by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week
Winter (?)
The Toronto Star has an article that discusses the impacts of the warm winter:
Thanks to the unseasonably warm winter, the city has saved $10 million to $12 million in snow removal costs (a number that could rise to $15 million if we don’t get any more snow). Heating bills were down about 20 per cent. Flu rates and car accidents dropped, too.
Of course, it’s hard to measure the intangible feeling of drinking beer on a sun-filled patio or walking your dog in a T-shirt in mid-March. For most, it’s sheer delight with a touch of “what the heck is going on here?” loitering in the background.
But experts caution it’s not all early blossoms and ultimate Frisbee. There are consequences, too — some unforeseen.
The Midwest has already seen an early and deadly start to tornado season. There are drought worries, too.
Windsor has already had a tornado warning. On Tuesday, Hamilton issued a smog alert, the earliest in the season since 2005.
“When the temperature gets much warmer things get out of sync in the natural system,” said Gord Miller, Ontario’s environmental commissioner.
For one, trees budded before the run for maple syrup really ever started. Producers are reporting two-thirds less than usual, a dismal season.
And because there were no frigid winter months to kill off pests like wasps, black flies and pine beetles, brace yourself for an insect-filled summer. The cold kills fungus, too.
Most forecasters bombed their winter forecast for the U.S. The Chicago Tribune has this article entitled: Accuweather offers explanation for wildly inaccurate winter forecast. Subtitle: Japanese tsunami weather debris may be causing mild temperatures, meteorologist says.
Keith Kloor has an article at Yale Climate Media Forum entitled The winter that never was. Excerpts:
As the Los Angeles Times notes in its report on the survey, “the nasty winters of 2009 and 2010 “seemed to indicate to a lot of people — rightly or wrongly — that they weren’t feeling any increase of temperatures. That helped drive down belief in climate change. But 2011 was a super-hot year, bad drought, with record-breaking precipitation in the Northeast, lots of weird weather. Public opinion? Must be climate change.”
In truth, as the LA Times story observes, “This shows how fickle public opinion can be.”
Ironically, this latest swing in the pendulum of public attitudes comes just as Beltway activists, according toPolitico, seek to turn the focus away from climate change to “kitchen table issues.” The article discusses upcoming ad campaigns by environmental groups that will emphasize economic and public health concerns.Politico notes: “So melting glaciers are giving way to smog-induced asthma. And fuel-efficiency is now a matter of pump prices, not pollutants.”
All this goes to show: If there’s one constant in the climate sphere, it’s the lurching nature of public opinion on climate change, and the lurching campaigns of those who try to lasso the fickle public on to their side.
Green groups embrace climate pragmatism
Matt Nisbet has an article Green Groups Rebrand Global Warming Around Public Health. Excerpts:
Following the demise of cap and trade legislation, green group leaders acknowledged that despite spending several hundred million dollars to pass the bill, they were unable to create public demand for action in key Midwest Congressional districts and states.
“The community that tried to move a climate bill fundamentally lacks political power and doesn’t have the ability to either deliver punishment or reward to members of Congress who don’t vote for us,” Kathleen Welch, a Washington-based philanthropy adviser told Politico in 2011. Her admission was echoed in statements by Fred Krupp, Bill McKibben and others.
Now, as Politico reports today, it appears that green groups led by the National Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club are seeking to address this weakness. “We’re going to talk a lot about the health implications of dirty air,” Heather Taylor, director of NRDC’s political arm told Politico. “I think that the Midwest is one of those places where [there are] a million great clean energy stories, especially. And they’re not being told right now, because we’ve tended to be in other markets. That’s an area where we feel like it’s time to go tell those stories.”
Michael Mann
The saga of Michael Mann as a lightning rod in the climate change debate continues.
The Daily Kos has an article titled Michael Mann is a Modern Hero and we need to acknowledge that. Accompanying the article is a readers’ poll:
POLL
Michael Mann
| did not choose to became a symbol | |
| 0% | 14 votes |
| has been attacked in many of the same ways that the President and John Kerry were | |
| 0% | 12 votes |
| Is an outstanding scientist and human being | |
| 0% | 11 votes |
| all of the above | |
| 1% | 58 votes |
| is distorting evidence to prove his point | |
| 71% | 3078 votes |
| should be fired from the university | |
| 26% | 1129 votes |
Not sure who made up this poll, possibly the same person that wrote the poll for the Scientific American, polling to see whether Curry was a dupe or a peacemaker.
Of all the toxic metals in the environment, mercury is probably the worse in terms of neurotoxicity. The ability of the biosphere to mobilize it as methlymercury and our own intestinal flora/fauna to do the same makes keeping it out of the environment very important.
We are going to see a rise in mercury levels in ground water, thanks to mercury filled, mandated, light bulbs.
IF an industry had pushed for these the EPA would have killed them, but for the ‘Greens’, anything goes.
And now hundreds of millions of Eco Stupid lightbulbs will end up in landfills, each one with its own little mercury landmine inside.
Brilliant level of Eco greenie stupidity
Tonight it is time to draw the curtain on a social experiment that escaped detection for sixty four years [2009-1945 = 64 years] until first exposed by Climategate emails and documents in November 2009 and then confirmed as purposeful government deceit by official responses to them.
The great fact is just this: From 1945 until 2009, world society
1. Benefitted as nationalism diminished and world peace spread, but
2. Collapsed as public confidence dropped in world leaders who made
FEAR-based decisions secretly among themselves to Unite Nations against an imaginary common enemy, Global Climate Change, based on deep-seated, but ill-informed fears of
3. The man-made “nuclear fire” that consumed Hiroshima and ended WWII on 6 August 1945, and
4. Threatened mutual nuclear annihilation for the rest of the world in the Cuban Missile Crisis of late October 1962.
Indications of deceit in government science appeared in 1956 attempts to block publication of evidence of naturally occurring “nuclear fires” on Earth [P. K. Kuroda, “On the nuclear physical stability of the uranium minerals,” J. Chem. Physics 25, 781 (1956); “On the infinite multiplication constant and the age of the uranium minerals,” J. Chem. Physics 25, 1256 (1956)].
After confirmation by the French Atomic Energy Commission in 1972, the story was published in Naturwissenschaften 70, 536-539 (1983): http://www.springerlink.com/content/n556224311414604/
Official efforts to hide information on the reason “nuclear fires” ignite spontaneously in the cores of
a.) Heavy atoms (A > 150 amu)
b.) Fluid planets, like Jupiter
c.) Ordinary Sun-like stars
d.) Galaxies
Prevented the development of realistic energy polices to sustain Earth’s increasing population, and led to the production of Hg-filled Eco-lightbulbs
The rest of this sad story is here:
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-compact-fluorescent-
lightbulbs-dangerous
Alarmism, SA and EPA all together at once. How can you top such a link?
I’ll never understand governments. Starting to promote CFL’s when LEDs and other technologies were only months from maturity.
I have some LED lights – they are horrendously expensive. That’s a problem.
The greenies will just have to throw more money at the Chinese. No problem
I have some LED lights that had reasonable prices.
Jim2
I believe there are some macromaterial properties of tungsten that allow one to produce equivalent-to-incandescent light at below-LED-consumption.
Some metal-doped carbon nanotubes and graphene sheets demonstrate similar high-efficiency lighting effects.
No clue how long before such an item will be market ready, if ever.
Er, “metamaterial” clearly, (of the subwavelength nanoptic variety) I should proofread or something.
http://www.patentgenius.com/patent/7535171.html
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/ees/mssed/metamaterials/
And not just for emitting, either:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/metamaterial-absorbs-light-0309.html
Your income may make the LED light prices seem reasonable to you. You can’t fool me though, I used to buy tungsten incandescent lights.
Jim2,
The purchase cost of LED lights is high but one lasts as long as over 10 Tungsten lamps, the power cost (which is dominate in total cost ) is 1/5th as much, and the effort of frequently changing bulbs (which can be difficult for some locations) is an additional negative feature for Tungsten bulbs. The total cost and difference in effort make even initially more costly LEDS a better deal over the life of the lighting. As more are sold and better technology developed, the difference will become even greater. CFLs would have been even a better deal at present costs, due to lower initial cost than LEDs, if the mercury problem was not an issue, but it is.
The same promise of longer life was made for CFLs and that was a lie. Anecdotal accounts have some LED lights failing after a mere 2 weeks. If you are good at electronics, you might be able to fix, but still …
LED failures …
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25270544-Ecosmart-LED-A19-lamp-failures
Jim2
I’m ringing up “No Sale” on that anecdote.
I know people with LEDs around here somewhere still working from the 1970’s, mostly in very fashionable numeric displays.
I also know people with incandescent bulbs from about that long ago, but frankly the ratio of working LEDs to working incandescent bulbs is amazingly high.
If any other product in the world were so fragile, troublesome, short-lived and inefficient as the incandescent bulb, the inventor would not be lauded as a genius, but as a hack. Butterflies are more durable. Of course, I’m not comparing inventors.
Bart R, there’s a huge difference between a LED used for display (as they invariably were until a few years ago) and one used for lighting.
Peter317 | March 25, 2012 at 12:29 pm |
An anecdotal anodyne for an anecdotal argument.
Lifetime cost of LEDs vs. incandescents is what it is, quality control issues and broken wires notwithstanding.
If your LED is broken, take it back for a refund. The manufacturer is at fault.
Bart R, the power dissipation of ‘lighting’ type LEDs is three orders of magnitude higher than that of ‘display’ type LEDs.
They’re completely different beasts, with completely different life expectancies.
What I find interesting about CFLs and mercury is how many advocates of CFLs are also advocates of AGW, but when you point out to them that the government says that CFls are dangerous and need to be cleaned up carefully, these AGW advocates suddenly give plenty of reasons to discount the government.
CFLs aren’t really that dangerous. They hardly ever break. The government is just being overly cautious. And of course, if you are worried about CFLs breaking you’re probably an old incompetent rightwing jerkface (a loose but accurate paraphrase.)
FWIW, I’d love to have some nice cool LEDs, I live in a desert and would love to get rid of incandescents.
…that the government says that CFls are dangerous and need to be cleaned up carefully, these AGW advocates suddenly give plenty of reasons to discount the government.
That proves that those “advocates” are able to make up their own mind based on their perception of the evidence, and are not drones.
I’ve changed one CFL light bulb in 8 years in my current house – the key seems to be to avoid cheap ones and to have a consumer protection regime that allows you to take stuff back to the shops even when it breaks out of warranty.
The risk from the microscopic amounts of mercury is I suspect easily counterbalanced by the higher (though still small) risk of breaking ones neck due to needing to change more incandescents or falling over in the dark when a bulb has blown. If you’re worried about them being in landfill then insist that your shops provide recycling facilities like they do in Europe.
And they’re a heck of a lot cheaper to run.
“Not sure who made up this poll, possibly the same person that wrote the poll for the Scientific American, polling to see whether Curry was a dupe or a peacemaker.”
Zing!
Tee Hee: “You can see from the poll that we have some trolls by don mikulecky, Fri Mar 09, 2012 at 08:31:01 PM PST.” Yeah, some.
Isn’t there some homily in legal advocacy, to the effect that you should never ask a question unless you know exactly what the answer will be?
NW, same with teenagers. Never ask a question that you may not wish to officially know the answer to, always give them wriggle room.
Yes, the same angry teenager who so often skins his shins.
The Kos/Mann poll is just plain weird. For all the complaint of trolls, where are the Mann supporters?
I see it as satire. But even that would be weird. Actually, weirder.
We are so far down the rabbit hole we know longer know where we are.
My first question was, “The Daily Kos _has_ over fifty readers?”
What a red herring. That is what is called a Daly Kos diary. I would estimate that hundreds of diaries are posted on Daily Kos every day, as there are well over 200,000 registered diarists on Daily Kos. Only a few diaries are “front-paged” per day, and those are the ones that get hundreds of comments — this one only got 18 so it was obviously buried and totally ignored by the main readership.
So some right-wing outfit decided to carpet bomb some run-of-the-mill Daily Kos diarist’s poll to make some immediately invalid statistical point. More than anything, it’s an exercise in gullibility, and it shows how the echo chamber works.
WHT,
You seem to know a lot about daily kos. Are you a regular daily kos denizen?
I adopted a few of the original blogs early on. I make it a habit to check This Week in Science every Saturday, written by DS
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/03/24/1076936/-This-week-in-science-angry-world-angry-universe#comments
I already knew about the carpet bombing of the poll, probably from last week’s edition.
Right wing? Pigeon-hole much?
It was organized and a suggestion was made to a specific audience to bombard the poll with responses. Only political organizations do that, as this was not by consensus but by instruction of someone with a following. There are two broad political organizations, left and right, and the left certainly didn’t do this. That leaves the right holding the bag.
@Doug Proctor
‘where are the Mann supporters?’
They voted en masse
All 14 of them.
Interesting to see that a few weeks after publication, Mann’s book is only one place above the great ‘Hockey Stick Illusion’ (published January 2010) in Amazon UK’s top seller list for ‘Global Warming and Ecology’
And they are both outstripped by Delingpole’s ‘Watermelons’.
Maybe the warmists have been so badly affected by the recent spring weather that they have forgotten how to read. When a slick soundbite will do your thinking for you, why bother with the facts?
The climate wars continue with India formally seconding China:
See the:
Moscow Meeting Adopts Declaration on Inclusion of International Civil Aviation in the EU-ETS
So the 48 States have a mild winter, and Romm berates the MSM for not attributing it to *global* warming, and some Americans are persuaded to believe in AGW again.
The insularity is breathtaking, given what occurred in much of Eurasia this winter.
Maybe the Inuit will do a good business selling seal skin kamiit to those top earning Brits who just got a sweet 20% tax cut.
Insulation is nice
Alaska got slammed too. The Iditarod route even had to be changed. Didn’t I read that Japan had unusual cold an snow also? Looks like SE Canada and Eastern US are the only warmer than normal areas.
The NW wasn’t (isn’t) warm. And last summer in Portland was a cold as I’ve ever seen. It was the year without a Summer.
So the 48 States have a mild winter
I can say with certainty the Washington State has not had a mild winter…and neither has Oregon.
http://bit.ly/zEjeR5
Girma
Corruption, not incompetence
The Brisbane catastrophe is far more directly due to greed and bribing politicians, than to engineers believing greenhouse myths. See:
Alarming report on Brisbane River risks covered up
David Stockwell has shown that the CSIRO’s drought predictions were inverted relative to the evidence.
http://bit.ly/zEjeR5
While the expert witness says that the engineers acted appropriately in the absence of a prescience available only to Girma?
Another item from the week, Chip Knappenberger’s ‘Lower Climate Sensitivity Estimates: New Good News’, updates the case for global lukewarmism. http://www.masterresource.org/2012/03/lower-climate-sensitivity-estimates/
Please delete the previous post
According to the pole 87% of voters believe Michael either distorts evidence to prove his point or should be fired from the university. That is a thumping.
The quote from Keith Kloor ” If there’s one constant in the climate sphere, it’s the lurching nature of public opinion on climate change, and the lurching campaigns of those who try to lasso the fickle public on to their side.” is interesting.
It seems that people must actually experience climate change in order to believe that it is happening and such experiences necessarily takes place at least at the regional level.
To my mind, people will therefore never be concerned with any global trend in climate because (a) they can’t experience it first hand and (b) the alarmist propaganda is wearing thin around the world, with more and more governments and academics joining the ranks of the sceptical.
Girma
I don’t know how to break this to you, but Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Leprechauns, Edward Cullen, Jason Bourne, and about 4000 of the respondents on the poll aren’t real.
Somebody made them up.
I voted, and am not imaginary, but several of my friends are.
cui bono
Which options did they vote for? :D
What good are imaginary friends if they don’t agree with you?
BartR, I guess those six you named were among the very few supporters of Mann, mates of yours?
I can’t imagine why the Easter Bunny would be a Mann supporter.
Firstly, the melting North Pole works well in his longstanding feud against his arch-rival, Santa Claus.
Leprechauns almost certainly wouldn’t be voting for Mann, what with the reports he’s stolen their pot of gold. That has yet to be confirmed by inquiry, but I expect Joe Barton will get to the bottom of the case, as soon as he’s found the end of the rainbow.
Bart R … my comment to you (above) was meant to go here!
Hopefully, this is a prelude to the US elections …
Anna Bligh has conceded defeat after a blood bath for Labor at the Queensland election.
‘It’s clear tonight that the people of Queensland have spoken with the strongest possible voice and they have voted for a change of government,’ she told supporters.
Labor will struggle form an effective opposition after the Liberal National Party sent it to the slaughter after almost 20 years of rule in Queensland.
Campbell Newman will be the next premier, with the LNP expected to have a staggering 74 seats in the 89-seat parliament.
Labor will have 10 seats at the most, analysts say, and Premier Anna Bligh has only just held onto her South Brisbane electorate.
http://www.skynews.com.au/topstories/article.aspx?id=732443&vId=
Can anybody remind us just how many seats the greenists won, please?
Just looked it up.
It was zero.
Again.
:)
The Greens are at 7% of the vote in Queenland – which is half their highpoint in 2010. They are of course in a coalition in government with Labor. It has been suggested that voting for the Greens might be attractive to some people until they get into government and start implementing policy.
The newly elected Q’ld Premier has started with vigour to reverse the multifarious, unbelievably expensive and hopelessly incompetent State Green Schemes that were emplaced by the previous soft left Govt on the grounds that the great big new Federal carbon tax is supposed to take care of all that (so why should he waste more money on them)
The emphatic size of the Q’ld vote ejecting the soft left is causing multiple stomach ulcers in the current minority Federal Govt (an unholy left/green alliance)
:) :) :)
The “Nya nya nya, I can’t hear you” fallacy?
Furthermore, people tend to forget how climate has changed previously in their lives and get caught up in some form of mass hysteria about unusual weather events.
Climate?
People don’t care about climate any more. They are too furious at the excesses brought on by green alarmist meddling. The hypocrisy stuff is hitting the fan and there is plenty of blow back
Prices for food, fuel, utilities, shoes and clothing are rising. Chinese labor costs more, spends more and is more preoccupied with it’s own future retirement.
The greenie tropical paradise Maldives had a coup d’etat. The Nigerian non409ers got shut out of the World Bank by a Korean yank. China India and Russia are laughing in the face of the EU airline carboon tax
Americans and Europeans are waking up to the realization that they have been had and are *now* stuck with getting fleeced.
Penguin, yak and polar bear chasing environmentalist were the ones caring about AGW. Everyone else cared about making money off the western world’s extravagant indulgence.
I call it a ‘precious conceit of the Western elite’, but both ‘precious’ and ‘conceit’ are used somewhat archaically, so I don’t think I’m understood.
====================
I get it, Kim. Very nice.
Kim is not global warming a western thing and by this precept the eastern and mid eastern economies will soon overtake us (westerners) due to the needless hampering of the green influence on our economies?
The geography isn’t perfectly strict. China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa have not partaken so much in the Western, developed nations, social mania, this precious conceit.
====================
Precious conceit is a concise expression for hubris driven western (exceptions acknowledged) guilt tripping.
The developed western world have run out of increasing marginal returns and are going to be exceeded by the countries who have considerable increasing marginal returns to go.
There’s no need for western developed countries to compound this with greenist claptrap.
World Meteorological Organization:
The global temperature increase rate has been “remarkable” during the previous four decades, according to the preliminary summary. The global temperature has increased since 1971 at an average estimated rate of 0.166°C per decade compared to the average rate of 0.06 °C per decade computed over the full period 1881-2010.
http://bit.ly/gGTbWJ
In an oscillating global mean temperature pattern ( http://tinyurl.com/7p963ez ), isn’t it pseudo science to compare warming rates of 0.166 deg C per decade from valley to peak with that from peak to peak of 0.06 deg C per decade and claim accelerated warming?
The proper comparison is either from peak to peak or from valley to valley as follows:
http://bit.ly/GD9Aye
Why do they mislead?
Sorry.
My jaw hit the floor a bit here.
Mr. Orssengo, did you just post a comment that was more than half technically correct?!
There’s hope for us all yet.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1884/to:1944/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1884/to:2004/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/from:1884/to:2004/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2004/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/derivative/mean:73/mean:79/scale:200/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.00001
To help you out, you can more legitimately compare any two points on the temperature graph that have the same derivative. Peaks and valleys have issues unless confirmed by other data, and there aren’t enough peaks and valleys. With either method — yours, or mine — HadCRU will take a few hundred years more data to actually be credible for this type of analysis.
BEST is better, but of course still extremely limited.
And yes, the derivative line from this data shows continued global warming on anything longer than a six year span, though it is hard to call it ‘accelerating’ on the face only of temperature data; the WMO claim appears to take into account too ENSO, which is pretty difficult to dispute.
Bart, I am not sure what your graph is supposed to show, but what I want to see is a measurement of the climate sensitivity of CO2 derived from an observed CO2 signal in a temperature/time graph. Until anyone can provide that measurement of CO2 climate sensitivity from observed data, the only conclusion that has any validity is that the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 from current levels is indistinguishable from zero,
What all Girma’s graphs demonstrate to me, is that there clearly is no observable CO2 signal in ANY temperature/time graph,
“but what I want to see is a measurement of the climate sensitivity of CO2 derived from an observed CO2 signal in a temperature/time graph”
Sensitivity is defined as the total response after the system reaches equilbrium. Depending on the inertia of the system it can take several centuries. That’s just the physics.
What you are asking to to see is by definition not possible. The best we can have is an estimate of the climate sensitivity. That comes from looking at reconstructions of the LGM for example.
If you understood the physics you would not make requests that are at odds with physics
“Depending on the inertia of the system it can take several centuries”
Naughty boy Mosher. Why not just work out what the inertia of the system is? Does the system respond to a loss of sunlight by cooling. Yup, every night.
Does the system respond to axial tilt? Yup every year.
Does the system respond to increases in atmospheric dust? Yup, every large volcano.
Does the system respond to grounded aircraft? Yep, post-9/11.
‘several centuries”
Want to model that?
.
Steven you write “If you understood the physics you would not make requests that are at odds with physics.”
I have no idea what you are talking about. We have been assured by the proponents of CAGW that global temperatures will rise by X degrees C by the end of this century. This number is obtained from an estimate of climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 which is in excess of 2 C. That being the case, we need to be able to measure this climate sensitivity from the observed data. If we cannot measure this increase we have no idea if it is happening at all.
If the proponents of CAGW are right, and a catastrophic temperature rise is occurring, then we should, by now, be able to observed this catastrophic rise in temperature. The fact that no CO2 signal is apparent in the actual temperature/time graph proves that, in fact, the alleged climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is indistinguishable from zero.
Yes Doc you can look at relaxation, but thats not exactly the same as the ECR..
Steven Mosher: Depending on the inertia of the system it can take several centuries.
For the climate sensitivity to CO2 doubling, is that not several millenia?
Jim you won’t find one in the global surface temperature data because the southern hemisphere coverage started so much later than the northern hemisphere and is pretty erratic. The Northern Hemisphere is contaminated by land use changes which may be over half of the signal. So the global surface station data is a neat compilation in need of verification.
I did do an estimate by latitude using the surface station data and came up with approximately 1,5C, but that did not allow for land use or include the poles because of poor coverage. Using the satellite data I come up with about 0.8 +/- 0.2, but that seems to remove most of the land use impact. A few of the guys at Lucia’s have used a variety of methods and come up with an average of about 1.2C also with a pretty good margin of error around +/- 10%.
A fairly new estimate discussed here, http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2012/03/bayesian-estimation-of-climate.html end up in the 1.8 range using the observations, but that should be on the high side because of the same issues with the surface station and OHC data.
So my best guess on the range is 0.8 to 2, but with most of the new paleo data actually including the whole data series and isotope data to boot, that range is likely to tighten up in the 0.8 to 1.5 range.
Another way to look at it, if you through out the pre-2000 estimates and average them all the more current ones, it is about 1.5C per doubling.
Some “pipeliner” will dispute that, but they are not as confident as they once were thanks to some younger players popping up on the scene that can add properly, http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/Documents/StevensSchwartz2012.pdf and are not quite as confident in model outputs as observations via satellite.
So if you are looking for no impact, can’t help ya
Captain you write “So if you are looking for no impact, can’t help ya”
Indeed I am looking for no impact. I look at Girma’s graphs, and it is obvious that there is no CO2 signal in any recent temperature/time graphs. No one can produce a temperature/time graph with a CO2 signal in it. By now, if CAGW is occurring, there should be an obvious CO2 signal in these graphs. How much longer do we have to wait for a CO2 signal to appear, before we conclude that there is no CO2 signal, and there never will be?
Jim said, “By now, if CAGW is occurring, there should be an obvious CO2 signal in these graphs.”
You answered your own question. There should be a more obvious signal IF Catastrophic warming were occurring due to CO2. The lack of uniform, measurable warming due to CO2 indicates that something is wrong with the estimates. The most obvious problem with the estimates is that using Solomon politics to build a consensus is not scientific. It is pretty obvious that the Hansen/Arrhenius estimates are wrong and the Manabe/Callendar estimates are more accurate. If Charney had said, “Here’s the deal! Since you guys can’t agree, we will make it a competition, one of you may be a hero, but at least one of you is going to be a goat.”, we would not be debating this nonsense.
Setting a range of sensitivity threw the progress of climate science off by decades. It forced a bias on the research. Now there will be a gradual trend to more realistic estimates as the up and comers try not to tick off the Emeritus. Some of the old guys can be pretty nasty when you challenge their work. If it were a business, you would fire or laterally promote the unproductive. There is no tenure in competitive enterprise.
0.15-0.2 degrees warming per decade was what was expected. Decadal avaerage temperatures for 2001-2011 versus 1991-2001 were different by more than 0.15 degrees by any measure (land even more so). The CO2 increase rate alone can account for this with a positive feedback factor of 2.5-3, somewhat as IPCC expected, and as climate scientists have been expecting since 1980.
Jim D | March 25, 2012 at 11:25 am |
0.15-0.2 degrees warming per decade was what was expected. Decadal avaerage temperatures for 2001-2011 versus 1991-2001 were different by more than 0.15 degrees by any measure (land even more so).
Land even more so, why is that? With land even more so, where is the warming? How about that polar amplification? Have you noticed that it is not bi-polar? CO2 should have a “signature” in the atmosphere where its radiant impact is initiated. Why is that not obvious and more evident over areas with the most land use changes?
There is an interesting paper I read. The authors seem to believe that if lighted color sugar beets were planted in Eurasia, that the albedo change would decrease average global temperatures by about a degree. Reducing CO2 emissions is always a good idea, but there is not a 1C cooling impact estimated for all the money it costs. For a fraction of the money, the world could bribe Russia and the other Eurasian Beet growers to do a little experiment.
I think Steven Mosher noted that new urban areas had more UHI effect that old urban areas. Could that be related to land use change and crop choices?
Given the differences between NH and SH temperature trends, the “warming” can be better explained by land use change than CO2 change. Odd that?
Capt., you say “Given the differences between NH and SH temperature trends, the “warming” can be better explained by land use change than CO2 change. Odd that?”
Nope. Just plain wrong. The NH has more land area, and land should respond more quickly to forcing changes than the ocean. You went off, or didn’t dispute, the original point which, maybe you agree with, is that the current warming is what was predicted as far back as 1980. Stay focused on the original question.
Jim, “Nope. Just plain wrong. ” I beg to differ. Land would create more CO2 impact because it provides more energy for CO2 to impact. If you adjust for percentage land area and compare by region, the greatest warming is in regions with the greatest changes in land use. http://www.nature.com/news/forecasters-look-back-in-time-1.10215
The paper mentions “even up to the 70s” but Khrushchev started a new push to expand into Siberia in the 60s which is fairly obvious in the Russian temperature records.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/03/whats-up-with-southern-hemisphere.html the SH shows an opposite trend. You have to be pretty dedicated to your hypothesis to ignore the differences. While ocean area warming would be less than land area, it would not be negative :)
Capt., so how much of the global land change of 0.9 degrees since 1980 do you attribute to albedo change from farming practices? Show the math that even makes it possible to make a dent. Sea-ice reduction may contribute more than whatever you can come up with.
Jim Cripwell | March 25, 2012 at 12:53 pm |
As we’ve both agreed the data doesn’t support using climate sensitivity, why continue on down that dark and unproductive alley?
We have other, very real and useful measures of consumer dissatisfaction with the very idea that their futures have been made more uncertain by people profiting from excessive use of the commons in the form of the carbon cycle (Hale, 2002), evidence that is not so easily dismissed from the geological and ice core records of the huge leap in an instant (by geological timescale) of CO2 level, of CO2 level as a proxy for pollutant levels due common origins. We don’t need ocean pH (though it’s pretty good overall evidence in itself). We don’t need shifting habitats of wildlife(unlike anything in the fossil record for millions of years). We don’t need rapid and dramatic changes in distribution of pollen in the paleobotanical record. But we have those too.
We just need to know the carbon cycle is a limited, that is ‘scarce’, resource and that we have a means to privatize it, like any good Capitalist knows is the right thing to do.
Bob Ryan | March 26, 2012 at 1:05 am |
“Technically the tragedy of the commons is solved by pricing and/or regulation. It’s the latter, and who does it, that worries me.”
Amen.
We have the tragedy of the commons.
We’ll come to one of three ends:
Succumb, mainly price, or mainly regulate.
Succumbing is idiotic.
Regulation is submission to the sort of idiots who got us here.
Pricing is privatization.
Privatize, submit or succumb. Take your pick.
If you hear someone trying to persuade you not to privatize, for instance by fee and dividend, then their agenda is go get you to submit or succumb.
Why would you hand them your guts on a silver platter?
Jim D
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/4/4/045110/pdf/1748-9326_4_4_045110.pdf
Based on that paper, crop albedo change can produce 0.5 to 2 C change in regional temperature. By selecting a crop with a shorter growing season to less disturb snow cover, that number could be increased. Russia and Canada’s arable land is about 1.5 million kilometers squared or about 1% of the land surface area of the Earth. It should have a measurable effect if enough land is used.
How much that would change global temperature is anybody’s guess. It would be a neat non-destructive test to help remove some of the guess work.
Jim D, http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4520911/Climate/temperature_trends.jpg
Carrick did that graph. So if you make a 0.5 to 2 C reduction in the temperature of 1% of the area causing most of the warming, that should put the impact in the 0.005 to 0.02 C per year range.
Jim Cripwell | March 24, 2012 at 10:20 pm |
I can’t help you with climate sensitivity. If one were the wizard you seek, I doubt he’d be the wizard you’d believe, in any event.
My solution is to ask if the Gordion Knot needs to be untied, or sliced through.
I chose to slice through it.
Everything about CO2 rise can be addressed on principles and premises far simpler than global temperature sensitivity (which is likely a dynamic figure dependent on shifting variables anyway), sufficient to know there is neither good reason to continue to seek CO2’s rise, nor to object to CO2’s abatement to a level below the current one, and to expect if the question were put up to the democratic forces of the free market in any meaningful way, the world would agree with this conclusion.
Climate sensitivity is a bludgeon term, an averaged average of ratios of averages, with insufficient physical reason to seek to know.
Bart, you write “Climate sensitivity is a bludgeon term, an averaged average of ratios of averages, with insufficient physical reason to seek to know.”
Again, as with Steven, I cannot understand what you are talking about. The proponents of CAGW have justified their claim that we need to stop producing CO2 by burning fossil fuels, on the basis of a series of estimates of climate sensitivity. If there is no reason why we need to know what the climate sensitivity is, then there is no need to worry about how much we use in the way fossil fuels.
Either climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is important or it is not. Which is it?
You silly, it’s the wilding not the warming. Try to keep up.
============
Jim Cripwell | March 24, 2012 at 10:20 pm |
You want to be led by the nose down the dark alley of impossible requirements, then by all means consider only impossible measures.
As you appear to willingly also labor under the fallacy that if “A causes B, then failing to understand A means B is impossible”, I’m not sure you’ll profit from the advice of trying some other solution for the problem.
Climate sensitivity is a real effect in Physics. It’s just very nearly impossible to use in analysis as to obtain it requires better methods and thousands of time more data than we have, and once obtained might change due other variables, so far as the little data we have indicates.
Rising CO2 is very clearly a problem for entirely nonclimate reasons, simply by virtue of having demonstrated the limits on the carbon cycle to reduce it back to historic levels. This makes it a scarce natural resource, and tells us we face the Tragedy of the Commons. The proven solution to the Tragedy of the Commons is privatization. That it is now administratively possible to move the carbon cycle into the marketplace moves the problem one step forward, from being a problem of a scarcity to the problem of bloatedly overpaid and stupid governments not doing their job.
Bart, you write “Climate sensitivity is a real effect in Physics. It’s just very nearly impossible to use in analysis as to obtain it requires better methods and thousands of time more data than we have, and once obtained might change due other variables, so far as the little data we have indicates.”
I think I agree. I interpret what you mean is that the current measure that we have of the actual numeric value of the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is impossible to guage with any precision. It could have any value from 0 upwards. I came to the same conclusion by a different way of reasoning.
But if this is true, then the whole basis of the case for CAGW is a load of scientific garbage. If we have no idea what the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is, then we have absolutely no idea what will happen to global temperatures as we put more and more CO2 into the atmosphere.
So, CAGW has not been proven to be correct, and is almost certainly wrong.
As to your idea that there are other reasons why we need to restrict the production of CO2, I simply disagree. I know of no other reason why it is thought desirable to restrict the use of fossil fuels, except for the wrong claim that this has been proven to show that the world will become too hot for human habitation if we do not reduce our production of CO2.
Technically the tragedy of the commons is solved by pricing and/or regulation. It’s the latter, and who does it, that worries me.
For more on the “Tragedy of the Commons,” this is a good read:
http://bnp.binghamton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Ostrom-2010-Polycentric-Governance.pdf
It is Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel lecture, reworked for publication in the AER 2010.
Jim Cripwell | March 24, 2012 at 10:20 pm |
btw, the graph you want. Observed CO2 signal in temperature/time.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/derivative/from:1958/trend/scale:450/plot/esrl-co2/trend/normalise
Keeping in mind, thousands of times too little data for this to be a very reliable approach.
Thanks Bart. I cannot understand the scale on the Y axis. One graph is temperature, the other is CO2 concentration, but only one scale. How does one calculate climate sensitivity from this graph?
What nonsense! If anything, the warming caused the increasing atmospheric CO2.
Edim said this:
I can show that transient seasonal adjustments are about 3 PPM per 1 degree C sea surface temperature change. Equilibrium about 16 degrees is required to double partial pressure CO2 levels.
This does not account for the >100 PPM CO2 change we have seen in the last century. That is all anthropogenic.
I disagree with the “all anthropogenic” part Web. I think that at least a significant part (since the consensus is basically zero, I say at least 10%) is climatic. By climatic I mean longer term warming from the LIA and the late 20th century warming combined with a general sea ice decrease and SST increase. In reality, I think more than 50% is climatic, maybe even much more. By the way, I am only convinced of the 75 ppm total growth (~315 ppm in 1960 to ~390 now), other “official” data/analysis/splicing is too unreliable. The pre-industrial constant concentration is implausible to me.
Global oceans and other water (land ice, lakes, rivers, soil moisture) plus maybe biosphere seem to have no problem reducing the atmospheric CO2 every year by ~6 ppm, in only ~5 months (May – Sep/Oct). The seasonal decrease is steeper than the increase, but it’s shorter (increase is ~7 months). In total, the atmosphere ends up with a very variable and temperature dependent annual increase of ~2 ppm (2000s average, 1.88 for 2011).
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.pdf
If the cooling really starts (as indicated by the coming modern solar minimum), the annual increase will decrease significantly (1.5, 1.0 ppm or even lower), in spite of further increase in human emissions. Meanwhile, I am looking forward to Salby’s paper.
Edim said:
You’re just like your buddy Chief. I call you guys on something — this time when you say “the warming caused the increasing atmospheric CO2.” — and then you immediately retract and say that it is down to 10%.
You guys actually have no interest in science and all you want to do is increase the level of FUD. So it really doesn’t matter how many times you flip-flop on what you are saying. To the man on the street, it doesn’t matter in that it appears that intelligent people are arguing over what is largely a settled question, that over 100 PPM of CO2 has been added to the atmosphere in 100 years due to fossil-fuel emissions.
More spew. No way could a small cooling reverse the annual increase in CO2 concentration. You really have no idea what you are talking about and likely don’t care. The skeptical FUD strategy apparently doesn’t require a scientific conscience.
Really Webby – the mean annual CO2 increase was 0.48 on 1992 and peaked in 1998 at 2.93. I’m figuring that quite a lot of the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere was from a warming Earth. This was not neccessarily ocean outgassing despite your idiotic one dimensional ideas.
I am tired of your stupid ad homs – I have such a broad background in everything from physics and hydraulics to fluvial geomorphology to environmental economics. I have 30 years of reading in science and I know a damn sight more than you will ever know about science, literature, art, history, popular culture and rodeo.
Offer some damned evidence – except you don’t have any – you are just hand waving and wasting everyone’s time. When all else fails – bully, denigrate and intimidate hey Webby? Is that all you’ve got? Why on earth do you bother with yopur totally stupid FUD.
The average increase over the last several decades has been about 1.5 PPM CO2 per year. My analysis shows that seasonal variations generate a 3 PPM change in CO2 for every 1 degree change in sea surface temperature (SST). That is consistent with seasonal outgassing.
That said, a brief warming period did hit the equatorial ocean in 1998, and you can see this in the NOAA data. It is quite obvious that the glitch is about 0.5 degrees C, which according to my analysis, would add 1.5 PPM (3x change) to the Mauna Loa readings. That is exactly the difference between 2.93 and the average 1.5 PPM increase per year from fossil fuel emissions. But since this temperature increase was temporary, it did not cause a long term change in the 1.5 PPM per year advance. It was just a brief ocean warming spell — the ocean breathed out CO2 and then eventually sucked it back in when the temperature fell back to the steady state in subsequent years.
I hope this is starting to make sense to you as it is all very consistent.
Hmmm. Maybe someone should alert the media.
The ocean temperature increase was nowhere near temporary but increased steadily over recent decades. The causes of the recent warming – in so far as we have a satellite record – show that the warming happened in the short wave and there was cooling in the IR. Given that warming in the early part of last century was mostly natural and warming resumed after 1976 – après the Great Pacific Climate Shift – we are entitled to think that much of the consequent change in atmospheric CO2 was the result of these other systems in which the fluxes are 2 orders of magnitude larger than anthropogenic emissions. We are entitled to think that these fluxes are not in equilibrium – as from the data. And that much of the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere is of natural origin because of natural warming of the planet.
The point being that there is a likelihood – if the planet cools – of a turnaround in the accumulation. We have so little data that it becomes increasingly difficult to do anything but speculate. We speculate that the world is cooling because of ocean circulation – hardly just a glitch – and declining solar activity both for the rest of this decade and as a longer term probability.
Me – “I am tired of your stupid ad homs – I have such a broad background in everything from physics and hydraulics to fluvial geomorphology to environmental economics. I have 30 years of reading in science and I know a damn sight more than you will ever know about science, literature, art, history, popular culture and rodeo.”
You – ‘Hmmm. Maybe someone should alert the media.’
By all means – tell them that I am a lonesome cowboy with degrees in engineering and environmental science. But you accuse me of not caring about science – how can that be?
The problem with the climate war is that curiosity no longer the ruling facor and everything is reflexively shoe horned into an ideology. Think instead of it as an exercise in natural philosophy where wonder and puzzlement are mixed in equal measure.
Now if we could possibly avoid snarks – it would be much more pleasant educating you.
Chief is consistent in his consistency. Now he is back to saying that the long-term atmospheric CO2 increase is due to a natural origin. What else is there to conclude when he writes the following:
Again, note that Chief says that “And that much of the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere is of natural origin because of natural warming of the planet.”. How much is much? I have to assume that he thinks that much of the 100 PPM increase over the last 100 years is of natural origin. This is in keeping with his Aussie buddy Salby.
This is fun because, like clockwork, Chief will now vacillate and respond with his standard equivocations, designed to create more FUD. That is how this kind of aggressively regressive pseudoscience works, you see.
I haven’t changed – the CO2 fluxes change with temperature. This isn’t merely as a solubility term but includes biological activity and 2 orders of magnitude greater than the solubility terms. This can be seen in any carbon cycle diagram – although it must be remembered that the fluxes have uncertainties greater than 20%. For instance – http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-7-3.html
Roy Spencer using data and a simple model calculated a 90% natural contribution to CO2 in the atmosphere.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/05/global-warming-causing-carbon-dioxide-increases-a-simple-model/
Webby ignores every factor but outgassing – and drops that into a novel formualtion of Henry’s Law of dubious validity and imagines that that explains everything with great precision.
Chief is consistent in his inconsistency as he has flip-flopped again.
This time he relies on that third-rate climate scientist Spencer, who makes an egregious error in interpreting rates. This is actually a rookie mistake made by most beginners when they are learning equilibrium and transient chemistry.
I will walk you through his error, as I find it instructive. What Spencer did was assume a rate of 4.6 PPM/year per degree C based on a fit and then maintains this value yearly. If you look at his CO2 curves they are concave upward, indicative of an accelerating cumulative, and it actually outpaces the Mauna Loa curve !!!
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/simple-co2-model-fig06.jpg
Of course it doesn’t take very long for such a maintained rate to start to overtake any actual physical mechanism. No wonder that Spencer, and now Chief, thinks that the CO2 increase is all natural.
However, partial pressures don’t accelerate in that fashion, apart from the initial transient as it chases the temperature forcing function. You just have to consider a sanity check to see how far off Spencer is. Say that instead of a minor change in temperature as we see now, we have a temperature change that is a few degrees. With a Spencer-like accelerator in place, the CO2 would shoot through the roof and some sort of catastrophic level would be reached even faster. The Paleoclimate data shows temperature changes of around 12 degrees while the CO2 level only changed by 100 PPM (that is the equilibrium 7 PPM/degreeC accepted by most), and that was over a long time scale, not a few years as Spencer is suggesting. — Who knew that Spencer was a believer of CAGW? ;)
Bottomline, Spencer is really a third-rate climate scientist, and the upper tier climatologists want nothing to do with a sloppy thinker and FUD propagator.
—-
Ain’t it the truth. Chief engages again in his copy&paste antics without actually trying to reason about the science. Spencer shows that he is an idealogue content to produce more FUD. Same goes for Salby.
Jim.
Of course you have no idea. First, climate sensitivity is not related to C02 per se. It is related to FORCING.
Lets give you a simple example. You press the accelerator on your car.
That results in the application of a forcing. Horsepower to your drive train.
The car will ( all things being equal) respond. Over time. When the car reaches a top speed and doesnt go any faster you will be able to
measure the response to that Force.
Now a car is easy to predict. but you do have some feedbacks to consider like changes to drag as speed increases and changes to friction as tires get hotter.
With the climate this is much harder to figure out.
1. you cant hold other forcings constant while changing 1.
2. It takes centuries to see the Full effect of forcings.
The best you can do is estimate the total response and then estimate
the sensitivity. You cant calculate it from first principles and
you can only measure it over vast time scales.
Sensitivity is expressed in terms of the final response in C to a forcing of watts. Apply a forcing of 3.7 watts ( ANY CAUSE WILL DO) and you will see a response of 3C when the system reaches equillibrium.
A doubling of C02 gives you 3.7 excess watts,
So, sensitivity is a metric that defines how the system responds to any forcing over time. Get that part straight first.
“A doubling of C02 gives you 3.7 excess watts”
Wild speculation.
How do you figure that, when the S-B response to an extra 3C is around 17 watts?
Steven you write “Apply a forcing of 3.7 watts ( ANY CAUSE WILL DO) and you will see a response of 3C when the system reaches equillibrium.
A doubling of C02 gives you 3.7 excess watts,”
Many thanks for the lengthy reply. I am utterly unconvinced. However, let me take issue with the numeric values you have quoted. Neither of the numbers 3.7 watts nor 3 C can ever be measured. It is impossible to measure them. Therefore we can never know whether their numeric values have any meaning. They are, in point of fact, little more that educated guesses. It is precisely for this reason that I do not believe in any numeric effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere unless it is derived directly to observed data. Then, and only then, can we be sure that we know what effect adding CO2 to the atmosphere has.
This remarkable increase is very similar to the remarkable increase that has happened time and time again over the past ten thousand years. Warm, then Cool, Then Warm Then Cool, then Warm, then Cool, Climate Etc.
‘Large, abrupt climate changes have affected hemispheric to global regions repeatedly, as shown by numerous paleoclimate records (Broecker, 1995, 1997). Changes of up to 16°C and a factor of 2 in precipitation have occurred in some places in periods as short as decades to years (Alley and Clark, 1999; Lang et al., 1999). However, before the 1990s, the dominant view of past climate change emphasized the slow, gradual swings of the ice ages tied to features of the earth’s orbit over tens of millennia or the 100-million-year changes occurring with continental drift. But unequivocal geologic evidence pieced together over the last few decades shows that climate can change abruptly, and this has forced a reexamination of climate instability and feedback processes (NRC, 1998). Just as occasional floods punctuate the peace of river towns and occasional earthquakes shake usually quiet regions near active faults, abrupt changes punctuate the sweep of climate history.’ http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10136&page=10
It would be remarkable if it didn’t change remarkably.
@Chief “It would be remarkable if it didn’t change remarkably”
Sudden climate change is the only thing about climateology that concerns me, notwithstanding that “sudden” would be probably be spread over several decades in the context of Earth’s climate over millions of years.
There are definite external forcings at work that would appear to bring this about since normal climate cycles certainly shows strong negative feedback mechanisms at work that keeps temperature, wind and precipitation levels within quite narrow bands.
I am most interested in hydrology because I believe that observed climate over the centuries have been heavily influenced by hydrology, such as, for example, the insulation effects of oceans and lakes on the relatively small land mass of Earth and on its the evaporation/precipitation cycles.
Peter,
I think this is the most remarkable graph in hydrology. It show the amount of red sediment washed into a South American lake – which increases in El Niño years. It doesn’t show individual El Niño – but it does show ENSO in aggregate over discrete intervals in terms of the frequency and intensity of El Niño – a red shift in the sediment.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=ENSO11000.gif
You can see a shift in ENSO 5,000 years ago that commenced the drying of the Sahel and changed human history. The drought starting in about 3,500 years ago that resulted in the demise of the Minoan civilisation. El Niño warms the world and the correlation with the Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age are obvious. ENSO – and more specifically the wider Pacific variability – is the cause of most of global hydrological variation. So we have evidence of floods and droughts lasting hundreds of years. It depends on how you define narrow bands.
Here’s an ENSO animation. – http://esminfo.prenhall.com/science/geoanimations/animations/26_NinoNina.html –
Have a look at the green arrow of the Peruvian Current – it is where it all starts. More cold water pushing up from the Antarctic is joined by upwelling cold water in the region of the Humboldt Current in a La Niña – or there is less cold water and upwelling is suppressed by a layer of warm water in an El Niño. The variability in the Peruvian current comes from variability in the Southern Annular Mode – the westerlies of the Antarctic polar vortex. The latter – as I show below – is associated with solar UV and stratospheric ozone.
So we have a control variable – solar UV – and a complex and dynamic system involving multiple feedbacks involving currents, winds, cloud and oceanic upwelling in a system that is a major source of planetary climate variability.
It doesn’t explain glacial and interglacials however – a whole different set of control variables and feedbacks.
Robert I Ellison
Chief Hydrologist
Thanks for the links and your explanations – as usual, most understandable for a lay person such as myself.
One thing about a good scientist (or any professional for that matter) is their ability to explain complex phenomena in terms understood by their audience.
Unfortunately, only a few experts contributing to this blog have this ability, so consequentially I have learned much more from your posts than from the others.
That’s 1.7 degrees per century.
Oooh. Scary!
http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_943_en.html
“WMO also announced preliminary findings of the soon to be released Decadal Global Climate Summary, showing that climate change accelerated in 2001-2010, which was the warmest decade ever recorded in all continents of the globe.
The rate of increase since 1971 has been “remarkable” according to the preliminary assessment. Atmospheric and oceanic phenomena such as La Niña events had a temporary cooling influence in some years but did not halt the overriding warming trend.”
Dr Curry – any comment on this press statement?
World Meteorological Organization:
The global temperature increase rate has been “remarkable” during the previous four decades, according to the preliminary summary. The global temperature has increased since 1971 at an average estimated rate of 0.166°C per decade compared to the average rate of 0.06 °C per decade computed over the full period 1881-2010.
http://bit.ly/gGTbWJ
In an oscillating global mean temperature pattern ( http://tinyurl.com/7p963ez ), isn’t it pseudo science to compare warming rates of 0.166 deg C per decade from valley to peak with that from peak to peak of 0.06 deg C per decade and claim accelerated warming?
The proper procedure is to compare one peak-to-peak period with another peak-to-peak period, or to compare one valley-to-valley period with another valley-to-valley period of equal duration as follows:
http://bit.ly/GO7OxC
Why do they mislead?
Why do they mislead?
Why do they mislead?
Why? you should know, you’re misleading as well
Steven, how do I mislead?
In the Queensland election, the carbon tax came high (3rd with 44%) in exit poll responses on why the state government crashed and burned.
Advance Australia Fair!
Is that the real reason,or that voters are realising that politicians( whatever their ilk) are more spin then substance in any solution environmental or economic or tax reform.
it is of course difficult to sell global warming when the sign is inverse
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/season/aus/summary.shtml
and it becomes dificult to sell either tax reform and emission trading regimes when the same players ie policy and financial markets are behind that greatest destruction of wealth the world has seen eg RBNZ.
Credit related losses $2 trillion
Equity markets $30 trillion
Housing market $4 trillion
Lost productivity $3 trillion
This of course allows one to ask the important questions,
1)Do we require a cap and trade or emissions trading market.
2)To what extent will this defacto tax burden exasperate the economic contraction.
3)Do we want financial markets playing in a defacto tax market.
Importantly can the developed economies further askew their own fiscal imbalances ,when the emission problem will simply be redistibuted to less environmental altrusic regimes.
This has been the mildest winter in my memory, and the earliest spring. Seems at least partially related to the arctic oscillation. For those that want to point to AGW, I would remind them that the earth is actually rather cool right now.
Anybody materially improve our understanding of sensitivity yet? Didn’t think so.
If write-ins were allowed I’d say…
is a self-defeating nihilist in Western academia’s Tower of Babel who is stabbing taxpayers in the back and living for the death of the last self-reliant individual in to die.
I notice Central England Temperature is threatening to break last years 2nd warmest record. Early days yet but 1/4 of the year is through now.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
With the La Nina gone and Solar max 24 still ahead, the the odds are better that 2012 will turn out warmer than 2011 globally, and the odds are even better still that we’ll see a new record warm year by 2015. All of this is of course hard to explain by skeptics to AGW so of course they’ll have to go back to their old fallback position of “natural variabilty” or maybe even “continued recovery from the Little Ice Age”.
Surely you can be a little bit more confident about this. You’ve already nailed ENSO and solar. The relatively simple way that the IPCC explains temperature and forcing would suggest that with a few more caveats like no major volcanoes or no sudden increase in aerosols (i can’t think of any more maybe you can) then there is absolutely no reason why 2012 is hotter and it continues on and on through 2015. Great something testable with no wiggle room.
…..no reason why 2012 isn’t hotter………..
I would predict that 2012 will be the 3rd warmest year in the UAH and RSS global TLT records, with near zero chance of breaking the record.
I would suggest even odds for 2012 to be the warmest year globally in HadCRUT4, GISS, NOAA.
As others have noted this is dependent on the evolution of ENSO. It’s looking like neutral to positive for the rest of the year but with a reasonable chance of lapsing back into La Nina.
Where do you get the idea that the cycle hasn’t peaked? http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png
‘As noted before, all of the ten two-year La Niña events between 1900 and 2009 ended up either as a continued La Niña event for a third year (four out of ten), or switched to El Niño (six out of ten), with none of them ending up as ENSO-neutral. The year 2012 promises to remain “interesting”.’ http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
Have a look at the multi decadal pattern in the MEI. La Nina (blue) dominant to 1976, El Nino to 1998 and La Nina since. We should be getting more frequent and intense La Nina for a decade or three more – and less intnese El Nino. This is an important mode of climate variability that as a general pattern you should try to understand. There are thousands of studies on this mode of Pacific decadal variability – start anywhere.
We may get a weak El Nino later this year – but it is particulary cool – http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2012/anomnight.3.22.2012.gif
Cheers
If the current 2 year La Nina – which is still hanging in there – turns into an El Nino 2012 will certainly be warmer than the 11th placed 2011. What’s your point?
One warm winter does not a climate make. The NAM is positive at the moment as is SAM and the polar fronts contract to higher latitudes.
See here for an explanation – http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/agriculture/about-agriculture/newsletters-and-updates/newsletters/milking-the-weather/june-2011/sam
It seems associated with solar UV variability.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v4/n11/full/ngeo1282.html
http://www.nipccreport.org/articles/2011/nov/2nov2011a3.html
http://www.ncas.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=890:solar-forcing-of-winter-climate-variability-in-the-northern-hemisphere&catid=53:current-news&Itemid=299
Which probably has decadal to centennial and longer variability. Here is an example of Hale cycle variability over the 20th Century.
http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/731/731index.htm
http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/731/fig1.gif
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/5/2/024001/fulltext/
The shift in atmospheric mass associated with sea level pressure changes at the poles must be linked to currents – in particular the Californian and Peruvian Currents – and therefore upwelling in the eastern Pacific. Although with lags and complex feedbacks – I don’t know how that could ever be proved. But it remains the only extant theory for the PDO.
I doubt if we know what the causes of recent warming were – if the satellite data is so unreliable that the implied albedo changes causing most of the warming are moot. Where is the future? It seems more likely to be more negative SAM and NAM on trend, negative PDO and declining solar activity. This must lead to cooler NH winters and cooler temps. generally.
Robert I Ellison
Chief Hydrologist
Support from AccuWeather that surprised me:
MacMath, Jillian. “What’s Causing All the Warm Weather?” Scientific. AccuWeather.com, March 22, 2012. http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/whats-causing-all-the-warm-wea/63076
Brilliant, that.
Brilliantly flies in the face of Occam’s Razor.
It’s warm because all these things we’ve seen countless times before in similar patterns when it wasn’t warm now make it warm by the power of coincidence?
The word for that is “crock”.
Unless, of course, Occam’s razor is in the hand of the Barber of Seville. :-)
Seriously, it is a “wicked problem”. :-|
For Occams razor to apply one must apply a hypothesis to the phenomenon in question – and it is one that has been known about for a long time.
‘The Northern Hemisphere annular mode (NAM) (also known as the North Atlantic Oscillation) is shown to exert a strong influence on wintertime climate, not only over the Euro-Atlantic half of the hemisphere as documented in previous studies, but over the Pacific half as well. It affects not only the mean conditions, but also the day-to-day variability, modulating the intensity of mid-latitude storms and the frequency of occurrence of high-latitude blocking and cold air outbreaks throughout the hemisphere. The recent trend in the NAM toward its high-index polarity with stronger subpolar westerlies has tended to reduce the severity of winter weather over most middle- and high-latitude Northern Hemisphere continental regions.’ Regional Climate Impacts of the Northern Hemisphere Annular Mode
David W. J. Thompson andJohn M. Wallace
Science 6 July 2001: 293 (5527), 85-89. [DOI:10.1126/science.1058958]
The NAM is currently mildly positive – but the trend is definitely negative in a multi-decadal cool phase. With a cool Pacific phase – there are cool, cool winters and drought in America’s decadal future. Haven’t you seen the temperature charts for the US and wondered why there are 2 peaks – one in the 1930’s and one in the 1990’s? My very serious hydrological forecast. You guys should seriously get ready – you will be praying for global warming.
Chief,
You are right in theory, but wrong in context. The rapid build up of greenhouse gases put increasing likelihood that such events will happen, thus when any such extraordinary event does happen, you can not dissect out the anthropogenic influence. It is all Anthropocene weather now that humans have so greatly changed the hydrosphere, biosphere, cryosphere and atmosphere. The real question is, how will we manage it?
That’s nonsense. There’s no plausible mechanism for that and, indeed, it’s never been shown.
And even if it were true, your contention that you can blame any extreme event on an elevated probability of it occurring is a logical fallacy.
Ah, but there is at least one plausible mechanism for events like this “summer in March” heatwave and even the Russian heat wave, that could easily be related to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. As the pressure and thermal gradient from equator to poles decreases, as shown by many global clmate models, the odds of getting the kinds of blocking high pressure systems increases. Stalled out high pressure systems combinded with more general heat in the troposphere would get excactly the kind of event we saw this March and over Russia in 2010. Certainly heat waves have always occurred, but the probability of them increases as the probability of blocking high pressure systems increases. Welcome to Anthropocene weather.
R. Gates: over Russia in 2010.
The heat wave was over part of Russia, not “over Russia”. Simultaneous with the heat wave was a cool wave to the northeast of the heat wave. How the simultaneous heat wave and cool wave would be produced by increased heat in the troposphere is something that I think has not been explained. Perhaps I missed it.
Can you quantify that decrease in thermal gradient?
I’m just having a bit of difficulty squaring significant pressure differences with a change in gradient amounting to something in the order of a handful of degrees over 6000 miles.
And your “more general heat in the troposphere”, given the low thermal capacity of air, doesn’t mean much either. The joules simply ain’t there.
R Gates
Please stop trying to attribute modern weather events to the ‘anthropocene’ (last time I intend to use this ridiculous politically loaded term until it becomes official).when they are not exceptional or unpecedented. Once again you are trotting out the Russian Heat wave and saying it can easily be related to CHG’s. Why not attribute it to natural variabilty as we have many examples of similar heat waves in the past?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/01/a-short-anthology-of-changing-climate/
Halfway down this article I mention the Russian Heat waves of the Mid 1800’s and have also written about other events elsewhere. (There were similar events in the 1760’s)
As regards Blocking highs I made mention of this in my article ‘The long slow thaw’ after examining tens of thousands of contemporary weather observations from 1538 onwards.
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/long-slow-thaw-supplementary-information.pdf
“Due to its geographical location British weather is often quite mobile and periods of hot, cold, dry or wet weather tend to be relatively short lived. If such events are longer lasting than normal, or interrupted and resumed, that can easily shape the character of a month or a season. Reading the numerous references there is clear evidence of ‘blocking patterns,’ perhaps as the jet stream shifts, or a high pressure takes up residence, feeding in winds from a certain direction which generally shape British weather.”
There is very little new under the sun including our weather patterns.
tonyb
Tony, every warming and “wierding” is anthropogenic, any cooling is natural. Simples!
Russian heat waves are oftten of Anthropo-political nature as this one was in the wake of Czechoslovakia’s invasion.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/69-71.htm
Notice the excessive positive anomaly is strictly confined to the USSR borders, and considering the area involved lifted global temperatures by ~ 0.3 C.
Here is a simple mind experiment to show why you are wrong about probability and the supposed “logical fallacy” argument.
Take a one meter by one meter piece of metal sheeting with a wooden frame around it, and cut a hole in it just large enough for a marble to pass through. Now place a marble matching the size of that hole on the metal sheet and gently rock that sheet back and forth with a certain frequency and record the number of times the marble drops through over some time period. Now add one more hole to the sheet and increase each hole just slightly in size, and rock the sheet back and forth at a greater frequency than before. Keep doing this for any given number of time periods you want and watch the number of times the marble passes through the hole increase over time. Guess what? The number of times (each of which is an individual event) is directly proportional to the number of holes, size of holes, and frequency of rocking back and forth. Any single event can indeed be related to the overall change of probability. In this case, correlation and causality are obviously related, and the new probability environment that you created can no longer be dissected away from any single time the marble drops, as the only proper way to look at it is obviously a wholistic one.
Increasing greenhouse gas concentrations alter the wholistc probability environment of any given event occurring. Thus, when any given event occurs (under the new probability environment created by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations), that event’s occurance is directly related to that new environment. With CO2, N2O and methane now at the highest levels in at least 800,000 years (and probably much more), this interglacial Holocene period is an atypical interglacial due to human activity. Thus, the Holocene became the Anthropocene and it is now all Anthropocene weather, and every weather event that occurs exists in this new probabilistic environment…i.e. you cannot remove or dissect out the Anthropocene high greenhouse gas environment from the overall causality of any weather event now occurring. The global climate models tell us the probabliity of extreme weather events will increase as we pump more greenhouse gases into the troposphere. We are cutting more holes in the metal sheet, increasing the size of each hole, and rocking that metal sheet back and forth more frequently.
R Gates
Taking your own logic to its conclusion, if the weather now is entirely Anthropocene but we can demonstrate that past weather events were as bad or worse than now, then anthropocene surely has no more affect than natural variability?
tonyb
But we’re not actually talking about changing the number or size of the holes, are we?
We’re actually talking about changing the statistical probability that the holes are going to be larger and/or more numerous at a given place at a given time than they were at the same place at the same time last year
Particularly when we know that the holes vary greatly in size and number from place to place, time to time and season to season – by orders of magnitude greater than our small statistical change.
Besides we know that extreme events, such as heat waves, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes etc etc, of various intensities, do occur in various parts of the world, and they occur often, always have and always will, so trying to pin the blame for any such event on a slight statistical increase in average global temperature (which itself only exists in the abstract) is simply disingenuous.
Tony B.,
If you believe (as I do) that clmate is not just a random walk, but there are real and multiple forcings, which added together along with their various positive and negative feedbacks, add up to cliimate, then certainly any climate period could resemble any other, even if due to different reasons. But “natural variability” is just a catch-all phrase really that definitely should NOT mean random walk, but hopefully means “a variety of natural forcings”. As Foster & Rahmstorf and other studies have shown, nearly all of “natural variability” can be broken down in to actual natural forcings such as ENSO, solar, and volcanic, which can be seen now as noise riding upon the underlying forcing caused by the 40% rise in CO2 (and other greenhouse gases) since the industrial revolution.
Peter,
I don’t think it is disingenuous at all to talk about increasing greenhouse gases changing the overall probabilistic environment of any single weather event. And the increase in atmospheric and ocean temperatures are just one of the effects of increasing CO2 on the overall environment. It is one metric to meaure the effects on “weather”, but certainly there can be others…i.e. stronger and more frequent severe weather events.
The marble and metal sheet mind experiment is only to illustrate how probabilities must be considered in a wholistic way, and thus, when global climate models show a likely increase in extreme weather events, then it should be considered as well in a wholistic way as part of a new probabilistic environment Any single weather event exists as part of that environment, and thus, you can’t dissect it out. It has multiple causes, all interacting, all part of the whole, and some of those causes as part of that whole must, by fact, include increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.
R Gates, if you choose to continue to believe in irrelevancies, that’s your business.
R Gates
So in effect you are sayng that we know ALL the component parts that make up natural variability? I suspect that as in all sciences-especially new ones- there will be some big surprises in the years to come as we realise we don’t know as much as we thought we did.
tonyb
Gates is right.
Almost all climate occurrences are thermally activated.
This argument requires a grounding in statistical physics but here goes.
Assume that some physical process is activated thermally and it is described by an activation energy governed by Boltzmann statistics.
If the activation energy is 0.46 eV, which is around the value for water vaporization, then you can get changes of probability of 15% for a 2 degree change in temperature.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=exp%28-0.46%2F8.617e-5%2F275%29%2Fexp%28-0.46%2F8.617e-5%2F273%29
If the activation energy is greater than this the probability changes are greater due to the steepness of the barrier. Higher activation energies are associated with stronger bonds.
Now consider that probabilities are multiplicative and if we have events that require lots of mechanisms of reduced probability, that 15% can start making an impact. And that is all from a 2 degree change, with enough time for the change to have an impact. This has positive feedback aspects should the warm seasons start to become longer as well.
Anyone that has done industrial or laboratory furnace control understands how important it is to maintain a stable temperature. This is something to really think about.
Apples and oranges.
Where on Earth’s surface is the temperature ever stable (ie the same) for more than a few hours at a time?
Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.
Unless we understand natural variability there is no basis at all for understanding anthropogenic influences. These are not cycles that Tsonis is talking about but climate crossing a threshold and spontaneously reorganising. I can’t stress enough that this is the natural mode of operation of the complex dynamical system that is Earth climate. The effects on temperature are seen prominently in the NH.
In the US –
http://bobtisdale.blogspot.com.au/2009/06/contiguous-us-gistemp-linear-trends.html
In the Arctic –
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=chylek09.gif
Why would this change and how would we know? All of the peer reviewed decadal forecasts – except Smith et al 2007 which is dated – is suggesting the potential for no warming over another decade or three. To suggest that the powerful mechanisms of climate are overturned because of minor warming may be inflating the importance of CO2. There is no great change in hydrology. The temperature change seems well within the limits of natural variability. It is cooler than at times in the Holocene. Climate naturally changes abruptly and nonlinearly – degrees in a decade. So the rate of change seems positively slow.
The planet has warmed a little last decade – but it was all short wave change. http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif You can’t simply say it is warming and then automatically assign all the warming to greenhouse gases.
It is warming at 0.166 degrees C/decade according to the WMO? So what? Here’s something from real climate – http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/ – that removes ENSO dragon kings to give a residual warming of 0.1 degree C/decade and suggests no warming for the rest of the decade. If you read the 2 papers – the period of no warming is indeterminate. It is the warmest year with a La Niña? Again so what? With the solar cycle peaking – what we get 0.1 of a degree minimum? 2005 and 2010 are warmer than 1998? Not in any statistically significant way.
And here is the best data on the solar cycle – http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png
What did cause the recent warming ? The satellite evidence suggests it was albedo change predominantly. – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif – The only physical evidence that counts is the TOA radiant flux.
The IPCC says that – if true – it may be simply low frequency natural variability. Well – you would have to assume so as there is a dearth of other options.
The solar cycle’s footprint on terrestrial climate manifests as anomalies in the seasonal switching of the hemispheric westerly winds, as indicated by semi-annual lunisolar-integrated variations in the rate of change of length of day. North-south asymmetry (due to the current distribution of continents) is evident.
The Solar Cycle’s Footprint on Terrestrial Climate
http://i43.tinypic.com/o52jbd.png
Data:
ftp://ftp.iers.org/products/eop/long-term/c04_08/iau2000/eopc04_08_IAU2000.62-now
pdf:
http://www.billhowell.ca/Climate%20and%20sun/Vaughan%20120324%20The%20Solar%20Cycle%27s%20Footprint%20on%20Terrestrial%20Climate.PDF
This result can be considered definitive.
It has absolute implications for ENSO research.
Note on context:
Much of the work I do is exploratory, aiming to sharpen questions where final answers evade, but my confidence in this finding is absolute.
Remember Tsonis, network synchronization, coupled oscillators?… There’s a solar tie-in — addressed in this more exploratory article:
Solar-Terrestrial Resonance, Climate Shifts, & the Chandler Wobble Phase Reversal
http://www.billhowell.ca/Paul%20L%20Vaughan/Vaughan%20120324%20Solar-Terrestrial%20Resonance,%20Climate%20Shifts,%20&%20the%20Chandler%20Wobble%20Phase%20Reversal.pdf
Some tiny parts of the northern hemisphere had a winter that never was, while it was mostly colder than normal at other places. Where I live (the med sea) Fenruary was the coldest in 100 nearly years according to our met office. Meanwhile, the southern hemisphere just had summer that never was…………………
Re CFL lamps, if these were proposed by the right politicians, instead of the left-green-red ones, every time one breaks, HAZMAT would have to be called in.
Perhaps Anthony Watts pointing out this poll contributed to the results?
A different result may have occured had the poll been pointed out by e.g. Real Climate or Climate Progress.
Self nominating polls are almost always distorted.
A different result may have occured had the poll been pointed out by e.g. Real Climate or Climate Progress
Alexa ranks Wattsupwiththat at 17,457…Realclimate at 223,655
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/realclimate.org
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wattsupwiththat.com
Climate Progress doesn’t have a dedicated site anymore, it is just a section of thinkprogress.org which covers the full range of ‘progressive’ issues.
More from Politico:
Shhhh! Don’t talk about global warming!
There’s been a change in climate for Washington’s greenhouse gang, and they’ve come to this conclusion: To win, they have to talk about other topics, like gas prices and kids choking on pollutants.
More than two years since Democrats’ cap-and-trade plan died in Congress, the strategic shift represents a reluctant acknowledgment from environmentalists that they’ve lost ground by tackling global warming head-on. Their best bet now lies in a bit of a bait and switch: Help elect global warming fighters by basing campaigns on kitchen-table issues.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/74263.html#ixzz1pysBwMzy
“Shhhh! Don’t talk about global warming!”
Let’s talk about “Sustainability”. It is perfect. Absolutely nebulous. A wonderful power magnet. Utterly unachievable in the long run, but it will do during during the terms of politicians and bureaucrats. :-)
“cap-and-trade”
You know, of course, that Cap-And-Trade (in any of its variants[1]) was a revival of the Soviet Union’s Turnover Tax. It worked so well there that Western politicians wanted to import it.
[1] Turnover Tax, Cap And Trade, Carbon Tax, Carbon Credit Card, Tax and Dividend
Pooh, Dixie | March 25, 2012 at 10:02 am |
“vodka”
You know, of course, that vodka (in any of its variants[1]) was a revival of the Soviet Union’s potato whiskey. It worked so well there that Western politicians wanted to import it.
[1] Potatoes, vodka, wedge fries, freedom fries, Jack Daniels.
Well, if you can’t tell Jack from a french fry, and you a Dixie lady, what can we say?
“Behold, I tell you a mystery: We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.”
1 Corinthians 15:51
The proponents of CAGW assure us that as long as we continue to burn fossil fuels, and put gigatonnes of CO2 per year into the atmopshere, global temperatures are going to rise catastrophically. The rise will be X degrees C by the end of this century, with the assumed climate sensitivity value of in excess of 2 C for a doubling of CO2 from current levels. And for the world to cotinue as we know it, we must ensure that this temperature rise is not more than 2 C.
So we will be able to measure the rate of rise of CO2 concentration. And we will be able to measure the rate of rise of global temperatures. And these will be highly correlated according to CAGW.
HOWEVER, and there is always a however, there will be never be any discernable CO2 signal in any temperature/time graph. It will always be impossible to observe any CO2 signal whatsoever in any such graphs. I do hope someone can explain this mystery to me, because, frankly, I think this is an impossibility.
Jim, there is a readily seen CO2 warming signal both in tropospheric temps and ocean heat content, but when it is pointed out to skeptics, they find all sorts of reasons why the data isn’t saying what it is obviously saying. There are none so blind as those who will not see.
How do you discern C02 warming signals?
Andrew
Andrew,
Of course, CO2 is the largest of the greenhouse gas increases to the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, but let’s net forget about N2O and methane, for they are not inconsequential additions in themselves, and certainly all three combined add to the total net positive forcing from human activities. Net is key here as other anthropogenic forcing such as from aerosols is negative and must be subtracted to reach the net forcing. Then of course all human forcing must be put into the overall natural forcing mix at any given time (i.e. ENSO, solar, volanic) to find out what the actual state of the clmate will be. The reverse of this, that is, dissecting out the individual components is exactly what Foster & Rahmstorf and others have done to see the overall underlying signal of anthropogenic warming that remains. The Foster & Rahmstorf study has been greatly debated here and elsewhere on the blogosphere, but it (I feel) has done a pretty good job at finding the underlying warming from anthropogenic GH forcing.
You didn’t answer my question, R Gates.
Let me repeat it.
How do you discern C02 warming signals?
If you don’t know, a simple “I don’t know” will suffice.
Andrew
Andrew,
Where is your emphasis in that question? On “you”, or “CO2”? I think the filtering techniques employeed by Foster & Rahmstorf are a reasonable approach for discerning warming from increases in CO2, but the signal they found would naturally include warming from increases in N2O and methane as well.
Filtering techniques? LOL. They shoud better be called denial techniques.
Here’s the answer in non-Climate Science Doublespeak:
You don’t discern c02 warming signals at all. By a process of elimination, you back into a guess.
Andrew
R. Gates you write “The reverse of this, that is, dissecting out the individual components is exactly what Foster & Rahmstorf and others have done to see the overall underlying signal of anthropogenic warming that remains. ”
The method adopted by Foster and Rahmsdorf works, IF AND ONLY IF you have a complete knowledge of ALL the efffects which change global temperatures. If you dont know ALL of them, then the answer you get is, at best, the maximum possible value for climate sensitivity. And since we dont know all the variables which affect global temperatures, the technique used by F&R gives nothing more that a useless guess.
R. Gates I forgot to ask. Did F&R calculate the climate sensitivity of the GHGs? And if so, what value did they get?
R. Gates,
Lindzen got in a world of trouble for talking about total ghg’s in the atmosphere. Be careful, or you might be shredded by unhappy believers.
You only like F&R because they give you a sciencey peg to hang your conclusion from.
There is no clear trend from CO2, unless it is fabricated, like a certain hockey stick or very careful tree selection that turns even near Arctic trees into cherry trees ripe for picking.
There are no such things as GHG warming signals.
There is warming: a measurement in C
There are increasing measurements of GHGs
And then there is a physical theory which explains how an increase in GHGs leads to an increase in Temperature.
You are asking stupid uninformed questions
Jeez, Mosh, your starting to respond like one of the team. Having a bad weekend?
Steven Mosher,
Your fellow Warmer Tribesman R. Gates commenteth:
“there is a readily seen CO2 warming signal”
Both of you can’t be right.
Andrew
R. Gates, what is the strength of that signal by region? I don’t deny there is a CO2 impact, but surface albedo change amplifies the impact. Surface albedo also has an impact on the accuracy of the surface station accuracy as well. http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/140742/files/Huwald%20et%20al..pdf Which is one reason I prefer to verify surface trends where possible with satellite data. That causes a lower estimate of sensitivity to CO2 that has been pointed out to most believers, who find all sorts of reasons why the data is not saying that :)
Captn,
I think far too much attention is given to the highly variable troposphere, which, while it certainly has shown warming over the past 40+ years, has such low heat capacity compared to the oceans and hydrosphere, that it is much more open to “noise” from natural variations to see any long-term trend without filtering out this noise by techiques such as employeed by Foster & Rahmstorf. Better still is to look at the largest heat sink you have, which we can measure in any fashion to see if the net heat of the Earth as a system is increasing or decreasing. Of course, when doing this, and looking at the ocean heat content down to 2000 meters, we see a consistent rise over the past 40 years, with no cooling or flatlining of temperaturs over the past decade. Earth has continued accumulating energy consistent with the continued increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
Don’t confuse correlation with causation.
The rate of accumulation due to CO2 is the issue. that would depend on the amount of OHC that would be “normal”. Given that the period from circa 1400 to 1900 was cooler than “normal” some portion of that uptake would be recovery.
There is a great deal of noise in all the data, that does not mean you should ignore one set in favor of another because it appears to have more noise. In a non-linear dynamic system, more often than not that noise is an important part of the signal. For example: if you compare the mid-troposphere to the stratosphere, the “noise” change around 1994. If you compare the southern extent satellite noise to the surface station noise you would see indications that the surface station data is less likely to be accurate than the satellite data. O’Donnell et al 2010 versus Stieg et al. 2009.
Too much can be made out of any data. The trick is finding out which data is lying the most.
Jim2
“Don’t confuse correlation with causation.”
It’s worse to take correlation for disproof of causation.
This is for DocMartyn, a skeptic who doesn’t believe that the Mauna Loa atmospheric CO2 seasonal variations on top of the anthropogenic rise are due to ocean outgassing of CO2.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/03/co2-outgassing-model.html#SST_CO2
This comparison between CO2 and SST along the warmest region of the equator is an eye-opener. The warmest oceans are most responsible for the greatest variation in partial pressure of CO2. That is in keeping with intuitive notions on how materials outgas.
This is the stuff you do to come up with comprehensive theories for climate science. You have to investigate piece parts and look for correlations which support causation. When enough of these pieces show consistency, one can start piecing these together to come up with better models.
A perfect example of modeling correlations to determine a causation.
WHT, that looks good on the face of it. It confirms my opinion that the seasonal CO2 variation is caused by temperature, not by vegetation in NH (consensus).
R. Gates, “I think far too much attention is given to the highly variable troposphere, which, while it certainly has shown warming over the past 40+ years, has such low heat capacity compared to the oceans and hydrosphere, that it is much more open to “noise” from natural variations to see any long-term trend without filtering out this noise by techiques such as employeed by Foster & Rahmstorf. ”
That is a pretty interesting comment.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/Funwithnoiseglobal-1.png
That is a plot comparing the global UAH MSU Data for the lower and mid-troposphere, and stratosphere. The highly variable stratosphere because less highly variable around month 175 on that plot. The highly variable lower troposphere, became more highly variable than the highly variable mid-troposphere around the same time.
While the satellite data is far from perfect, the lower thermal mass of the atmosphere would respond more rapidly to changes in radiant forcing and be more easily measured than say 2000 meters of saltwater. At least, it would seem that way to someone with a basic knowledge of measurement of thermal capacities. I wonder what Foster and Rahmstrof would make of this noise since the period appears to be a bit longer than typical of ENSO or Volcanoes?
R. Gates,
Speaking of cherries, that is a really nice fat one you are using to slide off of the failure of the troposphere predictions.
I agree that the vegetation theory (“greening of the earth”) propagated by the Idso team of AGW skeptics is pretty much nonsense:
http://www.co2science.org/subject/other/co2amp.php
The skeptics don’t have close to a consensus view, as they are all over the map.
It’s getting to the point that climate scientists understand every last detail of the atmospheric physics. The skeptics are really making a mess of the situation by pushing forward all these pseudoscience theories.
If you look at the data – CO2 concentration in the atmophere correlates to outgassing for fairly obvious reasons.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=global17.gif
It is obviously not just one thing or another – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=globalco2flux.jpg – but the interactions in a complex system.
If you look at the annual mean growth of CO2 – there is a link to ENSO. High growth in El Nino and low growth in La Nina. http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=co2_data_mlo_anngr.png
Is the tail wagging the dog the dog. There is largely natural warming from albedo change – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif – and then you get outgassing.
Webby – you’re source actually says the reverse of what you claim.
‘I agree that the vegetation theory (“greening of the earth”) propagated by the Idso team of AGW skeptics is pretty much nonsense:
http://www.co2science.org/subject/other/co2amp.php‘
‘Together, these phenomena combine to produce the results shown in the graph above, which stands as a strong testament to the reality of the ubiquitous “greening of the earth” (Idso, 1986) that is currently in progress.’
Chief claims to be an AGW skeptic yet shows a plot that was meant to show correlation and thus causation between anthropogenic CO2 levels and average global temperature:
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=global17.gif
He obviously doesn’t understand that what I am looking at is the small periodic fluctuations of the CO2 level, which are largely due to outgassing due to the large seasonal temperature variations.
The albedo of the greater Pacific ocean does not change over time. Water is water and the albedo stays fixed. What I showed was outgassing around the equator due to seasonal changes.
Capt. Dallas – the large variability in the early part of the satellite stratosphere record is caused by the el chichon and pinatubo eruptions. There is less variability in the latter part of the record because there haven’t been any volcanic eruptions of the same magnitude. It really is as simple as that.
You’ll have to point out exactly what you mean regarding a change in tropospheric variability. I can’t see it.
‘Note that a rise of 0.1 ºC corresponds to an increase of about 15ppmv in the atmosphere (150ppmv per ºC ~ 300Gt/ ºC carbon). Cumulative anthropogenic emission over the industrial age is estimated at about 140ppmv over two centuries, which is about the same as an ocean warming of 1 ºC.’
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=global17.gif
I was showing a graph that correlated ocean temperature with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The ocean warms and outgases significantly. The question is what caused the warming and where is this likely to go.
I was talking more generally about albedo change – because the satellite SW data does not distinguish between sulphate and clouds for instance. But the albedo over the Pacific most certainly does change dramatically. Cloud in the marine stratocumulus region is inversely related to sea surface temperature.
The evidence shows recent warming was mostly cloud –
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif
We are in a cool Pacific mode – cool PDO and more intense and frequent La Niña. The blue V in the central Pacific that is the signature of the cool mode and which lasts for 20 to 4 decades. So cooler SST – more low level marine stratocumulus – more reflected SW and less CO2 outgassing and cooler temps.
http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2012/anomnight.3.22.2012.gif
As I say – the peer reviewed science is suggesting no warming for another decade or three. What more can I say?
PaulS, This does look related to Pinatubo.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/Funwithnoisenoext.png In the northern extent, the stratosphere shift in 1994, about month 175 on that plot. Just after Pinatubo, which had me thinking it was just aerosols.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/Funwithnoisesoext.png in the southern extent, the shift is either 100 months later or there may not be a real shift since it is so short a period.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/Funwithnoiseglobal-1.png
Globally, the shift is close to month 175 to 200. Pinatubo is close to the equator, so it should show globally or in the tropics before the northern extent and not have a 9 year lag or more before showing in the southern extent.
The troposphere shift is a step in the northern extent and there is a delayed flattening in the southern extent. Doesn’t look like a volcanic impact to me, looks like a forcing change, likely PDO related, to me.
What is really neat, http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/Funwithnoisesopole.png
That seems to indicate that the south pole has been cooling with the stratospheric cooling. That could be pretty interesting.
Oh, I nearly forgot, http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/JubanyvMaunaLoaCO2.png
There just happens to be an Antarctic CO2 series that started in 1994 and ran until 2009. There is a difference in the slope that should back up the Antarctic cooling somewhat. I always wondered why the southern hemisphere CO2 seemed to run lower than Mauna Loa.
Bizarre. No scientist in his right mind would attribute a 0.3 C change in ocean temperature to a 40 PPM change in atmospheric CO2 concentration. This would generate an outlandishly high activation energy according to Henry’s Law. When you suggest this mode, the activation energy would have to be around 3 eV which is around 10 times as high as the energy needed for vaporization of CO2 from solution.
Bart R | March 25, 2012 at 1:58 pm |
It’s worse to take correlation for disproof of causation.
But Bart, correlation isn’t proof of causation, and neither are computer models. So that leaves one with … not much of anything to prove global warming, what is left of it, is caused by man-made CO2.
Jim2 | March 25, 2012 at 9:26 pm |
Again, no sale.
While the global warming case is what it is, on the balance of probabilities it outweighs by a wide margin the case that there isn’t global warming, and also the case (such as it is) that human activity plays an insignificant role.
And it’s not my case. I see no profit in pursuing proof of a randomly distributed distribution of random heat-driven events on a global multidecadal scale. It doesn’t help predict local conditions anywhere, very much. It doesn’t help make investment decisions much.
All we get from it is what we already have from other, better sources: it’s time to privatize the carbon cycle, and if people want to emit CO2, let them pay for their use of the limited common resource.
What have you got against Capitalism?
Webby,
We have both the solubility pump and outgassing and unless you’re getting about 90 to 100 Gigatons/year for each of these then you’re not in the right ballpark. I have suggested that looking at two aspects is too simple – yet alone having only one degree of freedom.
The solubility pump doesn’t depend on for instance only on solubility – but on biological transformation and subsequent sinking. As the name suggests there is a flow there to the benthos and the deep ocean.
Cheers
That is an interesting plot and it shows that the overall CO2 levels are diffused uniformly across the earth. The fact that the Antarctic rides a little below the Mauna Loa data is trivial, as that could be a slight diffusive lag. The lack of a strong ripple on Antarctic data demonstrates that the seasonal variations don’t diffuse that far south and that the CO2 outgassing is lower for lower temperatures.
I should point out that this supports the excellent fit I just modeled for the Mauna Loa ripple, where I used the equatorial SST data to correlate with the seasonal outgassing of CO2. This is both a strong temperature effect and it is localized, totally consistent with what your Antarctic data shows .
When you say that you see a difference in slope and that one curve is lower than another, I am afraid you are suffering from phantom vision, i.e. you are seeing things that are inconsequential. A slope of 1.887 vs 1.908 is a 1% difference and that is within a margin of error. The fact that the two overlap with the strong outgassing at Mauna Loa makes that inconsequential as well.
Wonder of wonders that when you do a very detailed statistical analysis of the data and apply real physics, consistent themes start to emerge. No reason to go off on red herring fishing expeditions when you can do sophisticated processing with the troves of data available.
I see you are trying to get educated. That is good. Next thing you will learn is that solubility and outgassing are two sides to the same coin, and in steady state these two balance. That’s what generates the quasi-equilibrium partial pressure, and is the foundation of Henry’s Law.
The biotic carbon cycle could have some seasonal effect but the SST is no doubt a stronger influence on the seasonal ripple.
Webby – your rudeness to your elders and betters knows no bounds. The minor point you chase with such doggedness while the whole world of more important issues I discussed goes begging.
The point as usual is that the system is far from equilibrium with both increasing partial CO2 pressurAse and increasing and decreasing temperature and the important question becomes whether the ocean is a sink or a source at any particualr time. The graph I provided suggests that the oceans are a source of CO2 – hence the close correlation of CO2 and ocean heat content. You are saying the same thing on a lessor scale and on the scale of glacials and interglacials – so why the problem?
I have seen such a wide range of estimates – and static moreover. Simple back of the envelope calculations for what I said to you long ago was a complex stocks and flows problem. There are multiple stores of carbon and flows between stores based on physical and biological processes.
As I keep saying – if you have one equation, one parameter, on degree of fredom that is fitted to a curve – I strongly doubt that you have captured the physics of the system.
Now if you will excuse me – I am a trifle bored with pseudo cleverness and snarky comment. They detract from serious discussion.
Robert I Ellison
Chief Hydrologist
Chief doesn’t understand that science often advances incrementally. He apparently wants it to follow his assertions and has decided to keep pushing the pseudoscience that the elevated levels of CO2 naturally arise.
Whatever happened to Murry Salby and his similar pseudo-argument?
Ahhh, so you want farmers to pay for the extra CO2 then? It is a very limited resource.
I am not relly sure what you’re problem is. You spend all your time saying that CO2 flux is temperature dependent – from outgassing but there are many other processes. It is evident from the record that the mean annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is temperature dependent – volcanoes and ENSO in particular – and that most warming last century was natural.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrI03ts–9I&feature=youtu.be
What is it you are trying to say? Why such a reflexible rejection of some simple and obvious ideas that spring directly from the data? Indeed in the words of a highly qualified and experienced climate scientist. You should show some respect and discuss the ideas rather than indulge in juvenile nonsense.
Chief said:
This is just totally wrong, and if there is one aspect to the carbon cycle that everyone must come to agreement on it is that the mean annual increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to fossil fuel emissions. That Chief and his Australian buddy Salby believe that CO2 growth is naturally spontaneous puts them both in the crackpot camp.
The sinusoidal ripple on top of the CO2 growth curve is the part that has the significant temperature dependence, and what I showed is that the differential Mauna Loa data is perhaps an acceptable proxy for sea surface temperatures around that equatorial area, as they track each other down to the second harmonic very well.
Chief also claims that I don’t have enough degrees of freedom. Well, I have also performed the emissions modeling, CO2 adjustment time modeling, and a convolution to arrive at the overall CO2 rise. The temperature dependence is important because it helps explain the paleoclimate data and any positive feedbacks that may occur with a large swing in mean temperature. I have already tried to include that in one of my earlier analyses, but as more data becomes available, such as this Mauna Loa CO2 differential analysis I just performed, we can do a better job of including this feedback.
Chief, everyone should now understand that you are an anthropogenic CO2 skeptic, which is much more problematic than being a CAGW or AGW skeptic. You could have saved yourself a lot of effort if you had just come out and said this right away ….
All clocks and calenders attempted to describe some natural cycle.
The Chinese calender has a 60 year cycle in it.
Have you ever asked yourself what 60 year natural cycle the Chinese were attempting to describe?
I can eyeball a 60 year cycle in the global temperature data sets overlaid on a ‘modest’ warming trend?
1940 peak warming followed by slight cooling then a 2000 peak warming followed by a relative flattening.
What would Adolf say? Even a self-indulging seminary dropout and spiteful lifetime Democrat politician like Al Gore who is pushing climate porn onto the children for money has his supporters. But, does he have the science authoritarians of the governmental-education complex both behind him and under his thumb?
I don’t know if this has been posted here before, but
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/03/24/how-green-gullibility-hyperpartisanship-are-wrecking-the-climate-movement/
About L’affaire Gleique
P.E. | March 25, 2012 at 11:49 am |
Thanks for this link.
It starts so promising and with so much clarity, only to disappointingly fall afoul of what it sees so clearly to be wrong with the other guy.
A pox on both their houses.
Much like you Bart. Still peddling your communist orthodoxy I see.
What’s a life long liberal to do? I detest Republican politics, or at least the current version of same. I don’t know how an intelligent conservative could watch the presidential primary debates these past few months without wanting to throw up. Sorry all who might be offended, but I think the Republican presidential field is a disgrace to our once proud country.
And yet these days I’m even more turned off by Obama’s green friendly policies. The whole thing is a sham, and a fraud. At the very, very least, as a matter of policy it’s idiotic.
Sorry cwon, I don’t believe it’s some sort of purposeful, planned conspiracy to take over the world…just a bunch of individual human beings doing what individual human beings generally do….that is pursuing their own self -interest. But you know, maybe that’s worse. A conspiracy can be uncovered, fought against, prosecuted.
For the first time in my life I’m so turned off by the whole mess I don’t even want to vote. I have very little hope that we’ll ever find our way out of this mess. I see a much colder world on the horizon along with decades of economic hard times. Anyone who thinks this European debt mess is just going to go away had best rethink in my opinion.
Sorry for the ramble.
pokerguy | March 25, 2012 at 1:09 pm |
Oh, pg, even dim conservatives want to throw up, and only about a half dozen candidates have any reason to take offense.. or correction.
But why do you think Obama either sincere, or not conservative?
It’s exactly at times like this when men of good conscience are wanted to vote, and participate, more, not less. Even and perhaps especially I say this with all respect to people like yourself who disagree in some ways with my vision of the world.
A woman like Gov. Palin who has the courage to stand up to the self-defeating nihilists of liberal utopianism frightens the hell out of the Left.
“Alaska’s climate is warming. While there have been warming and cooling trends before, climatologists tell us that the current rate of warming is unprecedented within the time of human civilization. Many experts predict that Alaska, along with our northern latitude neighbors, will warm at a faster pace than any other areas, and the warming will continue for decades.”
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, July 2008
Go get ’em durned lefties you can see from your front porch, Sarah! Yee haw!
Looks like she was wrong about that one.
Jim2
You have a cite with actual data and analysis that proves Sarah Palin’s science wrong?
LOL at Sarah Palin’s science. A good name for the AGW science.
Well, Bart, global warming wasn’t making its presence known there this Winter … not proof, but given the highest level of CO2 EVA!
I’ve seen Warmers Appeal to many things like:
Evolution
Themselves
Religion/Morality
The Unknown
Etc…
But I really didn’t expect an appeal to Sara Palin to try and sell Global Warming. There is no bottom here. ;)
Andrew
Bart R missed his line, ‘It’s Saturday Night’.
===============
That Gov. Palin is in the crosshairs of the Left only means she cares about what happens to the future of personal economic freedom and individual liberty in America. Being the target of the Left simply means she does believe in the ideologically-motivated views of science authoritarians–with their ends justify the means morality–and, that she does not see eye-to-eye with the socialist agenda of the liberal utopians. For the future of the country and for the cause of truth for its own sake the truly ‘great’ among us are ‘ always willing to be little.’ (Emerson)
She frightens the left because she’s profoundly, shockingly, nearly unbelievably ignorant.
I know you’re a bright guy Wag. That you can’t see her for what she is is exactly why I’m in such despair.
She’s not one to blame it all on man.
================
Of course not – she has to share some of the blame ;-)
And not all men are so simple-minded as we see on display here. Brit Hume observed that her selection as VP galvanized the Republican party and that she and McCain were leading in the polls right to being torpedoed by the the economic meltdown. Gov. Palin gave wings to the Tea Party. You cannot desire someone like Al Gore over Gov. Palin if you want a VP with some balls.
What about huge Volcano in Yellowstone, if this volcano wakes up, all the humanity in around the world will be on the verge of death. And you are talking about the climat.
Bart R ….rainbows…..rainbows….;
Start with the headline and work backwards: “Rainbows to disappear under climate change” (Wow).
Rainbows need sunlight and raindrops … the regional models show changes in precipitation and there must be changes in high cloud cover, so one could work towards “Rainbows to become less common in cerrtain regions under climate change” -the media will do the shortening.
An initial (simple) paper would highlight the need for further studies, OK they would be collaborative but as long as we hold the algorithms all is well — think of the funding the publicity and the citations: “Stranglove and Bart (2012) ” ! [We could discuss whose name goes first]
The conclusions would be fed to every infant in nursery school ; ‘Here is a pretty rainbow ..but they are going to disappear because of horrid pollution’ We would be creating millions of little eco-warriors.
and think of the funding … for years and years.
What do you reckon :-)
Yep, scare the children … no more rainbows … wahhhhhhhhhh.
All your pots of gold are belong to us. Nothing base about it.
==================
Sounds good. doesnt it! – it may not be Bart R’s cup of tea and even though he mentioned the word ‘rainbow’ first and so is the orginator of the idea, maybe I will be looking for another co-author …
I believe you’re mistaking me for David Wojick.
Good luck with that.
On Tuesday, Federal Judge Louis Guirola Jr., in the Southern District of Mississippi, dismissed the case of Comer vs. Murphy Oil for lack of standing. Gulf Coast property owners had sought to hold a grab bag of energy companies responsible for damage they suffered from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The plaintiffs claimed the power companies knowingly had endangered them by emitting unsafe levels of carbon dioxide. The case was dismissed in 2007, then resurrected by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2009. The latest ruling should put an end to it.
For the property owners to be able to claim damages, the court would have had to accept some vast logical leaps. First is the highly speculative argument that carbon-dioxide emissions contribute to cataclysmic weather. There is no statistical evidence that hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones or other extreme weather events have been increasing in frequency. Nevertheless, after every disaster, climate alarmists exploit the suffering by claiming it is an example of “global weirding.” Because warming has stopped, this vague notion – which can encompass just about any weather fluctuation – is all they have.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/mar/23/next-time-sue-the-weatherman/
It’s not drought, it’s climate change, say scientists
August 30, 2009
SCIENTISTS studying Victoria’s crippling drought have, for the first time, proved the link between rising levels of greenhouse gases and the state’s dramatic decline in rainfall.
A three-year collaboration between the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO has confirmed what many scientists long suspected: that the 13-year drought is not just a natural dry stretch but a shift related to climate change.
http://bit.ly/H2wEE8
The Victoria’s draught is over now!
http://bit.ly/fWj6Wz
Bart,
What do you mean, “the limits of the carbon cycle”. It’s a cycle, and adding more CO2 will not qualitatively change it, and I don’t think much is known about quantitative changes either. There is no indication that it will grind to a halt above a certain CO2 concentration. Plants do better with more CO2 and animals aren’t bothered by it until it gets orders of magnitude larger than now.
I agree it is reasonable to try to move away from energy production that produces pollution, but the ways that have been proposed recently would cost so much that donor nations would not be able to help developing nations and this would cost lives, mostly of poor people. I would prefer to use inexpensive fossil fuel (though more conservatively than now) until economically viable non-polluting alternatives are developed. Given that CO2 has been much much more abundant in the distant past than it is now without causing a runaway greenhouse effect or a tipping point, etc. it seems reasonable to wait for conclusive evidence of higher and harmful temperatures associated with CO2 before starting a disruptive crash program to decrease emissions.
Stephen Pruett | March 25, 2012 at 9:51 pm |
Technically, what’s called the ‘carbon cycle’ is more aptly called a chain. This is important, because if you make the mistake of treating it like a cycle instead of a chain, you end up perpetrating Murray Salby’s mistaken interpretation of isotope numbers.
Adding more CO2, changing land use, and a dozen other human changes operating on a global scale can be shown to both qualitatively and quantitatively change the operations of the carbon chain.
While grinding to a halt may not be the first likely outcome, it’s simpleminded beyond belief to discount any Risk associated with these profound and significant changes caused largely by waste and inadvertence, repeating tired refrains about plants from the Idsos and animals that are simply based in ignorant extrapolations of human tolerance tables.
What’s the LC50 CO2 dose for each class of soil microbes? They’re interdependent species, you know, soil microbes — if even one link in the chain is curtailed, the catastrophe propagates through the life cycle unpredictably. And zooplancton?
Do you know? Where are your field studies?
It’s the Tragedy of the Commons, and no excuse made by people who want to continue to be Free Riders disproves this patent fact.
And your extraordinary claim, “the ways that have been proposed recently would cost so much that donor nations would not be able to help developing nations and this would cost lives, mostly of poor people.” I know I’ve seen this claim made before, but every time I dig into it for source research, I find none at all for most of the proposals, and the cherry-picked few really awful proposals that do get analyzed generally get analyzed poorly.
What do the analysts say about proper revenue-neutral fee and dividend systems? The big complaints I hear about those are from the Left, who claim it just won’t do to give people their own money and let them spend it for themselves. Oddly, similar to the complaint of tax-and-spend conservatives.
When you say “distant past” about the much more abundand CO2 levels, you recognize you refer to a time over ten times the age of the entire human race ago, before half the ocean’s population of phytoplankton evolved to the lower CO2 levels, in a world so unlike our own you would no more know how to survive a month in it than you would on Mars.. and while you claim there were no tipping points or runaway GHE in that world you know nothing whatever about from first hand, I remain skeptical of your unconfirmed and unconfirmable pronoiaism.
I’d rather just privatize the carbon cycle like a good fair market Capitalist, and let each of us pay for the benefit we obtain.
If you want your higher CO2, pay for it.
We have with the atmosphere what can be called common pool resources – like a forest, a fishery or an aquifer. We have 3 choices. The first is for governments to step in and tax carbon sourced energy out of existence. The second is to manage resources co-operatively – a way that is much more efficient and effective than governments assuming market failures and stepping in with a bureaucratic solution. The third choice is to determine that the risk is minor and the cost of option 2 is too great to contemplate – so we do nothing. The emissions are minor in the context of global carbon fluxes, the temperature changes are both minor when compared with natural variability both in scope and speed and overwhelmingly the result of other causes and there being no change in ocean pH because the system is buffered and there are huge sources of available calcium. We are nowhere near the limits of the atmosphere or the oceans – it is nowhere near a tragedy.
We would perhaps be willing contemplate pragmatic programs. ‘This pragmatic strategy centers on efforts to accelerate energy innovation, build resilience to extreme weather, and pursue no regrets pollution reduction measures — three efforts that each have their own diverse justifications independent of their benefits for climate mitigation and adaptation.’
‘The old climate framework failed because it would have imposed substantial costs associated with climate mitigation policies on developed nations today in exchange for climate benefits far off in the future — benefits whose attributes, magnitude, timing, and distribution are not knowable with certainty. Since they risked slowing economic growth in many emerging economies, efforts to extend the Kyoto-style UNFCCC framework to developing nations predictably deadlocked as well.
The new framework now emerging will succeed to the degree to which it prioritizes agreements that promise near-term economic, geopolitical, and environmental benefits to political economies around the world, while simultaneously reducing climate forcings, developing clean and affordable energy technologies, and improving societal resilience to climate impacts. This new approach recognizes that continually deadlocked international negotiations and failed domestic policy proposals bring no climate benefit at all. It accepts that only sustained effort to build momentum through politically feasible forms of action will lead to accelerated decarbonization.’
http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/2011/07/climate_pragmatism_innovation.shtml
The major reason for not progressing on the pragmatic options is still that a battle is being fought on option 1 – a battle that will continue. I don’t need to be a time traveller to know that the Australian Labor Party/Greens alliance is utterly doomed along with the carbon tax. They will go the way of their Queensland colleagues. The pity is the great waste of time, energy and goodwill.
Robert I Ellison | March 26, 2012 at 6:13 am |
“We have 3 choices. The first is for governments to step in and tax carbon sourced energy out of existence. The second is to manage resources co-operatively – a way that is much more efficient and effective than governments assuming market failures and stepping in with a bureaucratic solution. The third choice is to determine that the risk is minor and the cost of option 2 is too great to contemplate – so we do nothing.”
What curious astigmatism. The government is everything; political leaders make all decisions; the nanny state controls it all.
If you limit yourself to the world view of tax-and-spend conservatives and tax-and-spend socialists — indistinguishable from each other except for the pretty words they dress up corrupt and inept practices — you’ll always limit your understanding of the world.
If government steps in to tax, it is stepping in. Your first and second cases are indistinguishable. Granny Government holds your hand. And your third choice, likewise, Granny Government holds your hand.
The emissions are cumulative, and combined with land use and feedbacks the Anthropocene has seen a 110 ppmv rise above the peak CO2 level of the past epoch, and rising.
The judgement of whether temperature or pH or other changes resulting from CO2 level could be left in the hands of experts, committees, and nonexpert committees. We all know it should not be, just looking at their track record. Risk is personal. It belongs to every one of us to determine their own sense of loss or tragedy. Denying the right to evaluate the cost of Risk to each person is simply antidemocratic crap.
None of your ‘choices’ addresses the Tragedy of the Commons except by one provably ineffective and costly means: regulation by idiocracy.
Command and control measures embraced by politicians facing an issue beyond their scope of course failed; there was not much sincerity among many, not much commitment to giving up the rewards of the status quo that only a small clique enjoys, and consequently only stooge proposals were put forward and signed off. How is that a surprise, or evidence against doing it right?
Ignorance of available solutions isn’t cleverness, it’s ineptitude.
By the way, well done Australia on the attempt to exercise democracy. Good luck with that.
Privatize the carbon cycle. Level the playing field. Let individual buyers and sellers determine the outcomes through the genius of the Market.
I think you won’t mind the equivalent of $20/barrel fuel for your vehicle. However mad it drives the carbon cartel that whispers otherwise.
No Bart – you have utterly misunderstood. I am talking about people solving their own problems cooperatively in a way that is far more effective than government stepping in and imposing top down solutions. An example is farmers managing aquifers rather than government establishing quotas. I am talking about the commons being managed cooperatively in the way they always were. The methphor of the commons lacks complexity and depth and ignores most of the ways that problems are addressed in a social context.
You have your obsession with limits and taxes. We understand that. The third course – no action – is preferrable. It is your choice – either forget your nonsense and support pragmatic action or the climate war continues. It is what it is.
In Australia we already pay some 38% of the sale price as fuel tax – far greater than BC – and have for many years. It was a tax meant to foster exploration and conservation – and failed on both counts. Fuel prices won’t actually rise – they will just impose one tax and reduce another.
I have assessed risk as minor – I have absolutely no problem with you being a millenialist twit and running around saying the sky is falling. I don’t need to believe you and my stance is hardly undemocratic – let’s vote on it.
Australia has had a stable democracy for a long time. We have a proud history in arts, letters, science, medicine and sport. We have a superb country full of natural wonders. We have an economy second to none in the OECD because of the discipline of fiscal and interest rate restraint over decades – and effective prudential and market oversoght. We might not agree all the time – but we would agree on one thing. We play by the rules and we can laugh at ourselves and often do but you just make yourself more ridiculous by smartarse comment on a country you know nothing about.
Chief – I hope you have many more like the Queensland … you Aussies have gotten green slimed long enough. I just hope the US is paying attention and can do likewise.
Robert I Ellison | March 26, 2012 at 7:55 pm |
“I am talking about people solving their own problems cooperatively in a way that is far more effective than government stepping in and imposing top down solutions. An example is farmers managing aquifers rather than government establishing quotas. I am talking about the commons being managed cooperatively in the way they always were.”
Nostalgic pseudomarxist wishful thinking. The commons being managed cooperatively by the common people through collectivism?! Srsly?
And your _only_ alternative to Animal Farm is 1984?
For any system to work, the incentives must align with the underlying physical reality. This is why tax disincentives and subsidy distortions are so harmful to the overall economy: they invert incentives and lead to an increasing perversion of rewards that causes runaway abuse of resources.
This has happened so many times historically on so many scales that Economists regard it as a law of human behavior.
While counter-regulation and grass roots movements treat the symptom — in some cases as farm cooperatives, in others as all out rebellion, they do not address the root cause and always also lead to greater mischief. The cure is privatisation.
Your “third course” of “no action” would be great. Except it isn’t actually no action, then, is it? It’s BAU. Which is extremely active.
No action would be an end to all tax and subsidy worldwide, true laissez-faire. Absolute permission for anyone who felt injured by the operations of another to litigate them out of operation, or simply shut them down directly, at no cost to the injured party. I don’t see that happening any time soon, and I don’t see that contained in your proposals.
Your “let’s vote on it” again replaces the judgement of a collective, of outside interests, by packaging ‘left’ or ‘right’ ideals inextricably with the outcome for no good reason. I understand why you do it. As a lifelong committee-oriented rent-seeker, it hurts your interests to see the playing field leveled in favor of the individual against the state and also against every other individual who seeks to substitute their judgement for the judgement of another.
This self-interest lets you gleefully blind yourself to patent facts, incites you to twist even the simplest concepts into bizarre pretzel logic, to focus on the “market oversoght” instead of the market mechanism, and keeps you rabidly gnawing on the bones of straw men while claiming your own assessment ought be good enough for the rest of us.
Sad, really. You even appear to think you’re right.
‘Contemporary research on the outcomes of diverse institutional arrangements for governing common-pool resources (CPRs) and public goods at multiple scales builds on classical economic theory while developing new theory to explain phenomena that do not fit in a dichotomous world of “the market” and “the state.” Scholars are slowly shifting from positing simple systems to using more complex frameworks, theories, and models to understand the diversity of puzzles and problems facing humans interacting in contemporary societies.’ By Elinor Ostrom – Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems
It is more the application of game theory to collective behaviour than collectivism per se. More corporation than Animal Farm – although – I have had experiences with some corporations that were more Animal Farm.
So on one hand a Nobel Prize in Enonomics winner and on the other Bart. If you really want to continue to flog a dead horse – as much as you flog cliches – well we will have to keep insisting that the costs of your proposals exceed the benefits by a wide margin. Not imposing taxes or caps is by far the more rational course – something you have little familiarity with. Rationality that is. There are better and more pragmatic approaches to decarbonisation – but really you are just a hindrance.
Then you show your true colours by denying the primacy of democracy in social organisation. ‘Your “let’s vote on it” again replaces the judgement of a collective, of outside interests, by packaging ‘left’ or ‘right’ ideals inextricably with the outcome for no good reason.’ Don’t know what it means – you seem to be accusing me of playing politics. It is really very simple – don’t decide in the Supreme Court, don’t decide in the UN, don’t decide in Brussels. Decide by free and fair elections between competing policy.
You know I have decided that you are a green/socialist climate warrior. I know why you do it – you are a space cadet. I sometimes wonder why I bother – but as Burke said all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
Robert I Ellison | March 28, 2012 at 11:23 pm |
If anyone here really thought you were capable of working at Ostrom’s level, we’d be taking the discussion beyond the simplistic “The Market” and “The State” level.
So, on the one side, we have scholars “using more complex frameworks, theories, and models to understand the diversity of puzzles and problems facing humans interacting in contemporary societies”, and on the other side we have you.
How did your complex framework go? “The commons being managed ‘cooperatively’ in the way they always were,” and “I have assessed risk as minor.”
Sure. These sound like complex models to understand a diversity of puzzles. The models used by ostriches.
Here’s a hint: It’s not called ‘cooperatively’ when a few call all the shots and everyone else is forced to submit, comrade Ellison.
Go ahead, express your complex theories unambiguously in the language of Game Theory. I’m all ears.
For more about a little bit of research on soil microbes and CO2 levels.
//www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0021377
I love the tagline of this site: Accelerating publication of peer-reviewed science.
And while there is zero alarmism, threats of glaciers or floods, dire predictions about famines or economic disaster, the conclusion appropriately states, “Together, these results highlight the urgent need for considering the interactive impact of C and N availability on microbial activities and decomposition when projecting soil C balance in N-rich systems under future CO2 scenarios.”
‘The findings that the stimulation of soil microbes under elevated CO2 over the course of the experiment may have significant implications for understanding residue turnover and soil C sequestration in agroecosystems under future climate change scenarios. In many natural and semi-natural ecosystems, the CO2-induced stimulation of plant growth may not persist because of nutrient limitation [9], [39]. In agricultural ecosystems, however, N is typically not a limiting factor for plant growth due to the application of chemical N fertilizers and/or the incorporation of legume plants, and CO2-stimulation of biomass production is expected to be sustained [2], [31], [66]. Therefore, it has been suggested that elevated CO2 can increase long-term C storage in agroecosystems, particularly in combination with no-tillage management [38], [67], [68]. However, this assumption does not fully consider the C output from agroecosystems: unlike forest ecosystems where the standing biomass constitutes a major C pool, most agroecosystems must accumulate C in the soil for ecosystem C sequestration to occur. Consequently, the fate of returning residues will largely determine the potential of agroecosystem C sequestration. The close correlations between N availability and both microbial respiration and metabolic quotient under elevated CO2 in our study (Fig. 3, Appendix S4 and Appendix S6) indicate that soil microbes became more active with CO2 enrichment. Our results, along with other previous findings [27], suggest that high N availability may significantly increase soil organic C turnover in agroecosystems through stimulating residue decomposition under future CO2 scenarios, highlighting the need to examine the interactive effect of soil N availability and atmospheric CO2 on soil organic C dynamics.’
This article need to be seen in the context of rebuilding soil carbon stores in agricultural soils. Carbon has been lost from soils in traditional practices over a long time and restoring stores is critical for several reasons. The most important is to do with feeding the world in this century. About 15% of Australian farms practice conservation farming – for the very good reason that production can be increased by 70 to 100%. Costs of production are slashed by reduced tillage, just in time fertilisation and spot weedicide application. On pastures and abandoned farm land, mine tailings, etc – a technique called regenerative grazing (http://www.soilcarbon.com.au/case_studies/index.html) It is high tech – using computerised weed profiling to direct automatic spraying can reduce weedicides volumes to 5% of the older ways. Using GPS driven tractors to traverse the same paths time after time reduces compaction on soils elsewhere. It is created by farmers themselves – http://www.wantfa.com.au/ – in a model polycentric solution and is the next great agricultural revoltution.
Oh it also sequesters vast amounts of carbon.
Robert I Ellison| March 28, 2012 at 11:57 pm |
Yet another case in point. Skip over the conclusion, cherry-pick a passage you don’t grasp very well and misinterpret it, and link it to yet more of the same things that don’t work, but that you love due to some misguided Australian patriotism and collectivist sentimentality.
Computerised weed profiling? Really. That’s nice and all, but it’s a solution applied under a system of inverted rewards. No price for CO2 emission, no reason not to waste it. No reason to seek the understanding the authors of the study conclude is urgently needed.
Are my authors better than yours? Many may believe so, but that’s hardly very meaningful; because there’s insanely backward incentives, it’s impossible to say.
Price the carbon cycle, privatize it, and instead of every little aspect of CO2 emission being a dispute, _money_ decides it. Are you calling money wrong, Mr. Ellison?
I started my thoughts with a quote from the Bible, “Behold, I tell you a mystery”. It has been an interesting discussion, and Steven Mosher has done his best to defend the indefensible, namely the hypothesis of CAGW. But in the end his statement is so ludicrous, that I think it needs highlighting. He writes
“Steven Mosher | March 25, 2012 at 4:09 pm |
There are no such things as GHG warming signals.
There is warming: a measurement in C
There are increasing measurements of GHGs
And then there is a physical theory which explains how an increase in GHGs leads to an increase in Temperature.”
Let me try to show how these 4 statements are self contradictory, and go to the heart of my thesis that there is no CO2 signal in the temperature/time graph, and that this absence of such a signal is proof that CAGW does not exist.
A quibble. There is no “theory” as to how GHGs lead to an increase in temperature. There is merely a hypothesis. But the basic case for the proponents of CAGW is that increasing levels on CO2 will cause increased temperatures. So now Steven claims that there is warming as measured in degrees C, and that GHGs are increasing in concentration. And these two things are direrctly related. So, as CO2 increases, then temperatures follow, and this temperature increase is directly caused by the increase of CO2.
But here is the mystery that I originally proposed. How is it possible for an agreed increase in CO2 concentration to directly cause an alleged increase in temperature, and there NOT be a CO2 signal in the temperature/time graph? Yet Steven states specifcly “There are no such things as GHG warming signals”.
So, once again, my question. Can anyone explain this mystery to me. How can there possibly NOT be a CO2 signal in the temperature/time graph, if this same CO2 is causing an increase in global temperatures? This surely the ultimate in the absurdities that exist in the propoganda, not science, of the proponents of CAGW.
Jim
The recent 30-years warming trend for 1981-2011 of 0.16 deg per decade is IDENTICAL to the one about 60 years ago for 1915-1945 as shown below.
http://bit.ly/Ha7PK1
The only difference is during the recent warming human emission of CO2 was about 5 times than that sixty years ago.
This result shows the effect of human emission of CO2 on global mean temperature is nil.
1915 -0.442802
1945 0.0410684
#Mean: -0.200867
vs.
1981 0.0137953
2011 0.501041
#Mean: 0.257418
Identical? They’re almost half a degree different in mean, start and endpoint. They have numerous mismatches of slope on shorter spans, and even more mismatches of slope on spans from points outside their range.
They’re less identical than Dr. Evil and Mini-me.
We are talking about the global warming rate
Data processed by http://www.woodfortrees.org
#Please check original source for first-hand data and information:
#
#—————————————————-
#Data from Hadley Centre / UEA CRU
#http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
#For terms and conditions of use, please see
#http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/terms_and_conditions.html
#—————————————————-
#
#File: hadcrut3vgl.txt
#
#Time series (hadcrut3) from 1850 to 2012
#Selected data from 1915
#Selected data up to 1945
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.016129 per year
1915 -0.442802
1945 0.0410684
#Data ends
#Number of samples: 2
#Mean: -0.200867
e
#Data processed by http://www.woodfortrees.org
#Please check original source for first-hand data and information:
#
#—————————————————-
#Data from Hadley Centre / UEA CRU
#http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
#For terms and conditions of use, please see
#http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/terms_and_conditions.html
#—————————————————-
#
#File: hadcrut3vgl.txt
#
#Time series (hadcrut3) from 1850 to 2012
#Selected data from 1981
#Selected data up to 2011
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.0162415 per year
1981 0.0137953
2011 0.501041
#Data ends
#Number of samples: 2
#Mean: 0.257418
e
They are both 0.016 deg C per decade, and are identical!
Girma
Testimony like yours is why the wrong man is so often accused in police lineups.
He’s a foot shorter than the man you described. None of his features match. A dozen experts have explained how they cannot be the same person, including specialists using advanced DNA technology. He has an alibi. Yet because he leans the same way, you insist he’s the same man?
Girma, I know. It was your graphs that made me realise that there is no CO2 signal in any global temperature/time graph. None whatsoever. I am not so much interersted in what has happened to global temperatures, as I am what is going to happen in the future. Unless a CO2 signal suddenly emerges in the graphs, it. is going to be extremely difficult for the proponents of CAGW to maintain the fiction that CAGW is happening at all.
Jim
Agree.
Five-times CO2 emission, but the same global warming rate of 0.16 deg C per decade before (1915-1945) and after (1981-2011) mid 20th century.
As a result, the effect of human emission of CO2 on GMT is zip.
Since the after rate is occurring at a higher temperature it means it takes more heat to maintain the same rate of warming.
So the same rate of temperature change requires more energy imbalance in the latter case.
Could be that CO2 is driving that extra push.
Jim – you really should get this right. It is not a signal – it’s a fingerprint.
Chief, You have lost me. This is a scientific blog, and I try to use scientific terms. I understand what “signal” means when we are talking signal to noise ratio. I have absolutely no idea what “fingerprint” can possibly mean in this context. What are you talking about?
Signal is easy. Any old simple linear correlation may do.
Fingerprint is hard. The correlation has to be such as to serve as a unique identifier.(http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/06/harmony-of-the-climate-isolating-the-oscillations-in-many-climate-data-sets/)
For instance, the solar cycle for a century ending partway through the last century had a fingerprint in global temperatures – an inverse relationship of sunspot peaks and global temperature lows and vice versa: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/sidc-ssn/mean:11/mean:13/from:1810/to:2005/plot/best/mean:41/mean:61/isolate:119/scale:100
This fingerprint degenerated after the 1950’s, which generally indicates the long-term chaotic system experienced external perturbation. Not unlike a car’s alignment running smoothly until you ride a curb, and then it suddenly pulls to right ever after.
There’s a similar fingerprint for CO2, but WfT doesn’t provide the long-term extrapolations for CO2 pre-Mauna Loa; I believe WHT has a graph for that.
Bart, You write “Fingerprint is hard. The correlation has to be such as to serve as a unique identifier.”
Thanks, I understand. I would never use the term “fingerprint”. So far as I am concerned, a “signal” has to be specificly identified with what is supposed to be producing it. So, in my mind, “signal” and “fingerprint” mean the same thing.
Bart, the long term extrapolation is a bit of a problem. If CO2 were truly well mixed, it would be fine, but there is a 30 to 50 PPM difference between the high north and south latitudes. So we are comparing southern CO2 apples to Northern temperature oranges :)
Gents
As with all graphical analysis, there are judgement calls and interpretive difficulties.
Conventionally, “signal” just indicates some potential relationship or response; “fingerprint” goes farther, into matching key elements from curve to curve.
You _can_ use any word you want any way you want, of course. But then you’re on your own, and will only confuse people as to your intention.
Bart R, but we are all opinionated over/under achievers. So I choose signal until it is worthy of being a finger print. :)
About the southern apples and the northern oranges,
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/SSANuekumetalversusTaymyrJacobyetal31YMAcenterwith25yearshift.png
That is a comparison of a northern tree ring reconstruction to a southern tree ring reconstruction. The northern leads the southern by 25 years, so I adjusted so they are in cycle. The only fingerprint that may be there is the anthropogenic sharper rise in the North, due to agricultural expansion, and its delayed by 25 year response in the southern reconstruction and a common natural cycle. The CO2 “signal” would have to be teased out of the agricultural land use “finger print”.
Bart, You write “Conventionally, “signal” just indicates some potential relationship or response; “fingerprint” goes farther, into matching key elements from curve to curve.”
I agree completely. If you just use the word “signal”, then it is not necessarily associated with CO2. But I did not use the word “signal” by itself. I specified “CO2 signal”. That means the signal must have been caused by CO2 and nothing else. Hence it is the equivalent of a CO2 fingerprint.
‘Many (signals) are called but few (fingerprints) are chosen.
Actually, Chief, It does not matter whether it is a signal or fingerprint. Whatever we call it, there simly isn’t one for CO2 in any temperature/time graph, and that is the important issue. Which none of the proponents of CAGW on this blog will address.
Again, I imagine you’ve heard echoes of this article:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1452.html
And must be aware of the “fingerprint evidence” of the authors (Coumou
& Rahmstorf).
You can redefine words any way you like, in your own playground. When “signal” is said by the professionals, they don’t use it as you do.
Signal may be “hunch”, “indication”, “possibility”, or “suspicion”.
People can claim signal about anything. Girma claims there’s a signal without it being of anything at all, just that it’s there and fits his imagined lines. Some claim there’s a signal of Jupiter and Saturn in the weather, or the nutation of the Sun, or a homeopathic signal of a “natural level being returned to from the LIA”.
Signal is generally the weakest level of connection, and who speaks of signal is usually saying they don’t (yet) need to (or want to or can’t) discuss mechanism, graphical proof or fingerprint.
Even “fingerprint”, convincing as it is, is pretty insufficient, lacking a working hypothesis of mechanism. Girma’s analyses seek fingerprints. Indeed, they turn every smudge and coincidence into features, while ignoring features where they disagree with his wishful thinking.
We’re very far past mere talk of signal or fingerprint, in the real world where professional scientists ought to be discussing mechanisms and testing hypotheses about them from actual data.
Which, when it’s looked at, overall, in sum, heavily favors AGW due CO2 and land use change, on a millennial scale, with clear and present effects on not just climate but also weather today. Most of this is patent. Where there’s still room for significant doubt and learning about unknown mechanisms, effects and teleconnections is far more interesting than “is there a CO2 signal?”, or even “how much, how fast?”
What’s interesting, in the pure science, is the same thing that’s interesting about a swarm of hornets revealed by whacking their nest with a shovel: what do we learn of the behavior of chaos, now that we’ve perturbed it?
What’s interesting in Policy is bee sting medicine.
I have drawn the 60-years-GMT-Trend plots for hadcrut3.
http://bit.ly/H7kIGI
What does it mean?
Cheers
This is a complete guess on my part. For what it is worth. If the data has some form of fundamental frequency in it, then if you happen to choose a time frame that coincides with that frequency, you will get an interesting graph. If there is a mismatch you wont. So you graphs may imply that there is a frequency in the data corresponding with about 30 years, but not 60 years.
Denier Lies and the Conspiracy Nuts Who Spread Them
http://nailsandcoffins.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/denier-lies-and-conspiracy-nuts-who.html
Iolwot
As I don’t intend to breach the paywall yet again (350$ of my own money spent on them already this year) perhaps YOU can tell us what you think the original paper says, as the abstract seems to suggest WUWT isnt far wrong
tonyb
@Webby
Quoting me – “It is evident from the record that the mean annual increase of CO2 in the atmosphere is temperature dependent – volcanoes and ENSO in particular – and that most warming last century was natural.”
The large variation in mean annual growth in CO2 in the atmosphere results from temperature changes. Very little at the time of Mt Pinatubo and very high in the 1998 El Niño for instance. This much is entirely evident from the mean annual increase in CO2 – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=co2_data_mlo_anngr.png
A. ‘This is just totally wrong, and if there is one aspect to the carbon cycle that everyone must come to agreement on it is that the mean annual increase in atmospheric CO2 is due to fossil fuel emissions. That Chief and his Australian buddy Salby believe that CO2 growth is naturally spontaneous puts them both in the crackpot camp.’
B. ‘The temperature dependence is important because it helps explain the paleoclimate data and any positive feedbacks that may occur with a large swing in mean temperature.’
A. Why should everyone agree to something that is wrong? Besides which – you should try to understand what the words mean annual increase mean.
B. Welcome to the crackpot camp. You use something that is obvious – CO2 in the atmosphere increases with temperature – and then object when people point out the obvious corollaries
‘Chief also claims that I don’t have enough degrees of freedom. Well, I have also performed the emissions modeling, CO2 adjustment time modeling, and a convolution to arrive at the overall CO2 rise. The temperature dependence is important because it helps explain the paleoclimate data and any positive feedbacks that may occur with a large swing in mean temperature. I have already tried to include that in one of my earlier analyses, but as more data becomes available, such as this Mauna Loa CO2 differential analysis I just performed, we can do a better job of including this feedback.’
You have a one compartment carbon cycle model and a one parameter paleoclimate model. The carbon cycle is obviously multi-compartment. The paleoclimate model uses temperature and CO2 from Vostok – so we have a model with one degree of freedom in CO2. When I ask about albedo you tell me it is a CO2 feedback – despite the fact that we know albedo leads the temperature decline into glacials and the emergence into interglacials.
My statement simply was that I doubted that a model with a single degree of freedom captured the physics adequately. Hey – I have a thought – it is probably why climate scientists haven’t gone down this particular daisy path.
“You should show some respect and discuss the ideas rather than indulge in juvenile nonsense.”
‘Chief, everyone should now understand that you are an anthropogenic CO2 skeptic, which is much more problematic than being a CAGW or AGW skeptic. You could have saved yourself a lot of effort if you had just come out and said this right away ….’
I meant respect for Professor Salby – I’m a climate warrior and I don’t give a rat’s phallus (copyright Joshua). But I doubt everything. Surely that is clear from everything I have said? I doubt that CO2 is as simple as all that. I doubt that 1976 – 1998 warming was mostly CO2. I doubt that it is going to continue warming over the next decade or three. I doubt that climate is the result of simple cause and effect and not dynamical complexity. I doubt ocean acidification. In each of these things I need to read a cross section of papers and views – and to make up my own mind based on scientific first principle such as it is and such as I understand it. I don’t take anything on faith – I don’t believe anything I read anymore – I don’t take anything for granted until I figure it out.
I may be wrong – and it seems difficult to find much enthusiasm for human emissions that are 8, 16, 32% of natural fluxes. For that reason I support pragmatic visions for accelerated decarbonisation of economies – through means of social organisation – that include technical innovation and the progress of free and democratic societies. Something far more likely to progress both decarbonisation and humanitarian aims than the futile deadlock of the past 20 years.
You may disagree with me – I regard that as space cadet stuff. But you can’t use your disagreement on specific details of whatever it is you are disagreeing about to then advocate taxes or cap and trade as some sort of automatic fallback. It is there that we draw the line and there that the climate war for the future of humanity commences. As I told Bart – you have the choice of technical innovation and pragmatic solutions or the continuation of the war.
Chief, Do you have any idea what is causing this?
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/FunwithNoiseStratospheregloballandocean.png
The shift in the stratosphere came right after Pinatubo, so that is suspect, but it doesn’t look like just aerosols to me.
Chief, The problem is that you are sloppy and can’t maintain a consistent level of reasoning.
Initially you said:
That says you believe the mean annual increase of CO2 is temperature dependent.
Then you pivot and say:
That says you now believe its the variation in mean annual growth rate. That is a completely different behavior and demonstrates that you may be trying to cover your tracks without admitting the error in your original statement.
Another incoherent rambling argument. Since when have I ever even mentioned “cap and trade” ???
I would suggest that next time you try to maintain a coherent argument.
Webby – I try to make it clear for and you simply accuse me of being inconsistent and ignore the meat of the diuscussion. It is a red herring fallacy on yopur part.
There is no semantic difference between the mean annual increase (defined as in the NOAA graph as the increase in CO2 ppmv annually) is temperature dependent. The increase shown varies with temperature quite evidently. And the variation in increase results from temperature changes. I am very careful – and good – with words so drawing an inference correcting myself on such feeble grounds carries nil weight. Even if I were claryfying a statement – there is still no inference to be made that I shouldn’t clarify statements where they might be less than precise or that either statement is incorrect. Both statement are based on the simple NOAA data and are correct.
Why do you think this is all about you? But what are the approaches you would endorse on this issue?
Not careful enough obviously – yopur is a new sort of yogurt that purrs as you eat it.
Chief said:
You really do have huge issues communicating anything technically. That is not even a valid sentence. You say “difference between” but you only qualify one of the terms “mean annual increase”. The other term that you need to difference isn’t specified.
No, the strength of the periodic fluctuation varies with temperature. The mean annual increase is caused by fossil fuel emissions.
You are back to flip-flopping again. Either that or you are very confused.
‘There is no semantic difference between the mean annual increase (defined as in the NOAA graph as the increase in CO2 ppmv annually) is temperature dependent. The increase shown varies with temperature quite evidently. And the variation in increase results from temperature changes.’ I realise it is a bit daring to start a sentence with an and. But what do I care.
So here is the data
year temp. anom (degrees C – gistemp) mean annual CO2 increase (ppmv)
1992 0.16 0.48
1998 0.76 2.93
Again with the hand waving, insults, quibbles and red herrings? I haven’t changed anything – the mean annual increase in CO2 in the atmosphere is temperature dependent. You keep saying the warm oceans outgas – although I wouldn’t necessarily limit temperature effects to the ocean. I keep telling you that is a significant conceptual failure on your part. But hell – with so many – what’s one more.
Chief is now starting to come around to what I have been saying. A temporarily warm season will provide a temporary large outgassing of CO2 to the atmosphere which will then get sucked back in to the ocean when the excess surface water heat diffuses into the deeper waters in subsequent years.
This is the SST for 1998:
http://img18.imageshack.us/img18/7246/sst1998.gif
The glitch of 0.5 degree increase in 1998 is multiplied by 3 to generate a temporary 1.5 PPM in CO2 concentration as measured at Mauna Loa.
Yet, I must state again for those keeping score, the most that a warming ocean can add to cumulative CO2 is only based on the absolute increase in temperature. So if the ocean warms by 1 degree C over a number of years it will add only a few PPM to the atmospheric CO2 concentration, not the 100 PPM caused by fossil fuel emissions. Fossil fuel emissions have a ratcheting cumulative effect, but seasonal temperature fluctuations don’t.
This is further evidence that the novel seasonal time series analysis that I recently posted is spot on:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/03/co2-outgassing-model.html#SST_CO2
I will add the 1998 glitch to that post, so Chief should be thanked for strengthening the CO2 outgassing argument :)
WebHubTelescope
I had understood that every 1 degree C rise in water temperature caused outgassing of 7ppm. This depends on the SST in the first place-warmer waters outgas more- and the surface warming is often not very consistent so the outgassing is not consistent either.
What figure are you working from?
tonyb
It is a pleasure Webby – I am sure I am happy to continue to educate you. Although what I was saying is that warming of the ocean and atmosphere increases both outgassing and respiration. The world has been warming – and so these natural fluxes to the atmosphere increase.
Here is the IPCC relevant section – note table 7.4 but note that these are not static but dynamic and the errors are +/- 20%.
The differential equilibrium increase in CO2 partial pressure is given by
If we assume the activation energy of CO2 is around 0.2 eV (which is what I have used and is straight from the tables), and given a steady-state temperature of 300K and partial pressure of 280PPM, then yes the formula above gives very close to a differential 7 PPM increase for a differential 1 degree C increase in temperature.
However, I get less than 7 PPM, closer to 3 PPM, because of the relatively short seasonal cycles, and the fact that the equilibrium CO2 partial pressure concentration is never reached. This shows up as a lag between the temperature and the subsequent CO2 increase, which you can see by the chart of differential CO2 against differential SST. A lag of 2 months is enough to cut the apparent CO2 sensitivity to SST increase in half. That comes out of first-order reaction kinetics, and I may add this to my post to strengthen the argument.
Actually carbon flux out of the ocean is more like 140 ppmv of Co2 per year. In engineering we are taught to do reality checks.
El Chichón was in 83 – so odds are this is volcanic. We are looking at increases in temp. (looks like) in the stratosphere where sulphides are injected – and there was a decrease in tropospheric temp.
Right, the 83 spike is El Chichon and the 91 spike is Pinatubo. What is odd is there is a rise in Stratosphere temps from end of the 83 spike to the start of the 91 spike. Same thing from 93 to 03 for Pinatubo. So it may be that volcanic aerosols have a much longer term impact.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/Funwithnoisenoext.png
In the Northern Extent, Mount St. Helens in 80 is somewhat noticeable. There is a lot more aerosol impact than I expected.
El Chichon was actually April 1982.
Regarding the rise in stratospheric temperatures, you’ll also notice that the “recovery” from El Chichon influence overshoots the previous temperature level. The rise in temperature can be seen as a subsequent “recovery” from that overshoot. You can see the same thing following the Pinatubo spike – an overshoot, then small incline.
Paul S, Yeah, the impulse and response is a signature that I was looking to follow as it propagates through the atmosphere. The paper on the Volcanic cause of the little Ice age got me going, because it only included the larger equatorial volcanoes. The northern high latitude volcanoes in the VEI 4 range should have a different signature with initial cooling followed by recovery plus some albedo impact (dirty snow and Ice melt). Looking at the 1945 ish temperature dip, it looks to be due to high latitude volcanoes in 45, 46 and 47 that impacted the NH first (cooling) with a SH response (warming) that propagated to cooling with a two to three year lag. So averaging high frequency paleo would naturally mute impacts. Not averaging properly would amplify impacts.
That leads me to believe that southern hemisphere reconstructions would have an advantage over NH reconstructions for determining average temperatures. So it may be possible to better determine a realistic average past temperature.
Chief, The problem is that you are sloppy and can’t maintain a consistent level of reasoning.
Initially you said:
It wasn’t a worthwhile comment in the first place – no need to repeat..
You’ve got a few problems with your model – outgassing is just a teeny, weeny part of the puzzle. I told you – you need to get flux out of the ocean of about 100 gigaton/a
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-7-3.html
Mysterious cloud on Mars? Volcano?
http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/23/10831821-mysterious-cloud-spotted-on-mars
CH @12.40am.
Rodeo? )
Beth me darlin’ – a cowboy’s gotta do…
Polls. While they might provide the idea of interaction between reader and author of a blog entry they are absolutely useless tools. This poll shows why:
“Michael McMann Is an outstanding scientist and human being”
Excuse me, how am I going to assess McManns qualities as human being? What a joke.
Yep :-)
You just can’t make this stuff up.
“The head of the EU’s environment agency has come under fire for using public funds for staff training in the Caribbean and Mediterranean and for spending some €300,000 to decorate its Copenhagen-based headquarters with plants.
…
It adds that the projects in the Caribbean and the Mediterranean were ‘in line with a priority in the agency’s work programme to raise awareness of environmental issues and develop expertise in the areas of research using citizen science and biodiversity as part of plans for the International Year of Biodiversity.’
A similar explanation was given when asked about a ‘green facade’ project costing some €300,000 in 2010.
…
Asked if there was a budget increase as the anonymous email claims, Rosenbohm said: ‘Yes, but it was not €350,000, rather around €300,000. This was a very creative project and we had to do it in a very short term, so the budget evolved.'”
http://euobserver.com/18/115709
This ridiculous waste of money wasn’t “evolved,” it was unintelligently designed.
I wonder how much in total has been wasted globally on global warming in the last few decades. Now that would be a hockey stick.
@webby – http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/24/week-in-review-32312/#comment-188298
It is like Webby has some weird blinkers on. We are not learning equilibrium chemistry at all – it is largely irrelevant to CO2 fluxes to the atmosphere which are overwhelmingly biological in origin.
Here is Roy Spencer’s simple model. It assumes that biological activity responding to increased temperature is a source of CO2 in the atmosphere. That CO2 increases with temperature as mostly a biological response – and quite complexly given natural ocean upwelling and hydrological change – is indisputable.
delta[CO2]/delta[t] = a*SST + b*Anthro
He defines a best fit to the Mauna Loa data as a = 4.6 ppm/yr and b = 0.1. The curve follows the Mauna Loa data more or less closely to 2008. It is a curve fitting exercise – so the objective is to get a close fit. So – 20% anthropogenic and 80% natural in this fit. The graph where it outpaces the curve assumes a higher anthropogenic contribution – and is not a good fit. It is an exercise in curve fitting – so nothing that Webby says makes any sense at all. Well, nothing new there is there.
Webby does the same thing in fitting functions to curves – it is all he does. As I say – the objective is to get as close a fit as possible. But this says nothing physical about the system – it is just fitting a function to a curve. In the context of climate – you can have a simple model that fits the curve or a complex model that more nearly captures the physics. Webby believes that you can have both by employing weird blinkers to the problem.
He keeps talking about a 7ppmv/degree C from outgassing as oceans warm. It is a one dimensional supposedly equilibrium formula of dubious derivation and uncertain dimensional consistency. It is humungously irrelevant. Why should any of that stays in the atmosphere over thousands of years?
The biological fluxes are 20 to 30 times that. Most of the cooling and warming in glacial/interglacials was from albedo change as ice and snow advanced and retreated more or less rapidly – and we know that this CO2 lagged temperature by some 800 years. Temperature changed significantly in as little as a decade. We know as well that plant stomata tell a different story of CO2 in the atmosphere. It adds up to a confused picture – from which it is difficult to draw conclusions of any significance.
Roy Spencer’s intention was to stimulate debate. The sort of response we get from a cut rate warminista, pseudo scientist like Webby seems par for the course but still contemptible.
If Anthro is adding twice as much CO2 as the atmosphere is gaining, and the ocean is gaining CO2 too, where does biology come in? Is it also producing CO2 or trying to absorb it? Spencer implies that biology produces 46 times as much CO2 as Anthro. Huh?
…or perhaps it is 4 times. I really don’t see how it balances.
I thought a bit more. My interpretation of Spencer: Anthro adds 10 units CO2 to the atmosphere, 1 stays, 9 go into the ocean, and biology returns 4 to the atmosphere, net effect atmosphere gains 5, ocean gains 5. The traditional view omits the biology route for which there is no support. Spencer is saying ocean acidification would be much worse if it wasn’t for his “biology”.
JimD, Could be his rationalization, but it sounds like a redefinition of terms to me, and just another way to spread FUD.
The problem with Spencer’s flawed reasoning is that standard diffusion laws always show a 50/50 allocation across a random walk interface. Anybody that has ever worked out diffusion equations for any application, whether it is an HVAC engineer, a semiconductor process engineer,etc, knows that this occurs, and CO2 sequestering is no different in this regard. To his credit, Hansen pointed this out back in 1981.
The bean-counting exercise of measuring all CO2 from fossil fuel emissions for the last 100 or so years show this 50/50 breakdown quite cleanly. There is no missing anthro CO2 and it is all accounted for by standard diffusion laws.
It is not even an alternative, because Spencer’s biology needs the Anthro input to be able to return it to the atmosphere, which is therefore just a pointless addition to the carbon cycle requiring an unusual uptake of 90% by the ocean for his special biology to work with. Some people just want to believe in anything thrown out there but the right answer. They are not skeptical enough in that sense.
Jim D, the problem with simple models is they are simple. They just give you an expectation that will have to be adjusted to reality. CO2 outgas and uptake rates depend on more that just sea surface temperature. CO2 may become carboxylic acid in solution or it may not. It does have a strong enough temperature relationship to be useful though. At the extremes, it will require adjustment, which is why I am skeptical of over confidence statements. Both Spencer’s and Web’s simple models are useful, but neither are reliable.
delta[CO2]/delta[t] = 0.5*Anthro
works even better, and explains the growing rate too, and you get ocean acidification as a bonus with the other 0.5, and it closes the carbon budget.
The problem is, delta[CO2]/delta[t] is dependent on temperature. The curves are almost identical.
Jim’s factor of 0.5*Anthro is actually a brilliant insight, as it does explain in a simple fashion how the excess CO2 is performing a random walk in the ocean, performing no service other than to increase the ocean’s acidification levels.
Then Edim says this:
Which means that Edim must have seen this bit of data mining showing the match to seasonal fluctuations:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AoUzuwoFQyA/T29AMKmFP7I/AAAAAAAABB8/O58gpDrQ-r4/s1600/co2_sst.gif
So not only do the top-tier climate scientists have a perfect accounting of all anthro CO2 increases, they also can account for the seasonal fluctuation on top of the rising Mauna Loa CO2 curve. They have the understanding of the carbon cycle down to a gnat’s whisker!
Web, I didn’t mean seasonal fluctuations. I meant the annual growth, which looks almost identical to the global temperature curves.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo_anngr.pdf
Since the CO2 lags the temperature, the conclusion is that the atmospheric CO2 annual growth rate is at least partly caused by the temperature.
Partly, of course, and according to Spencer, Chief, and yourself, that it can lead to CAGW.
What else can I conclude given the huge sensitivity you have given to it, what appears to be an activation energy of a few electron volts, instead of a few tenths.
Web, no it cannot lead to CAGW. It happened thousands of times before. There’s always a shift from warming to cooling at the maximum CO2 “forcing” and vice versa. CO2 seems to have no significant effect, if anything maybe some cooling effect, but probably not.
I don’t see how can CO2 have any warming effect, if the surface is free to cool by evaporation/convection and on the other side CO2 can enhance the atmospheric radiative heat loss to space. Overall, it’s either zero or slightly negative.
Edim like the others denies that increased levels of atmospheric CO2 are caused by fossil fuel emissions. He thinks that less than a 1 degree swing in temperature leads to a full 1/3 change in CO2 partial pressure, suggesting an activation energy of at least 2.5 eV. Name a physical process that has this high an activation energy. If it is a biotic cause, it should be easy to spot as it will completely swamp out the conventional thermodynamic potentials of 0.2 eV to 0.4 eV, which vaporization of molecules such as CO2 and water vapor obey.
This is a very good discussion on thermal activation:
http://www.chem1.com/acad/webtext/dynamics/dynamics-3.html
Towards the end, they have a link to a popcorn popping study. I have further analyzed this specific topic in my book (linked in my handle). Even something as complicated as popcorn popping only has an activation energy of 0.5 eV, which is close to heat of vaporization of water. Same goes for the famous study of crickets chirping. In fact many of these temperature-driven biological and metabolic processes are largely driven by thermodynamic processes as a foundation. I have seen a reference that the thermal activation energy of photosynthesis is around 0.32 eV. Wow, this is close to the activation energy for vaporization !!!
Everything that Edim argues beyond this point is moot. If he can’t support the idea that elevated CO2 is not temperature activated and in fact is the result of fossil fuel emissions, he is way too deep in the weeds.
(BTW, 50 kJoules/mole ~ 0.5 eV )
Y’all still arguing over CO2?
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/maunaloavsouthernoceans.png
I can’t make heads or tails out of that noisy satellite data, but It kinda looks like the ocean carbon sink is kinda complicated.
The amazing Spencer mechanism is that the ocean outgasses CO2 at a rate that increases with temperature that is far higher than the anthropogenic effect even at today’s temperatures. It is easy to see that this unstoppable mechanism would have been disastrous for warmer paleoclimates because the natural sequestration rate cannot keep up with this CO2 production rate by several orders of magnitude. For a realistic picture of the carbon cycle I recommend Richard Alley’s invited AGU talk a couple of years ago.
Edim says “The problem is, delta[CO2]/delta[t] is dependent on temperature. The curves are almost identical.”
In warmer years the uptake of anthropogenic CO2 is expected to be weaker. That leads to this correlation. It doesn’t bode well for the future that the uptake rate is declining too.
It is not complicated at all. The seasonal outgassing works like clockwork,
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/92/sstvsco2phaseplot.gif
while the CO2 from fossil-fuel emissions continues to pile up as the diffusional path to sequestering has a very long tail.
http://img38.imageshack.us/img38/92/sstvsco2phaseplot.gif
Captain, many times the data looks complicated because the relationships haven’t been presented correctly.
The natural flux from biology on land and in the ocean is 200 gigaton +/- more than 40. http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/figure-7-3.html
I would look at both terrestrial and marine sources and sinks – rather than as Spencer did. The ocean may be always a net sink – but the amount of the changes with nutrient upwelling. Sources from land are primarily heterotrophic microorganisms. These source and sinks vary – inter alia – with temperature.
Does warming result in increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – rather than the other way around? It certainly does. Is this a feedback from anthropogenic CO2 – you know I don’t think so.
More flip-flopping from Chief. Obviously this does occur, otherwise I wouldn’t have said that we can account for the seasonal outgassing fluctuations.
The IPCC chart you link to shows a balance of +3.2 PPM/year to the atmosphere, given the +6.4 PPM from the fossil fuel emissions. This is exactly the 0.5 or 50/50 fraction that Jim D and I are suggesting is the standard operational model. Half of the CO2 goes into a diffusional active state, partially acidifying the ocean and partially hiding out in the active biotic carbon cycle. The other half stays in the atmosphere, randomly walking across the dispersed diffusional interfaces until the larger fraction can get permanently sequestered in a few hundred years.
Another super embarrassing public boner Webby? An inability to read and comprehend the captions? A neophyte trap?
The figures are of course in gigatons. And of course it adds up – be a bit embarrassing if it didn’t. And of course these fluxes have uncertainties greater than +/- 20%. Read the caption.
It is more like 4 ppmv anthro. emissions. But in a cool year it could be as little as 0.4 ppmv accumulating in the atmosphere and in a warm year as much as 3 ppmv – from the limited data we have. But the ocean has been warming – so these fugitive emissions have been ratcheting up for decades.
And what caused the warming. I’d put my money on clouds – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif
You think if you accuse me of flip flopping incessantly it will stick? I haven’t changed a bit – temperature drives CO2 levels in the atmosphere obviously.
Chief’s views are now known when it comes to emissions. He thinks that elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 are natural.
The sad part is that he could have saved himself and everyone else a lot of effort in pursuing his other arguments suggesting the futility of modeling the climate system. The emissions by itself is a deal closer.
So whenever you have another pointless discussion someone will interject and point to this thread.
You have some strange beliefs, Chief.
Yes, Spencer stimulates debate to the extent that we can say he is completely wrong. Good job there old Roy-boy.
So are you still going to back him up, when it is clear that a 4.6 PPM/degree per year increase can not be sustained more than a couple of years before it reaches a steady state?
Paleoclimate data showed a 12 degree change and 100 PPM increase, consistent with about a 7 PPM/degree long term steady-state relationship.
If Spencer had his way, the rise in CO2 concentrations during those periods would have been in the 1000’s of PPM. Biota still existed back then, right? Using Spencer’s logic, we would say that the 4.6 PPM yearly increase would last for 50 years, and then a total of 12 degrees would put it at 50*4.6*12 = 2,760 PPM CO2 !!!! Yet, the data never showed anything much larger than 300 PPM.
Jim D has the same “Huh?” reaction that I have.
Too bad you are throwing all your credibility eggs into this basket, Chief — not that you had any to begin with.
Webby – the 4.6 ppmv is a parameter to fit a curve to the Mauna Loa data. It is multiplied by the SST – i.e
delta C/delta T = 4.6 ppmv X 12 degrees/delta T (assume no anthropogenic as it was so long ago)
=> delta C = 55.2 ppmv – hey that’s not bad. It was all natural back then – who’d of thunk it.
Idiot. I will speak to Jim separately but I would advise him not to put his Easter eggs in a basket with you.
So by your lame reasoning 4.6 ppmv * 0.5 degrees gives 2.3 PPM, which is a far cry from 100 PPM.
The reason is that Spencer multiplies this out by around 40 years so he gets
4.6 ppmv/degree/year * 0.5 degrees * 40 years = 92 PPM.
That’s why I said that he maintains this increase year on year to explain the 100 PPM change.
It really doesn’t matter that you can’t seem to grasp this. What matters is that the top-tier climate scientists understand the physics and chemistry. No way does Spencer’s theory explain the modern-day CO2 increase, unless you resort to JimD’s bookeeping fudge factor, which does a sleight-of-hand concerning where the excess CO2 is coming from.
WHT The problem (non trivial) is the biological pump if shut down,would increase the ATM co2 from around 280ppm-450ppm over around the same timescale.Thus the marine biota play an important role in estabilshing the atm concentration,and hence the planets climatology eg Sarmiento 2011.( chapter 4 The role of marine biota in the co2 balance of the OA System)
That the Biota in the SO was operating at a greater efficiency in the LIA and mid 20th is well documented in the literature.That the effects of O3 depletion also need to be assessed in reducing the climate potential of the HNLC zones such as the SO are an interesting problem,as the reversal may enhance the efficiency ie the potential is around 1/3 of the present anomaly .
That the Southern ocean is an important part of the global OA system in paleo climatology is well discussed eg Marinov and Sarmiento.
This mechanism is equivalent to the sea-ice mechanism proposed by Stephens and Keeling [2000], and the gas exchange mechanism of Toggweiler et al. [Part 2, 2003]. Interestingly, this mechanism occurs also as a result of selfsustained climate oscillations in Gildor et al. [2002]. Increased sea ice coverage decreases and results in a decrease in gas exchange efficiency in high latitudes, and therefore a stronger biological pump. Stephens and Keeling [2000] conjecture that complete coverage with ice of the Southern Ocean during glacials would have decreased atmospheric pCO2 by 80 ppm relative to the
present CO2 level.
Here is the model as it compares with the Mauna Loa data.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/simple-co2-model-fig05.jpg
No one is going to defend this model to the death – the suggestion from both Salby and Spencer is that other things are obviously happening. We don’t know sinks or sources to more than +/- 20% (how much more I wonder) or how these change with temperature and other factors.
There is in fact a literature on this that is fairly extensive – I suggest googling ‘respiration and ocean zooplankton’ or ‘respiration and temperature’. Anything but continue a fact free and beligerant discourse with me.
delta C/delta T does not equal 0.5 anthropogenic. It simply doesn’t and that can be seen quite plainly in the graph – whereas a function of SST produces produces a better fit. Are all the physics and biology captured – of course not.
So unless you want to talk complexity, uncertainty and shades instead of dogged insistence that some superior beings know everything to within a cat’s whisker – I’d suggest you take your random walk down to the Ministry of Silly Walks and apply for a grant. It would certainly be where it belongs to the nth degree.
Chief Hydrologist.
A couple of years ago I wrote an article examining the historic background to CO2 measurements.
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/historic-variations-in-co2-measurements/
At one time it was thought that co2 levels varied considerably due on year (due to ocean outgassing amongst other factors) and until the 1950’s it was generally thought that around 400ppm was the bakground level.
Within the article itself you will see much interesting historical information and within the comments much practical physics. It is a very good source of information as many people from both sides of the argument took part.
My own take is that the pre industrial 280ppm was a highly debatable figure that was put together by GS Callendar and taken up by Keeling at Mauna Loa and that if Keeling was innediately correct with his readings in 1957 (even though he had no experience of the subject whatsoever) then thousands of respectable scientists were wrong for the 130 years that 200,000 readings were being taken prior to that. Science however seems to say that this rapid variation in atmospheric CO2 readngs that was considered the norm can’t happen.
Its worth a read and has some information and a graph of the 7ppm rse per 1 Degree SST change .
tonyb
Folks, this is what is known as a show-stopper. If you don’t think that the elevated levels of atmospheric CO2 derive directly from fossil fuel emissions, then there is no further need to argue over the details of climate modeling (unless you are interested only in the science, which I really, really doubt based on barely concealed political beliefs).
Lift up a rock, and you never know what will crawl out.
I have resisted using the denial tag but when it comes to emissions and CO2 levels, the dynamic range and evidence is great enough to suggest that you guys are in denial over a foundational principle on which AGW builds from. Curry has wasted all of her time tracking climate uncertainties when the show-stopper is front-loaded. That is, if we believe you guys and Salby and Spencer.
People are using the temperature correlation as though it is something that is mysterious and biological when Henry’s Law (chemistry) alone predicts that warmer water will be less effective at uptaking manmade CO2, and gives magnitudes that explain the interannual variations. It is not perfect because the biosphere and other ocean chemistry play a role too, but it accounts for most of the measurable temperature effect.
Thanks Tony – I have book marked it andcommenced reading.
Webby – Jim,
Biology not important? – http://science.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/ocean-earth-system/ocean-carbon-cycle/
So when NASA says that 48% of emissions are sequestered in the oceans – it is overprecise and variable. In a cooling world (from natural variability of the Sun and ocean circulation) could the oceans absord all of the still minor emissions relative to the size of natural carbon fluxes.
Show stopper? Webby you seem more interested in getting to a foregone conclusion than otherwise. Nothing interesting to say merely handwaving – fundamental misunderstanding of units and processes – gross oversimplification of physical, chemical and biological processes.
My barely concealed politics? Not concealed at all. But it is really economic growth that matters – along with individual freedom, free markets, the rule of law and democracy. You’re barely concealed politics relies on contempt for markets and command and control interventions by government. OMG – he’s a communist. Enough said.
CH, in a cooling world, the ocean would re-absorb some CO2 and get more acidic than it already is. It is an irreversible path now that we have all that fossil CO2 added to the system.
Yes, this is actually a pretty mild analysis I undertook. The activation energy for Henry’s law is about 0.2 eV and I was detecting about 0.1 eV, which is lower because the seasons are short enough to make a difference — so obviously the CO2 will always be chasing the SST and therefore lag slightly behind.
Maybe this phase plot will show how clearly the seasonal variations in equatorial sea surface temperature (SST) align with the seasonal variation in Mauna Loa CO2. Note that the dashed lines largely follow the regression line fit, and I corrected for a 2 month lag between CO2 and SST to make it as narrow as possible.
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/92/sstvsco2phaseplot.gif
Of course, the anthropogenic contributions to the CO2 were removed, because that trend is largely independent of temperature.
Amazing that by working out the chemistry of partial pressures, of which must exist in a system composed of material phases (liquid and gas), that it could engender so much hostility.
WHT, I come at it from a slightly different angle, where Henry’s Law doubles the partial pressure ratio for each 25 degree C rise. This implies 10 ppm per degree at current values. The actual interannual response seems to be about half this.
Jim,
I have a reference that a 16 C change will double the CO2 partial pressure.
Takahashi, T; Sutherland, SC; Sweeney, C; Poisson, A; Metzl, N; Tilbrook, B; Bates, N; Wanninkhof, R; Feely, RA; Sabine, C; Olafsson, J; Nojiri, Y “Global sea-air CO2 flux based on climatological surface ocean pCO2 and seasonal biological and temperature effects”, 2002
The 16 C change corresponds to about 6.5 ppm per degree change.
It is quite easy to get half the steady-state rise by working out a first-order rate equation assuming sinusoidal variation. This gives a lag which you can fit to (about 2 months), and then the time constant will also cut the response in half. Play around with this Alpha equation and remove the exponential transient.
Lots of this is standard reaction rate modeling.
Jim
We don’t really believe in ocean acidification. The ocean is a buffered solution so we get a shift in equilibrium products rather than a pH shift. Oceans might become undersaturated in calcium in a few hundred years time.
We are talking about 90 gigatons CO2 coming out of the ocean and approximately the same going back in. About 60ppmv going in and out every year. But we don’t really know which is which to an uncertainty greater than 20%. That’s the big thing you guys insist on missing – it is not Henry’s Law it is Henry’s Law plus a hell of a lot.
I keep saying Webby is as crazy as a loon – a space cadet. I think you probably are too.
Chief doesn’t believe that elevated CO2 is due to fossil fuel emissions. His argument is that big numbers prove something or other.
WHT, my CO2 temperature dependence comes from the constant in Wikipedia under Henry’s Law which is 2400 K. This gives a doubling for a 25 degree increase.
Falks
Has Murry Salby made his talk on “Increase in CO2 concentration is natural” available as pdf file?
I would love to carefully read it.
Girma, I am not sure if this is up to date:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/08/04/carbon-cycle-questions/#comment-181312
Thanks Edim.
Let me put this at the bottom of the discussion, where I hope it will be noticed.
“Bart R | March 29, 2012 at 1:47 am |
Signal may be “hunch”, “indication”, “possibility”, or “suspicion”.”
What I am saying is much simpler than you are making it out to be. If there is a CO2 signal in the temperature/time graph, then it should be possible to calculate the climate sensitivity of CO2 directly from this signal. No such calculation has been made. There is no CO2 signal. It is as simple as that.
Try again to get this at the bottom.
Let me put this at the bottom of the discussion, where I hope it will be noticed.
“Bart R | March 29, 2012 at 1:47 am |
Signal may be “hunch”, “indication”, “possibility”, or “suspicion”.”
What I am saying is much simpler than you are making it out to be. If there is a CO2 signal in the temperature/time graph, then it should be possible to calculate the climate sensitivity of CO2 directly from this signal. No such calculation has been made. There is no CO2 signal. It is as simple as that.
Jim Cripwell | March 29, 2012 at 7:18 am |
More precisely, there are infinitely many climate sensitivity figures, varying with the time and the time scale selected. Do the calculation yourself. Extract the CO2 change over the time period (be it an hour or a millennium or more), put it in terms of doublings, and compare it to the change in global temperature. There you go, there’s your momentary (or millennial, or more) climate sensitivity.
To my way of looking at things, this isn’t unexpected; what would be astounding would be if climate sensivity remained fixed.
We know climate sensitivity must be subject to feedbacks, meaning it must change over time just due to its very nature. However..
To be very precise, you would seek to adjust the global temperature figure to remove for known effects: seasonal variation (which is fairly regular due North-South topology differences, but not perfectly so due influence of initial conditions in any season), solar variation (which is tiny on even the millennial scale, but still demonstrable), volcanoes, influence of ocean basin oscillations, albedo effects (ice and cloud), particulates, etc.
And you can’t remove for these other signals. They’re too noisy. There’s too many of them. They’re too little understood. Nowhere near enough data is gathered. All of these are practical physical limitations on our knowledge.
Failure to know enough to produce a simplification describing an effect — a calculation as you call it — is hardly proof the effect doesn’t exist. That’s one of the vainest arguments possible. When did we get so wise that anything we can’t calculate we must deny exists?
Utter reductionist vanity with no basis in reason.
You demand impossible perfection. Your argument is hubris.
Bart, you write “You demand impossible perfection. Your argument is hubris.”
Complete an utter garbage. The standard practice in signal to noise ratio calculations is to be able to distignuish a singal above the level of the background noise. The IPCC and the proponents of CAGW have always claimed that the CO2 signal is so strong that it overwhelms all the background noise.
So if the CO2 signal is so strong, then it ought to be detectable above the background noise. It is not. There is no CO2 signal in ANY temperature/time graph. This complete absence of any CO2 signal proves beyond all doubt that the hypothetical and meaningless estimations of the climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 are simply wrong. These hypothetical estimations are either IMPOSSIBLE to measure or have never been measured.
According to the time honored scientific method, if the observed data is different from the hypothetical data, we ALWAYS believe the observed data.
The climate senstitivity for a doubling of CO2 from current levels is proved to be indistinguishable from zero. Period.
Yet, if we remove all the CO2 from the atmosphere, the earth would likely be around 10 degrees cooler, and 33 if all GHG’s were removed. That is the signature right there.
Webby, Agreed. When CO2 is in low concentrations, less than 20 ppmv, it has a considerable climate sensitivity. As it’s infra-red absorbtion bands become saturated, this sensitivity decreases. At current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, the IR bands are saturated, and adding more CO2 has a negligible effect.
Let me put some numbers on this matter. What Girma’s graph shows is that, since about 1850, there has been a limear signal of around 0.6 C per century, and a noise of around +/- 0.25 C. We have no definite idea as to what has caused this signal. It is some form of recovery from the LIA. What the proponents of CAGW promised us, was that, after around 1980, there would be an additional CO2 signal in excess of 2 C per century. It is this signal that is completely missing, and no explanation as to why.
WHT
Tch. Signal < Fingerprint < Signature.
CO2 signature is found in the pen of H2O GHG signature, traced in the differences in temperature between deserts and rainforests at the same lattitude in the same season for the same time of day.
There's an undeniable temperature gradient observed that tracks with humidity. The GHG effect of water is so pronounced and definitive as to be a signature of GHG. Not just a feature-by-feature fingerprint, but so undeniable a mountain range of evidence as to shatter uncertainty.
The relative CO2 and H2O GHE's are easily measured and calculated from absorbtion spectra and the straightforward operations of Rayleigh Scattering. We know the different profiles of water vapor and CO2 in the atmosphere, and that compared H2O, CO2's residency time is practically infinite. We can see that CO2 does not saturate over the course of a 600 km deep well of optical density, simply by partitioning the atmosphere like the layers of an onion. Where one layer saturates, the next layer up remains operational, and so forth and so on, and due _scattering_, not absorbtion, the mean path length of IR doubles with each successive layer.
See? Signature. Not mere fingerprint. Not mere signal. Can sensitivity be calculated from it? No. It's a silly requirement, bred of an objection with no foundation in logic.
I cannot reliably calculate the next words out of anyone's mouth, but I know there'll be words of people's mouths. The lack of a calculation doesn't shut them up.
Bart writes “See? Signature. Not mere fingerprint. Not mere signal. Can sensitivity be calculated from it? No. It’s a silly requirement, bred of an objection with no foundation in logic.”
Again, complete and utter garbage. As I have pointed out many times, the estimations of climate sensitivity are based on hypothetical methods, and are either impossible to measure, or have never been measured. Physics is based on the ability to eventually actually measure any quantitiy that is vital to the proof that a hypothesis is correct. So, unless we eventually measure climate sensitivity, we simply dont know what it’s value is, or whether CAGW is correct.
Quite simply, and obviously, if climate sensitivity is a measure of how much global temperatures rise as a result of rising levels of CO2, (as claimed by the proponents of CAGW), then the way you measure climate sensitivity is to measure how much global temperatures rise as a result of rising levels of CO2. This to me is so obvious that I simply cannot understand how Bart cannot see how correct it is.
We are doing the experiment. CO2 levels are rising at a rate that, according to the proponents of CAGW, is unprecedently fast. We are measuring global temperatures. The observed data shows that adding CO2 has no effect on global temperatures, by virtue of the fact that there is no CO2 signal in any temperature/time graph.
The obvious conclusion is that the hypothetical estimations of climate sensitivity are wrong, and the actual climate sensitivity of CO2 is indistinguishable from zero.
Jim Cripwell | March 30, 2012 at 6:50 am |
And the second you produce the calculation that accurately predicts the next thing anyone will say, you’ll have overcome the first counterexample to your reasoning.
You do not address the signature of CO2, you sidestep it by resorting to an invalid requirement for impossible perfection.
This is stark and undeniable irrationality on your part.
Spend a few hours plotting the Mandelbrot Set (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ma6cV6fw24&feature=related).
Tell me how it exists, if every point on it is indistinguishable from zero by your reasoning?
What you want is to know if climate sensitivity is bounded. That, it clearly is, from measurement. Mosher’s explained this to you. Refer back to his answers to you, if you need help with the math.
Bart, why would anyone want to shut up? Web uses the no CO2 Earth to attempt to prove a signature. The no CO2 earth only shows one layer of the onion. He would readily admit that before man, albedo change provided a minimum temperature range, the latent heat of fusion barrier for the stability saddle. He would avoid that the latent heat of vaporization would be the warm side barrier, he likes fat tails.
“Crop albedo geoengineering has been tested in HadCM3 by Ridgwell et al. [2009] and Singarayer et al. [2009] and in CAM 3.0 by Doughty et al. [2011]. We follow a methodology similar to that of both Ridgwell et al. [2009] and Singarayer et al. [2009], apart from using the MOSES 1 land surface scheme rather than MOSES 2.1, used in these studies, in order to provide consistency with the other simulations presented in this paper. We adopt the same definition of crop extent, with the crop area being defined as C3 or C4 grasses that are within human-controlled or disturbed areas as defined by the Wilson and Henderson-Sellers [1985] land-type data set. The total area covered by crops is 15.7 × 106 km2, 3.1% of the Earth’s surface area or 10.6% of the land area (Figure 1a). To these areas we apply an increase in snow-free albedo dependent on the fractional crop coverage in the grid cell.”
http://www.agu.org/journals/jd/jd1124/2011JD016281/body.shtml
I would think that modifying 3.1% of the Earth’s surface would have some impact and that with most of that modification being in the Northern hemisphere, most of the warming being in the northern hemisphere, that more experts would be focusing on the ramifications. What did Chief call it? One trick ponies?
Bart, you write “You do not address the signature of CO2, you sidestep it by resorting to an invalid requirement for impossible perfection.”
I suspect we are getting to the nub of our differences, but I cannot really understand what you haved written. You are correct, pedantically, I do not address the signature of CO2. I dont even know what a CO2 signature looks like. What I address is a CO2 signal, when this is defined in the classic way in physics in doing signal to noise ratio calculations. A signal in this sense is a quantitative measure of what is happening, which can be observed above the noise. In Girma’s graph, we have a linear signal of 0.6 C per century, the cause of which we do not understand. This is quite discernable above the noise of +/- 0.25 C.
So, what I am looking for is not a CO2 signature, but a CO2 signal. There is no CO2 signal in any global temperature/time graph. There may well be all sorts of signatures, but there is no signal.
If my definition of signal is wrong, then what is the correct definition of signal in classic signal to noise ratio calculations?.
Without the GHG, the warm side barrier is ultimately the Stefan-Boltzmann energy balance black-body curve. The barrier slopes upward as T^4, which is fairly steep, yet still a fat-tail as it remains a power law.
Jim Cripwell | March 30, 2012 at 12:29 pm |
Do you directly measure temperature? No, I think not. Temperature measured from a standard thermometer is a measure of volume of a liquid that expands under the influence of heat and cold. You measure expansion, not temperature.
Do you measure temperature as it would be without you there observing it? No, I think not. The mere presence of a thermometer with its slightly different specific heat (from whatever would have been there had you not been measuring), gives an infinitessimaly different result.
Do you measure temperature at the moment you are measuring? No, of course not. There is a lapse rate associated with temperature changes, you measure only the stabilized temperature — which is volume, or expansion — of a moment in the past.
Do you measure the temperature of a single atom? No, of course not. Heat is an emergent effect of a large number of energetic molecules.
Do you measure the temperature of a wide area? No, of course not. A temperature reading, while taken by the conventional fiction of representing an area, does not prove anything about the temperature ten feet in any direction from the thermometer.
Temperature is a bounded value, not a precise one.
The same as climate sensitivity, so far as these conventions of measurement go. There are very few real measurements overall, and many approximations bounded by physical limits.
So, is climate sensitivity 40 degrees per doubling of CO2? No. We can be sure that’s too high. A negative number or zero? Again, we’re sure that’s too low. Direct measurement is mainly a myth, a simplification, a rarity.
Let’s look at what you say, “In Girma’s graph, we have a linear signal of 0.6 C per century, the cause of which we do not understand.”
Given that Girma’s proposing his graph represents 0.6C/century on an oscillation, the length of the oscillation being the better part of a century and he having neither effective definition of mechanism nor enough data to support a graphical guess of such an oscillation (would take two centuries of high quality data — which on BEST, shows Girma’s dead wrong), and plentiful evidence of a possible mid-century discontinuity, indicating two different graphs, two different dominant mechanics, meet at the mid-century mark, we really have little reason to use Girma’s number.
So, tell me again why you say for instance 2C/century isn’t the present global warming trend? Within the bounds of possible values based on observation, it’s as reasonable an approximation as Girma’s.
And we can’t know. We’re just that bad at collecting observations globally.
Add to that, the Thermomechanical Principle predicts half of all added energy is transformed to other forms than heat. Are you measuring all the energy in winds and currents, lightning and thunder, chemical changes and so on?
I think it’s noble you want to observe this number. But failure to observe it is not proof it doesn’t exist. Believe me, having come upon the scene once of an 80 car pile-up after a sudden fogbank rolled in over a freeway, there’s plenty of real things people can’t see.
And I really have no answer for capt. dallas 0.8 +/-0.2 | March 30, 2012 at 10:49 am | , much as I respect his diligence. Bored now.
Bart R | March 30, 2012 at 11:41 pm |
Thank you for your long reply. I have absolutely no idea why what you have wrritten has anything to do with the observation of a CO2 signal in a temperature/time graph. So far as I can tell, it is completely irrelevant to a scientific discsussion of the subject.
Because it’s pretty:
http://hint.fm/wind/gallery