by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week
James Lovelock recants his alarmism
The blogosphere is abuzz with the msnbc.com interview with Gaia scientist James Lovelock. Excerpts:
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.
“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.
University of Washington
The Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington is one of the premier atmospheric science programs in the world. However, if you follow mainly the public debate on climate change, you might not have heard of any of their faculty members. In recent weeks, two of their faculty members have been speaking out publicly: Mike Wallace and Cliff Mass. Pielke Jr discusses their recent statements in this post entitled Pushing Back on Extreme Nonsense. Pielke Jr closes with this statement, with which I concur:
Over the long term I have every confidence that scientific questions will be resolved using the tools of science. In the meantime, it sure is nice to see these prominent scientists standing up for the integrity of their field, even if it means sticking their necks out and risking criticism from a few overly enthusiastic scientists and reporters.
Teaching uncertainty in science
William Briggs has an article on Tennessee Votes to Teach Uncertainty in Science. This issue is generating much discussion in the blogosphere, most of it predictable, but I thought Brigg’s post was interesting.
Quote of the week
“We have to ask ourselves, are we doing the right thing? Or are we using scientific information to do the wrong thing more precisely?” — Roger Pulwarty, Director, NOAA National Integrated Drought Information System, NCAR Jr. Faculty Forum, July 2010
Guilt trip
Guilt trip is the title of an article in the latest edition of Nature Climate Change. There is one sentence that is not behind paywall:
As the evidence for a tight link between greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change accrues, scientists — and editors — should moderate their use of international air travel.
Climate Change Bingo
Understanding Climate Risk has a live blog about I Can Change Your Mind About . . . Climate. This caught my eye:
It’s a pity we don’t have cards for climate change bingo to mark off squares for “It hasn’t warmed since 1998″, “scientists are only in it for the grant money”, “the temperature record cannot be believed” and so on. Likewise, I don’t recommend drinking games. You’ll be on your ear by 9.
Climate change bingo, or roulette, or monopoly, the possibilities are endless . . .
“…even if it means sticking their necks out and risking criticism from a few overly enthusiastic scientists and reporters.”
I guess Pielke Jr’s being polite. It sure is a lot more than “a few” and they suffer from something more pernicious than just too much “enthusiasm.’
All that said, these are healthy developments as the AGW fraud continues to slowly implode. James Lovelock? Who’d have thought it possible?
Anyone who thinks the skeptics aren’t starting to prevail, isn’t living in the real world.
From the beginning the crisis of AGW that we now see as a teetering house of cards on a slippery slope was created for ideological not logical purposes. It was always more social than science and it still is more science fiction than anything real. The arguments underlying fear about global warming were created out of whole cloth–e.g., simply pulled from a hat. And like magic a belief in it actually relies on a belief in mystical properties that are not observed in nature.
Hope this comment doesn’t end up being a double post-
To your- “Climate change bingo, or roulette, or monopoly, the possibilities are endless” comment there is some big news in regards to monopoly as the biggest PV facility in the world was just turned on : “Largest Solar PV Plant in North America Comes On-Line, Agua Caliente is now the biggest PV plant around. And there’s more to come. Utility-scale solar will rule in 2012” http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Largest-Solar-PV-Plant-in-North-America-Comes-On-Line/ The output of this facility is being purchased by PG&E for it’s CA customers via a 20 year Power Agreement with the current owners of the facility- NRG.
The federal governments economic risk in regards to ” a $967 million loan guarantee from the U.S. Department of Energy for the project is pretty low as the PPA transfers risk (actually it’s fixed costs at this stage of the monopoly game) to the rate payers at PG&E
Krakatoa, your post amply illustrates that a world in which James Hansen’s and Michael Mann’s climate-change predictions are validated, is not an apocalyptic world, but rather a world of vibrant enterprise, vigorous job creation, foresighted leadership, responsible stewardship, and even (dare we say it?) FUN!!!. :)
For which, we owe you our sincere thanks.
“…but rather a world of vibrant enterprise, vigorous job creation, foresighted leadership, responsible stewardship, and even (dare we say it?) FUN!!!”
Not really, but you could have included crushing electricity prices. California rates are 50% above the national average. Do you notice they never publish the power purchase agreement costs?
Arces,
You are in luck- in regards to the data NRG used when they figured out the cash flow from the First Solar facility. On the revenue stream side of their calculation they know the contract details. For AVERAGE info you might find the following document of interest- http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/NR/rdonlyres/3B3FE98B-D833-428A-B606-47C9B64B7A89/0/Q4RPSReporttotheLegislatureFINAL3.pdf
…….”Figure 6 below shows the weighted average TOD-adjusted cost of contracts approved by the CPUC in that year. From 2003 to 2011, contract costs have increased from 5.4 cents to 13.3 cents per kWh. One important reason for this this increase is that the IOUs contracted with existing renewable facilities at the beginning of the RPS program and with mostly new facilities in later years. In order to meet the ambitious 20% and 33% RPS targets, the IOUs have to contract with new facilities, which require higher contract costs to recover the capital needed to develop a new facility…..”
I know you, like I, don’t like to evaluate a specific situation with average data- especially without a bit of information about the SD for that average. The folks at NRG would not of used AVERAGE data to figure out what to pay First Solar for the rights to the facility. Finance and Accounting folks would of used something a bit more specific- actual payments per kwh generated over the time frame of the contract. The sticky thing is we need to know some details about those TOD adjustment factors and the price per kwh that goes with them. We happen to be in luck as those TOD adjustments happen to have been published as were the prices at the different TOD’s in the following document- http://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PUBLISHED/FINAL_RESOLUTION/111386.htm
Your homework assignment (if you wish to do some calculations on your own) is to figure out what PG&E be paying NRG for the kwh’s generated from the facility during “Super Peak” times in the June to September time frame of this year.
I have but one belief about California and electric power contracts. If there is a way to give the other party bad incentives, California will be there first.
Let’s not be coy. Solar and wind mandates are driving up California electricity costs big time. The LA Department of Water and Power (possibly evil, but definitely not for profit) is asking for big rate hikes largely on the basis of their need to meet the “renewable” power mandate from the state. The ISO head in California a few years ago gave a speech expressing his near-panic at the continuing addition of counterproductive wind-power capacity to the grid.
Solar and wind electricity mandates are straightforward sinkholes of economic destruction, accompanied by transfers of wealth to appropriately connected and/or opportunistic parties. Costly, unreliable, untimely power from these sources is even less justifiable now as cheap shale natural gas allows for low-pollution generation from fossil fuels at a price that threatens even coal, the previous low-price king of power.
srp,
The 20%RES mandate was only required of the privately held ISO’s in the state. The recently signed into law 33%RES now includes the public utilities like LADWP and SMUD. I don’t think I ever said it was cheap for us to meet this mandate. At a CARB meeting I went to last year I saw a table that indicated that the folks serviced by LADWP are going to see the biggest percent increase in kwh prices to meet the 33%RES. This is the case because their management (public board) decided to wait until they were required to change their behavior (vs being asked to do so). Some people have classified LADWP as bad “California’s 46 publicly owned utilities manage about a quarter of the state’s power. Of them, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the state’s (and the nation’s) largest public utility with about nine percent to 12 percent of California’s generation, has been thought the bad boy for making lots of promises about developing renewables and then going back to fossil fuels.” http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/ladwp-looks-at-33-percent-renewables-by-2020/ I haven’t seen the word evil used. One can say that LADWP hasn’t been an early adaptor of RE. PG&E on the other had was required to be.
I concur that CASIO has expressed their concern about grid stability. They have recently requested that a natural gas plant in Northern Ca be keep open rather then shuttered as we will need the output form the plant in a few years to deal with the intermittent nature of wind and solar power output.
Predictably unpredicatable.
http://www.iea.org/IEAEnergy/Issue2_FitsStarts.pdf
Understanding variability is the game changer. That’s why Curry is in a good position — mastering and dealing with uncertainty is the wave of the future.
Imagine the FUN that can be had in determining the cost effectiveness and carbon accounting of various programs like the one in AZ. First Solar has a few things to say about estimating the CO2 displacement. http://www.firstsolar.com/~/media/WWW/Files/Downloads/PDF/Document-Library/Sustainable-Development/TechnicalReport_CarbonDisplacement_02761_NA.ashx
The cost effectiveness side of the question on the other hand needs a few more details- a few of which I have if your interested.
Joy
Perhaps you didnt see my comment on the other thread when I asked if you believed in Hansens sea level predictions to 2100?
tonyb
Climatereason, following four opinions are IMHO rational:
• James Hansen’s predictions will be thoroughly tested, and
• the probability they’re valid is
, and
• if the observed sea-level rise-rate accelerates to 5+mm/year by 2025, then James Hansen will receive a Nobel prize (in Physics or Peace),
• the result will not be apocalypse, but rather apocalypse averted, via economic and social processes that are broadly and responsively productive of enterprise, prosperity, liberty, and security.
Needless to say, this outcome is, by deliberate consideration, an outcome that scientists, skeptics, conservatives, and liberals jointly can hope does come to pass.
Joy
You’re answering a question I didn’t actually ask. Do you believe his predictions to the end of this century, not to 2025
Tonyb
Apocalyse averted through magical action. Give us some concrete sense of just what these economic and social processes are and not just arm waving about a rainbow future.
ClimateReason and Chief Hydrologist, to provide a concrete response to your questions, Hansen and Sato assert in the abstract of Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change (2011) “the possibility of multi-meter sea level rise this century.”
• Hansen and Sato are 100% correct that this event has nonzero possibility.
hmmmm … which is a boringly common-sense statement. :roll:
So to stir some comment here on Climate Etc., under the assumption that our planet continues with a business-as-usual global carbon energy economy, then if I were a Lloyds-of-London handicapper, the sea-level rise betting odds would be set as follows (for payout in the year 2100):
• Rise of 1 meter (or greater): 5/7;
• Rise of 2 meter (or greater): 2/5;
• Rise of 3 meter (or greater): 1/8;
• Rise of 4 meter (or greater): 1/15; and
• Rise of 5 meter (or greater): 1/20.
• Over-under: 1.8 meters rise in the year 2100.
Needless to say, depending upon whether sea-level rise accelerates substantially by (say) 2025, these odds will shift dramatically in coming years! :smile: :grin: :lol:
Indeed, it will not surprise me in the slightest, if insurers like Lloyds *do* start offering odds (along the above lines) to shoreline real-estate developers, who wish to lay-off the investment risk that Hansen’s upper-limit predictions *do* come to pass.
But to be clear, in no event will any of these outcomes constitute an apocalypse … provided that we respond soberly and responsibly to our slowly clarifying appreciation of these probabilities.
My odds if I were giving them would drop off faster than that. 1/20 is 5%, I think more than 5 meters by 2100 would be closer to 0.5%, maybe lower but I have trouble visualizing small odds.
Joy
I admire your odds, if I were a betting man I would take them. You underlined the paleo climate reference rather than linked to it. Would you care to provide the actual link as hansens guesses
are far higher than you set out.
Tonyb
On further reflection Joy, that’s a really good method to add clarity to the debate. It shows the true nature of the danger of AGW, which is about risk. It’s not about this “CAGW” strawman that gets thrown about. The IPCC reports give projections on likelihood, not certainty and the effects are also uncertain.
Your numbers are reasonable even though I would have the %s lower, but qualitatively it’s the similar danger with only slightly different odds: It’s a big gamble.
If you could get skeptics to give their %s you’d probably get some interesting results. Either they have to give reasonable numbers too and admit we are running a gamble, or they put 0% for items and expose themselves as guilty of underplaying uncertainty. It’s hard to argue that the science is all uncertain and then write 0% next to every item afterall.
Lolwot, the odds of 5+ meters rise by 2100 are set fairly high, for the sobering reason that the disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, as well as the shuttle explosions of Columbia and Challenger, all teach the conservative science-and-engineering lesson that disasters assessed as having small probability generically occur with anomalously high probability.
Climatereason, you can download the full text of the Hansen-Sato article, legally and free-as-in-freedom on the physics community’s Arxiv Server, under the title “Paleoclimate Implications for Human-Made Climate Change” (search for arXiv:1105.0968v3).
Needless to say, the Hansen and Sato article does *not* provide a meter-by-meter odds tote-board … which is why I *did* provide a blank template … so that Climate Etc. folks are hereby invited to make their own book!
So try setting the odds, why don’cha … `cuz it’s fun … and it requires yah to *think*! :smile: :grin: :lol:
Yes Joy, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Columbia and Challenger were low probability events – they’ll probably never happen again.
Lesson in statistics – the moment an event happens, the probability of it happening becomes exactly 1, regardless of how improbable it was before.
Peter317, a visit to the wonderfully interesting (which also is hugely frightening) website Engineering Failures will swiftly change your opinion regarding the high probability of low-probability events!
:eek: :oops: :eek: :oops: :eek: :oops:
Yes Joy, the probability of the Titanic hitting an iceberg and sinking was so tiny that it really didn’t happen.
My point is, statistics really tell you nothing about one-off events, except to muddy the waters.
The sea level is either going to rise 1m this century, or it isn’t. It’s either going to rise 5m this century, or it isn’t. It will either fall 5m this century, or it won’t, regardless of what probability we ascribe to it now. We will only know what it will do when it happens, not before.
There, fixed (some of) it for you.
The rest is irreparable.
typo:
• the probability they’re valid is \mathsf{P}_{\mathsf{VALID}}\ltrsim \ltrsim \tfrac{1}{2},
Joy
Reading the Hansen paper (which seems very similar to one he gave at the Royal Society) merely reinforces why sceptics give him little credibility these days. Do you really go along with this alarmist nonsense?
We are likely to see a natural rise of up to 30/50cm by 2100. Could be less unless warming kicks in again much faster. Your other scenarios are not going to happen so your odds are very generous.
tonyb
I find it hard to believe anyone would categorize blasting someone into space and then bringing them back safely as a low probability of disaster event. Unless you think a 1 to 2% chance of something going catastrophically wrong or a 1 in 25 chance of a astronaut losing their life is a low probability event, then yeah…ok.
“Lolwot, the odds of 5+ meters rise by 2100 are set fairly high, for the sobering reason that the disasters at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, as well as the shuttle explosions of Columbia and Challenger, all teach the conservative science-and-engineering lesson that disasters assessed as having small probability generically occur with anomalously high probability.”
“Three Mile Island accident was the worst accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant history…..
….”there will either be no case of cancer or the number of cases will be so small that it will never be possible to detect them. The same conclusion applies to the other possible health effects”.Several epidemiological studies in the years since the accident have supported the conclusion that radiation released from the accident had no perceptible effect on cancer incidence in residents near the plant, though these findings are contested by one team of researchers.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
The accident at Chernobyl was directly linked to process of testing safety procedures:
“The disaster began during a systems test on Saturday, 26 April 1986 at reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant
…
“There had been concerns that, in the event of a power grid failure, external power would not have been immediately available to run coolant pumps. Chernobyl’s reactors had three backup diesel generators; these could start up in 15 seconds, but took 60–75 seconds to attain full speed and reach the 5.5 MW output required to run one main pump.
To solve this one-minute gap, considered an unacceptable safety risk, it had been theorised that rotational energy from the steam turbine (as it wound down under residual steam pressure) could be used to generate the required electrical power.
…
This capability still needed to be confirmed experimentally, and previous tests had ended unsuccessfully. ”
So reason for Chernobyl accident, was it thought possible their could safety problem, and they trying work out solution [by experiment- and obviously in retrospect a very poor experiment]. So rather than not think an accident was possible, he accident due trying a somewhat bizarre way to solve a potential future risk.
Fukushima:
I would say the Japanese should have been anticipated the tsunami, just as earthquakes should anticipated if reactor was in California. But to be fair to the Japanese the amount damage done to the area by the tsunami dwarfed the nuclear reactor accident.
The problem with Fukushima [similar to Chernobyl] is the needed dependable supply of electricity- and there back up supply failed {and should been designed to not fail under those circumstances}].
So with most of these accidents there isn’t a problem of failing to predict there could be accident. The outstanding record of nuclear energy industry is due to quite the opposite, they have assumed accidents could happen.
As for the shuttle accidents. The problems with lead to accidents were known before the accidents. And NASA was quite aware that flying the shuttle was dangerous. And due to numerous possible failure modes, the difficulty is properly determining an acceptable risk. They were aware of how dangerous it was. As evidence knowing the dangers, there are safety back up plans which were never used [such as abort land areas in Africa, emergency exit pole, and escape system used by all NASA manned rockets [which were never used by any manned flight- though they were emergency drilled].
“There were five abort modes available during ascent, in addition to pad (RSLS) aborts. These were divided into the categories of intact aborts and contingency aborts. The choice of abort mode depended on how urgent the situation was, and what emergency landing site could be reached. The abort modes covered a wide range of potential problems, but the most commonly expected problem was Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) failure, causing inability either to cross the Atlantic or to achieve orbit, depending on timing and number of failed engines. Other possible non-engine failures possibly necessitating an abort included multiple auxiliary power unit (APU) failure, cabin leak, and external tank leak (ullage leak).”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_abort_modes
My forecast for sea level ten years from now, twenty years from now and a hundred years from now is that it will be lower than now.
While in Europe in 2007, we visited the Blue Grotto.
http://www.mediterranean-cruise-ports-easy.com/capri-blue-grotto.html
A lot has been written about this natural cave and its surreal, phosphorescent blue light, created by the daylight entering the cave through an underwater opening located below the entrance.
The blue is intensified even more by the fact that the water filters through all the red shades of light and what you see is a blue so vibrant and real you feel like you can capture its essence in a jar.
We know for sure that the Capri Blue Grotto has been known since Roman times, especially under the rule of emperor Tiberius.
The remains of statues of the sea god Neptune/Triton, dating to the 1st Ct. A.D. have been found in the Grotto and they once lined the walls of the cave decorating Tiberius’ private swimming pool or nympheum.
In other words, the sea level is much like it was two thousand years ago. During the next two thousand years, sea level will be much like it was during the past two thousand years. Ice melts and causes warm times and then it snows and that causes cold times. The oceans go up and down during these natural cycles. Ocean level is at or near an upper bound and will go down to the lower bound as the cold time takes its turn.
So they’ve found a way to encourage those PV cells to generate in the dark ?
Actually, there was a case in Spain where they were shining floodlamps on the PV cells at night in order to generate electricity and collect the feed-in tariffs.
Read recently that an enterprising bloke was running a diesel generator at night by-passing his solar array to take advantage of the solar feed-in tariff. He was caught because we all know that the moon doesn’t power PV arrays.
Streetcred-
I haven’t come up with anything that will make my little PV system work at night. A big caution for anyone considering putting PV in place in a snowy location: SNOW=BAD for PV output. I have only had about a dozen zero generation days with my PV system in close to 6 years. Most of my zip generation days occurred when my panels had a snow load of 1 to >2.”
As noted in my reference link, up thread, out here in CA we value RE more at certain times hence we are willing to pay more for it during those time frames. We didn’t leave much incentive for RE operators to increase their output at night (we have lots of hydro and nuclear power for base load by the way). At first blush the PPA’s may not seem fair to wind RE generators as the value of electrons from their output at night is only $.074866 a kwh (June to September months that is). If the PV guys figured out how to get their process to work at night that’s all they would receive as well. On the other hand if you can provide that RE output to the grid at Super Peak times we (PG&E actually in the example above) will pay $.2393 kwh for the generation.
“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said.
“The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising
I think it’s quite pertinent that this is pure tosh. It’s the same tosh that he spouted when he said we were all going to fry. I’m all for scientists who aren’t specialists making comments about the climate but it is embarrassing when they fail to grasp even the basics. 12 years is not a reasonable time to make a judgement about a change in the climate – not by a long chalk. For once I’d recommend having a look at SkS’s ‘The escalator’. http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47
If the world (apparently) warms up by a third of a degree in the next decade will the likes of Lovelock go back to saying humanity is going to become extinct again?
I’m glad he is recanting some of his more extreme lunacy, but his reasoning is no more cogent than when he extrapolated a barely measurable warming into the final apocalypse.
Perhaps I should add that starting from 40 years ago (as the SkS escalator does) or the beginning of the satellite date (a third of a century ago) or from the date of the first IPCC report (1990) all produce the same level of apparent warming – about 1.5 degrees C per century.
I don’t make any grand claims about what that means except that periods are more significant than barely a decade.
We see the same thing with sea level rise, and even arctic sea ice. Vast swathes of people read too much into short-term trends. Time will be a cure I am sure as various short-term predictions fails start stacking up.
For example already in conversations with people claiming sea level has fallen since 2010 I have been citing WUWT back in 2009 which argued that sea level rise had stopped since 2006:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/18/global-sea-level-updated-at-uc-still-flattening/
It didn’t. They were wrong.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Over the last year sea level has jumped up and and so very soon I will have 2 examples of short-termers getting it wrong. Even if they refuse to learn about short-term/long-term trends, I figure it only takes so much back-history of failure before it becomes to embarrassing for them to keep doing it.
Another example of course were all the skeptic predictions of arctic sea ice “recovery” after 2007.
Iolwot
Were you secretly smiling ruefully to yourself when, in criticising others for short termism, you refer to a record going back only to 1992?
tonyb
why is 20 years not enough? You can see from the data that it is. 3 years however is stupidly short period of time.
Ilowot
But you need to put it in a much wider context. We are still way below the sea levels in roman times and during the mwp so I would see the current modest rise in that historical context
Tonyb
but we are trying to tell if the current rise has stopped or not.
Roman and medieval sea levels are completely irrelevant to that. So are 3 year periods.
iolwot
In that case we need another year or two to see if the line is going anywhere, but even if it does rise its nothing alarming as it will still be within natiural limits
tonyb
Sea levels lower 2000 years ago!
http://people.rses.anu.edu.au/lambeck_k/pdf/242.pdf
Maybe you can provide your source that says they were higher?
LOLWOT, the linear trend for the whole satellite record is 300 mm per century, it is 333 mm per century for the 92 t0 02 period and less than 230 mm per century for the last ten years. Tsonis et al describe a climate shift around 1998. Sea level appears to have taken a shift. Either way, 1 meter of sea level rise every 300 years is a touch less than Hansen estimated. It seems the more up to date data that is collected, the less likely there is need for urgent action. That is kinda the point most folks are trying to make :)
‘It didn’t. They were wrong.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/‘
Nice data set. Have you looked at the actual data?
Have a look at the change over between Jason-1 and Jason-2; as well as the other step changes?
2004.1173 (colorado) 20.377
2004.1716 (colorado) 31.193 (Doc’s estimate delta 5.5)
2008.3253 (colorado) 34.075
2008.3796 (colorado) 47.284 (Doc’s estimate delta 7.5)
My guess they have padded the data with 11 mm since 2004.
Have a look at their splicing vs mine.
Raw data Col vs my splice
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/sealevelColvsDoc.jpg
CUSUM data Col vs my splice
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/sealevelCUSUMColvsDoc.jpg
Amazing what you can do with a bit of splicing; adding up to 13 mm in 8 years. They so wanted an increase, and after all that they still didn’t get one.
The data from different satellites overlap, just not in that image.
lowat, they were in the same orbit from July 2008 to January 2009.
They did not get a smooth transition between the two.
Here is CNN with a JPL rep explaining why sea-levels aren’t rising.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/living/2012/02/11/pkg-zarrella-sea-level-rise.cnn
So the water fell on land and stayed their, bleeding obvious explanation.
looks like it’s back
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_MERGED_Global_IB_RWT_GIA_Adjust.png
Lolwat, the redline cannot be an average through points which do not exist. Moreover, the CUSUM plot clearly shows step changes due to poor data splicing. Like much in ‘climate science’, the more you look, the less there is.
Background on CUSUM for you.
http://www.stattools.net/CUSUM_Exp.php
Sea level readings are now coming in above levels back in 2010. We have reached 2010 levels again and even surpassed them, just as NOAA predicted. The “slowdown”/”fall” in sea level is over. Another failed skeptic “it’s stopped” argument.
The UoC graph doesn’t show any of the 2012 data yet.
Lots of satellite overlap:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/romanm_slensemble_annotated.png
The majority of the sea level fall over the past few years was due to La Nina driven changes in rainfall patterns and other global atmospheric circulation pattern changes that brought more water from ocean to land. Grace satellite data clearly showed this movement of water mass from ocean to land. Much of that, but not all, has now had time to drain back into the ocean. The long term trend of ice mass melting in Greenland and Antarctica is only going to accelerate later this century. This, combined with the continued thermal expansion of the ocean as ocean heat content increases means we’ll very likely see the anticipated acceleration in ocean sea level rise later this century.
Next topic…
@R Gates
“The long term trend of ice mass melting in Greenland and Antarctica is only going to accelerate later this century”.
What is the basis for this prediction? The basic CAGW thesis, or something else?
R. Gates – even if the sea level resumes its rise, logically that does not imply that man generated CO2 is the cause. Not logical.
+1
“I’m glad he is recanting some of his more extreme lunacy, but his reasoning is no more cogent than when he extrapolated a barely measurable warming into the final apocalypse.”
I agree Anteros. But frankly I just don’t care. He’s a big name and it’s a positive development if you’re a skeptic.
pokerguy – of course, but he should have been ridiculed so much more in the first place…
Today I finished reviewing a methods paper. I rejected it, sending the editor a pdf of a 2001 paper in an obscure Japanese journal which contained the same method; including a pair of paragraphs in the methods and conclusions, where were >95% identical in 2001 and 2112.
Now I have a reason to lobby against reviewers being blind to authors names. It would have been a lot easier if I had had the authors names to look through their individual publication record. Instead I sort of lucked out searching for text in Google.
First paper I have ever reviewed with such serious misconduct. Someone is going to be in a world of hurt.
If you review, ALWAYS check, even if it is only a little paper in a little journal.
“As the evidence for a tight link between greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change accrues”
It seems that repeating the same BS over and over equals the accrual of evidence.
As for climate change bingo, a player would get a lot drunker and a lot faster by using a card with alarmist canards.
Lolwot writes: “We see the same thing with sea level rise, and even arctic sea ice. Vast swathes of people read too much into short-term trends. Time will be a cure I am sure as various short-term predictions fails start stacking up.”
Pot meet kettle. Besides, let’s not forget that this current “short term” trend of no additional warming is taking place at a time when Co2 levels are increasing dramatically, at least to hear the warmists tell it.
Where’s the missing heat lolwot? And don’t tell me it’s not missing, because otherwise Trenberth and co, surely wouldn’t be looking for it.
Under the thread Education and the Art of Uncertainty, I put my thoughts as to how one could interpret Girma Orssengo’s graph, to arrive at a measure ot the climate sensitivity of CO2 added to the atmopshere from current levels.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/plot/gistemp/compress:12/detrend:0.1/offset:-0.075/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.35/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.0001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.9/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.0001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.64/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:-2
My claim was that this graph shows that we can easily detect a signal of 0.06 C per decade against a noise background of +/- 0.25 C, but the alleged signal of 0.2 C per decade for adding CO2 to the amosphere cannot be seen. I concluded that the CO2 signal is simply not there; that adding CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels has no effect whatsoever on global temperatures.
No-one has challenged this conclusion, so I can only assume I must be right. Clearly the climate sentitivity of CO2 added to the amosphere from current levels, must be indistinguishable from zero.
Anyone disagree with me?
Here is you CO2 signal
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/from:1850/to:1960/plot/gistemp/compress:12/detrend:0.1/offset:-0.075/from:1850/to:1960/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.35/from:1850/to:1960/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.0001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.9/from:1850/to:1960/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.0001/detrend:-0.83/offset:-0.64/from:1850/to:1960/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:2/from:1850/to:1960/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:-2/from:1850/to:1960/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:1960/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/from:1960/to:2012/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1960/to:2012/trend
Bob
Why not try 1902 to 1942 to see another co2 signal?
Tonyb
cause there wasn’t a significant amount of CO2 then, and even though the trend and the length of the trends are vaguely similar, since the trend from 1960 on starts at a higher temperature, it requires a larger forcing to achieve the same amount of heating.
Does not the incremental CO2 forcing decline logwise with concentration? Plus I thought the second supposed temp rise started in the mid 70’s, not 1960. Have they changed the data again? It is hard to keep up.
Bob
We can see imaginary co2 signals in lots of different time scales
tonyb
Thanks bob. Assuming you are right, and I have not, as yet, had time to see exactly has been done, then taking your graph, it appears that the signal you claim is there, is around 0.18 C per century. If that is all the total climate sensitivity is, then this seems to be far less than the claims of the proponents of CAGW. We are told that it is essential that we restrict the rise in temperature to 2 C. According to your graph, this wont occur until well into the 22nd century. So why do we need to worry?
How do you get 0.18 C per century?
Using this
http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
and from 1962 to 2012 just to get a 50 year trend,it is 1.4 +/- 0.27 C per century, even using the cool biased Hadcrutch3.
Shouldn’t we limit it to 2 C even if it is into the 25th century?
I mean we do want to keep the greenland and antarctic ice caps from melting don’t we?
@bob droege
‘Shouldn’t we limit it to 2 C even if it is into the 25th century?
I think you can guess exactly where on my list of things to worry about a projected temperature rise 400 years from now based on just 30 years data, some strenuously unvalidated computer models presented by a nascent and possibly corrupted ‘scientific’ field and a very dodgy hokey stick graph is going to come.
You must try harder than this.
bob you write “How do you get 0.18 C per century?”
I read your graph.
Whether or not you care is not much of a scientific argument, n’est pas?
I wasn’t using the Mann’s hockey stick reconstruction in my arguments, I was using Craig Loehle’s reconstruction. And I wasn’t using a GCM to predict future temperature, I use a regression plot of CO2 levels vs temperature.
And I am relying on 19th century physics and thermodynamics, hardly a nascent field.
Coal burners ought to clean up their messes.
“I mean we do want to keep the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps from melting don’t we?”
Why would we want to prevent melting of the ice caps assuming (CAGW is real)? Melting the ice caps would take thousands of years in which we could adapt to what was almost certainly a more benevolent climate. It would mean that puny, pitiful mankind was able to forestall the next ice age. The most scurrilous practice prevalent in the alarmist camp is to portray AGW as universally and relentlessly deleterious.
McShane and Wyner have proven that GCMs can have no forecasting ability and not just because they fail ‘backcasting’ ability. That had been proven before. These statisticians have shown that the data upon which the GCMs are founded contain absolutely no global warming ‘signal’ whatsoever.
Even Phil Jones admits that. He admits that there has been no statistically relevant global warming since 1995; and he acknowledges–as does Kevin Trenberth–that the Earth has been in a cooling trend for a decade. Trenberth says it’s a ‘travesty’ that ‘we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment.’ He’s still looking for it to turn up in some deep ocean crevasse because he’s so sure he can’t be wrong.
“He admits that there has been no statistically relevant global warming since 1995”
No he doesn’t
“and he acknowledges–as does Kevin Trenberth–that the Earth has been in a cooling trend for a decade.”
That’s not right either
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content700m2000myr.png
“We don’t need to think more, we need to think differently” Albert Einstein
Facts are facts. The sun was very active throughout the 20th century and, nominally, this has lead to global warming. It’s happened before. Now the sun is anomalously quiet. And, it has been quiet for a while now. It is not surprising to many scientists that the combined satellite and radiosonde temperature data now indicate that there has been a cooling trend for years corresponding with this observed nominal change in solar activity.
Nature has a way of having the last word. If we are willing to listen, Nature will teach us that the increase in atmospheric CO2 level is not correlated with global warming. However, it is inescapable that changes in solar activity explain both global warming AND cooling. Everything else is dogma.
Accounting for Mother Nature, what’s left…?
Nature has cycles on decadal, centennial and millennial time scales. Add to that the role of the moon and big planets, Jupiter and Saturn, and the effects on the geomagnetic field and galactic cosmic radiation and little is needed — indeed little room is left – for postulating a human causation as an additional factor let alone a rational explanation for all or even most of observed climate change.
It is well known that the Sun plays the fundamental role as our energy source… To date, the only proxy providing information about the solar variability on millennial time scales are cosmogenic radionuclides stored in natural archives such as ice cores. They clearly reveal that the Sun varies significantly on millennial time scales and most likely plays an important role in climate change. (J. BEER, et al. Solar variability over the past several millennia. 11-Nov-2005))
The disengagement that historical perspective affords gives wings to skepticism. Curiosity not consensus is what opens up myriad possibilities. It is skepticism that gives value to science and is what separates true seekers of truth from government science authoritarians.
Exactly lolwot.
The troposphere is about 1/1000 or less of the Earth’s solar energy storage, and when looking at the bigger bucket of energy, the ocean, we see a steady increase over the past decade. No cooling…
Wagathon writes: “Nature has cycles on decadal, centennial and millennial time scales. Add to that the role of the moon and big planets, Jupiter and Saturn, and the effects on the geomagnetic field and galactic cosmic radiation and little is needed — indeed little room is left – for postulating a human causation as an additional factor let alone a rational explanation for all or even most of observed climate change.”
There is no evidence the “moon and big planets” affect Earth’s global temperature in any significant way. There isn’t even physical mechanism proposed for them to do so, let alone quantified AND shown to be significant enough to matter.
It seems you will lap up *any* explanation for climate change except CO2, without any logical reason for doing so. You state that “little room is left” for postulating a human causation, but it seems you have plenty of room to postulate the moon. Why is that?
Why is there conveniently exactly enough room to postulate a whole bunch of stuff like cosmic rays, the moon, big planets, etc, but we only just run out of room when that list ends and we reach human causation? Don’t you realize how convenient that is? You know: as if you planned it that way deliberately to exclude CO2.
Why for example doesn’t “room” run out after the Sun, planets and moon meaning that no room is left for postulating cosmic rays?
Do you even realize that cosmic rays don’t correlate with global temperature sInce 1950? I bet the “moon and planets” don’t either. The Sun sure doesn’t. Considering you demand CO2 must correlate to qualify as a climate driver, why aren’t you applying the same standard to all these other factors you postulate?
Why are you clearly singling out CO2 without any apparent logical reason? Especially when CO2 is the only item on the list that has a quantifiable – and significant – physical mechanism for affecting the climate.
All of the land based data is corrupted by the urban heat island effect. We do, however, have accurate satellite and radiosonde temperature change data for the top layer of the ocean and lower troposphere (see below). We know the truth.
The observed ocean heat content trends were calculated by Josh K. Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Craig Leohle of the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, Inc. Loehle’s calculations have a smaller margin for error than Willis, because Willis only uses annual average data. The heat deficit shows that from 2003-2008 there was no positive radiative imbalance caused by anthropogenic forcing, despite increasing levels of CO2. Indeed, the radiative imbalance was negative, meaning the earth was losing slightly more energy than it absorbed.
Since the oceans are the primary reservoir of atmospheric heat, there is no need to account for lag time involved with heat transfer. By using ocean heat as a metric, we can quantify nearly all of the energy that drives the climate system at any given moment. So, if there is still heat ‘in the pipeline’, where is it? The deficit of heat after nearly 6 years of cooling is now enormous. Heat can be transferred, but it cannot hide. (William DiPuccio)
Because some of these people enjoy being contrarians?
http://judithcurry.com/2012/04/26/perils-of-apocalyptic-thinking/#comment-195580
So the contrarian wagathon says:
Yes, the heat gets dispersed as it transfers to deeper waters.
To review, the ocean has approximately 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere, and it can mix, creating an effective diffusional dispersion. The problem is that dispersion, to someone that doesn’t understand what it means, looks a lot like hiding.
So they use the term “hiding” because they think it will remind everyone of “hide the decline”, and all the negative connotations that has attached to it.
Some of this contrarianism is so transparent in its intent.
Webby:
Same question as to R Gates : do we know for a fact that the oceans in their entirety are warming ? Or just some of them? Or only to a certain depth ? Or … ?
lolwot and Web, I think the statistically significant thingy is pretty important.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/Oceanswagthedog.png
I am having fun playing with that detrending stuff, pretty interesting. If I compare the UAH ocean temperature to the U of C mean sea level with all the seasonal noise in it, there is a pretty decent match. It kinda looks to me like sea level changes before the air temperature over the ocean does. That chart indicates that from 1992, there was definite warming. It kinda looks like that trend is shifting though. Sea level will continue to rise, but that thermosteric portion seems to be on the decline.
Oh, I used the lower troposphere this time, but the mid troposphere is mighty interesting. It is almost like you can make a pretty fair Wattmeter with the satellite data. I will see how close I can estimate the rate of ocean heat uptake and the sign pretty soon.
Bob droege
You should not compare apples to oranges.
Here is the way to do it => http://bit.ly/IFtPxW
Thanks, Girma. Your grpah shows just how wrong bob droege’s graph is, and confirms my interpretation of your graph. There is no CO2 signal. And the climate sensitivity for CO2 added to the atrmosphere from current levles in indiustinguishable from zero.
Actually, Bob, this is the best fit to CO2 forcing I could find.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/comparingCO2focingtoUAH.png
Mid-troposphere land only is a pretty tight fit. Should be since the mid-troposphere and land both should have a higher CO2 impact. That proves the obvious, CO2 does have a radiant impact. Only one problem though, there is no evidence of water vapor amplification. That kills two thirds of the “projected” impact.
If you can find a better fit, that actually includes the CO2 data, I’d like to see it. You can try the same thing with the surface station data, but you should notice a hitch around 1990. Funny thing, the mid-troposphere seems to jive pretty well with the steric portion of sea level rise and fall. Another indication that the satellite data is superior to the surface temperature data. That should not be a shock, that oceans and southern hemisphere are poorly covered and no amount of creative statistics can compensate for poor data. You and Girma should find some new data sets to play with :)
Actually, the best thing to do is to plot CO2 from mauna loa against any of the temperature series, leaving time out of it.
I have one, but it is not mine to post because I can’t give credit to the source.
It gives a good estimate for the transient response to CO2 forcing, with a decent R2 value.
Try it.
In as much as the atmospheric CO2 level at Mauna Loa–the site of an active volcano–can change by as much as 600 ppm in a single day that is a silly proposition.
Bob Droege is exactly correct and wangathong is entirely wrong:
All the data is available. All you have to do is plot the ripple of the CO2 signal at Mauna Loa against the equatorial ocean temperature record, and you can see how well the seasonal fit works.
This is an interesting graph I worked out
The details of my study is blogged here:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2012/03/co2-outgassing-model.html
Bob says to try it, like I did. I very much doubt that wangathon will try anything, as he much prefers to heckle from the sidelines.
What an astounding hypocrite to cry about how others treat you on this blog just days ago and then play name games like child.
Tim Ball: “Pre-industrial levels were 50 ppm higher than those used in the IPCC computer models. Models also incorrectly assume uniform atmospheric distribution and virtually no variability from year to year. Beck found, “Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942 the latter showing more than 400 ppm.” Here is a plot from Beck comparing 19th century readings with ice core and Mauna Loa data…
“Elimination of data occurs with the Mauna Loa readings, which can vary up to 600 ppm in the course of a day. Beck explains how Charles Keeling established the Mauna Loa readings by using the lowest readings of the afternoon. He ignored natural sources, a practice that continues. Beck presumes Keeling decided to avoid these low level natural sources by establishing the station at 4000 meters up the volcano. As Beck notes “Mauna Loa does not represent the typical atmospheric CO2 on different global locations but is typical only for this volcano at a maritime location in about 4000 m altitude at that latitude.” (Beck, 2008, “50 Years of Continuous Measurement of CO2 on Mauna Loa” Energy and Environment, Vol 19, No.7.) Keeling’s son continues to operate the Mauna Loa facility and as Beck notes, “owns the global monopoly of calibration of all CO2 measurements.” Since Keeling is a co-author of the IPCC reports they accept Mauna Loa without question.”
(Time to Revisit Falsified Science of CO2, December 28, 2009)
Wow, I didn’t realize that Chief Hydrologist was in on this thread.
BTW, Trash talkin don’t phase me.
“…doesn’t ‘phase’ me”
doesn’t face me.
doesn’t phays me
doesn’t fayze me
oh well.
Leaving time out of the comparison leaves too much to chance. There is also a Jubany CO2 series that is short but interesting. Since it is in the Antarctic, it shows the ocean uptake caused by cooling Antarctic waters. That would also be a check of the accuracy of the surface station record which show warming where the satellites show cooling. That creates a problem, global mean temperature is not accurate enough to be used to determine CO2 forcing. Only the satellite data, which has uncertainty as well, is accurate enough to reliably detect any trend associated with CO2 in the modern era. That halves the estimated impact of CO2.
http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/fileadmin/staff/stevensbjorn/Documents/StevensSchwartz2012.pdf
That paper estimates the TOA imbalance at 0.53Wm-2 +/- .43 Wm-2. Using the ocean surface imbalance, it is closer to 0.36 +/- 0.25 Wm-2.
There have been lots of improvements since Hansen’s 1980s predictions :)
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/playingwithaqua.png
Bob,
That is another interesting chart. The blue curve is the sea surface temperature via AQUA with the others the atmospheric temperature starting at the near surface layer. Note that the Blue curve is out of sequence with the others. The oceans are warmed by short wave in the SH summer and cool during NH summer. If the surface station data were accurate, it would consistently show the seasonal SST change, it doesn’t. So if you try to match GISS or HADCRU to SST or Steric seal level, it don’t work. BEST is trying to generate a surface oceans a mean, they will not be able to create one with any reasonable accuracy with the data available. They may be able to “model” or reanalyze global SST, but not without the satellite data.
bob,
Here’s your CO2 signal:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/tbrown_figure3.png
It’s about time people like Wallace and Mass, found the guts that the hitherto few like Pielke. Lindzen and others, though at this stage, the damage to the integrity of science as a whole has already been done in the public psyche, I think. All a bit late guys.
“As the global warming hysteria becomes a forgotten thing, what will be remembered by the general public is that it was scientists, who they once trusted implicitly, warning them of catastrophic events going to happen, which never did. The real tragedy, is that the impact will be on the credibility of science in general, not just climate science.”
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/lies-damn-lies-and-polls/
Pointman
Yes, for the most part they’ll blame the scientists. I know my global warming convinced friends will. And they’ll be angry and defensive. “Hey I was just listening to the experts”
But it won’t fly. Anyone buying this crap has no one to blame but themselves. It’s analogous to those who bought a house in 2005. Sure, “experts” were telling them to go ahead. But who’s the real moron in that scenario?
The reputation of real scientists is not in danger. Public-funded academia has, however, stabbed the country in the back and few will forget that.
That’s a tender notion Wagathon, but I fear Joe Public ain’t gonna make that distinction.
Pointman
That publicly-funded climate academia have exhibited widespread, unrepentant and unpunished dishonesty and politicization, is a ‘tender’ notion? Hardly.
I don’t know why, but there’s something about this blog which seems to attract a lot of people with a reading skills issue.
Pointman
Only in the minds of the comically self-opinionated.
And a tad over aggressive as well …
Pointman
“I don’t know why, but there’s something about this blog which seems to attract a lot of people with a reading skills issue”
> a tad over aggressive as well …
Yes he is, isn’t he ?
… and dare I say it, a bit last wordish? Resist, resist, you have to resist but you can’t, can you …
Pointman
Cliff Mass said:
True. Too many of the misinformed opinions come from the fake skeptics who lack any kind of scientific credentials.
In what way are they “fake?” I really want to hear this.
Fake skeptics are not really skeptical and have no intention of ever changing their opinion, no matter what the evidence were to say. Fake skeptics are also known by the more derogatory term of denier.
Yes, We have to conclude from what Cliff Mass said that the vast majority of climate scientists are remaining objective and not being influenced by statistical weather events.
Does this mean that real skeptics intend to change their minds? That is nuts. There is nothing fake about having a strong opinion. You are playing a semantic trick, just because people disagree with you. Get over it.
It depends doesn’t it.
If someone says “I believe the Earth is 6000 years old and God put down all the animals in a single event because the Bible says so” that would be honest.
But if they throw out silly rationalizations and arguments against the science under the disguise of being a “skeptic”, then you are dealing with a fake skeptic.
So you are sticking up for the reporters and the media?
Reporters love to report on the anecdotal, the coincidental, and the improbable,
Those traits are quantifiable by probability and statistics and are the realm of science when used to explain something.
It’s too bad that freakish occurrences are also used for entertainment (i.e. ratings) purposes.
But Wot, you throw out silly rationalizations and arguments against the science all the time, in my view anyway. Does that make you a fake?
Of course, the probability of life occurring on Earth was so infinitesimally tiny that it really must have been a freakish event, without which we’d really have nothing to talk about. ;-)
WHT, define “trait” please
Wow, you trally know them well ;-)
R Gates
When you look at the following data
http://bit.ly/ItVhhv
The monthly average has dropped from its maximum of 0.74 deg C 14 years ago to only about 0.23 deg C now, a drop of 0.51 deg C.
Who is the denier of this fact?
I won’t deny your two facts, or two data points, but you must realize there is alot more data out there.
But you are going El Nino to La Nina, so a temperature drop from those two data points would be expected.
You are apparently talking about the troposphere which contains less than 1/1000 th of the energy stored in the Earth’s system. The bigger energy storage reservoir, the ocean, has gained something around 10 x 10^22 joules over the past decade, which dwarfs anything that the troposphere even could store by several orders of magnitude.
Thanks Bob.
Because of the shift in the PDO we will have more frequent La Nina’s in the next couple of decades resulting in global cooling. During the warming phase of 1970-2000, there were more frequent El Ninos. Be prepared for the annual global mean temperatures to drop to 0.2 deg C before the end of this decade. Last year, it was about 0.34 deg C, well below the record maximum of 0.53 deg C for 1998, according to hadcrut3.
Mr. Orssengo
You’ve decided on 14 years? You’re sure?
That’s the precision you vest in HadCRUT3?
This is your decision, and you stand by its consequences?
Because, to me, it appears an exercise in excessive precision. Which is to say, the dataset does not appear under even the skimpiest statistical or graphical analysis (which someone — I hope jokingly — incorrectly called ‘graphology’ lately here!) to support so short a term.
Let’s have a look (and to add to the value of the lesson, I apply several cases of a different species of excessive precision):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997.35/to:2011.35/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997.33/to:2011.33/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1934.25/to:1948.25/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1934.33/to:1948.33/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1944.92/to:1958.92/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1944.87/to:1958.87/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1959.1/to:1973.1/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1959.25/to:1973.25/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1956.1/to:1970.1/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1956.25/to:1970.25/trend
The graph shows the ‘inflection points’, where the HadCRUT3 curve switches from positive to negative (or vice versa, naturally) 14-year trend, since before the mid-century point.
There were five such inflection points, in — and here we see the excessive precision — March 1941, then almost 11 years later in November 1951 (see, we wouldn’t expect the month of the inflection point to change readily, as the Earth has a strong North-South bias due distribution of continents and oceans, but we do see it which may suggest something about ocean circulations or about how bad our data is, but our data in HadCRUT3 is too poor quality to say which one it is), then almost a dozen years after in February of 1963 (again, excessively precise), and really soon after that again in February of 1966, after which the rise was steady until April 2004.
Recall, you’ve recently had experience with 30-year trend line derivative curves, which were so smooth as to resemble a trig function for a portion of a wavelength or more (which to graphical analysis means nothing whatsoever). The fourteen-year trend line doesn’t give that effect. It’s jittery for a quarter century, then steady for almost four decades. As such, we know that — if they are predictors at all — 14-year trends are very unreliable predictors.
Which means saying “there’s been no warming for 14 years”, or “there’s been slight cooling for 14 years” leaves us with no significant confidence about the value of those statements.
We can, however, note that in 63 years from principle minimum to the current maximum the rate of temperature rise was about 0.75C/century (much higher than your 0.6C/century claim elsewhere), and we also know that the past 17 years, with 95% confidence, rose about 0.78C/century.
It’s warming, and the warming is accelerating. About one span of 17 years or longer in twenty will be cooling, that cooling is about a third less intense every six decades lately, which is not a reliable enough observation to make confident predictions about, however.. if we used your logic and excessive precision, we’d say the current ‘cooling’ will last at most another 8 years, before we see — again, based on nothing but the fantasy that your invalid techniques mean anything — an unbroken and accelerating (for any span of 60 years) rising temperature trend at least 0.8C/century in 25 years time, and hitting 2C/century in (again, using your invalid methods) about 300 years.
Give or take 325 years.
Mr Orssengo,
Please pick another data set to use for one time only.
You have been told time and time why it is biased and how it is biased, yet you continue to cling to it.
Enough already! I have accepted Christ as my Lord & Savior.
If you have not, you are by the classic 2000 year old definition, a ‘denier’.
The ‘Holocaust’ did happen. What does this have to do with AGW?
Who perverted the word for PC use? We know who first started using the term “poe”. What was the evolution for the PNS term ‘skeptic’ to a ‘denier’?
Facts are important for history to mean anything.
2Ti 3:5 Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away.
Tts 2:12 Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world;
2Pe 2:1 But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction.
Jud 1:4 For there are certain men crept in unawares, who were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our Lord Jesus Christ.
Enough said?
“Fake skeptics are also known by the more derogatory term of denier.”
And by what term what are fake scientists also known? Professor?
Quack…
Anyone can understand the basic scientific issues. I am developing materials to explain them to 4th graders. One needs scientific training to do research, but not to understand the climate debate. So people get their opinions mostly from each other. The dumbed down versions are dumb, but still largely accurate as simplifications. Ignorance does not explain skepticism.
David Wojick | April 27, 2012 at 5:24 pm |
Anyone? But why would a parent let just anyone near their kids to introduce them to that foundation of their understanding of science?
Wouldn’t a caring parent, for example, choose the one with the best understanding of science, if they could?
Are you the one with the best understanding of climate science?
And I’ve done a lot of debating, and seen a lot of debating, from the high school through competitive college and university through of course political debates, and I can honestly say that anyone confusing debate with science has no business teaching children about either.
Bart,
I don’t think this is right. There is a “paradox of the expert.” Experts have, in many cases, long forgotten how to unpack what they know for the benefit of the novice or student–particularly those most distant from them in depth of understanding. Frequently, the grad students and junior faculty excel at teaching the undegrads, while the most senior faculty do a bad job of that but an excellent job teaching the grad students and helping out the junior faculty. And there are good cognitive psych reasons why that might be expected. A great deal of expertise involves the automatization of lower-level concepts, that is, making the simpler stuff routine to the point where it requires no conscious resources. But at that level of routinization, the simpler stuff has sunk below the level of easy conscious availability. So (“paradoxically” but not really) the highly expert can turn out to be a worse teacher that the lesser expert, because the former cannot easily unpack knowledge for the benefit of the novice.
NW
Your points are rather excellent, but led astray a bit; the fault is mine.
“Scientific debate” is not “formal” or collegiate, or political debate. The phrase is all but misnomer.
In scientific debate, the scientific method, the proposition of competing hypotheses or standards of proof, or some fixed and systematic objective basis for understanding from observations and analyses rules, and the subjective opinion of reviewers is, so much as practical given the sub discipline and nature of the evidence, suppressed.
In formal debate, political debate, competitive tournament debate, the opposite is the goal, based on ancient principles founded in the practice of rectors in the Roman era. There are exactly two sides, and the intention is that one win and one lose in an adversarial display of persuasive arts. A scientist is generally not only out of the very element of science in such a situation, but almost always at a decided disadvantage.
So while perhaps the very best experts make very challenging pedagogues — though I seldom found this so even as a child and much preferred adults who spoke to me as to an adult over adults who lied, dissembled and just plain didn’t understand what they were saying — and slightly less expert but effectively competent communicators may be more effectual, utter incompetents with an ulterior agenda never make the sort of teacher one wishes on any child.
Rhetoric versus dialectic..
Bart masters the dialectic.
Wojick masters the rhetoric.
High school debates reward rhetorical arguments.
Scientific progress favors the dialectic process.
Mosh will pipe up if I got this wrong.
WHT – We don’t need rhetoric, debate, or dialectic. We need science. That’s what the CAGWarmists don’t have.
So the webfuscator has found a new word of the day. Dialectic however requires understanding, humility, good faith, good humour and implies empathy and 2 way communication. Qualities sadly lacking in some benighted corners of the blogosphere.
NW was speaking in some sense about asymmetric knowledge. Knowledge that is in some way transformative. Threshold concepts in pedagogy. ‘Threshold Concepts’ may be considered to be “akin to passing through a portal” or “conceptual gateway” that opens up “previously inaccessible way[s] of thinking about something” (Meyer and Land [9]). – http://www.ee.ucl.ac.uk/~mflanaga/thresholds.html –
The teacher and the student can inhabit a different universe and use a different language. Some may never make the transition for whatever reason. ‘Sometimes the convincing force is just time itself and the human toll it takes, Kuhn said, using a quote from Max Planck: “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’
Bart, I find your post incoherent as usual, so it is hard to repy, but I will try. I am not proposing to teach, just to provide existing teachers with teaching materials that they can use if they choose. I do think I understand the scientific debate better than anyone, because the logic of complex issues is my field and I have been studying this debate for 20 years. But the students are not supposed to debate. They are to learn that debating hypotheses is central to the scientific method, and the climate issue is presently being debated by the scientific community. In this case the existence of the debate is the fact they are learning.
Bart R
I would have no problem with Wojick educating my children in logic and philosophy of science. With you, it’s a different story; parental guidance is required. In fact, I have used one of your prezi presentations as an example of possible dangerous sophistry.
For example, your oddly worded claim that “current CO2 levels are more than three times the needed level for plants”. My children tell me that the statement implies 130 ppm is an optimal level. Whereas 130 ppm is the level of zero net photosynthesis.
Therefore, to remove one of the impressions of dangerous sophistry from your presentation, simply change the ambiguous needed level to lower limit. Even better, also discuss upper limit. And show where lowered CO2 can result in stunted sparse vegetation and the prevalence of desert biomes. Finally, discuss how the mass of plant eaters is tied to the mass of plants. Then I might let you near my children, BART r. You do have some math creds.
Only one?
Your children are very cunning. And I thank you for the feedback. That particular section has been quite troublesome.
Also, I admire your parental zeal.
There you go.
Updated per your children’s observations.
If they think of anything else, just use the comment feature there if you think that’s worthwhile.
I know it means getting a prezi account, but I think using prezi can be good for young people. What do you think?
David Wojick: “Anyone can understand the basic scientific issues. I am developing materials to explain them to 4th graders. One needs scientific training to do research, but not to understand the climate debate.”
Do you really believe this will do (public school) 4th graders any good? Compared to say teaching them basic science (e.g., a little physics, a little chemistry, a little biology, something about the scientific method) which they most definitely can understand, and, much more importantly are *not* getting now?
I understand that politically you’re trying to respond to the kind of teaching that sends little girls home claiming CO2 is an “evil gas,” but you are in my opinion, only adding to the problem. 4th graders need to have some fun with Newton’s laws and watch amoebas under a microscope; they don’t need or want to “debate” climate science.
What you’re doing will have the same outcome as “science” taught only to the extent that it supports a leftist-environmentalist agenda: the kids will simply end up confused and turn away from science. I think you should leave the climate science for high school or beyond, and turn your efforts to basic science teaching. It is badly needed in grades K-8.
I agree entirely with you, Robert. Public and high school science should be a grounding in the uncontroversial basics. The trendy environmental sciences that are politically tainted should be left to post secondary education where the students might have a modicum of knowledge and maturity to access what is being presented as fact.
The only options today are teaching the debate or teaching CAGW. I prefer that the debate be taught, but teachers need the materials to teach it with. There are hundreds of CAGW materials pouring into the schools, many federally funded.
Wishing the world were otherwise is not helpful.
@David Wojick, you may prefer that the debate be taught, but you didn’t actually answer my question: I wasn’t asking about your preferences; I was asking you if you believe this somehow helps 4th graders. How does it help them? Please respond in detail.
Two “wrongs” don’t make a “right” either.
Robert G: In reply toyour query, I do not think that the CAGW scare helps 4th graders, or adults either. It should not exist. Does that answer your question? However, countering the scare is not a second wrong.
In the USA the topic of weather is normally taught in 4th grade, by law in most states. These kids know about the scare, and ask about it, so it cannot simply be ignored. Polls indicate that many teachers want to teach about the debate, as opposed to teaching CAGW as fact. These are the two options. The greens and the Feds are pumping out teaching materials to help teach CAGW. I am developing materials to help teach about the debate instead.
If you have an alternative approach, what is it? That the scare does not exist is not an alternative. Just as science has been politicized, so has science education.
BTW your claim that our students are not getting basic science is wrong. I am impressed by the K-12 curriculum, which I did a three year study of. See http://www.stemed.info. Of course it is only 60 to 100 hours a year of instruction, but they cram a lot in, one to two basic concepts an hour in fact. The teachers do a great job. If you want more science then you need to say what other subject to cut to make room for it. Reading? Math? History? Lunch? Be specific.
David Wojick: “Robert G: In reply toyour query, I do not think that the CAGW scare helps 4th graders, or adults either. It should not exist. Does that answer your question?”
Well, no, it doesn’t and clearly you aren’t going to say whether you think you’re helping 4th graders so I’m going to quit asking.
I followed the link to your website and found basically a hodgepodge of broken links and some bureaucratic sounding gobbledygook which often contradicts your admiration for the K-12 science curriculum. If you’ve done a three year study, you must have come across this: http://www.science-house.org/middleschool/reviews/textreview.html which does not paint a pretty picture of middle school physical science. Also, why does virtually every major science or technical organization in the country have a program to address the declining participation of girls and minorities (as well as boys) in the STEM subjects? Finally just look at the adult US population which is in general dismally ignorant of science.
Or consider my own experience as a single father who raised two daughters in metropolitan Minnesota. It soon became clear that in the lower grades my daughters were learning less science than I had taught myself in a two-room school in rural Oregon. In midde school “science” was pretty much “Voyage of the Mimi” for my kids. What they learned about Newton’s laws, astronomy, evolution, and many other bits of science came from me–not the schools. I volunteered to judge the Science Fair for many years, and when my oldest daughter reached fifth grade, I was proud that she had a project with real research which went on to the district level competition. But by the time my youngest was old enough to participate (two years later), the principal had decided that the Science Fair hurt the delicate egos of those who didn’t participate, so she abolished it, replacing it with a “Project Fair” open to all–but with no judging.
I think this illustrates a fallacy in your thinking. Looking at the curriculum tells you little about the actual teaching. I essentially “home schooled” my own kids in science. Maybe I did something right (my oldest daughter is a surgeon), but most parents I’ve ever known don’t care or couldn’t do what I did. And I refuse to believe that any teacher could properly teach “one to two” basic concepts per hour; maybe therein lies the problem.
What would I do? I’d start by closing down the teacher colleges and abolishing the public schools. Sometimes you just have to sweep out the garbage and start over again.
…and (4), we finally arrive at the point where we have the unquestioned thoughts about reality that flow from the bearded brains of Über experts–i.e., effete snobs of Western civilization who in their hubris and unctuous disdain of the vulgar lot of the rest of us simply anoint their own thoughts as somehow totally representative of what should be a worldwide view of all things related to their special baby.
“Too many of the misinformed opinions come from the fake skeptics who lack any kind of scientific credentials.”
Yes, scientific credentials like hiding data, hiding declines, redefining peer-review, etc. Truly appalling.
Guiltless Trip
Until the evidence for a tight link between greenhouse-gas emissions and climate change accrues, scientists – and editors – should have no reason to moderate their use of international travel.
Live it up.
Last year a dozen climate scientists were trying to explain why the not tight link had become less tight. They were trying to answer the question:
“Why, despite steadily accumulating greenhouse gases, did the rise of the
planet’s temperature stall for the past decade?”
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/candid-comments-from-global-warming-climate-scientists/
It’s settled.
If they believe let them be the first to act on their beliefs. No JET TRAVEL! Especially to greenhouse gas impacts meetings. I think high atmospheric contrails have big impacts. Live in the way one wants peasants to live.
Especially Gore. He almost became President. We got Bush instead. What a great country to survive the two of them.
Emerson would have had great respect for George Bush. Sometimes we get much better than we deserve and perhaps because of that some may read about that long after we’re all gone.
….and then you chose Obama. Does the US have a death wish?
OMG we did choose Obama. We do have an economic suicide wish. US spending as a % GDP highest ever at 24%. Got to raise more taxes from the peasants and non supporting barons. We can raise price of electricity by contolling coal CO2 emissions and ignore the real risk from coals acid gases and the superfund coal ash. Why we don’t attack the real priorities in the environmental systems is confusing. Big problems ignored to attack pretend ones.
Thanks Dr. Judith for a place to vent to a community of like and unlike people but very smart on the whole.
Joy seems to be proposing that we decarbonize the global economy for the fun of it. Novel! And funny.
Nasty, brutish, short, but FUN!
====================
Yak, yak, yak … Dave and Kim, it’s time for you guys to make book!
Just fill in the blanks on this handy tote-board … :smile: :grin: :lol:
— THE SEA-LEVEL RISE TOTE-BOARD FOR 2100 —
• Rise of 1 meter (or greater): ___/___ odds
• Rise of 2 meter (or greater): ___/___ odds
• Rise of 3 meter (or greater): ___/___ odds
• Rise of 4 meter (or greater): ___/___ odds
• Rise of 5 meter (or greater): ___/___ odds
• Over-under: _____ meters rise in the year 2100.
I would say the chances of 2 meters or more are zero. But I do not bet on events which are unpredictable due to ignorance. They have no probability.
I note that once again your response is unrelated to my comment. There is no fun in pointless sacrifice.
Sorry Dave … it seems to me that lolwat’s post got it right.
So… are there *NO* climate-change skeptics who will make book on their convictions? :shock: :oops: :roll:
I will bet you $1000 it is less than 2 meters. Satisfied?
Yes, there are. I will. Let’s bet on temps over the next 3 years. I’ll bet you a thousand bucks the lack of stat. sig. additional warming starting in 1998 continues through 2014. We’ll have to figure out the exact terms, and find some way to safely escrow the money. But I’m very happy to make a bet.
I won’t make any bets on it because it’s only going to happen, or not going to happen, once. If there were another ten Earths coming our way then I probably would, because if I lost this time I’d probably win next time.
It’s really just a thrill-seeking game to some of these people. Pokerguy, the erstwhile semipro gambler, still needs to recapture the buzz that is addictively programmed into his brain.
Some of us get satisfaction from working out challenging problems.
To each his own.
Some folks here on Climate Etc. don’t (as yet) fully appreciate that a balanced “book” is an offer to pay-out either side of a bet (minus a commission that typically is ~5% to ~10&). So for example, a book that is so foolish as to offer excessively skepetical odds such as this:
• Rise of 2 meter (or greater): _ 1_/_10,000,000__ odds
… will be swamped by folks putting up one dollar, for a change to win ten million dollars. Are even the most ardent skeptics eager to incur multimillion-dollar liabilities?
That’s why the tote-board of a (balanced) odds book conveys *far* more information than a bet! And that’s why the book that I proposed carefully balances the predictions of Hansen-style models with the uncertainties of Hansen-style models.
So with the preceding in mind, here’s *one* well-considered odds-book (in which “5/7” means, a bet of 5 receives a payout of 7, for a net better’s profit of 2):
• Rise of 1 meter (or greater): 5/7 odds;
• Rise of 2 meter (or greater): 2/5 odds;
• Rise of 3 meter (or greater): 1/8 odds;
• Rise of 4 meter (or greater): 1/15 odds; and
• Rise of 5 meter (or greater): 1/20 odds.
• Over-under: 1.8 meters rise in the year 2100.
Respecting which, it is (in my personal view) reasonably rational to be either better or bookie with respect to the above odds.
——————-
Bottom Line Are there *NO* climate-change skeptics who will make book on their convictions?
So far, the surprising answer is “no”. :shock: :oops: :roll:
I would gladly take anyones money today on a bet that won’t be determined until 2100.
If one’s position is that the science isn’t settled, there is no reason to make a bet one way or another. Let’s just wait 50 years, then reconvene.
You have to offer the skeptics the less than 1 meter sea level rise, what is the payout on that.
Even us hardcore Hansenites would prefer to bet on that, for two reasons.
One, the world at large is smarter than the majority on this board and will actually do something about the rise in CO2 and other greenhouse gases.
Second, even if the world doesn’t act, economics will force a shift away from coal to nuclear.
And third, even the IPCC isn’t underestimating sea level rise by half.
And fourth, I can’t count.
Economic growth does not arise from printing money to manufacture filing cabinets full of public-funded global warming junk science.
“We have to ask ourselves, are we doing the right thing? Or are we using scientific information to do the wrong thing more precisely?” ~Roger Pulwarty
“One, two, five!” “Three Sire!” “Three!” :)
Bob u got to be kidding that the world at large is smarter than this blog. Go talk to all who don’t care or think about these issues. All the young gen Z, X, Y who serve ;coffee at starbucks as they smoke cigs and dope as they protest the 1%. Nothing at this blog or online will move china and india, brazil or columbia, to take useful action. Europe may try to control the emissions in Greece, Portugal and India but only if Germany pays for it with England.
Scott,
On your list of countries that view adaption, to the potential impacts of CO2 concentrations, as the better approach for their citizens I would add Russia.
I am surprised that this new research on changes in ocean salinity didn’t come up in the week in review:
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-rainfall.html
Unlike ocean heat content, the measurement of ocean salinity has less uncertainty and more direct physical connection to both global warming and intensificaiton of weather patterns, It explains concisely and scientifically why global warming will cause both increases in drought and floods– depending on where you are on the planet.
I caught one of these people on TV. Simplistic explanations over too short a period. If you want to discuss the science (or lack of it) of this you need to be specific about just what aspect you find interesting. No merely hand wave.
For instance there is no evidence that total global rainfall has changed much at all.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch9s9-5-4-2.html
Evaporation = precipitation over a short period. No evidence at all increased evaporation – indeed global evidence of declining point evaporation. There are many other factors involved in addition to temperature.
And as much of global rainfall variabilty comes from ENSO – little confidence that the range of ENSO variabiliy over yeasr to millennia can be distinguised from a 50 year record.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=ENSO11000.gif
The southern hemisphere freshning is the result of changes in sea level pressure around the pole meaured in the SAM index -http://ljp.lasg.ac.cn/dct/page/65572 – This is more the result of solar UV/stratopheric ozone interactions than global warming – let alone CO2 which is not notably the major cause of recent warming.
There are complex systems and the simple minded explanations of amatuers and true believers. The former and the latter in my opinion are worlds apart. The world is cooling for a decade or three because we are in a cool Pacific decadal mode. Beyond that climate is non-linear and thus ultimately – although deterministic – not predictable by means yet envisaged.
Chief Hydrologist,
When you say the “world is cooling” over the past decade that is completely an unscientific expression. You need to define exactly what part of the planet you are referring to. About the only thing that can be accurately said is that tropospheric temperatures have not risen over the past decade. But given that the troposphere represents less than 1/1000th of the non-geothermal energy energy storage on the planet, and the vast majority of this non-geothermal energy is in the oceans, and they have risen in temperature and energy content over this past decade, then the only accurate thing to say if you insist on generalizations is that the planet has warmed over this past decade.
How would you explain that?
The very fact that the atmosphere has such a low thermal capacity compared to the oceans, should make it by far the quickest to respond to changes in energy flux.
Yet we’re apparently seeing increasingly large amounts of energy being stored in the oceans, accompanied by relatively little change in the atmosphere.
The low thermal capacity and low thermal inertia of the atmosphere make it extremely open to natural variability, and thus,there will be much more noise when trying to see any longer-term trend. Solar, ENSO, and aerosol effects will have a much greater impact on the atmosphere than the ocean in terms of overall heat content. This is not to say the ocean is not affecting by these other sources of natural variability, because certainly it is, but the effects are vastly dampened, especially if they are only short-term, because of the oceans thermal inertia.
Think about it this way. Put a thimble full of water next to a small pool of water, both at the same starting temperature, and put them both in a temperature chamber. Begin to raise or lower the temperature in the chamber very slowly and record the temperature separately in each the thimble and the small pool. Of course the water in the thimble will change more rapidly. If you lower or raise the temperature in the chamber long enough the water in the small pool will change, but it certainly will change more slowly than the thimble. This, roughly speaking, is the thermodynamic equivalent scenario of comparing the troposphere to the oceans. So, when someone says the “Earth has cooled” over the past decade”, they are saying, essentially, the thimble has cooled. When filtering out ENSO and solar effects, we see this actually really isn’t true, But even so, in larger pool of energy, meaning the oceans, have continued to increase in their energy content. The atmosphere only holds 1/1000th or less of the energy of the oceans. Which one is a better representation of the non-geothermal energy of the Earth?
R Gates
Granted the thermal capacity and inertia of the oceans would make for a better measure of the earth’s temperature. But
(a) Do we really know the oceans are warming up in their entirety?
(b) If natural variations were to continue keeping the surface atmosphere temperature more or less steady, would you not expect the oceans to follow suit, eventually ? Or do you think ocean and atmosphere temperatures trends can diverge indefinitely ?
R. Gates, where your thimble analogy falls down is that the vast bulk of the heat in the atmosphere comes from the surface, and, because of its low thermal capacity, it responds quickly to changes in surface temperature.
Which makes it very difficult to see how the surface could warm without the atmosphere following suit.
Punksta,
Their is enough data to be pretty confident that the oceans have been warming down to at least 2000 meters over the past 40+ years. Certainly the error bars get bigger the further we go back, but the trend doesn’t change even with the outside margins of the error bars taken into consideration. At deeper abyssal levels of the oceans certainly the data is far more spotty, but their are multiple confirmatory studies that show warming at abyssal levels as well.
Certainly if the troposphere were to cool over a longer period, say 20+ years, there is a chance the oceans to begin to follow suit, albeit much more slowly, but given the multiple factors that influence ocean temperature, even this is not assured. The continual growth in atmospheric greenhouse gases have an effect on ocean temperature that is disproportionate to their effect on the atmosphere. This is counter intuitive for some, because, after all, the greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, so one might expect the greatest warming to occur there. But because of the oceans greater heat capacity, and the fact that net energy flow is from ocean to atmosphere, greenhouse gases alter the thermal gradient across the ocean skin layer, slowing down the rate of heat flux from ocean to atmosphere. Thus, the oceans have, and will continue to, be the largest depository of the excess energy in the ongoing energy imbalance caused by the continually increasing anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
Peter317,
I’m not sure what point you are making about the “surface warming without the atmosphere following suit”. When you say surface, are you talking about land and ocean? Certainly these two have very different effects on the atmosphere, with the ocean being far more predominant in driving the atmosphere. LW radiation coming from the land surface displays diurnal modulations of the atmosphere as the land quickly loses energy back to the atmosphere with the setting of the sun. The oceans, on the other hand, retain heat and have a longer term effect.
What increasing greenhouse gases do is slow down the rate of energy flow from oceans to atmosphere. Certainly the troposphere will warm as well (subject to much short-term natural variation) from increasing greenhouse gases as there is simply more LW being absorbed and reemitted by the troposphere, but by far the bulk of the warming of the Earth system from increasing greenhouse gases will go into the oceans as net heat flow is from ocean to atmosphere and increasing greenhouse gases in the atmopshere will reduce the overall thermal gradient between ocean and atmosphere, thus trapping more heat into the ocean!
R. Gates, You asserted that while the troposphere hadn’t heated in the last decade, the ocean had.
I’m simply questioning how the oceans can warm for 10 years without the troposphere showing warming as well.
@R Gates
So the idea is that an atmosphere warmed by the additional heat that additional CO2 captures, inhibits the cooling of the oceans.
This refers to cooling by ocean-to-atmosphere conduction only, I take it?
Easy to see pair correlation of temperatures 500 meters below the surface with the near surface temperatures:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Eq48-ospM8s/T5NI04EBLCI/AAAAAAAABHc/2BSD5B9nDfU/s1600/sst_cf_R.gif
That is some huge heat sink we are talking about.
The atmosphere has relatively little heat capacity in comparison so will get buffeted by all sorts of transient climate effects. As Gates said, the ocean is stable in comparison.
Peter317,
The oceans warming while the troposphere remains flat to even a slight decline in temperatures over a decade is not at all hard to explain. Take a look at ocean heat content over the period and compare it to ENSO activity. You certainly know that in general, La Nina periods are times when oceans (as a whole) gain energy (thus releasing less to the atmosphere) and El Nino periods are times when the ocean heat content declines as more heat is released to the atmosphere. During the height of an El Nino, when measuring SST’s, we are actually measuring heat flux from ocean to atmosphere, as El Nino is a time when heat is readily flowing from ocean to atmosphere. Tropospheric temperatures often spike a few months after an El Nino has reached its peak as the heat that flowed from the ocean is then measuring in the troposphere.
So in general, ocean in atmosphere, over the long term, will move together based on long term forcings in climate, but in the shorter term, they can move in opposite directions as the atmosphere is subject to much more influence of short-term natural variability from solar, ENSO, aerosols, etc, and specifically during El Nino and La Nina periods, oceans and atmosphere often move in exactly opposite directions in terms of overall energy content.
Punksta,
It is not a simple effect on conduction between the ocean and atmosphere that higher greenhouse gases in the atmosphere affect. It could effect net convection as well. We know, for example, that there is less net convection and thus clouds from the ocean during La Nina periods (in general) and this is also a time when the ocean is usually gaining net heat content. This makes intuitive sense as clearer skies mean more SW radiation can enter the ocean, plus less energy is leaving the ocean through convection. Also, in terms of conduction, and the effect of higher greenhouse gases in the atmosphere effecting the ocean-atmosphere energy exchange, the real key rests in the alteration of the thermal gradient across the ocean skin layer by higher amounts of LW coming from the higher levels and warming the very top of the skin layer of the ocean. This makes the gradient across the skin layer less steep, and thus, less heat flows through the skin layer from deeper waters. The net result– ocean heat content goes up over the long term, with short-term up and down fluctuations from solar, ENSO, and aerosols, but the longer terms trend of a longer term forcing is for higher ocean heat content– exactly as we’ve seen over the past 40+ years. And by the way, this general kind of forcing of higher ocean heat content is exactly the kind of thing brought about from Milankovitch cycles when coming out of glacial periods. Only in that case, it is
increased solar insolation on the oceans that warm them, bringing about an increase in CO2 in the atmosphere as it is outgassed from the ocean, which then sets up a positive feedback cycle whereby the little kick start from Milankovitch warming takes atmospheric CO2 from around 180 ppm to 280 ppm, and the glacial period is over.
Chief Hydro, Won’t rain go up as air over oceans warm? Maybe move exact locations a little in a hard to predict way. Perhaps we can grow crops on Greenland again and more Russion growing season in the far North. I don’t think the Russians will be upset. Will the move of rain bands impact the Sahara and Saudi Arabia which used to have lakes and flowing rivers? This is a very interesting experiment. Water and desalination are the next big issues if we can make the energy in a sustainable or fusion way.
James Lovelock meet Patrick Moore: Pat, meet James.
Pat is the founder and past president of Greenpeace, James. And, Pat came to understand a year or so ago that cutting down trees is great: it means humans like them and will plant more of them.
It’s just impossible to imagine that kind of clear thinking and logic from enviro-whackpot. Are you writing a book or have you changed, James?
Can it be than you come to have a practical understanding of the world and no longer feel compelled to rely on the judgments of those who have not shown themselves to be hypocritical anti-business, cheeseburger-hating, liberal fascist ideologues?
I am especially a “cheesburger-hating” liberal. Many a case of stomach cancer caused by these tasty, but deadly delicacies. For more on this, see:
http://www.cancerproject.org/media/news/fiveworstfoodsreport.php
“Our universities shape young men’s and women’s sensibilities, and our professors are supposed to serve as guardians of authoritative knowledge and exemplars of serious and systematic inquiry. Yet our campuses are home today to a toxic confluence of fashionable ideas that undermine the very notion of intellectual virtue, and to flawed educational practices and procedures that give intellectual vice ample room to flourish.” ~Michael Crichton
“I am especially a ‘cheesburger-hating’ liberal.”
Oh you should see some of the s–t they have in China. I was especially taken by “duck lips” (their translation to Engrish): Chewy, almost jerky-fied duck bills served on a plate surrounded by quail eggs. Very delicious, I thought, even as I assumed they were deadly. Then there were the street vendors with pyramids of roasted rabbit heads. Those were very tasty too, though a little goulish in their presentation–like some awful Indiana Jones scene. The fish head hot-pot was a show-stopper. Do you know: As in a top-shelf Western steak house, the top-shelf fish head hot-pot restaurant brings the fish heads to tableside, for the diners to inspect prior to hacking them up for the soup. Just to make sure they meet with the approval of the diners you see. You can tell a lot from a decapitated fish head you know. The smell, the glossy eyes, the red gills… it all adds up to a judgment.
I loved Chengdu!
Sounds better than Icelandic sheep’s head.
In China, the credo “It is permissible to eat anything that walks with its back to the sky,” is a point of national pride.. which is a very high point indeed.
The saying is justified by some as the reason China has survived millennia of drought and flood, war and tyranny and bureaucracy and subjugation and enemies on all sides. The Chinese do not run out of protein, and so they do not weaken, this historically questionable reasoning holds.
I amend with Farley Mowatt’s advice about eating mice: don’t eat the mouth of any rodent. You know where it’s been.
Ratatouille is Chinese, right?
In Australia we skeptics had an excellent week with exposure of our view in our public television station the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
Here is the TV program => http://bit.ly/IwZMrL
Nick Minchin was representing the skeptic’s side and here is his article regarding the TV program => http://bit.ly/KaQOlW
Thanks for the link Girma. The ABC was more than usually balanced on the topic of climate change and that is a positive development.
peterdavies252 | April 27, 2012 at 8:53 pm |
And yet, Mr. Delingpole brutalized the episode as one-sided and inept. Worse even than the BBC, or some such.
He’s been fairly savage to a lot of Australians. I’d think any country with a shred of self-pride wouldn’t stand for such attacks by foreigners on its citizens.
Though conversely, he’s also claiming he loves the country and would wish to stay. I can’t say I blame him. I’ve been to the UK.
I had a look at the Delingpole interview and find much of it to be true. The fact that Palmer was on the panel with Minchin was a distinct plus as far as I was concerned.
While I can’t speak for Australians generally I don’t think that we really care what foreigners think of us but there is a bumper sticker going around that says to immigrants in general that if you don’t love us then you can go back home where you come from. The language on the bumper sticker was more direct ;)
peterdavies252 | April 28, 2012 at 2:43 am |
Bumper sticker: “What are you complaining about? We tried keeping your kind out.”
Not sure if I ought admire its directness, or revile everything about it.
Don’t like that one at all Bart. The other one that I referred to implies that all are welcome but don’t complain. Just go home.
The ABC here is a wholly government owned and run sheltered workshop. And actually we are getting to the state of excitement where the only thing that really counts is the brilliance of sporting performances at the Olympics by any athlete – and how many medals we win. Say what? Global warming? You have got to be kidding. Say that’s the second time I’ve used that phase today. I was voting for Mayor in our compulsory voting system.
But in the meantime I was reading the comments on the Delingpole article and this appeared.
“In point of fact, the hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth’s surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The GHG (greenhouse gas) hypothesis does not do this.” Wojick added: “The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates.”
In the remote chance that energy can’t jump out of a non warming atmosphere and wriggle it’s way to the bottom – that’s quite a good dialectic. Solar variability is measurable as reflected SW as well as TSI. I wonder what the satellites say about that?
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-4-1.html
The recent press given to a few prominent warmists whom have expressed doubt on AGW alarmism is a good sign, but before sceptics get too excited by this we should remember that short term indicators are poor predictors of longer term trends. So, if they (the warmists) have extrapolated too much in the past then it is highly likely that they will extrapolate too much right now.
“Joy Black | April 27, 2012 at 6:44 pm |
Peter317, a visit to the wonderfully interesting (which also is hugely frightening) website Engineering Failures will swiftly change your opinion regarding the high probability of low-probability events!”
I think, Joy, you miss the whole point of the Engineering Failures website. Unlike many climate scientists, engineers try hard to minimize failures since in many cases they can be held criminally liable.
The Challenger was not an unlikely happening. NASA knew unequivocally that the shuttle boosters were a marginal design, put in place for political reasons. The question was not “how likely is a disaster”, but “will we be lucky enough to avoid a disaster before the program ends?” The Columbia accident was much more complicated than Challenger. After the accident and two and a half years of research and testing they still hadn’t found the real cause. It took another launch that had a failure on the same failure on the totally revamped insulation on the hydrogen tank to pinpoint the real cause. Neither one was an unlikely disaster. At the time of the design the shuttle system pushed all the design and development limits. In truth, nobody really expected that there would be no accidents over the life of the program.
Chernobyl was a totally predictable disaster. The reactor design was inherently unsafe and did not include any of the backup safety systems, such as multiple layers of containment and back up cooling. It was caused by a poorly planned, stupidly run test.
Fukushima is a bit more along the lines of a highly unlikely event. But it did show that engineering is not a fool proof science, since they put the power plants for the emergency cooling under the reactors, where they could be flooded in the event an highly unlikely tidal wave overtopped the flood walls that were thought to be excessively high.
Betting on how much sea level rise there might be by 2100 is a fools bet. Very few people betting have any liklihood of being around to collect for one thing. The other is that climate science simply isn’t capable of making a trustworthy prediction, Dr. Hansen be dam***. Heck, at this point we can’t even make reliable measurements of sea level. It’s a case of the “signal” being lost in the noise even worse than the temperature records.
I can make one 100%reliable prediction though. If people are not prevented from taking appropirate mitiigation and adaptations for unexpected events(having spent all the money on CO2 reduction and uneconomical sustainable energy schemes) the cost and loss of life from man-made disaster and many natural ones will continue their downward trends.
My prediction is that anyone with a conscience made a beeline for the UN exits years ago. That leaves hard core Leftists for whom truth does not matter and eco-whackpots who would feel more at home on the dark side of the comet Hale-Bopp with their Heaven’s Gate buddies than do an honest day’s work providing something of value to society.
Challenger and Columbia accidents had different causes. One caused by insulation knocking off during launch and the other by an o ring in the booster that lost it’s ability to seal in low temperature. The o ring accident had an engineer protesting the launch. His boss was told by NASA that they would lose a schedule bonus if they delayed. So NASA political incentives killed those people. The management told the decision maker to put on his management hat and overrule the engineer. That is why we trust the politicans to make the big decisions so much.
About Bart R:
As a general precept, if you think I agree with you, you’re probably wrong. Even if I’ve said I can’t disagree with you.
I will agree with evidence, observation, analyses, logic, reasoning, methods, processes, opinion, attitude or belief; and I’m prone to change those rather regularly, due the self-check imperative I’ve found useful that the stronger my sense of agreement, the less thought I put into an idea before agreeing with it, the more worth re-examining the premises of the arguments I have come to accept.
I distrust anything I find too easy to agree with.
So, to remain friendly and positive in social interactions (no, really!), I distance ideas from people who have them.
So, even people I disagree with quite a lot, I hope understand I respect.
And he refuses to join any club that will accept him as a member.
Yet they keep asking me to pay dues.
o/t warning !
The argument has been made (eg by Tamino) that although global surface air average temperature trend has been flat since 1997, this does not mean global warming has stopped. The reasoning behind this seems to be that that net effect of natural forces are known to be having a downward effect for all this time, that has offset the hypothesized CO2 effect.
Well if natural forces are now so really well understood, it must mean
– the debate is over, since any departure from what (by assumption well-understood) natural forces would do, must be down to man
– climate science and the models can now reliably predict future temperatures.
But, only reliable in the long term, right?
That can’t be right – in the longer term climate is non-linear.
Yes – which of course raises the question : how long is “long” ?
Climatology tradition says 30 years. 17 years is “significant”, said someone (Santer?), echoed over at RC.
It’s now been 15. So the climate blogosphere’s short-term future looks assured.
So.. are we back to, “If it’s rising it’s non-linear; if it’s not clearly rising then we can keep burning whatever we want (which we would’ve done anyway) and no one’s going to cram anything down our throats?”
I still don’t see it, but then until BEST confirmed warming, I was never really interested much in the warming argument except as a math problem and a bit of trivia.
High and rising CO2 in and of itself is reason enough to investigate and invest in lowering commercial CO2 emissions, on principle. You don’t accept strangers pouring strange liquids in the village well without investigating and investing in preventing the practice. Why do you take any different approach to your air?
So although temperatures are clearly flat, BEST “confirmed” warming ? I previously thought BEST was quite reliable.
Certainly CO2 warrants being looked at, even if it turns out it isn’t warming us. But also seen in the light of both costs and benefits. eg, is more CO2 a price worth paying to avoid energy costs going up by a factor of 10 or whatever ?
Punksta | April 28, 2012 at 3:14 am |
Every child in the world who has ever visited the seaside comes to grasp the difference between the rising of the tide and the occassional dip due the troughs in waves.
That nineteen in twenty spans of seventeen years or more are clearly rising, that on every span of thirty years or more those seventeen year rises are faster and faster, tells us that talking about a fourteen or fifteen year flat span is simply misleading.
The concept of forest for trees comes to mind, to mix metaphors.
There can be another fifteen years of ‘flat’ — if you reject all the non-flat rising temperature records, which apparently you do and do not answer for why — and still the average of long run (to us; geologically, all climate involves spans of tens of millions of years or more) GMT will be rising as the tail catches up with the top. And even then, we cannot by Bayesian logic dismiss CO2 induced global climate change as a hypothesis, or even the warming outcome of climate change as the most likely.
That’s just the statistical reality. Saying ‘flat’ is simply meaningless for now.
Wondering _why_ the outcomes seen are happening (even on inferior datasets), that’s perfectly valid and interesting.
Are there underlying aggregated trends? Is it all turbulent with no real fixed pattern beyond days, seasons and years? Could all the components be winnowed out and modeled and simulated?
Fascinating stuff that.
Until then, a staircase runs up, though every step is a flat; the tide rises though it is made of waves with troughs.
Oh.. and ‘a factor of 10 or whatever’ for energy costs.. you do realize that’s the demented product of fossil-idolizing propaganda, don’t you?
Q: Where else but about fossil do you hear the argument that one single source is better than competition among many alternatives on the open market? (A: Communism, monotheism, and mania.)
Bart
Yes, as even you seem to know, given the noise and uncertainties, the long term is the thing watch. Even thirty years may not be enough, but even that is as much as the CAGW camp can point to too. Your fond imaginations of a constantly rising tide/staircase exceed even the blinkered and feverish activism of the IPCC.
Oh.. and ‘a factor of 10 or whatever’ for energy costs.. you do realize that’s the demented product of fossil-idolizing propaganda, don’t you?
Sure, nuclear could work, and hydro where the terrain supports it. You do realize though that only Green-idolizing propaganda maintains the likes of wind and solar are serious alternatives to fossil fuel.
Q: Where else but about fossil do you hear the argument that one single source is better than competition among many alternatives on the open market? (A: Communism, monotheism, and mania.)
A silly strawman – noone is saying a single source is best. Only that one source happens to be vastly more economical.
Only that one source happens to be vastly more economical.
And to hide the failure of this claim, they’re willing to crash the economy repeatedly by manipulation and deception.
If you have a case of the models not matching reality, then it is obvious what is wrong
“Oh dear, I think you’ll find reality’s on the blink again. — Marvin The Paranoid Android”
Punksta,
You misunderstand the basics of a chaotic system. We know, for example, all the forces that can cause a falling leaf to twist this way or that as it heads to the ground, and if we know the general speed and direction of a prevailing wind, we can tell you the general direction where most of the falling leaves from a tree will head. None of this involves any unknown forces or variables. Despite all of this knowing, we cannot predict the exact path that any single leaf will take to the ground. So the climate is m much like a falling leaf, however, as yet, don’t know all the variables that go into forcing the climate one way or another, but we are getting better at knowing what causes general trends (i.e. the forcings that drive long and short term changes to climate).
R Gates,
Yes, climate is a bit like leaves twisting in the wind. But that itself in no way supports the idea that CO2 corresponds to the general direction of the wind.
Climate is non-linear whether it is warming or cooling. Neither state is all that predictable. It is the new climate paradigm according to many who have got across this concept – or threshold idea. There are still underlying mechanisms of course. If we understand oceans have warmed in the past decade and atmosphere hasn’t – the warming oceans must be the result of solar variability. Always assuming that is that energy can’t jump out of a non-warming atmosphere into the ocean and wriggle its way to the bottom.
This is of course measureable by the Clouds and Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) program.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif
It is clearly there in the SW signal being the most significant part of the net rising (warming) trend. It offset the minor decline in TSI in the period. SW reflected has increased in the last couple of years with La Niña – which really must be expected to intensify over the next couple of decades in the cool Pacific decadal mode.
I have to disagree with disagreeing with the simple falsification meme. If for instance the speed of light – a usage webby disagrees with but then webby has some very odd ideas – was measured as something other than 300,000,000 m/s odd then there goes special relativity. Although if that happened you should check the calibration before going public.
Regardless – there is both an alternative theory and a metatheory and a better interpretation of the data – although all seem to be threshold concepts that are poorly understood.
Chief,
Do you believe in coincidences?
As you go deeper in water, it gets heavier and has more pressure.
It is also less and less planetary velocity.
Go figure??? :-)
Warming of the oceans can be the result of many factors, with solar variability being only one. Some of the main factors include:
Solar variability
Astronomical changes (Milankovitch cycles)
Changes in greenhouse gas concentrations
Changes in aerosols from volcanic activity
Chnages in aerosols from human activity
Changes in aerosols from biological activity
Changes in ocean current circulation patterns
And of course multiple and interrelated combinations thereof.
And clouds, of course.
And shark flatulence.
Hydro: … where there is no increase in atmospheric warming there is no increase in downwelling radiation.
Gates agrees. But also notes atmospheric “temperatures have increased along with greenhouse gas concentrations” over recent decades, resulting in net an average downwelling LW increase.
This, though, is not true of the most recent decade+. The atmosphere has levelled off, which must surely mean the downwelling LW has too …?
That’d be jellyfish flatulence; shark numbers appear to be down 90% according to some, whereas jellyfish counts seem to be growing.
Except the darned things aren’t self-reporting, so we can’t be sure of how many there are out on the ocean, emitting like crazy.
They keep filling in the ballots “You’ve got to be kidding.”
R Gates
So if ocean and atmosphere temperatures can move out of sync with each other (in the short term), it means ocean temperatures are not being (sufficiently) influenced by what is happening in the atmosphere.
Which inter alia rules out anthropogenic CO2 effects…?
No – Mr Gates – where there is no increase in atmospheric warming there is no increase in downwelling radiation. We can then rule out greenhouse gases. Your next 3 factors are related to SW forcing but are otherwise moot. The contibutions from either volcanos or human aerosols were neglible in the period. Interestinly – biological emissions are little understood – but it all comes out in the wash of TOA power flux.
ENSO does change ocean and atmosphere energy dymanics considerably – but is all accounted for in TOA energy flux.
We are talking about CERES and the 21st and the inclusion of orbital eccentricity is funny. Warming in the CERES record linked to was caused by less shortwave being reflected back into space.
Chief Hydrologist said:
“No – Mr Gates – where there is no increase in atmospheric warming there is no increase in downwelling radiation.”
——–
This is true, but does not get to the bigger point about longer term increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases that have occurred over the past few centuries.. The atmosphere certainly shows more variability because of its lower thermal inertia, but temperatures have increased along with greenhouse gas concentrations. Most of the downwelling LW is going to be from water vapor anyway, which has shown only marginal increases, (maybe 5%) over the past few decades, while the other greenhouse gases have increased between 30 and 40%, thus, the net average downwelling LW has increased and this does effect the top of the ocean skin layer, altering the thermal gradient across that layer, specifically making the gradient less steep, and slowing the rate at which energy is transported from ocean to atmosphere. The net effect– the ocean heat content has had a steady increase for many decades all as a result of increased downwelling LW from greenhouse gases.
.
Don’t think it had much to do with greenhouse gases at all – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view¤t=Wong2006figure7.gif
R Gates
This ocean-atmosphere temperature gradient thing – I’m not really getting it. You’re saying increased LW downwelling warms the ocean surface, thereby reducing the rate at which it loses heat ? So if LW downwelling was reduced, the oceans would lose more heat ?
Surely the warmer the oceans, the more heat they will lose, regardless of gradient?
Joy Black wrote: “Bottom Line Are there *NO* climate-change skeptics who will make book on their convictions?
So far, the surprising answer is “no”.
Seems you’re the one who won’t take a bet. I’ve offered you a reasonable wager the outcome of which will be determined in no more than 3 years. Betting on the year 2100 is meaningless. Obviously.
Joy Black – now back to the science. Here is the big hole in the CAGW effect that does not get enough play. This missing observation makes all the arguments here for naught. The missing like is water vapor. CAGW hypothesis has it that higher CO2 —> higher H2O vapor. This has not been demonstrated to be the case. In fact, the missing hot spot in the troposphere would suggest the higher H2O vapor idea isn’t panning out.
Some climate science blog needs to put up water vapor as a topic.
“Summary:
It is very hard to quantify water vapor in the atmosphere. Its concentration changes continually with time, location and altitude. To measure it at the same location every day, you would need a hygrometer, which in earlier days made use of the moisture-sensitivity of a hair, and by now of for instance condensators. A vertical profile is obtained with a weather balloon. To get a global overview, only satellite measurements are suitable. From a satellite, the absorption of the reflecting sunlight due to water vapor molecules is measured. The results are pictures of global water vapor distributions and their changes. The measurement error, however, is still about 30 to 40%.”
http://www.espere.net/Unitedkingdom/water/uk_measurement.html
Here is a chart of water vapor, the concentration in the atmosphere is going down, not up.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/Climate_Change_Science.html#Water_vapour
Relaive humidity is not a measure of the concentration of water vapor in the atmosphere.
The metric you want is absolute humidity.
A decrease in relative humidity leads to a decrease in cloud cover, which is a positive feedback.
But Jim2..
Not to put too fine a point on it, but you’ve been so bad at science in the past, so ready to leap at and embrace unskeptically so much that is shakey and shoddy at first blush and that inevitably when checked closely bears no semblence of reality, and have already granted that so many of the very few observations your sources base their arguments are on are by any means even a little bit reliable, why should we switch horses from, frankly, people who have much more experience being bad at science, embracing unskeptically so much that is so shakey and shoddy, and using inferior observations to you?
Seems you’re asking folks to leap from a frying pan that benefits them to a fire that benefits you.
Resume your dialectic, Bart. You have nothing you can point to that you embrace the science. Frankly, you seem to be obsessed with any gimmick that will distract from the science.
The lack of discussion of the role of water vapor and the link between it and CO2 levels sticks out like a sore thumb. The entire CAGW argument is balanced upon water vapor. All the betting nonsense, name calling, and peak oil BS just distracts from the real issues.
I keep hearing ‘name calling’, and yet.. could you be more specific?
Where have I used an indefensible name?
And the limited nature of reserves does not alter regardless of where the peak may be, or if due technology revolution we shift the peak or merely drive up the cost of the next peak, does it?
You say water vapor is the ‘real issue’ now? Huh. A poorly understood, poorly measured, vaprous foggy topic is the one the case must rest on, or you just won’t be happy?
Sounds like someone fleeing obvious workable solutions for mysticized obscurantism to avoid clear and immediate decision and action.
Bart – without any knock-on effect of CO2 on water vapor, which is the keystone of the CAGW argument, there is no problem at all. Water vapor has been the real issue all along – it is the so-far-mythical ‘feedback’ that causes the catastrophic warming. We need more science and less bloviation.
Jim2 | April 28, 2012 at 1:38 pm |
If “need more science and less bloviation,” then why not put more effort into getting the science right before making simply wrong claims?
I can go along with that one, Bart. Now if Hansen and the other CAGW’s will get the memo.
It is a good issue on water vapor. When ;clouds are bright satellites don’t measure water content well, they reflect the instrument signals. Then when clouds are dark the signals don’t penetrate. Waster vapor is the big greenhouse gas and we can’t measure atmospheric content reliably. It has higher activity and in general much greater concentration. So lots of science to be done to improve data collection before we model what we have trouble understanding. Will increased water vapor increase rain, snow, reflect the sunlight, cause plants to grow in deserts, increase ice in artic. OMG lots of work to do to understand prior to actions. Bisides, Chin and India need energy from coal.
Scott | April 28, 2012 at 11:51 am |
“lots of work to do to understand prior to actions. Bisides, Chin and India need energy from coal.”
So, is that prior to actions to burn any more carbon or emit any more CO2E, or is that prior to actions to switch from raising the CO2 level even higher above the highest level of the past 15 million years by more than it has changed in all that time?
And can you tell my why India and China need for their energy to be from coal, specifically? Both of them have had for centuries incredibly inefficient economies, such that misery is endemic throughout, needlessly. Certainly what they need isn’t more energy but less misery; this can be satisfied by efficient technology and energy conserving process design and from geothermal, solar and wind with present technologies and for no more long-run cost — and often for less short-term cost — than attempting to exploit the mountains of coal you allude to.
The only people who love how cheap coal is have never worked coal.
Bart R, I never agreed with u before. Amazing. India, China and Russia use coal because it is cheaper first cost wtout considering pollution from acid particles, fly ash and radon. Those costs are paid by the rest of the world or the poor citizens who can’t breath. I don’t support that use but just recognize it. renewables are cheaper if a full accounting of intangible costs were made. But not there or in West Virginia or Wyoming in the US. That is reality. Without some technical alternative the CO2 models don’t make much difference. I hope for fusion and the end of the fossile fuel era in a hundred years. U and I will both likely be dead but we hope to leave a better planet for our children.
Every couple of months this favorite theme pops back up.
There have been almost as many climate change betting sites — or online bookmakers or the like with a climate or weather option or six — as there are climate change sites themselves.
One is reminded of Pascal’s Wager (which every couple of years pops up again) applied to climate, currently making the rounds as ‘No Lose Adaptation’, or some such.
Mathematically, Pascal’s Gambit does hold in the case of CO2 emission and control in the long run. It’s not as if fossils in the ground for millions of years are going anywhere, or as though their value drops with time.
A fossil reserve is treasure in the vault of earth to the nation that holds it, and at best a nuisance to the nation that hauls it up, refines it by noisome and toxic means, and burns it to questionable residues for the questionable benefit of liberating its energy while turning it from raw material for fertilizer, pharmaceuticals, plastics and other vital industrial chemicals to so much CO2, soot, ashes and dust, rather than obtaining efficient and plentiful energy from the many alternative means that are by virtue of their multiplicity less subject to the problems of a monopoly.
Anyone making a ‘cheap energy’ argument based on fossil energy alone is simply not telling the full truth. We know from the vast spread among high performing economies of reliance on fossil energy — some use next to none, some use a huge amount — with no correlation (or probably negative) of intensity to prosperity or even to welfare that ‘cheap energy’ is an outright failure as a philosophy.
So what do ‘cheap energy’ (fossil) advocates do when they fail? Rather than accept reality and change their minds and their ways, they inveigh upon governments, turning every tool of influence and corruption in their arsenal, to attempt to fix this error by subsidy (just until they succeed, mind you, it’s for the greater good, you see — that is irony there, btw) and enter a downward economy-crushing spiral.
The economy of the world is resilient enough to tolerate such abuse in ordinary times for a very prolonged period. It may even seem to be growing and prospering by the self-fooling subterfuges of impaired judges of economic success, for a time. Until extreme weather coincides in enough of the globe to interfere in enough agriculture that the demand for fertilizer (from natural gas by the Haber Process) and fuel (for transportation, working the land, refridgeration) and substitute foods (to make up for shortfalls) causes a triplepoint spike in economic staple prices and people stop being able to pay their mortgages, backed by increasingly shakey conveyances in a ‘deregulated’ (rather, re-regulated to hide its flaws) banking system.
The solution? Bet as if CO2 level really is caused by CO2 emission by human commerce (the odds are extremely high, notwithstanding Salby’s addled and confunded calculations) and that CO2 level really will cause extremely expensive periods of adaptation and constriction of the world’s economy and its ability to feed, shelter and sustain the lives of very large swaths of marginalized people. Namely, you. Not because the odds are high enough that the conclusion is true (which, it’s pretty high), but because the economy runs better, more efficiently, is more stable and gives more people better lives than if you fall for the ‘cheap energy’ from fossil scam.
Every couple of months Bart regurgitates this silly scam of his, namely that fossil fuels are not really cheap, because they’re subsidized. And urges us to adopt non-subsidized energy like, er, wind? er, solar?
Punksta | April 28, 2012 at 11:53 am |
Please, I grind this axe at least once a week.
Fossil fuels have the price the infrastructure gives them. The infrastructure is the playing field the government sets by regulation, spending and taxing. It’s not a natural market, and it bears little semblence to the physics of the real world.
The inverted rewards contrived by ‘cheap energy’ fanatics have not worked, mathematically can’t work, and while we were seeing only a few adherents of the fad wasn’t so bad, but it will collapse the economy time and again now that it has grown to infect so many.
Not a scam at all, because it keeps on mutating in unexpected ways.
Just today I ran across the helium supply crisis again. This time it seems to be gaining a toehold, as wholesalers are starting to replace helium with partial mixtures of nitrogen for balloons:
http://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2012/04/27/helium-shortage-takes-air-out-o…
I don’t know how we will ever get enough helium to replace the stuff that is depleting.
The issue is that helium was a byproduct of the large natural gas reservoirs. The helium was trapped similar to how the natural gas was trapped, and in large enough volumes to be able to be collected separately. With natural gas now collected by hydraulic fracturing, the helium is no longer there, free for the taking.
This is not just a problem for party people and Steve Martin, but for medical and physics research and for welding. I have used helium for cryopumps and for general purpose usage such as detecting ultr-high vacuum leaks.
Unlike precious metals, helium is actually a non-renewable resource. I have no idea of a way that it can get recycled, unlike renewable metals and other elements. Once it escapes into the air, that’s it. Goodbye helium. It slowly diffuses to the top of the atmosphere where it occasionally gets enough kinetic energy to escape the earth’s g-forces.
Is this the real helium shortage that we have been anticipating for a few years now? The economists are now trying to prove their rules for substitutability. Nitrogen for helium, sure that will cut it :(
Qatar is ramping up helium production
Somebody said that one hope is to get fusion to work and then collect the helium from the deuterium byproduct
d + d → 4He + γ
But that means we need fusion to work.
Helium looks like a more imminent problem, I agree. The supply for party balloons needs to be cut off.
Regulation brings many distortions, but making fossil fuels appear cheap is not one of them. Making solar panels, by contrast, is one of them.
How can we know, when the government and industry continue to pour a thousand times as much money into carbon-based fuel research and subsidy than into solar, wind, geothermal, and ocean combined?
Don’t believe me? Check the Lamar Alexander reports in detail by breakdown.
With the grided power systems bent toward coal to prop up mining interests, and pipeline megaprojects getting unprecedented and unparalleled levels of support not seen even with the building of the railroads, how can anyone pretend the market is not distorted toward fossil?
Is it wilful blindness, loyalty to others who have misled you, or simple obstinacy? I don’t ask to cast aspersions or imply motivations, but it’s important to know what the source of such eggregious error may be, to furnish remedy in future.
Bart R
Alexander wants to end subsidies for oil, gas and wind. However he says here that over the last 5 years the Federal tax-payer funded subsidies to “Big Wind” were $14 billion . That dwarfs the subsidies to big oil.
blueice2hotsea | April 28, 2012 at 10:13 pm |
Yeah, I looked at the pretty graphic in Lamar Alexander’s presentation labeled ‘CBO Debunks Myth That Tax Code Favors Oil Over Renewables’.
Did you look at the graph at all?
Until 2007, the vast majority of subsidies were identified as specifically for fossil fuel. Indeed, over any timespan longer than a decade, the fossil fuel subsidies vastly exceed the combined other subsidies on the graphic.
And here comes the neat trick. There are three categories besides fossil fuel. Nuclear is clearly nuclear, of course.
But what about the other two?
Energy Efficiency? What does that mean? Why, it means over 95% goes to energy efficient fossil fuel equipment and processing! SCAM. Shame on Lamar Alexander.
Renewable Energy? What does that mean? Is is all windmills and solar? Why, no. It means over 95% goes to ethanol and biodiesel acting as complements to fossil fuel, or to research carried out by fossil industry labs and engineers themselves! SCAM. Shame on Lamar Alexander. Dwarfs the subsidies to big oil? Dude, it is the subsidies to big oil.
Outright lies to America, using the little phrase ‘benefits oil directly’ to sweep under the rug the vast indirect benefits.
What is the actual subsidy to wind and solar power in the USA, and what form does it take?
Here’s a hint: Lamar Alexander doesn’t know. Which is a shame; his twisty and corrupted pretense at subsidy cutting only undercuts real efforts to turn America around. He’s just another carpet-bag carrying promoter of the deadweight loss “cheap energy” scheme to hide the real cost of fossil by whatever means it takes, distorting the fair market.
Efficient plastic, nitrogen fertilizer, pharmaceuticals and industrial chemicals are the root of America’s prosperity; fake “cheap energy” from fossil burns the source of these precious resources, robbing America of its future.
That would make a nice speech.
Also, I don’t think citizens can get tax breaks to work on nuclear energy research or to develop new seismographic techniques to find oil in their backyard. Yet those same citizens can get tax breaks to try out solar, PV, wind, heat exchangers, insulation, hybrid cars, batteries, etc.
Heaven forbid that some startup guy in his garage would find some interesting renewable energy approaches.
I found this web site. Not saying it is right or wrong.
http://www.friendsofscience.org/
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SIX THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE:
1. The earth is cooling. Click here.
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Judith,
There are currently two sides in science.
One is data collecting and analysis to generate predictions.
The other is physical evidence gathering and mechanical processes.
Which one is correct?
Joe, you write “Which one is correct?”
Both are correct. There are not two sides. There is one scientific method.
1.. Get some data
2. Form a hypothesis (theory)
3. Predict what should happen if the hypothesis(theory) is correct.
4. Get some more data and revise the hypothesis(theory) so it expalins all the data.
5. Repeat 3 and 4, until you have enough data to make it clear that the theory is probably correct.
If you can collect enough data to support the theory, and all your predictions are always correct, eventually the theory becomes a law.
Excellent Jim!
1.. Get some data
They got the Global Mean Temperature data called HADCRUT3.
2. Form a hypothesis (theory)
They hypothesized human emission of CO2 causes global warming
3. Predict what should happen if the hypothesis(theory) is correct.
They projected, “For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios.”
4. Get some more data and revise the hypothesis(theory) so it expalins all the data.
More data contradicts theory=> http://bit.ly/HnYPQf
5. Repeat 3 and 4, until you have enough data to make it clear that the theory is probably correct.
Instead of repeating the comparison observation and theory, they changed the data from HADCRUT3 to HADCRUT4 (I personally will never touch hadcrut4, as I was not able to make the conclusions I made studying HADCRUT3. Data must not change midstream)
Actually, they want us not to look at the temperature record any more!
William Nordhaus: Climate scientists have moved way beyond global mean temperature in looking for evidence of human-caused climate change.
http://bit.ly/HHbaSC
http://bit.ly/IzGlLr
Only if you throw away the conclusions of AR4!
IPCC AR4 was 2007. By your extortionate argument, no new data or observations can be used as a basis of common understanding, communication or analysis until and unless conclusions you dispute are thrown away out of hand.
That’s not how science works. Without holding up previous conclusions as a target to outperform and improve on, we merely go back to step one.
We reach new heights much sooner standing on the shoulders of giants than throwing down mere men and crushing them to dust beneath our feet.
Good point though about the AR4 based on CRUdat3. New data forces review of old conclusions. What about clouds and temps over the vast Pacific Ocean? What about temps below 2000 m in ocean? I can’t understand about AMO being challenged because of aerosols from US and now new aerosols from China over Pacific and India over Indian ocean don’t change those basins. Too much data to gather before conclusions much less actions. Someone brought up waiting for the scientific basis conclusions prior to attribution or adaption conclusions. That is what must have pushed the pressure on Dr Santer to edit the reports science basis to support the already published summary for policy makers in 96. That was an excellent article on linked web page from a thread a while back. More articles to come from that arena.
Bart
I agree, but the scaremongering must stop first.
I went to see James Delingpole in Australia. I thought he was pretty good, a welcome change from the barrage of global warming propaganda I see and hear dozens of times a day on the mainstream media.
The “I can change your mind about climate’ program, which I saw tonight (thanks Girma), I thought was typically biased and an obvious set up. At least we have a foot in the door, and the associated poll was certainly dominated (last time I looked) by the ‘dismissive’ vote. I was encouraged that the brits are sick to death of the global warming scam.
Also kudos to Joy Black for stirring the pot, we could use a few more debates without attendant ad homs, although those smiley faces are a bit cheeky !!
I think that global warming is a sideshow to the more sinister UN agenda 21, to which the american military machine is inextricably linked.
William, u should leave the US military out of the climate scam issues. UN is a hypocritical failure that puts Libyia, saddam Hussien’s Iraq, and China on human rights panels. UN tries to extort money from the West. China will pursue its own interests and the US military may be the only force to restrain them. The military follows the leaders orders and the upper levels so kowtow or are forced to retire that they have almost no independent judgement. They fight were they are told. And they die. Leaders betray their loyalty but the ranks usually follow duty, integrity, honor and bravery. We all could use a dose of their ethics.
Mr. Orssengo, I’m sorry if you’re scared by the prospect that actions have consequences, that chemical reactions have products, that interactions of products of chemical reactions with radiant energy have outcomes, and that outcomes of products of chemical reactions that run into the many millions of tons with radiant energy that runs into the terawatts boggle you.
However, simple observation, analysis and deduction — which the vast majority of scientists do — falls short of any definition of scaremongering. Who had scaremongered? A few activist scientists on either side of the unreconciled issues? Sure.
Many activists of all stripes and politicians on both sides of the political issue around the world? Clearly. Personally, I find the ridiculous scaremongering about how ‘cheap energy’ is threatened and paying the full price for the outcomes of our commercial activities will lead to the death of the economy to be by orders of magnitude the larger scaremongering activity, and the most patently false one.
Am I scared by it? Not so much. The only thing we have to fear is the fearful themselves.
Do I think we must apply reason instead of fiction to solve our problems in the face of these many scares, regardless of them? Absolutely.
Making up extortionate preconditions to rationality is simply bullying; perhaps it is bullying by the frightened who aren’t comfortable confronting difficult decisions. That’s all the more reason not to hold reason hostage.
So, on Lovelock’s recanting.. do we have a list somewhere of who all have recanted what?
Lomborg recants so often you can set your watch by him, of course.
Arrhenius partly recanted and was later proven right on his original claims; probably.
Einstein’s recanted, but that wasn’t about climate so much. And later been proven his original claims were likelier true.
Galileo recanted, but we all know that was just to be spared more torture and the death penalty, and also not about climate.
I’ve recanted my earlier objection to ‘warming’ being certain, once BEST pretty much nailed the lid on that coffin.
Any other recanters out there?
Someday, I hope people actually learn what happened with Galileo so we can stop hearing about his false heroism. I doubt I’ll live to see the day though.
You said this sort of thing back when BEST hadn’t published their work, hadn’t offered a data set, and had at least one major conclusion be obviously wrong (which they’ve now recanted).
People need to learn how the burying process works. First something has to die, then it gets put in the coffin, then the lid can be nailed shut. Doing this in any other order tends to screw things up.
Brandon Shollenberger | April 28, 2012 at 3:05 pm |
Back when I said something like this, I put the precondition ‘pending peer review’. I’m loosening that precondition here, as this thread has seen plentiful discussion of the scientific method and judging by the data and analyses available, as indeed the recanting question is part of.
I’m glad you added BEST itself to the recanters list; if you care to provide more details, that’d be cool. And heck, talk some more about what really happened with Galileo, if you like. I’m all for being educated.
Also, very few coffins in the Western world these days are actually nailed shut any more; mainly they’re locked, or at least bolted. It’s a figure of speech long since separated from its origins. The “it’s not warming” body is good and dead, statistically. Propping up the corpse and waggling its jaw or tying strings to flap its arms is just a macabre masquerade. Mistaking the fourteen-year cooling period for signs of life, or hoping for resurrection, that’s just religious fanaticism.
That tombstone is not going to roll itself back.
It’s shuffled off this mortal coil.
It’s a dead parrot.
Bart R:
Why? As far as I can see, it can’t be based upon anything BEST has actually published or shown I know BEST announced its results, but science through press release is no science at all. I’ve been waiting for some time for them to move beyond the press release stage, but as far as I’ve heard, they haven’t. Do you know something I don’t?
BEST originally claimed the UHI effect was meaningless because trend was small and negative. That was a nonsensical conclusion, and according to Steven Mosher (who has worked with BEST), was due to an error. He says they’ve changed that position, and I have no reason to doubt that.
Of course, if one doesn’t want to believe they’ve reversed that position, he or she can. It just means believing BEST holds a stupid, obviously untrue, position. You can’t really do that and promote them as credible.
What’s there to say? The popular view of Galileo is false and fabricated, possibly in order to give ammunition to critics of the church/religion. He was a welcomed member within church society, and when he was “punished,” that punishment consisted of being placed on house arrest where he stayed in lovely estates, and wasn’t even censored. And that only happened because he was a complete and total prick. It had nothing to do with his scientific work.
Do you really think that needed to be said?
That’s an interesting position to take. Presumably, you would claim the current pause in warming is not statistically significant. However, if we adopt that position, that means we cannot make any judgment as to what has actually happened in over a decade. That means it is impossible to say whether or not it is warming.
While relying on statistics to promote a position of ignorance, you claim statistics rule against a position. That’s all sorts of messed up.
Brandon Shollenberger | April 28, 2012 at 7:02 pm |
Why loosen the precondition ‘pending review’ in a thread discussing recanting? Well, because recanting due review in a thread discussing recanting is self-evident, given the point.
And really, a study of this size needs more than just the internal and peer review to have much confidence in or regard for, so while the slow and careful pre-publication (which is just more proof the publication process is flawed) is frustrating, it’s only half or less of the full idea of review.
Still, that a not-yet-published dataset is so much better than any other is also evidence of just what a shoddy job has been done up to now collecting and evaluating global climate data. BEST — improvised and arbitrary as it is — throws into sharp relief the paucity of legitimate systematic effort even with satellites and international communication networks of climate science.
Now, Mosher (and others’) hints that UHI and or other conclusions will be modified on publication is also not surprising. I’d be surprised if there weren’t 30 or 40 changes in the process. The fact that we’re all shut out of seeing what they are merely adds to the fog. We don’t know if Mosher’s leak from the inside is as big as it sounds, or bigger, or in what direction, until we see what’s actually going on behind that wall of silence. Whatever else, it doesn’t remove what _has_ been published elsewhere before and since about the urban cooling shadow and other aspects of UHI, which tend to agree largely among those selected papers of those views among themselves in a self-consistent way.
I can’t agree entirely with your views on Galileo’s imprisonment, as one of the most important and influential academics of his time and personal friend of multiple powerful leaders run afoul of the Spanish contingent of strict literalists; the Chinese government claims the same as you do of Galileo about many of its own prisoners. Do I believe them?
As for the point on coffins.. yeah. It’s kinda a thing with me.
I _do_ take the position it’s impossible to make statements about the most recent decade to two with great confidence at any moment. See the bit above about how lousy a job we do collecting data. However, it’s logically inconsistent to then throw away the confidence we do have in the seventeen years or more where the statistical significance can be confirmed above 95%, give or take uncertainty 19 times in 20. That’s what statistics can give us, and is no different on global temperature than on the speedometer of your car. Or do you believe your speedometer is precise to the nearest foot per second? And if you do, why do you only do it on the one single among the better of the bad datasets that gives the cooling result and no other?
So, no, I don’t support ignorance. I support appropriate precision and appropriate confidence. Why do you seek to support overprecision and over certainty?
Other than religious faith? Because there’s the same miniscule chance the conclusion of warming from 1960 to now is wrong as of a cow exceeding the speed of light while jumping over the moon, give or take a few percent, nineteen times in 20.
What the future may unfold, whether there’s cooling now that we can confirm in a few years or not.. that’s something we can’t know. Unless we’re religious fanatics.
Oh, I should have commented on this:
You claim it is “religious fanaticism” to say an observed pause in warming gives some amount (no matter how small) of credence to the idea the planet isn’t warming. It’s incredible what any reasonable person would consider open-mindedness is fanaticism to you.
Any real scientist would look at it and get the thought, “Hey, maybe there’s some miniscule chance we’re wrong.” It’s called questioning one’s beliefs and assumptions.
I have no idea how even considering the possibility of a theory being wrong is fanaticism in your mind.
Bart, your claims that fossil fuel is given considerable favourable political treatment is a lunatic fantasy, comparable to anything Friends of the Earth / the IPCC have come up with. It’s simply a vastly cheaper technology. Which means if we are forced to switch, we will end up seriously poorer.
And which, amoungst other things, explains why green and other totalitarian advocates want to control it by taxing it one way or another. If the problem was the subsidies you imagine it gets, they would simply urge that the subsidies be scrapped. Noone has done this to my knowledge, for the simple reason there aren’t any subsidies TO scrap.
I have noted your painfully stumbling progress towards some free market ideas, Bart. So, lest there be any doubt, if someone does find some subsidies or preferential regulations for fossil, I am all in favour of scrapping them. Along with any for windfarms, solar panels, etc etc (which we know for certain do exist).
Punksta | April 28, 2012 at 2:36 pm |
And yet somehow I always find myself facing excuses like “well, that’s just a tax expenditure, not a subsidy”, or “but subsidies to ethanol aren’t really carbon subsidies”, or “depletion is just a sort of depreciation, there’s nothing wrong with that”, or “of course the government buys immense amounts of oil to pump into the ground, that’s for our military defense”, multiplying like lawyer’s fees at a loophole convention.
You get rid of all your subsidies, tax dodges, incentives, intrinsic benefits, expropriation under emminent domain, at the federal, state and local level, and start paying a fair price for the CO2 you emit to everyone with a birthright in the air we all were born to breath; make a clean break from the state distortions of fair market capitalism, get rid of the petro-favoring regulations and policies, and tell me again when Americans are paying 40% less taxes and getting around less expensively, and heating and cooling and powering their homes for less, how much subsidy there hadn’t really been.
Bart, your claims that fossil fuel is given considerable favourable political treatment is a lunatic fantasy,
That eg the government buys immense amounts of oil to pump into the ground for strategic defense, is not a subsidy that makes fuel cheap for everyone. There is no general “petro-favoring” regime making fossil fuel appear cheaper than it actually is. (If there was I’d recommend it be scrapped).
“start paying a fair price for the CO2 you emit to everyone with a birthright in the air”
If and when it is actually shown that CO2 is indeed a serious issue, and not as at present largely just a government-funded exercise to boost the role of government, this is something to consider. Note too that it will of necessity also involve government (eg CO2 tax or CO2 permits).
Punksta | April 29, 2012 at 1:46 am |
Google “deadweight loss”; also, perhaps look up the definition of ‘tort’, because you’re confusing torts with goods.
Note too it will of necessity involve government in about the same way as weights and measures involve government, and not necessitate tax by any name.
The weird weather is solar driven: it’s because the Sun’s magnetic field has just split into 4 poles, the first time in 250 years, So the jet streams have moved. In the UK it went South thus giving us cold air mixing with warmer damp air, hence tornadoes and heavy rain. Nothing to do with CO2, just the World preparing for a new Little Ice Age starting in 2015 but taking a further 30-40 years to build to its lowest temperatures.
PS I am now as certain as I can be that the origin of the ‘back radiation’ Perpetual Motion Machine in IPCC climate modelling which turns a convective system into radiation control, is Meteorology which imagines ‘downwelling IR’ is from an energy source.
It’s the lack of formal radiation physics, also lacking in much Physics’ education nowadays [Planck never finished it]. The Met guys imagine that a pyrgeometer measures an energy source. In reality it’s an artefact of the measurement. It’s easy to prove; put two radiometers back to back with no temperature gradient and the difference signal is zero. Take one radiometer away and the shielding at the back of the detector stops the Prevost Exchange signal from the other direction nullifying the signal.
So, these poor saps imagine that there is a real energy source in the sky – the ‘Sky Dragon’. All the climate models need to be reconstructed – sorry folks but that’s science for you! The net result is that the IPCC has exaggerated AGW by at least an order of magnitude.
My nomination for Quote of the Week, from a senior EPA administrator, on his philosophy in regulating oil companies:
“It was kind of like how the Romans used to, you know, conquer villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go in to a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw, and they’d crucify them.”
(Here’s a link to the video. Sorry about linking to the journalistic anti-Christ, Fox News, but that profile in courage Youtube deleted the video when it went viral.)
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/04/26/epa-official-apologizes-for-call-to-crucify-oil-companies-senator-investigating/
Oh, and this bright light of the CAGW community received, by my tally, $603,331 in federal research funding from 2006 to 2009.
Ah the wonders of pristine, objective science.
COMPUTER RECREATIONS
I spent a couple of days studying and writing a program to plot the Mandelbrot set.
Here are my pictures => http://bit.ly/ItrAiF
Extremely beautiful!
Is this science or art?
I used for my study the excellent article written by A. K. Dewdney in Scientific American of August 1985, 27 years ago!
COMPUTER RECREATIONS
By A. K. Dewdney
The Mandelbrot set broods in silent complexity at the center of a vast two-dimensional sheet of numbers called the complex plane. When a certain operation is applied repeatedly to the numbers, the ones outside the set flee to infinity. The numbers inside remain to drift or dance about. Close to the boundary minutely choreographed wanderings mark the onset of the instability. Here is an infinite regress of detail that astonishes us with its variety, its complexity and its strange beauty.
http://bit.ly/czu5SA
Bart makes the claim it’s “religious fanaticism” to say an observed lack of warming suggests the the planet isn’t warming.
The only religious fananticism present here is of course Bart’s.
It’s religious fanaticism to claim that a computer modelling process in which imaginary work is done by creating an imaginary heat source is able reliably to predict that we will all burn from CAGW!
**That is exactly what the IPCC claims.
Mydogsgotnonose | April 29, 2012 at 8:14 am |
Hunger Games better watch out, you could knock it off the top of the fiction list with pure fantasy like that.
Not fiction; the IPCC modelling procedure exaggerates AGW by at least an order of magnitude as proved by this: http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/figure-102.png
CO2-AGW can’t cause cooling of a big part of the ocean. Therefore the fast heating in the 1990s had to be from another process.
Yes, I have worked it out but you have to fix Sagan’s broken aerosol physics first and that means there is no imaginary cooling by polluted clouds hiding imaginary CO2-AGW!
This climate science fraud is coming to a rapid end, thank the Lord above.
Mydogsgotnonose | May 8, 2012 at 10:39 am |
Would that be Lord Lawson, or Lord Monckton?
I think you place false lords before the one truth of logic.
Uh.. you’ve mistook Bart for Mathematics, which points out there is warming, while Bart claims the only observed lack is from lack of observation due willful blindness.
Not the same thing at all.
Girma, One wonders why HadCrut3 data base changed. What did they say? Your posts about not using it makes sense since a lot of work to date is based on existing data. It is ok to update but did they extend the range or use satellite data?
I just noticed this item. http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0402/Global-warming-began-in-oceans-135-years-ago-suggests-study
It suggests that ocean warming began long before AGW. The possibility is not mentioned however.
The headline spins a very sketchy story about a sparse set of measurements made over a century ago (hence the 135 years) that compared to more recent measurements may have been lower..
Which isn’t so surprising. A lot of short term regional measurements appear to say the same, or the opposite, or nothing very much at all from a similar time period.
It just underscores how poor our record keeping has been for so long, compared to what we might have achieved with foresight and curiousity and pursuit of observation for the sake of pure science with no application we could imagine today.
GO FOR A THOUSAND Dr. Judy–it’s all about morality, stupid.
EcoReport
In today’s feature report, Nobel Prize winning scientist Michael Mann speaks about the dirty tactics petroleum-industry front groups use to deny the reality of global warming.
http://www.wfhb.org/news/ecoreport-april-26-2012
Shell Chief: Energy Prices Too Cheap to Change Consumption
Peter Voser told Silicon Valley investors at a dinner held by the Churchill Club: “For certain things energy prices need to go up otherwise the behavior will not change.
“We have hit the cheap oil peak. So the cheap oil is over. It’s going to be more expensive and energy in general is going to be more expensive.”
snip
Factoring a Carbon Price Into Their Business Model
“We are clearly in favour of cap and trade systems,” he said. “We would like to have them globally for a global level playing field. That’s most probably not going to be possible, so we can live for a while with regional or country-specific cap and trade systems.
http://energy.aol.com/2012/03/23/shell-chief-energy-prices-too-cheap-to-change-consumption/
:)
This caught my eyes today:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/the-arbitrariness-of-the-ipcc-feedback-calculations/
The ARBITRARINESS! Probably the weakest side of the AGW argument, not only the feedback calculations (by IPCC).
Now I have to read that. Hmm. Can I sue IPCC if I lose my job?
Lovelock said, “The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.”
Pardon the scepticism, but do I correctly foresee a profitable book on its way from Lovelock? Perhaps even a cold period scare? Perhaps even something like, we were cheated of our warming prediction by a reduction in solar activity …
Howdy! I could have sworn I’ve visited this site before but after browsing through a
few of the articles I realized it’s new to me. Anyways, I’m definitely
delighted I stumbled upon it and I’ll be bookmarking it and checking back regularly!