by Judith Curry
Last week, Rep. Lamar Smith wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post entitled Overheated rhetoric on climate change doesn’t make for good policies. Critics are responding with . . . overheated rhetoric.
Lamar Smith is a Republican representing Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives and is chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. I reproduce his op-ed in its entirety:
Climate change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. Unfortunately, claims that distort the facts hinder the legitimate evaluation of policy options. The rhetoric has driven some policymakers toward costly regulations and policies that will harm hardworking American families and do little to decrease global carbon emissions. The Obama administration’s decision to delay, and possibly deny, the Keystone XL pipeline is a prime example.
The State Department has found that the pipeline will have minimal impact on the surrounding environment and no significant effect on the climate. Recent expert testimony before the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology confirms this finding. In fact, even if the pipeline is approved and is used at maximum capacity, the resulting increase in carbon dioxide emissionswould be a mere 12 one-thousandths of 1 percent (0.012 percent). There is scant scientific or environmental justification for refusing to approve the pipeline, a project that the State Department has also found would generate more than 40,000 U.S. jobs.
Among the facts that are clear, however, are that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global concentrations of greenhouse gas, and that even substantial cuts in these emissions are likely to have no effect on temperature. Data from the Energy Information Administration show, for example, that the United States cut carbon dioxide emissions by 12 percent between 2005 and 2012 while global emissions increased by 15 percent over the same period.
Using data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a Science and Public Policy Institute paper published last month found that if the United States eliminated all carbon dioxide emissions, the overall impact on global temperature rise would be only 0.08 degrees Celsius by 2050.
Further confounding the debate are unscientific and often hyperbolic claims about the potential effects of a warmer world. In his most recent State of the Union address, President Obama said that extreme weather events have become “more frequent and intense,” and he linked Superstorm Sandy to climate change.
But experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have told the New York Times that climate change had nothing to do with Superstorm Sandy. This is underscored by last year’s IPCC report stating that there is “high agreement” among leading experts that trends in weather disasters, floods, tornados and storms cannot be attributed to climate change. While these claims may make for good political theater, their effect on recent public policy choices hurts the economy.
Rep. Smith attended the recent Congressional Hearing on Policy-Relevant Climate Issues in Context where I presented testimony. Rep. Smith’s op-ed touches on some of the main themes included in my testimony, including global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, there is a great amount of uncertainty associated with climate science, climate models have overestimated recent warming, Hurricane Sandy can’t be attributed to global warming.
There has been considerable backlash against Smith’s op-ed. Some examples:
Eugene Robinson of WaPo writes a response in the San Antonio Express News (behind paywall):
Only someone who was ignorant of basic science — or deliberately being obtuse — could write a sentence like this one: “Contrary to the claims of those who want to strictly regulate carbon dioxide emissions and increase the cost of energy for all Americans, there is a great amount of uncertainty associated with climate science.”
Oh wait, that’s a quote from an op-ed in the Washington Post by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Yes, this is the officially designated science expert in the U.S. House of Representatives. See what I mean about President Obama likely having to go it alone?
For the record, and for the umpteenth time, there is no “great amount of uncertainty” about whether the planet is warming or why. A new study looked at nearly 12,000 recently published papers by climate scientists and found that of those taking a position on the question, 97 percent agreed that humans are causing atmospheric warming by burning fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The mechanism by which carbon dioxide traps heat is well understood and can be observed in a laboratory setting. If Smith and other deniers wish to create the impression that there is an “on the other hand” argument to be made, they’ll need to come up with a radical new theory of physics.
Ryan Koronowski at ThinkProgress, some excerpts:
Rep. Smith made the case that “global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.”
This is simply not the case. The overall trend line shows continued warming. 2010 was the hottest year on record. Every year of the decades of the 2000′s was warmer than the average temperature in the ’90s.
However, experts in the field explain that climate change makes hurricanes and Nor’Easters like Superstorm Sandy more powerful and more destructive. The experts that Rep. Smith tried to cite mainly focused on research saying that climate change has not increased the frequency of hurricanes. Climate scientists pointed to the link between climate change and the increased strength and intensity of storms.
Smith said that the EPA “proposed emissions standards that virtually prohibit new coal-fired power plants.” He goes on to say that regulating carbon emissions from power plants will “raise both electricity rates and gas prices — costing jobs and hurting the economy.”
The Environmental Protection Agency is required to regulate carbon because the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. EPA regulations actually help the economy and create jobs. Every $1 invested in the economy yields $10 in benefits.
Smith concludes that we are “pursuing heavy-handed regulations” on climate change and urges everyone to “take a step back from the unfounded claims of impending catastrophe and think critically about the challenge before us.”
There have been thousands of experts thinking critically about the reality of climate change, and their overwhelming conclusion is that emissions need to be reined in. Not eventually, but right now.
A discussion at MasterResource points to an essay published in the Houston Chronicle by by Ronald Sass, Fellow in Global Climate Change at Rice University’s James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. Excerpts:
Smith purports to address the ill effect of “overheated” rhetoric about climate change on policy decisions. In fact,Representative Smith is more heavily invested in promoting the Keystone XL pipeline than he is in policy for climate change. He began his campaign promoting the Northern Route Approval Act (HR 3) when his Energy and Environment subcommittees recently held a joint hearing examining the science and environmental issues of the proposed pipeline.
Climate Science Watch responds:
Overall he claims we know little about what influences the climate or what can be done to stop climate change. However:
- Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes warming. There is no uncertainty in this fact. Even if the lowest warming estimates turn out to be correct, we will still experience ruinous impacts that go far beyond the current costs unless we start acting soon to reduce emissions.
- Extreme weather has already increased measurably due to warming, and scientists project this will continue.
- The United States has emitted the most carbon pollution of any country, and if we act on emissions reductions, we can change our climate fate as part of a global effort.
The claim(s):
Smith’s op-ed tries to raise several claims: Uncertainties “undermine” and limit our understanding of the causal connection between warming and carbon dioxide, both in the past and future; Models have “greatly” overestimated warming, as shown by the “fact” that there has been no warming for 15 years; Extreme weather events have no connection to global warming; Regulations to reduce carbon emissions have no impact on the climate, kill jobs and hurt the economy, which is why we shouldn’t hesitate to build the Keystone XL pipeline.
The details:
- Physicists have known of the warming effects of CO2 for more than one hundred years. Scientists are only uncertain about how exactly much warming each doubling of CO2 causes, and they have that question narrowed down to a range of a few degrees (2-4.5 ºC). While that range has recently narrowed, there has been little change to the bottom of the range, which is still way above what could possibly be considered “safe.”
- Our understanding of the climate of the past informs our knowledge of the magnitude of the risks we face today. The last time the world experienced our current concentration of 400 ppm of CO2, temperatures were so warm that now-extinct mammals roamed aforested, ice-free Arctic. That was over three million years ago; humans have never experienced such conditions.
- Warming has continued to increase, and models have predicted warming accurately. Current atmospheric temperatures are on the lower end of projections but still within the bounds of variation predicted by modeling. Furthermore, ocean warming has continued unabated, and sea level rise and Arctic ice melt have exceeded estimates. To say that “global” warming has stopped or stalled is simply wrong.
- Many types of extreme weather have been connected to climate change. It’s no surprise that Smith references the IPCC Special Report on Extremes, yet doesn’t link to it. That’s because the report makes the opposite point he describes: it connects extreme precipitation, heat waves, and droughts with human-caused climate change.
- Regulations to reduce pollution have historically been found to be good for the economy, despite hyperbolic claims of imminent doom from industry groups (and, in the case of the Keystone XL pipeline,inflated job creation statistics). The United States has emitted the most cumulative CO2 of any country, and as such should take a leading role in reducing emissions.
JC comments: The theme of Rep. Smith’s op-ed is overheated rhetoric; he selected topics to discuss where he views the rhetoric to be overheated. Rep. Smith’s statements about climate science itself are defensible, in fact support for these statements is provided in my testimony. Criticisms of the ‘science’ were either:
- factually incorrect (warming has continued to increase and models have predicted warming accurately)
- appeal to consensus (the infamous 97%)
- attack a statement that was not made (carbon dioxide does not trap heat)
- appeal to motive attacks (Smith is more interested in Keystone than in climate change policy)
- confuse science and politics (decisions surrounding keystone are about politics, not about science)
These criticisms of Rep. Smith’s op-ed make Rep. Smith look like more of a defender of science than his critics, which is not a good place for these critics to be.
Apart from the ineptness of the responses to Rep. Smith’s op-ed, there remains genuine disagreement about aspects of climate science and acknowledged uncertainties.
With regards to political issues such as the Keystone pipeline and EPA regulations on emissions, these are political and economic issues, and there is of course disagreement on these issues.
I find the response to Rep Smith’s op-ed to be unfortunate, since he seems to be generally a supporter of science (particularly NASA) and he does not hold scientifically irrational opinions or positions regarding climate change. When compared with say Senator Inhofe, it seems that Rep Smith is someone that the Democrats should be able to work with. In closing, I will repeat Rep. Smith’s opening statement:
Climate change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. Unfortunately, claims that distort the facts hinder the legitimate evaluation of policy options.
I have been hoping for a “thoughtful” debate about climate science for a long time. I have yet to see one that satisfies my interest. How about a two week debate two hours per day covered by C-SPAN where both sides deliver their positions. The format would require citations to support statements.
Would providing “citations” from peer reviewed papers that describe vast future harms to humanity based on the outputs of GCMs qualify?
Not a single one of the critics argued against the statement that even if the United States entirely eliminated CO2 emissions the impact on global average temperature in 2050 would be less than one tenth of one degree.
Not a single one of them critiqued the fact that the US between 2005 and 2012 cut its CO2 emissions by 12% while global emission grew by 15% during the same period.
IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THE US REDUCES CO2 EMISSIONS MORE OR NOT. IT WOULD HAVE NO SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON GLOBAL WARMING. NOT A SINGLE CRITIC ARGUED THAT POINT.
It bears repeating.
IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THE US REDUCES CO2 EMISSIONS MORE OR NOT. IT WOULD HAVE NO SIGNIFICANT IMPACT ON GLOBAL WARMING. NOT A SINGLE CRITIC ARGUED THAT POINT.
Steven Mosher states below that doubling CO2 causes 3.7 Watts/m^2 more energy at the surface and that this is materials engineering fact.
Yes that’s conditionally true if nothing else changes.
Another engineering fact is that matter responds differently to different frequencies of radiation. Some matter will reflect certain frequencies without impact while others will absorb the same frequency. Some, like water let some frequencies pass through it for great distances while only impurities in the water absorb it along the way and at other frequencies it merely evaporates a vanishingly thin surface layer without raising the water’s temperature at all.
All radiation is not created equal. This is also used in engineering.
Write it down Mosher. Some day you might actually become an engineer but you have a very long way to go right now.
David Springer | May 31, 2013 at 4:36 pm said: ”IT DOESN’T MATTER IF THE US REDUCES CO2 EMISSIONS MORE OR NOT”
Back to kerosene lamp Yankees!!!
There is a debate on climate science.
There are some issues, however, that thoughtful scientists will not waste their time on.
1. Thoughtful scientists will not waste their time debating physics that works.
basically, the physics of radiative transfer, which tells us that doubling
c02 will increase forcing by around 3.7 Watts. That science has been
turned into engineering which gets used everyday. Philosophers might
debate this, but folks who need to build stuff won’t. They have better things to do.
2. Thoughtful scientists won’t waste their time debating the GHG effect.
you can find some, like Judith, who will give space to cranks to
expound their untested theories, and you will find some like Spencer
who will argue with them. And you will find Experimentalists ( Anthony Watts ) who will go to the trouble of performing experiments to show them
the error of their ways, but even then they refuse to listen.
If you want play at having a debate, then you can debate on blogs whether sensitivity is high or low.
If you engage in skeptical games around the concept of sensitivity, you are not joining the debate, you are debating the debate.
But in the end the science isnt decided by debate. Debates dont answer questions, and science is not a debate. Science behavior is different than debate behavior. Don’t confuse the two.
But … but … the filament temperature!
Steven Mosher, you write “There are some issues, however, that thoughtful scientists will not waste their time on.”
All I can say about your discussion is that it absolute garbage. This is precisely what has prevented the learned scientific societies from doing their duty on this debate. The warmists have taken the position that on some isssues, there must be NO debate. That is fundamentally wrong. ALL issues need to be on the table.
The learned societies have ensured that a proper debate has never taken place. Shame on them, but how do we change things?
Steve,
Yes, climate sensitivity. Also “extreme weather”. Also effect on sea level rise. Also, the possibility that warming might be an actual net benefit. I didn’t read all of Rep Smith’s statement carefully, so if he was trying to debate things that are no longer debatable, I apologize. Otherwise, your comment seems a bit of a straw man in context.
Mosher: At the frontier science is always a debate. Some of these debates last a long time, such as whether light is a wave or a particle, which lasted over 100 years. The points you regard as settled are not particularly relevant because sensitivity is a meaningless abstraction at best. There is no reason to believe that global temperature is uniquely determined by the CO2 concentration, or even a definable function thereof. CO2 forcing is just one vector in a vector field, as it were. It tells you nothing about what will actually happen. It is just a piece of data.
Thus you have missed the point of the debate, which is what is the truth?
Jim
“All I can say about your discussion is that it absolute garbage. This is precisely what has prevented the learned scientific societies from doing their duty on this debate. The warmists have taken the position that on some isssues, there must be NO debate. That is fundamentally wrong. ALL issues need to be on the table.”
please point me to the measured empirical data which proves that science progresses through debates. please show me the data that shows that scientific societies have a duty to debate. Science has no duty to debate. Debate resolves nothing. Debate answers no questions. Debate is verbal behavior. It goes on forever. It never closes. it never ends. Well, it ends when people stop listening to you or when they start mocking you. Science behavior, in contrast, moves on. It answers questions and does things. You will be hard pressed to find a working scientist who will debate RTE with you. he has no duty to. He will, as others have, point you toward the literature, point you to the physics code, and remark that if you want to do anything in this world you would be wise to use the answers that others have provided. If you want to rework the science out for yourself, expect no special help. If you want to debate what works, take it up with mother nature.
This looks like a good time to pay Steven Mosher a “you don’t sweat much for a fat girl” compliment.
Steven, you are pretty smart for a libertarian.
David.
“Mosher: At the frontier science is always a debate. Some of these debates last a long time, such as whether light is a wave or a particle, which lasted over 100 years. ”
Those are not debates. You are mistaking the verbal behavior that accompanies science for science itself.
“The points you regard as settled are not particularly relevant because sensitivity is a meaningless abstraction at best. ”
Well, its not a meaningless abstraction. I understand it. Other people understand it. it is a useful system metric. Nothing more nothing less. Like all abstractions it is a posit that doesnt exist. It works more or less well to help us make sense of a complex system. It’s clearly not meaningless since we both use it in a sentence and know what we are referring to.
“There is no reason to believe that global temperature is uniquely determined by the CO2 concentration, or even a definable function thereof. ”
See, you agree with climate science. Climate science agrees with you.
temperature is not uniquely determined by C02. IF IT WERE, then folks would not refer to the effects of black carbon, CFCs, methane, clouds, feedbacks, land use, albedo, sulfates, etc. So you agree with climate science on this and there is no debate. Now you can pretend to create a debate by constructing a strawman, but thats a pitifully boring show.
“CO2 forcing is just one vector in a vector field, as it were. It tells you nothing about what will actually happen. It is just a piece of data.
Thus you have missed the point of the debate, which is what is the truth?”
As i stated there is a debate, but if you question things like sensitivity you are really debating the debate and not the issue. people who debate the debate typically do things like creating strawmen. They also mischaracterize debates by turning them into things like ‘debates about the truth?” why? well because we know that debates about the “truth” never really end. In science, however, people move on and do things. Netwon didnt win a debate. Folks used his laws of motion because they worked, not because they were true. although they called them “true”. If truth mattered
you’d get nowhere in science because as you know our scientific understanding is not true. Its neither necessarily true in all possible worlds nor is it true for all time. It works. And we assume that what works today will work tommorrow. That is the test of science. It works. In a debate your nose never has to leave the book. In science, you actually have to do things. And you accept what works. You dont even need words to describe it. And if you have something that works, you will rightly ignore people who ask philosophical questions like ‘is it true’.
‘truth’ is a word we use to describe stuff that works.
“Climate science agrees with you.
temperature is not uniquely determined by C02. IF IT WERE, then folks would not refer to the effects of black carbon, CFCs, methane, clouds, feedbacks, land use, albedo, sulfates, etc.”
This would be just so much more comforting if “climate science” wasn’t clamoring for decarbgonizing the global economy.
Besides, it’s not like the consensus claims that CO2 is the “earth’s thermostat” or anything.
Oh wait:
“CO2: The Thermostat that Controls Earth’s Temperature”
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/lacis_01/
@Steven Mosher…
But do the models work? They don’t predict details. They don’t predict regional influences well enough to bank on. I’ve asked the question: “how well do the models emulate the Tropical Easterly Jet?”, and so far don’t have an answer. If the models can’s emulate major unique features like this, why should we assume they “work” for anything but supporting political agendas? If they can, why hasn’t there been more discussion of its influence? Maybe I’m searching in the wrong place?
AK,
Of course the climate models work. Progressive politicians pass taxes. They collect those taxes and fund progressive climate scientists to do “climate science” through models. The models then predict thermageddon.
The politicians then use those predictions of doom to enact laws and regulations that raise more taxes. They also use the fear to get re-elected as the saviors of the Earth, and demonize their evil opponents. (See the main post above.)
The new taxes are then used to fund CAGW inspired alternative energy boondoggles and generate campaign contributions for the politicians who then pass more taxes that can then fund more climate research.
The fact that the models can’t predict anything worth a damn is irrelevant. They work like a charm.
Is it a perpetual motion machine or a Rube Goldberg Device? Hey, why not both?
========
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/lacis_01/
In other words, temperature on Earth is regulated by a trace gas.
This is sick and it is not science. That is sooo really unbelievable. That is really not reasonable.
A trace of anything has a trace influence.
Temperature on Earth is regulated by something that is abundant and that changes states in the temperature range that occurs. That something is Water in all of its states. Water, Water Vapor, Ice, Clouds, etc. do regulate the temperature of Earth.
Do you believe you can regulate the temperature of a massive system with a trace of something or do you believe you need something that is abundant? If you go with a trace, I would like some real world examples. If you could cool a huge building with a trace of anything, everyone would be doing that. I have not found even one example and I have been searching for five years.
Steven – how exactly do you measure forcing? How exactly do you measure sensitivity? Thoughtful scientists undoubtedly do it.
GaryM
“This would be just so much more comforting if “climate science” wasn’t clamoring for decarbgonizing the global economy.”
you are mistaking the policies suggested by some climate scientists with the findings of climate science. Don’t do that.
########################
Besides, it’s not like the consensus claims that CO2 is the “earth’s thermostat” or anything.
Oh wait:
“CO2: The Thermostat that Controls Earth’s Temperature”
Did you actually read the article. Probably not. The temperature in your house is a function of the outside temperature, the insulation, your furnace, etc.. and the thermostat controls or attempts to control the final output. It’s a pretty bad metaphor for how C02 actually works in the actual science. You should not mistakes metaphors about the science with the science itself, in the same way as you should not mistake the policies for the science.
If you object to the policies, then object to the policies. You can accept the science, as say Judith or I do, and suggest different policies. But no one is going to listen to you about policy if you say nutty things about the actual science. If you object to the metaphors about the science, then object to the metaphors about the science. Understand when you do this, you are not doing science. you are talking about talk about science
George
‘Curious George | May 31, 2013 at 4:08 pm |
Steven – how exactly do you measure forcing? How exactly do you measure sensitivity? Thoughtful scientists undoubtedly do it.”
How do you measure forcing?
here is a simple explantion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing
If you are looking for a quick and dirty method to measure it, one tool would be MODTRAN
http://modtran5.com/
http://modtran5.com/faqs/index.html
If you doubt this physics you would be fired as a working sensor engineer.
There are other higher fidelity tools: Line by line models.
How exactly do you measure sensitivity?
Well, first you start with the definition. Lets take a simple example.
How do you measure speed? well R = D/T so we measure speed by measuring time and distance. Note this looks like I use a “model” R=D/T to come up with a measurement.
Lets focus on transient climate sensitivity.
Lambda = DeltaTemp/DeltaForcing
So you have to measure change in temperature, and you have to measure change in forcing.
Both your numerator and demoninator can have large error.
Note this is just one way of measuring.
3.7 Watts does not have the same effect at all frequencies on all types of surfaces.
I wish you’d quit acting like it does, Mosher. It doesn’t and if you don’t know you couldn’t pass a high school science course in the United States.
Steven Mosher, “If you doubt this physics you would be fired as a working sensor engineer.”
Yep, that is the same physics that allows the satellites to remotely sense temperatures at various levels of the atmosphere. So we know the physics works, perhaps there are some issues with definitions?
@Herman Alexander Pope
No Herman. A trace amount of black pigment in a white paint that is itself a trace amount of the weight of a metal automobile body will have a disproportionately large effect on the temperature of the auto body sitting out in the hot sun. Did it really never occur to you that the only difference between a black car and a white car sitting out in the summer sun is just a few grams of black pigment in the paint?
Don’t be stupid.
Steven Mosher: 1. Thoughtful scientists will not waste their time debating physics that works.
basically, the physics of radiative transfer, which tells us that doubling
c02 will increase forcing by around 3.7 Watts. That science has been
turned into engineering which gets used everyday.
Thoughtful scientists will, however, invest time to investigate the omissions and inaccuracies of the “physics that works” that you cite.
Also, it is yet possible that thoughtful American scientists might invest time calculating how much effect on the equilibrium temperature change America might achieve.
But in the end the science isnt decided by debate.
That’s a good one, a positive howler!
AK
‘But do the models work? They don’t predict details. ”
1. Of course they work. you press go and they run.
2. Of course they predict details. Lets take wind for example. They predict windspeed. That’s a detail. or wait, its general. no wait its a detail.
Your questions are framed wrong. The real question is are models useful? useful for what? useful for whom. My distance to empty model in my car gets all sorts of details wrong. But its useful.
“They don’t predict regional influences well enough to bank on.”
Well, that’s wrong since it depends on what you want to bank on and who you are.
” I’ve asked the question: “how well do the models emulate the Tropical Easterly Jet?”, and so far don’t have an answer. ”
probably because nobody cares about your questions. If you are really interested in the question go get the data. Its free and open.
“If the models can’s emulate major unique features like this, why should we assume they “work” for anything but supporting political agendas? If they can, why hasn’t there been more discussion of its influence? Maybe I’m searching in the wrong place?”
Well, there are a lot of assumptions in your questions.
1. Why assume the work for anything else? Thats the wrong question. The question is whats the best tool for understanding sea level rise in 2100.
A) shoulder shrug.. who knows its variable.
B) extrapolate
C) no change
D) an imperfect physics model.
I’ll use an example from aircraft modelling. At High AOA some aircraft nose configurations will develop a vortex flow to either the right side or the left side which creates a strong yaw force and you get a nose slice. nasty fricken business. CFD code cannot predict whether this will be a left hand or right hand slice. Therefore, CFD code is no good at estimating drag. Opps. Here is a clue. Not all the moving pieces of a complex model touch each other so you can be broken in one regard and work perfectly in other regimes. in short, NOTHING follows from getting one aspect right or another aspect wrong. Models are merely a tool, like the rest of science.
Steven Mosher: If you want play at having a debate, then you can debate on blogs whether sensitivity is high or low.
You can also debate whether it is even estimable, and whether it is constant. If you like, you can debate whether cloud cover will increase or decrease. There is lots of science relevant to CO2-change-induced atmospheric changes that can be debated.
david
‘David Springer | May 31, 2013 at 4:45 pm |
3.7 Watts does not have the same effect at all frequencies on all types of surfaces.
##############
yes david, you too agree with climate science. 3.7Watts does not have the same effect at all frequencies and on all types of materials. you forget that I worked in IR stealth
you can just do a dtic search
What about the logarithmic effect of co2? Maybe not so bad?
You should stick to running a fishing boat, Dallas. Satellite sensors that collect UAH and RSS data collect microwave emissions. Each level of the atmosphere has a slightly different emission frequency based on pressure and temperature. By comparing the energy in any small frequency bin against total energy it can, broadly for kilometers thick layers, get a very accurate temperature reading.
Greenhouse gases on the other hand to their thing in a vastly different part of the electromagnetic spectrum with vastly different physical characteristics like the difference between an an x-ray machine and a toaster oven. Almost literally. The same theory of operation doesn’t apply to both.
PaulS | May 31, 2013 at 5:55 pm |
“What about the logarithmic effect of co2? Maybe not so bad?”
Irrelevant. It’s why so-called climate sensitivity is given as a constant amount for each doubling of CO2. The logrithmic effect is incorporated thereby.
Curious George, you ask Steven Mosher “how exactly do you measure forcing? How exactly do you measure sensitivity?”
What you need to realise is that so far as Steven Mosher and John Carpenter are concerned, there is no CATEGORICAL difference beetween an estimate and a measurement. Steven can correct me if I misquote him, but so far as he is concerned; all the various hypothetical estimates (guesses IMHO), are the equivalent of slightly less accurate measurements. So there are lots of measurements of climate sensitivity and radiative forcing, according to Steven
Arctic Sea Ice is the real thermostat for Earth
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page34.html
Of course the models predict details. They just don’t get important stuff like temperature correct.
They have a really good handle on sensitivity.
They were asleep when basic physics was introduced to them.
They have cause and effect totally backwards.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page44.html
Steven Mosher
Re: “temperature is not uniquely determined by C02.”
That is well put.
ALL the mainstream global climate models are predicting way too high in ALL IPCC reports. It is therefore obvious that they are missing major physics and are tuned far too sensitively to CO2.
Until we identify ALL the physics involved and verify and validate the climate models, alarms over CO2 are but an argument from ignorance.
To be scientifically sound, those advocating the majority anthropogenic global warming hypothesis have the very difficult challenge of distinguishing and quantifying anthropogenic warming from natural warming from the Little Ice Age, with superimposed “accelerated warming” due to ~ 1500 year climate oscillations such as the Medieval Warm Period, combined with climate persistance (Hurst-Kolgomorov dynamics) with superimposed ENSO oscillations, varying solar cycles, cosmic ray variations and chaotic variations. For first order linear natural warming see:
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, On the recovery from the Little Ice Age, Natural Science, Vol. 2, No. 11, 1211-1224 (2010).
For a second order “quadratic” (oscillatory) component estimate of the null hypothesis of natural variation see the millennial scale cyclic variation:
Craig Loehle and S. Fred Singer, Holocene temperature records show millennial-scale periodicity Can. J. Earth Sci. 47: 1327-1336 (2010).
Climatic variability over time scales spanning nine orders of magnitude: Connecting Milankovitch cycles with Hurst–Kolmogorov dynamics
Now compound that with major missing physics that may be greater than the CO2 effect. See:
Study says global warming caused by CFCs interacting with cosmic rays, not carbon dioxide
QB Lu Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change.
Good luck. We have not even begun to have a serious quantitative debate from a sound scientific basis. Until then, catastrophic anthropogenic global warming is very definitely “Not Proven”!
All policy proposals on that are but panicking politicians to imprudent decisions to benefit a few high fliers like Al Gore to the detriment of the poor and the impoverishment of the taxpayer.
Steven Mosher,
You are primarily a polemicist in your posts here. (When you are being less polite, I feel free to call you a pedant.)
Your difficulty is that you are very critical of the thinking of those with whom you disagree, but incapable of critical analysis of your own, or of that with which you disagree.
This paper by Andy Lacis being a case in point. You actually think it is a piece of science. Let’s pretend I actually read it, and see what we come up with.
First the title that I quoted.
“CO2: The Thermostat that Controls Earth’s Temperature”
Thermostat? That’s science? Then that makes you a science denier. Because the whole impetus of my comment was your comment immediately above that “temperature is not uniquely determined by C02.”
You calim it is a poor metaphor, but have YOU actually read the rest of the paper? It doesn’t get any better. (I notice you didn’t post any excerpts.)
If we go further into the article, which I will continue to pretend to have read, we get this: “Within only the past century, the CO2 control knob has been turned sharply upward toward a much hotter global climate.”
I am curious as to how we get to the conclusion that the climate is headed toward “much hotter?” When? What constitutes “hot?” It sounds very scary, as it is intended to, but this is what you call science?
And then we get “It has been suggested that we are well past the 300 to 350 ppm target level for atmospheric CO2 beyond which dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system would be expected to exceed the 25% risk tolerance for impending degradation of land and ocean ecosystems, sea level rise, and inevitable disruption of the socio-economic and food-producing infrastructure (Hansen et al. 2008).”
Next there is “unacceptable environmental consequences.” What is the scientific formula for unacceptable?
Dangerous? Inevitable? Impending degradation? Inevitable disruption? Unacceptable?
Lions? Tigers? Bears?
Oh my!
Yet you see that paper as calm, objective science. Who am I to disagree with the science?
CO2 is not the Earth’s thermostat.
There is no thermostat because man cannot control the climate of the Earth – we are simply not as powerful as you and your fellow true believers dream yourselves to be.
Neither Andy Lacis nor you knows where the global average temperature will be in 100 years.
Hansen is a wild eyed political fanatic.
That paper by Lacis is a polemic, just like 97% of your comments here. (OK, I pulled that figure out of the same place Oreskes did.)
Mosher, I think you have jumped the shark. You state that a doubling of CO2 will increase back radiation by 3.7 w/m2. That figure has never been been established from first principles nor measured.
You are completely wrong in your assessment Steve.
Moreover, 3.7 w/m2 is greater that the SD of measured fluxes, see
Martin Wild, Doris Folini & Ellsworth G. Dutton
http://www.gewex.org/BSRN/BSRN-12_presentations/Wild_FriM.pdf
Steven – thanks for providing an explanation. The situation reminds me of an old East German joke: Comrade Mittag (a secretary of economics) sits on the steps of the Central Committee and cries. Comrade Honecker, a Secretary General, comes by:
– Comrade Mittag, stop crying. People will see you and suspect that something might be wrong with our economy.
– Comrade Honecker, I am crying because I don’t understand how our economy works.
– Comrade Mittag, come with me, I’ll explain it to you.
– No, please don’t. I have explained it many times myself.
Seriously, the Wikipedia article does not show how to measure radiative forcing : “The radiative forcing of the surface-troposphere system due to the perturbation in or the introduction of an agent (say, a change in greenhouse gas concentrations) is the change in net irradiance (solar plus long-wave; in Wm-2) at the tropopause AFTER allowing for stratospheric temperatures to readjust to radiative equilibrium, but with surface and tropospheric temperatures and state held fixed at the unperturbed values”. Go and measure it. There is a Nobel prize there.
Regarding MODTRANS, do you always measure sensitivity from models, and never from Mother Nature?
Springer, “You should stick to running a fishing boat, Dallas. Satellite sensors that collect UAH and RSS data collect microwave emissions.”
Plan to, but that doesn’t mean the similarities aren’t greater than you tend to believe. The differences though are more interesting, which is why that comment was directed at Mosher, who has used the UAH data as a reason for accepting 3.7Wm-2 per doubling, I think he would have gotten the not so subtle differences.
First, You can measure the temperature of CO2 in the atmosphere using the IR spectrum. If that “signature” of CO2 warming of the atmosphere where large enough, Jim Cripwell would have his “measurement” with tolerances he is looking for, that missing tropical troposphere “hot” spot that is virtually undetectable (there is a hint in the NH).
Second, while CO2 may be fairly uniformly distributed, the energy that CO2 responds to is not. To get that full 3.7Wm-2 of impact, advection as well as convection would have to be part of the “all things remaining equal” caveat and they are not. (That is the reason there is a hint in the NH, meridional heat transport aka long term natural variability).
So when Mosher says, “a higher warmer place” I ask where? When Mosher mentions the ERL, I ask which one?
cd ( meridional heat transport aka long term natural variability).
meriodional Transport is a poorly understood mechanisms in the so called consensus science literature, it is a very interesting subject due to its generic application in aeronomy such as Jupiter etc.
The ability of meandering jets to block or become meridional transport barriers is well described in the literature ( where mathematical physics is a first language ) as KAM theory predicts the generic increase in structures that act as transport barriers.
There are two interesting parts to the arising system, it enhances a self referencing mode eg polar ozone holes by decreased polar T.and it enhances the T in mid latitudes.
There is a nice paper on this here.
http://www.nonlin-processes-geophys.net/19/687/2012/
doi:10.5194/npg-19-687-2012
re; 3.7W ~ 1C
http://www.spectralcalc.com/blackbody_calculator/blackbody.php
Go use the calculator. Radiant emittance at 16C for a perfect blackbody is 397W and for same body at 17C is 401W.
This is not in question. Mosher is correct. Doubling CO2 decreases net longwave radiation by 3.7W and that translates to about 1C surface heating to increase the longwave emission and bring system back into equilibrium.
However that’s for a perfect black body at the surface and an atmosphere with no water vapor in it. Which isn’t the case of course. The devil is in the details.
Over dry land this is approximately what will happen. Water vapor amplification is urban legend. Anywhere there’s plenty of water to evaporate the surface is cooled like a sweating racehorse and any CO2 warming is marginalized. That’s why actual global average temperature is only a fraction of the advertised value because it simply isn’t happening much where it’s wet. In the winter when the ground is frozen CO2 is the only game in town. This will undoubtedly alter weather patterns but probably in a good way because it means longer growing seasons where growing seasons are too short, less fuel needed for heating in the winter, faster plant growth from more fertile atmosphere, and less water using by the same plants because gas exchange regulated by stomal opening happens faster and less water is lost by the plant in the process.
In short there’s a f*ck of a lot more than 1 degree of heating in the winter in the frozen north to evaluate for positive and negative impacts.
Now add in the frickin’ enormous economic benefit of cheap energy and it becomes insane to even think about limiting CO2 emissions. Suck it out of the atmosphere if and when it becomes a problem. It’s highly unlikely to become a problem and is already an insanely large benefit.
David Springer
I don’t totally understand your comments. I say a trace of CO2 has a trace of influence on Radiation and therefore a trace of influence on Temperature. You say a trace of pigment has a large influence on Reflection. You are comparing radiation and reflection. You are comparing apples and oranges.
You are on the right track. How much light that is reflected can and does regulate temperature. Reflected Light does not cause warming. When oceans are warm it snows more and reflecting ice advances. When oceans are cold and frozen, it don’t snow much and reflecting ice recedes. More clouds when oceans are warm and wet and less clouds when oceans are cold and frozen does most likely work in the right direction to help with this.
This is the secret to temperature control for Earth. Just like the white car and the black car. We did have a black mail box for years. We replaced it with a white mail box and the difference is good. YES!
“Thoughtful scientists will not waste their time debating physics that works. Basically, the physics of radiative transfer, which tells us that doubling c02 will increase forcing by around 3.7 Watts.”
Thoughtful scientists will not waste their time on theories based on ill defined concepts, such as “forcing”, which need an ad hoc fudge factor (a.k.a. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-8-5.html“>”efficacy”) to be applicable. The first thing they do is to replace it with something definite. While discussing the GHG effect, they may e.g. consider using the Planck weighted average thermal IR optical depth instead (a dimensionless number).
Herman Alexander Pope | June 1, 2013 at 12:35 am |
“I don’t totally understand your comments. I say a trace of CO2 has a trace of influence on Radiation and therefore a trace of influence on Temperature. You say a trace of pigment has a large influence on Reflection. You are comparing radiation and reflection. You are comparing apples and oranges. ”
No Herman. The mechanism by which CO2 causes surface heating is it decreases the albedo. It causes the surface to absorb more energy. The reason people don’t usually see it that way is because the operating frequency is infrared which is outside our range of vision. You literally see it working with black and white surfaces. If you come to understand the action of CO2 as changing the albedo of the earth you will understand how it works to warm the surface. Here are references. Hyperphysics is an award winning online physics reference for physics teachers created by and hosted at Georgia State University.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/phyopt/albedo.html
Maksimovic, “The ability of meandering jets to block or become meridional transport barriers is well described in the literature ( where mathematical physics is a first language ) as KAM theory predicts the generic increase in structures that act as transport barriers.”
Thanks for the link, a tad over my head at this point, but the 184K to 195K range is the higher colder spot that doesn’t like to get colder or higher. Near the poles the stratospheric events are more dramatic, but the same 184K to 195K limit would apply to the atmosphere as a whole. Big ozone “holes” near the poles are easy to find while “tropical ozone depletion” requires better measurements to “see” a greater overall impact with more subtle shifts in Brewer-Dobson circulation.
Someone will probably get a pretty nice chemistry prize when they figure out the CO2, H2O, O3 and solar interactions at 184K to 190K (I think the range is a bit tighter).
The really good news in all this is that Mother Earth, In delivering a huge amount of snow since October of 2012 has made a statement: “I am not part of the 97 percent who said that snow would be a thing of the past”
David Springer
Thanks for the lesson in physics that says that albedo light reflection and CO2 energy radiation are the same thing.
that ain’t how it works
Hank, which “both” sides do you mean? Do you mean warmists on the one side and on the other side so called self-designated “skeptics” who support the warmists’ physically absurd core points, present fake experiments and criticize only minor inconsistencies of the AGW concept? This would be no real debate.
If a debate were to happen alarmists wouldn’t like the outcome, so it probably will never happen.
SlammerBC, you swrite “If a debate were to happen alarmists wouldn’t like the outcome, so it probably will never happen.”
I hope the use of the word “never” turns out to be wrong. The pressure for this sort of debate is getting stronger and stronger. I, for one, hope that it cannot be postponed for ever
Hee, hee. He said ‘facts and uncertainties’. Heh.
==========
We have been discussing this ever since Climate Etc started; and for years before that. There is no scientific authority which can settle which side of the argument is correct; EXCEPT the empirical data. So basicly we have two alternatives. Convene some sort of scientiic discussion, with the heavyweights in the field taking part, and where the playing field is level; and try to get to the bottom of what the fundamental physics really states. (Maybe the GWPF/RS discussions will provide this forum). The point of this is that it is ESSENTIAL that experts from BOTH sides of the issue participate on an equal basis. The warmist idea that we skeptics/deniers are providing disinformation is completely unacceptable. Or we can wait until Mother Nature provides us with the empirical data which will decide the issue.
Luckily, from my biased point of view, there is going to be no political will to restrict the use of fossil fuels on a world wide basis, and we are going to get the empirical dat which will decide the issue.
”
There is no scientific authority which can settle which side of the argument is correct; EXCEPT the empirical data.
”
”
Convene some sort of scientific discussion, with the heavyweights in the field taking part, and where the playing field is level; and try to get to the bottom of what the fundamental physics really states.
”
Let’s look at nothing EXCEPT the data.
Let’s have a debating match about physics.
No contradiction there.
I’m trying to imagine Tim Ball and Tom Harris discussing physics with a thousand experts who actually do scientific research. Not pretty.
‘Let’s look at nothing EXCEPT the data.
Let’s have a debating match about physics.”
That is one of the funniest contradictions Cripwell has ever come up with.
Steven Mosher, you write “That is one of the funniest contradictions Cripwell has ever come up with.”
As usual, putting words in my mouth that I never said. EVERYTHING needs to be discussed.
I hear ya Jim. Ya can’t swing a dead cat in here without hitting a warmist (luke or otherwise) strawman.
How about Richard Lindzen?
Jim, it’s a good idea but I don’t believe your suggestion would resolve the issue. The issue is the projected harm of increased carbon in the atmosphere. The empirical data you seek only looks at current or past information. Here is a hypothetical scenario – what if there was consensus on the data between all alarmists and skeptics/deniers – carbon concentration in the atmosphere, and temperature readings (land, sea and satellite). Do you honestly believe it would change minds? No empirical data exists now that could sway the mind of someone who is convinced they know what will happen (or not happen) in 50-100 years.
Tim Irwin, you write “No empirical data exists now that could sway the mind of someone who is convinced they know what will happen (or not happen) in 50-100 years.”
I agree. But are you prepared to state, unequivocally, that no data will EVER exist that will change people’s minds? Supposing this year, total sea ice extent in the Arctic at minimum turns out to be 10 msk. Dont you think this might be a wake up call? Or supposing that over the next 5 years, global temperatures drop 2 C. Or, or, etc.
Jim (couldn’t reply to your note so had to reply to my original post)
I think you are moving the goalposts here. Data in the future is not part of the current empirical data so therefore could not be included in the debate you desire.
In theory something could change in the future but I doubt it would sway minds. Temporary or short term changes in Arctic ice levels or global temperatures would always be dismissed as aberrations with little impact on the larger trends. I would personally be highly skeptical of making any determination on the basis of any short term trend.
Anyone who is convinced they know what will or will not happen in 50-100 years, except in the broadest terms such as the earth will still be approximately 93 million miles from the sun with a 24 hour day-length is an imbecile or a liar or both. No one knows the future except perhaps God and I suspect He invented free will so He wouldn’t go nutty as a Gore-bot from the sheer boredom of knowing everything that’s going to happen in advance of it happening.
People keep saying BOTH SIDES. There is a consensus side with enforced beliefs and one theory. The other side does not have consensus and does not have one “enforced” theory. There are many different theories and it is most likely that one or more of them is more correct than the current consensus Theory. That is how most of the consensus Theories that were held as “we got consensus on this” Theories of the past did fall. One of the despised Theories did boot the “Consensus” Theory out.
This will happen, the question is not “if”, it is “when”!
Jim Cripwell
What you’ve written makes good sense.
I’s all about rationally looking at the empirical evidence at hand, rather than emotionally predicting future disaster backed only by model simulations based on theory.
It’s basically what Rep. Lamar Smith has suggested, as opposed to what President Obama is calling for (see previous post).
Max
So Al turned to Jim and Mike and said sombrely: “Guys, when we’ve lost the WaPo, we’ve lost America.”
Who are those guys, anyway?
======
Every time I see your name I hear Howard Wolowitz’ mother on “The Big Bang Theory” screaming his name across the house HOWWWWWWWW-AAAAAAAAARD! Would you possibly consider changing it. It’s not a flattering comparison.
last 18 months, and with ENSO neutral well into the fall, it’s only gonna get worse for you
Springer… cool. Now we can add antisemitism to your growing list of pathologies.
It’s just a guess OP ED piece, so it is a bit premature to say they’ve lost the Post. Eugene Robinson is one of their regular opinion columnists and he certainly has changed his mind.
BTW – my email to him after reading his Op ED from last week.
Eugene,
What is it about the topic of climate change you find so important it motivates you to publish an opinion that puts into the running for drama queen of the month?
As someone with a graduate degree in Environmental Science and Engineering who took courses in Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry, I do not come at this issue from a basis of political opinion. I try to form an opinion on the best information out there. Your piece indicates you didn’t bother with that.
Sure basic physics tells us what amount of warming to expect with a doubling of the CO2 concentration. Do you happen to know what that number is? (~ 1 degree C).
Are you aware of the amount of warming that occurred during the 20th century? The answer is 0.8 degrees C. Exactly what bad things happened as a result of that increase?
But what about the higher temperatures predicted by the GCM’s (global climate models)? Where do they come from? Well, I’m glad you asked. They come from inputting certain values to the models. In some cases these are nothing more than best guesses. One of them is water vapor. The modelers assign a value to this factor and the value they assign is one of a positive feedback. Warmer air has a higher carrying capacity for water vapor and water vapor is a far more effective GHG than CO2, hence the values of warming ranging from 2.5 to 5+ degrees from a doubling of CO2. Now, if we were headed towards the high end of that scale, then yes, pushing for action to reduce CO2 sounds logical and reasonable. But to date, there is zero evidence which supports that outcome. In fact continued research is now pointing to a sensitivity to CO2 that ranges from the low end of the current predictions down to below 1 degree C. Apparently the modelers got it wrong. At least in their assumption about water vapor. See, if you bother to take the time to learn about climate science, you would know that our understanding of how clouds work in the overall system is pretty poor. They provide multiple impacts, feedback effects which are positive and also some which are negative. What the sign of the net feedback signal is is anybody’s guess.
Evidence that the modelers are most likely wrong is provided by the global temperature record of the past 17 years. According to the models and the theory, as CO2 emissions rose during this time span, temperatures should have as well. Except they didn’t. At least not at a rate that is significant in any way. Some of the climate scientists are sticking to their guns and saying the “missing” heat (their words) is going into the oceans. Only they can’t provide a mechanism by which this is happening. Those troubled by a claim with no proof (or physics) to support it are going with the aerosols argument. Fortunately there are still scientists more interested in pursuit of knowledge (i.e. what is really happening) than defending their theories. Those are the ones who are taking a second look at their assumptions and questioning them. The results of this are the lower sensitivity estimate I mentioned above.
In reality, your claim that “Only someone who was ignorant of basic science — or deliberately being obtuse — could write a sentence like this one: “Contrary to the claims of those who want to strictly regulate carbon dioxide emissions and increase the cost of energy for all Americans, there is a great amount of uncertainty associated with climate science.” is an example of someone who either doesn’t understand the science or is trying to be obtuse. I am not ignorant of the science and why would I want to be obtuse. The simple fact is that the subject of climate change is an extremely young science and there is a considerable amount of uncertainty in a host of areas if touches on. That you reference the recent John Cook paper is evidence you either don’t care about educating yourself on the subject or are more interested in creating obtuseness. John Cook is a not a good source for anything concerning climate science. The paper you refer to is getting ripped to pieces. It’s sole purpose was to provide a new source of support for the 97% figure. If you bother to look at it, you find that the 97% applies to only 32% of the 12,000 papers reviewed in the “study”.
So you can say 97% of 32% and accurately report on the results of the paper (and we will ignore all of the problems with the paper and simply take it at face value). Somehow, that doesn’t sound as convincing or as much of a consensus as just saying 97%. Hell, what’s a little sloppy journalism when the future of the world is at stake. Which brings me back to my original question. What is it about climate change that has you so worried?
Now, I’m hoping I didn’t make too many errors. Putting one’s foot in one’s mouth is emnarassing. Stepping on one’s crank is painful.
that was supposed to read “guest” and “hasn’t” in the 1st para.
timg56 | May 31, 2013 at 5:57 pm | Reply
“As someone with a graduate degree in Environmental Science and Engineering who took courses in Atmospheric Physics and Chemistry, I do not come at this issue from a basis of political opinion.”
Well that explains why I only disagree with you about stuff that Ms. Manner’s already answered. Mostly in your favor too. I never was fond of the snooty old gal.
tim, excellent, don’t expect a coherent reply from Eugene.
Tim, add my kudos to those of Faustino. Well said. Very well said.
timg56 | May 31, 2013 at 5:57 pm |
Try a shorter reply for better success. People who had to shorten ‘opinion’ and ‘editorial’ to ‘op ed’ may respond better to brevity.
Also, argument from authority may not be the best starting point. I know you didn’t intend it, but it’s how it came across. As for the rest, you may as well have simply put in a link to WUWT or GWPF with the note, “These guys are always right!!!”
And yes, putting one’s foot in one’s mouth is ’emnarassing’. Unless you’re weaving a tapestry, in which case it may be a Persian Flaw.
Bart’s right. Journalists have the attention span of … journalists.
@tmg56
Same year as I was born. What exit?
“Are you aware of the amount of warming that occurred during the 20th century? The answer is 0.8 degrees C. Exactly what bad things happened as a result of that increase?”
Yes but pipeline.
Word on the street is that ocean below 700 meters is sequestering heat in the same imaginary way we’re going to sequester CO2 underground. Somehow the heat is getting there without being detected moving through the upper 700 meters so it’s sort of magic heat. But that’s not the best part. Oh no. The best part is all the evil OHC stashed away in Davy Jones locker is going to magically jump back out in 30 or 50 years and bake us.
So there.
Yes, but PDO and the sun. These used to be skeptical favorites, but have the wrong sign for now, since they explain the pause, and should be giving us a downward trend in a neutral climate.
Actually, Jimbo, global average temperature has been falling like a stone since 2010. Give it some time. The worm only very recently turned. We need to observe more the AMDO (not PDO by the way) downside. It’s a 60 year cycle which means we need to have 60 years of satellite data to know WTF happens in a complete cycle with the excrutiatingly fine detail needed for attribution. We currently have 35 years of satellite data only about 5 of which are on the downside. The AMDO is a sine wave and we just crossed over the peak circa 2005 and by 2010 it appears we entered the steep downward slope. Here’s what it looks like:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2010/plot/rss/from:2010/trend
Three years and three tenths of a degree C down. That’s scary fast cooling.
And yes I know it’s due to back-to-back La Ninas. So what? Most of the warming during the satellite era was due to a single massive El Nino. If we start discounting La Ninas then to be fair we discount El Nino too.
wrong place above. Last 18 months
still going up is where we most likely are
David, you write “Actually, Jimbo, global average temperature has been falling like a stone since 2010.”
David, you are forgetting Rule#1 in any discussion with warmists. No matter what argument you bring forward to claim that CAGW is wrong, there is a graph, or a peer reviewed paper, or whatever, which shows that CAGW is correct. On a blog like this, you will NEVER win the argument
I only look at decadal averages, not every annual or monthly wiggle. You should try it, and you can maintain sanity that way. Every wiggle leads you to a roller coaster of emotions. For decadal averages, the last decade was 0.15 degrees warmer than the previous one, and that has been the case for many decades now. It is very steady, because this is what climate change looks like.
JCH – are you saying the warming rate will increase or what?
Yeah. Overheated rhetoric. Lamar Smith has some nerve.
1. Keystone XL has gone ahead. It’s southern leg is nearly complete, and likely to be done ahead of schedule. Saying the project is endangered by climate science is like saying Jack the Ripper is endangered by the Little Match Girl.
When the southern leg is complete, then tarsand will be re-routed from Detroit (for instance) and other inland refineries, where it is currently refined at US domestic tar and oil prices, to the gulf coast of Texas, where it will be refined at World tar and oil prices.
US domestic tar and oil prices are substantially below World tar and oil prices. That’s because the US has a domestic stranglehold on inland reserves. Oil and tar that is produced within easy reach of a coast gets the World price, which is higher. American consumers pay a mix of domestic and world price.
What seller will give US consumers the domestic price, when they can pipe their products to where the World will pay so much more?
Keystone XL will not give the USA net benefits. It has already cost a huge, government subsidized, amount. It has produced few US jobs, and on the whole when the price impacts of the jacking up of domestic tar and oil are felt through the system, the net job loss will stagger the economy.
And then the Northern Route, which is going to happen under Obama — whose presidency has seen the building of more pipeline on expropriated US soil than any other — will multiply that impact.
See, I understand why Lamar Smith would lie to America. He’s from Texas, the only state that will receive a net benefit.. well, scratch that. He’s the Republican member from Texas, whose Republican constituents will be the only large group that will receive a net benefit.. no, that’s not mathematically correct either, trying again: Lamar Smith is the Republican FUNDED member from Texas, whose financial backers are the only group that will receive a net benefit from the largely Chinese- and Russian-owned TransCanada Corporation’s expropriation of US soil and profiteering on the back of US gullibility.
A different Republican Lamar has different opinions, not quite so colored by tar-soaked rubles and renmimbi.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Republican-Senator-Praises-Solar-Warns-of-Human-Caused-Climate-Change
Just curious, what is the current domestic oil price and what is the current world oil price?
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_dfp1_k_a.htm
It’s complicated.
In round figures, when the World price is around $100/barrel, the mixed US price is around $93/barrel, with inland producers getting far less.
There’s no picture where more pipelines to the coast from Canada doesn’t bring the domestic US price closer to the World price, and the World price won’t drop as a result of new Canadian tar.
“It’s complicated.”
I knew I’d seen Bart somewhere before.
GaryM | May 31, 2013 at 3:22 pm |
Just confirming: the first one to say ‘complicated’ was the world-saving hero who ultimately triumphed, and the second one was the greedy, short-sighted, treacherous goblin destined to die messily?
Oh wow, that parallels the clip, too.
Complicated? Must be…Todays WTI crude is about 93USD and Brent is about 102USD. So is this the world price or the US price?
Bart R said: “What seller will give US consumers the domestic price, when they can pipe their products to where the World will pay so much more?”
____
I sure wouldn’t. I would try to make as much as I could. Doing otherwise would be Un-American.
Eric, sorry for coming to your question late. Hope you see this. Oil pricing isn’t really complicated at all, since shipping is usually quoted extra since depends on destination. Japan, not Saudi Arabia, pays shipping.
The two crude benchmarks you typically read about are Brent and Oklahoma. The first is a marker for the North Sea (Brent being one of the larger fields) and Europe. This is a light sweet crude (meaning doesn’t need a lot of cracking of heavier fractions, will produce more transportation fuels and less road tar per barrel, and is naturaly low sulfur). Right now is running roughly $105-$110/bl. Oklahoma is a pipeline terminus gathering a lot of Texas and Oklahoma crudes, a marker for the US. Those crudes are heavier and sourer (higher viscosity, less transportation fuels, more tars, more sulfur to be removed). That is why they sell at a discount. Right now roughly $93-95/bbl. Saudi crudes vary greatly by field, so there is (by Saudi choice) no benchmark. An extreme is Canadian “tar” (really bitumen) sands. Extremely heavy by definition, and very sour. Only a portion can be upgraded to ‘syncrude’ even after coking and hydrogenation. Rest is called Dilbit (diluted bitumen, where natural gas liquid solvents and water are added so the gunk can be moved by pipeline). So per barrel of produced stuff, actually sells at a 30 to 35% discount from Oklahoma. Which is why as the world uses up the good light sweet crude, oil prices rise as what is left is more expensive to extract, and less useful for transportation fuels at the same time. See my posts on peak oil here for consequences on a broader scale over more time.
Bottom line is crudes are not equal in raw material value. They are equal in weighted average finished product value at any point in time, because those products (primarily gasoline, diesel, and jet kerosene which comprise on average over 2/3 of a crude barrel’s end products) are true globally traded commodities before taxes.
Regards
Thanks Rud for the explanation.
Rud Istvan | May 31, 2013 at 8:18 pm |
“Oil pricing isn’t really complicated at all..”
And people say Rud has no sense of humor.
If the pipeline proposals were designed to bring more sellers to US buyers, the price pressure would go down, all other things being equal.
The pipeline proposals are designed to bring world buyers to US (captive inland) sellers. That brings price pressures up, all other things being equal.
As a capitalist, I’m in favor of Market conditions that maximize sellers and buyers in a Market. This relates to some of the five fundamental requirements for an efficient market.
As a minarchist, I look at the role of governments in the pipelines with dismay.
A pipeline right of way by statute regulation in the USA is 100′. Multiply that 100′ by the length of pipelines proposed to be built currently, and that staggeringly large area of land is enough that if solar farms were built on the same area in Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, California on total scrubland, three times the energy would be produced as the pipes will be shipping. And solar is cheaper right now, even when converted to fuel or to run electric vehicles than dilbit, or tar sand that has sucked up natural gas and water resources for transportation, and that will suck up toxic waste dumping grounds after refinement for its high sulphur uselessly granular coke.
Past pipelines made economic sense. They made technical sense. These pipelines are so a worse product that will cost more can go from being a fringe boutique option that lowers inland US prices to being a refinery-crippling nightmare that exports US jobs and capital growth offshore. Only an enemy of American interests would push for them.
Oh. Since we’re talking about Alberta and electric vehicles, time to put to rest another myth:
http://theenergycollective.com/nnadir/221226/green-electric-car-actually-green-external-cost-lithium-batteries
Are electric cars worse than dilbit cars?
Not by a long shot.
http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2013-05/does-tesla-model-s-electric-car-pollute-more-suv
China has the technology for solar that is cheaper than coal, and can build solar faster; China also has the technology for CCS, and Chinese death smog provides all the reason for China would want to apply advances in scrubbing that would be consilient with CCS.
Either way, in the USA it would cost far less to promote new solar tech than tar sand. It’ not an environmental argument, it’s not a climate argument. It’s simply cheaper to use solar with current technology.
http://www.oil-price.net/en/articles/oil-and-refineries.php
Interesting read on refineries and oil prices. This article disagrees that the XL pipeline will increase the price that refineries pay for oil. The problem seems to be the refineries inability to get the cheaper domestic oil via pipeline so they have to pay higher import crude prices.
Eric H. | May 31, 2013 at 3:53 pm |
Are you suggesting we oversimplify a complex situation, because a transitory pair of figures you cherry pick make your argument sound even barely plausible?
Sounds like you’ve earned your WUWT Logic badge for June early.
Eric H. | May 31, 2013 at 5:12 pm |
And the article you cite does nothing like what you claim. It’s repeating the tired old blame-the-EPA line for the fact that doubling, redoubling, and redoubling again the capacity of oil refineries (almost always due local subsidies or tax breaks) is a better deal for refiners than breaking new ground.. but it points out that refineries are already, and always, run far short of supply, because that keeps prices and profits oligopolistically high.
If tar flows to the gulf of Texas and there’s no capacity, it’ll just be loaded on ships for offshore refineries. See, that’d be no gain in US jobs.
And that will mean the US supply will constrict, even with more pipelines. Paradoxically, refineries might even start closing down more rapidly, to keep down the capacity below the new, lower local supply as tar and oil leave for foreign shores.
Why are you trying so hard to fool yourself into seeing a good end for you or the USA in all this?
Eric, it is a little more complicated than the article implies. Right now, Bakken light sweet crude from horizontal drill crack is displacing heavy sour crude from, for example, Nigeria in the Gulf Coast refineries. The economics are so compelling that the crude is being shipped by rail, since pipeline capacity is strained. Causing all kinds of stress at this weeks Vienna OPEC meeting where the African members want Saudi cutbacks to raise prices to offset their lost revenue from volume declines. Could even lead to another upheaval in Algeria, since planned social spending to quell fundamental Islamic rebels now exceeds revenues by almost 2x. Ditto for Venezuela.
All the XL would do is allow Canada to ship upgraded (at their expense) syncrude, or less expensive Dilbit to the Gulf Coast refineries. Won’t change refinery net average feedstock costs much at all ( yes, they will pay for pipeline transportation, no different than they did tankers from Nigeria. They will work like any good business to get the lowest net cost feedstocks.
The arguments being cited here otherwise ( and probably elsewhere otherwise) are poppycock. I might add, ignorant of economics and the oil business poppycock.
Rud,
The EIA says we are using about 18-19 Mbarrels a day in the US and exporting ablut 3 Mbarrels. Wat is the composition of the exports wrt crude vs refined products?
Thanks again Rud.
Bart, you insulting my logic I will take as a compliment. If you would care to insult me some more I am in the UK and at your disposal. Please let me know when you would like to see me in person so that you can insult me to my face.
Eric H.
Don’t take Bart R’s insults too seriously.
He is just frustrated because global warming appears to have stalled (the “pause that refocuses”) and he suffers from a delusion that the world (or someone out there) “owes him money” for burning fossil fuels but he can’t figure out how to get his hands on this money.
Other than that, he’s a pretty nice guy.
Max
TCF, to your question on oil imports and exports. Depends on the year and month, but right now yes the EIA pegs US ‘consumption’ at 18-19mbpd of crude. Of that about 7-8mbpd is domestic and growing thanks to tight oil produced from source rock rather than reservoirs by horizontal drill frack, and the rest is imported from places like Canada, Venezuela, Nigeria, and increasingly Brazil.
The US has no meaningful crude exports. What it does export are finished products like gasoline, diesel, jet kerosene, and heating oil, to places where that makes more economic sense than importing crude and building refineries. We are long refining capacity, especially on the East Coast. The majority of those exports go to eastern Canada via existing pipeline infrastructure, a minority to the Carribean rim countries. Net domestic crude consumption is therefore 15-16mbpd.
Which the notion that tight oil will provide oil independence is such nonsense. But rather than climb onto that soapbox, I will just stop with the answer to your excellent question.
Rud
Your answers are impressively detailed and informative. If you have the time and interest I would actually be extremely interested in what you have to say on your soapbox about tight oil and oil independence. While I’m at it, I’ve been seeing articles in reputable newspapers about the US becoming a major oil exporter in the foreseeable future. What do you think of that assertion?
tcflood,
A better book on oil than Rud has put together is my tome The Oil Conundrum (available as a Google Docs download). This is the text being used to analyze the depletion of oil reservoirs, as it provides the rationale for physical and statistical models. The economics is secondary to scarcity and estimating how fast we can extract the fuels, and for how long.
manacker | June 1, 2013 at 3:10 am |
The ability to construct ‘logic’ worthy of WUWT is a special gift; some spend lifetimes devoted to such attainment. Advertisers. Politicians. Defense attorneys. Con artists.
I mean absolutely no insult. If any took my comments as such ad personam, they’ve reached an idiotic conclusion, and I apologize.
If they take my comments on their comments as compliments, for whatever reason, I cannot claim any credit whatsoever. Though the words ‘pretty’ and ‘nice’.. I must admit some startlement at, unused as I am to hearing them in this context.. I mean, I’m used to very wrong statements from you, I could not have expected anything quite that wrong.
It’s good we can chat so harmoniously. Though, I ought point out, if warming were my issue, which you know it isn’t, I can only imagine frustration if the facts were on your side, which they aren’t.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:191/mean:193/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:5/mean:7/last:190/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:120/detrend:0.65
If global warming had an appearance of stalling, it’d look like the detrended blue line on the graph. As it happens, the graph apparently continues the general trend of climate as shown in the red line through the green line, with too little data yet to calculate and confirm whether appearances are real or no.
You do get that grown ups don’t get frustrated by childish fantasy, right?
Eric H. | June 1, 2013 at 2:58 am |
Thank you for the kind invitation.
I’ve been to the UK.
I have no plans to repeat that particular exercise any time soon.
I know you must lament this as much as do I.
Perhaps we can move past percieved or imagined slights, unintended or incidental contact leading to dives that would make a footballer blush, and rise above the sort of handbag fights that too much derail interesting exchanges.
Please, by all means. You were going to answer how gasoline couldn’t be purchased?
Bart R, are you sure you posted that graph as intended? I clicked on your link, and I saw a blue line dropping to -0.3 degrees, the temperature level of ~1900. That is a drop of about .8 degrees in ~15 years. I can’t think of any reason we’d expect to see temperatures like that, but I’m sure I wouldn’t expect them if temperatures had mostly stalled. After all, stalling or pausing implies staying relatively constant, not rapidly decreasing.
Well Bart I don’t find you interesting at all. As for football player dives you are obviously more equipped for the game of soccer where I prefer contact sports such as American football where we don’t fall down on purpose. Your arguments are obviously parroted non-sense and your abilty to build straw men would make a Sophist blush. You may think that you are witty and cool on this blog but I find you desperate and unable to have a rational debate. The fact that you resorted to insults when you were obviously wrong is typical of your inability to reason. I would guess that yo u have never accomplished anything that didn’t involve a spread sheet or power point. You hide behind your keyboard and practice your craft because if you mouthed off in person to any real man you would get your clock cleaned. In short, a coward. Oh, and have a nice day!
Brandon Shollenberger | June 2, 2013 at 2:54 am |
Bart R, are you sure you posted that graph as intended? I clicked on your link, and I saw a blue line dropping to -0.3 degrees, the temperature level of ~1900. That is a drop of about .8 degrees in ~15 years. I can’t think of any reason we’d expect to see temperatures like that, but I’m sure I wouldn’t expect them if temperatures had mostly stalled. After all, stalling or pausing implies staying relatively constant, not rapidly decreasing.
You are perceptive, and you are not completely wrong.
Stalling or pausing normally implies a good deal, among which implications may be a plateau.. or a fall from the sky. The problem with too many claims is the immediate inference “the show’s over, it’s all gone, go home now, nothing to see here.”
How many people, reading the articles glancingly, do you think would draw this mistaken inference, especially given how headlines and conclusions are worded too often?
AGW minus negative natural trend or negative feedback ought ‘stall’. That’s not remarkable. It’s called for in the models, and it’s called for with the same frequency as we see it in reality. That’s the story.
As the models predict, GMT varies dominated by AGW. That’s the headline.
Eric H. | June 3, 2013 at 2:48 pm |
About your constant and unremitting ad personam attacks, unrelieved by useful contribution of fact or reason: do you really think anyone as obnoxious in writing as I am is not as obnoxious face-to-face?
I’m worse in person. By far. And I have yet to have my clock cleaned.
One more thing you’re just plain wrong about.
And what is this ‘parroted’ stuff? My arguments sound like they’re repeated from someone else? Except where I cite others, howso?
I’d think you’d be personally insulting them, not me, if such were the case.. My arguments are my own.
Can’t you tell by how badly they begin, and how over months online they are refined and reformed until more nearly correct? How their parsimony, simplicity, universality and accuracy increases through experiment by exchange with others here?
No, I guess you just don’t recognize science when you see it.
But we already knew that.
Bart R, you’re free to say a “stall” in global warming would present itself as a massive drop in temperatures. I’m free to call you a loon for saying it.
And everyone else is free to decide which is more reasonable.
@BartR
I’m sure you won’t let facts get in the way of your opinions but…
http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/regional/gdp_state/gsp_newsrelease.htm
According to latest US Bureau of Economic Analysis only North Dakota (#1), Oregon (#2), and West Virginia (#3) topped Texas (#4) in economic growth.
Please note that the Texas GDP is $1.3 trillion/yr while the combined GDP of the higher performing states is $0.27 trillion/yr or about a fifth the size of the Texas economy.
Whatever Texas is doing it’s doing right.
You may now return to your UK fantasies about the United States. I suppose that helps take your mind off the economic collapse of the European Union. Was that ill-advised or what? heheheh
David Springer | May 31, 2013 at 5:15 pm |
“My Texas, Right or Wrong?”
How do you turn anything I said into anything you said about it?
And UK what? EU what?
I grew up just outside Buffalo, NY.
Sure, I’ve _been_ to the UK. I think they must have some sort of problem with lead in their water pipes, plus, Socialism.
I’m perfectly happy to leave Texas alone; shame Texas politicians are forcing landowners along pipeline corridors off their land in the rest of the USA, as that would be equitable.
@BartR
Sorry. I thought you were the UK shopkeeper. All the dumbass warmists start looking alike after a while.
SCOTUS gave their blessing to some pretty sick schit in the way of eminent domain. Have at them but don’t blame Texas for playing by rules they had no part in making. The last two POTUSes from Texas didn’t happen to be in office at the right time to change the political makeup of SCOTUS away from 4 libtards, 4 conservatives, and one swinger.
One plays by the rules one has not by the rules one wishes they had.
David Springer | May 31, 2013 at 11:30 pm |
I have nothing but respect for how Texans play a game.
Texas: first in for a fair game, and even faster in for a crooked one.
Among the facts that are clear, however, are that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global concentrations of greenhouse gas, and that even substantial cuts in these emissions are likely to have no effect on temperature. Data from the Energy Information Administration show, for example, that the United States cut carbon dioxide emissions by 12 percent between 2005 and 2012 while global emissions increased by 15 percent over the same period.
The preceding paragraph is simply factually wrong on all points.
US emissions are a major contributor, the second largest after China, practically the largest per capita, the largest in total product life-cycle (ie imports of goods from, for instance, China, assign CO2 emission to end consumer, rather than producer), and even moderate real cuts in each of these proportions would have more efficient, more economical, direct impact on CO2 levels than practically any other effort.
The utterly spun way Lamar Smith cunningly arranges words to imply otherwise is artful and crafty, on some level, but ultimately insulting the reader’s intellect and math skills.
So while the US shipped jobs and capital to China, while China poached the US share of the Carbon Cycle as a Free Rider (which, incidentally, would end and reverse immediately under a CO2 Fee & Dividend system including imports), the bulk of the 15 percent rise in world CO2 emission during the supposed 12 percent US drop were attributable to US consumption. No one should be fooled by claims otherwise.
And let’s look more closely at the claim of a 12% US drop in CO2 emissions. LIDAR readings components of the natural gas production chain tell us a tiny percentage of actual emission is reported. The growth of natural gas production, the growth of coal activities (as coal mining becomes more intensive and more emissive), the open sewer that Keystone XL will drive into high gear in Albertan tarpits.. there is nothing in these reported drops that has the ring of truth. What sort of dyskeptic or child would believe the claims, who has eyes and can see?
So what you are in fact saying is that even though the US reduced CO2 emission by 12% it’s still the bad guy on the world stage because we have to much money and simply pay some third world shiithole to burn our fossil fuel by proxy and ship us the end result. So in fact what the world needs to do is make the United States impoverished.
Fat chance. Too many of us are hip to that scheme. I think you need to worry about Europe becoming impoverished. Mind your own business in other words before we decide to boycott your dumb asses and buy everything from China, India, Korea and any number of countries that want to trade with us and don’t give us any shiit about how we spend our money.
David Springer | May 31, 2013 at 5:21 pm |
I’m saying someone spun up the 12% figure and you bought it hook, line and sinker.
Suppose they’d said 97% instead? Would you believe that without checking?
I know a lot of people who doubt 97%, that instantly believe 12% like it were the Word of the Messiah.
The USA isn’t the bad guy in the world. The USA is the best thing to ever happen in, to, or for the world. That China steals US production capacity and then scams Americans into paying China to take US jobs and US capital growth from Americans doesn’t make the USA the bad guy. It makes the USA the victim.
Of course, like all victims of con games, you think you’re too hip to be fooled. It’s what makes you such a great mark.
And I could freaking care less about Europe. Sorry, Bjorn and Pekka and any other denizens of yesterdayland. It’s not that I think less of you, it’s that I have no place making decisions on your behalf.
I’m saying the USA will have higher ROI if it has less waste. I’m saying the USA has X-inefficiency in its energy markets due barriers to entry and exit, largely from subsidies for fossil. I’m saying what any competent businessman would know, if he made his money by smarts not by luck or charm.
Bart R | May 31, 2013 at 6:46 pm |
“I’m saying someone spun up the 12% figure and you bought it hook, line and sinker.”
“Someone” is the US Federal Department Energy Information Administration (EIA) headed by an Obama appointment to Secretary of Energy.
http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec12_3.pdf
I realize that the proper partisan knee-jerk reaction is to distrust everything remotely connected to the Obama Administration but homey don’t play that game. I generally trust government generated statistics about the country unless I have specific reason to distrust them. In this case I don’t. The reasons are clear enough. Continued increases in fuel economy in the transporation fleet, a huge replacement of coal fired generators with natural gas, obscenely higher prices for gasoline and diesel, and a recession which so predictably follows oil price it’s trite.
Now try to respond without being stupid.
David Springer | May 31, 2013 at 11:46 pm |
http://lib.semi.ac.cn:8080/tsh/dzzy/wsqk/SPIE/vol4893/4893-141.pdf
CO2E levels are reported to the government by industry. Industry estimates are based on half-century-old methods that were barely appropriate even back then. They’re supposed to be updated every 30 years, but you know how these things go, with government efficiency.
Using current technology to track current practices, 12% is pure spin.
Bart,
I’ve seen the per capita arguement before. As far as I can determine, it is bogus. Why don’t you tell us what the result would be if the US were to match China’s per capita number?
timg56 | May 31, 2013 at 6:03 pm |
I think you can do that math. Heck, you could do the math of what it’s more likely to be: China matching the US per capita number.
Because, why would China not match the US per capita number, when it doesn’t have to pay a penny to plunder the US share of the carbon cycle, take American jobs, poach US capital growth opportunities, and hack US industrial and technical secrets? (Okay, that last one is a distinct rant.)
The problem isn’t per capita emission. It’s per capita dividends that ought be paid to the owners of the carbon cycle.
When are we going to pay the owners of the nitrogen cycle, the water cycle, the bi cycle … Bart, give it up. We all breathe the same air and we all get the benefit of fossil fuels. You are all cost and no benefit. You’d make a lousy bookkeeper.
jim2 | May 31, 2013 at 7:01 pm |
The N2 cycle doesn’t exhibit much scarcity. Not rivalrous. Not excludable. Not administrably feasible. NOx’s are subject instead to command and control regulation. Is that what you want more of?
Water? You think your water’s free?
And I’m not sure whether you realize it or not, but if you walk around picking up bicycles (or bi’s, if that’s what you mean), that belong to someone else and ride them around the town, pretty soon it’s going to lead to a bad end for you.
Bart R, surely one must look at CO2 release per GDP? i did just that. I used the UN 2011 national GDP (as $Billion) and this measure of CO2 release
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=90&pid=44&aid=8
I plotted Log(GDP) vs Log(CO2), as $Billion and Million metric tons.
I get a linear relationship in Log space.
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/logGDPvslogCO2_zpsea49a810.png
Nations above the fit are naughty, burning fossil fuels for little GDP gain and those below the line are jolly good fellows who eak out the last erg of productivity from their bottled sunshine.
China is above the line, the US smack in the middle and the UK, France and Germany are the pants.
Looking at 40 nations with the highest GDP, the worst polluters are, in order,
China, Iran, South Africa, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Thailand, United Arab Emirates and Malaysia.
The best at making money for little pollution are:-
Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Austria, Italy, Finland, Brazil and Colombia.
Norway is a bit of a cheat as it exports oil for most of its foreign earnings and Colombia makes a lot from nose-candy.
So, overall all, Bart, you are completely wrong. The USA is in the middle of the pack, neither good or bad. The three places on the boo-hiss podium are China, Iran and South Africa and the winners rostrum is filled with Switzerland, Norway and Sweden.
DocMartyn | May 31, 2013 at 10:10 pm |
Completely wrong? Wow. And I wasn’t even trying all that hard. I must be a natural talent.
Why ‘must’ one look at GDP?
This is not a race, or a contest. It is not about good or bad. It is nothing to do with podiums.
The USA is the best place for sound CO2 privatization policy not for its ratio of GDP:CO2 (which is, frankly, an idiotic measure: if you ascribe location by consumption of end products rather than of production, you get an entirely different outcome) but for its positive effect on the US economy.
Solar is cheaper than coal. Right now. Today. Oil, tar and coal subsidies stymie and distort the US economy. Right now. Today. There is a pervading sense of unfairness about pricing and externalities in the Market among buyers. Right now. Today.
So, even by your specious, precious, narrow argument I’m not wrong, and overall, your argument is not even a speck on a flea’s pimple.
A portion of China’s CO2 comes from manufacturing things for export to the US and other places. How do we allocate that carbon, by the maker or the consumer?
He quoted Cook et al’s 97%….EPIC fail. Smith nailed it, WaPo and ThinkProgress did the normal progressive MO and came across arrogant, angry, and inflated the certainty of the science. Mitigation is a policy based in “feel good-ism” and is not only a waste of time but will negatively impact the economy.
+1
Yes. Bottom line is US CO2 emission is not a large enough fraction of global emission to make a significant difference in global average temperature increase. It’s an empty gesture that does nothing but rearrange the deck chairs.
”
When compared with say Senator Inhofe, it seems that Rep Smith is someone that the Democrats should be able to work with.
”
When compared with Senator Inhofe, anyone else looks reasonable, with the exception of Chris Monckton.
Could you set the bar a tad higher?
Inhofe, and Dubya, had the bread in their baskets turned to roses.
==============
Inhofe is an Okie. Comparatively speaking he’s pretty bright. Compared to say Max_OK, Inhofe is Albert Frickin’ Einstein. That’s presuming that the fiction calling itself Max_OK is actually from Oklahoma and not some, for example, lazy frog who hates the United States. Or maybe he’s actually a Republican from Lamar’s District on Lamar’s payroll acting as a double agent to make the warmists look like a bunch of drooling imbeciles. He’s worth every dime if that’s the case.
As a minarchist and a capitalist, I am not “those who want to strictly regulate carbon dioxide emissions and increase the cost of energy“.
I want to remove government from the lives of individuals so far as is possible while still obtaining the benefits of the same Capitalism upon which the USA was built. To do that, we must have government upheld standards of weights and measures, a trustworthy currency enforced by strict and balanced laws, and a fair Market where theft is prevented by threat of police action and remedied by swift action of justice.
That is not a lot of government. It’s far less than Lamar Smith demands.
It doesn’t expropriate lands for private enjoyment by foreign corporations. It doesn’t subsidize tar and oil and coal while technology exists that makes other options cheaper.. and while the trend of innovation tell us that price will drop and drop in the near term while tar and oil and coal only become more expensive and homelier.
It establishes and measures standards of use of the scarce carbon cycle resource, and ensures a fair Market fee is collected as determined by the Law of Supply and Demand, where the dividend to every owner of the scarce resource — each of us who breath in the nation — is maximized. Privatization is the classic, technically correct, Capitalist action to take faced with the conditions we are in. Anything else grows government. Anything else steals decision power from individuals in the Market. Anything else is anti-democratic. Anything else is Un-American.
Lamar Smith promotes with every fiber of his serpentine politicking this anything else.
Bart, again your carbon trading scheme fails on its face as carbon has no value and will only have value if government assigns it a value through regulation. The only reason to regulate would be to try and control the climate which the US cannot do by itself and developing countries have no desire to. If your carbon cycle resource actually had a demand it would a value. Perhaps a review of economics 101?
Eric H. | May 31, 2013 at 2:06 pm |
You misunderstand what is scarce, and what is being sold.
It’s the carbon cycle that is scarce.
That’s a natural scarcity, as is clearly seen by the continued rise of CO2 levels. Government doesn’t make it. It’s a rivalrous scarcity, as in no human lifespan is the carbon cycle buffer or capacity used up for a measure of emission usable again by another consumer. Government regulation can’t change that rate or make it not rivalrous. It’s an excludable scarcity, as lucrative products that consume carbon cycle can be constrained by VAT systems and point-of-sale standards like any weight or measure in a sales system. Don’t you approve of weights and measures being enforced with a firm and trustworthy hand? And the carbon cycle is administrably feasible.
This is in no way different from the sort of regulation applied to the pricing of apples, or cell phones.
The reason this natural value for the carbon cycle does not have its demand reflected in the Market is that it has up to now been nationalized. Do you propose the government nationalize cell phones? Or apples?
Perhaps a review of how the real world works?
Bart R,
Hey Bart, you can buy my share of the carbon cycle. How much will you give me for it?
I got all four Railroads. Whaddya gonna do about it?
=========
GaryM | May 31, 2013 at 3:09 pm |
You’re trying to sell a share in a nationalized good.
This is no different from offering to sell the Brooklyn Bridge or Yellowstone Park.
You know, if it were privatized, you could do that.
Now? Now the government’s made you a criminal for what ought to be your right.
Bart,
In the US carbon has not been nationalized, there is currently no market for carbon. Why? There is no value, therefore no supply, no demand, no trading…Scarcity doesn’t matter if there is no demand. Here’s an idea, buy all the carbon you can get a hold of…a great investment!
Eric H. | May 31, 2013 at 3:49 pm |
Of course it’s nationalized.
That’s what you call a shared, unpriced Commons.
The cure for the Tragedy of the Commons is privatization.
See, “has not been nationalized” is a clever trick of language. Mobile phone bandwidth “had not been nationalized” before it was privatized. You’re fooling no one.
You knock down the doors and stop enforcing the laws, and no goods have value in a riot. Everyone takes what they want. They smash what is in excess of their wants, and waste it. But that’s not an economy, and it’s not a Market. You’re advocating theft and mob rule.
Bart, The post office and Amtrak are nationalized. I can buy stamps and buy a train ticket. Please provide a link to where I can buy some carbon cycle in the US. I have not promoted anarchy and your argument has gonewell beyond rational. I am done.
Eric H. | June 1, 2013 at 3:13 am |
You can also buy gasoline, and burn it to use up carbon cycle.
You really literally can’t grasp that?
kim | May 31, 2013 at 3:26 pm |
Same thing as everyone always does with every comment you post: pat you absently on the head like a good little pet, and ignore it.
Yes Bart, last time I was in the US I filled up my gas tank and since the carbon cycle was nationalized I stopped by the “public carbon cycle office” to buy some carbon coupons in case I got checked by the “fair market enforcement police”. Wouldn’t you know it some brilliant “capitalist” had bid and won the government contract and was now selling the carbon cycle at it’s equilibrium price. Since the government had put a ceiling on how much carbon cycle could be sold for private transportation (you know to stop global warming) there was a huge shortage of carbon cycle coupons and a bidding war had developed right there at the new, not so government, coupon office. Wow, and just think, six months ago carbon was not scarce, rivalrous or excludable. Of course the whole carbon cycle scheme had in six months paid off $15T in debt and we all were flush with cash so I just whipped out the debit card and doubled the highest bid! You should have seen the looks on their poor faces as I perfectly executed a four wheel burnout in the Suby on my way out of the parking lot. Yeah…gotta love that “fair market”.
Bart, I didn’t know the word minarchist, assuming the wiki definition is accurate, it gives me a better understanding of where you are coming from. I perhaps have minarchist tendencies, but I’d see a significant reduction in the role, reach and size of government as a hopefully achievable goal. I try to promote that, the chance of government retreating to the minarchist position seems remote. But if promoting minarchism helps lead to reduction, at least that’s an improvement on the present overblown scale of government.
From memory, when the UK government introduced some social security measures about 100 years ago (1911ish), government accounted for only about 11% of the economy. That introduction led to the demise of many non-government co-operative schemes. (I might follow up the facts on that.)
Faustino | May 31, 2013 at 7:16 pm |
The road to overgovernment is paved with spun intentions.
Even a nation full of local non-Market cooperatives and charities beats a nation where the government is All-Mother and All-Father all the time.
It would be best if all potential actors in the Market achieved their fullest possible expression in an equitable society, but government made too large kills that in its tracks.
It’s like marines and maturity. Once they’ve been through basic training, they’re never going to get any further.
Good to see that your testimony may have had an impact, Dr Curry. Good to see Rep. Smith speak out in such a reasoned fashion (unlike Inhofe).
Sad but typical vicious responses based on distortions, misrepresentations, or outright falsehoods. Par for the WaPo course.
If the northern leg of Keystone XL isn’t built, there are two projects waiting, both costing less, one using existing pipeline rights of way to lay a second line, that will move the Athabascan oil to the BC coast for shipment to China. China already spent $2.1 billion to build a first leg from Fort McMurry to Calgary, to move oil from the projects they already co-own. And Canada’s premier met with China’s premier in Hawaii six months ago and got a promise of Chinese financial support for the remaining legs. Obama’s continued delay is forcing the political hand of our northern neighbor. Isn’t pretty.
Hansen and McKibben’s arrogance to think their little protest in front of the White House would affect Canadian resource development or Chinese resource acquisition is as delusional as their CAGW thinking.
Rud. Dont forget, in Canada, “oil east”. There are lot of Canadians who want to see the bitument from Alberts shipped to Quebec and the Maritimes.
I didn’t. Actually finished a draft essay on keystone XL about two months ago for the next book. Focus was Hansens protest futility, not the geopolitics.
Turns out the distance is so vast, the cost so high, for ‘oil east’ that the cheapest solution is the northern leg of XL for both Bakken (North Dakota) and Athabascan (Alberta) to existing (being expanded) underutilized refinery capacity already capable of refining heavy sour crude (since Texas peaked long ago) on the Gulf of Mexico, then use the existing Gulf to Northeast Pipeline Infrastructure to supply eastern Canada. The long way around works best (least cost and billions of new investment) under the background assumption that we remain good friends and partners. Boy, I hope we do.
Obumer nixes XL, and we might not. Canada has been getting quite cozy with China. Cannot criticize under the circumstances but is very worrying.
Obama is playing with Checkers, oh no, that was Nixon, another unfortunate parallel, while the Middle Kingdom does multi-dimensional chess.
=======
You seem to be behind the times. The BC government, which despite its name is the conservative party of British Columbia, rejected the Northern Gateway pipeline.
http://www.vancouversun.com/news/metro/formally+rejects+proposed+Northern+Gateway+pipeline/8462046/story.html
Perhaps you think other legs, through the Arctic, are more attractive?
This being less than half right, it’s becoming a par for Rud Istvan.
The other route is south of Northern Gateway, merely doubling the capacity on the existing right of way to an existing seaport terminal about 50 miles north of Vancouver. Cost is $5 billion versus at last $7 and rising for the northern leg of XL. The southern XL leg is being built to debottleneck Oklahoma, and has little or nothing to do with the tar sands.
And Nothern Gateway is not dead. The rights of way are being squabbled over, including by indigenous peoples. Money usually solves those sorts of things in the end.
Rud Istvan | May 31, 2013 at 5:30 pm |
Yes, the other route is backed by the BC government.. but David Black’s other route is tied to Kitimat refinery expansion in Canda, which violates the one explicit condition of the agreement between Stephen Harper and China — that all new refinery capacity is in China.
This is not really a problem for Harper. His government has a track record of tearing up international agreements at whim. But China might not like it.
However, Northern Gateway is an idiotic route. Forgetting that it’s geologically unstable and no pipeline has ever before overcome the technical challenges it faces.. Forgetting that it crosses over a dozen discrete indigenous claims — which is a dozen times the money that solves all things — the precedent in Canada for right-of-way across a province that is resistant is the James Bay transmission corridor. Quebec refused right of way until they obtained 92% of the revenue of the James Bay project. Do you foresee Alberta and the tarsand producers settling for 8% of the revenues of the tar they sell?
And while you might think “debottlenecking”, I think “exporting offshore”.
But then, it’s been a long, long time since you’ve shared the concerns of the average gasoline consumer in the USA.
Rud Istvan,
+1
Whole comment is well said, and especially the last sentence:
I’m not clear on the actual beliefs of several of those who have commented so far, so let me say something specific.
I don’t see the 15 years of constant temperature in any generally accepted data set that I’ve seen. Even to the extent that there are frequent pauses lasting several years, total global heat content continues to go up at the predicted rate. Trenberth’s “missing heat” has mostly (not all) been found in the ocean at depths of about 700-2000m.
I’m not predicting catastrophe or not, I’m just saying that the warming is real (I’v seen an estimate of about 160TW for the last 20 years or so.
Let’s see how people feel about that much.
Yup, except that deep ‘missing heat’, if not figmental, will re-appear when we need it at the end of the Holocene.
And global cooling is more likely in the short, mid, and long-term than global warming. We’re approaching the border of the Holocene, if not over it from our poor maps, and the sun behaves in a new fashion to our observation and understanding.
It seems the most that man is plausibly going to increase the temperature of the earth, two, possibly three degrees C, will more likely be beneficial than harmful, in net terms. These warming scenarios are rosy compared to the many more degrees of negative C, that will come our way sooner or later.
If in fact climate sensitivity is high, we’d have probably slipped over into the crevass of glaciation, had we not already impacted the end of the Holocene.
=============
Kim
I don’t have any idea of how to respond to that cascade.
If you would like, in an effort to find common ground, I could list some references for you.
Just watch the temperatures, tcflood.
============
HADCRUT, GISS, UAH all show the 15 years of flat temps. As for the OHC at depth take a look at how well this data has been sampled and for how long. Then, even if you still insist on defending a recent warming trend then you still have to make the real world connections to CO2. There is plenty to be skeptical about.
Trickle it in.
======
Eric,
can you give me a reference to a graph of the data?
tcflood…woodfortrees.org
Eric,
At your link, one is definitely increasing, one is not a scatter plot and one is too noisy to interpret. I don’t see a 15 year levelling. I didn’t anticipate having this discussion today, but I’ll go find data for you as well.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/13212-global-climate-warming-stopped-15-years-ago-uk-met-office-admits
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/05/has-global-warming-stalled-now-includes-january-data/
Eric,
Actually, it’s a waste of time for both of us if I just sit here and reproduce Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Kallen and all of the references therein. I suspect neither of us has read all the references yet (although I’m working on it) so I suppose one either finds the data convincing one doesn’t.
tcflood, I have been reading papers and articles for the last 6 or 7 years and I am sure that I have barely scratched the surface. I try not to argue the science as I don’t have the chops to do so. If you want to be convinced of a certain position then you will find what you are looking for. There is plenty of garbage on both sides of this debate, I happen to think the skeptics have a better arguement. Judith Curry, IMHO, has a rational and reasoned approach and I value her opinions. Good luck here, I hope you are able to take something from it.
must have measured it with a level instead of estimating it with an eyeball
Thanks, Eric!
It’s been nice interacting with you.
tcflood,
I think there is still uncertainty about the ‘missing heat’. There does not appear to be a great explanation of how it got past the upper 700 m unnoticed. So saying the heat has been found deep in the oceans and total global heat content continues to go up is debatable for many here. Further, proponents on either side of the debate have produced temperature plots that show either a continued slight increase in surface temperatures or no statistically significant increase in surface temperatures since 1998 (. See any of the previous posts Judy has made on ‘the pause’, or as Willard says…’da paws’.)
A Shaggy Heat Story.
===========
John,
I’ve heard the assertion about the non-trackability of the heat path and don’t find it convincing. Let’s call the first 300m the SS, 300-700m the middle sea (MS) and 700-2000m the DS (deep sea). Each is significantly cooler as we descend. Suppose there is some shift in circulation patterns that causes the MS and DS to mix more than usual. This would lead to the MS increasing and DS decreasing in T. Then suppose SS and MS also mix, at about the same rate as MS and DS. Then SS and MS could appear be nearly unchanged while DS would increase somewhat. Within the resolution and averaging across the oceans, this scenario ISTM is not at all unlikely. I eblieve the MS and DS data at this point a quite good, and I don’t think we can say the heat isn’t there even if we are not comfortable with how it got there.
This scenario also, of course supposed the heat that has resulted in increases in the near surface air T and the SST is the heat that is being shuttles in to the DS with the result that the NSAT and the SST appear nearly unchanged,
tcflood,
you seem to be suggesting that, by some strange coincidence, circulation patterns not only changed with the onset of warming, but also increased in effect as temperatures increased?
Also, you’ll find that almost no mixing takes place between the MS and the DS, due to the thermocline.
Phatboy,
No, AFAIK the specific changes and specific mechanisms for activating them are not worked out as yet. NTL, the hypothesis is that some combination of factors (e.g., freshwater perturbations of the halo/thermocline steadystate from melting ice?)
tcflood,
IOW, it’s yet nothing more than pure speculation.
Phatboy,
Not exactly. Either you find the DATA convincing that the heat is there and wasn’t earlier, or you don’t. A couple of different groups adduce data that it is and I see no reason to believe they are wrong based on the data.
tcflood,
You have made a couple of big suppositions to explain how the heat gets there. There is very little to support it at this time, so I personally dont find that explanation very convincing either. The current explanation for getting the heat to the DS is as fluffy as CRE is as a significant driver of MGT. Both have some plausible physics to explain, both lack convincing evidence of being real.
tcflood,
No, the argument is about the ‘missing’ heat, which does not show up in the data but is assumed to be there, just because, well, it must be there, where else can it be, er…
Phatboy
If I have credible data (which these groups seem to) that says 10 years ago the temperature was lower and now its higher, that means there is more heat there. Right?
If your cavil is about what the change means, see my answer to Jim2 below Tony’s post below. I’m starting to get hand cramps. :-)
John,
There is still a lot to learn. I find the idea quite plausible and so chose to retain the overall theory as a still workable one. You of may chose to use the lack of a well-worked-out mechanism for this one feature as a reason to eject the whole body of work.
Bear in mind, I’m just trying to arrive at the best scientific model to accommodate the radiative and global climate phenomina. In this mode I’m not worrying about AGW or CAGW. If AGW is a believable model worth retaining based on the entirety of work by hundreds of scientists (not because of any “consensus” or lack thereof), then I chose to retain it until either someting clearly better comes along or the existing model becomes untenable for multiple failures.
I’m sure you are aware of the story of how Uranus was discovered.
(no pun intended).
tcflood,
Yes, there is more heat in the system, which has been measured and accounted for.
All the kerfuffle is about the ‘missing’ heat – which has not been measured but is assumed by some to exist only because it fits their models.
That nobody was looking for it is a better explanation than it sounds.
The upper layer is cooling due to the PDO which has enhanced upwelling in the eastern Pacific, so this explains how the upper layer may not be warming. Now, you can choose to be skeptical about the OHC measurements and, with it, the PDO, but that would be your choice.
John Carpenter
Pardon me, I meant the discovery of Neptune. You must have wondered what I was talking about.
The general trend in the Ocean Heat Content is well understood. The relative amounts in various layers is readily explained by diffusional transport, and the only discussion point is on improving the accuracy and precision of the collected data.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
What will help with improvements in the data quality is time — as we continue to collect the data and the heat content continues to rise, the signal-to-noise ratio will increase along with it. Each year of OHC rise will strengthen the model.
tcflood – here is an image I lifted from climate audit.
http://imageshack.us/a/img23/4564/polarh.png
It shows a proxy that tracks UAH. If it is as good in the past, it means there has been very little warming since 1900.
http://climateaudit.org/2013/05/24/briffa-2013/#comment-421072
This is proxy data for limited geographical areas and is sufficiently noisy that personally, I wouldn’t deduce anything from it myself.
It matters not that the proxy is from a limited area. It tracks UAH GLOBAL temperature. It’s no more noisy than any other instrumental data. It looks more and more like the 97% like to pick the same cherries.
Jim2,
I;m not familiar with that particular proxy method, so I’m not going to try to analyze it.
Why don’t you explain to me exactly what it is, what geographical area it covers, how samples were acquired, and what the empirical precedents are for me to interpret it the way you want me to?
Actually your casual assertion that it is no more noisy than other kinds of data would need to be backed up. I don’t believe you are qualified to say that. Have you seen raw data from all possible sources?
Also, I must be making headway along your list of objections because you are rolling out the ad hominem arguments.
I rolled out a proxy. One, BTW, that was culled out by Briffa I believe it was. I’m just giving you an opportunity to strut your stuff. Sorry you don’t appreciate it.
tcf – I don’t have access to papers unless they are online and free, but I have a feeling this proxy will be getting more attention due to its unique characteristics.
Serfs are cool with
freedom of choice
as a rule, But in science?
Freedom to choose what
ter keep or exclude
in the data to git
the signal yer want,
like Briffa ex – cluding
Khadyta data
fer a pre – ferred
re – sult ?
No the missing heat hasn’t been found. The change in OHC is so minute the margin of error in the implied half-watt imbalance at TOA is an order of magnitude larger. We don’t even know the polarity of the change in OHC because it’s only a half-watt and the margin of error is 4 Watts.
Adding insult to injury the OHC imbalance was initially a tiny decrease in noted by Josh Willis who manages the ARGO data then it was pencil-whipped into a tiny increase. When pencil whipping (or maybe it was water boarding hahaha) can change the polarity of the imbalance you should instantly know the data quality is too poor for what’s being asked of it.
There was a post here on thsi not long ago. Peer reviewed and published by numerous jointly named team members admitting to the inaccuracy. Try to keep up.
David,
OK, I’m tired. Let me read your posting, do my homework and reply tomorrow.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
David,
Please pardon my silly conceit that any of you would want to check back tomorrow.
I’m reading Levitus et al. 2012 and he gets answers for OHC close to those of Trenberth. His heat increase for 0 to 2000m is given in J (I assume per year?) and is 24.0 +-1.9x 10^22 J . I couldn’t find any instance in either paper of a reported standard deviation that was 8 times the measured value?
Let me help.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/11/05/uncertainty-in-observations-of-the-earths-energy-balance/
An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations
Graeme L. Stephens, Juilin Li, Martin Wild, Carol Anne Clayson, Norman Loeb, Seiji Kato, Tristan L’Ecuyer, Paul W. Stackhouse Jr, Matthew Lebsock and Timothy Andrews
Nature Geoscience 5, 691–696 (2012) doi:10.1038/ngeo1580
http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/27/candid-comments-from-global-warming-scientists/
Trenberth questions whether the Argo measurements are mature enough to tell as definite a story as Hansen lays out. He has seen many discrepancies among analyses of the data, and there are still “issues of missing and erroneous data and calibration,” he said. The Argo floats are valuable, he added, but “they’re not there yet.”
Several data sets show no statistically meaningful rise from roughly 1998. (Temperature is not constant.) Even UK Met now says for 15 years in their newest. Even IPCC’s Paucheri said it in Australia ( of all places) about 3 months ago. And the Warmists at NASA and NOAA said ( including in peer reviewed articles) that either 12 or 15 years of now statistically meaningful rise falsified the models.
Trenberth’s missing heat was allegedly found by him. The Model used found 50% more than the NCDC model using the same ARGO inputs, Pielke pointed out the transport mechanism problem ( to warm deeper water by conduction or convection you have to warm shallower first, and there is no Argo data showing that — why there is a thermocline), and Trenberth’s proposed trade wind overturning mechanism is at variance with the fact that University of Hawaii says AGW has caused them to weaken, not strengthen, so Hawaii is drier recently.
Both observations strengthen the attribution problem, suggesting a greater role for natural variability, so a lesser role for CO2.
Rud and David,
I’m sorry to burn out. I’m tired. Let me read your posting, do my homework and reply tomorrow evening. I promise I will, but you, of course, may not still interested enough to come looking :-)
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
Rud,
Again, please excuse my conceit that you would want to check back tomorrow. I’ll certainly check out all of the assertions.
OK, it’s a moonless night around midnight somewhere in South America. We are lost in a grassland, where the grass is 2 to 3 feet tall. We come to a shear 20 foot drop into a dry creek bed. One of our fellow travelers pipes up and says we should jump the 20 feet into the dry bed. Jaws drop all around. Why, they ask, should we do that? The Uncertainty Principle, says the man. What? Yes, the deadly Fer-de-Lance inhabits this place. While we aren’t likely to be bitten, if we are we will surely die. Better to take our chances with the 20 foot drop. But, his fellows replied, if we jump, we could break feet, ankles, or worse. We could starve in that gully! The man said, but that is the better choice. The group wandered on their path and didn’t jump. The made noise and beat the grass with sticks and kept a sharp eye out for snakes.
jim2 that one needs lost of work.
Why would people lost in a grassland be wandering around aimlessly on a moonless night?
In the darkness how would they know the creek bed is dry?
Why would snakes be in the grass but not in the the creek bed?
How do you keep a “sharp eye out for snakes” in the dark?
Starlight.
Slithertongue, er Parseltongue is necessary if not sufficient.
=============
“Starlight,” you say, jim2. HA HA, if its your story, why don’t you just give them flashlights.
Like I say, your story needs work.
Climate science needs more work than my story, Max.
jim2, Not from you, it doesn’t. Work on your story. For a start give ’em compasses as well as flashlights.
Max, I’ll sell you the copyright for a fee.
“Only someone who was ignorant of basic science — or deliberately being obtuse…” -Eugene Robinson on Rep Lamar Smith Op-Ed.
Judy, you forgot ad hominem attack as another criticism of the science.
So, I’m not even going to get a serious response.
The cascade swelled to a flood.
=========
How many degrees C has the ocean warmed due only to the man-emitted CO2, tcflood?
Jim
I don’t have the data in that form, but in a recent Trenberth paper the change in heat content at various levels is plotted. I just saw that that plot is on this website under the thread “Has Trenberth found the ‘missing’ heat.”
I can see that you guys have already debated most of the stuff to the point of battle weariness.
Am I just wasting my time at this site?
Mainly ours.
Take the temperatures at woodfortrees from 1997.5.
Add a trend line.
What do you see?
Why would I draw a trendline through a data set of 15 years when I have good comparable data for at least three times that, where apparent “pauses” occur on a regular basis?
In addition, why would I consider only near surface air temperature when the radiative imbalance would need to correspond to the total additional heat through all the spheres (atmo, hydro, litho, bio, cryo)?
It is highly likely that these pauses are periodic changes in halo/thermocline oceanic mixing patterns and changes in ocean-atmosphere thermal coupling patterns. (90%+ of the heat goes to the ocean after all.)
So the answer is that you don’t know the actual ocean temperature rise due to the man-made portion of the CO2? Seems that would be an important number. You know water has a big heat capacity. An ocean of it can absorb a lot of heat and not get very hot. Just sayin’.
Alex
Take a look this NOAA plot at http://theconversation.com/global-warming-is-here-to-stay-whichever-way-you-look-at-it-14532
I think the most representative years are 2007-2009. What do you see?
Tcflood
Temperatures have been rising since the start of the instrumental data in 1659
http://climatereason.com/Graphs/Graph01.png
Sometimes it has risen much faster than the period since the 1970’s
Tonyb
Jim2;
Hello again.
I’m a chemist. I know a little bit about heat capacity. The new fleet of about 3,500 Argo buoys that measure temperature, salinity, and water velocity from 0 to 2,000m (deeper for new ones) are apparently pretty good at it’s metric tasks. (Argo data down to 2,000m is only available from about 2007, but comparison of data with existing, longer extant measuring systems is reasonable).
IMO what we need to focus on is imbalance in the radiative budget (inbound SWR minus outbound LWR) versus the total change in heat content on the globe. Any imbalance in the radiative budget is due to GHG, arosols, etc.(obviously we are not talking about CO2 in a vacuum) and must be equal to the total global hear CHANGE over a specific time period. Thus, assigning CHANGE in heat comtent of my piano bench can’t be assigned specifically to anthropo while that in my cookie jar is to something else.
Tony,
AFAIK people only tried to calculate a global near surface average temperature back to about 1850 until the Berkely BEST program tried to extend it back quite a bit.
Since I haven’t memorized the data (or a simple graph) it would be difficult for me to address your assertion. We would need to talk about the specifics of the data sets we used.
Tcflood
Here is BEST ‘global’ to 1753 graphed alongside cet to 1659
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/14/little-ice-age-thermometers-historic-variations-in-temperatures-part-3-best-confirms-extended-period-of-warming/
The ups and down can be clearly seen although the general trend from 1659 is up. Giss from 1880 is merely a staging post in the warming trend and not the starting post
Tonyb
Tony, (I hope this ends up in the right place.)
O.K., you are clearly a heavyweight. (I certainly don’t claim to be.). Let me take your WUWT paper and digest it. I promise I’ll get back to you Saturday or Sunday, if, of course you still care what I think by then. I’ll move your last posting to the bottom and respond there.
Thanks for your interest.
Tom
Tcflood
Cet goes back as an instrumental record to 1659
I reconstructed it to 1538 and also compared the temperature reconstructions of dr Mann and Hubert lamb over the same period.
This article is therefore much more comprehensive and includes the graph I linked to earlier
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
Tonyb
81 years with a flat trend means whatever was happening before 1850 probably did not continue into the 20th Century
BTW, tcflood. I’m also a chemist, although I no longer practice. Programming, even with all the outsourcing and BS from the tech companies, is still a better gig.
Tony,
Please pardon my presumption about anyone checking back tomorrow. It must have been a Dunning-Kruger moment. I definitely will carefully read your work, but we’ll see when our paths cross again.
Jim2;
It was fun while it lasted. Now I’m retired and looking for more “relevant” things to spend my time on. Hence …
tcf – Do I detect a bit of disappointment that you didn’t make as big a splash as you anticipated? Stupid, old, conservatives got you down? Don’t fret. If you hang around, you will learn something.
Jim2,
Actually, I was talking about being a chemist and then retiring.
I’m beginning to get the idea of how you guys work. I just need to be as arrogant, derisive, and condescending as possible and I’ll fit right in.
tcflood – you statement about being a chemist was a bit ambiguous. Do you mean you are a retired chemist or that you want to be a chemist, then retire?
WRT heat in the deep ocean. It is cold down there. Any heat that gets into the deep ocean won’t be coming back to haunt us anytime soon. In order to move thermo energy, the source must be hotter than the sink. That’s why I was asking you about the temperature rise due to man-made CO2 in the ocean. It is an important question.
CO2 back radiation (I believe in it), higher surface temp on land, lapse rate, MODTRAN and radiative balance are the CAWG’ers tool box. But what happens after the increased back radiation occurs? The knock-on effects are where the uncertainties lie.
How can over 90% of the heat be going into the ocean yet we can still see approximately 1.2C land warming and 0.8C global warming over the modern industrial era?
Simple. The 90% is a cumulative amount that builds up over time. If 50% of the energy imbalance goes into the ocean and 50% stays in the atmosphere according to the OHC model, it won’t take long for the OHC to build up. The heat in the ocean can’t go anywhere very quickly, while the atmosphere and land has a small heat capacity which can radiatively equilibrate.
This also has the consequence of providing a long term excess heat source (albeit small) should we turn around the AGW trend.
Remember the old-fashioned drying irons?
http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-51781768/stock-photo-still-life-with-linen-dried-flax-and-old-fashioned-iron.html
tcflood | May 31, 2013 at 2:26 pm | Reply
“So, I’m not even going to get a serious response.”
I’m going to go ahead and scratch off ‘Patience’ in the list of possible middle names for you.
David,
I’m embarrassed.
tc,
I saw more than one serious reponse to the temperature questions, particularly about increasing ocean heat content.
1) No good hypothesis for how heat made the transfer to lower levels.
2) Quality of data availible for OHC is not robust – the error range swamps the readings.
I’ll add:
3) Length of OHC data is not very long.
Tcflood, it is late on Friday and I admit to two glasses of wine with dinner. (whoops, even had to retype that, LOL). You may not spot this, but hope you do.
This thread is confusing due to response timing, but your good questions are not. You strike me as someone genuinely concerned ( as anyone would be reading AR4 or listening to the US Presidents pronouncements), yet genuinely wanting to understand. That is great. Dr. Curry’s blog is IMO the best place for that. She is one of the world’s experts, vets the top line posts severely (since reflects on her…think peer review of one, or getting a graduate paper graded by the department head that she is…) yet lets others present their less reasoned side with only light moderation. What a wonderful and educational juxtaposition. Personally, I think her plan is mostly to let her ‘class’ teach themselves, while she provides occasional ‘guidance’. I would expect no less from one of the top climate researchers/ educators in the US. You know, sort of the Harvard case method applied to climate. Of which brutal yet effective system I am a multiple product.
Tell you what. I will hang around this thread all weekend for your possible replies. You want to take it off line, I am not hard to find since not an avitar. Dr. Curry can supply my contact information. And TonyB’s, and some others you may wish to exchange ideas with. She first put Tony and myself into direct communication. Has been extraordinarily fruitful. I hope he has a book forthcoming with my encouragement. And Brandon Schollenberger, a previous post co- author who is valiantly fighting the Cook 97% nonsense mostly over at Lucias. Proud to be in such company, and would welcome your joining our (not a consensus) dialog here and elsewhere.
High regards
Tim,
I do get hyper sometimes I guess.
1) I don’t find the “chain transfer” mechanism implausible, but I agree that as of now it has no factual support.
2) As I just wrote to David Springer above, I can’t find any mention of a standard deviation that is 8 times the observable in either Trenberth’s or Levitus’ paper. The assertion of that level of error must come from some place else. I’ll keep trying to find it.
3) The data used ranged from 1955 to 2010 for Levitus’ paper. I agree that’s not long enough to impart much confidence in any interpretation.
I swear I have the most commonly misspelled name in the climate blogosphere. Even co-authors get it wrong! Come to think of it, Judith Curry even misspelled my name when she uploaded that post. And I’m pretty sure Watts misspelled it when linking to one of my posts…
Maybe I should just change my name?
tcflood
Graeme Stephens is the primary author.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n10/abs/ngeo1580.html
Insist on primary literature wherever possible.
You’re welcome.
Rud,
Thanks so much for your interactiveness. Your calm presence on this combative site is refreshing. I’m finding I’m already learning a great deal. The cumulative expertise in this group is impressive.
I already looked at your two books on Amazon and your post on the Buckminster site. The books look pretty fascinating.
I’ll look forward to interacting with you.
Rep. Lamar Smith – chairman of the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology – is now raising questions the US NAS (National Academy of Sciences) should have been raising.
+1
There has never been a debate about CAGW among climate scientists.
If they have never had such a debate among themselves, why in the name of all that’s secular would anyone think they would engage in such a debate with one of their political opponents?
CAGW is not science, it is politics. It has always been. The IPCC is not a scientific body, it is a political one. It was created for political purposes and has operated exactly as designed. The responses to Representative Smith are not scientific, they are political.
Why is any of this a surprise to anyone?
”
There has never been a debate about CAGW among climate scientists.
”
Correct.
That’s because “C” AGW is a term coined by denialists who want to make scientists out to to be extremists.
Denialist meme – denialist “debate”
”
The responses to Representative Smith are not scientific, they are political.
”
Smith wrote an op-ed in a national newspaper – He talks about “hardworking American families” and people who want to “increase the cost of energy for all Americans”…
– Did you really expect tables of data and derivations of equations in response?
My dear Heiny,
Are you saying that no climate scientist ever predicted castrophically rising temperatures, catastrophically rising sea level, catastrophically rising ocean acidity, catastrophically rising extreme weather events, catastrophic crop failures, and so on and so forth?
What is the color of the sky on Heiny’s World?
Phrases such as “death trains”, “unprecedented droughts and floods”, “killer heatwaves” and “millions displaced by rising seas” come to mind.
Except for meteor strikes, how do you get much more catastrophic than that?
Judith, can you please tell me why I’m being moderated.
Heinrich, when Hansen writes a 2011 article saying his fellow scientists are afraid to call sea level rise correctly and the ‘real’ number is 5 meters by 2100, when Ban Ki Moon opens Doha by saying nothing less than the survival of mankind is at stake, when the NRC briefs Congress that US corn yields will decline by 60% by 2060 due to AGW (see my post here last year)…then it is denial only when “C” is not put in front of AGW.
phatboy
There are blacklisted words and pieces of words that cause auto-moderation.
You know the thing on your bed where you rest your head? A p-i-l-l-o-w?
Try writing it out and posting it without the spaces. It will be moderated because it contains the word p-i-l-l which is usually spam associated with v-i-a-g-r-a.
I’d take issue with the statement that there has been no warming over the last 15 years. Over the last 10 years, perhaps, but 15 years only works if you use the 1997/1998 ENSO event as the starting point of the series. Using a simple OLS fit, there has been statistically significant warming over 16 years and 14 years, but not 15 years. This falls somewhat into cherry-picking territory.
Its also worth pointing out that temperatures over the past 15 years are actually warmer than we would expect based on the trend of the prior 30. E.g. the trend from 1970 to 1997 is lower than that of 1970 to 2013. I’m not suggesting that the recent slowdown isn’t noteworthy, or that it agrees well with model projections. Rather, its just that calling it a 15-year pause somewhat overplays your case. A 10-year pause is much more defensible.
Noted and agree.
Zeke, there has been some warming in some regions of the world but there has also been cooling.
And it isn’t 10 years. HADCRUT4 up to March 2013 shows cooling for 12 years. -0.034C / decade.
And even 16 years for HADCRUT4 is only 0.039C/decade which is 20% of the IPCC predicted warming.
Bruce,
“No warming for 15 years” and “less warming than the IPCC projects for 15 years” are very different things. I’m discussing for former.
Zeke, .039C per decade is not far from 0. And is a lot closer to 0 than the IPCC predictions.
And it is no warmer than it was 15 years ago.
1998/03 0.556
2013/03 0.412
And Zeke … SH Linear Trend is negative.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1998/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1998/to:2013/trend
My favorite. HADCRUT4 Global
1878/02 0.403
1878/03 0.351
1878/04 0.332
2013/03 0.412
Wimpy CO2 …. only gets us to 1878 temps.
Zeke, you do realize comparing trends from 1970-1997 and 1970-2013 isn’t actually a test for determining if temperatures are higher than would have been expected, right? Trends are, at best, a poor measurement of absolute temperatures.
ZH says I’d take issue with the statement that there has been no warming over the last 15 years.
That there is a clear coldening in the SH is clearly evident over the last >17 yrs is clearly evident.This now needs some physical explanation and not more statistical twaddle.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3sh/from:1995.6/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3sh/from:1995.6/mean:12/trend
Interestingly, all of the temp increase has been in the NH, especially the Arctic. That leaves 50% unaccounted for. Just saying….
All that heat and hardly a dent in wintertime Arctic ice. What are we gonna do when it gets cold?
========
Kim, I am going to cut down more carbon sequestering trees on my farm and burn them in my fire boxes. As Wisconsin folks have done for centuries. And if the EPA comes complaining, I reckon (joke following for the IRS and FBI) we will be able to run them off. You know, like we did for Injuns, Revenuers, and Commies while us poor farming folk just tried to make a living off OUR land.
BTW, main portion of my farmhouse is a two story log cabin, hand hewn of oak, at least 12″ thick, dating from about 1880. We have pictures of the original cabin and the settlers that built it! And my kids partly grew up there, so know a thing or two about trees, splitting mauls, and the IRS.
Freeze – and shiver.
“■Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes warming. There is no uncertainty in this fact. Even if the lowest warming estimates turn out to be correct, we will still experience ruinous impacts that go far beyond the current costs unless we start acting soon to reduce emissions.”
How does a trace gas which is practically a blanket of 100% hole in the atmosphere and with zilch heat capacity which means it does not trap or store heat – raise the global temperature at all let alone by several degrees?
HOW?
Zeke Hausfather said in his post on May 31, 2013 at 2:53 pm.
“Using a simple OLS fit, there has been statistically significant warming over 16 years and 14 years, but not 15 years. This falls somewhat into cherry-picking territory.”
_________
Amen !
And cherry-picking territory is intellectually dishonest territory.
I.
And using something other than a simple OLS fit may give negative results. Maybe we should say it is cherry-picking and accuse you both of intellectual dishonesty!
So is pretending that OLS trend lines mean anything when applied to such noisy signals
What’s wrong with a simple OLS fit ?
What “something other than a simple OLS fit gives negative results” and why would that be better?
I never said anything was wrong with using an OLS fit. Or with using it over a 15 year period, a 14 year period or a 16 year period. There can be many different, legitimate tests. It’s cherry-picking when you pick one test over another because you like the results you got.
As for another test, I don’t need to show there’s a better test. The fact there are alternatives is all that matters for my point. (But there are better tests.)
When the noise is so much greater than the signal, an OLS fit tells you a lot more about the start- and end-points you choose than it does about the signal. And why use an OLS when your eyeball can tell you more?
Try using polynomial fits if you want to see trends going every which way. It’s complete nonsense, of course, but it’s fun!
Re Brandon Shollenberger’s post of | May 31, 2013 at 4:06 pm
But Brandon, I didn’t ask you if there are alternatives to Zeke’s simple OLS fit for 16 years and 14 years.
I asked you demonstrate a better alternative to his OLS fit and explain why it’s better. Regard this as an invitation rather than a challenge.
Max_OK, I’m well aware of what you asked. That’s why I told you what you asked for was irrelevant. Repeating your question and acting as though I was unaware of it doesn’t change the fact your question has no bearing on the point I made.
Brandon, you declined my invitation. That’s the last time I extend an invitation to you.
Max_OK, if the request is genuine, I’d have no problem discussing statistics. But unless or until you acknowledge your request has no bearing on the point I made, I cannot consider it a genuine invitation for discussion. Not only have you failed to admit the disjointness of the two topics, you’ve implied the two are relevant to each other.
Put simply, you’ve given every impression of trying to create a strawman. That is not something I will encourage.
Max,
If you were sent out to pick cherries, what are the odds you’d come back with a basket of acorns?
Any chance your dad frequently referred to you as numbnuts?
(Not that really proves anything. It was one of the names my dad used for me. My favorite was when he made the comment “I should have named you hemi.” That one threw me and I had to ask. He said it was short for hemmaroid. (sp?) )
It’s good having a father with a sense of humor.
One of my father’s favorites was “sometimes I’m not sure you know which end is up.”
Max_OK
But there has been slight cooling since 2001 – or 2002 – or 2003 – or 2004 – or 2005 – or 2006 – or 2007 – etc.
Ain’t no’ cherry pickin there.
Max_CH
And don’t forget the rest: there’s been cooling since 50 Mya, 10 Mya, 1 MYa, 5 kya.
What warming?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/20/monckton-challenges-the-ipcc-suggests-fraud-and-gets-a-response/#comment-1311386
And the satellite data?
Lord Monckton is always an entertaining clown.
Maxok
I would pay good money to watch you debating climate science with monckton
Tonyb
Tony, I can out-clown Monckton without even trying.
Could I wear a costume?
Would I get any of the money?
You should have half his brains Max_OK. You could definitely use a few dozen more IQ points.
I would pay good money to watch you debating climate science with monckton
TonyB,
OH God that would be something to watch. I’d dig deep.
Sorry, left out quotation marks above. It’s TonyB’s trenchant comment.
Max_OK | May 31, 2013 at 4:43 pm |
“Tony, I can out-clown Monckton without even trying.”
No doubt. You out-clown Bozo your every waking moment near as I can tell.
“Could I wear a costume?”
No need. It would just be redundant.
Max,
There is a difference between a professional clown and looking like a fool pretending to be one.
Yes, timg56, the second one is a little harder to do, as it requires acting ability. Monckton is a good actor. I was impressed with his impersonation of Sacha Baron Cohen when interviewed by Craig Reucassel. If you haven’t seen the interview, it’s in the last part of the linked Youtube clip:
Maxok
Instead of linking to a spoof, why don’t you link to the real thing. Moncktons style on climate change is not one I personally like but he is very compelling in real life.
Note to Maxok. A spoof is not the same as the REAL THING..
tonyb
In all this wide world, is there anything more funereal than Melbourne comedians on Australia’s taxpayer funded ABC? For the information of those who are spared their caperings, the Chaser Boys are middle-aged princesses who convey a sense of shock and risk to our Posh Left, people who shriek if their superannuation is a dollar short, or if someone discovers a tuft of asbestos somewhere in their gentrified inner-city suburb.
My taxes fund these dull bromides and their leaden satire. Sorry, world. Not my idea.
As someone who enjoys going to Baker Institute events, I find the over heated ad hom style of one of their academics to be a poor reflection of what the Institute was founded to do.
I agree. I work with a number of bright, hard working individuals at Rice. (I’m not a Rice employee.) I’m shocked that someone with such a lack of knowledge and grace is occupying a position there. I’m even more shocked that the hard science scientists and engineers at Rice haven’t spoken out – he tarnishes all of their reputations.
With regards to the pipeline’s environmental impact, it is an issue of oil leaks versus greenhouse gas emissions. As it stands, the oil has been making its way to the refineries, only over rail instead of a pipeline. Burlington Northern has been an outstanding acquisition for Warren Buffett.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-23/buffett-s-burlington-northern-among-winners-in-obama-rejection-of-pipeline.html
Clearly, Lamar Smith wins this exchange.
Stephen Mosher – You say “Please point me to the measured empirical data which proves that …..”.
That’s a good approach. Let’s go through Rep. Lamar Smith’s op-ed piece, and use measured empirical data to show how wrong he was. So …
… please point me to the measured empirical data which proves that:
– the Keystone XL pipeline will have a significant effect on the climate.
– if the pipeline is approved and is used at maximum capacity, the resulting increase in carbon dioxide emissions would be significant.
– global temperatures have increased over the past 15 years.
– extreme weather events have become more frequent and intense.
– Superstorm Sandy was unusual, and was caused by climate change.
– trends in weather disasters, floods, tornados and storms can be attributed to climate change.
Mike Jonas
You are right on this one. Rep. Smith has got it right.
– Keystone XL will have no perceptible impact on our global climate
– the “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature anomaly” has not risen statistically in the past 15 years
– there is no evidence that Superstorm Sandy had anything to do with human-induced climate change
– there are no significant trends in the intensity or frequency of severe weather, which can be attributed directly or indirectly to human-induced climate change.
If Mosh claims otherwise he is flat out wrong (and he will be unable to provide evidence to support his claim).
Max
Judith Curry
Rep. Lamar Smith’s op-ed makes good sense, starting with the opening sentence:
Who could possibly disagree with this observation and the rational logic that follows?
The “consensus” crowd apparently, as you point out.
It appears that for this group the time for “objective discussion” is over and it is “time to act”, instead.
The comparison could not be starker between Smith’s objective and rational analysis of the issue and the shrill “calling out” of members of congress for not agreeing that “the science is settled” by the OFA (supported by President Obama).
Max
If Obama does not OK the Keystone XL, expect to see a slightly shorter version proposed. One that stops about 10-50 km south of the border near a convenient rail road leading North. Buy some unit trains and have them shuttle the bitumen across the border. No state department approval needed.
At some point in the future, request approval for a (very short) pipeline that simply joins the two existing and in use pipelines to eliminate the rail shunting across the border. Hopefully by then a more intelligent process will take place.
maybe a more intelligent person will be in the White House
It’s not easy to top Val Jarrett.
========
Obama in a coma would be more intelligent than a boatload of Republicans. The last on those we had as president, Bush, was responsible for an unnecessary war and an unneeded tax cut that worsened the national debt, and he left office with the lowest approval rating ever recorded.
Lamar Smith showed bad judgement in supporting and defending Bush, and has shown bad judgement on climate. But you could say in both cases he really wasn’t trying to exercise good judgement, but was just following the Republican line.
Max,
You mean a ‘dittohead’?
Max_OK | May 31, 2013 at 11:48 pm |
“Obama in a coma would be more intelligent than a boatload of Republicans.”
A boatload of hammers isn’t as dumb as Max_OK, whoever that is.
Something just occurred to me in your comment, and maybe there’s a waiting answer: how can the US State Dept keep playing with itself re Keystone with NAFTA requiring free trade? I wonder if Canada has pressed the issue as a NAFTA matter. It’s increasingly looking like the I5 bridge fiasco is a delayed consequence of NAFTA, so it does seem to have some teeth.
Global warming does not worsen tornadoes or Nor’Easters.
And Sandy was transitioning into a Nor-Easter for at least a
day before landfall, and hit as officially an extratropical storm.
Tropical/extratropical hybrid storms have hit the northeast
hard on average a few times a century, and have always done
so. There was Agnes of June 1972, a cool year – which caused
many Pennsylvania flood records that still stand. There was
Hazel of October 1954 – which landfell near Myrtle Beach NC,
but managed hurricane-force-qualifying winds in NYC, Philadelphia, and Toronto. There was the Saxby Gale of 1869, apparently a Nor’Easter that formed around a hurricane once the hurricane got up north. A significant Philadelphia flood record from that storm still stands.
Nor’Easters and major tornadoes are powered primarily by horizontal temperature gradient. In fact, the trend of USA tornadoes F2/EF2 and stronger since 1950 is slightly downwards. USA’s total tornado trend being increasing is due to increased detection of F0/EF0 tornadoes, which resulted from growth of technology and population.
I forgot to mention in my previous comment that global warming
is decreasing the horizontal temperature gradient in the northern hemisphere. Arctic and near-Arctic areas are warming more than anywhere else.
Donald L. Klipstein
Shouldn’t that theoretically reduce the frequency and severity of hurricanes?
Max
Haven’t been able to think of a way to use ‘weather calming’ as a vehicle for fear and guilt, yet. Give it time.
===========
Max, I thought that that was implicit in Donald’s posts, re-read the last para of his first post and then his second post.
Faustino
Yes. I just wanted to make it explicit.
Max
:For the record, and for the umpteenth time, there is no “great amount of uncertainty” about whether the planet is warming or why:”
. There have been two periods of global warming: 1910 to 1940 qnd 1070 to 1998. The second period may have been just the effect of the first delayed by the transport delay of the oceans. Despite ever increasing CO2 concentration, global average temperature has remained constant or fallen at all other times. This om/off nature of global warming is not understood nor is it predicted by models. So how can one say that climate is well understood by science?
One cannot (only a fool would claim that one can).
Max
I’ll show you how to say it. It’s really very easy.
Climate is well understood by science.
Climate is well understood by science.
Max_OK
It’s easy to “say” that “climate is well understood by science” – but only a fool would do so.
Max_CH
Max_ CH, the question was “how can one say that climate is well understood by science?” I simply showed how.
If you don’t think “climate is well understood by science” then you must think climate is understood by science. Otherwise, what’s the point of the adjective “well.”
That you think climate is well understood by science speaks well for you.
Max_OK
I said that only a fool would say it.
And you said you said it.
So that’s where we left off.
Max_CH
I. THE CONCLUSION THAT EPA DREW FROM ITS THREE LINES OF EVIDENCE IS DEMONSTRABLY INVALID.
EPA grounded its controversial near-certain conclusion that manmade GHG emissions contributed to observed warming in the latter half of the twentieth century on three “lines of evidence” in the administrative record: (1) a “basic physical understanding” of the impacts of various changes—both natural and manmade—on the climate system, (2) historical estimates allegedly suggesting that recent changes in global surface temperature are unusual, (3) and computer-based models simulating the climate’s likely response to various forcing mechanisms. 74 Fed. Reg. 66518 (2009).
Not one of these lines, however, supports EPA’s ultimate conclusion, much less the degree of certainty asserted by EPA. The significance of the flaws in the bases for EPAs contentions should not be understated. EPA’s expansive GHG regulation program is unprecedented by any agency regulatory program in size and scope. Because evidence EPA had available to it contradicts EPA’s ultimate conclusion, its corresponding sweeping actions are arbitrary and capricious.
In the view of many scientists, including amici, there is ample evidence that EPA’s Endangerment Finding is grossly flawed. In its finding, EPA relied on the claim by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of 90-99% certainty that observed warming in the latter half of the twentieth century resulted from human activity. See id. & n.22. EPA bases its Endangerment Finding on three “lines of evidence.” 74 Fed. Reg. 66518. But, using the most credible empirical data available, each of EPA’s three lines of evidence should be soundly rejected.
EPA’s purported three lines of evidence are summarized below:
1. The first line of evidence is EPA’s “basic physical understanding of the effects of changing concentrations of greenhouse gases, natural factors, and other human impacts on the climate system.” Ibid. EPA is here referring to its GHG Fingerprint (or Hot Spot) Theory, which is that, in the Tropics, the upper troposphere is warming faster than the lower troposphere and the lower is warming faster than the surface, all due to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations blocking heat transfer into outer space. By this mechanism, increasing CO2 is assumed to increase surface temperatures.
2. The second line of evidence consists of “indirect, historical estimates of past climate changes that suggest that the changes in global surface temperature over the last several decades are unusual.” Ibid. This line of evidence refers to EPA’s claim that GAST has been rising in a dangerous fashion over the last fifty years. Ibid. This line of evidence refers to EPA’s claim that GAST has been rising in a dangerous fashion over the last fifty years. Ibid.
3. EPA referenced as its third line of evidence the the “use of computer-based climate models to simulate the likely patterns of response of the climate system to different forcing mechanisms (both natural and anthropogenic).” Ibid. Those climate models assume that CO2 is a key determinant of climate change, and EPA’s conclusions rely on such models to provide forecasts of future temperature conditions that are adequate for regulatory policy analysis.
In fact, however, highly credible empirical temperature data facts, readily available to EPA prior to its endangerment finding invalidate each line of evidence. And temperature data that is now available for the years 2009-2012 further confirms that each line of evidence was invalid.
[Excerpt taken verbatim from the brief by the Attorneys for Amici Curiae Scientists (see, Amicus brief) in Support of the Petitions for Certiorari before the U.S. Supreme Court in the matter of Southeastern Legal Foundation, Inc., et al., Petitioners, v. Environmental Protection Agency, et al.
Here’s the reasoning set forth in the Amicus brief concerning EPA’s first “line of evidence,” summarized above, as follows:
A. First Line Of Evidence: EPA’s GHG Fingerprint (Or Hot Spot) Theory
The GHG Fingerprint (or Hot Spot) Theory is that in the Tropics, the upper troposphere is warming faster than the lower troposphere, and the lower troposphere is warming faster than the surface, all due to rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. See 74 Fed. Reg. 66522 (2009); Brief of Amici Curiae Scientists in Support of Petitioners Supporting Reversal, at 28-29, Coalition for Responsible Regulation, Inc. v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 09-1322 (CADC June 8, 2011), ECF No. 1312291; see also U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences, at 112-116 (Apr. 2006), available at Here. That theory is totally at odds with multiple robust, consistent, independently derived empirical data sets that show no statistically significant positive (or negative) trend in temperature and thus no statistically significant differences in trend line slopes by altitude. Brief of Amici Curiae Scientists in Support of Petitioners Supporting Reversal, at 30-34, Coalition for Responsible Regulation, Inc. v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 09-1322 (CADC June 8, 2011), ECF No. 1312291.
For example, balloon data from the Met Office Hadley Centre (Figure 1a), satellite data regarding temperature in the tropical troposphere from the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) (Figure 1b), and central Pacific Ocean tropical temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (Figure 2) are shown below. None of the three has a statistically significant trend line slope. That is, their trend lines are all flat. All temperature data are shown as “anomalies,” where anomalies are computed by subtracting a base period average from actual annual temperature values, both measured in degrees Celsius.
Figure 1a, see Met Office, Global Means Anomaly Series, available at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadat/hadat2/hadat2_monthly_global_mean.txt (last visited May 17, 2013) (Tropical Atmospheric Temperature Anomalies Hadley Balloon Data: 200 hPa, 12 km, Degrees C).
Figure 1b, see National Space Sci. & Tech. Ctr., Monthly Means of Mid-Troposphere MT5.5, available at http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2/tmtglhmam_5.5.txt (last visited May 17, 2013) (Tropical Atmospheric Temperature Anomalies UAH Satellite Data: Surface to 18 km, Degrees C).
Figure 2, see National Weather Ctr. Climate Prediction Ctr., Tropical Center Pacific Ocean Temperature Anomalies NOAA Buoy Data: NINO 3.4, Degrees C, available at http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/data/indices/ersst3b.nino.mth.81-10.ascii (last visited May 17, 2013).
All three figures above show data through the most recent period available, 2012. In December 2009, when EPA issued its Endangerment Finding, the trends in all three were also flat based on annual data through 2008. The more recent data simply reconfirms those three flat trend facts. For EPA’s assumed theory to be valid, all three temperature trend lines would have to be upward sloping, but with the Upper Troposphere Trend Line (Figure 1a) steeper than the Mid-troposphere Trend Line (Figure 1b), and that trend line steeper than the Pacific Ocean Temperature Trend Line (Figure 2).
There is no longer any doubt that the purported tropical “hot spot” simply does not exist. Thus, EPA’s theory as to how CO2 affects GAST—EPA’s first line of evidence—must be rejected.
“These criticisms of Rep. Smith’s op-ed make Rep. Smith look like more of a defender of science than his critics, which is not a good place for these critics to be.” – JC
What a steaming pile of BS.
Smith trotted out a bunch irrelevancies and half-thruths.
US GHG emissions contribute “very little”???????
Models “greatly overestimate” warming??
There are “great unceratinties”. Apparently we don’t understand the role of CO2 in the past very well, though he can’t seem to explain any uncertainties.
And he implies that we expect CO2 and temp to rise in lock-step.
Yes, thoughtful and objective discussion would be great. but this is just more rhetoric in the service of preferred policy outcomes.
Michael
Go read Smith’s op-ed again.
– US GHG emissions contribute very little to global warming? Yep. About 0.14 deg C by 2050 based on estimated population growth and same per capita CO2 and IPCC’s high 2xCO2 temperature estimate, which is probably on the high side (figure it out for yourself)
– Models greatly overestimate warming? By a factor of at least two, based on latest observation-based info on 2xCO2 temperature response from several independent studies..
– There are great uncertainties? Amen! (Just ask our hostess.)
Looks like all three premises you cited are spot on, Michael.
Max
Who can’t read??
“US GHG emissions contribute very little to global warming? Yep.” – Max
“Among the facts that are clear, however, are that U.S. emissions contribute very little to global concentrations of greenhouse gas” – Lamar
You gotta be kidding??
Models overstimated by a factor of 2!!
Got a cite for that??
Ask our hostess – you were calling he an “idiot” just the other day on the basis of overestimating uncertainty.
I must apologise to Max, he didn’t call Judith an “idiot”, but rather used the term “nuts”.
And FWIW, I must agree with him on this point at least.
Michael
There have been several recent studies, all pointing to a 2xCO2 climate sensitivity at equilibrium of around half the vale of 3.2C previously predicted by the climate models cited by IPCC.
These are:
Lewis (2013) 1.0C to 3.0C
Berntsen (2012) 1.2C to 2.9C
Lindzen (2011) 0.6C to 1.0C
Schmittner (2011) 1.4C to 2.8C
van Hateren (2012) 1.5C to 2.5C
Schlesinger (2012) 1.45C to 2.01C
Masters (2013)* 1.5C to 2.9C
* not yet published
The average range of these recent studies is 1.2°C to 2.4°C, with a mean value of 1.8°C, or about half of earlier model-based predictions cited by IPCC
Unlike the model predictions, many of these are at least partly based on actual physical observations.
Hope this helps.
Max
Michael
You must be referring to my namesake from the great state of Oklahoma, Max_OK.
I never said our hostess was “an idiot” or “nuts”.
Don’t make stuff up, Michael.
Max_(not from OK)
My money is on Lindzen. There’s no such thing as water vapor amplification which takes it down to 1.5C. There’s little effect over the ocean DWLIR powers a heat engine which efficiently removes energy from the ocean and deposits it in the cloud deck and thereby creates negative lapse rate feedback which largely cancels out surface warming. Net climate sensitivity is therefore 0.5W/m^2 and Lindzen is the closest.
“I never said our hostess was “an idiot” or “nuts”.
Don’t make stuff up, Michael.” – Max
Here’s Max’s response to my quoting Judith’s CS range of 0-10C.
“There are all kinds of nuts out there.” – Max
I thought you were going to show me some “models” overestimating warming by a factor of 2??
Ok now it’s estiates of CS.
But here’s a fun game for you, since your doing nonsensical simple averaging of the different numbers.throw out the ridiculous figure from Lindzen that even the other low-ball figures don’t come close to, and then tell us the new average.
For more fun,throw in Judith’s 0-10 and and do it again.
Same here (i.e. in Australia)
Peter, here I was addressing you in German on another thread!
let’s throw another shrimp on the barbie instead. What a wonderful tell. I carry on a long range, long time dispute concerning fundamental energy storage ( a possible root solution to AGW) with a Kiwi nicknamed EI. google around, you can probably find us bickering. Hint: EEStor (nonsense).
What is your probable avatar on JoNova? You should definitely plead the US 5th Amendment and refuse to reply. Pleasure getting to know you and you salient comments better anyway.
Ich bin ein jellyfish on the barbie.
========
“I am a jelly doughnut.”
Eddy Izzard (translating JFK)
Hi Rud,
Your comment are brilliant. I probably missed the comment in German but wouldn’t have understood it anyway. My Lang ancestry is from Scotland.
I’ll look at your discussion with your sheep-shagger mate :) in a while.
In the meantime, if you want to see some of what I’ve been up to – it is mainly aimed at policy and economically rational policies for energy and cutting global GHG emissions, as distinct from mitigating emissions in single countries or regions – see:
What the carbon tax and ETS will really Cost http://jennifermarohasy.com/2012/06/what-the-carbon-tax-and-ets-will-really-cost-peter-lang/
The ultimate compliance cost for the ETS http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13578
Renewables or nuclear electricity for Australia – the Cost http://oznucforum.customer.netspace.net.au/TP4PLang.pdf
What is Risk? A simple explanation http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/07/04/what-is-risk/
eleven posts on energy, CO2 abatement, costs and policy listed here: http://bravenewclimate.com/renewable-limits/
Rud Istvan,
I am afraid the “EEStor (nonsense)” is way over my head and outside my are of knowledge.
Peter, you have an impressive body of work. Please keep it up.
The EEStor nonsense is actually important for a reason related to Climate Etc. The small publicly traded Canadian company Zenn licensed the supposed EEStor invention for vehicles. If it were real (in both physical and economic senses) as proclaimed to shareholders back in 2008 and 2009, it would enable practical all electric cars with a range of 400 miles and a fill up time (recharging) under 5 minutes. Revolutionary impact on AGW and peak oil. Problem is, I showd back in 2008 that both the physics and the economics are ‘impossible’ and that the issued US patent claiming working examples is perjured.
EI stands for Energy Investor. He is (or at least was) a Kiwi forensic accountant and bankruptcy trustee, and has a hard time thinking I might be right and he missed the evident scam.
If you want more details on this and other energy scams (as well as one that might not be), they are on my ebook The Arts of Truth. There is also a longish chapter on AGW that both Dr. Lindzen of MIT (in the entirety) and Dr. Curry ( portions via critiques of subsections that became posts here last year) vetted prior to publication.
Highest regards
Rud Istvan,
Thank you for the beckground. I’ve add your book tio my “must read” list BTW I hope you realise I was quoting you when I said “EEStor (nonsense)”, so wasn’t intending to be dismissive.
At one stage of m y career I was program manager managing over 70 RD&D projects and the the cost benefit analysis and selection of projects for government support. Many others were the CNG buses and cars, LNG long haul transport systems, energy saving systems for agriculture and wide variety of other end use energy programs. One of the projects was development of fuel cells. All the same hype and excessive enthusiasm was aroung back then as is the case now. That is why I am slow to take seriously the many “new solutions” such as EEstor, synethetic biofuels, thorium reactors, nuclear fusion, and piping hydrogen from the Sun :)
I think, even if the US stopped CO2 emission today, global temperatures would rise 4 C by the end of the century, so he is asking the wrong question by posing that hypothetical. The question is what happens and how does the US prepare for a possible 4 C rise and the effects it brings? I don’t think he gains much by asking that, however, so he stayed well clear.
Jim, your future temperature rise is predicated on an ECS assumption. The outstanding question is by how much. The current answer is by about half.
So on your own logic, if the new data is correct, there is no issue.
(Actually, there still is, but not in re AGW. Posted previously).
4 C comes from middle-of-the-road estimates, 700 ppm CO2e and 3 C sensitivity (land currently shows greater than that, but hopefully that will slow down). But, the point is, we’ve seen this calculation for years now, of what if the US/Britain/Australia/(insert country here) stopped emitting now, what does that do to global temperatures? They think it is clever, but it misses the point that, yes, it is unstoppable, and needs to be planned for, and it is large.
Remember, CS could be as high as 10.
Jim D
Let’s do a quick sanity check on your statement:
At 2xCO2 sensitivity of 3C and 700 ppmv we would have warming of
3.2 * ln(700 / 394) / ln(2) = 2.5C warming
At the more recent estimates of 2xCO2 ECS this would be around 1.3C warming
And 700 ppmv CO2 by year 2100 is also on the high side (not “middle-of-the-road”).
You are exaggerating things again, Jim. No wonder no one believes you.
Max
Michael
Man, what are you smoking?
Come back down to planet Earth, Michael. Don’t make up stupid stuff.
Max
manacker, you have been here long enough to know he was quoting Judith’s range of possibility mentioned on this very blog.
Jim D
You know as well as I do that recent studies have essentially killed the notion of a “fat tail” in the 2xCO2 ECS. Older notions exceeding 4.5C are outdated.
Michael needs to get up-to-date.
Max
Call re-write for Fahrenheit. Better, mark it well as a metric of the madness. They go insane by the herd, and return to sanity single file.
============
Until JC provides a revised range, people will be quoting her on that one.
” Older notions exceeding 4.5C are outdated.” – Max
Someone needs an update alright.
The evil IPCC gave a likely CS range not above 4.5 back in 2011 (2-4.5).
Judith’s 0-10 predates that, but only by a few months.
At any rate, there are papers going back over a decade with <4.5 ranges.
I think no one can know what will be in 100 years. So, I believe you must be someone.
Jim D
The question is “what would be the future temperature impact with or without US CO2 emissions”?
And the answer is a difference of about 0.14C (by 2050).
Not a whole helluva lot. Right?
Max
Conclusion – forget the warming, do nothing, right?
Jim D
Not really “do nothing”, but instead prepare to adapt to any climate challenges nature throws at us, if and when it becomes apparent that these are imminent (the common sense approach).
At the same time hope that slight warming as we’ve seen continues, instead of a prolonged period of significant cooling.
But don’t throw absurd sums of money at our climate in a futile attempt to “geo-engineer” it or change it at will -we can’t.
Max
manacker, that is not what any of these politicians are saying. Preparation involves saving funds, which involves raising funds at a minimum. I wish they would talk more about impacts and adaptation or resilience, but they play the fear game of 0.0001 C per trillion dollars or whatever, which is just junk economics and junk science combined aimed at simple Joe Public who eats it up. Get real, politicians!
I take pre-industrial as a base (280 ppm). While 4 C from today’s temperature is possible in areas, that wasn’t what I was saying. Note that I said 700 ppm CO2E which includes CH4 and NO2 and CFCs. This value can be 20-30% higher than the CO2 value, and it turns out that 700 ppm CO2e would then be optimistic, but can be achieved with some mitigation policies.
Jim D
You take the “pre-industrial base (280 ppm) to estimate future GH warming.
It would be silly to do that, Jim.
The climate back in 1750 was not “better” for humanity than today’s climate.
In fact, it is arguably much better today than back then, thank you..
Don’t “inflate” future warming figures by adding in past warming.
To your second point: IPCC tells us that all other anthropogenic forcing components other than CO2 (aerosols, other GHGs, etc.) cancelled one another out in the past, so you can forget about adding in “CH4 and NO2 and CFCs” – it’s just another gimmick to “inflate” future warming estimates.
Max
manacker, go ahead and think that 3 C warmer than today is a better way to say it. I don’t care. The problem with a moving base is that it always makes the real warming seem far away even when we are half way there. You hope aerosols will increase at the rate they have, but as you have seen, policies on clean coal or replacing it with natural gas, and general pollution will tend to reduce aerosol forcing from its peak around 1980, while the other GHGs will just increase. So the aerosol respite was temporary, even with China doing their best to burn coal. You can hope they don’t stop, perhaps. This is Hansen’s Faustian Bargain which he says we have with aerosols.
Jim D
Sure, if you ASS-U-ME that aerosols are going to disappear yet CO2 is going to increase at a greater exponential rate than it has over the past decade despite the fact that human population growth is expected to decrease sharply, yet that other GHGs are going to increase exponentially and, oh yeah, that doubling CO2 would cause around twice as much warming as the many recent studies suggest, you can arrive at astounding warming estimates.
But they are bogus, Jim.
Don’t expect anyone to fall for them.
Max
700 ppm CO2e is not a high growth rate. It even takes some per capita reduction globally when you factor in population growth, which implies negative development (a failure mode) or globally effective decarbonizing policies (success). Aerosol forcing is proportional to the aerosol production rate since they are short-lived in the atmosphere, so we are running just to stay still with that term. Any drop in our pace of aerosol production leads to a reduction in the effect of this negative term on forcing. Fuel efficiency standards will tend to reduce aerosols, and both the US and China have fairly draconian plans there.
Jim D
No. You are wrong
– If population increases to 10.5 billion by 2100, following the year-by-year UN world population growth forecast, i.e. an exponential rate of 0.45% (it increased from 3.7 to 7.1 billion since 1970, i.e. an exponential rate of 1.56% per year)
– If per capita CO2 generation (fossil fuel use) increases by 30% by 2100 (it increased by 20% from 1970 to today)
Then a cumulated total of 3860 GtCO2 would be emitted by 2100 and, with half of this remaining in the atmosphere, the atmospheric CO2 concentration would increase from today’s 340 ppmv to a value of 640 ppmv.
At the latest estimate for 2xCO2 ECS (average of several recent studies) of 1.6C, this would mean 1.1C warming from today to 2100
At the previous higher IPCC AR4 estimate of 3C for 2xCO2, this would result in 2.1C warming from today to 2100
So we can say that the theoretical GH warming from CO2 from today to year 2100 lies between around 1C and 2C.
And that is nothing to get very excited about.
Max
Typo in last comment:
Today’s CO2 level should be 394 ppmv – not 340 ppmv.
manacker, the global emission rate has been doubling every 33 years for the last century. It may well double again by 2050, at which point we would be adding 4 ppm per year instead of today’s 2, and beyond that it could be higher because the leveling off of population is predicated on development which implies increasing per capita carbon. It is very easy to see scenarios of 700 ppm CO2, and especially CO2e, by 2100 amounting to a forcing of 5 W/m2 (equivalent to a 1.5% solar increase).
It is certainly inspiring to see how Judith eschews the normative and advocacy in her approach to climate science.
It is to laugh.
Nah, it’s way too late to take you on again tonight. Even to laugh.
On the other hand, Joshua, just what do you define as normative climate science other than your (already proven flawed) world view? Your definition would provide SMEs grounds for debate, as opposed to mere solipstrisms.
It is hard to counter a swarm of critics so I will just take on one of them,
Ryan Koronowski at ThinkProgress. He says:
“Rep. Smith made the case that “global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions. This is simply not the case. The overall trend line shows continued warming. 2010 was the hottest year on record. Every year of the decades of the 2000′s was warmer than the average temperature in the ’90s.”
First, he is cheating by talking of an “overall trend line.” That should be enough to disqualify him. But then he correctly names 2010 as the hottest year on record and leaves it at that without explaining why. Partly that is due to his own ignorance of the real temperature history of the world. Fact is that all of twenty-first century temperature is above the nineties because of a step warming that accompanied the super El Nino of 1998. This one just happened to be the highest El Nino peak of the twentieth century and it carried a huge amount of warm water across the ocean with it. This caused a step warming which raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. There was no warming after it as CRU of East Anglia tells us. But the idea of a step warming may be new to him and others because this warming was formerly subsumed into a phony “late twentieth century warming ” in the eighties and nineties. That was said to be the warming that Hansen told us about. All this is a myth, of course. What Hansen thought was the peak of global warming in 1988 was nothing more than the peak of the 1988 El Nino.That El Nino was one of five in the eighties and nineties. Six months after his talk it was finished and the La Nina that followed it dropped global temperature down from that 1988 peak by 0.4 degrees Celsius. That is as much of a temperature change as fifty years of global warming can do. But the story with that late twentieth century warming is more complicated. Satellite temperature records prove that global mean temperature was steady from 1979 to 1997 and I wrote that in my book “What Warming?” in 2010. Nothing happened and nobody paid attention, or so I thought. But then last fall, what do you know, GISTEMP, HadCRUT and NCDC temperature data sets all got rid of that phony warming and now agree with what satellites tell us. Hence, we now have no warming from 1979 to 1997 as I have been saying and we also have no warming in the entire twenty-first century. In between these two hiatuses is a narrow strip just wide enough to accommodate the super El Nino of 1998 and its accompanying step warming. And this leaves no space at all for any greenhouse warming since 1979 when satellite measurements begin. The reason that all of twenty-first century is higher than the nineties is due to the effect of the step warming of 1998. Hansen pointed out that nine out of ten warmest years happened after 2000. He was right of cause for that reason but he was dead wrong to invoke greenhouse warming as I explained above. And 2010? It just happens to be the peak year of the 2010 El Nino that sits on top of the platform created by the step warming. To get global warming you don’t use the El Nino peaks but the average of the El Nino peak and its nearest La Nina valley. It so happens that the nearest La Nina to the 2010 El Nino is the 2008 La Nina and the midpoint between the two lines up perfectly with the platform of the twenty-first century high that was created by the step warming of 1998.
Indeed Arno, I have made the same point here many times. There appears to be no GHG warming for the last 34 years, strongly suggesting that CS is zero.
Absolutely true. I said that in my book too but seeing the main temperature databases almost simultaneously turn around did my heart some good. CS is clearly zero but you can’t get the meaning of it through the thick skulls of warmists. It has probably been zero all along and was kept alive only by misattributing natural warming to the greenhouse effect.
My personal favorite in this controversy is Eugene Robinson, a syndicated columnist who can be relied to take the wrong side of every issue.
Robinson’s recent “Op Ed” quotes a study by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli as if it mattered. You have to feel sorry for people who don’t know the difference between “Skeptical Science” garbage and real science.
Another lollapalooza was Ryan Koronowski at ThinkProgress who wrote:
Duh!
Koronowski apparently does not understand the difference between a “trend line” and absolute values.
It warmed more in the 1990’s than it cooled in the 2000s, so obviously the average temperature of the 2000s was higher than that of the 1990s, despite the fact that there has been a cooling trend since 2001,
Send Koronowski back to high school.
Max
The responses to Rep. Lamar Smith’s op-ed are astoundingly stupid, as is being pointed out.
“Climate Science Watch” falls into the trap of stating:
The USA has probably emitted more CO2 than any other nation up until a couple of years ago when China’s emissions surpassed those of the USA, but the rest is is pure BS.
No matter what the USA does to reduce its CO2 emissions, it will have an imperceptible effect on our “climate fate” (like 0.14C by 2050 if all future US CO2 emissions were completely eliminated).
It always amazes me when people make stupid statements without even first checking out what they are talking about.
Max
Max_CH, Rep. Lamar Smith is wrong about the the 15 years. See my 2:53 AM post down thread for why he is wrong.
Maxok
In the real world of temperatures in real countries instead of the agglomeration of data that shows a ‘global’ temperature that collectively relates to no known place, here is what is happening
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/
tonyb
Maxok
In the real world of real countries here is what is happening
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/
The world is made up of different climates and the artificial ‘global’ temperature reflects none of them accurately
tonyb
Michael Mann is unhappy with this post. He tweeted:
This was also retweeted Dana Nuccitelli of Skeptical Science fame. Apparently lots of people think this is a “denial screed.”
Who done the dirty
Screenial deed?
The Piltdown, siltdown
Credenceless feed?
H/t moshe.
=============
But Dana Nuccitelli is SkepticalScience’s “scientist” on all matter of climate science. And SkepticalScience is the unbiased, impartial explainer of climate science to all who want to know the truth about climate science. It relies only on peer reviewed papers and selects only those that are correct. So, what Dana says must be correct.
The key to SS is the strawman playing the pea under the thimble.
==========
Brandon Shollenberger
If Michael Mann is “unhappy with this post”, it must be spot on.
Max
PS Same goes for Dana Nuccitelli of Skeptical Science fame
Livin’ – on – the – littoral – hak – u –
and thort frt today:
“The first great step fer
mann wus outta the enclave
of shared certainty.”
One – of – the – goddam – serfs
– happy – it – took – place.
(Serfs endors open societee.)
open societee.)
Brandon, this is in a way good news. Means they are paying attention. Which means they have to know their case grows ever shakier. Which means they will resort to ever more stupid things like Marcott emulating Mann which SM and I tore apart in a week, Cooks 97% which you and Tol have shredded, and so on. It gets easier and more fun with each passing event.
Btw co-author. Don’ change your name. Get me to spell it right. Sorry about that yesterday evening upthread.
Highest regards
Rud Istvan
When you shine enough light on any questionable proposition, it begins unraveling, and it becomes only a matter of time until it is fully exposed.
This one is no different.
It’s just that this one has become a multi-billion dollar big business, and there are so many financial interests that IMO there will be a lot of inertia before the whole thing comes to a grinding halt.
Max
No worries. I’ve gotten used to people misspelling it. I’ve had police officers and airline attendants say they couldn’t find me in their system because of it despite them holding my ID.
It’s actually an interesting example of confirmation bias.
In his Washington Post Op-Ed, Rep.Lamar Smith said “Contrary to model predictions, data released in October from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit show that global temperatures have held steady over the past 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.”
Rep. Smith did not use the latest data.
Global temperature data from Rep. Smith’s source (Hadcrut 4 ) for the past 15 years ( June 1998 – May 2013) show temperature has risen rather than held steady, as can be seen in the linked chart. Other sources of global temperature data, UAH and GISTEMP, also show temperature rose over the past 15 years.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1998.42/to:2013.33/plot/gistemp/from:1998.42/to:2013.33/plot/gistemp/from:1998.42/to:2013.33/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998.42/to:2013.33/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1998.42/to:2013.33/trend/plot/uah/from:1998.42/to:2013.33/trend
You are starting with the super La Nina that followed the super El Nino so you get an upward trend.
No, he’s plotting the last 180 months (15 years).
JCH, yes, the past 15 years is the past 180 months. My chart is correct but I erred in my text. I should have said May 1998 to April 2013 since May 2013 data were not available when Rep. Lamar Smith’s Op-Ed appeared in the May 19, 2013 Washington Post..
Maxok
I replied to you earlier but it ended up in the wrong place
http://judithcurry.com/2013/05/31/rep-lamar-smith-on-climate-change/#comment-328379
tonyb
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/last:180/plot/rss/last:180/trend
Negative trend last 180 months.
Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) dataset is paid for by NASA.
http://www.ssmi.com/about_rss/about_rss.html
Max_OK and David Springer
The conclusion from looking at all the global temperature data sets is that there has been no statistically significant change in the global temperature over the past 15 years and a very slight cooling over the past 10 years.
My understanding is that some climatologists (and the UK Met Office, for example) believe that this is simply an anomaly caused by natural factors that are temporarily masking the AGW signal from the increased GHG concentrations, and that AGW will soon resume.
This is why the current period is generally called a “pause” in the global warming.
Others (including some solar scientists) believe that we are entering a prolonged period of slight or even moderate cooling, which might last several decades, before the overall warming trend we have seen at least since 1850 resumes.
I’d say it’s anyone’s guess what will happen in the future.
Max_not from OK
Judith, for me this is the money quote from your testimony:
“The politicization of climate change presents daunting challenges to climate science and scientists. In my assessment, the single most important actions that are needed with regards to climate science – particularly in context of assessments for policymakers – is explicit reflection on uncertainties, ambiguities and areas of ignorance (both known and unknown unknowns) and more openness for dissent. Natural internal variability is a topic of particular importance over which there is considerable disagreement. Disagreement and debate is the soul of the scientific frontier, which is where much of climate science lies. Greater openness about scientific uncertainties and ignorance, and more transparency about dissent and disagreement, would provide policymakers with a more complete picture of climate science and its limitations. When working with policy makers and communicators, scientists should not fall into the trap of acceding to inappropriate demands for certainty; the intrinsic limitations of the knowledge base need to be properly assessed and presented to decision makers. The role of scientists should not be to develop political will to act by hiding or simplifying the uncertainties, either explicitly or implicitly, behind a negotiated consensus.”
Well said!
Neither should they fall into the trap of being paralysed by the absence of certainty.
Nor failing to fulfill their ethical obligations to make clear the implications of their specialist knowledge, both to the general public and policy makers.
+1000 fer the above…
‘Disagreement and debate is the soul of the
scientific frontier…’
Socrates, the gadfly of Athenian democracy would agree
… if they hadn’t required him ter drink hemlock or abscond,
opting, as he did, ter be faithful ter democratic principles,
he can no longer participate in this debate.
H’t Karl Popper The Open Society and its Enemies.’
Beth, I am not so much into your sort of stuff. I am just a business guy who plans to make a buck (times some large exponent) off a small contribution to energy storage materials that might make a small contribution to AGW (no) or peak oil economics (yes).
But what you said was (so far as I know) historically correct, brilliant, and spot on from a larger, more humanistic, and ultimately more important perspective.
Haven’t read Popper, only read others summaries. Darn it, now have placed him on the long to-do list.
Regards
Michael Larkin
Agree 100%
Our hostess is spot on.
Max
Mosher says: “please point me to the measured empirical data which proves that science progresses through debates. please show me the data that shows that scientific societies have a duty to debate. Science has no duty to debate. Debate resolves nothing. Debate answers no questions. Debate is verbal behavior. It goes on forever. It never closes. it never ends. Well, it ends when people stop listening to you or when they start mocking you. Science behavior, in contrast, moves on. It answers questions and does things. You will be hard pressed to find a working scientist who will debate RTE with you. he has no duty to. He will, as others have, point you toward the literature, point you to the physics code, and remark that if you want to do anything in this world you would be wise to use the answers that others have provided. If you want to rework the science out for yourself, expect no special help. If you want to debate what works, take it up with mother nature.”
No scientist has a duty to debate. That about sums it up. Scientists have no public or political duty.
thats why scientists have no legitimate or special role in the political debate. Now raw unmanipulated data does have a role along with complete details of how the data was gathered. Interpretations of data, adjustments of data, manipulations of data have no legitimate role in political processes precisely because the adjusters and manipulators have no public or political duty. . . .no accountability.
Imagine going back to the days of a complete corporate lack of accountability? The result of those days were massive depressions brought on by wild speculation and no control or confidence in markets.
It might be premature because I am not aware yet of any disasters arising out of changing climate so it may not matter a lot to have no accountability for science. It will only matter at the point that science actually starts setting policy. And politics without debate? That sounds like a step backwards.
Nice distinction re the role of scientists in the political debate.
I stand corrected … yet again (
Science behavior, in contrast, moves on, but it will move on without the 97 percent because they have locked in onto something and are no longer skeptical. They are no longer doing science, they have a religion.
I need to take some time to investigate this guy Godwin. He has made it easy for wanna-be Hitlers to take a pass on their bad behavior. The history of WWII Germany holds such important lessons, it is a shame to have it throttled by some mindless “law.”
“Imagine going back to the days of a complete corporate lack of accountability? The result of those days were massive depressions brought on by wild speculation and no control or confidence in markets.”
Wow, historical AND economic illiteracy all in one short paragraph.
j2, the damage is insidious and devastating. The field is certainly well fertilized.
========
Steven Mosher | May 31, 2013 at 12:50 pm | Reply
“1. Thoughtful scientists will not waste their time debating physics that works.
basically, the physics of radiative transfer, which tells us that doubling
c02 will increase forcing by around 3.7 Watts. That science has been
turned into engineering which gets used everyday. Philosophers might
debate this, but folks who need to build stuff won’t. They have better things to do.”
Steven, I get the engineering of “radiative transfer”. I know there is work that shows energy will be attenuated in radiative transfer through x amount of carbon dioxide. This knowledge is used in a lot of engineering applications.
But you suggest it results in some kind of useful “forcing” used everyday in engineering. Can you provide an example of how engineers explicitly use this “forcing”? Seems I have heard thousands ask for this answer and it seems no scientist or engineer or you ever has the time. I would think it would obviate a need for a debate.
We see claims that in recent years, such-and-such year was the warmest on record. And that the current trend of temperatures is positive. Let me note two things that are axiomatically true.
1. If we have a warming trend followed by a cooling trend, the cooling trend ALWAYS starts at the maximum of the warming trend.
2. If we have a sine curve, and start at the bottom, and plot the values at regular intervals, the slope of a forced linear fit will be positive until we return to the bottom of the next cycle.
(Tongue in cheek) So, claiming that such-and-such was the warmest year on record, or that the current trend is still positive, could turn out, in to end, to be the same as saying that the cooling trend has just started.
like the mid-century cooling dalliance?
JCH, It could be like the mid century cooling dalliance or it could be like a multicentury reversion to mean.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-yCVnY6nXIiQ/UZmVEhGt-oI/AAAAAAAAIJs/EozQSkgn614/s817/IPWP%2520spliced%2520with%2520cru4%2520shifted%2520anomaly%2520from%25200ad.png
The Indo-Pacific Warm Pool should be a fair proxy for ENSO variations on long time scales, that orange line is the HADCRU4 30 to 30 which seems to fit pretty well with the same bin period used in the IPWP recon.
Of course, smoothing all the wiggles out of the paleo to get a smooth handle then smoothing out the “detrended” natural variability to get a smooth blade is a lot more common.
Yes, it snows the most when oceans are the warmest. It snows the least when the oceans are the coldest.
warm wet oceans are used to produce more ice than what melts every year.
cold frozen oceans are used to produce less than enough ice to replace what melts every year.
the sun is used to melt ice every year.
snow is switched on and off as needed to keep temperature in bounds.
Cappy doesn’t know how to do actual analysis or interpret other analysis. The point of the Oppo paper from 2009 is to show how important the Indo-Pacific warm pool is in determining global climate factors
Using the SST data for latitudes -6 ±15 degrees, which straddles the Indo-Pacific Warm pool, I can take the Mauna Loa CO2 data and subtract a factor of 3 PPM/deg C after applying a lag of 1 month. This simple transformation completely removes the seasonal CO2 oscillations, leaving only noise and perhaps a few glitches related to El Nino events (see 1998-1999).
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/223/maunaloacorrected.gif
Webster, “Cappy doesn’t know how to do actual analysis or interpret other analysis. ”
Well, I certainly should not feel like the Lone Ranger since I took that, “In particular, the tropical Indo-Pacific warm pool (IPWP) represents a major heat reservoir that both influences global atmospheric circulation and responds to remote northern latitude forcings. to mean that the IPWP represents a major heat reservoir with responses similar to ENSO. Based on my faulty logic, ENSO would appear to have a longer term trend from that “Little Ice Age” starting roughly 0.8C below the IPWP mean. The “responds to remote northern latitude forcings.” could imply changes in the meridional heat flux that would impact “average surface temperature” despite changes in CO2 concentration.
It is nice to know that you can still remove all biological impact on atmospheric CO2 with your force fit expertise though.
Cappy said:
Force fit?
As the Oppo paper said, that region accounts for 75% of the tropical heat
You apparently don’t understand Henry’s law and the Clausius-Clayperon relation. The CO2 outgassing will reflect the highest temperature of a liquid source of the vapor. That highest temperature happens to be in the tropics, and specifically around the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool.
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/6527/ipwp.gif
I use the SST from within that region, which is definitely not a “force fit”.
Read this and perhaps you will better understand:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/03/co2-outgassing-model.html
Webster, “You apparently don’t understand Henry’s law and the Clausius-Clayperon relation. The CO2 outgassing will reflect the highest temperature of a liquid source of the vapor. That highest temperature happens to be in the tropics, and specifically around the Indo-Pacific Warm Pool.”
Two points, first, that IPWP reconstruction is 2000 years long, it was “binned” to make comparison to instrumental temperatures easier. The region that represents ~75% of the energy in the system indicates natural variability of “surface” temperature is greater than ~0.2C and not dependent on CO2 concentration.
Second, Outgassing would be related to the warmest water temperature and CO2 uptake related to the cooler water temperatures and the biological cycles. There are two ends to the road. Limiting the uptake or sequestration if you prefer, would have a longer term impact on the CO2 cycle imbalance. You can compare Barrow Alaska and the South Pole CO2 if you would like to see the differences in the uptake side of the problem.
if you like, there is a 1000 year high resolution CO2 reconstruction that is handy to compare with the Oppo IPWP.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/lawdome-data.html
Have fun.
You are dwelling on fast responses while I am looking at longer term responses.
Temperature is going up everywhere, polar latitudes more.
Sorry Cappy Tuna, I got the long-term sequestering covered with the dispersive diffusion CO2 model.
That means I have both short-term and long-term covered and will use it as a battering ram the next time Edim or Bartemis tries to pull that non-anthropogenic CO2 increase argument on the 3% crowd.
People have not changed. For example, storms have been knocking down houses for 1,000s of years. There are only so many responses to that. It’s not even a new response to look for someone to blame for causing the storm. According to wiki Moses used fear to accomplish his aims by taking responsibility for nine plagues that occurred back then, the seventh of which was a storm. In effect it is not that much different from what the Left does in attempting to increase political power to accomplish Leftist goals by pretending the productive are responsible for a storm. Global warming is history not science.
‘Moses used fear to accomplish his aims ..’
… deja vu all over again:
‘By foul play, as thou sayest,were we heaved thence.’
(The Tempest Scene 2.)
…like Bush standing up to the UN/Eurocommie/Academics telling the Left to let his people go…
Climate Change is an issue that needs to be discussed thoughtfully and objectively. This was written by someone who is clearly tied into the 97 percent who are not objective or thoughtful.
http://www.chron.com/opinion/outlook/article/Sass-It-s-time-for-an-open-national-debate-on-4558358.php
In this article, Ronald Sass wrote: It requires not just climate scientists, 97 percent of whom believe that climate change is real and, in a large part, due to human activity, nor just those who control the economic reins of the world and have so much at stake in our current and future ways of producing wealth, nor even just those in key political positions who have the responsibility of providing the informed leadership required to take us into a better future.
About the 97 percent, I write: Scientists must be skeptic. The people in the Consensus Alarmists Clique are not Skeptical and are, therefore not real Scientists. The only reason they have 97 percent is that they exclude all but 3 percent of those who disagree. That 3 percent is just the leftovers of the huge number of real Scientists who have already bailed out of the Consensus Clique. Get Skeptical and engage with those who disagree or quit pretending to be a Real Scientist.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/31/the-baker-institute-climate-embarrassment/
–e.g., from wiki (based on verses in Exodus), check this out:
“…Therefore, at this time tomorrow I will send the worst hailstorm that has ever fallen on Egypt, from the day it was founded till now. Give an order now to bring your livestock and everything you have in the field to a place of shelter, because the hail will fall on every man and animal that has not been brought in and is still out in the field, and they will die… hail fell and lightning flashed back and forth. It was the worst storm in all the land of Egypt since it had become a nation.”
Wagathon
Weather was much worse in the MWP and LIA than today. Here is but a short entry from Matthew Paris who chronicled the weather in 13th Century Britain
1228 inundations of rivers in Dec Jan and Feb –in Worcester- such that no one then living had ever seen the like in their time
1229 severe winter ‘unusually bitter, waters so frozen horsemen could cross upon the ice, great snow afterwards earth covered for several days.’
1231 March to October hardly any rain anywhere in England-great drought
1233 wet summer from 23 March with great inundations of rain through the whole summer destroying warrens and washed away the ponds and mills throughout almost all England. Water formed into lakes in middle of the crops where the fishes of the rivers were seen to great astonishment and mills were standing in various places they had never before been seen.
1233-1234 severe frost from Christmas 1233 to Feb 2 1234 destroying roots of trees to four foot down then rest of year very unseasonable
1234 third unseasonable year
Wet weather in autumn choked the seed and loosened it.
1236 great floods in Jan, Feb and part of March . Bridges submerged, fords impassable, mills and ponds overwhelmed and sown land meadows and marshes covered. Thames flooded palace of Westminster so small boat could be navigated in the midst of the forecourt. And folk went to their bed chambers on horseback
Followed by dry summer with intolerable heat that all lasted four months. Deep pools and ponds were dried up and water mils useless.
1237 great rains in February, fords and roads impassable for 8 successive days
Turbulent year stormy and unsettled
1238 great floods in many parts probably December
Cloudy and rainy in beginning until spring had passed then the drought and heat were beyond measure and custom in two or more of the summer months. Great deluge of rain in the autumn that straw and grain became rotten and an unnatural autumn which is held to be a cold and dry season gave rise to various fatal diseases.
1239 very wet weather continually from Jan to March, it has continued for four months without intermission.
1240 dry Jan to March, wet from April to December but fruitful and abundant but wet and rainy autumn greatly choked the abundant crops.
1241 drought from March 25 to Oct 28 drought and intolerable heat. Pastures withered, herds pined away from hunger and thirst
December very cold and bitter weather the like of which no one had seen before, binding the rivers killing large numbers of birds
Great inundations of rain and flooding are a particular feature of days gone by, as are great winds, great heat and great cold.
tonyb
It all depends on where you are. After the fact humanity can always be counted on to be more superstitious and ignorant than scientific when it comes to looking at what comes next. In the Fukushima incident. it was extraordinary earthquake/tidal wave that did all the damage to that part of the country.
Thanks for posting this chronology of weather in 13th Century Britain.
The 2009 Climategate mystery will not be solved until the scientific community insists the US National Academy of Sciences and the UK’s Royal Society address undeniable experimental evidence:
Our elements were made right here, immediately before solids started to form in the solar system.
“tcflood | May 31, 2013 at 4:20 pm |
Why would I draw a trendline through a data set of 15 years when I have good comparable data for at least three times that?”
You use 15 years if you want to know the trend for the last 15 years.
You use 45 years if you want to know the trend for 45 years.
You use ten thousand years of ice core data and look at how the trend repeats inside the same bounds. Any straight line trend during any warming or cooling period would go out of bounds. Straight line trends do not understand bounds or what causes them.
Alex,
Alex and Jim2,
Yes, but the discussion is about whether there is a statistically significant change in behavior in a temp vs time plot that is on a timescale of many decades, where the most pronounced behavior is in the last, say. 50 years, during which there appears to be a lot of natural variation. Using the NOAA plot at
http://theconversation.com/global-warming-is-here-to-stay-whichever-way-you-look-at-it-14532,
it also looks like there could be three periods where “pauses” occur where we could still be in the third pause. I think that the honest observer has to say that we don’t yet know whether we are in the third pause or whether we are at the beginning of a substantial change in overall behavior.
I also need to say to you that the NOAA plot is very convenient for this argument and I don’t know whether other data sets would show the same traces of a superimposed periodic behavior or not. I don’t think it really matters for the arguments I’m about to make.
My conclusion would be that either one needs to ignore the “scatter” and focus on the longer trends, in which case an apparent 15-rear trend should be ignored, or one must try to make a periodic behavior fit the plot.
More importantly, I think people are coming around to focusing on the fact that the radiative budget deficit is really quite large and over some timescale more than 90% of the heat will end up in the oceans. Thus, if there is any variation at all in the A-O heat transfer mechanisms, one would expect the global average near-surface atmosphere temperature (GANSAT – is that a record?) not to be completely smooth or even monotonic. Since we have been most able to measure GANSAT, that is what people have focused on. But IMO, we should focus on the total global heat CHANGE vs time. As I understand it, the extent and quality of our ocean data collection is increasing rapidly, but unfortunately, it will I’m getting the impression it will take decades to generate enough of a plot of total heat change vs time to be able to say anything convincing.
I would say that we need to be careful to not conclude that the overall model that implies AGW must be discarded. It is POSSIBLE that we may in fact be in just one of a periodic series of episodes of shifting A-O energy transfer mechanisms and that the atmospheric heating could still be on track for one of the worse projected warming trajectories.
tcf: “In addition, why would I consider only near surface air temperature when the radiative imbalance would need to correspond to the total additional heat through all the spheres (atmo, hydro, litho, bio, cryo)?”
You have to take what we got. The temperatures of the lower troposphere are quite well known. If we knew the temperature of the deep sea, Trenberth would be forced to retire.
If we knew the temperature of the deep sea, Trenberth would be forced to retire.
This is completely untrue. Trenberth is doing exactly what any good scientist should do. There’s a discrepancy. It can only be proven by looking for the heat in the oceans, and he is properly looking for the heat in the oceans. It would be impossible to find the heat in outer space, the only other place it could have gone, so he does not look there.
Is there a single paper out yet on OHC that has not found deep ocean and abyssal ocean warming?
A good scientist would start from the physics and realise that heat going into the deep ocean without being detected in the first 700m is unphysical. A good scientist would use Occams razor and admit that the data shows no warming because the hypothesis is wrong – not that the putative heat is hidden by a putative cooling that he had previously not considered precisely because he had thought it impossible.
There is a discrepancy, and Trenberth and JCH apparently see only one way to resolve it.
There is a discrepancy there. Who will knit up this ravelled sleeve of intellect?
=========
James,
Occam’s razor says “don’t make explanations any more complicated than can be justified by the data” nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t say “ignore data.” My impression is that the prevailing judgment by knowledgeable oceanographers is that there is more heat below 300 ft that there was 10 years ago. Now, you can dispute the data (your word against theirs) but you can’t just say there is no new heat because I’m not clever enough to figure out how it got there.
I now agree that the “missing heat” was strictly a meaningless question (because of the immense uncertainty in the TOA OLWR). Trenberth’s was a private statement to colleagues about his process of trying to find the heat he thought should be in the environment to fit a model. It was not his fault that his email was stolen, publicized and then ridiculed, although, IMO, it probably was a mistake to defend it once it was made public. In any event, that whole issue is now a canard and is irrelevant to any serious discussion. That being said, all of my comments in the post above stand.
Yeah, he was best in the NPR interview when he admitted the real possibility that what was missing had been radiated out.
==========
Kim,
I didn’t see the interview.
I think he should have said that all we can do is try to find all the heat change we can on the globe and look for changes over time of how it is redistributed. It is another mater to figure out how best to compare it to the TOA radiative imbalance. The email revelation was like recording someone thinking out loud. As I said above though, it was a mistake to defend it.
No soap. Radio.
=====
Giggle, sorry, sort of. NPR 2008, worth a listen, it’s not long.
==============
Alex,
I tried to respond to this question in the response above. Thanks for interacting.
“tcflood | May 31, 2013 at 11:52 pm |
I just need to be as arrogant, derisive, and condescending as possible and I’ll fit right in.”
You are doing well.
Thanks! / Why, you dirty rotten …
Did someone mention Michael Mann? Oldie but goodie…
David,
I did enjoy that. Some of our Climate Study Group did attend a Michael Mann Lecture at Texas A&M. I did talk to him a short time and told him and his associates that it snows more when oceans are warm and did give him my business card that shows the link to my Theory. I also mentioned Ewing and Donn Theory. Some of them said they had not heard of it. None said they had.
I have not heard from any of them. They are clearly in the 97 percent clique that does not consider any ideas that disagree.
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Since the oil is currently moving by rail car, I suspect that less energy would be used, and of course less CO2 would be generated.
Jim2
“[This proxy] …was culled out by Briffa I believe. …I have a feeling this proxy will be getting more attention due to its unique characteristics.
http://imageshack.us/a/img23/4564/polarh.png
http://climateaudit.org/2013/05/24/briffa-2013/#comment-421072 ”
I’m interested to hear more about it.
Fear and loathing that humans would destroy life on Earth with the energy that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 Aug 1945 convinced world leaders and their science advisors to undertake a human engineering experiment sixty-eight years ago by:
1. Forming the United Nations on 24 Oct 1945,
2. Ending national boundaries and national governments, and
3. Compromising the integrity of science to hide that source of energy.
Craig Rucker and CFACT have issued an advisory on new UN climate talks next week in Bonn, Germany on 3-14 June 2013: http://tinyurl.com/l8uh2pp
I personally endorse the effort to form a peaceful global community but not by sacrificing:
4. Civilian control of government, and
5. The integrity of government science.
With kind regards,
– Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
Note to the militant moron Eugene Robinson:
For the record, and for the umpteenth time, there is indeed a large and increasing amount of uncertainty about whether the planet is warming or why.
Only someone ignorant of the basic principles of science – or in the pocket of Big Government or agitating for more taxes – would claim otherwise.
I’m agitating for more taxes to pay down the national debt. A big country needs a big government. And I know a thing or two about the basic principles of science. So, you are wrong.
You seem certain about uncertainty. Me, I’m uncertain about certainty.
Maxy
There will be no paying down the down the national debt until there is 1st a discontinuation of annually spending more than is generated in revenue.
How is it that people such as yourself who claim to be progressive are so clueless about the basics. Either taxes will need to be dramatically raised, services for retired will need to be dramatically curtailed, or a combination of the two.
Rob Starkey,
Max_OK is a default progressive. He believes what he believes because that is all he was ever taught. It is what almost everyone he knows believes. All the news and entertainment he sees conforms to this world view. You shouldn’t expect someone to understand policies they have never given any critical thought to.
Now the real progressives – the ones who write the legislation, run the bureaucracies and the NGOs, they understand perfectly the damage they are doing to the economy. But that is a feature, not a flaw.
A big country no more needs big government – high rates of tax and levels of state control over society – than does a small one. The national debt can and should be cut by reducing government spending greed.
Only a half-wit would think the U.S.A. needs no bigger government than Lichtenstein.
A tax increase combined with reduced government spending is a big way to reduce the national debt.
A tax increase alone or less spending alone are half-assed ways.
Only a half-wit thinks a big country needs a proportionately bigger government.
With hopelessly bloated governments like eg the US, the sensible approach is to cut spending and reduce the government burden on the economy. Tax increases are what are half-assed under these circumstances – you need to think beyond just the debt.
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Scanning nearly 450 comments are made here, along with numerous comments cited by Judith Curry, and they don’t take on board what Lamar Smith is saying.
To think critically and objectively about any complex problem, it needs to be broken down into sub-sections with relevant areas of expertise. This is no more important in climate change policy, which science demands belief and people get lost in irrelevant detail. A starting point is to divide the issue into three parts, with the relevant experts in brackets.
1. Whether there is a potential problem. (Scientists)
2. Whether that potential problem is non-trivial. (Economists interpreting the scientists work)
3. Whether there is the ability to do something positive about that problem. (Economists and public policy-makers to formulate any policy. Economist/auditors, with some input from scientists, to interpret the results.)
I examine this areas further at http://manicbeancounter.com/2013/06/07/lamar-smith-and-implementing-effective-policy-on-climate-change/
mbc, whatever impression you have from the comments, this is similar to the approach followed by many posters here. Scientists can suggest possible paths of change in temperature and other variables, but with low levels of certainty. Economists/policymakers can attempt to assess the likely costs, always bearing in mind that forecasting is the least successful part of the profession, and attempt a cost-benefit analysis. I’ve argued that we can have little faith ion long-term assessments. Re three, if at this stage further warming is seen as harmful, our response again involves cost-benefit analysis of alternatives. Can we reduce warming, and if so at what cost? Or are we better developing resilience/robustness, mitigating any harmful outcomes and taking advantage of good ones? Or should we just go for growth and foster innovation, so whatever befalls, we have greater resources and options? Etc.
Welcome aboard.
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