ah ha hah ha ha
00
That was the DEPARTMENT that supervised my thesis
that and the math department
00
Jeg kan IKKE fordroge Robin.
(Only Anne Kit will know what that says)
00
There is one small detail that Robin left open to check
That is, I write PhD PE after my name!
PE menans that I am a Professional Engineer, licensed in the Commonwealth of Virginia, United States.
Now for THAT one I can offer a means to confirm directly
(be sure to check box “professional engineer”)
http://www.dpor.virginia.gov/regulantlookup/selection_input.cfm?CFID=6727968&CFTOKEN=20911450
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I
could
not
survive
if
I
told
lies
on
the
internet
attaching my name to what I write
00
Det kan jeg heller ikke – han er en ubehagelig lille skiderik. Hvor har du laert dansk? Har do boet i Danmark?
00
“du”, not “do”, can’t even spell my own language anymore …
00
Ikke, jeg lƦrt et antal sprogene nemlig en barn nemlig underholdning — og Dansk var sig i den sprogene at jeg lƦrt.
Tak MEGET for lƄn nemlig al jer lave!
00
You do lie about being a professor at Maryland University. It doesn’t affect your ability to post here. You don’t need credibility or respect for that.
Your claim that you don’t know whether or not you’re a professor at Maryland University is laughable.
Strictly speaking, you should stop using the PE too then. Your license expired in February.
Not that four months is a biggie, but since you claim you couldn’t survive if you told lies on the internet, perhaps you should be careful to not tell them … what with all that non-survival you claim would happen.
00
Mike is away. Mike has been away since I have been in Iraq. I taught courses and PhD students with Mike.
When Mike returns – do you think Mike will ask me to come back?
(answer: not if you have anything to say about it I supppose)
Thamks for reminding me about the $85 renewal + $50 late fee I owe on my license.
I can’t
I just can’t …
I just
can’t
shake this
feeling
that
somehow
for some reason
you
you
you don’t
you don’t like me
00
Better watch out, Robin – people are going to start asking you: if you’re so sceptical about HIM – then why don’t you focus some of your scepticism efforts on the IPCC too?
Answer — Because you have accepted AGW as your religion and you view unbelievers (and proselytisers of disbelief) as frauds who need to be summarily exposed as frauds!
Before they pollute minds!
00
Robin, you didn’t write the following blog anonymously, did you?
(Note: The entry is posted under the anonymous byline “The Insolent Braggart”)
At what point do we jail or execute global warming deniers
June 2, 2009, 9:42PM
What is so frustrating about these fools is that they are the politicians and greedy bastards who don’t want a cut in their profits who use bogus science or the lowest scientists in the gene pool who will distort data for a few bucks. The vast majority of the scientific minds in the World agree and understand it’s a very serious problem that can do an untold amount of damage to life on Earth.
So when the right wing fucktards have caused it to be too late to fix the problem, and we start seeing the devastating consequences and we start seeing end of the World type events – how will we punish those responsible. It will be too late. So shouldn’t we start punishing them now?
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Link for that story.
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/1096/Shock-Call-To-Action-At-what-point-do-we-jail-or-execute-global-warming-deniers–Shouldnt-we-start-punishing-them-now
I believe the actual comment has been removed from the original blog now. Possibly that blogger realized inciting people to murder others was just a tad too unscientific…
00
Robin, may I note that you have inadvertently accused Dr Ohadi of telling lies
– You stated you wrote to Dr Ohadi
– Dr Ohadi never mentioned any such thing to me about receiving such email
– That means that you have accused Dr Ohadi of telling me a lie, and so Dr Ohadi did in fact receive your message and did not tell me
– Dr Ohadi chose to ignore your message, or never received it through the email for some reason
The probability of the last is very low
You didn’t tell lies about that did you, Robin?
00
I apologise to Robin for being so harsh. No mind was ever changed with harshness.
May I suggest, that personal or personnel differences be better handled off line.
Robin if you question my job with UM, I don’t blame you one bit!
I take it as a compliment that you have the interest to find out.
You could easily have emailed me as I offered, and I would be glad to send you a copy of my letter of appointment from the Provost of June, 1999 appointing me adjunct associate professor of engineering.
That appointment is for good, Robin, there was no time horizon set forth in that letter nor did I receive a notice rescinding that appointment at any time.
Then Joanne’s and everyone else’s time isn’t wasted with you stamping your feet and rattling off accusations and me defending myself using a lot of sarcasm for which I apologise.
Anyway, I can’t reasonably answer your questions about the climate &c here because that will only inspire some more repetitive questioning and no one has any interest of it.
Again I cordially invite you to write to me personally to discuss anything you like.
Eventually, perhaps, we may reach some level of mutual understanding.
00
There are some games that are best won by not playing.
What I see here is a lot of entropy being pointlessly created by playing a game called “Now I have you, you SOB!”
Isn’t the real issue the existence of AWG, its significant, can we do anything about it, and is it worth doing anything about it if we could?
Does the content of a person’s CV have anything to do with the validity of his position on an issue such as AWG?
Do you really destroy an argument about anything by destroying the reputation of the person arguing or by pointing out weaknesses in his personal or even professional life?
Isn’t the only relevant thing with respect to the AWG issue the best evidence available, interpreted without contradiction, in the widest context that is possible to achieve?
Aren’t personalities, their lives, their nose counts, and their emotional pathologies irrelevant to what is true about AWG?
Oh, I know a good harangue relieves anxiety. A successful and sharp put down of another can be soothing for one’s feelings of inadequacy. The exchange of barbs can stimulate the blood to flow faster and relieves boredom. What this has to do with AWG and its possible impact or lack thereof on our future is beyond me.
I suggest we all refer to http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ and start learning how to avoid committing such fallacies. If we did that, we could make much more progress in mutual understanding and speed the solving of the real problems.
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Brian Wrote:
I am not aware of a more peer-reviewed document than the IPCC reports. The papers upon which they base their statements are well referenced. So the reason for believing any particular point made in the IPCC reports can be explicitly followed through from the research.
For example the estimate of climate sensitivity of about 3Ā°C per doubling of CO2 is based on about 20 papers taking diverse lines of reasoning, that confirm each otherās findings by reaching the same result from independent methodologies. (What is sometimes called in philosophy of science ātriangulation in logical spaceā.)
Your points are the opposite in many ways.
You have different conclusions from the data; that the recent warming is due to changes in solar irradiance, that it is due to the position of the earthās orbit, and that it can only be astronomical in origin (and in this last point you seem to be referring to cosmic rays).
This is a divergence in logical space, which fails to confirm the results, and moreover shows that most of them must be wrong.
Your claims are not peer reviewed, and, in fact, disagree with the established scientific position. (When I find that my thinking is different from that of the experts in the field, I generally wonder what it is that Iām doing wrong. Most people would be the same.)
Your claims cannot be followed through from any research, and in fact you simply ignore the plethora of questions that your statements have raised.
This is why you attract more scepticism than the IPCC.
00
Different approaches may very well have yielded the same value of the climate sensitivity, but none of them may be correct ā if in fact all the approaches applied the same underlying assumptions, which were not true.
That is the approach I have taken, and I will not be the judge of the truth of what I claim, innumerable other people will be.
I am aware as anyone in the difficulty of demonstrating something of that magnitude and I cannot claim that my demonstration will be accepted in any short time.
Iāll agree most would see a claim such as this as crank right now, and I envision the following scenario:
– I submit for publication at least three times, and rejected (real publication not fake āArXivā do-it-yourself āpublicationā)
– Rejected each time
– Finally accepted for publication
– Causes uproar like Gerlich and Tseuschner have done in J Phys B, inviting untoward criticism and counter demonstrations, laughter, and rebuke
– Finally accepted as truth by more than half of the original critics
Thatās about the best I can hope for within the span of my lifetime.
You might well dismiss this as the ranting of a fool.
Everybody knew that parity was always conserved in all physical interactions, including weak interactions, and so everybody knew that the theta and tau particles were distinct entities, everybody who thought otherwise was a crank.
C N Yang and T D Lee just didnāt believe it
00
Reactions to what I have written above will range from
“I wish you well in your endeavours”
to
“heh heh heh it doesn’t bother me or anybody else that you’ll waste more of your time doing your crank thing and fall flat on your (face) and I won’t be the first one to laugh”
It is this difference of point of view that makes life interesting
00
People ask me, “Why are you doing this, Valentine? What do you hope to get out of it? Fame? Are you trying to get yourself a high paying job with a right wing think tank or something?”
No. The only “reward” that I’ve earned so far is a lot of abuse and accusations – rather like Robin’s (sorry Robin to use you as an example).
I do it as an attempt to prevent the very bad consequences of “carbon reduction schemes” that will be imposed on those least able to afford them, as well as poor people in poor contries who are going nowhere if carbon law becomes international.
I don’t make a penny from it – can a lot of global warmers make the same claim?
No.
00
Brian G Valentine, You have a lot of supporters watching the global warming tribe as they try to justify their continued bleeding of public cash in these trying times, most of which hark from the private sector who know what it takes to make progress at their own expense! Keep delivering the undesirable facts up to these recalcitrant seeds.
00
Brian et al,
What makes the whole “global warming” and “climate change” context lose credibility is the belligerent disregard for all non-human impacts. Meanwhile, the UN IPCC stance is skewed by tailored surveys and press releases, and the news media is conveniently asleep at the wheel — real journalism died a long time ago.
I am especially thankful for you scientists and others who have committed themselves to seeking the truth. And the truth is the only thing the “global warming” context will achieve is higher costs for us all, making the poor poorer and the already stupid-rich even richer.
It’s insane.
00
Thank you both very much.
I have copied both of your messages onto a sheet of paper and have pinned them to the post board next to my desk
00
Brian G Valentine wrote:
Certainly it doesn’t directly address the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in your posts here. (The ones that aren’t just juvenile).
If you think that, as someone with no published research, and as a petroleum technologies engineer, can suddenly publish a paper on atmospheric physics, that claims petroleum technologies are not harmful, despite all the work done on atmospheric physics over the past 100 years, good luck to you … have you sent off any drafts yet?
But with respect to what you’ve put on this thread, there are two salient points:
1) Your claims that the CO2 greenhouse effect doesn’t exist because of Wood’s work on whether glass stops IR are weak at best.
Your claims that this is not refuted by experiments so common that they do them in high schools around Europe, because the heat retention in the CO2 is due to it’s thermal conductance rather than it’s absorption spectrum does not hold up when we notice that non radiative heat transfer in air (or CO2) in the is dominated by convection.
So, you’re mistaken; CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and a classroom of school kids with a tank full of it can verify this.
2) As to your claims of what else is causing the warming, they are inconsistent. An inconsistent world view is not a scientist’s world view. It shows that you have beliefs that are based on dogma and not on analysis.
And that’s where we’re at. If you think that either of those are wrong, feel free to answer the questions that have been put to you. “I’m not consistent here, but, I’m going to publish a paper … later” is fine for its own sake, but it doesn’t make you any more compelling or credible here.
00
Dallas Beaufort wrote:
What “facts” are you talking about here? (I ask because I’m reading the same posts that you are, and don’t see any facts from Brian).
00
David Walker wrote:
What’s a non-human impact? Is that an impact on a non-human, such as a subantactic ocean community?
Ecologists are writing about this too. Australia has seen dramatic changes to rainfall patterns with climate change, and every ecologist you talk to is talking substantial or total annihilation of almost whatever community that they are studying.
Or is it an impact from a non-human?
Attribution of climate change has certainly not been ignored. The papers referenced in Chapter 9 of the IPCC report are a good starting point, but it is a much researched area.
I don’t understand this. Can you explain how this works to someone with no economics background? I don’t think that the “stupid rich” use less fossil fuels than the poor. Quite the opposite.
00
google – the calling by max igan
00
[yep. Deleted]
00
You sat there and told out-and-out lies on these blog pages, Robin, and anonymous or not – you’ve got all the credibility of dog crap on my shoes.
00
[deleted – comment in reply to deleted insult]
Brian G Valentine:
I think that you are mistaken about this point too, and would like the opportunity to counter this accusation.
What, specifically, have I said that are you claim are “out-and-out lies”?
(Still no response to date, btw, from Prof. Ohadi)
00
[…] Full Story […]
00
george from denver wrote:
The reason why I find conspiracy theories unscientific is because they are not falsifiable. Evidence against is part of the conspiracy, as so the conspiracy just needs to be bigger.
I stopped watching the calling when the voice-over was saying that people who worked out the conspiracy have been eliminated, and the pictures showed the Kennedy assassination.
So alas, I, couldn’t make it to the parts about climate change.
I thought “Foucault’s Pendulum” by Eco was a great novel though.
00
(Still no response to date, btw, from Prof. Ohadi)
Yeah. Dr Ohadi has all your “integrity”, and you can bank on that.
00
So, Robin, get ready – because here it comes – when Dr Ohadi emails any request you made to him – Dr Ohadi is emailing to me whatever he sends to you –
and I am posting that response in full, right on this same column! And whatever name you have chosen for yourself with Dr Ohadi, is the name that’s gonna get associated with you, right here!
00
Robin, you make a very poor Chess player.
You have played a “Queen’s Gambit” – using my queen
00
also known as an own goal
00
Brian Wrote:
Not exactly. A gambit is a sacrifice.
The main question was: What, specifically, have I said that are you claim are āout-and-out liesā?
00
Bye dear.
00
What, specifically, have I said that are you claim are āout-and-out liesā?
00
y’all said ya’s wrote to Dr Ohadi
y’all ‘d never done that honey
never done that honey, never once, an’ y’all knows it.
An’ any mor’ y’all got’ta claim about it […rephrased… ‘lies’.]
00
Emailed Prof. Ohadi, Isabelita S. Brown, Payroll/Personnel Coordinator Department of Engineering at Maryland University, and to the registrar’s office at RPI.
The email to Prof Ohadi has the subject “Dr. Brian G Valentine.”, and was sent Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 6:47 PM, AEST (UTC+10)
Is that all? When you claimed “out and out lies”, I assumed that you had more than one instance. What with “lies” being plural and all.
00
I should add that I didn’t email your boss, not because I lack the resources, but because I felt that going to someone’s employer is inappropriate.
By the same token, you are welcome to post my email to Prof. Ohadi, and his response if that is okay with him.
You do not have my permission to include in that post my email address.
00
Assuming that he takes the time to respond – and I don’t personally see why he should.
00
You write it to Doctor Ohadi kiddo and it’s MINE kiddo
and I’ll do whatever I damed please with it pal and [edited… essentially – Brian is not going to let you get away with libellous claims and I’m getting bored of it too. – JN]
00
Joanne I extended the olive branch to him/her four times.
Four is enough.
I could do it ten and ten wouldn’t be enough.
00
not because I lack the resources, but because I felt that going to someoneās employer is inappropriate.
I told you that you could enail whoever you wanted to.
If you emailed Mr Kaempf, all he would do is hand it to me.
At which point that email together with your email address would be posted on every single global warming site there is in an English speaking language.
Buddy, that’s what’s going to happen with Dr Ohadi’s letter to you.
00
I learned in elementary school that bullies can’t be “appeased”.
It just can’t be done!
00
Assuming that he takes the time to respond – and I donāt personally see why he should.
Translation: you lied about doing it in the first place.
If MMO saw my name in the subject he would respond at once.
Try it!
er- but now you can’t …
00
Very poor judgment on your part, Robin.
Very very poor.
00
Nearly 500 messages here to bring this thing to this conclusion.
Unbelievable.
Absolutely unbelievable.
00
Brian wrote:[ edited insult ]
I’m not sure to what you are referring, but it needs to be very clear that I have intended nothing to be a threat in any interpretation of the word.
[Robin, you-the-anonymous has accused Brian, with a real career, of lying about his career. That’s libellous, you have no proof except you claim to have emailled a referee who apparently has not recieved it. – You could have CC’d Brian or me in on that email to prove you sent it, but you didn’t do that, so who do we believe on this essentially irrelevant matter? The real name who appears to be doing all he can, or the anonymous poster who has already called him a liar?. – JN]
I don’t feel particularly defamed by your suggestion that I was lying about e-mailing prof Ohadi. I think it is pretty clear from your posts that you don’t actually think that that is a lie. After all you refer to his response as if you believe it will happen.
[Is it possible to defame an internet pseudonym?. – JN]
I am much more concerned about this accusation that I made threats. At no point was that my intention.
When I enter my email into this site, it is given that it will not be published. The reason for this is to cut down on the spam because there are spiders that harvest email addresses on web pages. It is not of particularly high concern, since I am well spam filtered. You still don’t have my okay to post it, but it is certainly not the end of the world if you do.
_____
I came to this thread wondering what the arguments were on the other side, and wondering how long the scientific view could be presented on a denialist site without censorship.
I have been surprised and impressed by what I have found with respect to the latter. Jo has genuinely and actively encouraged my input to the discussion, completely counter to my expectations.
With respect to the former, I am increasingly disappointed.
00
Brian G Valentine wrote:
Not at all. I just suspect that as President and Provost of the Petroleum Institute, Abu Dhabi he might get more emails than he can answer. Clearing up petty online squabbles for an alleged ex-colleague may be important to him. But it’s certainly not mission critical for the Institute.
00
Brian, my expression of support. I am astounded by the tenacity of Robin. I am beginning to wonder if he is one of those “hired hands” on DesmogBlog, getting paid for trying to discredit some of the more visible and better known skeptics. He certainly wouldn’t have much time left in 24 hours to hold down a job, unless the guy never sleeps.
Hell, I think he might me one of those Cyborgs who just keep comin’ at ya, no matter what you throw at them. “Must…find… Sarah … Connor!” “Must… bring …. down … Brian … Valentine”.
Tell us who you are, Robin, that would give YOU more credibility.
00
I posted an inline reply in #495.
Robin: we are not asking for your money. You and others who want ours, have provided no empirical evidence that carbon dioxide makes a significant difference. The ball is in your court. Provide the evidence, and convince us all… We don’t need to censor any scientific comment because we have nothing to hide.
We are the constant target of irrelevant ad hom attacks though, and I censor those (possibly not enough). This is a game of theatre for the weak minded. Those who can’t reason look to see who is winning by judging which side is more confident, which side yells the loudest about accusations of fraud or “Lies!”.
We sceptics don’t play for the audience as well as the DeSmoggy-paid-PR-team and cohort do. We are hampered by our need for evidence (obviously, there are exceptions). We need to improve without lowering ourselves to Team-AGW’s baseless standards.
That’s why more and more I am tempted to chop the baseless ambit claims, the libellous insults from cowards who won’t print their full name. Robin, it’s time you either retract your claim that Brian is not who he says he his, or at least provide your full name.
Brian, at any time, I will delete all the unfounded insults to your real name if you request, since they are libellous, and future employers may google your real name – I leave them up for the moment, so impartial observers can see how delusional the attack dogs of AGW are.
This is pathetic. Robin someonearother is trying to do real damage to a real career, and it serves no purpose for anyone’s understanding of the climate. As well as being irrelevant, do we know if Robin has something to gain? Does his career depend on AGW fraud, or is he just playing this for sport, a teenage sparring match to score ‘points’ in a game of cutting down opponents? He doesn’t have to post his email address, but some identifying information would make this appear honest. (And BTW, it’s easy to avoid spider spam just write “name AT ….com” Humans can read it.)
Robin someonearother is providing good proof that AGW is driven by religious belief in UN-science (pun intended) and illogic.
00
Mike Ohadi is a professor of engineering at University of Maryland.
In 2005 Mike went to UAE to set up the Petroleum Insitute. I went to Iraq.
Mike is still a professor of engineering at UM on leave.
Mike and I have been friends for years, there is no more chance that Mike would neglect or ignore a message about me than there is the sun not coming up tomorrow.
Robin never wrote to Mike in the first place.
It was want of courage.
I know Cathy at the RPI registrar’s office. So I will know more about Robin on Monday.
My life is an open book. Robin’s is not – and there is a reason.
What tha is, I don’t know right now.
00
This is a bully! Pure and simple!
Step 1 of dealing with a bully is to unmask them
00
Hello again everyone.
It seems that a couple of the people here including Jo would like me to do an introduction.
I am Robin Meikle Grant, Sydneysider and amateur skeptic.
If anyone on this thread has an interest in Science and Reason, and finds themselves in Sydney on the first Thursday of the month, come to Sydney sceptics in the pub, look for the guy who looks like the photo here (occasionally with a short beard), and we’ll have a drink and partake in some skeptical discussion. Email me beforehand at RobinMGrantATgmailDOTcom if you would like me to bring my passport.
This month the speaker was Dick Smith and he spoke, perhaps relevantly to this thread about irrational belief. He told about testing people who claimed that they could water divine. He reckons he said to James Randy that “we can’t do this to these people, we’ll destroy their belief in themselves on national television.” James Randy replied “Dick, we won’t change anyone’s beliefs one bit”. And James was right.
(Dick also mentioned that James had told him some time later that “Everyone has irrational beliefs except you and me. And I’m starting to have doubts about you.”)
So you can’t change people’s beliefs. But science advances, funeral by funeral.
I am not a pseudonym, and the reason I didn’t CC anyone on the email to Prof. Ohadi was that said Prof. Ohadi was Brain’s chosen referee, and I did not foresee a problem establishing that I sent the email. I have forwarded it from my sent items to Jo. It is quite honest (as have been all my posts), and includes the URL of this thread by way of explanation.
I did say that Brian lies, but my intent was to point out the circularity of the argument that he must be telling the truth because he uses his name. The argument is fallacious, but I was overreacting to what I interpret as his rudeness. I should have been much more analytical in my language.
I put his name as a search term into all the copies of METRICS I could download, and also into the Maryland University news archive, to no hits. I couldn’t download the 2002 METRICS. He may be mentioned in there.
Jo: I am not asking you or anyone else for any money. I am merely advocating science and reason.
Because it seems to me that I have presented empirical evidence of AGW (and certainly a couple or few papers that the authors consider observational evidence), I think that a good thing to know would be what you would consider sufficient (and sufficiently empirical) evidence of AGW. What experiment or measurement would convince you of AGW?
Anne-Kit Littler: Pleased to meet you. Who are you?
Brian: I didn’t lie, and I am loathe to resend the email again to prof. Ohadi, because I interpret his lack of reply to date that he is busy, but if it will put you at ease, and if you think it wouldn’t irritate him, I will forward another copy and include you as a recipient.
00
Good for you Robin for identifying yourself and your interests. You have a lot to be proud of.
You see – there was no reason to squabble with me in the first place!
All of this could have been avoided by just emailing me personally. Repetitive questioning me would cease because, you would ultimately receive an answer that you could agree or disagree about based on evidence.
When you drag Joanne in then you start setting me off because Joanne has nothing to do with it.
I am always open to discussion, but not in the open if it is going nowhere.
00
I can confirm that Robin has forwarded those emails to me.
Thank you for your honesty Robin.
Robin if you would vote for an ETS you are asking me to spend money (and every man women, child and homeless hobo). Therefore, all of those who wish to make forced carbon reduction a reality – written into law and enforced by armed police, ought to be able to say ‘why’. Why should we reduce carbon dioxide? Why are we so sure it changes our climate significantly.
There has never been a time in Earths history when temperatures are shown to have responded significantly to carbon.
I have not seen observable evidence on this thread or anywhere else that carbon is now or has ever caused global warming. Not in ice cores, formanifera, sediments, glacier movements, modern thermometers; not from the last 100, 1000, 1 million or 1 billion years. If you have posted something like that, I must have missed it. I have already written about ‘evidence’ http://joannenova.com.au/2008/10/30/what-is-evidence/ and
also here in the comments 9 and 12 … http://joannenova.com.au/2008/10/30/agw-is-a-religion/.
“if we had found the hot spot; if global temperatures were rising; if the ice cores showed carbon leads temperatureā¦ then Iād be a Pro AGW person again.
If rises and falls in CO2 matched turning points in global temperatures (not just a single rising slope) I’d find that convincing.
Robin, are you happy to trust argument by authority? Is that why you want to know if Brian’s credentials are legit?
00
There has become a mind set of AGW enthusiasts that sceptics are frauds, somehow, and all one needs to do to at least silence them is to dig deeply enough about them, find information they don’t want public, and make it public.
I have been through it before, and the technique doesn’t work.
Obviously I would not become a very very very public sceptical figure if there were things I didn’t want public, nor would I offer facts about myself that could easily be disproved.
No one would have heard any more from me long ago.
00
By way of introduction of Mrs Littler by herself, I might add that Mrs Littler is a consultant to the Government for international affairs, a writer, and an example of discourse and polemics I haven’t but should have followed.
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Jo wrote: Robin if you would vote for an ETS you are asking me to spend money (and every man women, child and homeless hobo).
I’m not advocating an ETS, nor any particular action, because my economics is weak. I have taken an interest in the physical scientific basis of AGW, and I am advocating that.
Jo wrote: There has never been a time in Earths history when temperatures are shown to have responded significantly to carbon.
Okay. My position is that that’s not true. I know from a podcast that I can’t currently find that the earth’s past climate is understood almost exclusively in terms of CO2. The iceball earth is argued about almost solely in terms of CO2, ice ages (in the more formal meaning of the term, that there are ice caps at both poles) are considered to be caused by vast upthrusts of mountain ranges allowing CO2 to be depleted by weathering. The Andes ice age is on the geological record, and the current ice age is attributed to the Himalayas.
This really quite pervasive understanding of long term climate as deeply tied to CO2 is fundamental to the theoretical basis behind papers that I have linked to before on this thread, such as Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years.
Of what basis are we abandoning this scientific understanding?
Jo wrote: “if we had found the hot spot; if global temperatures were rising; if the ice cores showed carbon leads temperatureā¦ then Iād be a Pro AGW person again.”
Any of them or all of them?
1) if we had found the hot spot.
I’m curious that the hot spot is there. You are broadly against all forms of climate modelling as any evidence whatsoever. Yet the only reason we expect a hot spot (once the steady state is reached) is from models.
How would you answer an accusation that you are cherry-picking, in that you accept no evidence of global warming from models, but your first and foremost evidence against global warming is from models?
2) if global temperatures were rising.
Okay how much, and over what time period would be sufficient? We know from 1998 that a good El Nino will raise temperatures 0.2Ā°C above the background trend, so we’d need a time period over which the warming dominates that. And we should take a whole number of sunspot cycles, for obvious reasons. Two sunspot cycles is only about 0.2Ā°C at current warming rates.
Would a global warming over three sunspot cycles, significant to a 99% CI be sufficient to convince you of AGW?
3) If the ice cores showed carbon leads temperature.
It does in some cases, such as the end of the younger dryas. But the glacial/interglacial cycle is periodic, and set off by MilankoviÄ cycles, which are determined by the beat between periodic variations in the earth’s eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession.
I am not aware of any scientist suggesting that CO2 and not MilankoviÄ cycles cause the glaciation cycle, and MilankoviÄ cycles are certainly not incompatible with CO2 being a greenhouse gas with a climate sensitivity of about 3Ā°C.
Jo wrote: “If rises and falls in CO2 matched turning points in global temperatures (not just a single rising slope) Iād find that convincing.”
On what time scale? Are we talking ice cores again here?
For some authorities. I don’t need to check for myself that Parity is not conserved in Beta decay, because I know that it was proposed to explain the various decays of strange mesons, that it was experimentally confirmed by Wu et al, and was confirmed immediately by Garwin et al, and has become part of our understanding of physics.
By the same token, most papers published in peer reviewed journals end up being refuted. So it is not sufficient to be an authority. It has to be reproduced and confirmed.
The flip side is the stronger discriminator. Some sources are just rubbish and not worth my time reading.
Brian used the unpolluted argument by authority in post 401: “The expected increase in temperature includes the feedbacks that one finds in the climate system.
The expected increase in temperature includes the feedbacks that Robin wants to find in the climate system.
The expected increase in temperature does not include the feedbacks that Brian Gregory Valentine PhD PE believes to be present in the climate system.”
It’s not that I think that a PhD is sufficient authority to accept (nor a single peer reviewed paper), but that no PhD is sufficient refutation of such an argument by authority. (And I did not expect to learn that he has one).
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And vice-versa.
That’s not obvious.
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For my part, the forum is much better if it involves the evidence base discussion. It seems the greater part of its value.
Perhaps you can understand why I’m probably not going to email you privately, except perhaps regarding UM and Prof. Ohadi.
I came here seeking a better idea of what climate-skeptics thought, (and their censorship policy … again kudos to Joanne). The view that there is no greenhouse effect whatsoever is not mainstream, even amongst climate-skeptics.
I want to read up about different kinds of Cosmic Rays, and I want to revisit the temperature profiles section of chapter 9 of the IPCC WG1 report (the hot spot argument) because these are commonly mentioned points.
Less mentioned points, such as there is no greenhouse effect, or that global warming is good for the world, (Or that biodiversity is not good for the world), are a lower priority.
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I know from a podcast that I canāt currently find that the earthās past climate is understood almost exclusively in terms of CO2.
Argument by the way of “podcast”. A new one.
Think about how silly that statement is, Robin.
Of COURSE you’re aware that the Earth’s orbit is an ellipse, for which there a number of factors influence the precession of the node and the obliquity of the apparent ecliptic.
The geological record IS the astronomical record, and many of the perturbations of the Earth’s orbit have been identified in the geological record, so as to identify the corresponding astronomical influence.
Geology has been a science since the 1860’s or so. Don’t you think that if CO2 was the influence of historical climate, then the formation of carbonate deposits &c would have identified such a thing long ago?
People, in their very brief spans of time on the Earth, tend to forget that a million years of geologic time is nothing, it is ten complete astronomical cycles, so as far as the Earth is concerned, that is like the passing of ten seasons.
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Perhaps someone here nearer the field recalls the paper. The author was discussing her work in which particular ice ages were attributed to CO2 depletion due to weathering of mountain ranges being upthrust at the time.
Key with respect to the current discussion was not that the author was looking at why the CO2 was low, which was known because the temperature was low.
The paper might be up on google scholar by now. I’ll see if my google-fu is strong enough to locate it.
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If CO2 is the cause of ice ages then – is there any present need for concern?
That is, if we cut back CO2 from fossil fuels, and the ocean resorbs CO2 of the air, and plant life flourishes – then do we doom ourselves to an ice age?
If so, then I’m all for using fossil fuel!
Burn, Baby