by Judith Curry
The hearing is now concluded, I’m on a plane flying back to Atlanta.
The testimony from each of the witnesses is now online [here]. The link for my testimony is [curry senatetestimony 2014 final].
The content of my verbal remarks is below:
I would like to thank the Committee for the opportunity to present testimony this morning. I am Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I have devoted 30 years to conducting research on topics including climate of the Arctic, the role of clouds and aerosols in the climate system, and the climate dynamics of extreme weather events.
The premise of the President’s Climate Action Plan is that there is an overwhelming judgment of science that anthropogenic global warming is already producing devastating impacts. Anthropogenic greenhouse warming is a theory whose basic mechanism is well understood, but whose magnitude is highly uncertain. Multiple lines of evidence presented in the recent IPCC 5th assessment report suggest that the case for anthropogenic warming is now weaker than in 2007, when the 4th assessment report was published.
My written testimony documented the following evidence:
- For the past 16 years, there has been no significant increase in surface temperature. There is a growing discrepancy between observations and climate model projections. Observations since 2011 have fallen below the 90% envelope of climate model projections
- The IPCC does not have a convincing or confident explanation for this hiatus in warming.
- There is growing evidence of decreased climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxideconcentrations
- Based on expert judgment in light of this evidence, the IPCC 5th assessment report lowered its surface temperature projection relative to the model projections for the period 2016-2036.
The growing evidence that climate models are too sensitive to CO2 has implications for the attribution of late 20th century warming and projections of 21st century climate change. Sensitivity of the climate to carbon dioxide, and the level of uncertainty in its value, is a key input into the economic models that drive cost-benefit analyses, including estimates of the social cost of carbon.
If the recent warming hiatus is caused by natural variability, then this raises the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural climate variability. In a recent journal publication, I provided a rationale for projecting that the hiatus in warming could extend to the 2030’s. By contrast, according to climate model projections, the probability of the hiatus extending beyond 20 years is vanishing small. If the hiatus does extend beyond 20 years, then a very substantial reconsideration will be needed of the 20th century attribution and the 21st century projections of climate change.
Attempts to modify the climate through reducing CO2 emissions may turn out to be futile. The stagnation in greenhouse warming observed over the past 15+ years demonstrates that CO2 is not a control knob that can fine tune climate variability on decadal and multi-decadal time scales. Even if CO2 mitigation strategies are successfully implemented and climate model projections are correct, an impact on the climate would not be expected for a number of decades. Further, solar variability, volcanic eruptions and natural internal climate variability will continue to be sources of unpredictable climate surprises.
As a result of the hiatus in warming, there is growing appreciation for the importance of natural climate variability on multi-decadal timescales. Further, the IPCC AR5 and Special Report on Extreme Events published in 2012, find little evidence that supports an increase in most extreme weather events that can be attributed to humans.
The perception that humans are causing an increase in extreme weather events is a primary motivation for the President’s Climate Change Plan. However, in the U.S., most types of weather extremes were worse in the 1930’s and even in the 1950’s than in the current climate, while the weather was overall more benign in the 1970’s. The extremes of the 1930’s and 1950’s are not attributable to greenhouse warming and are associated with natural climate variability (and in the case of the dustbowl drought and heat waves, also to land use practices). This sense that extreme weather events are now more frequent and intense is symptomatic of pre-1970 ‘weather amnesia’.
The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is heavily influenced by natural climate variability. Whether or not anthropogenic climate change is exacerbating extreme weather events, vulnerability to extreme weather events will continue to increase owing to increasing population and concentration of wealth in vulnerable regions. Regions that find solutions to current problems of climate variability and extreme weather events and address challenges associated with an increasing population are likely to be well prepared to cope with any additional stresses from climate change.
Nevertheless, the premise of dangerous anthropogenic climate change is the foundation for a far-reaching plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events. Elements of this Plan may be argued as important for associated energy policy reasons, economics, and/or public health and safety. However, claiming an overwhelming scientific justification for the Plan based upon anthropogenic global warming does a disservice both to climate science and to the policy process.
Good judgment requires recognizing that climate change is characterized by conditions of deep uncertainty. Robust policy options that can be justified by associated policy reasons whether or not anthropogenic climate change is dangerous avoids the hubris of pretending to know what will happen with the 21st century climate.
This concludes my testimony.
JC comments: The hearing was very long; not so much because of questioning of the witnesses, but there was much pontification by the committee members (much more of this than on the House Subcommittees, it seems).
Several things struck me. All of the members seem pretty well educated on the topic of climate change. I cannot say the same of the administrators on the first panel.
Most of the members were there for Panel 1; only a few remained for Panel 2.
I’m fairly happy with my written testimony, but was surprised that my verbal testimony went over the time limit (have never gone over before). The questions were fairly light weight.
Andrew Dessler did a pretty good job particularly on the verbal testimony and answering questions.
All in all, a very interesting experience, but stressful since you need to pretty much drop everything to prepare your testimony (and I have a pile of things that need to be finished before tomorrow).
So does any of this matter? We’ll see. I felt that my previous testimony to the House Committee did have an impact.
Democrat senators had tired and fallacious talking points. Headed for a fall.
==========
“Part of my problem with the whole process is, that it seems that the cleaner we make our energy generation capability… now we want to come up against an obstacle that nothing can come out of those pipes, we have already taken out the VOX, the NOX, the SOX, the POX, the TOX. Now it is the carbon dioxide and water that are coming out of those smokestacks that has to be stopped.” (Michael Burgess, Committee on Energy and Commerce, 109th Congress Hearings, Second Session, July 2006)
Great job Dr. Curry. Thanks so much for your professionalism and integrity.
Scott
+1
+1 also.
+1!
+another1
Excellent!
Such a prepared speaker and attorney as Senator Whitehouse, should have found a more neutral way for ending Panel_2’s hearing, don’t you think?. Concluding the meeting with that “you can’t debate” is appropriate for countries like Cuba or North Corea; but for the US … I don’t think so.
As a resident of Rhode Island I can say Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) is an ongoing embarrassment.
Hi Pete, I wouldn’t say that Senator Whitehouse is an embarrassment. He did his job as he introduced that good political argument against JC’s testimony: AR5 is different from AR4 in the same way that JC’s statements at present are different from those that she held in 2007.
Anyhow, I do not care about politicians. I am mostly interested in the scientific debate. And, hopefully in a few days (weeks), we will be able to debate my ideas about Anthropogenic Climate Change in this blog.
My ideas are summarized in:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4r_7eooq1u2VHpYemRBV3FQRjA/
but they would come in a much easier understandable format.
Outstanding! The public deserves to hear this kind of measured and professional presentation. I hope it gets picked up by some of the MSM.
Dr. Curry, The length of your testimony notwithstanding,I thought its content hit on all the salient points that have been brought out in various contributions to your column over the past several months. Well done in all respects.
Tom Lester
Great job, although I believe Senator Whitehouse owes you an apology for his ridiculous closing questions.
“… if you and the rest of your tribe…”
—-
Me and my tribe? I’ve been hammering home the message of looking at the full Earth climate system energy long before others have now started repeating the message. I applauded Pielke Sr. And his 2006 paper for at least looking at moist enthalpy as opposed to simple sensible heat. But more to the point, I have been a long term fan of Budyko’s approach in looking at climate from an total system energy perspective. The myopic focus on sensible tropospheric heat is understandable from a historic perspective since it was the easiest measurement to make, but that legacy does not serve is well for actually understanding the full energy flow and content of the climate system.
When the atmospheric measures were going up you were in there myopically swinging away RG, even after the bell sounded 17 years ago.
Now you choose to throw in a couple of low blows like total energy perspective and the sea is heating the atmosphere when the referee docked your points.
If you look at Nature magazine you will find you have just lost on a TKO with the PDO counter punch.
hahahah that measure stopped serving as well about the time it stopped warming for just a few years short of a full santer
I propose that we officially name a period of 17 years a ‘santer’
“As a result of the hiatus in warming, there is growing appreciation for the importance of natural climate variability on multi-decadal timescales. “
New article in “Nature” supportive of this. Anthony W. blogs: “From the “settled science” department. It seems even Dr. Kevin Trenberth is now admitting to the cyclic influences of the AMO and PDO on global climate. Neither “carbon” nor “carbon dioxide” is mentioned in this article that cites Trenberth as saying: “The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/16/the-journal-nature-embraces-the-pause-and-ocean-cycles-as-the-cause-trenberth-still-betting-his-heat-will-show-up/
It’s a travesty that we let the oceans do this to us.
=============
Yes, perhaps we can wage war on the oceans now as well.
A very significant article. Vindication for a lot of folks.
post on this coming tomorrow
I will probably also be publishing a post about that Nature article on Saturday. I’m interested to see what you have to say.
Great job at the hearing today, Judith.
Regards
“’The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,’ says Kevin Trenberth
…
‘You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,’ Trenberth says. ‘At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.’ And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.”
So the last super El Nino started the hiatus, but the next one will start a warming trend.
The more I read, from consensus climate scientists and skeptics alike, the more convinced I am that no one understands ENSO/PDO/AMO, let alone the climate as a whole.
El Ninos release heat from the ocean, allowing it to be radiated ion space. But the released heat that was unmeasured before shows up in the surface air temps that are reported as “global average temperature”. So at a time when the climate system is losing heat, reported temps are shown to increase, raising the long term temp averages.
During a La Nina or neutral phase, when unmeasured heat is accumulating in the ocean, reported surface temps, and thereby “global average temperature”, show a decline, or hiatus.
Nobody has a clue what is actually going on as far as total heat content of the climate system.
“So at a time when the climate system is losing heat, reported temps are shown to increase, raising the long term temp averages.”
____
That’s exactly why it is foolish and incorrect to use sensible heat in the troposphere as proxy for Earth’s energy imbalance. Ocean heat content increases (and the closely related sea level rise) is a far better long-term proxy for energy in the climate system.
R. Gates,
“That’s exactly why it is foolish and incorrect to use sensible heat in the troposphere as proxy for Earth’s energy imbalance.”
Just think how much easier your argument would be now (correct though it is), if you and the rest of your tribe hadn’t been pitching the surface temps as “global average temperature” for so long.
Here will be the test of your “skepticism”. Another El Nino will come eventually, and when it does, reported surface temps will almost certainly rise for one, and perhaps two or more years. I wonder how much you will decry them as a “proxy for Earth’s energy imbalance” then? I am betting – not so much.
The thing is, you and all the other warmists knew full well that reported surface temps only told part of the story. But you hid the caveats in footnotes and addenda, because it is so much better advocacy to just call it “global warming”. In fact, I don’t even remember reading that they were a proxy, they were just flat out called “global average temperature”.
Even today, reports of “the warmest year ever” and “the warmest decade ever”, are based on those reported surface temps. May I expect to read your denunciations of such misleading headlines each time they repeat themselves in the future? (And I use the term “reported” surface temps, because I think it is ridiculous to even accept the accuracy and precision of those.)
AGW predicts that with positive forcing changes, a combination of things happens. (1) surface temperature increases to offset the forcing and/or (2) the heat accumulates steadily in the system (mostly ocean), which is unsustainable for long on its own because eventually the surface temperature will have to rise. This is what has been happening, and AGW predicted it happens when the surface temperature doesn’t rise.
“Just think how much easier your argument would be now (correct though it is), if you and the rest of your tribe hadn’t been pitching the surface temps as “global average temperature” for so long.
Gates….This is a point I’ve made several times. I’m not a scientifically literate person, but I have the sense that you’re making a valid point. And yet this whole dog and pony show has from the beginning been framed in terms of surface temperature. Why? I assume because it’s simpler to grasp by the public, and because it lends it self to more effective fear mongering. “Energy imbalances” just doesn’t cut it in the propaganda realm.
Since as a scientific illiterate I can’t very well sort my way through competing scientific arguments, I have to go at this issue in a more indirect way. All non scientists do. Though I began as a believer, it became obvious to me rather early on that the warmists were engaged in tactics that severely impacted their credibility. Climate-gate was seminal to me;the way in which alarmist blogs don’t allow genuine debate was also decisive. It was evident to me that these people were angry, arrogant, and nasty. Who acts like that? Doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to know that it’s generally people who aren’t being honest, people who have things to hide. And so I gradually became more skeptical.
Warmists….there’s not question in my mind…have been their own worst enemies. From Al Gore to Michael Mann to Pachy and the IPCC, to utter scum bags like Dana N. and Peter Gleick to name just a few… the whole “movement” has been a joke and a scandal. I don’t see how any thinking person can come to any other conclusion…
I do believe the jury is still very much out as to the ultimate effects of Co2 emissions, but if it turns out as bad as some of you guys think Gates, you’re going to have to take some of the blame.
Gary, see:
http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/16/senate-epw-hearing-on-the-presidents-climate-action-plan/#comment-437643
I quote GaryM | January 16, 2014 at 8:41 pm |:
“‘You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,’ Trenberth says. ‘At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.’ And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.”
It just might and then again it might not. Did you know that he managed to lose 80 percent of global heat in just four years? If I had been the reviewer I would have sent him back to study the Argo floats that reported the loss. But I guess buddy reviewers don’t pay attention to such minor points. He is of course right about water piling up and then sloshing back. As I pointed out elsewhere, water does that periodically every four-five years. When this happens it is called an El Nino wave. It is the one whose passage is measured by Nino3.4 temperature.This is what makes ENSO an oscillation. Once gravity flow east starts it continues along the equatorial counter-current, crosses the ocean, runs ashore in South America, and spreads out north and south along the coast. This warms the air above it, warm air rises, interferes with trade winds, joins the westerlies, and we notice the arrival of an El Nino. But any wave that runs ashore must also retreat. When the El Nino wave retreats water level behind it drops, cool water from below wells up to fill the vacuum, and a La Nina has started. As much as the El Nino warmed the atmosphere the La Nina will now cool it. By the end of the cycle global mean temperature will have returned to the beginning. And that is all you need to know to understand El Nino.
“Bob Tisdale | January 16, 2014 at 8:41 pm |
I will probably also be publishing a post about that Nature article on Saturday. I’m interested to see what you have to say.”
—-
Out of retirement!
Thought your verbal remarks quite compelling, Judith. Many deeply sincere thanks for your courage.
If folks want a copy of the data for the US through 2013 ( and the globe) that Dr. Curry used just pipe up and I’ll post it
data for 2013. zekes charts and a few supplemental charts
https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B9IIrBCUsRhIa0Z2a0J2NnFZTkE&usp=sharing
Steve, please post it.
I would
Thanks Steve
Mosh
How many stations are there in the US and global records from 1850 to present- your first and last graphs?
Tonyb
tony,
That would be hard to pull out of the data I got. We ran this as a one off for Judith, so I just have the final output files. The total processing ( which outputs all the support files and uncertainties) takes two weeks of CPU.
and some stations have yet to straggle in. Its not uncommon for station counts to bounce around by a couple of thousand.
Mosher, in your expert opinion, are the recent changes in US temperature something to put us in the ‘stained underwear’ fear quadrant or not?
“Mosher, in your expert opinion, are the recent changes in US temperature something to put us in the ‘stained underwear’ fear quadrant or not?”
no. but there is a turtle head poking out
“no. but there is a turtle head poking out.”
—-
A new metric for climate sensitivity has been found! It will certainly make future AGW conferences rather interesting.
What does your sensitivity meter say?
I admire your courage, Judy…
I agree Dr Curry is courageous. I watched her testimony on CSPAN: convincing, poised, targeted.
The Committee Chairman, Senator Whitehead’s behavior was disgusting!
He attempted to label Dr Curry as a contrarian. He used pejorative and snarky language when referring to those opposed to his ideology. Skeptics were referred to by him as “deniers”. His behavior is an example of a person intoxicated with power.
Thank you Dr Curry!
Pontification is the least of it. See
http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/Senators-launch-5129383.php
Skeptics are special interest liars, say Democrat Senators.
Yes, said in the same breath as “it’s already happening in China” – to paraphrase.
So just who’s lying to whom?
Who lost Boxer?
===========
Amazing cauliflower brain on that Boxer, who conflates air pollution in China with climate change. Hasn’t she heard Figueres claim the Chinese are administratively better equipped, by virtue of central direction, for climate change than democracies?
========================
She said the Chinese don’t like to see the air they breath. That’s something I have in common with the Chinese in addition to my appetite for dim sum. I also like to see what’s in the dim sum.
For the democrat sock puppets to be talking about others being under control of ‘special interests’ is good entertianment.
Judith, that was the best presentation I ever saw you give. You exude the qualities of a first rate scientist – cool, calm, and analytic. Dessler did a decent job, although he seemed a bit anxious to get his talking points in.
Dressler did talk fast.
As the oceans stay warm for some time to come, I will watch the snow fall and the ice volume build and the oceans drop, getting ready for the next ice advance that will cool earth into the next cold period, that always follows every warm period.
History does repeat. Watch the data with me each day of each year as Dressler gets more and more wrong.
Dessler has to keep everyone distracted from those pesky chlorine molecules.
Pingback: Judith Curry’s testimony on obama’s Climate Action Plan | Blog of Junkin
JC said ” If the recent warming hiatus is caused by natural variability, then this raises the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural climate variability.”
______
Yes, you can raise the question, but can you provide evidence that trumps evidence climate variability did not contribute significantly to the 1975-2000 warming.
Natural variability can be a warming influence on global temperature, a cooling influence, or no influence at all if the natural warming negates the natural cooling. Anthropogenic CO2, on the other hand, can be only a warming influence.
If we assume rising levels of atmospheric CO2 from man’s activities have little influence on global temperature, the lack of a significant increase in surface temperature over the past 16 years raises the question as to why natural influences on balance had little affect on temperature during that period. Is there an answer to this question?
The real question is how much of the temperature change over the past million years was due to natural variability.
The answer is 99.99999….. percent.
A manmade fraction of a trace gas has a fraction of a trace of a chance to make a change to that.
CO2 is here to make he green things grow and it is not here to control temperature. You do not control massive systems with a trace of anything.
On Earth, to control Temperature, you use something that is abundant! Water, Ice, Clouds, Water Vapor can help regulate Temperature in tight bounds! A fraction of a trace gas is not, cannot not, will not, make more than a trace of a difference.
CO2 has gone up for 17 years and temperature has not. CO2 has not made a difference.
Herman, you did not answer my question?
It is obvious that AGW has completely negated a confluence of downward pressures from nature: napping sun, negative phase of the PDO, La Nina dominance, etc. There has been no cooling. In the 10 years starting in 1942 there was not a hiatus of warming, there was cooling.
The temperature dropped.
This is what the public means by cooling: it actually gets colder, like in the good old days of natural variation.
Yes, you can raise the question, but can you provide evidence that trumps evidence climate variability did not contribute significantly to the 1975-2000 warming.
Max ok You have no evidence that climate variability did not contribute significantly to the 1975-2000 warming.
There is no such EVIDENCE!
Only climate model output does that and it has not provided a skillful forecast in two decades.
Climate Model Output is NOT Evidence.
JCH, I have wondered why there’s been no drop in average global surface temperature for 16 years. I agree with you. If natural cooling influences are trying to push the average down, man-made warming must be preventing the drop.
“Solar intensity vs. earth temperature. A great correlation. Adapted from Hoyt, D. V., and K.H. Schatten, 1997, The Role of the Sun in Climate Change: Oxford University Press, New York, 279 p.” ~Dr. Lee C. Gerhard
http://www.warwickhughes.com/geol/LG51.JPG
Herman Alexander Pope said on January 16, 2014 at 7:30 pm
“Max ok You have no evidence that climate variability did not contribute significantly to the 1975-2000 warming.”
_____
Herman, if natural variability has not cause significant warming after the year 2000, wouldn’t it be reasonable to question whether it contributed significantly to the far greater 1975-2000 warming?
No she cant provide the evidence. That would require that somebody turn over control of a gcm to her. And would require an advance in science that let gcms represent natural variability. In short the science has falsely ruled out what it cannot reprsent.
Steven Mosher, ” In short the science has falsely ruled out what it cannot repr[e]sent.”
Neat trick ain’t it?
heh! Mosher considers GCM output to be “evidence.” Right.
Max_OK.:
Yes, there is an answer to your question.
The warming between 1975 and 2000 was due to the implementation of the Clean Air Act, and ended when no further significant amount of pollution was being removed from the atmosphere (as happens when the pollution from a large volcanic eruption settles out of the air)
Warming will resume when further significant cleansing of the air is attempted, as when China, India and recent EPA efforts are implemented.
“I have wondered why there’s been no drop in average global surface temperature for 16 years. I agree with you. If natural cooling influences are trying to push the average down, man-made warming must be preventing the drop.”
______
The past 10 years have been warmest on instrument record. You absolutely cannot detect changes in GH gas forcing on periods less than 10 years. Under 10 years, the ENSO cycle absolutely dominates the sensible tropospheric temperature record (unless there is a large volcano). On multi-decadal timeframes, GH gas forcing and the PDO/AMO combination have been having fairly even in their relative forcing over the past century, but the GH gas forcing is growing so large that it now dominating these longer-term natural variations…so the kicker is that the rapidly increasing GH gases, now at their highest levels in millions of years, are very likely influencing the nature of ENSO, PDO, AMO, and other formerly “natural” cycles.
I get it now. Man’s activities have little if any effect on average global surface temperature, and since the last 16 years of natural cooling caused no significant increase in warming, don’t expect a return of natural warming to cause much cooling.
Gates, I meant I get what many climate contrarians are saying, not what you are saying, although I get that too.
Burl Henry, some might not agree with your answer, but it is an answer. Thank you.
In “Silver Blaze”, Sherlock Holmes is able to identify that the miscreant thanks to this piece of logic,
Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”
Holmes concluded that the dog didn’t bark at an intruder, as the intruder was known to the dog and so the dog didn’t bark.
However, it is also possible that the dog didn’t bark because it was busy chocking on a chicken bone some thoughtless cook had throw out or because it had made an acquaintance with a local bitch of easy virtue.
Samuel Vimes has a completely different view of ‘Clues’.
“He had a jaundiced view of Clues. He instinctively distrusted them. They got in the way. And he distrusted the kind of person who’d take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, “Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fallen on hard times,” and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man’s boots, when exactly the same comments could apply to a man who was wearing his old clothes because he’d been doing a spot of home bricklaying for a new barbecue pit, and had been tattooed once when he was drunk and seventeen* and in fact got seasick on a wet pavement. What arrogance! What an insult to the rich and chaotic variety of the human experience!”
The GCM’s, in the Mosher sense of an experiment, can answer the question, can we get this output if we ask this type of question. Computer models can act as an aide-réflexion, not a proof.
And give me that crap about there being no proof in science, as I am counting the number of living cancer cells that have survived a chemotherapy titration at the moment.
“heh! Mosher considers GCM output to be “evidence.” Right.”
of course its evidence. If the output is very wrong its evidence that something needs fixing. If the results are in line with observation its evidence the models can capture relevant aspects of reality. Anything can be evidence. finding a logic flaw is evidence. data is evidence. a theory that doesnt predict well is evidence.
The question is “evidence of what” and “how much weight should we give this evidence” Those are practical questions and in the end science is practical, not some ideal.
Natural variation would be warming and cooling in equal measure over the last 50 years. What we see are warming and pauses instead of cooling, which doesn’t appear to occur at all. What happened to the natural variation, formerly known as cooling? I think we are too conditioned to warming and pauses now to notice that those coolings have been gone for the last century. It’s the “frog in the warming pot” syndrome.
Pay attention, now. Our own little jimmy dee gets to define climate natural variation. Watch this: equal warming and cooling over a fifty year period. Thank you, jimmy. Your Nobel Prize is in the mail.
The solar slump, increasing aerosols from China, negative PDO phase, dominant La Nina phases for a few years, yet no cooling. Strange, eh?
The last 16 years has shown a secular increase in retained thermodynamic free energy factors which have obscured the underlying temperature increase.
Suggest you read introductory texts such as Thermodynamics of Atmospheres and Oceans if you have trouble with this concept.
Max OK
Herman, if natural variability has not cause significant warming after the year 2000, wouldn’t it be reasonable to question whether it contributed significantly to the far greater 1975-2000 warming?
It is reasonable to assume that natural variability is in total charge of earth temperature and that it causes all the warming and cooling, including the Roman, Medieval and modern Warming.
It is reasonable to assume that natural variability is in total charge of earth temperature and that it causes all the warming and cooling, including the Cold period after the Roman Warm Period, The Little Ice Age and the next cold period that will follow this Warm Period.
It is not reasonable to assume that a fraction of a trace gas is in charge of earth temperature.
Look at temperature and CO2 for 600 million years.
There is no CO2 control knob in this relationship.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sjn639tp9kqirei/Temp%20and%20CO2%20for%20600%20Million%20Years.pdf
Max ok wrote
Herman, you did not answer my question?
Is this the question you refer to?
JC said ” If the recent warming hiatus is caused by natural variability, then this raises the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural climate variability.”
The right answer is “ALL OF IT”
They tell us the Roman Warm Period and the Cold Period that followed and the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age was Natural Variability, but that this Modern Warm Period is not Natural.
That is not something that I can believe. They say Natural Variability suddenly stopped and was replaced by a CO2 control knob.
A trace Gas?
One Molecule per ten thousand has made a major difference?
Gimme a Break.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page16.html
Herman, would you say nature helped man-made warming during 1975-2000, then held back man-made warming during 2001-2013?
These are approximations of the periods, so you might want to adjust them by a couple of years.
Max ok you wrote:
These are approximations of the periods, so you might want to adjust them by a couple of years.
These were your approximations, adjust them however it works to your advantage and I will look at what you did.
I am going to word this a little different.
This modern warm period is not yet as warm as the Roman Warm Period and not yet as warm as the Medieval Warm Period, but we are not as warm because man-made CO2 is causing the modern warm period and natural variability caused the previous warm periods.
I do ask:
“WHAT NATURAL VARIABLE STOPPED TO CAUSE US TO NOT WARM AS WE ALWAYS HAVE AFTER COLD PERIODS SUCH THAT NOW WE NEED THE MAN-MADE CO2?”
Jim D said:
“Natural variation would be warming and cooling in equal measure over the last 50 years.”
Whatever would make you think that is what happens, Jim D?
Something like warming and cooling fairly taking turns ? Make us laugh, Jim D. Say some more.
chaos I tell ya, chaos
mr. thisnotgood, your statement shows that the “skeptics” have given up on cooling by now (?), after decades of it not happening. I guess that is progress. Pauses are what they now define as a victory.
Dr. Curry ==> Nice done. Congratulations.
Chairman Boxer and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me to present views under President Obama’s historic Climate Action Plan. In addition to stopping the seas from rising we shall undertake to protect protect our children and future generations of unaborted from the effects of climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants and by taking sensible steps to prepare for changes in climate that are no longer avoidable.
I have this here model that Al Gore helped me with. Ah yes! The model says, It’s now or never! We Must Act Now! Al Gore gave humanity 10 years. The model agrees with him: humans may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan. The model essentially says that our world is spinning out of kilter” and that soon — maybe 5 or 7 years — there will be no polar ice caps. Actually, the model says we’re already doomed.
The points of Dr. Curry’s presentation are well honed…a very nice job. However, the fact that:
“Most of the members were there for Panel 1; only a few remained for Panel 2.”
is no surprise and suggests lockstep going the motions by the members, i.e., a preamble for other things. So it goes.
Judith –
In being a scientist asked to testify at a Senate hearing (in your capacity as a “non-advocate,” of course, it would seem to me that you would have reason to do your best to be precise and scientific.
There hasn’t been a “hiatus in warming.” If there has been a hjiatus, it is in surface temperatures only – and not a “hiatus” in warming. As someone who doesn’t doubt the basic physics of the GHE, no doubt you realize that.
So what, then, do you think the language that I excerpted above expresses the best of your scientific precision?
why only a single paren ?
I must say I did not agree with this part of Judith’s testimony
‘Global sea level has been rising for the past several thousand years. The key issue is whether the rate of sea level rise is accelerating owing to anthropogenic global warming. It is seen that the rate of rise during 1930-1950 was comparable to, if not larger than, the value in recent years. Hence the data does not seem to support the IPCC’s conclusion of a substantial contribution from anthropogenic forcings to the global mean sea level rise since the 1970s”
—- ——-
The best evidence is that sea levels oscillate around a mean of a metre or so. However once again this notion of a global level confuses things as not everywhere will rise or fall by the same amount and some places will outstrip this.
. We currently have sea level rising by several mms a year (and more ) in some places and in others falling by similar amounts. All complicated by whether the land is rising or falling.
Generally, sea levels are probably lower than today-taking everything into account- than they were in Roman and MWP as the snow/ice/glaciers had melted substantially then. That all got locked up again during the LIA and it is that which is currently melting..
So I don’t buy this notion of a linear rise over several thousand years unless of course you don’t believe in warm periods in the past as well as cold ones.
tonyb
Hmmmm.
So many opportunities lost for a high level of scientific precision.
Judith, how do you reconcile a belief in the physics of the GHE with a belief that adding CO2 to the atmosphere could be accompanied by a “haitus in warming?”
I can see how it might be reconciled with a relatively short-term “hiatus” (if you must) in the trend of significant increase in surface temperatures, but not with a “hiatus in warming.”
Remember, Judith – no one hear doubts that adding ACO2 to the atmosphere causes warming.
and no on here, either.
also no one here. Sheece!
Joshua – spot on!
(sorry for the over exuberant ! – I’m a Brit and it’s what we do on occasion)
Think hard, you two. All it would take is for natural variability to dominate over the CO2 Control Knob. Are you ever going to get the point?
===========
Which could explain a “hiatus” in the trend of significant increase in surface temps. It could not explain a “hiatus” in warming.
Unless you doubt the physics of the GHE.
You know, I’m beginning to suspect that one or two “skeptics” my have, how shall I say it, er….. A selective acceptance of the physics of the GHE…
“Are you ever going to get the point?”
Nah, motivated obduracy much more fun.
Everyone has a flaw or two.
i’m amused at your selective use of ‘warming’. C’mon, get with it, it’s ‘energy balance’. Check with RGates if you need pointers.
=============
Joshua,
Your assertion is wrong. I doubt that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes warming. I am certain that creating CO2 by oxidising C causes warming.
Unlike your bizarre theory, mine is supported by reproducible experiment.
Anybody who professes a belief in the GHE is obviously capable of believing any number of impossible things. I see no conflict.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike –
Allow me to explain:
Quite a while back, Judith said something to the effect of “no one here doubts that ACO2 causes warming (or perhaps affects the climate?).”
I am teasing her – because it has been my experience that there are many here that, just like you, have their doubts about that. And so I am pointing out that there is a, er….. selectivity in her observations.
Further, I am pointing out that it is logically inconsistent to say that there has been a “hiatus in warming,” yet still say that you don’t doubt the physics of the GHE. If you believe that adding ACO2 to the climate causes warming, then you cannot believe that adding ACO2 to the climate could be concurrent with a “hiatus in warming,” because …er…. we are adding ACO2 to the climate.
Now if someone were to day, as Judith clearly did not although she had many opportunities to do so, that “concurrent with warming of our oceans there has been a hiatus in the significantly increasing trend of global surface temperatures,” then I would have not problem with the logic.
That would be a more precise statement, and one that would be less likely to be misunderstood.
Mike, please don’t feed the…er…
Actually, in the name of being precise…
Kim said:
“i’m amused at your selective use of ‘warming’. C’mon, get with it, it’s ‘energy balance’. Check with RGates if you need pointers.”
____
Thanks Kim, I know you are having your poke at me, but perhaps we’ll make a physicist out of you yet. Increasing GH gases is a energy imbalance issue– not specfically a warming issue. The “warming” of the troposphere as measured by sensible heat is only one very small part of the energy in the overall climate system, and the part with the very lowest thermal inertia and very sensitive to very small changes in ocean to atmosphere sensible and latent heat flux such as we see in the ENSO cycle. Thus, sensible heat in the troposphere is a proxy measurement for AGW, and, as some are finally learning, an extremely poor proxy over shorter time frames.
Joshua –
Considered in isolation, CO2 increase will lead to warming. However, it is never in isolation. Minor fluctuations in ocean currents and clouds are likely to overwhelm the CO2 effect, both on the positive and negative side. The point is that until we understand the effect of the oceans and clouds we will never know exactly the effect of CO2. That is what is meant by “natural variability”, and that is what she referred to.
When data shows no warming for 16 years, that trumps religious belief that CO2 warming must be still accelerating. Natural variability does squash Consensus Warming like a BUG.
Er Josh, think of it this way, I have two children that were the product of sexual intercourse. Indeed, almost all people on the planet are the product of sexual intercourse. However, there is no correlation between the frequency of sexual intercourse and the production of babies.
You can have smoke without fire and also fire without smoke. In the same way you can have intelligence and knowledge and still be stupid and ignorant.
reading that charitably I thought she meant hiatus in surface temps. That was the data she asked for and presented.
once again your motivated reasoning forces you to find a flaw where there is none.
When you read a text ask yourself. Have I tried to impute beliefs to the author which render them dishonest or which expose some mistake. And then
which is more likely to be true
1. They made perfect sense, and I read the text in such a way as to create an easy critcism
2. I make more sense about this topic I know nothing about, and they are at fault
You always have to make this decision. Always. No text tells you what it means on its face. All reading is an act of interpretation. You cant escape it.
And finally ask yourself. How likely is it that I am always right and Judith is always wrong, because that is what most folks would infer about your responses to her.
More than CO2 can impact outgoing LW, and that yet other things can impact incoming SW. There is nothing in the physics of climate that require a long term accumulation of energy due to rising CO2. It is perhaps a likely outcome, but it is not required by the physics of spatial and temporal chaos.
Doc,
Whoa… Even broaching the subject of you and intercourse is extremely upsetting so I’m gonna have to stop reading that right there, Doc. Prolly going to have nightmares now as it is.
Yes, good point, steven. And her neglecting to mention anything about OHC was probably just merely coincidence.
You know, if you bend over backwards, squint really hard, cover one eye, turn off 3/4 of our brain, and redouble your efforts to be “charitable,.”
Judith has stated in the past that she finds it acceptable to engage in inaccurate rhetoric as some sort of balance against what she feels is inaccurate rhetoric on the other side of the debate.
I would like to hope that rather than engaging in two wrongs make a right logic, she would take this opportunity of testifying before Congress to step up the level of precision, thoroughness, and acknowledgement of uncertainty. The fact that she failed to do so is her right. It is the right of anyone to be an advocate. I just happen to think that advocacy works better when the advocate utilizes precision, thoroughness, and an appropriate acknowledgement of uncertainty. Just the way I roll.
You should have known better, Doc. The mere mention of heterosexual activities sickens little joshie. Please be more sensitive.
Joshua. I dont blame judith for not raising ohc. You see there is a history. Before the pause anybody who talked about ohc like peilke was rated a skeptic or denier. There was one consensus metric. Air temp. If you tried to mention that ohc was the best metric they would shout denier. The table was set. The feild was lined. You had to talk about air temps. So I forgive judith shes a little slow to follow the flipping of the script. But rest assured when the warming returns as it will they will forget ohc even though it is the better metric. They will forget it because it is not marketable. But now its all they have. Had they taken a balanced lukewarmer stance they wouldnt have to pretend that they never claimed air temps were important
No, no, moshe; not ‘as it will’, but ‘as it may’.
==============
Steven Mosher, can you show where peilke was called a skeptic or denier before the pause for suggesting ohc be the metric of choice? I doubt very much this is true but would be happy to be corrected.
“But rest assured when the warming returns as it will they will forget ohc even though it is the better metric.”
——
Interesting notion. Certainly tropospheric sensible heat will fluctuate on the shorter term based on ENSO, PDO, and AMO, rising and falling with these fluctuations, but each major El Niño will tend to see higher highs, with La Niña not seeing quite as low of lows. The last La Niña was the warmest on instrument record, the base leading up to the next El Niño starts from a higher plateau. The rising energy in the climate system, lead by rising OHC, and driven by increasing GH gases is the dynamic behind this. The only ones who’d like to forget this are not “warmists”.
DocMartyn | January 16, 2014 at 10:31 pm |
“However, there is no correlation between the frequency of sexual intercourse and the production of babies.”
I believe that to be seriously mistaken. Evidence?
Dr. Curry’s testimony available here …
http://www.c-span.org/flvPop.aspx?id=10737443558
Begins at about 3:09:55
The hearing is also posted at
Environment & Public Works Committee SD-406 hearing
Dr. Judith Curry began at 3:13:57
I see you are bit by the slidebar problem, too.
Dr.Curry – Thanks so much for delivering such a clear and concise message. I fear the ‘tax and spend’ steamroller will continue to race on, unabated. That said, the fight for scientific clarity must be fought. Billions of dollars are a stake.
Walt –
Apparently you must have seen someone else’s presentation. You see, only an “advocate” would provide testimony that could be considered as prescriptive, policy-wise.
And we all know that Judith is certainly not an “advocate.” Advocates are bad.
Joshua,
I am a little confused by your comment.
I assume that Dr Curry was invited to express an opinion. It could be no more than that, as the future is unknowable.
Is she not free to express herself as she wishes? She appears to have been requested to do exactly that.
What would you have her do? If you disagree with her actions, you might choose to work hard, be lucky, and when you are invited to express your opinion in similar circumstances, refuse outright. That might show the strength of your convictions.
Please note that I am not even expressing an opinion, merely pointing out one option amongst many, after asking a couple of questions upon which you might care to express an opinion.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike –
Is she not free to express herself as she wishes?
Of course Judith has every right to express an opinion. In no way am I suggesting that she doesn’t have that right, or that she shouldn’t express her opinions. In fact, I think that she should be expressing her opinions. As a well-qualified expert, her opinions are valuable.
I am suggesting two things: (1) That when she expresses her opinions, she be precise and, (2) that she shouldn’t be so, er…. selective in her determinations about who should and shouldn’t be expressing their opinions.
Joshua,
Thanks for the prompt reply.
Like you, I support Dr Curry’s right to express herself herself as she sees fit.
Unlike you, I don’t feel the need to offer her suggestions as to how she should express her opinions. You appear to be offering advice, albeit in a somewhat circuitous manner, about who should or should not be allowed to express an opinion.
You may be able to advance some cogent reason for expecting her to take any more notice of your wishes than of mine. If she invites you to express an opinion on how she should express herself, I would expect you to be honest, of course.
I just can’t think of any reason that Dr Curry would seek advice from you. Please let me know if I am wrong.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike –
No. I am suggesting to her that she not be so selective in her determinations of who should and shouldn’t express their opinions. I’m all for anyone expressing their opinions, and I don’t think that anyone should be disallowed from doing so
Not at all. I have no reason to believe that she should take any more notice of my opinions than she does of anyone else’s opinion, and certainly not in comparison to the opinions of someone as smart and knowledgeable as you are!!!
I don’t think that someone needs an invite to express their opinion.
No, I can’t think of any reason why she would seek out my advice either.
Neither can I think of why you seem to think that’s relevant. At any rate, Mike, this little exchange of ours is getting to be a bit tedious, and the double-thick pork chops just got placed on the table.
Have a nice evening.
Joshua,
Thank you for telling me what a smart and knowledgable fellow I am. I am probably smarter and more knowledgable than you. Don’t be despondent, anybody that believes the global warming warming nonsense demonstrates their lack of smartness and knowledge in the area.
Enjoy your pork chops.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Joshua
“No. I am suggesting to her that she not be so selective in her determinations of who should and shouldn’t express their opinions. ”
Sorry, Judith gets to be as selective as she wants to be. Note, you are being selective in deciding which determinations she can make or not make.
perhaps you should take a taste of your own medicine before suggesting that others take it. Judith absolutely gets to argue that her form of advocacy is better than others. She has good reason to make this case and its grounded in her own experience as well as some suggestive studies.
She gets to argue that her form of advocacy is superior to others and gets to argue that others should follow her path. She absolutely gets to do that.
You might find the argument unpersuasive, but you havent even begun to make that case. In fact, you can’t. you can’t because you can’t even bring yourself to understand her position in a way that isnt infected with your motivated reasoning. Go ahead try. You can’t
steven –
One paragraph. Two sentences. Both based in faulty reasoning.
First, I never said that she doesn’t “get to be as selective as she wants to be.” Of course she does. I am merely suggesting that she be more even-handed in how she applies her criteria.
Second, I have not “decided” what determinations she “can make or not make.” Once again, she can make whatever determinations she wants. I am merely suggesting that she be more even-handed in how she applies here criteria
Let’s start with you fixing the faulty reasoning in both of the sentences in your first paragraph, and then maybe, if you accomplish that goal in good faith, we’d have a starting point for discussing the rest of your comment.
And steven –
For what it’s worth, I think that your white-knighting would be more usefully direct at cwon; He’s someone who talks about what Judith “needs” to do, and often uses the kind of language that you so often, falsely, attribute to me. I specifically avoid the kind of over-statements that you use to mischaracterize my opinions (I can only, at this point, conclude that you do so willfully).
You are more weasely than clown14, but just as offensive. Keep at it. There is always a chance Mosher will give you some more attention.
Joshua
Now you are changing your position
‘ I am merely suggesting that she be more even-handed in how she applies her criteria.”
“(2) that she shouldn’t be so, er…. selective in her determinations about who should and shouldn’t be expressing their opinions.”
There is a difference between being selective and being even handed.
I’m selective when I choose a basketball team. I pick the best players.
I am not even handed.
Second, SHE IS EVEN HANDED when applying her selection criteria.
she applies it to everyone.
Let’s see if you can lay out Judith’s position on advocacy. you can’t, but lets see you try.
Then, you have to demonstrate that its not even handed.. which you also cant
Peter – do you mean capacity credit for the last 2 #s?
You failed to correct for your errors, steven. Try again.
Watching Mosher take Joshua apart time and time again is almost painful, like watching a heavyweight boxer beating the hell out of some poor skinny schnook. The analogy breaks down quickly however, as the poor skinny schnook would quickly learn to avoid the boxer. Joshua not only doesn’t learn, he continues to think he has a chance.
In a linguistic battle with Mosh, Joshua is unarmed.
How Texas will best utilize all this wind capacity remains to be seen. Because of intermittency and seasonal variability, the Texas grid (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) rates wind generation only at 8.7 percent of wind’s installed capacity. … – advocate witness from Texas
FEB. 13, 2013, AUSTIN, TX — A strong weekend cold front that brought needed rain to much of Texas also propelled the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) to a new wind power record, …the generation provided nearly 28 percent of the system load in ERCOT at the time
ERCOT says the capacity factor has moved into the 35% to 50% range.
The advocate’s number is 8.7%. The complete quote from her citation:
But because of wind’s variable nature, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid, only includes 8.7 percent of wind generation in estimating available power at peak conditions, even though it frequently generates a much greater amount.
Not sure of your point. The 8.7% number refers to the capacity the grid operators can count on in the worst case. The 28% number represents the largest percentage of wind energy available at one time measured so far. So the two numbers are the minimum and maximum wind energy capability at any one time. Capacity factor is an annual number and unless you can provide documentation for 35 to 50% values I am very skeptical that anyone at ERCOT would claim values that high.
We own the second largest wind generation in US.
Average availability is around 21%.
JCH,
You are confusing capacity factor and capacity credit.
Capacity Factor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor
Capacity Credit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_energy_source
Average capacity factor of wind is around 30%
Average capacity factor of wind in ERCOT 8.7% (your quote), in South Australia is 7% and in Victoria (Australia) is 3% (from memory).
Timg56,
Thank you for that comment. It is really valuable to have people like you contributing and stating the facts as they are.
Yes. My mistake. Now I am confusing readers. The last paragraph should have said:
Average capacity factor of wind is around 30%
Average capacity credit of wind in ERCOT 8.7% (your quote), in South Australia is 7% and in Victoria (Australia) is 3% (from memory).
JCH,
It is also worth noting that capacity factor of a wind farm decreases as the wind turbines age. Professor Gordon Hughes has studied this and quantified the effect for the UK wind farms to date. He estimates that the capacity factor of UK wind farms decreases at the rate of about 5% per year. Professor David MacKay disagrees with the 5% and suggests it is more like 2% per year. However, REF has stated that Gordon Hughes is it correct, based on their figures.
http://www.ref.org.uk/publications/303-response-to-professor-mackays-comments-on-wind-farm-economic-lifetime-research
The witness left out:
, even though it frequently generates a much greater amount.
Also, that 8.7% is in the process of being raised to 14.2%.
JCH,
Do you still not understand the difference between capacity factor and capacity credit.
Just by coincidence, a good example occurred on January 15 which will help to explain the difference. This chart shows the wind farm output and capacity factor for all wind farms and total in the Australian National Electricity Market:http://windfarmperformance.info/?date=2014-01-15 . Notice how the capacity factor of all wind farms combined dropped to less than 5% between 12:00 and 15:00. That coincided with the period of peak demand a very hot day (near record temperatures).
Capacity Credit is a probabalistic estimate of how much capacity wind can be relied upon to deliver at the times of peak demand.
On this day, wind generation provided almost nothing at the time of peak demand. That is it cannot be depended on to supply power when most needed. So, it’s capacity credit is low.
You might compare it with an unreliable worker: it cannot be relied upon to show up to work when most needed. In Australia, some may call wind power “the true Aussie bludger”.
From today’s “Weekend Australian”
“Wind fails test as demand soars
WHEN electricity demand peaked at the height of this week’s heatwave in southern Australia, the total power output from the fleet of wind farms across Victoria and South Australia was almost zero.
The doldrums that stopped wind power production about midday on Wednesday coincided with warnings from the Victorian government and the national electricity market operator that electricity users faced the possibility of blackouts.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/state-politics/wind-fails-test-as-demand-soars/story-e6frgczx-1226804532811#
Also from the article”
Between 11:30 am and 4 pm as demand peaked wind share of supply fell to 0.3%. Electricity price peaked at $6,213/MWh at 15:30 to 16:00 in South Australia. Capacity factor fell to 2% in South Australia and 4% in Victoria.
Throughout the week, of high temperatures, wind farm output had tended to move in the opposite direction to demand.
“The failure of of wind to continue supply at times of high demand this week has highlighted a long standing argument about the impact of intermittent renewable energy on the stability and reliability of electricity networks.”
From the Australian Energy Regulator “State of the Energy Market” (2009), p68: http://www.aer.gov.au/sites/default/files/Chapter%201%20Electricity%20generation%202009.pdf
The unexpected loss of two North Texas plants had prompted ERCOT to issue an emergency alert Monday morning, borrow some power from other grids and ask consumers to take extra conservation measures.
The wind that made the blue norther seem even chillier turned out to be more friend than foe in the power crisis.
At one point, spinning turbines provided a critical 1,500 megawatts of power of the available 56,000 megawatts of generation capacity — as early morning demand hit 55,487 megawatts.
“If we hadn’t had some wind yesterday, we would have blacked out for sure,” said Adam Sinn, an independent energy trader in Houston.
JCH,
You must fit the description of “denier” perfectly.
Are you being intentionally obtuse providing an example of when the wind blows, rather then the consequences when it doesn’t blow at time of peak demand?
Can you really not get your head around the concept of ‘Capacity Credit’ or are you playing the role of the classic denier?
AEMO, “Lessons learned from International Wind Integration Studies WP4(A)”, 2011
http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/Planning/Related-Information/Wind-Integration-Investigation
Note that the long transmission lines to remote areas also reduces the reliability and probable availability of wind farms (and, importantly, at times of peak demand which is what is relevant for capacity credit calculations)
Here is a figure that compares “Availability factor vs capacity factor for different energy sources. It’s worth spending some time contemplating this.” says John Morgan.
pic.twitter.com/ofFM56kB5V
Judith Curry
First, congratulations upon a succinct verbal presentation and a clear rationale in the written portion of your testimony.
As politicians go home to discuss important issues with constituents, it is more likely than not that the constituent’s increased home energy expenses will be raised with the political types. There are many people whose mortgages are still underwater, and many remain “house poor.” Added expenses for heating one’s home removes discretionary monies from the economy, making the poor, poorer, and the middle income people not buying that something extra. Freezing people’s degrees of freedom to spend as they want, may influence a few political types into reassessing their stance on climate change. The time to change beliefs on climate is now!
Even in your home state, this “cold snap” from the descent of the circumpolar vortex will have home heating consequences.
In another week, there is predicted another drop in temperatures into the subzero for us Midwesterners and Eastern Seaboard residents.
Natural gas stores are now below their average for this time of year. 50% of US homes are heated by natural gas. The price of natural gas increased by 50 cents/bty recently and is more likely than not to increase further.
My whole point in the above verbiage, the good Senators, the Honorable Representatives and the POTUS will more than likely than not be feeling the heat of their constituents for their stance on government changing the economy to change the climate for persons too distant to conceptualize using a rationale no longer fit for purpose.
RiH008
Nicely put. But I am not sure that theoretically reducing temperatures by a fraction of a degree at some time in the far distant future can be called changing the climate. Large amounts of money for a miniscule effect hundreds of years hence….Do they tell their constituents that?
Tonyb
Tonyb
Once climate change becomes a citizen pocket book issue, dollars to donuts say those whose political leanings on the side of taxing the hell out of everyone for climate warming, will soon find employment in other than government, possibly as lawyers or lobbyists or other such low valued citizens.
RiHo08,
I agree. That is what every sensible, rational, responsible person should be concerned about.
‘If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too …
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or with kings – nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you but none too much ….
…you’ll be a man my son!’ Or in this case
an honest scientist. H/t Kipling.
Thank you Dr Curry.
+1
Always loved this one Beth. I especially like the “and blaming it on you” clause. Now that’s a challenge.
Beth Cooper, January 16, 2014 at 6:18 pm
‘If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …
_____
Judith Curry, global warming scapegoat? I can think of better choices.
Judith’s testimony has got the usual nitpicking suspects in a tither. It’s too bad they don’t let anonymous little dweebs in to question witnesses at Senate committee hearings.
“FirstEnergy, one of the country’s largest electric companies, has agreed to work toward reducing its carbon emissions in response to pressure from shareholders including New York State and Connecticut pension funds, New York Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli said on Tuesday.”
“The company, which operates in six states, including Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, promised to study and report on what it could do to help meet President Obama’s goal of reducing carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2050.”
“Mr. DiNapoli said the decision could speed the adoption of agreements for environmental planning at other energy companies.”
For more on this go to
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/business/energy-environment/power-company-to-study-emissions-after-pressure.html
__________
Public companies can’t ignore their stockholders. It’s good to see investors looking beyond profits in the short-term.
This is exactly why it is dangerous to have politicians and their appointees control pension funds. You risk this kind of politicized nonsense at the expense of normal profit-seeking shareholders.
I’m a profit-seeking shareholder who takes the long-view. I take the long-view on things in general. The desire for instant gratification is childish.
Since the stock price embodies future expectations, your long-term versus short-term point is incoherent.
Steve, he missed the word “normal”, as in rational.
Don, I left “normal” out on purpose as bait, so I would have an excuse to say I’m better than normal. Thanks for taking the bait.
You missed it again, maxie. Steve was talking about normal/rational shareholders. You changed the subject.
stevepostrel January 16, 2014 at 9:44 pm
Since the stock price embodies future expectations, your long-term versus short-term point is incoherent.
______
I don’t think so Steve. The price of a stock will change as future expectations change. A change in the price of First Energy’s stock after the agreement should reflect any change in expectations as a result of the agreement. If the market saw the agreement as improving expectations for the stock, then it’s price should rise.
Exactly. There is no short-term/long-term conflict here for normal profit-seeking shareholders. They all want the price to go up today based on improved prospects for cash flows in the future. Unfortunately, politically motivated shareholders don’t care as much about that and significantly weight political grandstanding into their objective functions. This isn’t difficult.
You are really confused, maxie. I believe that steve meant that stock prices are based on expectations for the future. That is essentially correct. He didn’t say that expectations don’t change. Normal/rational shareholders re-evaluate their positions continuously. Your long-term vs short-term whatever, has nothing to do with steve’s observation that political ideology has no place in sound portfolio management. Especially, when the political hacks are managing other people’s pension money (OPPM).
stevepostrel said “Unfortunately, politically motivated shareholders don’t care as much about that and significantly weight political grandstanding into their objective functions.”
Detroit Don chimed in “Your long-term vs short-term whatever, has nothing to do with steve’s observation that political ideology has no place in sound portfolio management.”
______
Well fellas, the price of First Energy stock closed at $32.49 a share today, up from a close of $31.86 two days ago when the company reached an agreement with those “politically motivated shareholders.” Other shareholders should be mighty pleased.
That’s quite a jump, maxie. The headline: Normal/rational stockholders slightly relieved government hacks off their backs.
All they had to do was promise to study and report. The government hacks will be back for more. You are a very funny guy, maxie.
Two city slickers, Detroit Don Monfort and stevepostrel, get schooled on the stock market by a country bumpkin. One of the slickers is all peevish about it, when he should be grateful for the lesson.
Well, I have learned from you maxieboy. Invest in those companies under attack from political hacks mismanaging other peoples’ pension money. When the hapless companies’ hack managements promise to study and report on whatever the political hacks are demanding, you will clean up. Maybe make a quick 60 cents or so, on your 30 bucks. Of course the stock can’t go too far, because the political hacks will be back for more. Keep it up, maxie.
Public companies are obliged to be fiducially responsible to shareholders. Public companies that knowingly act to reduce the value of shareholder interests can and frquently are sued by shareholders.
So yeah, they’ll study voluntary means of reducing carbon output. The safe way is to offer “green energy” to retail and commercial power users at whatever rate doesn’t detract from their bottom line. If the consumer wants to pay the freight for green energy then there’s no lack of fiduciary responsibility by the board of directors to the shareholders.
I suspect their motivation is increased profits. That is just the point, if energy companies can reduce their emissions and become more efficient and so increase their wealth who can be against them? If, on the other hand, they simply want government assistance in reaching further into our pockets then that would be unacceptable.
In the UK both the politicians and power utilities have bumped into resistance towards higher electricity prices and they all know that it is green levies causing them but they are pretending to the consumers that that is not the case. The point I am making is that government and the utilities know people balk at paying more to stop a vague and uncertain something when they have the travails of day to day living to contend with so the government has moved the green charges to the general tax account where it can be hidden from view.
Will American utilities reduce emissions and improve efficiencies and so make better profits or will government send them subsidies to cover up the costs? The shareholders in the utilities are betting on government money.
Keitho makes a sound general point: Firms can often profit by tapping subsidy streams from the public till. They can also often profit by supporting regulations that differentially disadvantage their rivals.
Stock prices may also go up after such an agreement to “voluntarily” reduce CO2 emissions if investors were expecting something worse and the news on the day of the announcement is that they got off easy. Event study analysis is not that simple.
I believe it makes good business sense for a firm to take a proactive approach in reducing emissions to position itself for the future. More regulations likely are coming in the years ahead and a foreword looking company will try to be prepared.
Dr. Curry, All I can say is your courage and integrity will live on in climate science long after we are gone. Thank you so much!
I am very disappointed that you did not point out that heat emissions alone are more than sufficient to account for all the rise in atmospheric temperature as well as increase in ocean heat content that we have witnessed.
The hiatus in rising atmospheric temperature may well be attributed to the large scale melting of glaciers. I have never received a response from you with respect to these points which I have brought up several times. Are these points with which you disagree or which are too controversial to handle?
Phillip Haddad,
You’ve been told you are wrong about this a dozen times. Are you obstinately innumerate?
The answer is that your “points” are too silly to handle. End of story.
Peter Lang,
With respect, I have been told many more than a dozen times that the greenhouse effect exists. I remain an unbeliever. I still think I’m right – global warming is nonsense. I may be wrong, but so far so good!
What’s wrong with letting someone express an opinion?
Calling someone obstinately innumerate, without adducing facts to support your assertion, is simply not good form. My opinion, of course. It’s worth exactly as much as you paid for it.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
You must have missed it, Mike. Hadad said that he was disappointed that Judith didn’t testify to a Senate hearing that blah…blah…blah. Isn’t that a little presumptuous? Hadad is an idiot. At least you have sense enough not to complain that Judith didn’t inform the Senate that the GHE doesn’t exist. Carry on. And you live well too. End of story.
Mike Flynn,
OK,
I retract my unnecessary statement.
Just yesterday Haddad… didn’t ‘ya see Dr. Spencer replied to you?
Wagathon | January
15, 2014 at 7:48 pm | Reply
Don Monfort,
I don’t think I missed anything. If Dr Curry takes offence at Philip Haddad’s comments, she is at liberty to delete them.
Where’s the harm in allowing freedom of speech on a blog such as this? In regard to your presumption as to another commenter’s mental state, what proof can you offer that your assessment is correct?
Just a couple of questions that spring to mind. Of course, I understand you may choose not to give direct answers.
Live well,and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Nobody said that freedom of speech should not be allowed on a blog like this, mikey. You just made that up. I will have to put you on my list.
Don Monfort,
I understand your reluctance to give direct answers to simple questions.
Should I be worried that you are going to have to put me on your list?
I hope it is a list of people you respect due to their superior intelligence and knowledge. May I extend my gratitude if this is the case. Thank you.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
I addressed your bogus accusation, mikey.
Sorry, but the list is for people who are not to be taken seriously. Their comments are read for entertainment purposes only.
Philip Haddad | January 16, 2014 at 6:33 pm | Reply
Philip Haddad | January 16, 2014 at 6:33 pm | Reply
Your position is contradicted by common knowledge so you’re kind of beneath notice for most people.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_heat#Environmental_impact
This blog is not a democracy or a public venue. Freedom of speech is as much or as little as the owner allows and where the speech isn’t outlawed such as reproducing copyrighted material.
But when this isn’t so much a freedom of speech issue as it a freedom of innumeracy issue. On a science blog it’s not good form IMO to allow the latter without any restraint.
All of our burning stuff amounts to less than 1/4000 of the energy we get from the sun. We don’t have thermometers sensitive enough to measure that.
Thank you very much for your forthright and accessible testimony. The new article in Nature buttresses your assessment and recent paper on oceanic interaction with the climate. Thank you!
“The new article in Nature buttresses your assessment and recent paper on oceanic interaction with the climate.”
____
Not really. What the new paper in Nature actually does is once more demonstrates why using sensible tropospheric heat is a very poor metric for sensitivity to GH forcing.
If the oceans had been losing energy over the same period the troposphere was seeing the “pause” or the sea level declining, or the net glacial mass of Greenland and Antarctica increasing rather than declining, then the “pause” would be confirmatory evidence that maybe the climate is not as sensitive to increasing GH gases.
shh gates, you can’t stop them pretending all the pieces fit their state of denial
Sensible tropospheric heat is the whole game. Nobody cares about milli-degree warming of the vast, cold deep ocean nor can such heat move against a temperature gradient and come out to bite us. If the ocean absorbs almost all of the excess energy from a forcing then the atmospheric surface temperature sensitivity to CO2 must be very small.
actually steve, if the oceans are gaining heat (or I should say they *are*, not if), then there’s an energy imbalance remaining. So yes it will come back to “bite” us in the sense that energy imbalance has to be closed eventually with an increase in surface temperature – heat in the pipeline.
That’s not the argument you wanted to make, lolwot. Everyone, including Trenberth I believe, concedes that the “heat in the pipeline” phrase does not refer to cold ocean water heating up hotter atmosphere. It refers to a future closing of the alleged heat pathway into the deep ocean so that the future forcing will go into increased surface temperature. But the heat that’s supposedly already down there ain’t coming out because it would have to flow against a temperature gradient.
that gradient is being reduced
The gradient will never be reduced to the point that the deep ocean is warmer than the atmosphere, so the heat can’t come back up. Period.
A smaller gradient would slow down the rate at which the oceanic heat sink absorbed the forcing, but that effect would be pretty linear, nothing like the cyclic or step-function data that Trenbeth and others are trying to explain. For that, you need some complex story about downwelling currents getting turned on and off at different phases of the cycle of natural variability.
actually steve, if the oceans are gaining heat (or I should say they *are*, not if), then there’s an energy imbalance remaining.
When the oceans gain heat they warm. When the oceans do not gain heat, they do not warm. For 17 years, the oceans have not warmed. For 17 years the oceans have not gained heat.
The temperature changes from day to night and summer to winter show that temperature and energy are always in balance or very nearly in balance.
This energy imbalance is JUNK science. They make claims about the deep ocean because that can’t easily be checked and that buys them time with their scams.
“Sensible tropospheric heat is the whole game.”
—–
Wow, even without considering the oceans this displays immense ignorance of basic thermodynamics and principles of what drives weather and the climate system. I assume you are just kidding.
RGates explores a new meme: Yes, all those alarmists were just kidding.
===============
By the way, RG, ‘energy imbalance’ ultimately isn’t going to cut it. If, and it’s a very big if, the energy is being sequestered elsewhere than the troposphere, it is just storing some up for the end of the Holocene.
===============
It’s not an if. The observations and measurements show the ocean is still gaining heat.
There cannot be an energy imbalance.the energy coming in has to go out . It all has to balance. The surface of the sea is hotter? Less clouds in that area for a while more heat into the sea that day an more radiated out that day and night. The atmosphere hotter at as level more sunlight getting through to that level and radiates out again .
Currents of hot water or air , have to be counterbalanced by cold currents nearby
Poor proxies , only when they don’ agree with models for 17 years. Before that they were so fantastic the IPCC used a whole spaghetti load of them and the US congress, smarter than the average bunny, still took its evidence in them. No bit coins here.
stevepostrel does not understand thermal physics.
Thermal gradients are the result of diffusion. Thermal gradients do not cause heat to redistribute, but are the results of the redistribution.
Heat itself does not respond to a gradient, such as a charged particle will respond to a gradient force field.
This is what leads people like you to promulgate nonsense.
observations and measurements show the ocean is still gaining heat
Show me THE actual observations and measurements.
No, None, Real, actual observations or measurements show the ocean is still gaining heat.
Only unsupported statements from desperate alarmists show the ocean is still gaining heat.
We measure the heat in the oceans by measuring temperatures.
If the oceans were gaining heat, it would show up as temperature increases and that has not happened since 1998.
lolwot re; The gradient is being reduced.
I don’t want to miss an opportunity to agree with you as they are very rare moments in my experience. Yes, the gradient is being reduced!
But if TOA energy imbalance is a paltry 0.5W/m2 that’s only enough to raise global ocean average temperature 0.2C after 100 years. The atmosphere is (mostly) warmed by the ocean so if average ocean temperature is 0.2C higher then it follows that average surface air temperature will be 0.2C higher as well. Anthropogenic global warming needs to be kicked into a much higher gear than 0.5W/m2 at TOA because that means it will take 400 years to reach the dreaded 2.0C of global warming acknowledged by warmists as the point where upsides of CO2 are outweighed by downsides. Nobody cares about 400 years hence because at the rate technology progresses we’ll be able to terraform planets by then including the earth if it needs adjusting.
lolwot re; The gradient is being reduced.
‘scuse me
At 0.2C century global ocean warming it’ll take 1000 years not 400 years to raise global average temperature by 2.0C.
Whether the ocean surface warms more than that is totally dependent on how long it takes excess surface layer energy to be diluted into the entire basin. The rate of diffusion across stratified ocean boundaries is not well known on a global basis and even weirder is that Jupiter’s gravity appears to have an easily detectable effect on it from cycles as short as 20 years to as long as 100,000 years. The last 10 in a row glacial cycles were paced by orbital parameters of gas giant planets. Smaller wiggles up to about 0.3c peak to peak since 1850 are paced by gas giant orbital parameters too (see Loehle and Scafetta 2011). We don’t understand nor predict solar variation due to cyclical things happening in the fluid sun which appears to have its own eccentricities with cycle times of as litle as to at least a thousand years. These change both total energy emitted and the distribution of total energy within the full spectrum of sunlight. Frequency shifts cause changes in the amount of energy absorbed by different materials. More UV and less near infrared instance means less solar energy absorbed by clouds and more absorbed by stratospheric ozone.
And those are just some of the known unknowns. We can’t even know, by definition, what might lurk in the category of unknown unknowns.
I think Judith left the Senate in no doubt that the IPCC sponsored models were unable to simulate the present hiatus in global temperature and are therefore not a reliable guide to future climate.
Presumably the Al Gore Si-Fi view of climate is still the view of his party and therefore the President’s.I
It seems to me that what is needed is a better climate model than the IPCC’s. One that includes the on/off nature of climate change, that only a Quantum based model could provide. I am surprised that someone out there with a knowledge of GCM,s has not already done so. Perhaps we need to know more about the effects of troposphere temperatures on the CO2 molecules than even the HITRAN can provide..This is a complex area of vibrational modes of the CO2 molecule.
Way to go, Dr. Curry!
You didn’t waste time talking about propaganda, you went forward and just did it!
And skilfully, too. Nicely nuanced historical narrative technique, subtle omission, carefully veiled insinuation. I recommend your testimony today for textbook study.
Well done, and a real turnaround for you.
Another Judith hater chimes in with a non-substantive slanderous rant. You boys are really hurting.
Thanks, Don Monfort | January 16, 2014 at 7:16 pm | for so lovingly chiming in with such a well-founded in reality assertion that there is no propaganda in senate hearings.
Why, I’m sure no one watching the hearing or reading its transcripts could find so much as a whiff of propaganda from any testimony or statement.
Unless, you know, they weren’t deaf and blind, and they knew what they were talking about, or something.
Here, some help: http://www-tc.pbs.org/weta/reportingamericaatwar/teachers/pdf/propaganda.pdf
NAME CALLING – links a person, or idea, to a negative symbol. Examples: commie, fascist, yuppie .. and might one suggest, “Judith hater”
Are we substantive yet, Don?
GLITTERING GENERALITIES – use of virtue words; the opposite of name calling, i.e., links a person, or idea, to a positive symbol. Examples: democracy, patriotism, family .. such as “the members seem pretty well educated ..
Are we substantive yet, Don?
The next two are ways of making false connections:
TRANSFER – a device by which the propagandist links the authority or prestige of something well respected and revered, such as church or nation, to something he would have us accept. Example: a political activist closes her speech with a prayer
TESTIMONIAL – a public figure or a celebrity promotes or endorses a product, a policy, or a political candidate. Examples: an athlete appears on the Wheaties box; an actor speaks at a political rally
Classic transfer notched up with a subtle irony, to use the IPCC AR5 and its associated authority, prestige and the hard-earned respect of the authors to promote the absurd notion that IPCC AR5 somehow represents the opposite to its own conclusions. And let’s face it, what else was Dr. Curry’s role than as a celebrity endorsing a policy and political candidates?
Are we substantive yet, Don?
Let’s skip over special appeals, as we can’t really speak of them without violating blog rules, to go onto:
The next two are types of logical fallacies:
BAD LOGIC – an illogical message is not necessarily propagandistic; it can be just a logical mistake; it is propaganda if logic is manipulated deliberately to promote a cause. Example: Senator X wants to regulate the power industry. All Communist governments regulate their power industries. Senator X is a Communist.
UNWARRANTED EXTRAPOLATION – making huge predictions about the future on the basis of a few small facts. Example: If the U.S. approves NAFTA, thousands of jobs and factories will move to Mexico.
Do these really need to be spelled out? Do you really need the exact quotes from Dr. Curry’s testimony that manipulate logic to promote a cause in a way that can only be considered deliberate? Because we can go there, again, if you really need to. Do you really need to have the logic of unwarranted extrapolation from a few minor methodical changes and the accidents of timing involved in IPCC AR5’s publication, leaving off Cowtan and Way’s correction to the global temperature trend although it is well-known to overcome all “The Pause” nonsense?
Are we substantive yet, Don?
Also, don’t call people ‘boy’, if you don’t want to be considered .. huh. I can’t say what you’d be considered, without violating blog etiquette. I can’t even insinuate it.
“Why, I’m sure no one watching the hearing or reading its transcripts could find so much as a whiff of propaganda from any testimony or statement.
Unless, you know, they weren’t deaf and blind, and they knew what they were talking about, or something.”
I am not one to disagree with that.
Curious though, why you are so adamant to point out only Judy’s skillful use of propaganda and not anyone else? Weren’t there were large wiffs of if coming from all the presenters? I gather you think so. What I mean is, first you congratulated Judy for a job well done using propaganda and then later in your response to Don indicated ‘any’ testimony or statement contained propaganda (and that was obvious unless you happened to be deaf, blind and didn’t know what they were talking about… i.e. not you… maybe Don). And since ‘any’ of the testimonies or statements used propaganda it is the same as saying ‘all’ of the testimonies and statements used propaganda.
So since everyone did it in the senate hearing and not just Judy… what intention do you really have in pointing this out to everyone here in such an unbalanced/biased way? Is it for the benefit of Judy to reflect on how do refrain from using propaganda for future hearings (as if using propaganda was a bad thing to do)? If so, are you trying to better Judy’s communication skills by making this point? If so, I would suggest your usage of sarcasm is not really a great way to come across as genuine… if that is what you’re intention was. I mean, for what other reason could one sarcastically point out only her usage of propaganda at the hearing as if using propaganda was a bad thing? Any idea Bart?
John Carpenter | January 17, 2014 at 6:01 pm |
Why point out Dr. Curry’s? Because of all the witnesses, indeed of all the speakers, she’s come the most distance, and done the best at overcoming her former deficits in propaganda.
As such, one suggests that the star pupil is the epitome, and the epitome is the relevant stand in to represent the whole.
I know Dr. Curry to be a sincere, honest, diligent, hard-working and incorruptible witness. Period. Full stop.
I don’t doubt most of the witnesses and some of the senators also are represented by these virtues; I believe the whole hearing itself to be represented well by the virtues of Dr. Curry.
And yet, it’s a roiling barrel of propaganda in a waterfall of propaganda on a floodway of propaganda lost in an ocean of propaganda.
Propaganda is hard to avoid. It takes real work to review and reject passages of testimony to eliminate it’s stench. And it is worth the effort to do away with, because in the end, one’s reputation is worth far more than any short-term gains of a flip turn of phrase or pat slogan. Unless you are Frank Luntz & co., in which case you cultivate a reputation for manufacturing whatever belief or disbelief, acceptance or denial, your paymaster payrolls, you should hope to be known better for other skills than agitprop.
It’s plain dirty pool, mere propaganda, to assert AR5 weakens the case for risks from AGW just because it lowers the top end temperatures projected by AGW. That needs to be called out. That there are other examples in the hearing, more egregious, I not only admit but am glad you point out, because it is far more useful to have them all exposed to the light of scrutiny and examined to their roots than to ‘win’ one side or the other of the hearing.
Aren’t you sick of politics as it went on there, too?
Bart R. takes a lot of time and words to craft his propaganda, but we still see through it. He seems to see himself as the pinnacle of subtle twist, but that is an eidolon.
Huh, dirty pool like the way increasing confidence has been decidedly promoted over, lets say, the increasing divergence between observation and model prediction?
Of course I’m sick of the politics.
John Carpenter | January 17, 2014 at 7:01 pm |
If you can substantiate it, then yes. Do as Dr. Curry, though.. don’t talk about showing it, just show it.
As for the divergence between observation and projection, I’m glad you mentioned that.
A small part of the gap is explained by how truly awful the observation is. While it’s true BEST reproduced a far more accurate representation of the observations than any other, and BEST indicated strong signs that other collections were falling further and further behind the actual temperature trend, we know BEST has some drawbacks: they’ve presented (to date, that I know of) land only, and that dataset stopped quite some time ago.
Cowtan and Way’s method again shows up this fact about how observations that take into account all observations instead of the biased sample that is easiest to collect are much closer to projections.
And still even with all corrections, we see a decided trend of divergence between actual and projection. In part, Senator Inhofe has this exactly wrong: the projections do predict the past ten years, and they do it quite reliably; many of the projections show at some point in their runs very similar trends (when we look at what BEST or Cowtan and Way tell us, especially). In part, it is right to note that the projections are not predictions, which is what every competent analyst — including those who constructed the projections — has said all along. The remarkable improvements with increasing resolution of the model grids tell us, however, that we are on the right track and fast approaching a point where model runs can adequately project probable outcomes. Twenty years from now, we might see that happen. But in the meantime, the projections all adequately show that AGW is a real affect, and a world without anthropogenic contributions is less volatile and bears lower social costs of carbon emission.
Cowtan and Way fail badly in east antarctic stations,repeating the same weighting error of Steig,ie spot the Byrd(ie) Cartography and geometry being a limitation on said authors with the geoids convergence eliminating substantive portions of the southern continent,
maksimovich | January 17, 2014 at 8:03 pm |
Which is just as likely a too low result as a too high one, and just more indication of how abysmal the effort to observe our world is.
What of it? How does this affect the discussion in the least?
Bart R,
Did you miss this reply to one of your comments?
http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/14/open-thread-5/#comment-437159
I’ve been waiting for your a reply (constructive or retraction).
Peter Lang | January 18, 2014 at 1:23 am |
Please refer to the passages containing the phrases “READ HARDER” and “HORSE TO WATER”.
The answer to your question is contained in the very lines you quote.
I expected something like that from you. You made a dismissive criticism without being able to point to any error. If I’ve interpreted you correctly, it seems the basis of your criticism is that some contributors supported carbon pricing which agrees with your position.
However, it seems you have found no error, the facts are correct and the conclusions are supported.
For the benefit of other readers, here is Bart R’s criticism and my question (that he has been dodging answering).
“
Peter Lang | January 18, 2014 at 2:15 am |
Your feelings are hurt. We get it. You don’t like being shown to be wrong. We understand. You don’t want to accept the patent evidence of your errors; who does? But it is all there, in http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/14/open-thread-5/#comment-436841 and plainly is understood as such by others, who have taken the trouble to explain it to you.
You need to get over that, and stop acting as if it hadn’t happened.
The monumental level of Dunning-Kruger it takes to believe that a self-published submission by an autodidact stands up to the peer-reviewed work of world-renowned experts, as you believe your paper stands up to some half-dozen different well-established documents, does your case in entirely.
You submit that Tol and Nordhaus support your view; when in point of fact only cherry-picked passages from their work lends some small comfort to your argument while the major thrust and conclusions of Nordhaus at least are starkly different from what you say, and even Tol is ill-represented in your citations.
You must know this, else you would not have been so surgically careful to extract only those particular bits that support your case while excising all contrary writings of your sources.
You can keep repeating the false charges about what happened, which would require everyone steadfastly avoid going back to the start of the exchange and reading it for themselves, or you can face facts and move on.
I don’t care which you choose to do. Good luck with whatever decision you reach.
Bart R,
Well, that’s the usual pile of ad hom, avoidance and obfuscation from you. Clearly you can provide nothing to back up your criticism and you don’t have the guts or integrity to withdraw it. I get it.
Two signs of a good hearing;
A. Joshua bed-wetting on the board.
B. The cover line of Climate Depot;
http://www.climatedepot.com/2014/01/16/climatologist-dr-judith-currys-testimony-at-senate-climate-hearing-attempts-to-modify-the-climate-through-reducing-co2-emissions-may-turn-out-to-be-futile-un-ipcc-now-making-a-weaker-case/
This is also reserved for inanity but not in this case.
CO2 is a greenhouse gas and more CO2 should trap some heat or radiate some heat. Do greenhouse gases radiate in or radiate out or both? Clearly they do both. Did the temperature of earth get colder or warmer in the past 16 or more years while CO2 increased? The Science is settled that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The Science is not settled as to what happens because of that and in spite of that. The natural variability, which has regulated temperature on earth for our whole time before manmade CO2 has worked without us. We humans are extremely vain to believe that is not still working and that our fraction of a trace of influence is something that can even be identified in the data.
The Science is NOT SETTLED!
” The Science is settled that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.’
Why bother whether it is settled or not? Does it matter? The greenhouse gas label is just an analogy to fool a scientifically illiterate public. It is not a scientific explanation. A scientific explanation would require that the specific heat of CO2 be much greater than has been measured in the world’s laboratories. This is a bit of physics that has always been avoided by the IPCC, because in one fell swoop it it would destroy their most cherished argument.
The best analogy is that the greenhouse gases turn the atmosphere into an insulator that maintains a gradient of about 33 C between the surface and space. Without them, there would be no gradient, and the surface would be that much colder.
With the atmoshere as it is, the Earth’s surface has mach lower thermal resistance to the atmosphere than directly to space. It transfers most of its absorbed energy to the atmosphere, in spite of smaller temperature gradients. The atmosphere, on the other hand, can only radiate to space.
The net effect of H2O for example is surface cooling, according to the consensus.
Judith,
I think your verbal remarks are brilliant, spot on, tells the truth as it is, doesn’t try to advocate in any direction. Spot on. (I haven’t read your written testimony yet).
I feel I can trust what you say!!!
Don Monfort,
I’m curious. Has the global,atmosphere warmed or not?
Has it been measured globally, or are you just believing nonsensical model output?
I agree that thermometers do not cover the surface of the Earth. I was under the impression that people claim to have measured an increase in temperature globally, over various time periods.
Oh well, I suppose you’ve just demolished those foolish people who believe that a thermometer can be used to measure air temperature.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
To Peter Lang. You cannot know that I am wrong. I have shown that the heat emissions are four times the amount accounted for in the actual measured rise in atmospheric temperature. That is a fact! Whether you are willing to accept this fact is up to you. You are entitled to your opinion of whether this fact is significant, but I intend to express it any chance I get, so why don’t you refrain from comment unless you can explain why this amount of heat has no effect on climate.
Wagathon | January
16, 2014 at 7:24 pm |
Please stop. You are wasting people’s time. You really don’t have any idea what you are talking about; the total energy that people generate, including waste heat, is orders of magnitude too small to have a significant impact on the global average surface temperature. Every scientist (from Gavin to Judith to Roy to… well to me) will tell you the same thing. Please do not keep making a fool of yourself by spouting such nonsense.
Total Anthropogenic waste heat is an order of magnitude or more less than the energy imbalance caused by increasing GH gases. See:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/tss/ahf/
Steve Fitzpatrick,
I see that you don’t believe in UHI. It can be verified that heat generated in the vicinity of a thermometer causes a rise in observed temperatures, compared to those measured in the absence of the anthropogenically created heat.
The average of individual UHIs globally gives rise to a GHI (Global Heat Influence). As to every scientist . . . , they obviously suffer from the same collective gullibility.
They have assumed that the heat from the fire is due to the CO2 resulting from the heat generating process, rather than the exothermic reaction which caused it. This type of incorrect reasoning has occurred in the past, and will no doubt occur in the future. Nature appears to be correcting the scientists. Time will tell.
CO2 induced global warming is nonsense. The effect of Man on climate is a totally different issue. Fools and frauds show a well developed ability to conflate quite separate matters to further their ends.
Might I invite you to spend a few naked hours in a desert without a bit of man made heat to avert hypothermia, and then repeat your assertion that the heat from my small fire is orders of magnitude too small to keep me warm and toasty.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
You are really making a fool of yourself, mikey. Hadad is not talking about UHI. He is claiming the waste heat is responsible for warming the atmosphere. Do you see him talking about warming thermometers? Atmosphere is different from thermometers. Are you following any of this, mikey?
Yeah, come on Flynn. We expect more from you than we do of John Holdren.
Don Monfort,
I was under the impression that the atmospheric near surface temperatures have been measured in the past using thermometers.
How have you been measuring air temperatures?
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Thermometers do not cover the surface of the earth, contrary to the beliefs of certain cartoon characters who believe that waste heat accounts for the observed warming of the atmosphere. End of story
Don Monfort,
Sorry. Wrongly posted before.
I’m curious. Has the global tmosphere warmed or not?
Has it been measured globally, or are you just believing nonsensical model output?
I agree that thermometers do not cover the surface of the Earth. I was under the impression that people claim to have measured an increase in temperature globally, over various time periods.
Oh well, I suppose you’ve just demolished those foolish people who believe that a thermometer can be used to measure air temperature.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike Flynn,
“I see that you don’t believe in UHI.”
Nah, I just don’t believe in accepting stupidity without complaint. UHI is quite real, it just doesn’t have much influence on, say, satellite based lower tropospheric temps.
The heat that humans generate globally via fossil fuels is not nearly enough to make much difference in average surface temperatures. philohaddad is just adding noise to the discussion; you ought to avoid doing the same.
People keep talking about not being able to find the source for the President’s higher social cost of carbon emission than expected ten years ago.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/inforeg/social_cost_of_carbon_for_ria_2013_update.pdf
There you go. When you’re next chatting with Jim Inhofe, you can set his mind at ease.
“So increasing GH gases and an ECS of 3C is going to heat the world up causing increasing La Nina’s hence a new Ice Age. ” quote R Gates. January 16th 8.14 pm .
Impeccable logic like that White House fellow, with more CO2 and hotter climate we will have a colder USA, did I get that right?
One worth framing,
angech | January 17, 2014 at 8:56 am |
It’s hard to say whether you got something right or not. Were you intending a “it’s cold so there’s no such thing as global warming” zing, or a “the explanation of a complicated situation is complicated, so there’s no such thing as global warming” zing, or some other kind of drive-by?
On reflection, no. Any Way you Cowtan it, you’re just plain wrong.
Overall, a well done testimony, and nothing coming from Dr.’s Curry & Dessler that was not predictable. This part of Judith’s testimony seems a bit of a stretch in the actual facts, and an important stretch:
“There is growing evidence of decreased climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.”
____
To characterize the evidence as “growing” is where the stretch comes from. The most recent major paper (Sherwood) indicates quite the opposite, and absolutely none of the recent paleoclimate data indicates this, which is a big part of the data that we are looking at in detail to ascertain sensitivity. More troubling, the recent model, observational, and paleo data is all beginning to more tightly converge at sensivity at least back at the long-term estimate of around the 3C level, if not a bit higher.
And of course, the issue of the consistent rise in the best metric of Earth’s energy balance- ocean heat content and the closely related sea level rise, get’s ignored as though, through some miracle, a warming ocean holding in the bulk of the anthropogenic energy imbalance gives we troposphere dwelling creatures a free pass.
Overall, a quite predictable hearing, which probably confirmed that both sides “tapped” the right experts to testify.
Sherwood is just more evidence of alarmist pal review. Try something else.
“Sherwood is just more evidence of alarmist pal review.”
____
In the very near future, another study will be released that will confirm how wrong your seemingly ignorant assessment of Sherwood is. Stay tuned and we’ll have fun discussing the ramifications of ECS being likely back at 3C or slightly higher. The cool phase of the PDO with a little kicker of a sleepy sun and increased aerosols has been a head-fake that movtivated “skeptics” have jumped on. What many “skeptics” love to ignore is the possibility that alterations in GH gases might affect internal variability in cycles like the PDO, ENSO, etc. Judith’s point about the warm phase of the PDO from 1976-1998 is a good one, and the question quite germain to trying to understand how much of that period was anthropogenic versus PDO, but the more important point is actually how much is the PDO (and by extension, the nature of the ENSO cycle) being influenced by the highest GH gas concentrations in millions of years. If you think the answer is zero, you might be disappointed by the upcoming studies. Here’s a clue– a tendency toward a more frequent La Nina state, driven specifically by increasing GH gas concentrations (and similar to conditions in the mid-Pliocene), may provide some modulation of tropospheric temperature spikes, but that energy will be advected somewhere (the idea of homogenous dispersion throughout the ocean is absurd), and that somewhere is exactly where we are seeing the biggest changes in the climate right now– the Arctic. Please stay tuned…
We can hardly wait for more model wizardly to be passed along to us by our consensus climate science pal review Team. Keep us updated, gatesy.
“The most recent major paper (Sherwood) indicates quite the opposite, and absolutely none of the recent paleoclimate data indicates this, which is a big part of the data that we are looking at in detail to ascertain sensitivity”
Wonderful. Can you point me to a study which examines paleoclimatic temperature, CO2 and atmospheric aerosols and reconciles them with present day temperature, CO2 and atmospheric aerosols? You see the thing is I have been waiting for a long time for someone to explain the lack of ‘forcing’ that aerosols, three orders of magnitude greater than present, during the ice-ages.
The paper of Sherwood et al tells only that when you measure a different thing you get also a different answer.
HadCRUT4 measures the average temperature over most of the globe, but not all of it. Arctic amplification is a long known phenomenon. Thus adding polar regions to the estimate of warming has been known to add to the rate of warming. Sherwood et al made an estimate on the size of this effect.
I have argued many times that a good index of warming has several properties, fully global coverage is not at the top of the requirements. It’s a nice feature, but not essential and may well contradict more important considerations like minimization of noise or relevance for humans and life.
All temperature indexes are troubled by noise, OHC is better in that respect, but temperature is what people observe, and temperature is what has direct influence on all life. But that concerns temperature, where people or life is. Very little lives in polar regions.
“I have argued many times that a good index of warming has several properties, fully global coverage is not at the top of the requirements. It’s a nice feature, but not essential and may well contradict more important considerations like minimization of noise or relevance for humans and life.
—–
A robust and scientifically objective measurement or index of “warming”, or more accurately, changes to the energy balance of a climate system needs to cover as much of that system as possible, as every part of that system, especially a chaotic system, will determine the various states that system may be in. How the net energy affects human and other life is of course important, and the biosphere is certainly part of the energy balance.
R.Gates,
Covering a wider area in the calculation of the average does not necessarily lead to a more representative index. It does not, if the added area behaves irregularly and is not as well correlated with the underlying process, the persistent warming in this case.
I consider it quite possible, and even likely that temperatures of polar regions have exactly that kind of behavior. HadCRUT4 may well be better correlated with OHC than an index calculated by adding to the calculation of the index the estimated warming of polar regions.
Several factors may lead to this:
– Large uncertainties in estimating the average temperature.
– Large “random” variability in the actual polar temperatures related to cold dry atmosphere, small effective heat capacity, and the tendency to have strong temperature inversion.
I rarely ever disagree with Pekka, but this is political. You take out the poles, and the barbarians sack Rome and the dark ages commence.
It’s time to modernize the definition of surface warming. Keep the arctic. Keep Antarctica. Add in the oceans to 2000 meters. Massacre the Barbarians at the gates.
Turn civilization over to Britain? You’re out of your mind, Pekka. Think tonyb and the death of global science via the CET.
Hadcrappy3 back on the throne? Good gawd.
RG, indeed.
The fact of the matter is that the ECS = 3°C for doubling of CO2 has not changed over the last several decades, ever since the Charney report estimate of 1979.
http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/~brianpm/charneyreport.html
By my own modeling — using the CSALT formulation — I get an ECS=3C by fitting to land-based records such as BEST. Only the land will respond quickly to the fast-feedbacks of CO2, which is what the skeptics seem to be missing in their analysis.
JCH said;
‘Think tonyb and the death of global science via the CET.’
You are too kind. However , like it or not very many scientists who have studied it somewhat longer than you (and even Pekka) believe CET has merit far beyond these shores. That includes the view of the Met Office amongst others..
Personally I think the correlation is better to the NH rather than global but we shall see if I ever get time to write my article on the subject. The trouble is there are too many fish queuing up in the barrel to be shot before that one.
tonyb
Seriously tonyb, an island, and not a really big one, in an ocean? I want to meet these knucklehead scientists.
Tony,
I was somewhat surprised by the strong correlation between CET and global or NH MST when calculated from 10 y averages (the same for GMST and NHMST), but now I realized that the reason was fully in the dominance of AGW in that calculation. AGW is by far the most important reason for variability over the period covered by HadCRUT4. Without its dominant effect the correlation is rather weak.
Pekka,
I appreciate your perspective, but I look not just at temperature, but the total energy of the climate system, with our knowledge of that energy having increased greatly over the past 10 years– specifically because of the rapid expansion of the Argo program, Grace satellites, Jason & Topix. These direct observational platforms are giving us an unparalleled view of the energy in the climate system, and most importantly, a view in which our uncertainty is narrowing and the consistent conclusion arising that total energy in the climate system is increasing on a very consistent basis. This total energy increase, highly related to anthropogenic activities, should be considered the true climate sensitivity. Because of the rapid transformation of energy from one form to another in the climate system…i.e. going from latent heat to sensible heast to kinetic to geopotential, the only accurate way to discuss the energy imbalance is to look at as big a snapshot of the total energy we can. In regards to the cryosphere, as the net ice mass on the planet has been declining steadily, this must be taken into account as part of the total energy mix. We also of course know that the northern sea ice is particularly vulnerable to rapid change (geologically speaking) given the greater advection of energy to that region and the properties of Arctic amplification (positive feedbacks) that we are become more familiar with.
Using the CET temperature series is problematic.
This figure shows what global factors that CET misses:
http://imageshack.com/a/img829/4871/l2p6.gif
Before 1865, HadCET is essentially the only input for HadCRUT and one can see that HadCET misses the strong warming pulse of 1878.
Even the CSALT model can predict that pulse! While CET fails miserably!
R. Gates,
Various indexes have their strengths and weaknesses.
OHC has its virtues. It’s based on a real physical quantity that follows a conservation law. That makes it stable and that makes all changes in it to be real changes, not something dependent on details of definition. It’s one main weakness is that it’s difficult to measure. It’s stability would make it ideal in describing short term variations, but it cannot be measured well enough to tell about those even with the present ARGO floats, past OHC is known still worse. Its other weakness is that OHC is hiding in the oceans as an very small change in average temperature. That change by itself does not affect much anything, but the temperature change is not uniform and some of the larger changes do have a direct effect. We can conclude that to know about the effects we need to know about the distribution, not the average.
The part of OHC that has direct influence is closely linked with the surface temperature (SST), but that’s further related to GMST. GMST has the essential virtue that it tells more directly about the influence, but the average is not important in that but the local changes. Those have influence where the people are, and where life can be observed. HadCRUT4 covers fairly well those areas. Average benefit or damage is not the benefit or damage of average temperature change, but the connection is not as remote as with OHC.
The fully global MST is not observable with present measuring network. Temperatures vary much more in Arctic or Antarctic winter than elsewhere. That leads to both noise and overweight of those areas in the index when compared with the connection to OHC or other more stable indexes.
Nice informative comment, Pekka. We need more of this and less of SEASALT.
If you are in business, you stop yapping when you close the deal.
With scientific research, you never clam up, because nature always gets in the last word.
And by the way, it is CSALT, Don Monckton.
It is just naive curve fitting, webby. Call it anything you like. Do you belong to the curve fitters union?
Not naive curve fitting,Don. That’s what financial types do.
I have seen that among some financial types, webby. They don’t last long. Many end up driving cabs or waiting tables. The higher skilled practitioners have found succor in the climate science industry.
He makes the claim that of financial types:
“The higher skilled practitioners have found succor in the climate science industry.”
Care to give examples of people that have switched from economics and financial analysis to climate science? I know that economists such as NW here act like they know what they are doing, but they get ripped to shreds by their lack of scientific background.
“I get an ECS=3C by fitting to land-based records such as BEST. Only the land will respond quickly to the fast-feedbacks of CO2, which is what the skeptics seem to be missing in their analysis”
Indeed? Where does the ‘wobblyness’ of he surface temperature come from? We know that volcanoes can give a couple of years of cooling, but the oceans are the only things that can move around large amounts of thermalizible heat. So, we can guess that changes in ocean heat profiles, like the PDO and the AMO are indicated by the 2-10 year ‘wobbles’ of the SST.
This is HADSST2
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadSST2.pdf
Now the land only data
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/CRUTEM3.pdf
Looks to me like the hemispheric alterations of the SST alters the land temperature; with a much closer correlation between land and SST within each hemisphere. What does this suggest?
Well it is reasonable to suppose that a temperature spike on land does not alter the nearby SST as there is no mechanism for transporting a large amount of heat, on the other hand it is reasonable to suppose that a temperature spike at the SST can transport large amounts of heat to nearby land, by the conversion of latent heat of vapourizaion into sensible heat.
So assuming that the TCS over land is equal to the ECS over land, and is thus equal to global ECS, is unfounded, as it is rather easy for massive amounts of heat to be transferred from ocean to land, hence the 1998 spike on land temperature, that came from an equatorial ocean even.
Web, if you go around fling ‘thermodynamics’ around, it helps if you understand the basics. Again, describe how the SOI is calculated and then tell us how this metric is a thermodynamic descriptor.
Note, the SOI a discontinuous series.
” I know that economists such as NW here act like they know what they are doing, but they get ripped to shreds by their lack of scientific background”
NW is the only person here who has a background in modeling non-linear, dynamic systems which operate in a pseudo-cyclical manner. He understands that evolved complex systems are robust, elastic and yet highly variable on some scales.
People disregard, or denigrate his input for three reasons.
1) ignorance
2) stupidity
3) nothing else.
Seriously, the SOI is an indication of a pressure difference, which in term is a measure of force in the thermodynamic terminology. The SOI also maps to the estimate of the global averaged angular momentum, also known as wind energy. Huge pressure differentials lead to a significant amount of kinetic energy held aloft which dissipates over the earth.
Thermodynamically, a free energy increase will get allocated to kinetic, thermal, potential, and latent terms and what CSALT does is book-keep the terms such that there are no discontinuous changes from year-to-year.
This is the decomposition of factors when it comes to explaining the warming trend. The factors are staggered so you can easily separate them.
http://imageshack.com/a/img28/5309/2sqg.gif
When all these factors are put together, we get a composite model which seems to match reality:
http://imageshack.com/a/img28/1736/cewu.gif
Almost impossible to separate the data from the model except for the effects of a 3-year exponential smoothing at the beginning of the time series.
Too good to be true, eh? That’s what makes this so much fun.
what Van said
“The basic mystery in thermodynamics is the universality. The validity of thermodynamic equations and theories regularly exceed the expectations. “
[1]P. Ván, “Thermodynamics of continua: the challenge of universality,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1305.3582, 2013.
“Seriously, the SOI is an indication of a pressure difference, which in term is a measure of force in the thermodynamic terminology”
You evidently didn’t actually look as to how the SOI is calculated before you included it in your model. I ask you again. In your own words, explain how the SOI is constructed. Basted on the methodology used to construct this discontinuous series, explain how it can be used as a thermodynamic metric, which means that it represents some quality of energy.
“The SOI also maps to the estimate of the global averaged angular momentum, also known as wind energy.”
Oh, you are a gift that keeps giving.
Explain the metric to the class
DocMartyn asks a rhetorical question as he knows that the SOI is the difference in pressure between two locations. Of course, the seasonal component is removed which is typical for these kinds of measures. One way to do this is to take all the January readings, all the February, etc, and normalize those to have the same mean value over the entire range.
Sour grapes because he realizes that MNFTIU.
Now watch this drive:
http://imageshack.com/a/img28/1736/cewu.gif
“DocMartyn asks a rhetorical question as he knows that the SOI is the difference in pressure between two locations. Of course, the seasonal component is removed which is typical for these kinds of measures. One way to do this is to take all the January readings, all the February, etc, and normalize those to have the same mean value over the entire range”
The calculation of SOI depends on the monthly calculation of air pressure difference and the average and standard deviation of the historical record of that month.Let us take the months of Feb and July and imagine we record an identical difference in air pressure at the two stations.
For February the average pressure difference is 4.74 and the SD is 2.17.
For July the average pressure difference is 0.97 and the SD is 1.6.
so the calculated SOI’s are
(Feb): 10*((0-4.74)/2.17) = -21.9
(Jul): 10*((0-0.97)/1.6) = -6.1
(x-Average(x))/SD(x) is not generally agreed thermodynamic quantity,
Having a different number of days in the months of Feb/Jul is also a bit of a pain as the intrinsic quality of SD is different from month to month.
One has the suspicion that Web has not quite understood the meaning of the term ‘statistical thermodynamics’.
DocMartyn | January 17, 2014 at 6:16 pm |
NW is the only person here who has a background in modeling non-linear, dynamic systems which operate in a pseudo-cyclical manner. He understands that evolved complex systems are robust, elastic and yet highly variable on some scales.
People disregard, or denigrate his input for three reasons.
1) ignorance
2) stupidity
3) nothing else.
———————————————————————–
At least the only qualified person willing to waste time on Pukite a.k.a. whut.
I’m waiting for whut to try publishing his model in a peer reviewed journal. Maybe he already tried and was rejected out of hand. One thing for sure is that Pukite is not an acknowleged expert in the field and furthermore won’t ever become one through anonymous blog commentary where his peers are Max_OK and lolwot. ROFLMAO
Pekka said, “Several factors may lead to this:
– Large uncertainties in estimating the average temperature.
– Large “random” variability in the actual polar temperatures related to cold dry atmosphere, small effective heat capacity, and the tendency to have strong temperature inversion.”
Right and because of the lack of data prior to 1950, this temporarily pads the warmist case. The Arctic relationship should change in the next few years which should produce about a 0.2C negative swing in “global” temperatures in the GISS 1200km version which will produce a difficult challenge for the warmistas. I may not be around for that, but it should be humorous.
DocMartyn said:
Interesting how I explain that seasonal adjustments can be normalized, yet he ignores that and goes about trying to school me on what I just explained.
Take a different slant — consider that this is really no different than normalizing night and day readings from a temperature record. Just because the temperature fluctuates during a day does not mean that we can’t take historical records that span years.
Look, the Mauna Loa records of CO2 also show seasonal adjustments, yet no one seriously denies that the long-term trend is what matters.
The pressure readings on the SOI are no different and the seasonal influence is simply a nuisance signal that needs to be removed. That’s where statisticians can contribute, for example in getting rid of nuisance signals.
DocMartyn is taking the approach of NW and hopelessly trying to pin a statistical failing on my findings. Doc has tried to do the same thing with respect to OHC records in the past. Of course with OHC, the data are much more noisy and everyone agrees that one can only go so far in accounting for the year-on-year variations. However, the quality of the temperature records in series such as GISTEMP are much better and therefore we can do more in terms of deconstructing the series into its constituent factors. That’s what CSALT does.
This really isn’t for the faint-hearted. If someone wants to try it, I suggest using the monthly records, in spite of what DocMartyn says. Doing monthly is critically in being able to align the thermodynamic records from different sources. For example, when one uses the yearly records for SOI and compares them with yearly records of GISS, there is ambiguity and uncertainty into where the average is meant to be applied — is it the first of the year, or is it halfway through the year? By using monthly, the uncertainty is at the level of the month.
When all is said and done, this kind of attention to detail results in high resolution fits with discrimination-worthy correlation coefficients. You won’t get this kind of agreement by happenstance or coincidence:
http://imageshack.com/a/img89/5736/1jg.gif
Can’t do that with OHC data yet due to what appears to be excessive epistemic statistical noise in the records.
“This sense that extreme weather events are now more frequent and intense is symptomatic of “weather amnesia” prior to 1970.”
Does anyone really think the chronic media, activist and imagined climate “scientists” weather hyperbole are attributed to “amnesia” of historic records and empirical evidence of extreme weather events over an extended comparative time??
No, of course not.
They’re engaged in massive distortion to expedite their political lust to tax and control carbon interests largely based on their political consistency. If there is any “sense” among the public that weather currently is more extreme it’s evidence that Joseph Goebbels was good at his job as well.
Why put lipstick on the pig and just come right out and state it, AGW is so desperate of empirical facts it needs ever increasing doses of fear and catastrophic rhetoric to maintain it’s declining intellectual and perhaps more importantly its political viability. It has zero to do with AMNESIA or for that matter science at all and everything to do with people who will lie about most anything across the board. Lying for a grotesque and well known reason that should have been confirmed in the testimony directly.
As always, the bar is set low and comparatively Dr. Curry was somewhat reasoned. Next to Barbara Boxer and Cory Booker who were off the wall crazy as expected we shouldn’t “nitpick” right? We should be having hearings on the political corruption of science itself that help rationalize regulatory excess as the meme of AGW has demonstrated time and again. We should again be raising the bar to what is obvious instead of the minimized science acknowledgements that might have shocked the informed of the debate 15 years ago. This is all mutually exclusive of the continued core arrogance and stupidity of the AGW activists and mouthpieces who are heavy lifting for this failed administration.
We can only hope that the GOP will go to the Constitutional mattresses to obstruct this totalitarian EPA abuse but the track record isn’t especially good to date. Raising expectations and rhetorical honesty is still essential and net of everything the hearing was a farce as expected. Dr. Curry could do so much more but chooses to maintain a moderation that is based on political disposition rather than the existing facts driving the AGW fanaticism. It really isn’t that defend-able.
Now we got some slander from the other extreme. Judith’s testimony was influenced by politics, the anonymous clown14 alleges. It’s too bad that you didn’t listen when the adults told you to stay in school. You might have become an accomplished climate scientist and gotten an invite to testify at a Senate hearing. As it is, you just get to shoot your mouth off on Judith’s blog.
Where is little david apple? I hope he is OK. It’s not like him to miss an important meeting of the Judith haters.
Even under cwon14’s own theory of what is going on, his proposed rhetorical strategy for our hostess is absurd. I’ve never been a fisherman, but I know that if you tug too hard on the line it breaks and the fish swims away. The same applies to the drastic-conversion, tribal-switch move in heated debates. We have many examples of this, including the head of Greenpeace “defecting” but having no measurable impact on the opinions of either greens or the uncommitted public. The usual result of following cwon14’s advice is a simple reversal of the direction from which the spitballs and the backslaps come.
In any case, it’s quite likely that Judith does not concur with cwon14’s diagnosis of the situation. But his/her rhetorical error even if she did should be noted for future reference since he/she has said the same thing a bazillion times and seems likely to continue in the future.
The main point stands;
Is “weather amnesia” a serious reason for the consensus (political, media, “science” community in coordination) posture regarding current weather (extreme or otherwise) to carbon??
It’s a Y or N for a start and then try to defend it. For those with a “Y” reply I have some swamp land to sell you.
For all the nuanced conflict with alarmist postures it’s exactly this sort of disinformation that preserves the AGW meme. That rationalization of “why” things are the way they are is a core problem of preserving dead alarmist’s authority. I picked something that was glaring and “amnesia” is only a tiny single sample of the phony equalization of the current debate that Dr. Curry routinely presents and many of the personality cult applaud or ignore. Dr. Lindzen and others acknowledge it, Dr. Curry obfuscates the entire motive of AGW agenda science with such narratives.
People who can’t confirm the AGW agenda motives are either fools but more likely willful and deceptive based on their presupposed political bias and culture that they come from. The latter is actually a much more damning charge. Since the AGW motive is a reflection of complete corruption, collectivist Utopian-ism, statist authoritarianism there simply isn’t a half-loaf compromise to justify Dr. Curry’s overall view. She needs to denounce the consensus manipulation of the term “science”, acknowledge the motives that drove it for 40+ years born of eco-radicalism of other kinds as a better starting point.
She does not. End of story.
stevepostrel | January 16, 2014 at 8:54 pm |
“Even under cwon14′s own theory of what is going on, his proposed rhetorical strategy for our hostess is absurd. I’ve never been a fisherman, but I know that if you tug too hard on the line it breaks and the fish swims away.”
In the end Dr. Lindzen will be remembered, many will be forgotten and Dr. Curry lost an opportunity. Under your plan the AGW meme goes on forever in part because knowledgeable people adhered to political correctness, their own predisposition (academic left) which includes policy authority translating into political practice.
We need for lack of a better metaphor a number of Elia Kazan moments, confess and name names. Yes, AGW is a green left policy meme, yes it drives the science conclusion before the first research task is/was undertaken, yes most of climate science participants are left-wing in nature. Yes, it’s political lust for central planning (expert and government top-down management) that contrives consensus “science”. I was one of them and many associated to the IPCC remain so.
It’s only a pretty basic truth that Dr. Curry isn’t formally acknowledging SP, so I’m not the one to be faulted. She is holding back progress in this obfuscation.
cwon14 says: “Yes, it’s political lust for central planning (expert and government top-down management) that contrives consensus “science”. I was one of them and many associated to the IPCC remain so.”
So why are you not making public your own conversion experience on this issue rather than remaining anonymous while asking her to take all the risks in public?
It reminds me of the old story after Khruschev gave his “secret speech” to the Party about Stalin’s crimes and cult of personality when a shout came from the audience “Where were you when all these evil things were done?” Khruschev replied, “Who asked that question?” When the sea of faces remained silent, he said “Well, Comrade, I was where you are now.”
We’ll done Dr. Curry!
“The stagnation in greenhouse warming observed over the past 15+ years demonstrates that CO2 is not a control knob that can fine tune climate variability on decadal and multi-decadal time scales.”
How can 15+ years demonstrate anything “multi-decadal”?
What matters is that on multi-decadal timescales (eg 3 or 5 decades) CO2 IS a control knob. Only greenhouse effect deniers and “0.1C sensitivity” folk can argue with that. Everyone else who follows the science, yourself included surely, has to accept that climate sensitivity estimates almost certainly show CO2 to be the dominant driver of global temperature over the next 50 years.
“Even if CO2 mitigation strategies are successfully implemented and climate model projections are correct, an impact on the climate would not be expected for a number of decades.”
Momentum. If you slam on the brakes the car doesn’t stop immediately, but since when has that been an argument for not using brakes?
“Further, solar variability, volcanic eruptions and natural internal climate variability will continue to be sources of unpredictable climate surprises.”
But come on, all of those things pale into comparison with CO2 in the longterm. See the CS figures again.
Even if CO2 causes 1.5C per doubling (and that’s a low estimate), and you double CO2, you are going to get 1.5C warming – twice the warming seen in the 20th century.
1.5C warming is simply far greater than anything natural. Nature hasn’t pushed temperature anything like that in a century. In short how can CO2 at the rate we are emitting it not be a control knob?
CO2 is certainly not a fine-tuning — it is rather an aggressive tuning on the climate. The Stadium Wave is the biggest of the fine-tuning factors and that appears to only be +/- 0.1 C compared to the 0.8C caused by CO2 (and this factor is 50% larger on land).
Let’s consider an analogy. We place electrodes between a skeptic monkey’s appendages and place a 10 V peak AC signal across the leads. In series with this, we place a DC voltage level that gradually increases to 80 V. The 10V is natural and the DC is CO2. Is that what we would call a fine-tuning? Shock the monkey, indeed.
Makes sense to me. In terms of the risk this has never been about decadal fine tuning, but about (preventing) the longterm slide into an entirely different climate the Earth hasn’t seen for millions of years.
Lolwot as Mosher would say 15 + years could demonstrate a lot in a multidecadal time scale, heck 15 minutes or heaven forbid 15 seconds could be used. Admittedly the last two would not be as reliable and might qualify as a poor metric. But 15 + years is a decade and a half plus so qualifies as a multi decadal metric and the fact that you hate it because it disagrees with your world view does not make it a poor metric. In fact if a pause stoppage is starting it is the best and most comprehensive metric available. Again when a metric disagrees you find it poor, why not say it is just a metric as good as any other 1;5 year metric we have.
I use a model called CSALT as a predictive tool for climate. This uses temperature records dating back to 1880 to generate an estimate of global average temperature.
Recently, I applied it to hindcast temperature to the 15 years before 1880, essentially to the date where all the necessary thermodynamic factors were available:
http://contextearth.com/wp-content/comment-image/4848.gif
Of course, the CSALT model gets the temperature spot on, even though it goes through some significant up and down shifts.
Before the date 1865, not all the modeling factors are available, in particular SOI, so that the model diverges in the details.
I am in no rush to do a forward-projection of temperature using CSALT, because I have been doing environmental prognostication long enough to realize that everyone only seems to remember the original prediction only. But it is pretty obvious that the pause or hiatus will not continue based on thermodynamic considerations, together with the relentless rise of atmospheric CO2.
Max_OK
See my response which closely follows your earlier (5:04pm) post.
Your question is answered.
In short, how can CO2 at the rate we are emitting it not be a control knob?
Manmade CO2 is a fraction of a gas that is a trace gas.
It is really not common sense to believe it has any more than a fraction of a trace effect.
There is NO data to support more than an unmeasurable effect.
Only Climate models that have been wrong for decades show a problem.
“common sense” would say that the trace gas ozone can’t protect the earth from harmful UV rays.
fortunately science works on evidence, rather than common sense, and shows that the ozone layer does indeed protect us from harmful UV rays. Turns out trace gases like ozone and CO2 have a huge influence due to absorbing radiation.
You are in trouble, Herman. You have given lollie the opportunity to look intelligent and reasonable. Please don’t help them.
Herman,
The trace gas argument is clearly bogus. Even I was able to figure that out years ago when I heard Joe Bastardi pounding the table about it. “how can a trace gas necessary for life etc etc, blah blah” Painful to be on the same side as lollywot.
I believe Monckton still uses the trace gas argument, but good to see the skeptics are seeing through this now.
Lolwot,
Common sense and science are in agreement with respect to ozone. Short wave ionising UV is prevented by reaching the surface by being absorbed by O2. The energy is used in creating monoatomic oxygen – leading to the creation of ozone. Ozone rapidly oxidises back to oxygen, releasing heat.
There is a lot of oxygen in comparison with the amount of ionising radiation available. Hence, not a great deal of ozone at any given time.
Ozone indeed absorbs longer wave UV. it heats up, and effectively re emits the energy at a longer wavelength. So do many other constituents of the atmosphere.
So once again, cause is confused with effect. CO2 warming? Nonsense.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
It is said, but not proven, how much trace gases like ozone and CO2 have a huge influence.
HAP, these days they have instruments called infrared spectrometers that can measure the effect of CO2 at various wavelengths in the atmosphere, and its direct impacts on intensity so it is all quantified and it agrees with physics too. No mysteries there.
Jim D
it is all quantified
AND DIRECT EFFECT OF CO2 IS REALLY SMALL
Only Climate Model feedback makes it big.
Climate Models, those things that predict warming that never happens.
trace gases like ozone and CO2 have a huge influence due to absorbing radiation.
actually, the ozone does show a huge influence.
actually, the CO2 does show a small influence.
Water Vapor does the heavy duty work with IR.
HAP, the measurable effect corresponds to 3.7 W/m2 per doubling. You can consider that small, or just deny it, but it is measurable and about equivalent to a 1% solar increase.
Judith,
Should this comparison be between the rate of rise or the total rise over those two periods?
If it is the rate of rise, it is a fair comparison, but if it is the magnitude (i.e. in mm), then I interpret your dot point to mean that the rate of rise is 50% greater in the later period than in the earlier period (since the later period is 19 years and the earlier period is 30 years duration).
This is the quote from the IPCC so I interpret it as the rate
” Between 1993 and 2010, the rate was very likely higher at 3.2 [2.8 to 3.6] mm yr–1; similarly high rates likely occurred between 1930 and 1950.”
@ Steven Mosher | January 16, 2014 at 10:25 pm |
“heh! Mosher considers GCM output to be “evidence.” Right.”
of course its evidence. If the output is very wrong its evidence that something needs fixing. If the results are in line with observation its evidence the models can capture relevant aspects of reality. Anything can be evidence. finding a logic flaw is evidence. data is evidence. a theory that doesnt predict well is evidence.
The question is “evidence of what” a …
*****
Since it is putatively a General Circulation Model of climate, one would expect it’s output to deal with climate. The output could be evidence of something else, I suppose, but then, so what? We are interested in the climate and the output of the model is not evidence of anything concerning climate. Of course, you are free to define evidence however you choose, but frankly that’s getting pretty boring.
Jim, don’t you believe that the output of the GCM is evidence that they aren’t good at simulating the climate? What if the GCMs produced results that you liked? Would that be evidence of something?
Don. OK, it can be construed as evidence of some sort. Again I say, SO WHAT? The output is not related to the real climate. Therefore, it IS NOT evidence related to climate either. We’re discussing climate, mostly, not programming.
The output is related to the real climate, jim. It’s obviously got significant parts of it wrong. We all agree to stipulate that the GCMs don’t provide evidence for AGW, if that mollifies you.
So, Don, you believe climate is controlled by a supercomputer? Interesting. Are you partial to tin foil hats?
Are you jimmy dee’s brother?
It’s just that GCMs are computer programs. The data, in a CS sense, is output. The problem is that the programs are deficient in the sense that grid cells are too large, clouds aren’t fully represented, approximations are made for different phenomena, etc. The climate contains the only true representation of climate – GCMs don’t. Therefore, their output contains nothing that I would consider evidence of a cause some phenomenon of climate. Can the output be evidence of how not to program a climate model? Certainly! On a side note, as a programmer I have to wonder if something like Agile is used. Do the models have automated unit tests. What other methods are used to find bugs in these byzantine monstrosities?
I see that Judith has, with some certainty, doubled down on the hiatus continuing. This is something that can go wrong and damage credibility very fast. The global surface temperature is already starting to rise even without an El Nino, and ocean, land and Arctic temperatures have been rising anyway with no pause.
“I see that Judith has, with some certainty, doubled down on the hiatus continuing.”
There is a reason for that called the Stadium Waves:
“In a recent journal publication, I provided a rationale for projecting that the hiatus in warming could extend to the 2030’s.”
IF:
“If the hiatus does extend beyond 20 years, then a very substantial reconsideration will be needed of the 20th century attribution and the 21st century projections of climate change.”
It’s perfectly good reasoning on her part in expressing confidence in the Stadium Waves work.
I have no doubt that the Stadium Wave hypothesis is operational, as I use it in the formulation of my CSALT model where it is manifested as the Length of Day (LOD) free energy factor:
http://contextearth.com/2013/10/26/csalt-model/
Unfortunately, the contribution of the LOD term is at best +/- 0.1 C, so that it is pointless to consider that it will stem the tide of the relentless CO2 thermal forcing function acting as the control knob of the Earth’s climate.
Web,
I wasn’t alluding to the veracity of the Stadium Waves hypothesis. I was simply pointing to the reasoning Dr. Curry may have regarding the hiatus and why it may continue. Whether or not she is justified in her belief, it explains why she has it.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/10/10/the-stadium-wave/#more-13302
“The stadium wave periodically enhances or dampens the trend of long-term rising temperatures, which may explain the recent hiatus in rising global surface temperatures.
“The stadium wave signal predicts that the current pause in global warming could extend into the 2030s,” Wyatt said, the paper’s lead author.
Curry added, “This prediction is in contrast to the recently released IPCC AR5 Report that projects an imminent resumption of the warming, likely to be in the range of a 0.3 to 0.7 degree Celsius rise in global mean surface temperature from 2016 to 2035.” Curry is the chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.”
As seen in Figure 3 of the Stadium wave paper the last ‘cool end’ of the waves lasted from approximately 1941 to 1973. Wave -I bottomed in 2000 so wave -IV could be expected to bottom in about 2032 if it lasts the same period of time.
ordvic said:
No, the warming from Curry’s Stadium Wave peaked in 1937 and bottomed in 1979. That is a half-period of 42 years. So we have until 1979+42=2021 before we hit the peak, assuming it is sinusoidal and quasi-periodic.
What you have missed in your understanding is that the temporal phase of the Stadium Wave depends on the geographical location where it is measured. The Stadium Wave needs to be averaged to determine how it impacts the global temperature. And that has a peak in 1937 and a bottom in 1979.
BTW, Jean Dickey from NASA JPL is a good resource for measurements of the Stadium Wave. She was the first to make the connection between Length Of Day and the long-term oscillating temperature.
http://www.today.com/id/42034517/ns/today-today_tech/t/what-earths-core-says-about-climate-warming/
“These deep waves of motion occurred in periods of 85, 50, 35 and 28 years and are at the root of the long-term rotational variations as well. “
Web, thanks for that link. I have Dickey’s paper from sep ’97 but I don’t think it elaborates like that article.
“No, the warming from Curry’s Stadium Wave peaked in 1937 and bottomed in 1979. That is a half-period of 42 years. So we have until 1979+42=2021 before we hit the peak, assuming it is sinusoidal and quasi-periodic.”
I’m not seeing that? I see the peak of Wave IV in 1937 like you said but the only thing I see for 1979 is a peak of ArcSib.
Because the year 1979 is a bottom valley and not a peak.
The upcoming peak will be weak.
Dr. Judith, you did a superb job and absolutely need no advice from the likes of me, but:
Listening to your excellent testimony it was clear that you were extremely careful and competent in using clear unambiguous scientifically supportable language. This is understandable and consistent with your rigorous approach to the topic. The problem is that there are no “sound bites” useful to the media and other scientifically illiterate folks.
Would it be possible to say in a fifteen second opener that “I’m about to use some carefully chosen scientifically correct terminology to say that ……..” and to present a message in layman’s terms?
Once again, your testimony was superb and my trivial suggestion probably should be ignored!
“As a result of the hiatus in warming, there is growing appreciation for the importance of natural climate variability on multi-decadal timescales.“
Dr Curry’s sentence summarizes the scientific argument more simply and elegantly than I have seen before. Any educated person, even without a scientific background, would understand her argument.
After reading Hubert Lamb 25 or more years ago–his earlier book, before he converted to AGW–I was persuaded that climate is naturally variable, so variable that climate alarmists have an immense burden to prove the AGW theory.
That was before I did an M.S. in Earth Science. You don’t need a degree in science to understand Lamb’s books. Too bad Lamb adopted AGW after he founded the CRU. How much this was attributable to peer pressure we may never know. A topic for some future historian of science?
Dr Curry identifies the real issue, “Sensitivity of the climate to carbon dioxide, and the level of uncertainty in its value, is a key input into the economic models…” In effect, how much warming can be attributed to GHG?. Lord Kelvin would have loved the claim that the AGW theory has to be correctly quantified in order to stand.
In my view, the effects of GHG have been masked by natural variability and may turn out to be insignificant for human welfare. Whether or not natural variability is chaotic or deterministic remains a scientific issue, presently more a philosophical than a scientific one.
Disclaimer: I am NOT skeptical about the physical theory and evidence that GHGs tend to warm the globe. My reason for not accepting AGW is that the feedbacks are not known well. For AGW to be valid, the net long-term feedbacks have to be positive or at least neutral.
Also, solar impacts and their feedbacks must be better constrained. Svensmark’s cosmo-climatology theory of climate change is a strong contender as an alternative. But it’s not the only solar game in town.
Before we accept AGW there is a lot more work to be done to exclude natural variability as the explanation for the observed changes in temperature and precipitation.
…not to mention that in the geological record of the Earth, increases in atmospheric CO2 follows global warming by hundreds of years.
Waggy probably believes borrowing increases debt but interest on loans doesn’t. He should destroy his credit cards.
Wagathon, so your theory is that the CO2 caused the paleo volcanoes that ended the Permian, or dominated the Eocene, etc., not the other way round. Interesting idea, but somewhat typical of the backward thinking of self-styled skeptics.
Frederick
Lamb wrote this in the preface to the second edition of his book ‘Climate History…’
“The idea of climate change has at last taken on with the public after generations which assumed that climate could be taken as constant. But it is easy to notice the common assumption that mans science and modern industry and technology are now so powerful that any change of climate or the environment must be due to us. It is good for us to be more alert and responsible in our treatment of the environment, but not to have a distorted view of our own importance. Above all, we need more knowledge, education and understanding in these matters.”
Hubert Lamb December 1994
I’m not sure I have seen much evidence of his ‘conversion.’ Lamb was an avid researcher who unearthed much material still of value today and was convinced of the wide natural variability in climate he found all over the globe. Which is not to say he didn’t feel man impacted on nature in a number of ways.
tonyb
tony b,
Lamb’s preface, i’d say, could uv been written by yer-self.
Hubris has been evah with us but some modest individ-u-als
take the trouble ter investigate long term history of climate
variability, human history with an open mind.
A serf.
… the only thing ad hom attacks do is telegraph global warmists’ intention to say something they know is deceiving. It’s all becoming pretty clear that a human signal does not exist at all without manipulating the data and pointing to statistical models that real world observations invalidate altogether.
The only correlation observed between increased CO2 and global warming, is the other way around: the historical record shows that increases in atmospheric CO2 follow periods of global warming. The lag time is measured in centuries – 1000±500 years (Wahlen et al. 1999).
Here is my take on Dessler’s Testimony:
http://xanonymousblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/17/willful-ignorance/
Willful misrepresentation would be more like it. Convincingly delivered to an audience that may grasp the basics but are ignorant of the details.
I wonder what motivation he has to enter a blog post into a congressional hearing testimony. Though his version of the escalator does a fairly good job of showing warming has peaked and cooling sections are getting steeper.
Senator Whitehouse (D-RI) was sharp and on point, especially questioning Judith and the other skeptic and summarizing at the end. For Judith he presented her with her own precautionary principle statement from 2007 with which she had to disagree and he also brought out some pretzel logic from Judith in the discussion on denialism. For Kathleen White, after she said she was just a layman regarding the science, he moved away showing complete and obvious disregard for a layman’s opinion of the science. Skip to the last 15 minutes of the hearing for the panel questions. The Republicans were predictable, bringing up China and trying to destroy the smoking parallel, the 97%, etc., rather than anything on science, but they didn’t seem open to talking or questioning the science as Dessler presented it well.
Thanks JimD,
I will have to watch that.
I have been working on comparing the Earth’s predicted dissipated tidal energy to that which can be extracted from a CSALT analysis.
This is like wow:
http://imageshack.com/a/img13/3775/89rt.gif
CSALT is able to decompose the thermal signal into the diurnal and semidiurnal tidal frequencies of 18.6 years and 8.85/2 years, getting the phase accurately and the relative strengths to boot. The significance is that this occurring as a coincidence is highly unlikely.
The reason that it works so well is that CSALT uses a multi-factor variational approach to isolate the individual forcing factors. The multiple factors provide discrimination over the entire temperature record, allowing very precise resolution.
http://imageshack.com/a/img20/9572/sz4.gif
This is just the tip of the iceberg — thanks to the Stadium Wave finding and all the inputs from the skeptics and deniers out there !
WHT, what is behind the tidal plot? Why LOD^3 etc ? Looks interesting.
Where does “Temperature 18.6 and 8.85” line come from?
I’m pretty sure there is such a signal, so it would be good to see how you derive that line rather than an unsuported plot.
It is simply a follow-on to this blog post:
http://contextearth.com/2013/12/06/tidal-component-to-csalt/
The diurnal and semi-diurnal frequencies are buried in the theoretical LOD signal and the easiest way to get the latter frequency to emerge is to raise the LOD or angular momentum value by a power. The running mean captures the peaks, and CSALT identifies the phase and magnitude of the signals.
Clive Best, the skeptic, is looking at this behavior in paleo terms.
Thanks, so the cube is just an arbitary power, a computational ‘trick’, rather than anything phyically meaningful. Is that correct?
BTW, what’s the origin of the 6.2 and 7.3 ??
Oh, I get it. 3rd harmonics of 18.6 and 21.6 (not shown) presumably solar.
Actually, the power of two converts a momentum to energy and a power of three converts angular momentum to power.
This is not exactly right in this circumstance however, since we are talking about a perturbation. More likely a non-linear effect related to tidal interaction is being detected. Remember that effects such as this have long been hypothesized, in particular by Keeling&Whorf and Brier and R.Ray from NASA, not to forget Scafetta and other Skeptics.
The harmonics are also critical under conditions of non-linear excitation because this shapes the waveform. I only keep the harmonics that have statistical significance.
The 7.3 year period is a strong harmonic of the Hale cycle. In a separate post, I demonstrated how the CSALT model draws these harmonics out of the temperature time series, as it variationally determines the phase to line up with the measured TSI activity peaks.
http://contextearth.com/2013/12/18/csalt-model-and-the-hale-cycle/
(BTW, anything periodic that has characteristics of a delta-function pulse, will by definition have all the harmonics of the fundamental frequency).
These influences (Tidal and Solar cycles) are a few of the natural variability factors that Curry suggested influence the characterization of ongoing climate change. As a slogan I have adopted the phrase the Cause of the Pause is due to thermodynamic Laws.
The unfortunate aspect to this, when we consider policy decisions based on science, is that this pause or hiatus obscures the underlying relentless thermal forcing function caused by the CO2 control knob.
One rather worrying part from Dessler’s testimony:
“d. Reconstructions of paleoclimate data over the last 60 million years
show that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide exert a strong control on the climate system.”
It would appear that he’s been watching Al Gore movies instead of looking at the data.
Even Algore’s movie showed carbon dioxide lagging temperature. Algore has a fever.
Actually Dessler was pretty much right on target.
Pingback: Judith Curry : Senate EPW Hearing on the President’s Climate Action Plan | CACA
Judith,
Words are what we programme our minds with. In recent decades warming has ceased. There is no way of knowing if it is an “hiatus”. For all we know it may not recommence. It seems to me that we pander to the alarmists by accepting and using their term “hiatus”. We can only identify an hiatus when the change or cessation of any trend direction once more changes.
Also for all we know, the previous decade and a half was itself an hiatus. Every periodic change would then become an hiatus.
Bob Trueman
Would “peaked until the next interglacial” would be more correct?
The best analogy is that the greenhouse gases turn the atmosphere into an insulator that maintains a gradient of about 33 C between the surface and space. Without them, there would be no gradient, and the surface would be that much colder.
God this is one of the stupidest things I have ever read on this blog. About every other word si wrong and it doesn’t even get the signs right.
Obviously THE surface wouldn’t be “much colder” at all.
PARTS of the surface would be much hotter and parts would be much colder. There would be large temperature gradients between the cold parts and the hot parts. If anything, the planet would be much less “isothermal” than it is now and it is trivially true that the gradients between the surface and the space would be larger for the hot parts of the surface too.
The atmosphere would exhibit very complex dynamics that would depend among others on the detailed topology, dust storms, speed of rotation, specific heat and conductivity and convection coefficients. The only thing one can say with certainty is that the dynamics would be very different from the one we know.
Totally without GHG’s the dynamics of the atmosphere would be very limited. The atmosphere would be warm and highly stratified like the stratosphere, but much warmer. Only a limited layer near the surface would have some convection, but even that would be very limited.
The reason for all that is that the atmosphere would not have any effective mechanism for loosing heat, nothing but conduction down to cold parts of surface and that’s very inefficient. Thus the atmosphere would be warmed to a temperature close to the hottest spot on the surface. Under this warm atmosphere the surface would behave more like the surface of the Moon that that of the present Earth. The much shorter day would, however make a big difference in comparison with the moon.
The above requires zero GHG, a very small absorptivity/emissivity would make a big difference and raise the tropopause near to the present level as explained by the theory of the optically thin atmosphere (see Pierrehumbert’s book or some other source). Even then the strength of the winds would be limited by the small power of the “atmospheric heat engine”.
Tomas wrote :
One has to remember that what was written was in response to musings by the brain trust of HAP and Biggie. When skeptics spew nonsense at every turn, it is often difficult to avoid getting tarred and feathered when you descend to their level.
The assertion by Tomas of the impossibility of analyzing climate science due to chaotic complexity is itself being torn to shreds by straightforward stochastic models of the climate such as manifested by the CSALT model.
http://contextearth.com/2014/01/11/the-cause-of-the-pause-is-due-to-thermodynamic-laws/
“Totally without GHG’s the dynamics of the atmosphere would be very limited. The atmosphere would be warm and highly stratified like the stratosphere, but much warmer.
—-
Of course we are not talking about Earth without GH gases, right?! If some odd phenomenon were to suddenly such even just all the CO2 out if the atmosphere, we return to Ice Planet Earth pretty rapidly– in the order of a few decades.
Clearly Tomas has a problem with the concept of a radiative equilibrium surface temperature of 255 K, and an actual surface temperature of 288 K. If you want to deny this you would be several steps behind even people like Lindzen and Spencer who do accept this much. You may want to read some posts Spencer has on this subject to get up to his speed at least.
Judith, your concluding remarks are a fair and balanced assessment which should be considered by all involved in making and implementing policy related to increased GHG emissions. The timing is ideal for Australia’s reconsideration of CAGW issues – thank you!
What I like in Judith’s written statement is that the scientific case is built on AR5 WG1. I agree even on some of the criticism she presents on AR5 WG1 report as can be seen by comparing this excerpt from the testimony
with my recent comment
http://judithcurry.com/2014/01/06/ipcc-ar5-weakens-the-case-for-agw/#comment-433813
I’m not as happy with the prominent subtitle of the testimony:
I would agree that AR5 has lowered slightly the estimates on the strength of the warming and on evidence on extreme events, but to me that’s not what the subtitle tells. The basic warming is as certain as ever, and the slight reduction in likely limits on the climate sensitivity don’t make AGW any more uncertain as a significant phenomenon.
The main problem for me is that the arguments of Judith make sense from the point of view of climate science itself, but not from the point of view of policy implications. Policy implications are not limited by the uncertainties of climate science itself, they are more limited for other reasons: uncertainties in actual impacts and most importantly uncertainties in the actual outcomes of any specific policy decision.
My dilemma is that I have the following set of beliefs:
1) AGW is true and significant.
2) Really severe consequences are not nearly certain but possible and not highly unlikely. (They are likely enough to justify action.)
3) Reducing the risk of severe outcomes requires strong mitigation. (Adaptation may fail in reducing the risk.)
4) All policies that have been proposed for strong mitigation are badly understood. They may have a very poor benefit/cost ratio due both highly uncertain benefits and highly uncertain costs. (There are less risky options for action, but they are likely to be also ineffective.)
Pekka Pirila,
I have to disagree with your stated beliefs Nos. 2, 3 and 4:
Not true if the ‘action’ is unlikely to succeed. The expected value of the consequences only justify action if the ‘action’ has a high probability it will succeed and the benefits (climate damages avoided) will exceed the mitigation costs. We MUST have confidence that the ‘actions’ have a high probability they will succeed before we embark on implementing them. That is not the case with carbon pricing, ‘actions’ favouring renewable energy, or Kyoto II polices. In fact it seems there is very low probability such ‘actions’ would succeed. So we should not proceed with them.
No. Definitely not, unless the ‘strong mitigation’ has a high probability of succeeding and the benefits will exceed the costs.
Given our previous discussion on this, I agree that “All policies that have been proposed for strong mitigation are badly understood.” However, I suggest it is the advocates of them that are misunderstanding thawt they have very low probability of success and will cost a great deal. IMO, your many comments in the past, e.g. advocating carbon pricing and renewable energy, have revealed that you are one of those people who “badly understand” the consequences of the “strong mitigation” policies being proposed. They almost certainly will not succeed (unlikely to be implemented successfully in the real world and if they were implemented they would be unlikely to survive).
“They may have a very poor benefit/cost ratio due both highly uncertain benefits and highly uncertain costs. ”
The costs are much better known than the benefits. The costs will probably be higher than the (probably optimistic) analyses suggest (they are based on optimistic assumptions as listed in here: http://jennifermarohasy.com/2013/08/why-the-ets-will-not-succeed-peter-lang/ ) and the benefits are highly unlikely to be delivered. The link explains these points (if you haven’t already read it).
“(There are less risky options for action, but they are likely to be also ineffective.)
The example I am thinking of (i.e. remove the irrational impediments to nuclear energy), could succeed, IMO, because it allows markets to operate and deliver the emissions reductions with no need for global agreements, global regulations or other global instruments. The emissions reductions would just happen (along with many other benefits) if we allowed it to. But you and the vast majority of those who are most concerned about CAGW are the same people who block progress on this option.
6 reasons why nuclear should be advocated:
1. Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity: http://nextbigfuture.com/2012/06/deaths-by-energy-source-in-forbes.html
2. Nuclear fuel is effectively unlimited; no other energy source will be able to provide the bulk of the world’s energy requirements, sustainably and economically
3. Nuclear is the least-cost, low-emissions way to generate electricity
4. The cost of nuclear can come down a lot if we remove the irrational impediments that are blocking it.
5. If we allow it to be cheaper than coal, it will replace coal without any need for UN and government command and control policy interventions. It will just happen because it is cheapest and fit for purpose – if we remove the impediments that are blocking progress.
6. We can all help to remove the irrational impediments if we are willing to inform ourselves of the facts – do the research, objectively and dispassionately – and then get out and explain to others what we’ve learnt.
the consequences of the “strong mitigation” policies
Just look at Germany
Pekka,
What are the temperature trends (summer, winter, annual) in Finland?
Are they flat as the global, or increasing as the Arctic/polar?
Vilnius,
The variability in local temperatures is so large that no unique interpretation can be given. Years 2007, 2008, 2011, and 2013 are among the warmest in record, but 2010 and 2012 that much cooler that the trend since 1989 is hardly statistically significant. 1989 and 1990 were about 3.5C warmer than 1985 and 1987 making the conclusions so dependent on choice of period. These temperatures can be seen on page http://ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/vuositilastot . The figures should be easy to understand in spite of the Finnish language of the text. Much less information is available in English. The open access data system is still under development, and longer history records are openly available only through international sources.
Finland is positioned so that we are most of the time influenced by the Northern Atlantic, but weather patterns where air flows from the Arctic or from Russia are also rather common. The Arctic amplification plays some role making the average temperature vary more than in more southern parts of Europe. How the Arctic weather patterns form is as important for Finland as it has been this winter in the U.S., but we are often in the opposite phase of the variability.
The temperatures vary much more in winter than in summer. Over the period 1900-2013 the range for monthly average temperature in Helsinki has varied between -16.5C and +1.4C in January and between 13.7C and 21.7C in July. The annual average has varied in the range 2.7C – 7.6C.
The variability is thus much stronger than the longer term changes. Years 1900-1930 were the coolest long period with average of about 4.5C, 1931-39 were warmer (about 6.0C, and 1938 warmest in record in many parts of Finland), but 1940-41 were exceptionally cold helping Finland in defending against Russian invasion in “Winter War”. General trend was then cooling until 1987, but the period since 1988 has been the warmest of such duration with an average a little above 6C.
Thanks for summarising your position, Pekka. My concerns are largely in the realm of (4).
Thanks, Judith. I find it difficult to disagree with anything you have written here, and I’m a bastard.
Desslers testimony is chock full of half-truths. This is often called lying by omission.
a) He presents a hindcast as if it was a forecast then claims that forecasts are therefore good thusly “If a theory successfully predicts phenomena that are later observed, one can be confident that the theory captures something essential about the real world system.” Notably the part of the graph where the actual forecast begins was chopped off because it diverges sharply with reality and the corrollory must be that if the forecast is unsuccessful then clearly one can be less confident of the standard model. Not that the model is even standard because it has 3x amplification of the CO2 effect inherent.
b) He states, “climate scientists predicted in 1967 that the stratosphere would cool while the troposphere warmed as a result of increasing greenhouse gases. This was observed 20 years later.” Yes but around 1995 the cooling stopped, which effectively negates both the argument and the hypothesis.
c) He states “Climate models predicted in the 1970s that the Arctic would warm faster the Antarctic.” They actually predicted that both poles would warm however the Antarctic cooled and increased sea ice extent utterly contrary to expectations. This was put down to natural variability. Curiously only the Antarctic was deemed to be governed by nature, not the Arctic, despite the Arctic having been as warm even in the 1930’s
d) It’s one thing pretending that a reduction in carbon dioxide could cause an ice age but it’s quite different to come up with a mechanism as to how, when the CO2 is at its maximum extent, it then suddenly changes from being an amplifier to being a coolant. You need a sudden, massive carbon sink to occur. What caused this – regularly?
e) Nobody predicted an increase in energy stored in the ocean until it was obvious that there was a “missing sink”. This is yet another opportunistic hindcast presented as a forecast – yet this time even based on an unphysical mechanism. If someone had predicted such an unphysical phenomenon ahead of time, eg skeptics, they would have been laughed at.
f) you’ve got to love how he smoothly changes from obsrvations to syntheses when talking about paleo reconstructions in the tropics. I’m guessing but past ecperience tells me that likely the data was adjusted to reflect the model then the adjusted data was held up as proof of the model. Hence the adjustments cannot be called observations, but syntheses. Am I right? He is right to suspect future revisions will show the satellite record to be adjusted upward. they did it with every other dataset and only the fact that spencer is in charge of one of them prevents further adjustments to the satellite data.
g) What the hell islung cancer to do with anything?
h) The hiatus proves that natural variability is underestimated. If part of this natural variation is heat being trapped in the ocean then this is also a reason for less alarming predictions – since it is never coming back out.
h) “And making successful predictions would help convince scientists that the alternative theory should be taken seriously. How many successful predictions have alternative theories made?” Actually skeptics have been proven right every step of the way just by being skeptical of the alarmists. There are of course several predictions made by skeptics that predicted a hiatus but if you don’t look then you don’t find! By contrast Dessler has never been right about anything. Even his attribution of droughts to climate change was poo-pooed by fellow scientists and NOAA.
All the rest is just pessimistic hearsay based on models that are provably inadequate.
More slight of hand in his figure 4 where he used very different temperature scales to make it look as if his selected CMIP3 runs were close to matching observations. One has a scale range of 32 the other 18 , almost half the range.
OK so his cherry picked models managed to get the max water feedback over the tropical part of the biggest expanse of water on the planet. Hardly an amazing feat, especially if you get the numbers wrong. by a factor of two and have to play games with the colourscales.
This is just a replay of Hansen’s rigging the air-conditioning in 1988.
Probably nothing indictable but deliberately misleading testimony.
JamesG
re; Dessler lying by omission.
More like lying with statistics IMO. Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statistics
If Samuel Clemons were still around he’d undoutedly, with much class and wit, villify Dessler.
JamesG
Heat “hidden” in ocean comes back out. The thing of it is that 2nd Law of Thermodynamics makes it come out very slowly compared to speed at which it entered. It enters through a shallow surface layer that is warmer than the bulk of the ocean below it. The warmth is eventually diluted into the frigid (3C) abyss by a factor of 10 to 1 (the ratio of cold abyssal water to warm surface water). The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that once the warmth is diluted there is no way to undilute it again. So basically any heat sequestered in the ocean over a century takes a thousand years to come back out. If temperature of the basin goes up 1C in a hundred years it will keep the atmosphere warmer by 0.1C for a thousand years in other words.
Ocean basin temperature, according to best Bedwetter Bandwagon estimate of energy imbalance at top of atmosphere, is only going to rise by 0.2C over the next century. The imbalance (0.5W/m2) is not sufficient to raise basin temperature any faster than that. It may very well raise the upper ocean mixed layer (~300 meters) more or less than that depending on the how fast energy in the mixed layer equalizes with the abyss. No one really knows with sufficient accuracy or precision how energy diffuses from the surface into the abyss.
JamesG
If you aren’t familiar with 2LoT and don’t really understand why ocean heat, once diluted, can’t undilute you may find the following trite expression useful: You can’t unbake a cake. 2nd Law of Thermodynamics apples there too. Once you mix the flour, sugar, and milk together it cannot spontaneously unmix due to 2LoT. Same goes with mixing surface heat into the bulk of the ocean. Both Judith Curry and Gavin Schmidt have acknowledged that even if Trenberth is right about global warming being sequestered in the deep ocean it doesn’t matter because that sequestered heat cannot undilute itself to warm the atmosphere quickly – it comes out over a 10x longer period at 1/10th the orginal power i.e. what when in at 0.5W/m2 in a decade comes out at 0.05W/m2 over a century which is insignificant.
That’s true, David. The sea surface achieves a temperature that is significant to weather and climate. But this is restricted to a relatively shallow layer. If the heat moves to the mid or lower ocean, the temperature will be so low as to be of no practical significance over a period of centuries.
Ice age timing has been set for the past million years or so by a 100,000 year cycle where the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit changes. At greatest eccentricity annual average solar power is increased 0.2% above least eccentricity. Eccentricity change is caused by the gravitational mass of gas giant Jupiter tugging on the earth’s orbit.
0.2% of 341W/m2 (solar constant) is 0.682W/m2. The current best estimate of energy imbalance at top of atmospehre is 0.5W/m2. This is blamed on anthropogenic activity. It might not be enough to prevent the end of the Holocene Interglacial but it’s in the ballpark. We’d have to keep the imbalance going for many thousands of years to get over the hump to where natural variation in insolation has risen sufficiently. There isn’t enough economically recoverable fossil fuel on the planet to keep up AGW for many thousands of years. We may delay the inevitable a bit but in the long run we need to warm the planet othewise the interglacial will end and that, my friend, will suck bigtime for both humanity and everything else that can’t survive for long under or on top of a mile-thick ice sheet.
Springer –
Doesn’t matter in what sense? Only in the sense that it would not significantly affect surface temps on a decadal scale? Or, are you saying that outside of any influence on air temps, a higher OHC would not create effects that would in turn have any impacts on society?
The return period for deep water on the world wide conveyor belt is something of the order of 1,000 years. We will all be dead and fusion power will produce abundent carbon free energy and desalinate sea water. Too bad we won’t be here to see it.
Scott
In the long run… orbiting mirrors. If needed.
“The hiatus proves that natural variability is underestimated. If part of this natural variation is heat being trapped in the ocean then this is also a reason for less alarming predictions – since it is never coming back out.”
____
? Energy always comes back out of the ocean eventually. Your statement is completely unscientific.
“Heat “hidden” in ocean comes back out. The thing of it is that 2nd Law of Thermodynamics makes it come out very slowly compared to speed at which it entered.”
____
Of course this is pure unscientific non-sense. Energy can enter and leave a water molecule at exactly the same rate– namely, the speed of light. Furthermore, energy can leave the ocean in vast amounts very rapidly as both sensible and latent heat causing violent reactions in the atmosphere such as hurricanes.
R. Gates
You’re arguing against your own tribe.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2011/10/global-warming-and-ocean-heat-content/
Gavin Schmidt says: “The deep ocean is really massive and even for the large changes in OHC we are discussing the impact on the deep temperature is small (I would guess less than 0.1 deg C or so). This is unlikely to have much of a direct impact on the deep biosphere. Neither is this heat going to come back out from the deep ocean any time soon (the notion that this heat is the warming that is ‘in the pipeline’ is erroneous).”
It’s almost inconcievable to me that Gate’s understanding of thermodynamic law is so poor that he doesn’t understand that if you take high quality heat and dilute it to low quality heat (i.e. 5000K sunlight to 300K thermal energy) then it cannot spontaneously increase in temperature above 300K. That breaks the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and every engineer since the invention of the steam engine understands it. Even scientists like Gavin Schmidt and Judith Curry were almost as quick as me to recognize that ocean surface warming, once diluted into the much larger basin, can never again spontaneously concentrate in the surface layer.
You’re right, in much the same sense that opening the fridge door will warm up a room, just as long as the room is colder than the fridge.
Joshua | January 17, 2014 at 11:46 am |
Springer: it doesn’t matter…
J: Doesn’t matter in what sense?
It doesn’t matter in the sense of global warming. At current energy imbalance the global ocean average temperature will rise 0.2C. If that increase is evenly distributed then the surface will only be 0.2C warmer than today and if the ocean surface is only 0.2C warmer then it cannot warm the atmosphere more than 0.2C. If you don’t understand that then you need to return to grade school. Fifth grade or thereabouts. This is really, really basic.
phatboy | January 17, 2014 at 2:48 pm |
“You’re right, in much the same sense that opening the fridge door will warm up a room, just as long as the room is colder than the fridge.”
Yes. But a better example might be that putting an ice cube in a drink will cool the drink and warm the cube. But under no normal circumstance will the drink ever grow warmer and the cube colder. That ship sails in only one direction and that direction is due to the the law of entropy – heat flows from warmer to colder and slows until both objects are the same temperature. An ocean that is 0.2C warmer than the air cannot possibly raise the air temperature more than 0.2C.
100 years of 0.5W/m2 energy imbalance can only raise ocean basin temperature 0.2C which cannot raise air temperature more than 0.2C. Temperature rise can be temporarily higher in the ocean’s surface if energy is being added faster at the surface than it can diffuse downward to the ocean floor. The diffusion rate is poorly characterized at best.
“Even scientists like Gavin Schmidt and Judith Curry were almost as quick as me to recognize that ocean surface warming, once diluted into the much larger basin, can never again spontaneously concentrate in the surface layer.”
____
There are two different issues here. No one is arguing against the basic laws of thermodynamics or against the notion that energy is dispersed throughout the ocean. But what is quite clear is that energy is not evenly distributed throughout the ocean, and is concentrated more in regions, both as heat and as currents and waves. The net energy flowing in a cross-section of the Gulf Stream, for example, is many times greater, both as heat and as kinetic energy, than a region in the Atlantic outside the Gulf stream. And that energy is advected toward regions such as the Arctic, with changes in the energy having huge impacts on the Arctic. Bottom line: The warming of the ocean is not uniform, the energy is concentrated in regions, and that has huge implications for weather and climate.
The biggest surprise for Bedwetter Bandwagon riders is that OHC is somehow increasing faster at depth than in the surface layer. This is physically impossible had the energy entered through the surface layer because, it must unfortunately be stressed, heat doesn’t travel from colder to warmer.
This is no surprise at all to me. I have long been of the position that greenhouse gases don’t directly cause much ocean warming. Greenhouse gases warm dry land. The land in turn creates warmer rivers which then enter the ocean and follow the bottom out to deep water so for diving buoys that don’t come near shore the heat is not observed passing through the open ocean surface. No surprise here. It all makes perfect sense in my view.
” No one is arguing against the basic laws of thermodynamics or against the notion that energy is dispersed throughout the ocean.”
Actually you are.
“But what is quite clear is that energy is not evenly distributed throughout the ocean,”
Correct. But it never goes from more evenly distributed to less evenly distributed. That violates 2LoT. It only goes from less distributed to more distributed.
Try to follow along now. The time and place when the energy is most unevenly distributed is when sunlight heats the surface in the tropics. It only becomes more diffused from that point onward. When it has diffused into the >700 meter depth layer that is by definition more diffused. Gavin and Judy and me instantly (I hope) realized that and the implications of it. High quality heat (5000K sunlight) is transformed into low quality heat (255K water) and it can never again be used to heat anything to a temperature higher than 255K which includes the ocean surface and the air above it.
Write that down.
and is concentrated more in regions, both as heat and as currents and waves. The net energy flowing in a cross-section of the Gulf Stream, for example, is many times greater, both as heat and as kinetic energy, than a region in the Atlantic outside the Gulf stream. And that energy is advected toward regions such as the Arctic, with changes in the energy having huge impacts on the Arctic. Bottom line: The warming of the ocean is not uniform, the energy is concentrated in regions, and that has huge implications for weather and climate.
R Gates:
That’s right. But the energy which is supposed to have beenaddedby AGW is more-or-less evenly distributed – unless you’re proposing a mechanism by which CO2 absorbs a greater proportion of available IR in some parts of the world than in others
“But the energy which is supposed to have beenaddedby AGW is more-or-less evenly distributed…”
—
The actual facts and data paint a very different picture then your imagination, eh?
The actual facts and data?
And not part of your imagination?
Well, come on, let’s have them.
Or do you prefer hand-waving?
Springer –
I see. So then you are certain that any increased OHC will be evenly distributed, and not affect various parts of the globe differently? I guess you learned that in 5th grade, eh?
Springer –
And did you also learn how to duck questions with non-sequiturs in 5th grade also? Guess you were a bit slow on the uptake, huh? That’s usually the 3rd grade curriculum.
Read the question again, I’ll give you one more chance to answer it before I give up on you.
“The actual facts and data?
And not part of your imagination?
Well, come on, let’s have them.
Or do you prefer hand-waving?”
—-
Deeper oceans down to 2000m warming at a faster rate than the upper ocean. This has been widely discussed here and elsewhere. The warming is not homogeneous, and further proof that it is not the atmosphere warming the ocean directly, but GH gas concentrations altering the flow of energy out of the ocean. Your winter jacket does not warm your body, but alters the rate of flow of energy out of your body.
So the same number of joules added by forcing from the same well-mixed gas heats one square metre of the earth’s surface by more degrees than it does to another square metre somewhere else, all else being equal, does it?
By what strange laws of physics?
By what mechanism?
Yes, from the surface. Greenhouse gases cannot affect the flow of energy within the ocean.
“phatboy
Deeper oceans down to 2000m warming at a faster rate than the upper ocean
By what mechanism?”
They are suggesting that warm water is down-welling to the depths. This mechanism presumably takes the warm and CO2 ‘saturated’ water to the deep and replaces it with cold, CO2 ‘unsaturated’ water to the top.
It therefore destroys the Bern Model of CO2 ocean ‘equilibration’.
Since you chose to become abusive Joshua I’m choosing to not respond to your questions. I forwarded them to Dr. Curry to dispose of as she sees fit.’
That’s why I come back to this site. In their exuberance, the skeptics give away the store.
The Bern Model of CO2 sequestration is actually mapping an “effective” diffusion of CO2. The further down that CO2 goes in the ocean depths, the more likely it is to be permanently sequestered.
This is much like thermal diffusion contributing to Ocean Heat Contet dynamics.
So what the Bern model is describing is the fat-tailed uptake of CO2 into the ocean. Don’t forget that the data is telling us about half of the anthropogenic CO2 is sequestered within a few years of being released into the environment. The fat-tail of the Bern model is describing the long adjustment time that comes about from diffusional processes.
See more here on how the Bern model is derived from maximum entropy-based physics:
http://contextearth.com/co2-pages/
This supports the Bern model. Thank you DocMartyn! You got everything right but the conclusion.
I am left with just one burning question. Are US senators pompous gits before they are elected, or do they become pompous gits afterwards.
I’m going with they were pompous gits before and grew to even larger pompous gits after. I just love how they look at the pile of taxpayer money as their own. They have no restraint spending it.
Before.
After,
Usually they start with good intentions but the environment evolves them.
Scott
Scott
I have read the solar and wind articles you posted. Thanks. Energy horses for courses.
Britain is a small island and frequently the whole country might have no wind or no sun thereby rendering it highly problematic to rely too much on renewable sources whose constant power input to the grid can’t be calculated and might at times be zero.
The US being much larger will always have places sufficiently sunny or windy that can generate power from solar or wind sources. You also havre the space.
We cant afford to turn over 50 acres of good quality farm land t power 3000 homes for part of their energy needs but in your case it might make sense to use such systems.
However there are many places in the US many miles from the sea, making tidal/wave energy more unlikely than Britain with nowhere more than 70 miles from the sea. Its a shame we have never concentrated on our strengths. In the 1970’s we had an advanced system with great potential.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salter's_duck
Unfortunately the UK Govt got its sums wrong and calculated that the energy from it was ten times more expensive than it really was. Brits will remember this system from TV programme ‘tomorrows world.’
tonyb
tonyb,
Any thoughts of schedule for sea level II and III?
I understand lots on your plate but those are of particular interest.
US National Academy of Sciences published a report on Dept of Energy Marine and hydrokinetic resource assessments. Has some good information but does not address your island.
I will find a link and repost
Scott
tonyb,
Here is the NAS report link. If you sign in you can read it or download it free. Have to establish a password.
If you have any trouble let me know and I can help.
Scott
http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=18278
Scott
Tony B
As I live in Switzerland I do not suffer from the phobia of being drowned by a deluge of sea water, as depicted in Al Gore’s sci-fi flic.
But I look around to see whether nearby island dwellers have this phobia or not (to see whether or not it is likely that such a threat exists).
Thus I am relieved and pleased that you, as a coastal island dweller, are not worried about this threat – and I conclude that it, therefore, is not a real potential threat to humanity at all, despite Al Gore’s prediction..
Thanks.
Max
“Are US senators pompous gits before they are elected, or do they become pompous gits afterwards”
I can tell you that they normally enter he Senate as poor public servants and then join the ranks of the 1% wealthiest citizens soon after.
Kudos for bring some science into the hearings by indirectly referencing your Stadium Wave hypothesis.
Unfortunately, the Stadium Wave is only contributing approximately +/- 0.1 C temperature swings to the global temperature signal — this pales in comparison to the 0.8C secular trend (so far) we are seeing, due to the CO2 acting as an clear and aggressive control knob on the climate.
http://contextearth.com/2013/11/21/variational-principles-in-thermodynamics/
Projected AGW warming is 0.2C/decade Webby. That’s straight from the Bedwetter Bandwagon’s party line. In the past 17 years we should have then expected a temperature rise of 0.34C.
The following is a composite temperature index from 1980 to which I applied a 24-month running mean to smooth it out a bit for easier viewing.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/mean:24
Common practice in first blush trend analysis is to look at successive highs and successive lows. If you can lay a straight edge on them and they each touch (or come close) to the straight edge there’s your trend.
Since 1996 we can do that and we find a series of higher lows that align perfectly on a trend line of 0.14C/decade and since 1998 we have a perfectly aligned series of higher highs on a 0.4C/decade trend.
The combined trend for the past 17 years (let’s call that time period “one Santer” lest you accuse me of cherry picking a time period) is
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1997/plot/wti/from:1997/trend/detrend:0.07
which in terms of a decadal trend is 0.07/1.7 or
in terms of a decadal trend is 0.07/1.7 or 0.04C/decade.
So we have a projected trend of 0.20C/decade and in the past 17 years and an actual trend of 0.04c. You need to find an explanation for a missing 0.16C/decade not the 0.1C decade natural variability that you (finally) have ceded. I admire your ability to admit some amount of natural variability but you don’t appear to have admitted nearly enough of it yet.
Springer,
What matters is the CO2 sensitivity, not some trend that depends on arbitrarily chosen starting points.
The following is the way the analysis is done, that is, if you have the mathematical chops:
http://imageshack.com/a/img20/9572/sz4.gif
The TCR is on the bottom and that is 2C per doubling of CO2. The ECS is about 3C higher than this, so we have significant warming in store.
Hope this helps in your understanding of climate science.
I look forward to you submitting your model to some recognized trade rag so it can be properly reviewed by experts in the art. How’s that going?
The world is passing you by. How does that make you feel?
Webby
To get up to speed, check our hostess’ expert testimony regarding 2xCO2 ECS. Then plug this into your model.
Just a hint.
Max
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | January 17, 2014 at 6:12 pm |
“The world is passing you by. How does that make you feel?”
How does this answer my question about you submitting your CSALT or whatever it is to a journal so it can be reviewed by experts in the art? It isn’t receiving that review in blog comments. Curry is an expert in the art of course but despite your tedious tiring repetition ad nauseum about it on her blog she’s kept quite mum about it. Maybe she’s astounded by your brilliance into stunned silence. Yeah, that’s it. That’s the ticket.
Interesting that I am using the ideas of Scafetta and others who believe that orbital influences can impact the natural variation in temperature.
Yet looky here and see what Anthony Watts said yesterday about Scafetta:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/17/the-planetary-tidal-influence-on-climate-fiasco-strong-armed-science-tactics-are-overkill-due-process-would-work-better/#comment-1539715
Why exactly does Watts think that Scafetta’s research is junk? At one time I thought along similar lines but then realized that Scafetta is doing routine scientific analysis and so he is exposing different perspectives to the data. This is not necessarily bad.
So the question is, how well can we extract the orbital/tidal/solar factors that Scafetta thinks contributes the natural variability? The CSALT model started with the C2O,SOI,Aerosols,LOD,TSI which comprises the acronym, but I have since added the significant orbital factors that Scafetta and other skeptics have suggested.
Those other factors are small but they help flesh out the CSALT model at high resolution, with discrimination to tease out the important periodicities.
http://imageshack.com/a/img20/9572/sz4.gif
So why is Watts at war with Scafetta?
Is Scafetta getting too near the truth and thus taming the FUD monster?
That is no good to someone like Watts.
The ENSO meter is tilting towards La Nina. And the move of hot surface water to the south is striking. Also, there is an obvious lessening of the hot surface area. The hot water is engulfing Australia.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/enso/
Well, that not what the experts are saying:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
But don’t let a little thing called science interfere with the entertainment value of WUWT.
I guess they can argue with the data, gates. Whatever.
More La Nina? Just frickin’ lovely. That’s a forecast for more cold dry weather for Texas and we’ve had plenty of both. We could use some nice anthropogenically (or otherwise, beggars can’t be choosers) warmed moist gulf air flowing inland this year and plenty of it. Barring that a hurricane landfall or three would be nice but those need the same warm moist gulf air that’s been MIA for a few years too.
It’s a repeat of the 1950’s. A natural climate cycle staying right on schedule. It’s like deja vu all over again (HT to Yogi Berra)..
R.Gates
Don’t let a little thing called data mess with your “science”. Regardless of what the experts say here is what the data says:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ts.gif
The Multivariate ENSO Index is quite clearly closer to -0.5 La Nina than to 0.5 El Nino. Thus the comment that the ENSO index is skewing towards La Nina has a truthiness index of 100 pct.
ENSO has been La Nina leaning, or actually in La Nina, for 24 straight months.
During which time the GMT is going up at ~.7C per decade. Which is three times the IPCC prediction of .2C per decade. Meaningless, but interesting.
ENSO forecasts for 2014 are for neutral conditions to continue into the spring. After that, forecasts tend to predict an El Nino, but it is way too soon to count on anything that far out in time.
What it means is La Nina has no punch. The little girl is in heat and she’s looking to mate with a boy. Hot. It’s going to get hot.
“ENSO has been La Nina leaning, or actually in La Nina, for 24 straight months.”
_____
Incorrect. It’s been in a La Nada – officially neutral for most of that period. “La Nina Leaning” is not an official designation, and according to nearly all the forecasts, it is “leaning” (that, is where it is headed in the future) toward a greater probability of continued neutral or El Nino later this year. The probability of La Nina is lower than either of those.
jim 2 and r. gates
Despite current events, no one knows whether where ENSO is headed this year or next.
Don’t let these folks fool you – they do not have a clue.
Gates, you’ve probably got it closest to right with “La Nada”
Max
third time a charm to fix blockquote?
re; Gates
The denial is strong in this one.
From the description of the Multivariate ENSO Index
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
In the MEI index for 2013 8 months were negative (including November and December) and 4 were positive (three of which were early in the year).
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/table.html
The MEI index has, by definition, spent most of 2013 in the cold ENSO phase and moreso in the second half of the year.
What part of this don’t you understand R.Gates that would cause you to deny the MEI isn’t leaning towards La Nina? Do you define “leaning” differently than the dictionary definition? Do you not understand that MEI = zero is perfectly neutral and any other value is leaning towards one or the other of El Nino and La Nina? Tell us what your major malfunction here is Gates we’re all dying to know!
Hey Gates, since you felt the need to point out that leaning La Nina is not an official ENSO state I feel obliged to point out that neither is La Nada an official ENSO state. The descriptor you were struggling to find is “ENSO-neutral”. Write that down of course!
I tip my hat to manacker’s clever play on words in calling this topic “current events.” That is all.
Pingback: CSALT model | context/Earth
It takes stones for a climate scientist to speak against the bandwagon. Professor Judith Curry has them. Her address perfectly represents my position and for that I thank her.
It’s too bad I had to click on scientist-bandwagoneer Andrew Dessler. Reading what that weaseling POS had to say made my blood boil. Given that it’s one of the most liberal members of the senate (since Obama left it) democrat Barbara Boxer from California it’s no surprise how skewed it was in favor of the Bedwetter Bandwagon.
What do y’all think of “Bedwetter Bandwagon” as a token description of the CAGW party? I mean it’s clearly offensive and in bad taste but not nearly so much as “Climate Deniers”, right?
I like it. If Sloganeering is good for the Warmer, then Sloganeering is good for normal people.
Andrew
David
I suppose I had better go read his comments. I know little about him or his politics but he seems to divide opinions
tonyb
re; normal
Nice little dig there. Subtle. Davey likes it.
David
OK I have now read Dessler. I don’t know his politics or if that was relevant. Also I don’t know the tone of the other participants other than him and Judith.
I thought he toed the consensus line but did not come over as very dispassionate, indeed I was surprised by the somewhat melodramatic way he had of phrasing things but perhaps that is normal at these hearings?
He is certainly a stranger to Judith’s uncertainty monster isn’t he, with his firm belief there is no alternative explanation for recent warming other than human activities. That he thinks the warming roughly matches the climate models also seems questionable.
With all these hearings, what comes over loud and clear is the lack of historic context. Do any historical climatologists ever give testimony in order to put the modern era into better context and help explain natural variability?. There was a climate BEFORE 1880 you know.
He didn’t make my blood boil as I don’t know much about him. Was he sceptical enough of the data ? Probably Not. Did he appear to know much about the period BEFORE his graphs. It seems not. But that seems to be a pretty common blind spot.
tonyb
” it’s no surprise how skewed it was in favor of the Bedwetter Bandwagon.”
____
Boy, certain folks would have demanded that Judith moderate this right off and made an official complaint WordPress.
I’ll trade banning of “bedwetter bandwagon” for banning of “climate denier”, Gates. Otherwise it would seem to be unfair to ban the one and not the other (either way). Most would say the holocaust association with “denier” makes it the more unsavory term. Babies wet the bed they don’t carry out pogroms after all. You probably don’t have enough objective bones in your body to agree though so I’ll stipulate in advance you don’t agree.
Tony B
Andrew Dessler is a devout disciple of the CAGW cause.
His testimony shows this devotion.
But it was not very convincing to anyone who has looked at all sides of this ongoing debate a bit.
And it was a long way from being as comprehensive, impartial and effective as the testimony of our hostess.
Some years ago Dessler used to blog on other climate sites occasionally, and I had the chance to joust with him. Good fun.
In 2004 he and Ken Minschwaner published a study on water vapor increase with rising temperature over the tropics, based on actual satellite observations. They showed that over a short-term period, WV does increase with surface warming, but only at around one-eighth the amount predicted by IPCC, based on maintaining constant relative humidity. IPCC cited this study in AR4, but nevertheless kept the myth of constant relative humidity alive in its estimation of water vapor feedback and 2xCO2 ECS.
Sometimes the facts on the ground get in the way of a good story – and we all know what happens then.
Max
I’ve quite enjoyed it, David, and you’re on good form today.
Anthony Watts now is blogging that NOAA has now quietly lowered its estimate of how much heat is retained in the Earth’s various ecosystems because of CO2 and equivalents. The watts per square meter of retained heat has in his understanding of NOAA graphics, updated because of new CERES data, seems to have been reduced from 0.9 to 0.6 watts per square meter. That would seem to say that climate sensitivity is also lower by 1/3, or about 2 degrees for a doubling of CO2, not 3 degrees.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/17/nasa-revises-earths-radiation-budget-diminishing-some-of-trenberths-claims-in-the-process/
I’d like to see experts on this blog weigh in on whether this interpretaton is correct, I want to make sure my reading is correct.
Because it is a really big deal, if corrrect!
If you dont get any response, try again. It is a big deal and there should be plenty of opinions if they see it.
The climate forecast is getting cloudier.
I’m not an expert, but I would expect numbers based on observations to change from time to time. It would not surprise me if that 0.6 watts was back up to 0.9 watts sometime in the future.
Max_OK, Citizen Scientist | January 17, 2014 at 11:56 am |
“I’m not an expert, but I would expect numbers based on observations to change from time to time. It would not surprise me if that 0.6 watts was back up to 0.9 watts sometime in the future.”
On that basis I would not be surprised if the 0.6 watts was further down to 0.3 watts sometime in the future either.
The settled science is restless, again.
Yes, RichardLH, anything is possible, but what do you suppose would have to happen to get it down to 0.3 watts?
Max
Ok, so why should it go back up to 0.9 again?
tonyb
Tony, for the same reasons it was there before.
BTW, do you know how to catch a unique rabbit?
Don Monfort says: “The settled science is restless, again.”
____
Nah ! John was referring to 2 degrees, a number within the IPCC’s lower threshold of equilibrium climate sensitivity.
You didn’t get the memo, maxie. The alarmists want to limit warming to 2C. We are there! Rejoice! Find another dumb cause to promote with blind religious fervor.
Another unrelated conversation with Detroit Don. My dog stays on topic better than Don.
‘Ok, so why should it go back up to 0.9 again?”
.9 became .6 for a very simple reason.
This value is SET by the studies of OHC.
Then based on CERES everything else is allocated such that the surplus is
.6
It would go back up to .9C if somebody took another look at the oceans and changed the value back to .9C
It’s not surprising that you enjoy conversations with dogs, maxie.
This is an error of false extrapolation of short-term trends related to natural variability to estimate a long-term forcing related to the continued build-up of GH gases. The variation of net global sensible and latent heat flux from the ocean, being impacted greatly by ENSO, the PDO, and the AMO, plays the dominant role in the fluctuations in total energy output measured at the TOA over short-term time frames. On the other side, aerosols (both human and natural), clouds, as well as solar output play a dominant role on the variability of input to the climate system. Trying to use the net TOA resulting from the balance of these short-term fluctuations as any guage of the long-term forcing or climate sensitivity to the forcing from the highest GH gases since the Pliocene is absurdly short-sighted and wrong-headed.
Knock yourselves out inferring small numbers as the differences between large numbers. Room for error is immense.
Listen to what Mosher is saying. The net heat sunk can likely only be determined by OHC characterization. If this is 0.6 W/m^2 then it is 0.6/07 ~ 0.86 W/m^2 over the surface of the ocean since that covers about 70% of the earth’s surface.
That number makes sense with respect to all the charts that I have seen.
SST are going up by .7C per decade.
OHC 0 to 700 meters just took a jump up.
Next energy balance estimate .6 plus, or .6 minus?
I am going to have to do a new figure. Here is Kevin Trenberth getting mugged by reality since 1997
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/1997and2009_zpsc79b5968.png
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/nasa_new_energy_budget.png
It is very, very, very difficult to measure influx/efflux and overall flux in a dynamic system. As I have stated many times, the only really good way to do it is to have at least three aircraft with up and down looking spectrophotometers, in front of, in the umbra of and following a total eclipse as it crosses the Earth.
Even in biological systems with potent, specific, toxins and ion sensitive electrodes or optical probes, accurately measuring flux’s to within 5% is very difficult.
Anyone claiming that they can measure the difference in Earths influx and efflux is quite simply a liar. Not only has it not been done, it cannot be done with the sensor coverage we have.
“I’d like to see experts on this blog weigh in on whether this interpretaton is correct, I want to make sure my reading is correct.”
You mean you can’t trust WUWT’s take on it? what a shock when even skeptics can’t trust the WUWT byline on a climate subject
The size of the imbalance varies with the time span you consider, because it is larger in periods of weak surface warming such as the last decade, when 0.9 W/m2 pertains, but smaller over longer periods that have more warming at the surface such as the last 20-30 years. There is an interplay between the imbalance and surface warming rate, and both are variable in short decadal periods. There is no single number for this any more than there is a single number for the surface warming rate.
Pingback: Judith Curry: Testimony To The U.S. Senate Hearing On President Obama’s Climate Action Plan | The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)
Fyi–
Chinese Coal Company Invests in U.S. Shale. China’s largest coal company, China Shenhua Energy Co. announced plans to form a joint venture with Energy Corp. of America to drill 25 natural gas wells in Pennsylvania. China Shenhua intends to use the joint venture to develop expertise in unconventional oil and gas development that it can apply to China’s shale reserves. While China Shenhua is the first Chinese coal company to invest in U.S. shale development, several Chinese oil and gas companies have already made significant investments in United States shale reserves.
[Sidley Shale Gas and Hydraulic Fracturing Report, 3:2 (Jan. 14, 2014)]
I have a question. If a given quantity of heat were injected into the environment, some going into the air and some going into the water, what is the length of time required for the temperature/s to return to the starting point? The half-life for air is probably different than that of water, but the question is “How can anyone dismiss the impact of heat emissions without knowing how rapidly this heat is dissipated, by whatever mechanisms, into outer space?”
Still looking for Dr. Dr. Spencer’s response to you?
Wagathon | January
16, 2014 at 7:47 pm |
Philo, a lot of that waste heat is used to make things cold:refrigerators, air conditioners, ice machines, ice cream makers, etc. Have you included that in your elaborate calculations? Maybe that’s why you differ from Roy Spencer’s calculations? Show us what you got. You have done the calculations, right philo?
This would be my suggestion to all latent heat alarmists–e.g., before asking the question you asked, yet again, ask yourself if you math is as good as Dr. Spencer’s math? The answer is likely will be, “no”, in which event, you should back quickly away from the keyboard.
““How can anyone dismiss the impact of heat emissions without knowing how rapidly this heat is dissipated, by whatever mechanisms, into outer space?”
simple by calculating the amount and seeing that it is tiny.
its around .03Watts per meter squared, .1 watts if all energy used was just turned into heat
Look up the range of annual coldest night and warmest daytime temperature, have a cup of tea and a sit down, it will then come to you.
Yes, and waste heat from thermal power stations (coal. gas, oil and nuclear) adds just 0.008 W/m2
I agree that energy production “heat” is noise. However, it is not just waste heat from energy use that eventually becomes heat in the atmosphere. All energy does, that is one of the primary implications of the second law.
Doug Badgero,
I agree. The reason I posted the figure for just the waste heat from thermal plants is because, way back on a previous thread, the argument started with a statement that the waste heat from nuclear power stations explains the temperature increases over the past 50 years (or something like that). Many others have posted the figures for the total waste heat from energy use; e.g. Wagathon quoted, several times, Roy Spencer’s estimate of 0.03 W/m2 for total heat from energy use (based on “Assuming today’s global energy use per year is 150,000 TWh per year.”). So, I decided to post just the waste heat released by thermal power stations to the environment at the power station.
Doug Badgero | January 17, 2014 at 10:47 pm |
“I agree that energy production “heat” is noise. However, it is not just waste heat from energy use that eventually becomes heat in the atmosphere. All energy does, that is one of the primary implications of the second law.”
Not strictly true. Energy can take many forms. For instance there is chemical bond energy in rocket fuel and some of that fuel is burned outside the earth’s atmosphere. Some may also be sequestered for such a long time that it doesn’t apply in any time frame of concern. For instance there is a lot of bond energy in stainless steel and hell will likely freeze over before stainless oxidizes and releases the energy to the atmosphere. In yet another example about 20% of energy released by anthropogenic activity passes out through the so-called atmospheric window and this energy does not become heat in the atmosphere.
Nice try but no cigar.
David Springer,
Talk about pedantic. Do you have a reference for the 20% through the atmospheric window claim. I don’t disagree that some is lost via this path but only that released as radiation outside can pass through this window. I am surprised that 20% is released this way. I accept completely that bonds created in the atmosphere but broken outside it are not adding to atmospheric heat………..good grief.
@pokerguy
re; tropo to ocean warming
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Switcheroo
LOL
And let’s not forget serial denialist Roger Pielke Sr. has been insisting, in the literature at least since 2003 that the ocean is the “primary diagnostic of climate system heat changes”.
Maybe we should listen to Pielke Sr. more and those who’ve wrongly insisted that atmosphere is the primary diagnostic.
The truth of the matter is that the usual suspects (climategate authors) run with whatever metric best fits their predetermined climate narrative and none is good enough, which has always been the case, they start pencil whipping the data.
Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335.
Pielke Sr., R.A., 2008: A broader view of the role of humans in the climate system. Physics Today, 61, Vol. 11, 54-55.
ya its pretty funny how quickly they forget
Prior to ARGO, how were they supposed to use OHC?
“Prior to ARGO, how were they supposed to use OHC?”
The data before ARGO is as good as present day ARGO measurements, or they would not ethically be able to plot per-ARGO and post-ARGO data on the same graph and would never, never, subtract present day ARGO calculated heat content from per-ARGO heat content calculations.
Pielke, Sr. has gone a bit quiet since global Argo results came out in 2009. He needs to be bashing on this as finally evidence that the earth system is warming, but no, and I suspect he has moved on to other things.
Massive Antarctic Glacier Uncontrollably Retreating, Study Suggests –
The glacier that contributes more to sea level rise than any other glacier on Antarctica has hit a tipping point of uncontrollable retreat, and could largely collapse within the span of decades, a new study suggests. – See more at: http://www.livescience.com/42622-pine-island-glacier-retreating.html#sthash.Y7sYI5Rh.dpuf
_____
I haven’t read all the testimony so I don’t know if the Pine Island Glacier was discussed.
Propaganda 101: Always give a glacier a name. That way it’s like a member of the family died when it calves off and falls into the sea.
Max
I don’t think you read your own link. Eric steig comments in the article
“Eric Steig, a glacial geologist at the University of Washington who also studies Pine Island Glacier but was not involved in this study, thinks the study provides the best models yet of this particular glacier’s dynamics. Still, he points out that the models make the assumption that melting rates will increase in the near future and that, while this is likely, it is not necessarily a given. Last month, Steig and colleagues published a paper in the journal Science reporting that Pine Island Glacier’s retreat slowed significantly in 2012 due to oceanographic changes related to La Niña. While this seems to have been an anomalous event, Steig says that the 40 years of data gathered on the glacier may not be enough to make accurate predictions about its future behavior, and about what is normal or anomalous for its flow. “I actually think it’s a good assumption that the melt rate will stay high,” Steig told LiveScience. “But my confidence that that is right is extremely low and the reason that it is low is that it depends strongly on what happens elsewhere.” – See more at: http://www.livescience.com/42622-pine-island-glacier-retreating.html#sthash.Y7sYI5Rh.UtBEPoAA.dpuf
If even Eric Steig is dubious it seems like pure alarmism from the new study which in any case only talked about a one inch rise over many decades. Last month Did you post a link to Erics non alarmist article in Science?
tonyb
This looks to me to be typical of climate reporting in the environmental press. A dramatic scary headline — uncontrollable! Tipping Point! — which will be remembered by those who don’t read the article, or by those who merely see the reportage summarized elsewhere where reporting standards are no longer what they once were.
Inside the article, we see Steig’s cautions (Eric Steig!), and we read that we could see in the next few decades about 4/10ths of an inch of contribution to sea level rise.
Good Lord! Let me take a deep breath!
The quote from the article: “Their models suggest that this would cause the glacier to uncontrollably retreat about 25 miles (40 kilometers) over the next several decades, potentially raising global sea levels by more than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter).”
Whoa is Me. Not Woe is Me. What a difference between the headline, and the notion that maybe, just maybe, if the modelers are right, this MASSIVE glacier in UNCONTOLLABLE retreat, past a TIPPING POINT, might by 2050 or so contribute less than half an inch to sea level rise.
What isn’t discussed is what would make the Pine Island glacier slide uncontrollably to the see — 1000 ppm? 1500 ppm? I can certainly see that SOME CO2 level would do that, but everything I have read so far about Antarctic says that in a somewhat warmer climate, which we will have in Antarctica soon, Antarctic as a whole will get more snowfall, hence more retention of ice, because warmer air holds more water vapor, even if the increase in warmth is merely from minus 40 C to minus 35 C.
Re comments by climatereason on Jan 17, 2014 at 2:39 pm
Tony, I don’t why you are taking me to task. All I did was quote the article’s title and lead paragraph, give a link to the article, and say I didn’t know if the glacier was discussed in the testimony.
Max
So I have performed a public service by reading the article and reassuring you that nothing is amiss. No, don’t thank me.
Tonyb
Tony, your spin isn’t a public service, it’s a public disservice.
A good example of a public service is me calling attention to news like the following:
http://www.catholic.org/green/story.php?id=53908
Max
Spin? No only reporting what the article says, rather than just relaying the headline. Why is that spin?
Tonyb
There is no point discussing Pine Island. we have passed the tipping point
nothing we can do.
Mosh
You’re right. Want to buy some cheap heated water wings?
Tonyb
If you took all of the glaciers that have ever calved and fallen into the sea over the last 6,000 years — and laid them end to end from Jupiter to Pluto — you’d have thrown away enough fresh water for a few feet of sea level rise.
Wag,
Don’t you think the sea level rise since the holecene is around 120 meters? The Farallons islands 26 miles west of the Golden Gate were contiguous with the land and SF bay was a river valley. The melting from the ice age rose the sea above much of the continental shelf.
Scott
Re comment by Tonyb , January 17, 2014 at 4:18 pm
Aw come on, Tony, you would change that headline from
“Massive Antarctic Glacier Uncontrollably Retreating, Study Suggests” to something like one of the following:
Climate Scientist Admits Antarctic Glacier Could Grow
Climate Scientist Doesn’t Believe His Own Assumption
Climate Scientist Waffles on Antarctic Glacier
Max
After reading your catholic link I think the headlines would be
‘Scientists pray for glacier stability.’
Tonyb
Pingback: Judith Curry’s Testimony | Transterrestrial Musings
Sign of the times.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/oddnews/it-got-so-cold-so-quickly-in-this-norweigan-bay-that-it-froze-a-bunch-of-fish-swimming-in-it-232504960.html
David, about 15 or 20 years ago there was a big cold snap in Washington DC, just when shad were starting to migrate, probably late February. A good number of them ended up frozen in the ice; as it melted, the gulls made a feast of them. Of course, it wasn’t nearly as cold as in Norway, but relative to what was expected by the fish, it was cold enough.
Mail Online (Jan. 17, 2014): “Here comes polar vortex TWO: Just when you thought it was safe to go outside…”
Time for climatists to throw more lies on the barbie.
Senate EPW Hearing on the President’s Climate Action Plan
The science is not settled. It is not a sure thing that the temperature and oceans will rise a dangerous amount.
There is NO climate data that is out of the bounds of the past ten thousand years, other than CO2.
There is NO climate data that is headed out of the bounds of the past ten thousand years, other than CO2.
There is NO actual proof that CO2 will cause anything else to head out of bounds. Nothing else is headed out of bounds, based on actual honest data.
Consensus Alarmist Climate Theory and Models based on Alarmist Theory is the only thing that shows anything likely to go out of bounds.
Sixteen years of failed forecasts and current temperatures that are outside the extreme bounds of the forecasts is plenty of reason to increase the uncertainty. They have increased the certainty as their forecast got worse. This is not REAL SCIENCE.
The IPCC and the EPA and the Presidents Climate Plan have no basis that is based on Science or Actual Data.
Stop them from doing more damage and investigate this properly.
Judith: I was nice to hear both the Democrat’s climate expert and the Republican’s climate expert agree far more often than they disagreed: The hiatus is real, the IPCC has lowered the likely range of climate sensitivity, the only type of extreme weather that has changed significantly is intense precipitation (not hurricanes, tornados, cold waves, etc.) Dessler’s statement that mitigation isn’t going to reduce the amount anthropogenic climate change in the first half of the 21st century was also remarkably candid. I don’t think Congress realizes that Americans are going to see no significant benefits from today’s mitigation policies for a half-century, and those benefits will appear only if the rest of the world follows the Obama administration’ lead (which most are not). China’s CO2 emissions will be double the US’s in 2014. If their economy continues grows at only 7% per year and their energy intensity improve 3% a year (their current commitment), their emissions will be triple ours in a decade!
What was missing from this hearing were experts on how the EPA should calculate the social cost of CO2 emission. The social cost of carbon depends dramatically on climate sensitivity, the range of possible damage AND benefits associated with any particular amount of warming in the future, and the discount rate. The answer depends dramatically on whether ECS is 2.0- (central estimate from energy balance observations) or 3.0+ (central estimate of climate models). One theme of the the hearing was how the administration’s policy could be justified from a cost-benefit point of view and the benefits can’t be determined with any accuracy. It would be nice if Congress understood the pdf’s for TCR and ECS and how much they differ when calculated from climate models and observations.
Frank, exactly right. How can EPA have increased the cost of carbon this past year, when we now can see that even Nature magazine, and NOAA, are published data suggesting a considerably lower climate sensitivity?
Perhaps the answer has to do with who EPA got together to make the new cost of carbon estimate: we don’t know who they are, or how they made the calculations.
A huge issue, with huge public consequences, but because it didn’t hit one of the qualifications for an official rulemaking, it was all done behind closed doors.
http://rhetorica.net/archives/8320.html
‘The argument is simple: In a media situation where anyone can report, publish, and be noticed, transparency (in purpose, methods, and ethos) becomes the new umbrella ethic, the new route to credibility — the willingness to be open about who you are, what you’re doing, and why you’re doing it. This is the opposite of the view from nowhere — the false notion that journalists can or should be “objective” in philosophical stance, that their news comes from some place apart from the pressures and intentions of the real world with no purpose other than to inform. (What journalists need to be are custodians of fact who operate with a discipline of verification – and be transparent about it.) –
Sometimes there’s no widespread agreement on what is fact and what is not. Is it a fact that water vapor amplification trebles MODTRANS CO2 sensitivity? What range of sensitivity can be considered a fact? Who is the final arbitor of fact and non-fact? Are facts and non-facts arbitrated by a consensus vote? Who gets to vote and what percentage is a consensus?
I fear your mission for the press is quite impossible and thus the best they can do is report as much as practical and let the reader decide which side of a story to believe. Just like it works in a courtroom. The judge determines what evidence is legally admissable he doesn’t determine truth or falsity that’s the jury’s job. The press is the judge. The readers are the jury. Write that down.
Let us try this again.
The Consensus Climate Scientists tell us they really don’t understand what has happened and the Consensus Climate Scientists tell us they really don’t understand what is happening, but they tell us they are 97% sure they do understand what will happen next.
I am 99.9999% sure that I don’t believe that.
Herman, I am 99.9999% sure you have misinterpreted climate scientists. If you believe uncertainty means no knowledge or no understanding, you are wrong. But don’t feel bad, you aren’t alone.
Maxie,
Uncertainty can be worse than no knowledge. Uncertainty means what is stated might be wrong.
Scenario 1: I went boar hunting and didn’t know if my rifle was loaded or not so I checked and made sure it was loaded before beginning the hunt.
Scenario 2: I went boar hunting and was 95% certain my rifle was loaded and so assumed it was. But I was wrong.
Famous last words: Holy crap look at the size of that boar charging at me!
With respect to the science of climate change, the most fundamental question remains: ‘Can humans manipulate climate predictably?’ Or, more scientifically: ‘Will cutting carbon dioxide emissions at the margin produce a linear, predictable change in climate?’ The answer is “No”. In so complex a coupled, non-linear, chaotic system as climate, not doing something at the margins is as unpredictable as doing something. This is the cautious science; the rest is dogma.
Philip Stott article: Global warming: Common sense prevails “The G8 declaration blows apart Green delusions”
“If you believe uncertainty means no knowledge or no understanding, you are wrong”
Not necessarily. One can say “I am uncertain I’ll have a job next year” and have, practically speaking, no knowledge about whether this will come to pass or not. Prediction of the future becomes increasingly difficult the farther in the future you imagine as more unknowns will present themselves.
But you know that already. ;)
Andrew
Bad Andrew, that’s not true. For example, a job seeker can be more certain he will find a job in the distance future than tomorrow. Predictions for a long time period can be more reliable than predictions for the immediate future because the longer the forecast horizon, the greater the opportunity for the prediction to occur.
Another advantage of forecasting long-term is the prediction doesn’t have to be as accurate as a short-term forecast in order to be useful. For example, suppose a $100 stock is predicted to rise in price by $10 over next year, and it actually does rise by $10, a perfect forecast. Now, suppose the same $100 stock is predicted to triple in price to $300 over the next 10 years, but it actually only reaches $280, a forecast error of 20%. Despite the error in the 10-year forecast, as an investor I would find it more useful than the perfect 1-year forecast.
Max_OK “Bad Andrew, that’s not true. For example, a job seeker can be more certain he will find a job in the distance future than tomorrow. ”
I hope you are right about that but it looks like Americans have educated themselves out of jobs. The way things are going less than 50% of Americans are likely to be “employable” in the next 20 years or so.
Capt if you mean of those that want to be employable, I would say you are too pessimistic. But I would agree a workforce can be overeducated for an economy’s jobs.
The mismatch between worker qualifications and employer needs, however, works both ways, with shortages of workers in some occupations and surpluses in others.
Just imagine how many jobs there would be if we outlawed fossil-fuel combustion. The Captain would have to have sailors and rowers and a playmate.
Whoops, 1st mate.
One thing that every everybody missed was desslers argument that we cannot do ANYTHING to change the weather of the next 3 decades.
it is already baked in.
1. If you believe the science, then nothing you can do will change the weather of the next few decades
2. If you believe the alarmist line about more extreme events then
you believe we are in store for 30 years of unpreventable extreme events.
So, you have a choice: how much money to spend on mitigation that wont have a benefit for 30 years versus spending on adaptation to do the best we can over the next 30 years.
And probably won’t have ever if we tried to implement the mitigation policies that are being advocated and have been advocated for the past 20+ years in the UN climate conferences, the IPCC, and by most of the climate orthodoxy.
Steven Mosher: So, you have a choice: how much money to spend on mitigation that wont have a benefit for 30 years versus spending on adaptation to do the best we can over the next 30 years.
IIRC, Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate told me that we do not have to choose: we have enough wealth to do both. But I agree with you that choices are necessary.
That was a personal opinion by Gavin Schmidt, not and expert opinion. He is a scientist/ modeller, not an economist. I assume he didn’t explain that his assertion was a personal opinion. right? So he’s doing exactly what is damaging science – speaking about subjects he has no expertise in and inferring that he is an authority we can trust.
Lets define what we mean by “alarmist” as far as I can see there are the following level of views-
1) Denial – man is so insignificant he cannot change a climate. Any and all climatic changes are do to natural variations, sun radiance, ocean currents etc. (Climate being patterns of weather over 30 year periods.)
2) Admission but unconcern – CO2 does block radiation and does have a greenhouse effect as theorised in 1824 by Fourier, later by Tyndall and Arrhenious and confirmed by USAF in the 1950s missile tests, but the effects are minor, overestimated and the Earth can manage the change in balance. Mother Gaiai is dominant
3) Admission with concern – There is a good chance that we are warming the planet and the trend continues upwards in CO2 concentrations, so it is a good idea to move to cleaner energy and cut back on CO2 emissions.
4) Alarm-ism: Oh My God methane is firing out of the Arctic tundra, look at the PETM, great dying it is happening now. Ge-oengineering is the only saviour.
I would define myself as favouring camp 3 and wholeheartedly support the move off fossil fuels, but I do not favour alarm-ism as in camp 4 (although can sympathise with all other camps) except views based on profit at the endangerment to humans and co species health, safety and well being. Such people are truly despicable.
At what cost? Unlimited cost?
Do you “wholeheartedly support move off fossil fuels” if:
– doing so would cause greater hardship across the world, especially for the poorest people?
– without a high probability that doing so would deliver meaurable benefits?
Steven Mosher: So, you have a choice: how much money to spend on mitigation that wont have a benefit for 30 years versus spending on adaptation to do the best we can over the next 30 years.
Option 3 is to spend less money on fuel subsidies,saving countries around half a trillion dollars,and improving their fiscal balance sheets.
Phasing out fossil fuel consumptions subsidies by 2020 would:
i)slash growth in energy demand by 4.1%
ii) reduce growth in oil demand by 3.7mb/d
iii)cut growth in CO2 emissions by 1.7 Gt
https://www.iea.org/media/weowebsite/energysubsidies/ff_subsidies_slides.pdf
Yes to phasing out fossil fuel subsisdies.
Yes to phasing out renewable energy subsidies and regulation that mandate and favour them over other technologies
Yes to winding back the mass of irrational, unjustifiable impediments that are preventing nuclear power competing on a level playing field for energy supply.
Peter Lang
“Do you “wholeheartedly support move off fossil fuels” if:
– doing so would cause greater hardship across the world, especially for the poorest people?
– without a high probability that doing so would deliver meaurable benefits?”
Take the country Paraquay, it does not have any oil or gas resource, 100% of it’s total electricity is generated by hydro. It has surplus power which it exports and that helps with it’s GDP. Paraquay has some very poor rural people, climate change is making droughts more likely in the future (and their export and supply is likely to get drier) who are these poor people who benefit from oil ? In my experience it is richer people who benefit from oil (and I have worked in the oil business for most of my life).
“If you believe the science, then nothing you can do will change the weather of the next few decades”
Hurrah, we can have the nuclear war we have always wanted!
That damned fool Sagan put us off in the 80’s, but Dessler puts nuclear winter to rest,
No worries about big rocks falling from the sky and hitting a pyrites bed.
“One thing that every everybody missed was desslers argument that we cannot do ANYTHING to change the weather of the next 3 decades.
it is already baked in.”
Like many other people who reached the same conclusion by a different route, I didn’t need Dessler to tell me that.
I’ve never understood the claim we can’t affect the weather of the next few decades. Methane has a atmospheric lifespan of about a decade. It also has a far stronger effect than carbon dioxide. Dramatic cuts in methane emissions would be expected to have an appreciable effect within a few decades. I believe changes in aerosol emissions could also have relatively quick effects.
I find it troubling it’s suggested I don’t “believe the science” because I look beyond carbon dioxide emissions.
Excellent, given time limits. Thank you.
Bad Andrew said on January 17, 2014 at 4:23 pm “Prediction of the future becomes increasingly difficult the farther in the future you imagine as more unknowns will present themselves.”
__________
WRONG ! And I will give you an example of why you are wrong.
Investors like me are more confident in long-term stock market forecasts than they are in short-term forecasts. I believe the S&P 500 will rise in the long run and I have put my money where my mouth is long ago by investing a big wad of cash in an S&P index fund. I would, however, have no confidence at all in a forecast of what the S&P will do next week.
Max,
I may be wrong in isolated cases, but generally speaking I am right.
Andrew
Max_OK, Citizen Scientist: I believe the S&P 500 will rise in the long run and I have put my money where my mouth is long ago by investing a big wad of cash in an S&P index fund. I would, however, have no confidence at all in a forecast of what the S&P will do next week.
that is an interesting analogy in many ways, not least that an increase would be considered “good”, as an increase in global mean temp might be “good”. However, would you be willing to bet which companies are included in the S&P index 20 – 80 years hence? Just as climate scientists add and drop measuring instruments from their indexes (indices if you prefer), so does S&P add and drop companies from its index. This makes the S&P index, like the indices produced by climate science, a poor measure of whether anything good or bad is happening over spans of time.
Matthew, your’s is the best example of wrong thinking I have seen in a long time. Nevertheless, there are fragments of truth in what you say. I would agree some kinds of growth are good (growth of wind power and solar power, and growth in motor vehicle mpg).
You asked how many companies in the S&P 500 Index will still be there in “20 – 80 years.” I would bet only between 0 and 5 of the current 500 companies will still be in the index 80 years from now, but if it’s 20 years I’m not so sure, showing again the longer the forecast horizon the greater confidence in the forecast.
BTW, since an index fund tracks the index, the change in the composition is not something the investor need worry about.
Max_OK, Citizen Scientist: You didn’t quote anything I wrote and show how it was actually wrong,, but you still have a chance.
BTW, since an index fund tracks the index, the change in the composition is not something the investor need worry about.
That’s true of the investor in the index fund, but not true of the investors in the stocks that make up the fund. If everyone invested solely in index funds, the index would always be 0. So there has to be something of which the index is an index, just as the climate summaries are summaries of particular measures at particular times and places. It matters a great deal where those measurements are taken, and if the measuring instruments are changed or moved. For example, it matters to the mean temp if a lot of urbanization occurs around a thermometer, if thermometers are removed from rural areas (or the measurements ignored), and so forth.
As global warming becomes the big no-show of the modern age, Tom Switzer of The Sydney Morning Herald brings us up to date on what humanity has been up to, as follows:
“The Kyoto treaty effectively expired a year ago. Prospects for a replacement are virtually zero. Rich nations are rejecting climate compensation for the developing world. Europe is in a coal frenzy. Germany, a former green trend-setter, is slashing unaffordable subsidies to the renewables industry. The European Parliament is losing confidence in the EU emissions trading scheme. No Asian nation has an emission trading scheme in operation. China’s and India’s net emissions are growing dramatically and governments, most recently Japan’s, are abandoning earlier pledges to reduce their nations’ carbon footprints… And as the US shale fracking revolution shows, the most efficient way to cut emissions is not via command-and-control regulation but by allowing private drillers to expand natural gas production.”
Excellent summary of the current situation.
IMO, it shows the stupidity of the climate science establishment, the IPCC, the environmental NGOs and the mass of climate alarmists for proposing and advocating economically irrational (mostly ideologically driven) policies to mitigate climate change. Economically irrational policies have virtually no hope of being implemented and sustained.
except fracking is not cutting emissions, in the longterm it contributes to increased emissions
With natural gas we’re burning more hydrogen compared to coal. Humanity has been decarbonizing all along…
Stop feigning stupidity
Michael Crichton had a big problem with these global warming alarmists who don’t really seem to like people much, whether at home or around the globe–e.g.,
“Everyday 30,000 people on this planet die of the diseases of poverty. There are, a third of the planet doesn’t have electricity. We have a billion people with no clean water, we have half a billion people going to bed hungry every night. Do we care about this?
It seems that we don’t. “
“But the study found that the boom in shale gas won’t cut emissions after all – the coal that countries would have burned to produce electricity, they now export to other countries that burn it.”
http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/greenhouse-gas-emissions-will-rise-almost-third-2035-study-20140116
“I don’t know what’s wrong with the rich self-centered societies that we live in in the west that we are not paying attention to the conditions of the wider world. And it does seem to me that if we use arguments about the environment to turn our back on the sick and the dying of our shared world, and that’s our excuse to ignore them, then we have done a true and terrible thing.” ~Michael Crichton
Dr. Curry,
Thank you for your time and effort.
Dave
The BBC must have been hacked!! (There is a video, I haven’t yet watched it, so they may end up saying the globe will warm anyway, but the headline is catchy.)
From the article:
Has the Sun gone to sleep?
17 January 2014 Last updated at 05:57 GMT
Scientists are saying that the Sun is in a phase of “solar lull” – meaning that it has fallen asleep – and it is baffling them.
History suggests that periods of unusual “solar lull” coincide with bitterly cold winters.
Rebecca Morelle reports for BBC Newsnight on the effect this inactivity could have on our current climate, and what the implications might be for global warming.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25771510
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/Cycle22Cycle23Cycle24big.gif
jim2
They said the northern hemisphere part of Europe will cool but the earth will continue warming. They also said Greenland may warm. “here come the vikings again”. Actually I added that but they did say global warming will continue as Europe cools down because of reduced sun spots. Quite the projection.
thanks for the link. It was interesting.
Scott
Fun hearing them talk about the sun going to sleep when as far as I heard it is still emitting over 1360 watts/m^2 felt at the top of the atmosphere.
So on the one hand, climate sensitivity is oh-so-important when it comes to sunspots, but not so important when it comes to CO2.
This is the decomposition of factors when it comes to explaining the warming trend. The factors are staggered so you can easily separate them.
http://imageshack.com/a/img28/5309/2sqg.gif
When all these factors are put together, we get a composite model which matches reality:
http://imageshack.com/a/img28/1736/cewu.gif
Almost impossible to separate the data from the model except for the effects of a 3-year exponential smoothing at the beginning of the time series.
Sun vs. CO2?
CO2 goes up and down by as much as 600 ppm on a daily basis at Mauna Loa. That does make the temperature fluctuate. But, when the Sun gods down… it gets cold.
Say, jim2, them cheshire sunspots disappearin’ in a solar lull …
We’ll need ter call on old King Coal, stored sunshine over eons.
Pity about them intermittant, inefficient renewables’ storage
problems … jest not there when yer need ’em most..
beth the serf.
Coal? Somebody needs coal? We have coal. Not the generic, but superb Sydney-Gunnedah Black. Accessible and in enormous supply. Lovers of authentic Lapsang Souchong tea and Cote d’Ivoire chocolate will adore.
We recommend burning in the best and mot advanced facilities, so that not a precious nugget is wasted. Don’t do what we Aussies do and burn the stuff in old clunkers after taxing the tripe out of it.
Btw, could those experts who have testified that the earth’s climate is changing rapidly (as it is) kindly point me to an era when the earth’s climate was not changing rapidly? Because any period of climatic stability would indeed be freakish.
Or aren’t we supposed to have noticed that?
The Sun is returning to levels of the 1910 activity minimum, which was prior to the mid-century warming between 1910 and 1940. This allows us to see how much of the last century is CO2 versus solar, and, guess what, all of the warming is still here despite the cooling sun.
Good point, JD.
Hearing how the skeptics describe the strength of the solar, it should wipe out the 0.8C of warming that we have seen since before 1900.
But then again they will likely instead fabricate some sort of “integrating” function that prevents the temperature from dropping. This will enable them to at least justify a plateau.
WHT, if they take that route they have to explain why it rose so fast following the solar trend almost immediately from 1910 to 1940, while it doesn’t drop so fast when the trend goes the other way.
JD,
Right, and so into the bin goes the “integration” ploy that skeptics from Tisdale to Salby seem to prefer. Integration acts as a filter and once they start using it to explain a gradual trend, then they can’t use it to explain a rapid change.
Judith Curry
Your testimony is excellent. As far as I can see, it covers all the climate-related points that a Senate Committee needs to know with regard to the President’s climate action plans. Hopefully, this body will take the time to try to understand what you have written, and slow down the EPA folks, who seem to be running wild to put out an imaginary fire.
Andrew Dessler’s testimony was pretty much the standard CAGW message – and he presented it well (but not near as convincingly as you did).
And he used a bit of “chartmanship” sleight of hand in his Fig. 5 – instead of showing the 2001-2013 extended period of cooling, he broke it into two cooling periods, 2002-2008 and 2009-2013, to make the “pause” seem shorter and more in line with earlier short periods of cooling. He also conveniently left out the 30-year cooling prior to around 1970. (“Inconvenient truths”?)
As for some of the senators using the opportunity to “bloviate”, hey, that’s what these guys are known for (remember the loony tunes cartoon character, Senator Foghorn Leghorn?)
Thanks for posting this for us all to read.
Max
Pingback: The Invisible Judith Curry | NoFrakkingConsensus
Ocean heat content for 2013 sharply upward breaking a new record
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/index.html
The destructive moment for the skeptic narrative is imminent. The next El Nino? I only wonder how skeptics are going to explain the ongoing warming during a quiet sun and negative PDO. Out of options?
Then you must believe in CO2 is a perpetual motion machine…
Waggie, the sun is about as close to that as we have.
It’s up because the winds are back to normal, which means upwelling in the Eastern Pacific is diminished, and that warm water from the Western pacific is sloshing back toward South America, Latin American, and North America.
Just as Trenberth said it would.
Smearing Trenberth – good sign you have an abject moron on your hands.
And just wait until we’re leaning toward El Nino. ’cause bingo, new record hottest year.
JCH – right now the ENSO meter on WUWT is leaning towards la Nina. The hot water in the Pacific has made a rather dramatic move South. It sure doesn’t look like an el Nino at any rate. Or do you believe this heat you speak of will sneak up on us while we are sleeping?
Check out this SST animation. (Pretty cool.)
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_update/gsstanim.gif
lolwot, if the PDO is a cycle, then at some point in the next 5 to 15 years, we should change over to a cycle of increasing temperatures. That isn’t a surprise, except to deniers, but not to skeptics. The issue isn’t whether we are warming, but rather what the sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 is.
You are like an Aztec priest who sees the hairy men, wearing steel armor, on horseback, but doesn’t realize it is the little man on the mule, the one wearing black robes, who he should be terrified of.
I suggest bereavement counseling, if something breaks your leg you see a leg doctor, so it follows that if something breaks your heart you seen a loss specialist.
The game is over.
Jan9, 2014 MEI, Wolter:
Stay tuned for the next update by February 9th to see where the MEI will be heading next. El Niño came and went during the summer of 2012, not unlike 1953. This was followed by our first ENSO-neutral winter since 2003-04 (2005-06 was an ENSO-neutral winter, but much closer to La Niña, and dipped into La Niña rankings during March-April). Over the last half-year, La Niña had its turn to come and go again, almost in a mirror-image of last year’s sequence. While we have now reached the time of year when drastic transitions are much less common than in the first half of the calendar year, the upward jump of +0.7 standard deviations between July-August and September-October, as well as its subsequent drop of -0.4 sigma, indicate unusual volatility. While ENSO-neutral conditions are the safest bet for the next couple of months, a transition towards El Niño by mid-2014 would not be surprising, if not overdue. …
So maybe an El Nino later or maybe not, but no La NIna in sight.
IRI Probabilistic ENSO forecast
So maybe an El Nino later or maybe not, but no La NIna in sight.
BOM Australia:
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) remains in a neutral state, with all indicators well within neutral bounds. International climate models surveyed by the Bureau indicate this neutral ENSO state is likely to persist into the austral autumn. Some models suggest the central Pacific Ocean may warm during autumn and winter, while others remain near average.
So maybe an El Nino later or maybe not, but no La NIna in sight.
NOAA, Jan 9, 2014:
The majority of models predict that ENSO-neutral (Niño-3.4 index between -0.5oC and 0.5oC) will persist into the Northern Hemisphere summer 2014 (Fig. 6). While current forecast probabilities are still greatest for ENSO-neutral during summer, there is an increasing chance for the development of El Niño. The consensus forecast is for ENSO-neutral to continue into the Northern Hemisphere summer 2014 …
So maybe an El Nino later or maybe not, but no La NIna in sight.
lolwot-
And how is lolwot going to explain continuation of the pause for another 25 years.
Temperatures not going the right direction so you awnt us to look at ocean heat content instead. But figures are really just guesstimates for the deep ocean. I’m unconvcinced. I guess we wait and see eh?
up, up and away
Where do you see the wrong direction?
When temperature does not go up enough to support the alarmism, they make up a new “thing” to hide heat in.
The new “thing” is just new garbage.
Earth temperature is always in balance or very close.
Day to night and summer to winter changes show that earth responds very quickly.
This hidden heat is a real bunch of garbage.
Lol. Made up?
The 2003 paper by Pielke Sr. :
An assessment of the heat storage within the earth’s
climate system offers a unique perspective on global
change. If the heat actually remains within the earth
system in the deeper ocean, for example, while the
heat content of the remainder of the heat reservoirs
in the earth system remains unchanged, …
There is absolutely no doubt that mankind has liberated huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the past two centuries. But mankind did not “create” this carbon dioxide out of nothing. It was released by the burning of “fossil fuels”, created by the Earth over millions of years from the remains of plants and animals (who themselves ultimately obtained their nutrition from those plants). So where did those plants get their energy and carbon dioxide from? They absorbed the radiant energy of the Sun, and breathed in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, as plants continue to do today. In other words, when we burn fossil fuels, we are utilizing a small part of the solar energy that had been collected and stored by plants over millions of years, and in the process we are liberating into the atmosphere the carbon dioxide that those plants had absorbed from the atmosphere in the first place.
This may sound like a fairly benign sort of natural cycle, until you realize that a couple of hundred years is a mere blink of an eye compared to the millions of years it took for the planet to build up those resources. It is right for scientists to worry about whether that massive and almost instantaneous “kick” to the planet may throw the equilibrium of the biota into complete chaos. It is a valid question, of ultimate global importance—one that most people would have thought would have demanded the most careful, exacting, and rigorous scientific analyses that mankind could muster.
Climategate has shattered that myth. It gives us a peephole into the work of the scientists investigating possibly the most important issue ever to face mankind. Instead of seeing large collaborations of meticulous, careful, critical scientists, we instead see a small team of incompetent cowboys, abusing almost every aspect of the framework of science to build a fortress around their “old boys’ club”, to prevent real scientists from seeing the shambles of their “research”. Most people are aghast that this could have happened; and it is only because “climate science” exploded from a relatively tiny corner of academia into a hugely funded industry in a matter of mere years that the perpetrators were able to get away with it for so long. (John P. Costella, ‘Climategate Analysis’)
One can find climategate right where it belongs: between billygate and coingate.
“We have seen above that one of the chief criticisms of the hockey stick was the fact that its author, Michael Mann, had withheld the validation statistics so that it was impossible for anyone to gauge the reliability of the reconstruction.” (Caspar and the Jesus paper)
You just move it a bit closer to billygate.
True, true, self righteous school teachers destitute of the impulse to any uplifting activity.
You’re going to have to help me. I’m not a school teacher. My kids went to inner-city public schools. They’re excellent students and great people. My son just finished interviewing for a residency at the top teaching hospitals for his chosen specialty in the country. Exactly where do you think there is some sort of deficiency?
With all we know about Michael Mann, how can he still have a job at Penn State? And, what about the conspiracy of silence among academics concerning Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ and its use by the UN-IPCC to perpetrate and perpetuate a fraud? Do academics face no consequences when it is shown that they have zero respect for truth?
easy:
Penn State apparently thinks your wild-eyed claims are flawed.
I think he’s wrong about the AMO. I don’t think it exists.
Penn State’s reputation and judgment ain’t so good. In the Sandusky child abuse scandal,”Per the findings of the grand jury, several high-level school officials were charged with perjury, suspended, or dismissed for covering up the incidents or failing to notify authorities.” But, Mann’s actions represent a failure of all academia. The government-education complex has failed America.
Very Well Said!
Climategate showed how propaganda could be created by selective interpretation of others words. Climategate also showed how gullible those claiming to be skeptics are.
It shows why Western civilization is going down the toilet: parents are putting the education of their children into the hands of teachers pushing climate porn in the classrooms.
Andrew Dessler’s testimony was spot on. I really appreciated his words, “Before I begin talking about impacts, it is worth discussing the value of talking about what we know rather than what we don’t know. Focusing on what is unknown can lead to an incorrect perception of uncertainty. “
What we know is global warming is a hoax and a scare tactic. It’s all about politics: that’s why it is a Left versus right issue. And, one of the biggest victims is the credibility of science. Freeman Dyson says, “I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic.”
There have been 3 to 4 significant down welling kelvin waves in the equatorial pacific during 2013, the last is captured by this animation:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_update/wkxzteq.shtml
Not one of these events lead to an El nino developing. Thus, the argument that warm water building up and sloshing east ‘must lead’ to an El Nino is clearly falsified…..by the observational evidence. Whether it is a westerly wind burst associated with the MJO or a downwelling kelvin wave, correlation does not equal causation.
While there has been warm water building up in the pacific, and this warm water is highly correlated to El Nino, and most of the models suggest there will be an El nino (because of these observations rather than any form of “forecast skill”), that does not mean 2014 will be an El nino. Of the short and almost meaningless record we have, the warm water is looking anything but suggestive at the moment:
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/tao/elnino/wwv/gif/wwv_nino.gif
I kind of looks like, from the SST animations, that something is blocking Sunlight. Why else would the warm areas of the ocean actually decrease? If an el Nino were imminent, we would see a large warm pool in the western Pacific. As you can see from the animation, this isn’t happening.,
you could have said the same thing in 1996, where’s the warm water?
but 12 months later el nino of the century happens.
“you could have said the same thing in 1996, where’s the warm water?”
It peaks around 6 months before Nino 3.4 begins to rise above 0.5 threshold, where are you glasses? Can’t you read a graph (time is on the x axis…..)?
Who made the argument that water sloshing toward the Eastern Pacific “must lead” to an El Nino?
“must lead” is a bit rich so you are right,
but since they have zero predictive skill, sloshing water and westerly wind bursts are all they have to cling to.
The truth of the matter is, they basically “pseudo-forecast” an El nino……..once it is already underway. So if there is some water going east they all cry El Nino! It works when there is an El nino but you might as well flip a coin then to rely on some idiot with a super computer.
RE the Mann case …
From the article:
Court: Bloggers have First Amendment protections
By JEFF BARNARD
Associated Press
Technology Video
Buy AP Photo Reprints
GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — A federal appeals court ruled Friday that bloggers and the public have the same First Amendment protections as journalists when sued for defamation: If the issue is of public concern, plaintiffs have to prove negligence to win damages.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial in a defamation lawsuit brought by an Oregon bankruptcy trustee against a Montana blogger who wrote online that the court-appointed trustee criminally mishandled a bankruptcy case.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BLOGGER_DEFAMATION?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2014-01-17-17-59-06
Judy, you were very polite at the hearing but nevertheless effectively presented some of the realities that the global warming advocates do not want to hear. My personal choice would have included drawing the connection between the current hiatus and the one in the eighties and nineties but that would have necessitated exposing the fake warming of the eighties and nineties which they would do everything to hide. Frankly, I suspect that Hansen had to know about it because the period in question covers the “global warming” peak he spoke of to the Senate. His steadfast refusal to use satellite temperatures in my opinion ties in with it. This work will eventually have to be done, in conjunction with new science about the origin of the super El Nino. If I were you I would direct some grad students or post-docs in that direction. If they get stuck I can help them.
Very few “skeptics” want to talk about all the previous hiatuses (hiati?), that occurred over the last few decades, perhaps because they all end with sharp rises. Somehow they want this one to be different from all those others, so it doesn’t pay to bring them up.
From the article:
Crude was mixed this week and it was finally WTI that outperformed. The U.S. benchmark benefited from a reported steep drop in inventories on Wednesday, which was aided by record-low net imports into the country. At the same time, Brent suffered after the Libyan government said that the country’s output has tripled in recent weeks to 650,000 barrels per day thanks to an agreement with protestors.
We continue to see a narrowing of the WTI-Brent spread throughout the year, but a decline in overall crude oil pricing.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/1953191-week-in-review-golds-rally-continues-wti-outpacing-brent-natgas-top-performer
Breaking News
Skeptical responses already have appeared:
Conclusion The shrinkage-rate of the self-iposed “bubble” of ideology-driven denialist cognition is accelerating.
Null Hypothesis = Scenario C
The idea of a “pause” in global temperature is not supported by the data we have, so I have nothing to explain there. In years to come I expect everyone else will realize this, when it becomes a bit more obvious and harder to ignore with more data, but for now only a few of us warmers understand what the data is showing.
All the evidence in the last 10 years points to Earth continuing to heat up through the 80s, 90s and 00s (and 10s). There’s no pause in even the surface data. The warming rate since 1997 is statistically consistent with the the warming rate before then.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1970
I just want to be clear in future that no-one says “oh but you thought there was a pause too”. No, I hope this comment (and others) will make it perfectly clear that at this time that I denounced I the idea of a pause as unsupported by data.
Yes, it will still be here for all to see in years to come, so you’d just better hope you’re right.
lolwot | January 18, 2014 at 6:33 am | Reply
“The idea of a “pause” in global temperature is not supported by the data we have, so I have nothing to explain there.”
The data says otherwise
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:180/mean:149/mean:123/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:720
quite a good graph, you can see temperature continued upwards through the 21st century, no pause.
In the good old days, back when the south side of fearsome natural cycles actually had teeth, the earth’s temperature actually went down. Nobody born after 1952 has any memory of it.
In Pielke’s own words he explains why there has been no pause in the warming of the earth system in which we live:
An assessment of the heat storage within the earth’s
climate system offers a unique perspective on global
change. If the heat actually remains within the earth
system in the deeper ocean, for example, while the
heat content of the remainder of the heat reservoirs
in the earth system remains unchanged, …
Lolwot: You want to add a LOWESS to that data so as to aid your eyeball in what will happen in the future?
You want to look rather closely and observe that the current ‘zero crossing’ in the 60 year is happening slightly too early if the underlying 100+ year trend is in fact still continuing upwards?
I am just content to wait for more data to determine if I am right or not. Beats guessing every day.
Null hypothesis = Scenario C
http://stevengoddard.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/screenhunter_1741-jan-14-09-31.gif
lolwot, If you consider a sine curve, you can start plotting from the lowest point of one of the oscillations.. A forced linear fit will have a slope greater than or equal to zero into the indefinite future. There will never be a negative slope.
‘Linear Trend’ = “Tangent to the Curve” = “Flat Earthers”
The world isn’t as it was 60 years ago so expecting the trend to follow a 60 year cycle is misguided.
60 years ago CO2 was only increasing 0.5ppm a year. Today it’s increasing at over 2ppm/year.
As for Hansen’s scenarios, emissions have followed Hansen’s scenario B, so observations should be compared to scenario B not A. Hansen’s projections were based on a climate sensitivity of over 4C. If we downgrade that sensitivity until the projection matches the observations I believe the CS comes out at about 3C per doubling of CO2, which will clearly prevent a pause happening.
I think even 1C per doubling of CO2 would prevent a pause happening, that kind of sensitivity would mean CO2 was the dominant driver of global temperature in the 20th and 21st centuries, which is why (as well as for statistical reasons) I am confident the pause is figment of the imagination, an apparition in an otherwise longterm upward trend. As JCH points out a far more glaring example in the 50s.
61 years with no south side the any cycle, so kiss them goodbye. They’re like buggy whips. You waiting for your common stocks in buggy companies to rebound.
Scenario C is BAU = crazed partisan
lolwot | January 18, 2014 at 9:43 am |
“The world isn’t as it was 60 years ago so expecting the trend to follow a 60 year cycle is misguided.”
If we only had a 60 year cycle to deal with I rather think this would have been sorted out long ago.
“As for Hansen’s scenarios, emissions have followed Hansen’s scenario B, so observations should be compared to scenario B not A.”
Actually I prefer to compare the observations to Scenario C.
http://snag.gy/GdnJ0.jpg
JCH | January 18, 2014 at 9:56 am |
“Scenario C is BAU = crazed partisan”
Are you saying that observations have NOT tracked Scenario C?
http://snag.gy/GdnJ0.jpg
Hi RichardLH. This is an interesting chart. The first set of peaks are separated by 80 years or so. The second set by 60 years. I didn’t know there was such a cycle, the 80-60 cycle. I’m curious about this, can you explain why the difference in the time between cycles?
@lollywot “no pause”
Always entertaining lolly:
First take a gander at recent article in nature : http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/16/the-journal-nature-embraces-the-pause-and-ocean-cycles-as-the-cause-trenberth-still-betting-his-heat-will-show-up/
Then check out this:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/17/world/asia/japan-philippines-ww2-soldier-dies/
jim2 | January 18, 2014 at 10:11 am |
“Hi RichardLH. This is an interesting chart. The first set of peaks are separated by 80 years or so. The second set by 60 years. I didn’t know there was such a cycle, the 80-60 cycle. I’m curious about this, can you explain why the difference in the time between cycles?”
If I could do that then prizes await no doubt.
All I can do is observe the data and call out what IT shows. Are you acknowledging that the (approx.) 60 year cycle exists?
I would go with the ‘zero crossing’ myself given that is the most common way of interpreting these things outside of climate science, peaks and troughs are way too easy to distort.
pokerguy pointing me at an article you don’t believe yourself
hypocrite?
@JCH
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1920/to:1980/mean:24/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1942/to:1977/mean:24/trend
Fixed that for ya by making it a full 60-year cycle and marking a very small downward trend that lasted for 35 years at 0.03C/decade. The current cold side of the AMDO is just getting started and while there is not yet any downtrend at all it still has another 20-30 years to develop one.
There’s no avoiding the fact that CMP5 ensemble plotted a future temperature trend that was slightly wrong for 22 continuous years then the observed temperature trend fell outside the 95% confidence bound of the projected temperature trend and it fell out on the cold side.
Since the ensemble could have been wrong in the 95% confidence range either high or low and it fell out on the low side we can now say, with 97.5% confidence that the model ensemble is running too hot by a large and growing error factor. Each additional year that the 0.20C/decade rise fails to happen the model projections become more wrong.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/
that’s tropical mid-troposphere springer, not global temperature.
scenario C didn’t happen so it doesn’t make sense to compare observations to scenario C. By not happen, I mean the forcing tracked scenario B the most. If you want to calculate how much lower the climate sensitivity model would have to be to match C fine, but that’s easier in reference to scenario B given forcings most closely followed that scenario.
“The world isn’t as it was 60 years ago so expecting the trend to follow a 60 year cycle is misguided.”
_______
This gets to the very important point that many so-called “skeptics” somehow think that internal variability and cycles such as ENSO won’t be affected by increasing GH gases in the atmosphere. They base much of their skepticism on looking back at these cycles and guessing how much of a temperature rise was due to the “cycle”. Here’s the thing– external forcings alter the internal variability of the system. Earth 2014 does not equal Earth 1976 or Earth 1940 or Earth 1750. We’ve got an atmosphere with GH gas levels not seen for at least 3.2 million years. The internal variability of the climate system is going to be different. ENSO will act different, the AMO will act different, and so forth. Even on a very simple bases (but an important one) the changes we are seeing in the Brewer-Dobson Circulation will have major impacts on these and other metrics of internal variability.
What is Pielke saying, or about to say? He’s saying the oceans could suddenly start sequestering so much of the energy arriving at the earth each day that the surface air temperature would go flat, and then…
What’s he about to say?
When they started they had a semblance of a land temperature record, and they had a semblance of a record for the surface of the oceans. Because that is where we live and work.
They did not have a means of adequately monitoring the deeper oceans.
So the definition of global warming became the surface air temperature. Pielke has been arguing to include OHC below the SST in the definition of GW because it is a far more robust way of doing it.
Gavin Schmidt argues the definition of GW is the SAT, and that it would be a mistake to change it midstream.
So advocates of claiming there has been a pause in global warming are actually agreeing with Gavin Schmidt, and advocates of fudging in OHC, because it the better way of doing it, are agreeing with Pielke Sr.
Since OHC has continued going up throughout, Pielke correctly predicted the current situation, and the globe has warmed throughout the “pause”.
“The current cold side of the AMDO is just getting started and while there is not yet any downtrend at all it still has another 20-30 years to develop one.”
_____
Perfect example of assuming that the internal variability of the system is not being altered by the rapid external forcing going on from the highest GH gases since the Pliocene. Very faulty logic.
good point about the influence of human activity on natural cycles. In addition human activity can create the false illusion of a cycle. Human aerosol emissions cause cooling in the 70s, skeptics mistake it for the cooling part of a cycle?
RichardLH- I have to apologize. for a long time there were a group of people who argued Hansen’s BAU was Scenario A, and I mistakenly thought you were another of them.
“Since OHC has continued going up throughout, Pielke correctly predicted the current situation, and the globe has warmed throughout the “pause”.”
_____
Precisely. And then there are those who admit that it is likely that OHC is increasing, but that it won’t matter as the heat is being harmlessly “dispersed” throughout the ocean– almost to suggest we can get a “free ride” from the highest GH gas levels in at least 3.2 million years. Such ignorance of actual ocean to atmosphere dynamics is actually rather frightening, especially when some of it comes from those who should know better.
external forcings alter the internal variability of the system
Yep. When the external forcing changes, earth responds to keep temperature and sea level inside the same bounds it has maintained for ten thousand years.
If the external forcing warms earth, earth produces more snow.
If the external forcing cools earth, earth produces less snow.
Just look at actual data. We are warm and earth is producing more snow.
Just look at the snow job that Dressler tried to pull off in Washington.
“Human aerosol emissions cause cooling in the 70s, skeptics mistake it for the cooling part of a cycle?”
_____
It get more complicated than that as there are always multiple forcings that influence the climate at any given time, and those forcings can themselves have complex feedbacks, both positive and negative, short and longer term. Hence why GCM’s are valuable tools for understanding these complex dynamics. The climate we actually get- is the complex sum of all forcings, including feedbacks. This complex sum of all forcings is revealed most completely in the paleoclimate record. What it tells us is that the last time GH gases were at this level for an extended period, the world was a much different place.
The cycle of fools.
PDO actually looks for awhile, mid century, like it determines temperature. The AMO is just tagging along. Because it’s a shadow: it does not exist. If the GMT goes up, it will go up. If the GMT goes down, it will go down. If the GMT stays flat, the AMO stays flat. The AMO does not drive anything; it follows. It’s the shadow of the temperature anomaly.
lolwot | January 18, 2014 at 10:30 am |
“scenario C didn’t happen so it doesn’t make sense to compare observations to scenario C.”
Arguing that CO2 did not track Scenario C is not the point.
The EFFECTS of Scenario C are that greenhouse gasses and any changes in them have no outcome on temperatures.
Just as the observation show!
JCH:
The 60 year cycle is present in HadCrut4, AMO and PDO.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:180/mean:149/mean:123/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:720
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/plot/esrl-amo/mean:180/mean:149/mean:123
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo/plot/jisao-pdo/mean:180/mean:149/mean:123
When will ENSO be affected? We are still waiting for the “more frequent and stronger El Ninos”.
http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.htm
The CO2 keeps piling up but the ninos have been weak sisters, for more than a decade.
R. Gates, a Skeptical Warmist | January 18, 2014 at 10:38 am |
“Perfect example of assuming that the internal variability of the system is not being altered by the rapid external forcing going on from the highest GH gases since the Pliocene. Very faulty logic.”
Perfect example of assuming that Greenhouse gas forcings ARE the main driver of temperatures.
“The EFFECTS of Scenario C are that greenhouse gasses and any changes in them have no outcome on temperatures.”
Uh no,
I’ve just realized you’ve altered Hansen’s words. Hansen said:
“We have considered cases ranging from business as usual, which is scenario A, to draconian emission cuts, scenario C, which would totally eliminate net trace gas growth by year 2000.”
You’ve altered this to “We have considered cases ranging from business as usual, which is scenario A, to draconian emission cuts, scenario C,which assumes zero effects from CO2 after the year 2000
Can you explain why you did that?
You do understand the two statements are not the same don’t you?
lolwot | January 18, 2014 at 11:36 am |
“Can you explain why you did that?
Because it makes the point!
You do understand the two statements are not the same don’t you?”
Duh!
What I am suggesting is that the model runs that produced Scenario C are those where Greenhouse Gasses were kept at a constant level. i.e. No change.
You can also observe that this is also true if in fact the levels change but the effect of those changes on temperature is zero. i.e. No change.
Logically the two statements are the same even if the words are different.
lolwot | January 18, 2014 at 11:36 am |
I would have liked it to read
“We have considered cases ranging from business as usual, which is scenario A, to draconian emission cuts, scenario C, which assumes zero effects from changing levels of CO2 after the year 2000″
but I could not fit it into the space available.
To put it in perspective, the 60-year quasi-cycle has an amplitude near 0.1 C and the temperature rise is 0.8 C and going up several more degrees. In the big picture these cyclic fluctuations don’t matter, and too much is made of them. By 2100 we may be at 3 C warming, and this cycle makes it 2.9 or 3.1 C instead. Does this part of the variation really matter?
Jim D | January 18, 2014 at 11:56 am |
“To put it in perspective, the 60-year quasi-cycle has an amplitude near 0.1 C and the temperature rise is 0.8 C and going up several more degrees.”
That is around 0.2c or slightly above for peak to trough for the 60 year.
Added to that appears to be around 0.6C peak to trough for a 100+ year cycle.
I don’t know if the current rate of rise will continue or not. I can’t tell if it has levelled off. Other than by assuming the models are correct there is no evidence/data to say either way (yet).
There isn’t a 100-year cycle. It is a 100-year trend. You can’t determine a cycle from a single-signed trend, and most would say you need at least two full cycles to say there is one.
Jim D: My apologies, I should have said ‘indications of a 100+ year cycle as hinted at by the longer, but lower resolution, proxy data’.
I do hope you are not suggesting a ‘linear trend’ in an upwards (or downwards) direction.
“Linear Trends” = “Tangent to the Curve” = “Flat Earthers”
RichardLH. Peaks are a better marker than zero-crossing because zero-crossing depends on the choice of smoothing. I added a linear regression to your chart to illustrate this dependency.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:180/mean:149/mean:123/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:720/plot/hadcrut4gl/trend
Jim2: As I observed to Jim D ‘linear trends’ are just about the most useless statistics that can be employed. At best they can be used to infill values within the data range they are drawn from. They have no meaning outside of that data range.
Removing the observed 60 year cycle by a 60 year filter is a rather good way of determining ‘zero crossing’. As I said, this sort of technique is used in all other science disciplines other than climate.
Jim2: And I’ve added CO2 into the mix so that you can use that to explain the ‘trend’ as well.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:180/mean:149/mean:123/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:720/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.006/offset:-1.9
RichardLH, as you show, the trend curves upwards somewhat like CO2. There is a theory that explains this, but I know some people have rejected that theory out of hand for reasons best known to themselves.
@ RichardLH | January 18, 2014 at 12:38 pm |
Jim2: As I observed to Jim D ‘linear trends’ are just about the most useless statistics that can be employed. At best they can be used to infill values within the data range they are drawn from. They have no meaning outside of that data range.
*****
Richard – you don’t understand the point I was making. My post concerned the wisdom of using zero-crossings as a method to determine frequency, NOT if linear regressions are a good tool to ferret out trends. In the chart I supplied, there is the linear treand line and the smoothing supplied by you. If you examine the zero-crossings carefully, you will see that the timing of zero-crossings varies a lot with choice of smoothing. That is the point.
Jim D: You obviously don’t get irony. You DO realise that including CO2 in that manner was an ironic comment don’t you?
Jim2: You missed the point about using a 60 year filter IS a good way of obtaining a zero crossing of a 60 year signal.
RichardLH, your attempt to be ironical backfired with that plot. The upward curvature of both lines is something to be commented on, and I did.
Jim D: Just because the upward trends match does not mean that one is an extension of the other. You rather do need to provide evidence other than that to be called a scientist.
Science has provided a reason for exactly that.
Jim D: Science MAY have provided a reason. The verdict is still out on that because the high quality data is not yet sufficient long to prove that what can be shown to be true in a laboratory also holds true as the only reason in a global sense,
That rather neatly brings in the other point about Scenario C being the most accurate alignment with the data to date.
RichardLH | January 18, 2014 at 5:51 pm |
Jim2: You missed the point about using a 60 year filter IS a good way of obtaining a zero crossing of a 60 year signal.
*****
So you believe the 60 year filter is a great way to find the zero-crossing with the arbitrary 720 month filter line? Interesting. Did you pick the 720 month line to find the correlation with CO2 that you just KNOW MUST be there?
Just askin’.
Jim2: “Did you pick the 720 month line to find the correlation with CO2 that you just KNOW MUST be there?”
No, I picked it because 12 * 60 = 720! Simple maths. The sort science is based on.
The data is too short to use a proper Triple Running Mean so a single stage is all that can be applied.
The point about filtering (as best we can) for a 60 year signal by using a 60 year low pass and thus derive a ‘zero crossing’ for that signal stands.
Re Pekka Pirilä | January 18, 2014 at 5:24 am
Thank you very much for your detailed answer, Pekka.
“So at a time when the climate system is losing heat, reported temps aare shown to increase, raising the long term temp averages.”
When was the last time the climate system was losing heat? Maybe the 1960’s?
RG: 1950-1980 according to this graph.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:180/mean:149/mean:123/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:720
The points of Dr. Curry’s presentation are well honed…a very nice job. However, the fact that:
“Most of the members were there for Panel 1; only a few remained for Panel 2.”
is no surprise and suggests lockstep going the motions by the members, i.e., a preamble for other things. So it goes.
Prof. Curry, I’m a little late and way down in this comment thread, but thank you so much for all you have done and are doing to advance the cause of good science in the climate debates. Your measured, balanced testimony here is just another example of your many great contributions, made at considerable personal cost and sacrifice. Thank you.
Ten “testimonies” were given, including statements by Dr. Curry and Barbara Boxer. Of these, nine were supportive of the President’s Climate Action Plan. All in the first session work for the Federal Government and supported the IPCC and Obama’s plan. Of the five folks in the second session, three were from universities and two from NGOs. Dr. Curry notes that fewer lawmakers attended the second session. (It would help to know which lawmakers attended each session).
The nine supportive testimonies gave the impression that the arguments, graphics and conclusions were familiar. Dr. Curry’s testimony was based on science and its uncertain conclusions. Many other factors could have been mentioned, but not within the committee’s time constraints.
The conclusion I reached was that the hearing was stacked in favor of governmental control: 1) the selection of witnesses, 2) the sessions which gave the first day to support, and the second, less-attended day to support and the sole counter-argument, and 3) time limits.
Dr. Curry is a person of courage and integrity. Thank you!
Kathleen White, though not a scientist, was supportive of Curry. Her point was that energy efficiency has increased which is good news, but she didn’t seem to care that CO2 was still increasing fast.
“but she didn’t seem to care that CO2 was still increasing fast.”
Perhaps she too has noticed that, judging by the fact that the observations appear to be tracking Scenario C rather well (which can also mean that increasing CO2 does not have a large, direct impact on global temperatures), there IS no need to panic.
Jim D: Unfortunately, they are talking about excess deaths being disproportionately among seniors, from which I conclude that the senior deaths are more than normal expectation. But I must agree that they could have been more explicit. It may be that fuel costs/carbon taxes are the root cause.
Cadman, Emily. “UK Sees Steep Increase in Winter Deaths.” Financial Times, November 26, 2013. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/763fcb26-5681-11e3-ab12-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2luySfQ2W
“Last year’s cold winter saw the number of excess winter deaths jump by nearly a third, according to official data.
“The Office for National Statistics estimates that there were 31,000 excess winter deaths in England and Wales in 2012-13, a rise of 29 per cent on the previous year.
“Last March was the coldest since 1962, with an average temperature of 2.2°C, and the second coldest since 1910.
“The majority of the excess deaths, 25,000, occurred among those aged 75 or above.”
Nelson, Fraser. “It’s the Cold, Not Global Warming, That We Should Be Worried about.” Telegraph.co.uk, March 28, 2013, sec. elderhealth. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/9959856/Its-the-cold-not-global-warming-that-we-should-be-worried-about.html
“No one seems upset that in modern Britain, old people are freezing to death as hidden taxes make fuel more expensive.
“The government’s chief scientific officer, Sir David King, later declared that climate change was “more serious even than the threat of terrorism” in terms of the number of lives that could be lost. (2003)
“Since Sir David’s exhortations, some 250,000 Brits have died from the cold, and 10,000 from the heat.”
Kathleen White referred to this Dail Mail article
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2478114/Fuel-poverty-Britain-24k-die-winter-rising-energy-prices.html
However, she said that 24000 people will die in Britain this winter because they can’t afford their fuel bills. This is twisted to say the least. The article says that 24000 extra people, mostly elderly, die in the winter every year. This is just because it is cold, and probably every northern country has increased elderly deaths in the winter. The article also says that the Conservative government won’t really care enough to subsidize their fuel bills the way a Labour government would propose, so this statement is more an indictment of the Conservative priorities than fuel prices.
Jim D: Thanks for the additional reference. I do disagree with your interpretation that seniors are more susceptible in winter; they are talking about an increase with an unexpected proportion of seniors.
What is especially sad is that the 80 year olds lived through the Battle of Britain, and some probably the Blitz. The ministers’ lack of respect is shameful.
I found an interesting presentation on the influence of seasons and temperature on death rate in Finland
http://www.metla.fi/tapahtumat/2009/talvitutkimuspaivat/nayha.pdf
Unfortunately the text is in Finnish, but some of the figures are easy to understand. I list few of the most interesting ones:
Pages 2-3: hypothermia
Page 5: Annual variability (people aged less than 60y have the peak in June/July, over 60y in winter. Totals is dominated by those over 60y with the share of 86%)
Page 6: Dependence on temperature (optimal temperature in Finland 14C, Italy 20.22C, Taiwan 30-32C
Page 7: Coronary artery disease
Page 8: Influenza (upper), high temperatures of 1972 and 1988 (lower)
er, the same charges were levelled against the previous govt when they were in power, and they’re the ones who presided over the biggest increases in fuel costs. You clearly don’t know how politicking works this side of the pond.
In fact, the winter fuel payment is uk law, Everyone over a certain age is eligable and it’s payable whichever party is in governent. There are other payments to subsidise the elderly’s energy costs as well, depending on how bad the winter is. Many old people will still die though, because they are afraid of switching the heating on, such has been the media frenzy about energy price rises…
The basic claim is that increasing fuel costs are causing a rise in ‘cold related’ deaths, mainly amongst the elderly, during the winter here in the UK.
At least some of the rises in fuel costs are due to the consumer provided subsidy of ‘green energy’, a levy as such.
Arguing that the figures are or may be incorrect does not alter the basic premise.
The issue of reduced easterly wave strata cumulus cloud mass over the equitotial Atlantic has to be addressed since it is the only viable explination for the sea warming trend which complies with every criteria for CC. There is an exceptionally high degree of confidence that the man made changes th the annual flooding of the Nile had altered two of the precursors for easterly wave formation thus equitotial Atlantic SSTs: we have accidentally geoenginered the planet!
I quote Jim D | January 18, 2014 at 11:41 am |:
“Very few “skeptics” want to talk about all the previous hiatuses (hiati?), that occurred over the last few decades, perhaps because they all end with sharp rises. Somehow they want this one to be different from all those others, so it doesn’t pay to bring them up.”
Clearly, you don’t know your hiati and are thinking of something like the caricature from Desmogblog. If you had followed my previous comments you would know there are only two: the one we are living through now that covers the present century and a few years before it, and the one in the eighties and nineties. The present hiatus has lasted from 13 to 17 years, depending on your starting date. The one in the eighties and nineties lasted from 1979 to 1997, a total of 18 years. The reason you don’t know about it is that it was covered up in official temperature curves by a fake warming called “late twentieth century warming.” It appeared in ground-based temperature curves but not in satellite temperature curves. Hansen, as you know, steadfastly refused to use satellite temperature curves, and with good reason it appears. You may recall also that in 1988 he told the Senate that global warming had started. His high temperature point according to his presentation was in May 1988, the highest temperature in one hundred years. If you look at available global temperature data you find that 1988 really was a peak warming year, not of global temperature rise, but of the 1987/88 El Nino. That particular El Nino was part of a group of five El Nino peaks in the time interval of the eighties and nineties I referred to. More specifically, it was the middle one of the five. Thus, Hansen’s evidence that global warming had started in 1988 consisted of calling the existence of an ordinary El Nino peak a sign that global warming had started. El Ninos are part of the ENSO oscillaton and new peaks appear periodically every four-five years. Now who would pick part of such a repeating pattern and call it peak of global warming?
Pingback: Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup | Watts Up With That?
Thank you, Prof Curry, for the steadfast and sober professionalism of both your spoken and written testimony, and for hosting what is a fascinating discussion. Eventually truth will out.
Pingback: Judith Curry om «klimastoda | «Klimagrasrota
Are there any comments in re: http://rabett.blogspot.com/2014/01/curry-vs-curry.html
“Curry vs. Curry” (past Judith Curry stuff debunking current Judith Curry testimony).
Can anyone point me to the rebuttal when/if it pops up?
Rabbits fail to change minds as fast as foxes.
============
Pingback: The Invisible Judith Curry | OMSJ
Pingback: Ship Of Fools Leader Professor Turney Arrives Home | PA Pundits - International
Pingback: Your Logic Escapes Me, by John Nielsen-Gammon
John Nielse-Gammon seems to have written a full post on arguments discussed by many (including myself) on this site in a shorter form.
http://climatechangenationalforum.org/your-logic-escapes-me-by-john-nielsen-gammon/
Very little logic in that article. Sorry.
“Curry alludes to the 1975-2000 period in her testimony. During this period, if we make natural variability as strong as it can be, natural variability would have accounted for about half of the observed warming.”
Natural variability as strong as it can be is all of the observed warming.
Then, after assuming that it’s 50% (0.25 C) in his “best-case-for-natural-variability scenario”, which it is clearly not, he assumes more and comes back to 0% natural variability and 100% anthropogenic. Lol!
I love: ‘Three times in the last century and a half has temperature risen at the same rate, and only in the last of these times has CO2 also risen’, as revealed to me by Phil Jones, heself, and Roger Harrabin, beside his BBCself.
Only in the last quarter of the last century has CO2 rise and temp rise been best correlated. Write that on the Blackboard.
=================================
Pingback: Obama's Global Warming Action Plan Is Wrongheaded, Global Warming Expert Tells Congress : The Tea Party Economist
The bogus argument attempting to convert the fact that 1998 was an exceptionally warm El Nino year into a claim that the earth’s atmosphere has not warmed for 16 years falls to bits if you look at the last 15 years.
It is true that there has been no “statistically significant” warming in the last 16 (or 15 years) only because when you deal with such short data sets the signal to noise ratio decreases, meaning that the 95% confidence level also increases. But sttistical significance cuts both ways. By the same token there is no statistically significant evidence for a “pause” or a “hiatus” in the temperature.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1979/to/mean:12/plot/uah/from:1979/to/trend/plot/uah/from:1998/trend/plot/uah/from:1999/trend
For the UAH satellite data shown below, the trend and 95% confidence levels for data since 1979 shows statistically significant warming:
Trend: 0.138 ±0.070 °C/decade (2σ)
For the data from 1998 and 1999
Trend: 0.060 ±0.223 °C/decade (2σ)
Trend: 0.146 ±0.212 °C/decade (2σ)
That is, for the data since 1998 the trend has a 95% probability of being between cooling of 0.163 and warming of 0.283 °C/decade.
For data since 1999 the statistically significant range is between cooling of 0.066 and warming of 0.258 °C/decade.
You can drive a bus between those error margins which is why there is not statistically significant warming, cooling , or a “pause”.
But the data from 1998 and 1999 is statistically in agreement with the warming trend from 1979 (since all 3 error margins overlap).
As every climatologist knows, CO2 is only one of the forcing factors affecting temperature, thus the temperature signal is “noisy”. Yet the correlation between temperature and log CO2 concentration since 1850 shows the expected straight line with a correlation coefficient of R + 0.91 of a maximum of 1.
The temperature also correlates well with the Muana Loa CO2 data which began being collected in 1958.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1958/mean:12/normalise/offset:-0.05/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/to:2014/normalise/scale:0.9/offset
Pingback: Leading Climatologist, IPCC Contributor, Criticizes Obama’s Climate Plan in Senate Testimony | Conservative Infidel Conservative Infidel
Judith –
Just reminded of this on another blog:
Good words of advice, don’t you think?
Pingback: Early 20th century Arctic warming | Climate Etc.
Pingback: UK Met Office Gets Overheated 13 Times Out Of 14 | PA Pundits - International
Pingback: Homo Marriage Doesn’t Fly. Neither Does The Republic, and ‘Climate Justice’ is Dead in the Water…. — Winds Of Jihad By SheikYerMami
Pingback: Partisan Politics Highlight Climate Action Review | Marcia G. Yerman
Pingback: NAS/RS Report on Climate Change: Evidence and Causes | Climate Etc.
Pingback: OMG(uacamole) | Chasin 4 Oil
There’s definately a lot to learn about this topic. I like
all the points you made.
Its like you read my mind! You seem to know so much about this, like
you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you could do with some pics to drive the message home a
bit, but other than that, this is great blog. A great
read. I will definitely be back.