by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week
Heat waves and politics
The political impact of the U.S. heat waves seems to be summarized by this WaPo headline: Washington’s hell week puts climate change back on the radar, with the following punchline: “it’s a total PR score for the climate change community.”
ThinkProgress provides a summary of what 3 U.S. government officials have to say:
From Jane Lubchenco, Undersecretary of NOAA: “Many people around the world are beginning to appreciate that climate change is under way, that it’s having consequences that are playing out in real time and, in the United States at least, we are seeing more and more examples of extreme weather and extreme climate-related events.” “People’s perceptions in the United States, at least, are in many cases beginning to change as they experience something first-hand that they at least think is directly attributable to climate change.”
From Morris Sherman, Undersecretary of Agriculture for Resources and Natural Environment: “the climate is changing, and these fires are a very strong indicator of that.”
From Janet Napolitano, Secretary Homeland Security: “But when you see one after another after another then you can see, yeah, there’s a pattern here.”
Extreme event attribution debate
Leo Hickman of the Guardian poses the following question to climate scientists [link]:
So, can we now say, or not, that specific extreme weather events are caused, or at least exacerbated, by global warming? Has anything changed in climate scientists’ understanding of the attribution – or “anthropogenic fingerprint” – of such events? Are they now more confident about making such links?
The following scientists provided responses: Kerry Emanuel, Peter Stott, Michael Mann, Clare Goodess, Doug Smith, Michael Oppenheimer, Harold Brooks, Michael Wehner.
Nothing too surprising here, but kudos for interviewing some scientists that typically aren’t in reporters’ contact file. The responses are worth reading. The best response IMO is from Harold Brooks.
The big fires in the western U.S. have also spawned a debate on attribution. Andy Revkin has a superb articles on this entitled Blame-ologists and the Colorado fires. Here is the money quote: “But when there’s a disaster, if the goal is to limit chances of a new one, it’s best to examine causes and drivers of risk without ideological filters.”
Madrid 1995
Last April, we had a thread on Madrid 1995, referring to Part I at Enthusiasm, Skepticism and Science. The final two parts have now been posted. The links to the three parts are:
- Madrid 1995: Was this the tipping point in the corruption of climate science?
- Madrid 1995 and the quest for the mirror in the sky (Part II)
- Madrid 1995 and the quest for the mirror in the sky (Part III)
This series provides a fascinating look at the controversies surrounding the IPCC SAR.
Lonnie Thompson
NYTimes has a lengthy article on Lonnie Thompson entitled A climate scientist battles time and mortality. The big news is that Lonnie recently had a heart transplant (I had heard nothing of his health difficulties). He has been back in the office for a month, I’m glad to hear that he seems to be doing well. He is looking forward to going back into the field, particularly for an unexplored ice cap in China. I was struck by this statement:
Now those scientists are beginning to age out of the field. Many of them say they grapple with the question of how hard to keep pushing themselves. Could one more finding or one more expedition help turn the tide of public awareness?
Lonnie seems set to follow the path of Steve Schneider, who kept travelling and speaking even in the face of serious health problems. As I ponder my own eventual ‘winding down’, I think a far greater impact from senior scientists would be in the area of synthesis: assembling and integrating their data sets for posterity, linking of ideas in textbooks, etc. Avoiding the rigors of field work and international travel probably would extend life span and the integral of the scientist’s contribution. Lonnie could make a huge and lasting impact by archiving his ice core data.
The heatwave afflicting Washington DC and surrounding areas has brought out the absolute worst in the alarmists. Ignore the rest of the world (in the UK our ‘Summer’ has been anything but barbeque) and conflate weather and climate with blatent selectively as it suits them (as I think you told Mr. Borenstein, though he chose to ignore you).
PS: Please do not ‘wind down’ too soon – this blog and your perspectives are unique!
It is as the wise and handsome man foretold . . .
https://i.chzbgr.com/completestore/12/7/6/Rd09jPjov069pWE3HvmSYw2.jpg
The continuing wave of alarmist environmentalism, political correct thinking, and post-normal science simply confirm the secret fear-driven plot by world leaders to save themselves and society from the threat of “nuclear fires” that consumes Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 Aug 1945, respectively.
For sixty-four (~64) years, world leaders worked behind the scenes, out-of-sight to: Avoid nuclear warfare, unite all nations, reduce nationalism and racism at the expense of
(1) Veracity on the energy that sustains our life, and
(2) Civilian control over our respective governments.
Climategate emails and the responses of world leaders exposed this plot to return totalitarian control of mankind in Nov 2009: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
Agree cui.
The cynicism and dishonesty from those who must certainly know better is disgusting.
Shouldn’t we pity those trying to deny the discovery that started the scientific revolution four hundred and sixty years (2012-1543 – 469 yrs) ago when Copernicus found this massive fountain of energy at the center of the Solar System?
http://tinyurl.com/7qx7zxs
1543: The Rise of Reason and Human Dignity
1945: The Return of Dogmatic Totalitarianism
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/
The Rest of the Story:
History teaches that Reality (Truth, God) must be accepted with humility and gratitude
1100 B.C.-1000 B.C. “Who is this that defies Reality (Truth, God)?” David to Goliath [I Samuel 17]
1543 Copernicus discovers a “fountain of energy” at the core of the Solar System.
http://tinyurl.com/7qx7zxs
1633 Tyranny and science collide at the Trial of Galileo
http://tinyurl.com/3tn6wz7
1905 Albert Einstein reports that mass (m) is stored energy (E), E = mc^2. Thus, in the fountain of energy, m => E.
http://tinyurl.com/8hays
1915 Niels Bohr discovers that atoms consist of light-weight, negatively charged (-) electrons orbiting a massive core, the positively charged (+) nucleus, in the same way that lightweight planets like Earth orbit the massive Sun.
http://tinyurl.com/6mhbgas
Aug 1945 Energy (E) released from the cores of uranium and plutonium atoms destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively.
Oct 1945 Frightened world leaders establish the United Nations to try to save themselves and society from the danger of destruction in “nuclear fires.”
Post-1945 Constitutional limits on government and every major field of science had been compromised by the time Climategate emails and documents were released in 2009 – exposing the plot to reestablish world tyranny.
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-105
Weather isn’t climate except when it’s hot somewhere. Especially somewhere crawling with activists, bureaucrats, and politicians.
And yes, I’m enjoying the schadenfreude from watching their electric grid fall apart.
Weelll, the chilly washout of the London 2012 Summer Olympics might gather some attention:
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/331299/It-will-rain-til-September
There is a big storm and people “experience climate change” first hand. It knocks out the power for a week and people experience a world without fossil fuels. But I guess that isn’t what we are debating.
+1 Robin
When we have cold and snow events next winter, like there were in the past two winters, they will not find these cold and snow events as remarkable as the warm events that support their alarmist claims that bring money to the alternate energy that does not help.
The CO2 religion is a construct of carbon traders and their dependent politicians. The likes of UCS, WWF and Greenpeace are funded by the corporates to act as Lefty political cover.
The last thing they want is the truth which is that due to ‘self absorption’, CO2 ceases to trap any more IR above ~200 ppmV in a long optical path at ambient temperature. This is an experimental fact dating back 64 years, used to design furnaces where GHGs in air are the energy transport medium: http://www.tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/agw-an-alternate-look-part-1-details-c.pdf
As for the models, they are based on a fundamental mistake in the heat transfer. http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/hafemeister.cfm
In Eq 17 the authors show the IPCC assumption, lower atmosphere DOWN emissivity = 1, generates excess energy. The assumption of reduced atmospheric emissivity is no solution because you must also reduce the earth’s emissivity and the CAGW scare would end.
To correct the mistake you have to correct the IR physics.The excess energy [333.[1-0.76] = 80 W/m^2] is 50 times claimed AGW; they offset it using other incorrect physics. G L Stephens revealed [Page 5] one such scam: http://www.gewex.org/images/feb2010.pdf
It’s the use of double real low level cloud optical depth. No IPCC climate model can predict climate.
For those who need a splash of cold water to douse their AGW fever dreams, I urge you to look at the current map of global temperatures.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/
more direct link
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/07/the-folly-of-blaming-the-eastern-u-s-heat-wave-on-global-warming/#more-66965
For those who’d like to see more accurate representation of what the global climate has been doing over the past few months (in terms of tropospheric temperatures) this a more accurate perspective than that shown by pokerguy (whose graph is severely cherry picked by being down to a specific hour on a specific day!) as opposed to being something that shows persistence, which this graph does, and is a more honest representation of recent trends:
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/maproom/.Global/.Atm_Temp/Persistence.html
I think you’ll quickly see how dangerous the kinds of cherries that pokerguy is feeding can be to one’s perception of what is really going on. I think pokerguy is eating psychotropic cherries and they are altering his ability to accurately perceive things.
R. Gates
Thanks for posting your “cherry-picked” chart to compete with that of Poker Guy.
Max
R Gates,
That graph shows that most of the world was warmer over the past three months than the 1961-1990 average. Is that controversial? I thought it was generally accepted (including by ‘sceptics’) that there was a warming period from about 1965 until 1998.
On the hypothesis this warming trend was caused entirely or mostly by anthropogenic greenhouse gasses, it should have continued at an accelerated rate after 1998. That is what the models predicted. But it hasn’t, has it? The temperate has pretty much flat-lined for the last decade and a bit.
So by my reckoning the hypothesis that *all* or *most* late 20th C warming was due to AGGs has been refuted by observation. The hypothesis that *some* of it was caused by AGGs has not been refuted.
A rational scientific approach would involving accepting the observed data and trying to determine *how much* warming was due to AGGs, and what the other drivers of climate are. That would inevitably mean revising down estimates of future warming that were based on the assumption that *all* late 20th C warming was due to AGGs. But that has not happened either. That is what leads me to believe that the IPCC and the “consensus” on AGW are no longer involved in rational science. (What they are involved in is another matter).
If I have got this wrong please explain. The reason I lurk on this blog (and occasionally post) is just because this is where the signal to noise ratio seems to be highest.
it should have continued at the same rate after 1998. It has
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/plot/uah/to:1999/trend/plot/uah/trend
I like it:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1965/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1965/to:1998/trend:1965/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1965/to:1999/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1999/trend
Now, I would not try to pass that off as a valid statistical analysis. My point is that just by eyeballing the data it is clear that something changed around 1998/9. Who is in “denial” now?
Weather brings to mind climate. Ok, sounds reasonable. One man’s fair weather can be another man’s fearful climate so it is impossible to separate the two or eliminate reasoned thought and superstition about either.
Our dilemma is that modern government is much like old religeon that is proactively engaged in fanning of superstition as a means to greater power over the productive by appealing to the fears of the ignorant. You don’t need a weatherman to understand the politics of climate change.
Archiving is important, and it seems like the Thompsons are in fact archiving their data. Not only for their own use, but it is publicly available on their institute’s website: http://bprc.osu.edu/Icecore/
It took about 15 seconds for me to find that link and download a random delta-18O file from a Peruvian glacier.
This comment makes no sense to me. Does anyone really believe the existence of some archived data from one author means “the Thomspons are in fact archiving their data”? Has anyone ever claimed Lonnie Thompson never archived any data?
http://climateaudit.org/2012/07/01/lonnie-and-ellen-serial-non-archivers/
Judith Curry, I’m well aware of that thread. In it, Steve McIntyre refers to non-archiving, by both Thompsons. However, he never claims Lonnie Thompson has never archived data. In fact, McIntyre never even claimed Mrs. Thompson has never archived data. He said she hasn’t archived “any data from the ‘nine expeditions to Antarctica and six to Greenland’.” If one could find data she had archived from say, Peru, that wouldn’t dispute his claim that she hasn’t archived data from Antarctica or Greenland.
It’s a common tactic to exaggerate an opponent’s arguments, creating a strawman which can be rebutted when the actual arguments cannot. That appears to be what brian has done, perhaps unintentionally.
The public could interpret this:
Lonnie could make a huge and lasting impact by archiving his ice core data. …
to mean he does not archive his ice-core data.
A strawman can itch both ways.
JCH, I agree Curry’s statement wasn’t as clear as it could (and perhaps should) have been. However, you’re talking about an issue of clarity. There’s a huge difference between something being unclear and something being flat-out misrepresentative as brian’s comment was. Moreover, anyone following Curry’s link would almost immediately see:
It’s hard to imagine how Mrs. Thompson could be a worse offender than her husband when it comes to non-archiving unless Mr. Thompson has archived some data.
I wanted to (a) agree with JC that archiving data is important and (b) that the Thompsons are doing so. I visited that website that I found very easily and was able to grab some data. There is a link to the PARCA data that is the focus of that climate audit post that JC links to, but that link is broken right now. There is other Greenland data available though. These are the data from the Thompsons’ expeditions, so I wanted to defend them to the extent that both climate audit and JC seem to suggest they are negligent in their data archiving. I was also able to easily find some of the data from various parts of PARCA, despite the climate audit post’s assertions, (e.g., http://zero.eng.ucmerced.edu/rcbales/PARCA/).
Here I’d like to make the point that archiving data does not mean making it available to the general public. Doing so goes well beyond what is typical in either the geosciences or science in general. The fact that the Thompsons are posting some of their data sets on a public web site is at least some indication that their data is being properly handled, and hopefully is able to be handed off to the next generation of investigators with minimal overhead.
‘Here I’d like to make the point that archiving data does not mean making it available to the general public’
Why ever not?
We pay for the stuff. We should have access to it.
If those we employ to gather it on our behalf can’t be arsed to put it in a form that we can easily find and use, I see no obligation for us to keep sending their paycheques.
Without full disclosure it there is no guarantee that any academic researcher is any more than a fraudster,..of whom there appear to be an increasing amount.
brian’s point (b) is untrue, as explained in my earlier response to him. He’s done nothing to address what I’ve said, and his current comment holds no more merit than his original. In fact, it is even worse as it says:
Both of these sentences are false. The “other Greenland data” he claims is available is really just four broken links. Moreover, that data is listed as being from Mr. Thompson, not Mrs. Thompson. Steve McIntyre’s comments were regarding expeditions by Mrs. Thompson to Greenland and Antarctica, so it would mean nothing if Mr. Thompson actually had archived data from one of his expeditions to Greenland (and brian’s supposed evidence of such doesn’t exist).
To put it bluntly, it appears brian is just making things up.
I need to make a correction to my above comment. The Greenland data brian referred to is available, just not from the site he linked to. If one goes to the NOAA website for that location, data is available. However, if you look at the Readme file for that data, you’ll see the data was transcribed and archived by a third party, not by either Thompson. This is what Steve McIntyre was referring to in his article when he said:
So yes, this was an expedition Mrs. Thomspon was involved with (something brian never bothered to demonstrate), and yes, data from it was made available. No, that does not mean Mrs. Thompson has archived any data.
“It took about 15 seconds for me to find that link and download a random delta-18O file from a Peruvian glacier.”
Nice. It would take you considerably longer to actually read the papers in question and find the actual ice cores that folks have been asking for for over 9 years.
Imagine you asked Enron for a list of their expenses and political contributions to republicans.They say no. Then, some stupid clueless moron comes along and finds a single dinner receipt posted and finds a
contribution to a democrat and declares: ” It looks like Enron is
providing data”
Probably, as with the BEST data, “skeptics” confronted with more confirmatory analysis would claim the data was corrupted (somehow) at the point of collection.
So rather than play along with what is doubtless an endless set of demands, let’s ask the “skeptics” to fund, conduct, and publish their own completely independent ice core analysis.
It’s interesting you would say that as when copies of unarchived data have been found, they’ve universally supported skepticism for paleoclimatology. Apparently you have no knowledge of the facts of the situation!
Since I was one of the people making demands of CRU and GISS and NOAA I can tell you that:
1. the demands were not endless, they were specific.
2. I knew what to ask for because I read the papers.
3. When the data and code was turned over, I began my own unfunded work.
4. The first publication took a while and thankfully NCDC helped
5. More work is in the pipeline.
6. Dont be an idiot.
The data thompsen collected was funded by tax dollars. I paid for the data.
I dont ask that anybody pay me for the work I do and no one does.
If Lonnie and ellen dont archive their data then the papers and the science that relies on that data is worthless. paleo work is too important to sensitivity studies to allow this kind of sub standard practice.
“Dont be an idiot.”
Probably better not to include grammatical errors when attempting to insult someone else’s intelligence. You see how that rebounded on you?
What peer-reviewed science have you published as a result of your demands for free access to other people’s work? Where is the societal benefit? In a free market system, shouldn’t you pay for taking the work of others for your own purposes?
That’s what’s called a scattergun approach to argument, Robert. Which bits were you hoping would stick?
Let’s just stop paying them for any work until they do .
Problem solved.
A hungry researcher – probably unemployable elsewhere – will have a string incentive to pony up data..or admit that the dog ate it – if they ever had it in the first place..
Please do. Refuse to pay your taxes. I’ll send you a postcard while you’re serving your time. :)
It might calm the markets if government-collected economic data (eg: GDP) was only distributed on a ‘need to know’ basis. :-)
@Robert
So rather than play along with what is doubtless an endless set of demands, let’s ask the “skeptics” to fund, conduct, and publish their own completely independent ice core analysis.
What a good argument for continuing to hide publicly funded data from those who refuse to swallow CAGW whole.
Robert,
“So rather than play along with what is doubtless an endless set of demands…..”
This would be those unreasonable demands to archive data, which would only open the way for one’s work to be checked, and possibly challenge the settled orthodoxy.
“…let’s ask the “skeptics” to fund, conduct, and publish their own completely independent ice core analysis.”
Yes, having the public purse almost entirely dedicated to funding the alarmist orthodoxy only, and requiring other views to be privately funded, is the tried and trusted vital ingredient of the settled climate orthodoxy.
Robert > let’s ask the “skeptics” to fund, conduct, and publish their own completely independent ice core analysis.
These ice core analyses were presumably publicly funded. So why should skeptics have to fund their own work, but believers be funded by government ?
And what is the objection to publicly-funded data and work being made publicly available? The only genuine explanation seems to be that it might expose the publicly-funded ‘Consensus’ to a balanced examination.
It would probably be helpful if there was some sort of list of just what hasn’t been archived. I don’t think that information has ever been collected in a single spot before.
In addition to the 15 expeditions by Mrs. Thompson mentioned in the linked CA article, from Mr Thompson we have (off the top of my head): Bona-Churchill, Dasuopu, Dunde, Guliya and Quelccaya records which haven’t been archived. I know there are quite a few more, but that gives a taste of the problem. It’s even worse when one realizes that despite there being no archived data, there are multiple, inconsistent records for several of those sites, and nobody could possibly hope to know how they came about.
Why not a system of refusing to publish unless data is already archived, and automatically retracting all already-existing papers for which the data has not been archived ?
Because that’s not something a random person who was interested in the subject could do. Desirable or not, your suggestion would require the support of thousands of people. My suggestion could be done by a single person. I prefer to keep my suggestions practical.
Incidentally, I don’t approve of retracting older papers simply because data for them has not been archived. Tacking on some warning, I’d be fine with, but it seems inappropriate to punish people for meeting the standards they were expected to meet at the time.
This is a “moving the goalposts” logical fallacy. The topic was just about the Thompsons’ archival efforts, not about doing new science with the data or even about understanding the data.
The analogy to Enron is also faulty to a degree, and I’m not even referring to the ad hominem slur. I think you are suggesting that like account expenses and political contributions, the data collected by the Thompsons should be perfectly accounted for in some ledger somewhere, available in the case of an audit or other investigation. There are guidelines for how to document and archive data, but they are not nearly as stringent as you imply. They have no obligation to store those ice cores forever and make them available for inspection by any interested party. I suspect that they have limited storage capabilities, for example, and the money that paid for collection of many of those cores has long since run out. If that is the case and they continue to store those cores with money not explicitly allocated for the preservation of ice core archives (they may well have some such funding though), they’d be doing it on the back of more current funding, and not because of some explicit obligation to archive the cores.
Brian, that’s a logical fallacy. If 99% of the cost of a project is getting the data, there is no excuse for not keeping it (and publishing is one form of keeping).
How about “We spent $24 billion dollars on Apollo, but we had ‘limited storage capabilities’ so we had to throw the moon rocks away”?
Brian is exactly right and most of you skeptics have never won a research contract as a principal investigator. The proposal usually involves finding something new or innovative and the objectives are to demonstrate that. If it is not in the contract to maintain the research work for years, there is no way for the funding agency to force that on the researchers. If the agency wants to keep track of the data, they may have that legal right, yet they will also need to find the money for it. What is happening now is that some agencies are starting to fund curation contracts, where the idea is to encourage semantic organization of the data so that it can be maintained over the years. The curator is not necessarily pulled from the same teams as the R&D innovators.
This seems blindingly obvious to me, but then again, I have been through this before.
@webbie
You make it sound like this is all a big deal. Sticking a few gigs of data on a public server is not the same as maintaining the entire Library of Congress.
But even this level of good housekeeping seems to be beyond the abilities of the average academic. Which raises a big question mark about their abilities in general.
‘
Re: failure to archive
If it is not in the contract to maintain the research work for years, there is no way for the funding agency to force that on the researchers.
So the real problem is the funding agencies, which is where heads really need to roll. Scientists we sort of expect to be irresponsible, but why can we not have grown-ups in charge of the money, and insisting on archiving and “curation” of the data as a precondition ?
I seriously do not believe that the whole world of science grants is so full of morons that these guys get grants for doing ‘work’ that they never have to show to anybody at all.
That they get sent off to have a trip to a exotic place with no more to show for it than an obligation to send a postcard from Hawaii and write a paper about their holiday..and that they can then just chuck away any data they collected with nobody caring or noticing for twenty-odd years.
I could with do some of that!. Since UK’s having the coldest and wettest summer for at least fifty years, I’m sure I could find a nice place warm and agreeable place to go. And since I won’t need to prove I ever did any work, I’ll start writing the paper now while I think of the suitably exotic location.]
But if this is indeed the ‘academic convention’, then it is long overdue a very thorough reform, with some proper checks and balances put in.
Latimer – absolutely agree.
As for nice freebee holidays to escape this rain, you could become a politician and go on nice ‘fact-finding’ trips to Curacao, or become an eco-activist and join the 50,000 permanent floating global mob who wined and dined in Rio. :-)
That article includes a quote of the sort that should never get printed, but always does:
Quotes like this are deceptive. “[T]his long hot US summer” is consistent with a planet without global warming. Do you see that get said or quoted? No. Instead, a true, but meaningless statement gets promoted in a way which implies it says far more than it actually does.
“This long, hot summer”? It’s only been summer for 2-1/2 weeks. And it’s not going to be any longer than any other summer. It’s going to be exactly 91.3 days long, just like all summers.
I think too many journalists are frustrated novelists.
I don’t take issue with including “long” in that quote. Why should I care if someone takes a bit of license with the words they use when everyone knows what they mean? Nobody would take that quote to mean the length of the defined summer has changed. That would be silly.
P.E., what’s wrong with saying something like “summer started early”? What’s wrong with saying something is “long” because it feels long, even if it technically is the same length as ever? Do you really think it’s worth harping on people for saying things everyone understands just because they’re technically untrue?
(Incidentally, the journalist was quoting someone. He didn’t write that.)
I’ll tell you what’s wrong with saying “summer started early”. It sure didn’t where I live. We’re finally starting to get out of the cold gray rain as of the 4th, ans into a summer pattern. This is like the 3rd day of “summer” here.
Point being that it’s all local, and as Pokerguy pointed out, looking at the world in toto, it’s still on the cool side. A hot spell in the political nerve enter does not global warming make.
But I’ll remember all the wild claims being made now next time there’s a blizzard, and the same usual suspects go back to “weather isn’t climate”.
But I’ll remember all the wild claims being made now next time there’s a bizzard, and the same usual suspects go back to “weather isn’t climate”.
No they won’t. They’ll say that the blizzard was caused by global warming. Seriously.
The meaningless mealy-mouthed phrase “is consistent with” should be banned.
NB: This comment is consistent with the existence of a benevolent diety.
I don’t think it should be banned. It should immediately raise red flags, but sometimes, it is an appropriate comment. The main problem with it is people only list one thing it “is consistent with,” implying that consistency is meaningful even when it isn’t. On the other hand, one could say something like, “The observed temperature changes are consistent with sensitivity values A and B, but not C.” That could be a meaningful and useful statement to make.
The problem isn’t that things like “is consistent with” get said. The problem is people fall for stupid tricks. You’re not going to stop that by banning phrases/words.
Brandon, fair enough. But as everyone knows AGW “is consistent with” hot summers, cool summers, hot winters, cold winters, wet weather, dry weather, more hurricanes, fewer hurricanes, ad nauseam ad infinitum.
All of those would also be consistent with global cooling. We just need to convince journalists to start quoting people who point that out!
Like that’d ever happen.
Andrew Weaver used the “consistent with” term a lot when he had enough credibility to be on local radio. I’m a lot better since I started on blood pressure meds.
Continually finding data this is generally consistent with a theory is extremely important, and each time it is found, effort should be doubled to look for data the refutes a given position. The problem is that many AGW skeptics misrepresent the actual AGW physical effect, and thus, it is easy to find data that seems to contradict it, when often times it is actually reinforcing the basic tenets of AGW (such as bigger snowfalls in the winter for example).
I can’t imagine you actually believe what you just wrote. How could it possibly be “extremely important” to find “data [that] is generally consistent with a theory” if that data is also consistent with every other theory?
I mean, that is what was being discussed.
Brandon, I meant what I said exactly. Note, I did NOT say “looking for data consistent with a theory is extremely important” as that would lead to confirmation bias. I said finding data consistent with a theory is important but the focus should be on the looking to find data that is not consistent with the theory. This is the heart of the skeptical process and the heart of scientific advancement. It s always finding the exceptions that move the science forward, not trying to look for data consistent with the expected rule.
Over and over again I find that unseasonably warm weather is blamed on climate change and unseasonably cool weather is not. This is consistent with cherry picking.
ROFLMA@U
I suspect if you at down and thought about it, you’d find you didn’t mean exactly what you said. I find it hard to believe anyone would think it mattered, much less was extremely important, to find data which is consistent with a theory if that data is not also inconsistent with some other theory.
For example, practically every measurement is consistent with global warming. If I weigh a rock, the data I get is consistent with global warming. Does it have any relevance to global warming? No, it isn’t inconsistent with any competing theories, so it has no relevance. But it is consistent!
For a more realistic example, if we take temperature measurements in an area for a couple decades and find that area is cooling, that is consistent with global warming as global warming doesn’t require every area get warmer. Does the fact those measurements are consistent with global warming make them “extremely important,” even though they don’t do anything to support the idea of global warming?
It doesn’t matter if data is consistent with a theory. What matters is if that data is inconsistent with some other theory. I don’t see any way to sensibly disagree with that, but… maybe you have an explanation?
Describing any weather event as consistent with CAGW is a meaningless phrase. That’s like saying a single role of a die is consistent with any prediction of a long term trend. When is that not true?
In the sentence “The observed temperature changes are consistent with sensitivity values A and B, but not C,” it is the “but not C” that is meaningful, not the rest. Are there any short term temperature changes that are inconsistent with any sensitivity value?
In the context of short term weather phenomena, there is nothing that is not consistent with CAGW. Shoot, even an abrupt ice age is shown to be the product of global warming in the movie Day After Tomorrow.
If a dice is perfectly balanced…that is, no side is favored to come up, then the long-term trend (i.e. each side will come up 1/6 of the time) is consistent with the dice being perfectly balanced. So too, if a weather pattern begins to occur more frequently than it has over a long-term time frame, then we can say a system is changing or had become unbalanced. In the case of the Earth’s energy system, continually adding more greenhouse gases will cause the system to become unbalanced such that more energy is retained by the system than leaves back to space. The slow spiral down of Arctic sea ice, more frequent extreme weather events, and warmer oceans are all consistent with this imbalance, just as if the number 6 starts coming up more frequently on a dice than 1/6 of the time. If this happens over a long-term, we can conclude the dice is no longer perfectly balanced.
GaryM, despite what you say, both parts of that sentence are meaningful. In fact, a more meaningful sentence wouldn’t use A, B and C. Instead, it’d give a range of values, such as, “Observations are consistent with a value for x such that A>x>B.” A sentence like that would say equally as much whether you discussed what values would be “consistent” or “Inconsistent” (as the two are simple inverses of each other).
Folks who tear themselves away from “he says/she says” gotcha-games have noticed that Neven’s Arctic Sea Ice blog is headlining in PIOMAS July 2012 the striking fact that the the 2012 Arctic sea-ice volumes anomaly “is now almost 4 standard deviations below the already steep 1979-2012 linear trend.”
Does this whacking big 2012 melt anomaly presage the “acceleration of the rate of sea level rise this decade” that James Hansen and his colleagues predicted in “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications” (2011, arXiv:1105.1140v2 [physics.ao-ph])? The smart bet is “yes.”
Politics and personalities aside, it is now reasonable that a marked acceleration of sea-level rise is every climate scientist’s “Plan A”, and every rational skeptic’s “Plan B” … and every polemic denialist’s greatest nightmare! :) :) :)
———————
Prediction: As ice-melt accelerates, polemic denialism will focus more on personal smears and conspiracy theories, less on science. Why? Because other options for polemic denialism are closing. Meanwhile, mainstream climate science is moving toward a data-driven consensus accommodation with rational skepticism, namely, that AGW is real, serious, and accelerating.
Well said fan. As data makes the honest AGW skeptical case less tenable, then the honest skeptics will either have to switch over to be honest skeptic warmists (my personal position), or become a true non-believing denialists. It will become harder and harder to maintain an honest position of skeptic but neutral on the issue of AGW. Some would say we’re well past that, but I try to give a great deal of latitude for each honest skeptics level of there being enough proof for accepting something as provisionally true.
No change in the climate pattern since 1850 => http://bit.ly/Aei4Nd
Where is your scepticism?
Funny that your graph actually proves exactly what you think it does not. It is showing the actual variance in temperature over the period is greatest toward then end, thus, not only is it warming over the period, but warming faster at the end– warming accelerated at the end of the 20th century.
My skepticism would lead me to be skeptical about what you think you may or may not be proving.
R. Gates
Sorry, but you apparently see something in Girma’s graph that is not there.
The warming cycles of the early and late 20th century are “statistically indistinguishable” (as Phil Jones put it), despite the fact that there was very little increase in CO2 over the earlier period.
There was no “acceleration at the end of the 20th century” as you claim..
Max
Yes definitely, R. Gates. And Homer Simpson describes denialism better than either of us:
Here Homer SImpson has aptly summed-up the practical difference between rational skepticism and climate-change denialism. :) :) :)
Sorry to interrupt this mutual admiration society!
Some points:
(1) ice mass is modelled, not measured.
(2) Measured Arctic ice extent a few months ago was in the ‘normal’ area. Now it’s gone below. All that means is that sceptics and alarmists alike should beware of getting het up over a few months data.
(3) We measure everything from 1979, because of satellites. 1979 risks being confused with some sort of baseline that has existed permanently during the Holocene. Can anyone figure out the Arctic ice volume in the 1940s, when newspaper articles warned that the Arctic would soon be ‘ice free’? Or the 1890s? Or the MWP?
(4) AGW is assumed to be the primary cause of Arctic ice decrease. No local effects may be inferred. So why not the Antarctic? “It’s the ozone hole” doesn’t quite cut it for me.
cui bono,
It is the long term data that is most important to drawing any conclusion of about Arctic Sea ice, thus, you are right, the fact that the level briefly gets back to the normal range for a month or two makes absolutely no difference. Thus, it is a slow spiral down to the ice free summer Arctic condition that is the cornerstone of what AGW will bring about. In this regard, the best chart to see this “death spiral” is this long-term chart:
http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/sia_2.png
This goes well beyond any short-term ups or downs and shows decadal trends quite clearly. The Arctic is spiraling down to an ice-free summer Arctic sometime later this century. The only real interesting discussion is related to whether this is a natural cycle or is mainly anthropogenic in origin.
Wow, a spiraling down since 1979! Alert the media, call out the national guard, save the women and children first!!
You don’t know how absurd you sound, do you?
When Cui points out we don’t even know ice extent from as recent as 1940 you counter with a diagram from 1979 to present?
Wow.
I know its inconvenient for AGW skeptics, but we have a pretty good idea of what Arctic sea ice was doing for the past several hundred years…certainly well before the 1940s. Yes, the satellite data is by far the best, but other proxy and observational data before the satellite era is far from being poor. See for example:
http://bprc.osu.edu/geo/publications/polyak_etal_seaice_QSR_10.pdf
And lots of great references to other research given in this report at well.
Generally, we’re probably at the lowest Arctic sea ice summer extents in at least the past 1400 to 2000 years.
“but we have a pretty good idea of what Arctic sea ice was doing for the past several hundred years…certainly”
Wow, for SEVERAL HUNDRED whole years!
And a “pretty good” idea, not just a “good idea”.
Does your skepticism know no bounds?
Re: “The Arctic is spiraling down to an ice-free summer . . .”
Then perhaps you could explain why the Antarctic ice is INCREASING and why the global ice remains about constant. Furthermore, why has the global temperature been declining since the Holocene Climatic optimum about 8000 years ago and what will happen as we approach the next expected glaciation in 1500 years?
The Skeptical Warmist (aka R. Gates) | July 7, 2012 at 5:16 pm | linked to…
http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/sia_2.png
That’s a useful way to visualize annual cycles.
Surprising we haven’t seen more of that.
By switching the # at the end of the link, found this:
http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/sia_5.png
Thanks for the link.
Ma Nature is shouting …
… denialists ain’t listening.
A trend since 1979. Color me unimpressed.
unimpressed that the car is heading at full speed towards a wall because you can’t see behind you
A fan of *MORE* discourse
“is now almost 4 standard deviations below the already steep 1979-2012 linear trend.”
That is a false argument because the period you choose “1979-2012” is just the warming phase of the cycle where the Arctic Sea Ice volume uniformly decreased. The proper way is to compare with the average for the period 1940-2000.
That is a best example of cheery picking. It is like saying it is warm in summer.
Girma, the US Navy has had nuclear submarines patrolling under that ice for the past 57 years.
And guess what, Girma?
The US Navy has abandoned climate-change skepticism.
Admiral David Titley’s explanation is well-worth watching, eh?
@John Sidles
I can’t speak for everyone but I’m watching global satellite temperature measurements of the lower troposphere. I understand why you might want to focus on other things since the actual mean temperature trend of the earth is pretty far below the IPCC-blessed prediction under the business-as-usual CO2 emission scenario. According to that prediction the trend is below the best case emission reduction scenario. Maybe the banning of incandescent light bulbs was enough to halt global warming. ;-)
I’ll never understand this sort of making things about personalities.
Look, here’s what woodfortrees says about how the temperature trend has gone the past 20 years (equal to the IPCC 0.2C/decade prediction) http://all-too-common-dissent.blogspot.ca/2008/03/david-scott-springer-tough-guy-for.html
Note that the GISTEMP-LOTI has arrived at the predicted trend a dozen years earlier than predicted. When we watch HadCRUT3, and the various other plotters like UAH, we see they’re generally only about half that far behind GIS on methodology and conclusions.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1992/trend
Doh. Copy/paste error. My bad.
fan writes, evidently not so interested in more discourse after all:Prediction: “As ice-melt accelerates, polemic denialism will focus more on personal smears and conspiracy theories, less on science. Why? Because other options for polemic denialism are closing. Meanwhile, mainstream climate science is moving toward a data-driven consensus accommodation with rational skepticism, namely, that AGW is real, serious, and accelerating.”
Funny, that AGw is accelerating in the absence of any actual warming in well nigh 15 years now. A nice trick, that.
“Life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it up with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his ideas are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality.”
Jose Ortega y Gasset
Except of course that the Earth has continued to warm over the past 15 years and your assertion that is has not indicates something more about you than about the facts. FR 2011 and numerous other studies have found this underlying warming, and the data from ocean heat content confirms the continued warming of the planet.
Some facts! They merely adjusted the data until it fit their preconceptions. The F in FR2011 is blogger Tamino (ha ha!). And they even missed out aerosols as an explanation of the “pause” in warming. Now that is a contradiction with other popular explanations (notably Hansen). Fred Moolten here seemed quite content that aerosol cooling was the one true explanation to the extent of calling that a fact too. Touted “facts” are too often contradictory post-hoc guesswork in reality.
The Earth has not “continued to warm”; the FR2011 assertion is that the natural cooling is masking the warming. This of course is the natural variation that was supposed to have been now totally dominated by human influence according to the IPCC.
As for “underlying” or “missing” warming that is so hard to find. Someone should have told them if isn’t obvious then it likely isn’t anything to worry about! The ocean heat content guesswork merely amounts to pretending that an unphysical mechanism is hiding the postulated warmth in the murky depths.
Believe in thermageddon and act the self-righteous blowhard all you like but don’t p on our shoes and tell us it’s raining. When you cannot admit there really is a warming pause and there really is a missing heat problem then this says only that you deny the real facts.
Only anthropogenic aerosols are missing from FR 2011, but then again, they only explained 70 to 80% of the natural variance. If the effects of the increase in anthropogenic aerosols (mainly from Chinese coal burning and other fossil fuel increases) are included, this gap could easily close to 90 or 95%. Ironically, the calculation for this human aerosol component might actually come from an unlikely ally in Ross McKitrick, who has shown an association between socioeconomic factors and regional variations in climate change over land with coal use being one of the the socioeconomic factors he uses. McKitrick, Foster, and Rahmstorf should team up on the next paper! :))
LOL I can see Spencer, Lindzen and Dessler, The Impact of Equatorial Cloud Formation on Ocean Heat Content, The Water Vapor Thermostat :)
capt,
Don’t forget to add Willis Eschenbach to that group. If you mention the word clouds and thermostat, his membership in this climate dream team would be essential to its success!
I’m sorry, Gates, but I choose to place my trust in global satellite coverage of lower troposphere temperature. It’s the only truly global 24/7 measure of the air temperature that we have. That shows no statistical warming over the past 15 years. Who’s the denier now?
These charts are interesting. I don’t deny these. Does gates?
All these are for the past 180 months (15 years).
CO2 level at Mauna Loa shows a straight line march upward of 8% from 365ppm to 395ppm.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/last:180
Global mean sea surface temperature trended down in the meantime by 0.025C.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/last:180/plot/hadsst2gl/last:180/trend
While global land temperature trended up by 0.2c
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah-land/last:180/plot/uah-land/last:180/trend
Nothern hemisphere alone sea surface temperature trended up 0.5c while southern hemisphere trended down by 0.1c
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2nh/last:180/plot/hadsst2nh/last:180/trend
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2sh/last:180/plot/hadsst2sh/last:180/trend
Here’s the kicker that Gates appears to flat out deny. CRUTEM3 variance adjusted land global mean is a flat line:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem3vgl/last:180/plot/crutem3vgl/last:180/trend
correction: northern sea surface temperature trended up by 0.05c not 0.5c
How much pencil whipped duplicity are we expected to ignore?
Here is CRUTEM3v vs. CRUTEM4v global land-only mean temperature:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem3vgl/from:1996/to:2011/plot/crutem3vgl/from:1996/to:2011/trend/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1996/to:2011/plot/crutem4vgl/from:1996/to:2011/trend
I had to back up to the 15 year period from 1996-2011 because CRUTEM4v appears to have not been updated since 2011. CRUTEM4v is ostensibly the new and improved version that will supercede CRUTEM3v. LOL
Dave Springer asks a cogent question:
@sidles
Maybe the owner of wood for trees is good at making interactive graphs of databases but sucks at interpreting them. That would be my guess.
The fun part is you can look at the graphs I constructed and which databases are used and arrive at your own conclusions. Let me know what you specifically disagree with on the charts otherwise I think they speak for themselves.
Dave, a huge part of the fun is that SpongeBob’s “Endless Summer” AGW skit called it right, years before WoodForTrees’ Paul Clark, and years before NASA’s James Hansen, and before this year’s massive heat-waves and collapse of Arctic ice-volume … heck, even before Intrade’s Arctic ice-melt markets!
Not to mention, SpongeBobs’ richly-structured and immensely popular story (23 million views!) naturally merges the economic insights of Friedrich Hayeck, with the sociological insights of Garrett Hardin, and even some of the general `cussedness (and good nature!) of that genuine American individual Wendell Berry.
How do yah suppose the little yellow guy does it? Is he smarter than we think, do yah suppose? :) :) :)
aka Gates
Rising ocean temperatures may well mean the earth is warming overall, but the atmosphere is not (anymore). Which means the (non-reducing) atmosphere-ocean temperature gradient is not what is driving up ocean heat. Must be something else. Any ideas?
Except the data show both atmospheric and ocean warming.
@robert
Actually in the past 15 years there’s been cooling trend of ocean surface (which includes air temp at the ocean surface).
I’m not making it up. This is straight from the official data. Hadley Sea Surface Temperature Version II global :
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst2gl/last:180/plot/hadsst2gl/last:180/trend
Land temperature up in NH and down in SH.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/crutem3vnh/last:180/plot/crutem3vnh/last:180/trend/plot/crutem3vsh/last:180/plot/crutem3vsh/last:180/trend
The northern and southern oceans one warmed and one cooled too except SH cooled more than NH warmed to give a global cooling trend.
For well mixed CO2 this doesn’t really jibe. This is more indicative of some forcing agent generated in the NH which doesn’t mix down into the southern hemisphere. A couple of things come to mind – urban heat islands and black soot are both local and greater in northern hemisphere.
Of course don’t let any facts I give you to get in the way of your beliefs…
Robert : “the data show both atmospheric and ocean warming.”
Not in recent history. Oceans are warming, atmosphere is not. Which still means overall warming (given the much larger thermal capacity of the oceans relative to the atmosphere). But means the ocean warming is due to something other than atmospheric warming (thus ruling out the CO2/greenhouse effect).
Things I found interesting this week included the continued Arctic sea ice free-fall: http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2012/07/piomas-july-2012.html.
Nino 3.4 officially crossed into El Nino territory, climbing to +0.6C. All of NOAA’s models are predicting a El Nino event beginning later this year: http://theidiottracker.blogspot.com/2012/07/brace-yourselves-el-nino-is-coming.html.
Colorado has seen over 600 homes burn in the last several weeks. It’s shaping up to be an interesting fire season. I noticed on another thread that some deniers wanted to blame a lack of logging for the raging fires, which I think underscores how potent the image of people’s home being consumed by fire is. If people associate that with global warming (as they should, because hotter temperatures are expected to result in more and worse forest fires) it may prove an effective “poster child” for global warming.
Crop failures cause by excessive heat are another very clear, visible consequence of heating the planet, and there may be an example in the offing with America’s corn crop: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/us/for-midwest-corn-crop-the-pressure-rises-like-the-heat.html?_r=1&ref=agriculture.
For the moment food prices remain below their all-time high from 2/11, but will it last? http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/05/good-news-on-food-prices-while-it-lasts/
This argumentation is nonsense. 0.6 degrees a century, none of which was in the last 15 years is the putative global warming. Yet you argue global warming = hotter temperatures = more forest fires? Then argue global warming = hotter temperatures = more crop failures.
Obviously with such small overall warming, excessive heat in one place must mean excessive cold in another; which is in fact what is happening where I am. Local highs or lows are just what mother nature does.
Only zealots use such backward reasoning. If you want to argue extreme events are caused by global warming you need to have an actual, plausible theory of how it manages to do it. So far that is totally lacking.
“If you want to argue extreme events are caused by global warming you need to have an actual, plausible theory of how it manages to do it. So far that is totally lacking.”
Only for those that struggle with the concept that hotter temperatures imply hotter temperatures.
Aside from the somewhat obvious example of heat waves, some “extreme events” will be more common and/or more severe in a warmer world, and some will not. There is an extensive scientific literature on the subject, i.e., what is “totally lacking” is not the theory, but your own knowledge of the subject.
For those who can grasp the idea that a hotter world = a hotter world, here is a slightly more difficult, but still very basic example:
Rising sea levels imply either moving people and infrastructure inland, or more severe floods/tsunamis (because the water is starting from a higher point relative to people and their civilization.)
Robert | July 8, 2012 at 10:44 am |
It may help to use the metaphor of the hotter engine running faster, or the more nearly equivalent the faster engine runs hotter but not smoother.
Thermomechanically, climate systems convert that heat energy to kinetic energy, which in turn moves masses of air and water or blocks and shifts flows and circulations, changes pressures and moves things to new altitudes and depths, produces changes in composition due vaporization rates and condensation points, remolds albedo both surface and cloud..
Bart,
When you get into dynamics of wind and water, my sense is that the complex reality may outstrip the power of metaphor. For example, hurricanes may become not become more frequent, but will on average be more powerful, and on balance, more destructive (http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/). Hard to reason that out by first principles.
I think the take home point is not that hotter is always and inherently more destructive (though your point about increased energy moving through the system is well taken) but rather that our civilization is highly complex and has adapted to the conditions that have prevailed in the last 8,000 years, which encompass the whole of human history. Any random change to the climate system is far more likely to be detrimental to us, rather than beneficial.
To those that argue that radical changes in the climate are just as likely to be beneficial to human civilization, I like to compare AGW to a person walking through a chemical plant and considering scooping up a cup of chemicals from a random, unidentified vat, and drinking it down.
Given that we do not know what the chemical is, is it:
a) Likely to give us superpowers.
b) Likely to give us important vitamins and minerals.
c) Likely to be harmless.
d) Likely to be a dangerous poison.
The moral of the story is that a random change to a complex, entropy-defying system, whether a human body or a human society, is much more likely to be disruptive and destructive as opposed to advantageous.
Ironically, your example of drinking random chemicals lists two as benefits, one as harmless and only one as poison. Your example does not support ‘much more likely to be disruptive and destructive as opposed to advantageous’ otherwise you might have picked two lethal poisons, one irritant and one harmless to make your point.
Perhaps the optimists think they are walking through a candy factory. Anything there is good. Anyway, there has been a perceptible shift from ‘climate change is not happening’ to ‘climate change is good’ among the ‘skeptics’. I predict this is going to continue as the warming becomes more obvious. They would then no longer be ‘skeptics’ but merely ‘optimists’.
“Ironically, your example of drinking random chemicals lists two as benefits, one as harmless and only one as poison.”
It would appear that you understand neither the concept of irony, nor the concept of probability.
Not all examples are equally likely, of course.
I doubt you are sincere in your ignorance, though. Would you drink a random cup from an unlabeled vat in a chemical plant? Good idea or not?
It’s not my ignorance, Robert, it’s your penchant for giving examples that don’t really add up. All examples may not have equal probablity, but when you put up three that are arguably not dangerous and one that is, it doesn’t help make your point, which is where the irony comes in, you provide three non harmful examples, one harmful and then go on to say it represents a much more likely to be harmful conclusion. It is a direct (and humorous) contradiction of what you intended to say, which is what ironic means.
“It’s not my ignorance, Robert”
Oh yes, it certainly is. You simply lack self-awareness; i.e., you are ignorant of your own ignorance.
The first step is acceptance. Good luck! ;)
The pathological condition being described is “pronoia”, a compulsive and irrational belief in the innate friendliness of the Universe and all things in it.
It’s generally rare in its extreme forms, as, well, its victims play in traffic a lot.
Jim D
You’re very late to the party. Right from the beginning there has always been a global-warming-is-good faction. Which seems to me to have actually decreased in size, probably in response to the post-1997 stalling in warming.
Vassily, yes, they are a fickle bunch with no core belief. I think they will swing back as soon as we get the next decade of warming.
As regards taking an allegedly random cuppa in a chemicals factor: the analogy only holds if current temperatures are unprecedented .
Which in practice means : only if the hopelessly flawed Hockey Sticks are true.
Robert: “For those who can grasp the idea that a hotter world = a hotter world”
The straw Robert grasps for, is that a world whose atmosphere has not significantly warmed for the last 15 years = a hotter world.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1983/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1983/to:1998/trend
But the world’s atmosphere has significantly warmed for the past 15 years.
You can compare the 30 year average now to 30 years ago, and I assure you the current one is verifiably hotter.
You can compare the 30 year trend to the 15 year trend starting 30 years ago, and the 30 year trend is steeper than the 15 year trend.
Your claim is false on all counts. You’ve confused a slightly negative short term trend line with the whole story. The whole story is one of not just warming, but of increasing warming.
Or, put another way, the whole so-called flat decade was warmer than the previous 30-year average, so the 30-year average is still rising and this will continue unless we get a year below the 30-year average, which hasn’t happened for several decades.
The plain fact is that the 30-year trend for the atmosphere is up, the 15-year trend is flat. These convoluted attempts to deny this are pointless.
But Yes, 15 years is not much, we need to wait and see. (Although Santer or someone has said 17 years of no warming is cause enough to have a serious rethink).
Vassily | July 9, 2012 at 1:56 am |
In Bayesian terms, we could wait seventy years with no more GMT rise than in the past 15 years as reflected in such suspect and disparaged sources as UAH and HadCRUT3 and still be seeing rising world temperatures and confirmation of AGW.
We could likewise see fifty years of temperature rise at double the rate of the past three decades and it would still furnish no additional evidence of AGW.
Temperature trendology is a silly hatstand, taken on its own, it lacks enough legs to hold up your hat, much less climatology.
Sad that so many stop there, on any side.
Now, CO2 level on its own, if you stop there, that’s good enough.
“This argumentation is nonsense. 0.6 degrees a century, none of which was in the last 15 years is the putative global warming.”
You’re confused. Nino 3.4 is not a global temperature index, and is an anomaly, not a trend.
“Yet you argue global warming = hotter temperatures = more forest fires? Then argue global warming = hotter temperatures = more crop failures.”
That’s what the science says. I suggest you review it.
“Obviously with such small overall warming, excessive heat in one place must mean excessive cold in another”
Again you would seem to be confused; confused about the amount of warming, where it is, and how it affect the probability of extreme events.
Study hard, and you will come to know better.
Where I am, there have been 15 days that have topped the previous record high temperature and no, none, zero days that have broken the previous record low temperature. That is better than 1 record high temperature every 13 days and records have been broken every month this year save Febuary. The current heat wave has only been beaten once, back in 1936.
This heat wave being proof of global warming, who are we kidding, been there done that. We already know the world is warming. My location has changed to a warmer hardiness zone.
The representation of this last weeks heat wave in the list of the 10 hottest days in this location is remarkable.
The world is warming, CO2 causes warming, you do the math.
Yes but agricultural productivity rises with longer growing seasons and higher CO2 content. As an added bonus crops require less water with higher CO2. Is that a bad thing? You do the math.
There’s no need, Dave.
`Cuz Mr. Krabs and SpongeBob have already done the math! :) :) :)
Dave Springer | July 8, 2012 at 9:47 am |
Agricultural productivity rises with longer growing seasons?
Technically true, so long as what is obtained is a longer uninterrupted growing season, with some caveats.
What interrupts growing seasons?
Aside from the obvious extreme weather events, floods and droughts, hail and major windstorms, there are also late and advanced frosts.
While warmer weather in general moves the start and end of growning seasons earlier and later dramatically, it does not curtail late or advanced spring or autumn (or even summer) frosts as much.
So a two week earlier spring planting for example will be ruined by a two day earlier late spring frost, but it will do two more weeks damage to the plants. This is _worse_, not better, when it happens — more expensive, more difficult to plan for, higher stakes, riskier. And the rates of summer frosts in some regions is off the scale, too. If you don’t know anything about agriculture, don’t make stuff up out of generalizations and averages. A plant doesn’t have to endure just the ‘average’ conditions.
Higher CO2 leads plants to grow better and require less water? Well, sorta kinda. From time to time some loon will make a point that CO2 is just a trace gas; measured only in 100’s of ppmv, its concentration is tiny, and yet even a tiny increase in its concentration has dramatic effect on the length and mass of branches, shape of leaves and plant sexual organs, uptake of water, aging processes and generation of nutrients in the plant; why? Because CO2 mediates, stimulates and suppresses plant hormones, mainly the auxins.
As Rudyard Istfan has pointed out previously, intensive agriculture makes use of something called dwarf plants, which are optimized to force most of their productivity into their harvested portions: for grains, that’s the seeds; for fruit, that’s the fruit bodies. This dwarfism is sensitive to hormones and is suppressed by increasing CO2. So, no, higher CO2 does not as a rule always lead to greater productivity. Just greater forcing of mass in lower-quality plant fibers.
Moreover, Liebig’s Law of the Minimum tells us plants are limited by the least available nutrient, which in agriculture is mainly Nitrogen supplied by fertilizer. CO2 leads plants and soil microbes to deplete Nitrogen in the soil as much as 25% faster in field tests. Not to worry, we can convert fossil fuels into Nitrogen fertilizer. In fact, we’re expected to convert five times as much fossil fuel into fertilizer by 2050 as we did in 2001. Sure, this will drive the price of fossil fuels up (which happens from time to time when bad harvests create a high demand for fertilizer and fuel simultanously, spiking prices in a well-known effect), but all that happens then is food prices go up.
So we should tell the thousands of farmers who pump huge amounts of CO2 into their greenhouses that they’re wasting their time?
No, but it would be nice if people told the truth about why they pump CO2 into greenhouses. Greenhouses actually worked pretty well before they started the CO2 enhancements.
Also, I grew up around 1000s of farmers, and none of them had a greenhouse, and they still don’t.
Yes, but thousands of other farmers do have greenhouses, and thousands of those do enhance CO2 levels.
Peter317 | July 8, 2012 at 10:56 am |
The greenhouse growers (not ‘farmers’, farming is different, though there is overlap) who pump CO2 into greenhouses do so for various reasons:
1. CO2 starvation occurs below 150 ppmv CO2, and plants vigorously growing during the day can reduce the concentration that low, especially if they have excesses of other nutrients — which they will if they’re being heavily fertiziled, for example with Nitrogen in petrochemical fertilizer;
2. Greenhouse growers who did #1 realized that they also get more mass and length in their plants, at the expense of sooner-to-brown (because of depleted nutrients and hormonal changes) and brittler leaves and stalks, and slightly deformed sexual organs (flowers and fruit), and mass is often attractive to buyers, who cannot discern quality or do not care.
There’s nothing wrong with the practice in many greenhouses, but you won’t find it done for example by greenhouse growers trying to ensure seeding reliably, or trying to force dwarf plants to put their productivity into fruit or root, unless they don’t know what they’re doing.
What’s wrong is people making sweeping generalizations about highly technical issues out of pure ignorance or for some ulterior motive.
Bart, I wasn’t trying to make sweeping generalisations, and apologies if I came over that way.
But some of your arguments leave a bit to be desired as well – like your one about early Spring frosts – which happen regardless of whether or not the average growing season is longer
Peter317 | July 8, 2012 at 1:11 pm |
You have little need to apologize. I’m sure you’ve been fed information from Idsos and others who have crammed to the gullet the debate with FUD so much that it’s hard to avoid irrational conclusions.
My point about Spring frosts (which happen either way), isn’t that they’re magickally absent in a low-CO2 world — they’re slightly more frequent, all other things held equal — it’s that they’re potentially much more costly in a high CO2 world, where plants have gotten further along before the killer frost sets in.
That frost further into the year is the costlier one, by far, as recovery is more expensive. The plants have invested so much into the destroyed tissues that they will generally simply shut down if the frost is too late, where in (relatively) less delayed frosts they’d bounce back with little trouble.
The ice wine industry on the other extreme, is running into the problem where more winters don’t get cold enough to produce ice wine; timber has certainly suffered enormously from insect damage due insects surviving milder winters disproportionately. People, too, generally suffer more bugs in the mild winters than in the coldest winters.
And as Robert says below, it’s complex. It’s certainly too complex for me to say which if any of these effects will dominate in any one case. One third of all climate basins at any one time are likely to experience little sign of warmer events. The Europeans who had the poor sense to locate their tiny islands in the vindictive and fickle Atlantic Ocean apparently are suffering chills and floods this month, an passing along the effect so far as Russia. Is that AGW, or just plain socialism?
Bart R, it’s patronising to assume that I simply swallow everything I read – who the hell is Idsos anyway?
But, more to the point, do you have hard data on the start of growing seasons?
Also, it’s interesting that you’re putting the cold weather in Russia down to the fickleness of the Atlantic, whereas the Russian heat wave of last year was almost certainly down to AGW (according to Hansen, anyway)
Peter317 | July 8, 2012 at 3:43 pm |
I’m a patronising kinda guy. Doesn’t make my observations into assumptions, nor does it make them wrong.
The Idsos are a family who run websites tilted toward pronoiac faith in the benefits of unlimited CO2 emission. Look them up if you wish.
You can find information on growing seasons regionally (and frost dates) in farm reports and services. http://www.almanac.com might be a place to start; I couldn’t say, having reported mainly what friends and family who still grow have said rather than having done significant research. I’d be very pleased to be proven wrong. However, combining http://g01.cnitc.cn/uploadfile/file/%E8%B5%84%E6%BA%90/%E9%93%BE%E6%8E%A5%E4%B8%8E%E6%96%87%E7%8C%AE/2002/2012010715580028.pdf (page 1330, image c.) and http://www.usda.gov/oce/climate_change/files/SAP4_3/BiodiversityBrochure.pdf and http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/climate-change-impacts-by-sector/agriculture with http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2011EI376.1 shows 10 to 14 day current shift in growing season, but only one third that shift in frost-free days, affirming my claim based on what actual growers have told me. This tells me the costs associated with AGW for agriculture are huge, and claims of benefit are overstated, simplistic or generally false.
And onto the caveats:
So long as the agriculture is not in the northern temperate zone, where studies pretty much show farming outputs are relatively unaffected by increasing CO2, at least in an upward direction.
So long as teh agriculture is receiving excess Nitrogen from fertilizer, such as only happens in cultivated lands.
So long as water remains plentifully available but not too plentifully available; although water uptake requirement is reduced pound for pound, sensitivity to variable water conditions is more of an issue with higher CO2.
There are other caveats to be sure, but I’m not claiming to be some sort of know-all, so..
Check out what happening with this years corm crop, in the midwest of the US.
That is if there is one.
I grew up in a part of the world where hot, dry years, often many in a row, were a fact of life – and which farmers simply had to cope with, one way or the other.
And, sooner or later, the rains did come.
The midwest of the USA is not the entire globe – no matter how many here seem to think it is/
It is supposed to be *global* warming, not your teensy weensy bit of North America warming.
You can no more generalise from your hot weather in Nowhereseville, Kansas, than I can from a damp and cold Wimbledon tennis tournament.
Bob, you may want to check out the chart of years withmthenhighest number of record highs here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/08/why-the-u-s-east-coast-heatwave-was-not-unusual-nor-the-number-of-record-temperatures-unprecedented/#comment-1027788
Highest numbers by far for the continental US were in the 1930s.
JC said,
“Lonnie could make a huge and lasting impact by archiving his ice core data”
____
Here here! I would like to see something akin to a Senior Climatologist’s data reference page on the web, where it could be operated by the Senior climatologists themselves and data and interesting discussions could be had all at one convenient stop. Completely cloud based, it would become a long-term climate related knowledge repository for humanity going forward,
As the sands of time keep slipping through one’s fingers, those tasks that one had set out for themselves, may not get done. Re: Lonnie and Ellen Thompson, and now this is just speculation on my part, maybe, just maybe the data not made public, either not archived or not coalesced into a usable form, can not stand the test of time. Maybe, just maybe, going on one more expedition will turn up a Eureka moment, a moment that will validate a lifetime of hitherto contrary and, ultimately, inconsequential data. Winner of the Life Time Achievement Award. Maybe one’s life is just a footnote in those sands of time.
I have seen this before: the shop keeper’s lifetime enterprise, dissipated as the child is not interested in following in dad’s footsteps.
Non-dialysable urine solids. A lifetime of medical science lost to posterity for its lack of relevance.
There are other stories, maybe most of the people have “barked up the wrong tree.”
As many of us reach a time to reflect, “what do I leave for posterity?” The question is pertinent.
Maybe, Lonny & Ellen’s data is just not that interesting after all, and failure to make publicly available is just not a loss.
RiHo08:
If so, perhaps they should stop receiving taxpayer money in the form of grants which require them to archive data.
RiH008 – that would indeed be sad for Lonny and Ellen.
However, we all know the relevent quote here. “If you’ve made up your mind to test a theory, or you want to explain some idea, you should always decide to publish it whichever way it comes out. If we only publish results of a certain kind, we can make the argument look good. We must publish both kinds of results.”
Those of a more suspicious nature than me might even wonder if the data ever existed at all. We know that ‘peer-reviewers’ never ask to see it, so there is no objective evidence that they ever collected it at all.
The easy way to dispel such suspicions is to publish it.
Given a choice between being straightforward and open about their work and activities and acting in a way seemingly designed to cast doubt upon their integrity and honesty. why do all climatologists naturally gravitate towards the latter option? Is it a requirement of admission to the Climatological Guild that any semblance of ‘proper’ behaviour is rigorously eliminated?
Just quit counting cites of papers without properly archived data, meta-data, and code. That would put a stop to the non-archiving.
My speculation re: Lonnie’s & Ellen’s data, nothing here to see, move along seems to be gaining traction as I read Steve McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit of July 8.
The data from ice cores Lonnie and Ellen have cited, is problematic. Steve McIntyre’s thought, that archiving data from years ago is beyond Lonnie & Ellen ability now may mean that all that data is “lost.” (Have we heard about lost raw data before?)
There may be one last refuge for the data. When grants are renewed, the Feds usually want some evidence that work has been done, more than a few publications. Usually some data makes its way into the grant renewal process that may be recoverable. If the reviewers for the grant renewal did not insist upon evidence, there is a process problem at the Fed level. How inconvenient. Now my suspicious mind is really running wild. Maybe some of the grant renewal reviewers have moved up in the Fed pecking order and don’t want a sloppy process to be…uncovered? to their career detriment?
Holy cow. I’ve really gone off the rails.
Does anybody know just how much this pair have been paid out of public funds over their career? It seems that the public have gained no benefit whatsoever from their supposed activities and so the public’s ‘investment’ has been ‘lost’.
And what really worries me is that it is only the non-academics who seem to find anything at all disturbing about this sorry tale of incompetence.
Is there nobody in academia who feels that they need to comply with the general principles of science, or the letter of their agreement with the funding authorities?
Or are all academics so deeply steeped in the playground games of their childish little rules and requlations about whose data it is and who their best friends are and whether Mikey and Gav want you in their gang or not and all that juvenile bollocks that the academic mind uses as a replacement for reality that they really can see nothing wrong? That they are somehow themselves immune from the behavioural standards they expect all the rest of us to adhere to?
Under English Law if you take public money under false pretences, you are called a ‘benefit cheat’ and imprisonment is a punitive option open to the courts.
The climate phrenologists are reading the climate’s future from bumps in localized weather again. Couldn’t this make it into virtually every week in review? Are they ever not making a link between some weather event and climate change?
And are we going to switch back, again, from “global warming” to “climate change” if we get a cold winter in Washington D.C.?
Gary,
The confusion is with AGW denialists in needing to wage their war on multiple fronts now and thus not knowing which battle to fight. As the data becomes more and more overwhelming (i.e. warming oceans, increased frequency of extreme weather, reduced sea ice) the only chance the denialists will have to stay in the game will be to go after the scientists themselves…oh, wait…that tactic has already started.
This.
The Progressive Warmist,
The only war that matters is the one on November 6, 2012 in the U.S. And we’er waging that one just fine so far thanks. All the rest of what is going on now is just sound and fury, signifying nothing. But I must say, you all are sure making a lot of loud nothing about the latest weather.
Maybe you should try to get the Supreme Court to rule that the next election has to be in August, on the hottest day of the month. Or at least station CAGWers at the thermostat in every voting place in the U.S.
Gary,
The U.S. Election in November will be about which corporations get to control the U.S government for the next 4 years. As an Independent, I’ve realized the current 2-party system is too corrupt for our democracy to function properly. It’s devolved into a pure Plutocracy. Bring on term limits and campaign finance reform and maybe democracy can be restored, but for now, those with the fattest wallets get to be king.
R.G. – The US is a Republic, not a democracy.
“The U.S. Election in November will be about which corporations get to control the U.S government for the next 4 years. As an Independent, I’ve realized the current 2-party system is too corrupt for our democracy to function properly. It’s devolved into a pure Plutocracy. Bring on term limits and campaign finance reform and maybe democracy can be restored, but for now, those with the fattest wallets get to be king.”
Those with money have historically affected who is elected. Sometimes we get some war hero, but it’s not as though it’s been any change.
The wealthy are why Obama was elected. And wealthy will strongly affect whether he is re-elect or isn’t.
So, since this was the way it was and will be the way it will be, one should want a less powerful state.
Is there anywhere in the world at any time when this has not been the case, that wealthy generally strongly affect politics?
America if anywhere has less of this affect than elsewhere. But if copy elsewhere, we get it more like elsewhere.
The idea of a stronger state is not an American idea- it’s the normal.
So term limits is a good idea. It’s not as though politicians improve the longer they are in office. There zero evidence of this. They do tend to become more powerful the longer they are in office, but don’t represent the people better.
But campaign reform has been a disaster. Transparency is good, it should a matter of public record who is supporting who. But the reform has muddied this situation [and so have worsen it]
gbaikie – good thoughts. If the government is less powerful, there is less incentive for the rich to try to influence it. The same is true for environmental groups, religious groups, doctors, … you name it.
Maybe R. Gates and Fan of More BS should read this:
“As a scientist, I KNOW other scientists will lie through their teeth when it comes to money or their career. I have had plenty of direct experience of outright lying and falsification of data. I have also been fired more than once for refusing to falsify data upon direct order from my superior.
My personal experience with the “Honesty” and “Integrity” of scientists is that it is rare, most will go along with the herd or with higher authority rather than stick their neck out.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/08/a-wave-of-heated-peer-pressure-results-in-shrinking-integrity/
What they’ll go back to is “weather isn’t climate”. But for now, weather is climate, apparently.
Again, a misrepresentation of what “weather is/isn’t climate” could mean in terms of AGW.
Local Weather is not indicative of global climate but represents a localized effect of global climate that may or may not represent the average of a global trend or pattern. For example, it being cold in Great Britain even though the majority of the NH is warm, is a localized effect of the the NH climate with plausible physical causes as to why it would be cooler than average but is obviously not indicative of that warmer NH climate.
The lesson here is- understanding why an area is cool or warm is critical to seeing how it fits with an overall pattern, no matter if it goes against the general trend or not, and futhermore, it is understanding the exceptions that allows us to really understand the overall rule.
Have climate alarmists never heard of ‘blocking highs’, the things that have produced the current heatwave in a part of the US, the Russian heatwave of 2010, the bone-dry N. European summer of 1976?
Occams Razor. There is no need to bring high-flown climate theory into weather events with simple explanations known to every passable meterologist.
And if you’re going to say ‘Yes, but it’s the frequency of the events”, please show that ‘extreme’ events are increasing with a definition and historical data.
cui bono,
Did you watch this (rather long) presentation by Dr. Jennifer Francis from Rutgers?:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4spEuh8vswE
Watch it, and then we can have some intelligent discussion about the potential relationship between blocking highs and climate change.
Yeah, but take the current heat wave out of the equation, at my location we are still setting record highs at the rate of once every 27 days this year.
There is more going on than just the current heat wave being caused by a blocking high.
And I guess I need to repeat that this has been going on for quite some time now. Not just a weather event, but a long term change in conditions.
Last year was the warmest year on record for this location, warmer than 1936 for example.
Somewhere in the USA, in the middle of the maps on the news, yes the one with 106 F for the high.
Well a theory at last. But not much use if the Arctic warming is natural; See
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/guest-post-by-hiroshi-l-tanaka-on-the-new-paper-data-analysis-of-recent-warming-pattern-in-the-arctic-by-ohashi-and-tanaka/
The Antarctic of course increases in extent as much as the Arctic increases. What will that do to the jet stream? The answer must perforce be optimistic by the previous argumentation.
Would global cooling cause less extreme weather events? The warmist zealots never see this logic disconnect. Harold Brooks explains it to them.
Bob Droege
My advice (if the heat bothers you): move to another location.
According to a global chart posted by WUWT, there are more “cooler” locations than “warmer” ones.
Max
Max, I wasn’t asking for your advice on where to live.
Are you sure you are using a calibrated eyecrometer when you claim that one time chart from WTFUMB shows more cooling than warming?
Here are a couple websites where you can get better info than WTFUMB.
http://denialdepot.blogspot.co.uk/
http://theclimatescum.blogspot.com/
43 C here yesterday.
So are you trying to argue that it is not warming?
Some farmers have already plowed their corn crop under, for a total loss.
Still the wettest and coldest summer on record in UK.
If we are going to have a few warm days in the US as undeniable proof of global warming, can we also have our dreadful summer as similar proof of global cooling?
If not, why not?
I have popcorn.
Latimer, I could have sworn I saw the sun for a few moments earlier today, but it might have been just my imagination :-(
Look again, Max. White is zero. Grey is heat.
Latimer,
And the US is 2% of the world’s area, and Great Britain is like 2% of the area of the US.
15 record highs this year at one location, and the year is barely half over. 15 is not a few. If it wasn’t warming, you might expect 3 or 4 all year, with 3 or 4 record cold days, but it has been a while since we had a record cold day.
So your cool Britain is worth a couple of US states, say Pennslyvania and Mississippi. How many record lows have you recorded in Britain this year? There have been thousands in the US against a few hundred lows.
Besides, it’s supposed to be cold and wet in Britain.
It’s not for proof of global warming, we already have that, and being near Illinois, I’ll bet I have more popcorn than you.
It’s a taste of how serious this is going to get.
We are going to have serious crop failures this year.
“Watch it, and then we can have some intelligent discussion about the potential relationship between blocking highs and climate change.”
It seems to me this should be studied a lot more.
I think one making a mistake if you assume lessening of polar sea ice is somehow unique to the 21 century.
It may or may not be unique in terms last few centuries.
Perhaps if you understood the affect of lessening polar ice or ice free summers, you could “measure” what been happening with polar sea ice centuries or thousand of years into the past.
But at the moment one keep in mind the shortness of time we had measurement of the polar sea ice.
In the future we could two separate things. Large areas of open water, sooner “in the season” and larger areas which ice free.
It seems that if you had a large area of open water before [or nearer to] midsummer, this could larger affect than large area ice free by Sept.
So one this points to is winds could be a large factor in this.
The issue the issue of open areas sooner having more significant relates to how high the sun is above the horizon- in Sept is near horizon, and there less solar energy is available to warm ocean. Whereas at midsummer the sun is highest above the horizon.
So a small area near mid summer could larger affect than much larger area in Sept
R gates
Context is important. Historical context is vital. I can’t see anything new if you look back longer than satellites. By the way we don’t all go after the scientists themselves. Both sides should play the ball and not the man
Tonyb
CAGW activists stopped playing the ball when Hansen monkeyed with the thermostat in the Senate hearing chamber in 1988.
The presence of AGW true believers or AGW true-denailists neither proves nor disproves the existence of AGW itself but says something about the potential for humans to get caught up in mass movements.
I found a youtube link to Senator Wirth saying “we” left the windows open the night before. Has Hansen ever admitted to being part of “we”. Wirth, from what I heard, never says they messed with the thermostat. If they messed with thermostat, why would they open the windows?
They’re all wearing suits and ties. Hansen does not appear to be sweating.
Maybe our resident HVAC engineer can figure this out?
Leaving all the windows open was “messing with the thermostat”.
Try it in your office sometime (works better with a big office, or lots of offices on the same AC circuit)
I live in Texas. When my windows are open, my gigantic AC unit cools the patio.
I offer an explanation and you just respond with snark
Tony,
I’ve always agreed that historical records and paleoclimate data are vital. But in terms of global climate change, the data must be interpreted in a global context (i.e. it’s warm over the Kara and Barantz sea but cold in GB etc.).
When you say “we” all don’t go after the scientists, I’m still not sure what “we” you are talking about. A real skeptic never ever goes after a scientist, but always is in search of data that either confirms or denies a hypothesis. All I care about is the data, and all any honest skeptic cares about is the data. If a scientist is corrupt I’ll distrust the data, but have no interest in a personal attack on them. It is not what skeptics do. Those who have personally attacked Mann, Hansen, et. al. lead me to believe they are not skeptics but denialists on an Ideological quest to prove themselves right.
R Gates
I was referring to the post where you said;
‘As the data becomes more and more overwhelming (i.e. warming oceans, increased frequency of extreme weather, reduced sea ice) the only chance the denialists will have to stay in the game will be to go after the scientists themselves…oh, wait…that tactic has already started.’
You specfically referred to ‘denialists’ and I was just pointing out that many of us deplore the notion of smearing scientists. .However in your follow up post I guess you chave tried to make the distinction between irrational ‘denialists’; and sceptics. Not all warmists make that distinction and consequently tar ‘us’ all with the sane brush.
tonyb
cr – SANE BRUSH?
I fully respect honest skeptics (as I am one) and certainly see the big distinction between skeptics and denialists, just as I hope you can appreciate that there is a difference between a warmist and a true-believer in CAGW. Those that spew forth personal attacks are dead ringers to be in either the denialist or CAGW true-believer category. It has become an emotional issue for them, and the chance for reason is long gone.
We are all trying to debate in good faith and as much reason as circumstances permit.
The D.C. heat proves that weather is climate:
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/331299/It-will-rain-til-September
Just to make it a real week in review. :) (Dunno if it’ll pass the filters)
Top of the world:
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Around its middle:
http://www.rtcc.org/
And from the bottom (Australia featured prominently):
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/archive/issue.html
Events upcoming:
http://on-climate.com/the-conference/
http://www.gmes.info/pages-secondaires/events/event-detail/?tx_julleevents_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=301&cHash=e3834c4be8312d7faec566c5fd023e80
Positions available:
http://unjobs.org/themes/climate-change
http://heartland.org/jobs
Glad to help.
So this is what Barry and his watermelon friends would REALLY like!:
” Echoing the laments of pundits like Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood argued Saturday that China outpaces the United States in building major transportation infrastructure like high-speed rail because of its authoritarian system and because the Chinese don’t have the Republican Party holding up progress.
“The Chinese are more successful [in building infrastructure] because in their country, only three people make the decision. In our country, 3,000 people do, 3 million,” LaHood said in a short interview with The Cable on the sidelines of the 2012 Aspen Ideas Festival on June 30. “In a country where only three people make the decision, they can decide where to put their rail line, get the money, and do it. We don’t do it that way in America.””
http://michellemalkin.com/2012/07/07/obama-transportation-secretary-china-infrastructure/
So in China, the Keystone pipeline would already have been pumping crude to the Gulf. I see. (But me, I’ll take our Republic over the Commie/socialist/fascist system.)
Why, that’s what’s the matter with markets. Way too many people involved.
Nobody goes there anymore; they’re way too crowded.
============
China’s in the market. The love our bonds.
Here is why it is wrong to measure sea ice extent starting from the 1970s.
ARCTIC CLIMATE’S
ALARMING CHANGE
LOS ANGELES.
A mysterious warming of the climate is slowly manifesting itself in the Arctic, and in the Antarctic ice regions and the major Greenland ice cap should reduce at the same rate as the present melting, oceanic surfaces would rise to catastrophic proportions, and people living in lowlands along the shores would be inundated, said Dr. Hans Ahlmann, noted Swedish geophysicist today, at the University of California’s Geophysical Institute. Dr. Ahlmann added that temperatures in the Arctic have increased by 10 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. An ‘enormous’ rise from the scientific standpoint.
Waters in the Spitsbergen area, in the same period, have risen from three to five degrees in temperature, and one to one and a half millimetres yearly in level.
‘The Arctic change is so serious that I hope an international agency can speedily be formed to study conditions on a global basis.’ said Dr. Ahlmann. He pointed out that in 1910 the navigable season along the western Spitsbergen lasted three months. Now it lasts eight months.
Saturday 31 May 1947
http://bit.ly/HdLubv
Townsville Daily Bulletin
What next Girma…photos of submarines coming up in a polynya? The spirit of John Daly is alive and well in the heart of the true-denier!
Well, Girma, what can I say. I’m skeptical, but not quite as old as that!
Thanks Girma. I tried to make the same point above, somewhere.
In the early 1980s, satellite observations showed the Sahara was expanding. Cue eco-hysteria about desertification and blaming local humans for overgrazing.
Then it began to contract. Turns out the Sahara has a cyclical ‘pulse’.
Which is to say, who really knows how the Arctic was decades or centuries ago?
Which is why I wish many more climate scientists were also good climate historians, as H. Lamb was, and listen more to the comments of those like Tonyb who are studying climate history. Now that our TV-addled minds are down to a memory span of 5 minutes, we should remember that observations by humans in the past are not mere ‘anecdotes’ with no scientific function, and there is more to past climate than dodgy treemometers.
Plus, on attribution:
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/arno-arrak.pdf
Attribution with certainty is impossible. You can only find data that is or isn’t consistent with a hypothesis and then adjust or abandon the hypothesis as appropriate based on the data. I’ve yet to see any data that shows the Earth as a system is not accumulating energy and has been consistently doing so for many decades, even with a leveling of tropospheric temperatures (at the highest levels on instrument record).
Please, if anyone has any data that shows the Earth as a system is not accumulating energy, pass it my way. This data that would prove AGW is not happening is vital to a true skeptic such as myself. When I ask for this kind of data, I get pictures of submarines coming up in polynya or newpaper clippings from the 1940’s. Very troubling if this is the best AGW skeptics can do!
There aren’t many here who claim the Earth to be in a cooling phase. Just no catastrophe.
A cooling phase was predicted by Keenleyside et al. Smith et al predicted natural variation would swamp the AGW signal in the latter 2000s, and then warming would resume. Tsonis and Swanson predict flat to declining temperature from 1998 onward for 2 to3 or so decades. Those are all AGW scientists.
Often citing Tsonis and Swanson, Chief Hydro often states we are in a cooling phase.
Max and Girma love them some HadCrut3 because it shows a 15 year cooling. Kim says we are cooling, for how long, he doesn’t know.
There are a bunch around here who think we are either cooling, or about to cool.
Perhaps true, but there are a few. Actually though, for purposes of clarity, I really prefer specific breakdowns of which part of the Earth system is warming or cooling over what time period…i.e. troposphere cooled from 2007-2009, ocean down to 2000 meters warmed from Jan-March 2012, and from 1970 to 2012, etc.
Tracking the flow of energy in the Earth’s system is key to understanding the nature of any imbalance, and simply saying “The Earth” cooled or warmed, besides being often quite inaccurate when talking about the whole atmosphere/ocean heat reservoir, is not very useful from a scientific perspective.
Skeptical Warmist: “Please, if anyone has any data that shows the Earth as a system is not accumulating energy, pass it my way. This data that would prove AGW is not happening is vital to a true skeptic such as myself.”
How would that prove that Anthropogenic Global Warming is not happening? It could be masked by declining solar output, oceanic circulation patterns and lags, ice melt, re-introduction of cold thermometers, changes in UHI and land use, price competition from alternate fossil fuels, government-induced recession or depression (e.g., the Great Depression), etc.
I’m fairly confident that few denizens here dispute that CO2 is produced by people and that CO2 has a warming effect. The real issue is how much warming and whether that is beneficial or harmful.
The Skeptical Warmist (aka R. Gates)
The historical newspaper statements are supported by the observed data => http://bit.ly/M50X2p
Girma,
You need to step away from the bowl of psychotrophic cherries you are nibbling from. This is the graph that tells you all you really need to know:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1880
Here is Ahlmann’s study. He stated that with all the new state-of-the-art equipment, this was the best study eva! (Paraphrasing :)) It’s interesting to read. I lot of current memes are already there. Climate science is very important to mankind, interdisciplinary, technological advances a big benefit, catastrophe in the making … but, alas, to no avail.
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=1918470
Solar-Ozone Graph:
http://i48.tinypic.com/349fbs2.png
Ozone (from KNMI Climate Explorer) hits extrema on odd 1/4-cycles.
__
Related reading:
Coughlin, K.T.; & Tung, K.K. (2005). Empirical mode decomposition of climate variability.
http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/coughlin-tungHHT05.pdf
Coughlin, K.T.; & Tung, K.K. (2004). 11-year solar cycle in the stratosphere extracted by the empirical mode decomposition method. Advances in Space Research 34, 323-329.
http://spl.mt.ntnu.edu.tw/courses_data/%E7%A2%A9%E5%A3%AB%E7%8F%AD/99/%E6%9E%97%E5%AE%B6%E9%BD%8A/EMD%E8%AB%96%E6%96%87/EMD/%E5%85%B6%E4%BB%96/%E7%A0%94%E8%A8%8E%E6%9C%83/11-year%20solar%20cycle%20in%20the%20stratosphere%20extracted%20by%20the%20empirical%20mode%20decomposition%20method.pdf
Coughlin, K.T.; & Tung, K.K. (2004). Eleven-year solar cycle signal throughout the lower atmosphere. Journal Of Geophysical Research 109, D21105. doi:10.1029/2004JD004873.
http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/coughlin-tung04solar.pdf
( draft version: http://depts.washington.edu/amath/research/articles/Tung/journals/coughlin04b.pdf )
Why is it that when I point out that the people who were a month or two ago insisting that weather isn’t climate are now saying that weather is climate, I get all these comments that amount to “hamada hamada hamada”?
P.E.
It’s the “inverse C:W correlation” at work:
When it’s Cold, it’s Weather
When it’s Hot, it’s Climate.
Quite simple, really.
Max
P.E. | July 7, 2012 at 7:14 pm |
Could you link to two or more statements by these people before-and-after to show what you’re talking about?
Because it’d be nice to know specifics, and not just more hamada.
The heat generated between 1905 and 1940 is a permanent addition to the thermodynamics of the planet. Eventually it worked through the oceans and tended to produce a new equilibrium temperature for the planet. That was a truly anthropological event, but won’t be repeated because the CO2 in the atmosphere is still saturated with heat at the critical resonant wavelength of about 14 microns. The unchecked rate of rise in global atmospheric temperature (0.15C/decade) between 1905 and 1940 will never be exceeded.
Your biggest error is that you forget that CO2 acts as a governor or control nob for how fast heat leaves the system. It is not the direct downwelling of LW that is key to adding more energy to Earth’s system, but rather, CO2 controlling how fast heat leaves the primary non-tectonic energy reservoir of the planet, which is the ocean. Over the past 40 years or so approximately 23 x 10^22 Joules of energy have been added to the oceans down to about 2000 meters, and even more if you look at the abyssal layers. This additional energy is there because the thermal gradient between ocean and atmosphere has become less steep from the increase in greenhouse gases (primarily CO2). A less steep thermal gradient means less heat has been flowing from ocean to atmosphere and thus the accumulation of energy in the oceans.
I assume you are replying to my post. Thank you. One problem with your theory is, as you probably know, water is a very poor conductor of heat, so the surface water of the oceans tend to act as insulators of the heat below. Most of the heat below is carried there by convection i.e. ocean currents, so is a very slow process. However density considerations require that the least dense water is on the surface. I am aware of the importance of the ocean/atmosphere interface, particularly as Latent heat of evaporation affects the temperature of both.
Alexander,
You may find this recent research on ocean heat rather informative:
http://phys.org/news/2012-07-scientists-tropical-oceans-heart-climate.html
In terms of slowing down the rate of energy leaving the ocean, can you think of any ways that increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases might alter (i.e reduce) the convection. conduction, or radiation of heat off the ocean surface, such that the oceans down to 2000 meters would have gained 23 x 10^22 Joules of energy over the past 40+ years? Several come to mind.
Thank you for the link re north- south ocean currents. Not surprising really that we have an analogue of atmospheric circulation from the equator, no doubt affected by Coriolis forces as well as continental shelves. Let me explain that as a mathematical modeller from way back, I believe that only a computer simulation can solve the problem of predicting future climate with acceptable accuracy and backed up with a validation program, based on every single process modelled. However if you don’t get the structure of the model right at the start you will never validate it by playing with parameters. I think the situation we are in with climate models is to get the structure right. One way to do this is to look at all the factors that affect climate, decide which are the most important to get the structure right – the latter is what I am trying to do. I am not sure that the IPCC can do that properly – they have about 20 (different ?) models when all they need is one good one. They are trying to run this as a nice democratic programme, but the science is highly elitist.
aka R Gates
You argue that the oceans are warming due to a decreased thermal gradient between them and the atmosphere, due to the atmosphere warming (due in turn to more CO2). (And the oceans being presumed to typically be warmer than the atmosphere).
This fits the facts over 40 years, but not over the last 15. So did the oceans stop warming in step with the atmosphere these last 15, or did they carry on warming regardless? If the latter, ocean warming must be down to something other than the ocean-atmosphere difference.
looks like it’s warmed over the past 15 years to me
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
Yes, the oceans have warmed, but the atmosphere hasn’t. Which means the oceans are being warmed by something other than the atmospheric temperature.
Both have warmed. Check the temperature records.
For a moment, allow them to believe it’s flat. It’s what they see in the graphs. People can make flattish lines. It’s not threatening in any way.
Handel, you are heading toward the truth, keep going. Remember that net heat flow is always from ocean to atmosphere and that the oceans warm primarily from solar SW radiation. We know that we’ve not seen an increase in solar SW over the past decade so the only explanation is that the ocean to atmosphere heat flux must have been reduced if ocean heat content is increasing.
Robert : Both [ocean and atmosphere] have warmed. Check the temperature records.
They haven’t (only the oceans have). Check the temperature records.
Gates, what you say isn’t bad, but you still haven’t addressed my actual point :
All you say is, it isn’t the sun. Fine. But it also isn’t the atmosphere, so what is it ?
My guess – the continual incremental increases in the enhanced greenhouse effect during the 2000s are progressively reducing the rate at which heat is leaving the oceans.
So more of what the sun puts into the oceans is staying there.
The atmosphere doesn’t have to warm. Increased CO2 gives more downward IR for the same temperature.
Jim,
The downward IR does increase with more CO2, but that is almost totally compensated by changes in convective heat transfer unless the atmosphere has warmed as well.
A better explanation for the apparent discrepancy may be that the temperatures tend to move together and the warming of the oceans leads to very small changes in the temperature. It is measured rather by changes in heat content than changes in temperature because of the huge heat capacity of the oceans. There’s a difference in the behaviour of the surface ocean and the bulk ocean temperatures, but they affect each other as well. Surface ocean behaves in an intermediary way between deeper ocean and the atmosphere.
The oceans slow down the rate of temperature changes. Both the temperature of the surface ocean and the atmosphere are rising slowly and together, deeper ocean takes the bulk of the heat but the corresponding temperature change is very small, small enough and non-uniform enough to make accurate estimates of the change in heat content impossible. The variability in convective heat transfer in oceans is enough to allow surface ocean to cool temporarily while the heat content of oceans keeps on rising.
The continents warm more and they have also on impact on the temperature of the atmosphere. That should add to the temperature difference between the surface ocean and lower troposphere.
JCH : can you suggest a reason that even though the atmosphere isn’t warming, heat is leaving the ocean into the atmosphere more slowly ?
Jim D : your answer is downwelling IR. Are you so sure ? Even the most fervent alarmists have now abandoned this idea.
Handel – can you link to what a fervent alarmist said before he abandoned physics?
Handel,
What hasn’t changed with the flattening of atmospheric temperatures is the amount of downwelling LW radiation as that is directly related to the concentration of greenhouse gases. In fact, the amount of downwelling LW has increased during the past 10-15 years along with increases in the levels of CO2, methane, and N20. It is critical to understand that standard ground based measurement of tropospheric temperature is absolutely not a measurement of the amount of downwelling LW. These are two different measurements and two different physical processes. Tropospheric temperatures measures the bulk general kinetic energy of the air. The air of course air is composed mainly of nitrogen and oxygen, which of course have no effect on the amount of downwelling LW. So when you are measuring the air temperature, the majority of that measurement (say taken about 2 meters off the ground) is actually measuring the average kinetic energy of primarily nitrogen and oxygen molecules moving rapidly around. When you measure downwelling LW radiation you are measuring the radiation coming from water vapor, CO2, methane, and N2O primarily. Each one of those can further of course be identified by the particular wavelength of LW in doing a spectral analysis of the LW radiation. Most importantly, unlike air temperature, in which nearly all the measured energy comes from the kinetic energy of nitrogen and oxygen moving around, virtually none of the downwelling LW energy comes.from these molecules. Thus,even though atmospheric temperatures can be flat or even declining, downwelling LW can increase quite nicely with an increase in CO2, and as measured at multiple points around the world, downwelling LW has increased continually over many decades (with no let up over the past decade) in direct proportion to the increase in greenhouse gases. One of the best ways to see the difference in temperature on the ground and the measurement of downwelling LW (using a pyrgeometer) is to go outside at night when it is 0C outside on both a cloudy night and then on a cloudless night. If you measure the downwelling LW on the cloudy night it will be much higher (coming mainly from the clouds and other water vapor in the air) versus the cloudless night, even though the ground temperature as measured on a thermometer is equal. Both are measuring energy, but one is kinetic and one is radiation, and they are mainly from different families of molecules..
So, going back to the ocean and the heat flux from ocean to atmosphere. Increased downwelling LW affects the thermal gradient across the ocean skin layer. It only penetrates the very top of the skin layer, but in doing so, that is enough to warm the top of the skin layer and alter (i.e. make less steep) the thermal gradient across the layer. A warmer top of the skin layer means heat will flow less rapidly across the skin layer, and thus, increased downwelling LW reduces the rate of heat flux from ocean back to the atmosphere with the net effect that over time, the ocean heat content increases.
Gates
Ok, you’ve now added downwelling LW to your position, whose overall logic I see. But when I last looked at Realclimate, Gavin & Co dismissed it as a significant contributor.
Be that as it may, how much of the downwelling LW is down to CO2, and in particular that portion of CO2 that humans have added ?
You while the LW passes oxygen and nitrogen by, what are the numbers for its effect on the ocean (surface) ? (And how does this compare to the SW impact on the ocean?).
Handel,
I’ve not “added” downwelling LW to my position. The absorption and emission of LW is the essential quality that distinguishes greenhouse gases from diatomic molecules such as nitrogen and oxygen. I assumed that when I mentioned the effects of greenhouse gases on ocean to atmosphere heat flux you and others knew I was referring to downwelling LW. Forgive me for that assumption.
In regards to what Gavin and others say about the effects of downwelling LW on ocean to atmosphere heat flux, I’ve not discussed it directly with them, so I won’t speak to that.
To your other questions regarding the contribution of CO2 to downwelling LW. It has great variabilty across the Earth’s surface. In that humans have been the main contributor to the 40% increase in CO2 over the past few centuries, and water vapor certainly has not increased by 40%, you can be pretty sure that human activity has been the major contributor to the increase in downwelling LW and the majority of that increase has come from anthropogenic increases in CO2.
More CO2 influences the energy balance of the surface by making the coupling of the surface temperature and the temperature of the lower atmosphere just a very little bit stronger through the combination of stronger absorption of IR from the surface by the lowest atmosphere and more downwelling IR from the atmosphere. Thus the temperature difference between the surface and the atmosphere at some fixed altitude (a few meters or a few tens of meters) is reduced by a very small amount. Beyond that the net effect is very small as long as there’s no temperature inversion at low altitudes as convection compensates the changes in radiative heat balance almost totally.
Under conditions of temperature inversion (and also other non-convective conditions with a lapse rate clearly less than the adiabatic value) the surface temperature is influenced more by the change in CO2 concentration as there’s no compensation by the convection. This is, however, more typical for a winter night in Finland than most of oceans.
I don’t know about the discussion on RC, but that might also be based on the compensating effect of convection.
Gates & Pekka:
So your argument is not the popular one that greenhouse gasses ‘trap’ heat in the atmosphere, but rather they re-radiate this LW (in all directions presumably), and that the downwelling part of this re-radiation is trapped by the ocean (surface), thus altering the ocean-atmosphere conduction gradient ?
Gates :
You haven’t really addressed the question of relative magnitude – how much of all downwelling LW is due to man’s CO2 additions? (And, by implication, how much more LW there is now than in the past. ie does LW show a clear hockey stick ?
Incidentally the most plausible hypothesis for increased blocking events is reduced solar activity.
Really? Please provide links to the scientific research and data that supports this plausible hypothesis…I’d be most interested. I’d always thought is was the exact opposite that was hypothesized…i.e. increased solar activity leads to more blocking events. But send the research my way, please…
(Ruzmaikin & Feynman, 2002).
Thanks, I shall read it promptly.
R Gates
Yesterday you were hypothesising that our cool wet summer and the southward position of the jet stream were due to lack of arctic ice.
I have checked with the Met office who have been predicting-as a result of AGW- hotter drier sunmers for a decade and are still doing so.
This paper also suggests that agw should push the jet stream further north, not south.
http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/27184/
In addition I have checked some 90 years of low ice records agaist CET and can not see any correlation. It seems highy random.
In addition The Vikings sailed in substantially ice free waters for some 300 years whilst, according to Prof Brian Fagan Britain enjoyed a similar period of warm settled weaher.
The best guess (and the words ‘guess’ and ‘climate science’ go together like strawberries and cream) is that the shift is partially driven by fluctuation in temperatures in the Pacfic.
So, nice try. Next guess?
tonyb
Tony, have you done a wind/pressure analysis for the past few months of the mid to high latitudes in the NH? I think if you did you see that your cooler weather is directly related to higher pressure over the Arctic, and specifically related to negative phases of the AO. Look at the AO chart and compare it to stormy and cold periods in GB. During a negative AO, the colder air is literally being forced from the Arctic by high pressure. If you tracked movements of air over the NH for the past few months you see the North and Northeast flow of air coming from higher latitudes right over your country. Higher pressure and low sea ice in the Kara and Barants have a direct relationship to your weather in GB this summer. In tracking the pulses of the AO, you’ll see a high AO (and stronger polar vortex) tend to bring nice, warm, and dry weather to GB and a negative AO bring the opposite.
Finally, the sudden stratospheric warming events that I’ve been talking about here on the this blog bring on the large scale major winter outbreaks that GB and other part of Europe saw. They are related to this discussion in that these SSW events also breakdown the polar vortex in a big-time way, bringing on a very negative AO, even reversing the polar jet as it is split in half, and send Europe into a deep freeze while Arctic regions warm.
R Gates
None of this gets away from there being no evidence to back up your case as I detailed above with actual case studies.The position of the Jet stream appears random as regards arctic ice levels
Julia Slingo -Head Honcho at the Met Office- is the one you need to send your research to. We have been told to expect hotter drier summers by the Met Office since the mid 80’s, and were told in gardening programmes to get rid of our traditional garden plants and put in mediterranean ones.
Here in the South West is allegedly the warmest part of the UK and all my mediterranean plants have died over the last five years. Unfortunately our summers have definitely not become hotter and drier as the tourist industry locally will testify.(our local councils are obliged to educate tourist businesses how to adapt to a hotter drier climate, often with a talk by a Met Office scientist))
If you can persuade the Met Office that the hundreds of scientists they employ are wrong (which I thought was my job) you can save the UK millions of pounds on wasted research funds which they can redirect to me.
I am happy to share the funding witth you on a number of joint papers on Jet Streams, SSW’s (genuinely interesting) and extending CET to the year 1000AD. I have spent four days research reading ancient manuscripts on the latter, so I reckon I should get the lions share of that portion of the Met office funds that are redirected.
Please send me a copy of your email to Julia telling her she is barking up the wrong tree. I will be at the Met Office library during the week and can ask if they have heard of any reaction.
best regards
Tonyb
Tony,
I would suggest the Met office look at the assumptions they put into their models for the effects of AGW, especially as we are transitioning from an ice filled to an ice free summer Arctic. They’ve probably not even considered the weakening of the polar vortex or sudden stratospheric warming events, etc. Perhaps they have, but I doubt it, as they would not necessarily lead to the conclusions of a warming and drying GB. Now, a few decades from now, once we’ve seen some new regime really take hold in the Arctic (as opposed to this time of transition), it is possible that the weakened polar vortex and open ocean in the Arctic won’t matter has much and GB could indeed see a period of warming and drying, or maybe warmer and wetter.
At any rate, in regards to recent weather patterns affecting GB, the low AO, open water over the Kara and Barants, and high pressure over the Arctic have been affecting GB. Your slugs and snails have been happy little critters!
R Gates
Your suppositions are as good as anyones.
I do think that climate science is in its infancy and much of what we are told are no more than educated guesses supplied in an overconfident wrapper .
Unfortunately my own speciality-hisrorical climatology- is considered anecdotal these days and the Met office library and archives (a wonderful place) are rarey visited by those upstairs,even though much of the material has not yet been digitised.
It is galling to be told to prepare for hot dry summers when the evidence from their own rain streaked windows can tell them its not happening for us, and they ought to revisit their models and perhaps take advice from R Gates?
.
tonyb
JamesG, so you are not at all skeptical of that? Ask yourself why not, when you are skeptical of better proven hypotheses.
The problem, of course, is that it keeps getting warmer and warmer.
The NOAA USA48 surface dataset shows the US at it warmest 12 months in their 117 year-long series. UAH LT USA48 is on the verge of setting a record.
Maybe if it stopped getting warmer, people will stop wondering what are its consequences. Until then, they’re naturally going to wonder.
Mere tenths of a degree difference from the thirties for heavens sake!
Stand by for another record cold winter with record snows followed by the puerile attempts of zealot warmists to say that is cause by global warming too.
No. The NOAA USA48 12-mth moving average is now 0.85 F above its peak in August 1934.
When you add the trend — 0.45 F of warming in the last 30 years — it becomes worrisome. The 1930s look like a natural fluctuation, while today’s warming looks like a trend.
Like I said, the problem is it keeps getting warmer. If it didn’t — as skeptics keep promising — people wouldn’t be asking these questions.
Correction: NOAA’s USA48 has warmed 1.3 F in the last 30 years.
(I hadn’t annually smoothed the data.)
David – “The 1930s look like a natural fluctuation, while today’s warming looks like a trend.”
Now that’s something I really don’t get!
We know.
But there is a community college with a basic statistics class starting soon somewhere near you!
Good luck!
That doesn’t look like Jesus on my toast, it looks like Mohammad.
James, do you know what a sudden stratospheric warming event is and what is does to the polar vortex? Do you know about its association with the severe outbreaks of cold weather at mid-latitudes? Do you understand how more open water in the Arctic and a shallower thermal gradient between equator and poles could lead to an increased frequency of sudden stratospheric warming events? Do you understand that record snowfall events in the winter will tend to be more associated with generally warmer climates (if you believe tens of thousands of years of ice cores)? Do you think that the bitter cold outbreaks at mid-latitudes is air that is created in place, or do you think that it must come from the poles because of conditions there? All these things are related, and thankfully some very smart men and women are working hard everyday to figure out how. In the meantime, for your enjoyment and education, here’s a little video of a sudden stratospheric warming event that took place over the Arctic in early 2009 (another one took place in early 2012 as well), just before a very severe cold outbreak at mid-latitudes as the polar vortex was broken by this sudden stratospheric warming, and cold air poured down from the north pole to freeze points further south:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-avwKDhXIrQ
Very large bubbles of warm air, rising up from the troposphere pierce into the stratosphere over the pole, causing a sudden rise in temperatures there and breaking the normally closed loop of the polar vortex.
Finally, for what its worth, I have my own pet hypothesis that these sudden stratospheric warming events (which release enormous amounts of energy out into space) are a small part of the so-called “missing heat” problem. These events are one additional way that the Earth system tries to maintain an energy balance, and need to be included in global climate models. Just like large bubbles in a the water of a pan that is heating up that releases energy from water to the surrounding space, so too, these bubbles that come up from the troposphere to the stratosphere, are releasing lots of energy to space. It would be interesting to calculate exactly how much energy is lost to space during these significant events and then include this data and dynamics in global climate models.
Cool. R Gates
R Gates – rhetoric aside, that looks genuinely fascinating.
R. Gates. It is nice to see someone else interested in SSW. To me, the interesting aspect of SSW, which you do not mention, is that it is a “one way street”. Unlike other cyclical patterns which alternately cause the earth to warm and cool, SSW only causes cooling. So, it is not noise that cancels itself out over a period of time.
We only have data on SSW since the 1950’s. So far as I have been able to find out, no-one knows whether what is now happening is SSW is normal or unusual. If the pattern of SSW were suddenly to change dramatically, it could have a major effect on global temperatures. And this, most certainly, is not included in any climate model.
Jim,
As meso-convective events, with heat rising up from the lower atmosphere into the stratosphere, I would take it for granted that everyone understood it was a one-way cooling event just as when a convective bubble in a pan of boiling water releases energy, this only serves to cool the pan of water.
Jim,
See my post below, but this very recent study:
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/12/7243/2012/acpd-12-7243-2012.pdf
Would seem to indicate that SSW’s have been increasing in frequency. My general thoughts are these are meso-convective events, preceded it seems by warming events in the troposphere which through and advection and convection of these large masses of warm air that move up and toward the north from the troposphere into the stratosphere over the Arctic.
I know you’re not a “warmist” as I am, but the increased frequency of these makes physical sense based on greenhouse gas increases and the positive forcing related to those which would be akin to the increased convective bubbling of water this is sitting on a hot plate. These SSW’s are one more (rather large scale!) way that the Earth gets rid of heat and certainly, if they are indeed increasing in frequency, they need to be included in global climate models. If we can get a fix on how many Joules of energy are released from Earth to space during one of these, we may have found some of the “missing heat”. Dr. Trenberth should take note…
Aye Captain Gates, would be interesting.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/climate%20stuff/MBLmodelversusAQUASSTandCh-6.png
I was playing with the AQUA data to do just that. Determining the accuracy is a bit of a challenge, but it looks like the satellite temperature data makes a pretty fair Wattmeter if you have the right reference values.
R Gates : notes a correlation between ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2.
But what of causation, especially given the recent lack of correlation between atmospheric temperatures and atmospheric CO2 ?
Here’s another couple of views of the SSW event from 2009, one of a temperture profile and one of a pressure profile of the troposphere/stratosphere layers. Look at the the timeframe on the far left hand side of each graph around the end of January:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_TEMP_ANOM_ALL_NH_2009.gif
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/strat-trop/gif_files/time_pres_HGT_ANOM_ALL_NH_2009.gif
If you study these graphs closely and keep them in mind when you watch this video a few times covering that late Jan 2009 time frame:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-avwKDhXIrQ&feature=youtube_gdata_player
You can get a real sense of the “stove pipe” effect whereby this monstrously large convective bubble rises up from the troposphere into the high latitude stratosphere, rapidly raising shattering the arctic votex and releasing and incredble amounts of energy to space. This natural cooling effect from SSW meso-convective events is currently not accounted for in global climate model I believe could represent a significant fraction of the “missing heat” when computing Earth’s energy balance and the additional forcing from increased greenhouse gases. One would therefore expect these meso-convective SSW events to potentially increase in frequency and/or intensity as greenhouse gases continue to increase.
“One would therefore expect these meso-convective SSW events to potentially increase in frequency and/or intensity as greenhouse gases continue to increase.”
That’s where I disagree a bit. It looks more like energy relief due to local heat content exceeding atmospheric heat capacity. This would happen more often due to the ocean heat content reaching capacity. There is a balance between what energy the oceans can contain versus what the atmosphere can retain.
Co2 helps restrict energy flow but does not significantly increase the thermal mass of the atmosphere, so you have to consider the thermal mass balance. That is why I think land use, especially expansion into normal marginal agricultural regions, Siberia for example, are a bigger factor.
BTW, Siberia took advantage of this season to do massive controlled burns. That is a quick way to expand usable farmland which has the added benefit of ash fallout on snow covered ground. Land use and black carbon are pretty significant.
Here’s another view showing strong poleward directed heat flux in association with the SSW of Jan. 2009:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/polar/gif_files/time_series_reanal_vt_100mb_2009_NH_10D.png
Captn,
We can disagree on this point of the association between rising heat content of the oceans and increased greenhouse gases. I beleive there is a direct correlation, as the greenhouse gases serve to restrict the flow of energy from ocean to atmosphere and rising heat content of the oceans would seem to correspond well with this hypotheses. But as a skeptic, I am always open to other interpretations…
Aye Captain, there she blows! You can check 1998 in the tropics, same deal. If the rate of diffusion/convection of the heat horizontally is low, then there is no where to go but up. BTW, the entrained water vapor with a blow through turns to ice and reacts with ozone. Solomon did a thingy on the tropics ozone depletion, which is not really depletion, just adjustment.
Prior to the satellite era, the Antarctic was having some ozone issues. I always thought it was that R-12 ran all the way to the Antarctic before doing anything :)
Aye, when captains disagree you need a bigger boat :)
Proving that the ocean heat capacity was reached circa 1995 is not small task with the weather noise, but me charts tells me that what be happened.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/climate%20stuff/whatsnormal.png
But I think I am making some progress with the ocean energy balance.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2012/07/our-solar-pond.html
A few minor issues with developing a specific case for relativistic heat conduction so it looks fancy, but you can get close once you notice that the specific enthaply of salt water at 21.1 C, the current average SST just happens to equal the latent cooling of ~83Wm-2 and the energy of the 4C ocean just happens to be 334.5Wm-2, oddly close to the Joules per gram of the enthalpy of fusion.
Funny thing, with more fresh ice and water involved, like during a glacial period, that 4C would change a touch. It is almost like there are two set points :)
For those following this discussion of SSW events, here’s a recent analysis and discussion of them with some indications that they:
1) Have precursor events that start lower in the troposphere
2) Have been increasing in frequency
http://www.atmos-chem-phys-discuss.net/12/7243/2012/acpd-12-7243-2012.pdf
Some interesting follow-up tidbits related to SSW’s: They have cooling effects that can be seen all the way to the equator– meaning that this large bubble of warm air that rises up from the troposphere in mid-latitudes and works its way north and out of the top of stratosphere in the Arctic, splitting the Arctic vortex (or sometimes simply displacing it to lower latitudes) actually ends up pulling energy from the entire hemisphere from pole to equator. These are amazing meso-convective events. I still would love to get an estimate on how many Joules of energy are released from the Earth system to space in one of these events.
Have you looked to see whether the 2009 SSW showed up in any of the temperature records?
Captain Gates Sir!
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/climate%20stuff/WabbitsFolly.png
Pick an anomaly, any anomaly :)
1998 peak anomaly +2 valley -1.8, 3.8 dT with 30C average SST there would have been ~25Wm-2 change in SS radiant energy in the tropical oceans.
What was the global temperature change that year? Yep, a rather sizable shift in energy in a rather short time. I did the Joules once, seems like there was a 10^22 or so kicker.
Peter317,
The 2009 (and 2012) SSW events showed up quite prominently in the lower troposphere temperature records in the days immediately following the event. In both cases, when the Arctic vortex was split, massive amounts of very cold air spilled down over Europe and deep into the the North American Continent. If you look at the temperature/weather for Europe in mid-January into early February following both the 2009 event and the 2012 event, you’ll find a massive deep freeze– and ironically, the Arctic was relatively balmy as the split vortex allowed the release of all that cold air to the mid-latitudes. Even more remarkable it the fact that during these SSW events, the entire N. Hemisphere cools all the way to the equator. A huge amount of energy is released out of the top of the stratosphere at the pole, like a stove-pipe cooling the entire hemisphere. Quite amazing meso-convective events.
I just about hit hit by a giant piece of falling sky this morning. It only happens when it gets hot so it is obviously caused by the Glowball Warming Thingy.
Maybe I should hire Mikey to hide some declines or swap some cherries, I mean data to back up my theory.
We could get all famous and everything. Mikey knows how to do.
Something we should all ponder more than we do. May the eventual be much greater then the number first thought of in this case.
On Work
By David Harold Fink
Release From Nervous Tension
1945
There is a philosophical school that calls itself economic determinism. Broken down into plain English, this school teaches that all of our adjustments depend upon the way we make our living. There is some truth in this theory, although as stated it is a little too inclusive. A semanticist would add “in part” after the word “depend.”
Certainly, your work does influence your outlook upon life. It gives you status, a place in the community, helps other people to form an opinion of you. You, in turn, are affected by what others think of you. Your work influences your adjustments to your family and your friends. How you make a living pervades all of your other social relationships. If your work adjustments are a festering abscess, all the rest of your life is poisoned by this focal infection.
Normally, a man likes his work. Work is more than a way of making money. Work is a way of life. Work is an opportunity to create. It is an opportunity to exercise one’s skills and techniques, to meet problems and lick them.
If you are not happy in your work, something is wrong. Perhaps something is wrong with the job. It may be that the foreman or the office manager takes out his neuroticism upon his staff. Perhaps something is wrong with you. One young lady who crabbed about her job suddenly found that all was roses and wine when her lover returned to her. Perhaps the job is all right, and you are all right, but it’s just a case of incompatibility. In that case, a fresh start is indicated.
Why does maladjustment in work make you sick? How does maladjustment in work affect your emotions, your interbrain, your digestion? The answer is: through frustration and conflict. You want your pay cheque and you want to escape from the circumstances under which you earn it. You can’t have both. The result is indecision, mental confusion, and a wave of inhibitions spreading over your brain.
Maladjustment in work is the Pavlov bell that means three square meals and an endless series of electric shocks, in the shape of boredom, new defeats, and discouragements by the hour. You want and you don’t want, and up pops a neurosis.
The Skeptical Warmist (aka R. Gates)
This is what the data says => http://bit.ly/Okl9MF
This data shows, the current warming rate of about 0.152 deg C per decade is LESS than a similar warming rate 70 years ago:
1911-1942=>0.160 deg C per decade
1981-2012=>0.152 deg C per decade
The current warming rate is LESS than a similar one 70 years ago.
As a result, the current warming rate is NORMAL.
Mr. Orssengo
You understand of course that as T increases linearly, the energy required to create the same delta-T increases as a cube, yes?
So your claim that 1911-1942 represents greater warming than 1981-2012 ignores that 1981 is half a degree warmer than 1911, and so you are comparing two very different conditions in an entirely invalid way.
The AGW signal.
Here is Swanson’s graph. Observed GISS 21-year running mean global mean surface temperature (heavy solid), along with that temperature cleaned of the internal signal, which is the mean over the eight active models of Fig. 1A (dashed). The cleaned global mean temperature warms monotonically, and closely resembles a quadratic fit to the observed 20th century global mean temperature (thin solid). The standard deviation of the cleaned temperature from the quadratic fit is 0.03 °C compared with 0.06 °C for the observed.
So that is 20 some years old.
How does it work if it’s then extended to 2011?
I believe it would look something like the graph does from 1940 to 1970.
I should say, I think the authors expected that in 2009.
I never did. Too much additional CO2. Oceans too hot. Natural variation is barely holding it back. We will see. I think we will beak hotter by 2015.
“I never did. Too much additional CO2. Oceans too hot. Natural variation is barely holding it back. We will see. I think we will be hotter by 2015.”
That interesting. I don’t have firm idea of what temperature will be in 2015. Nor I am confident of what the sun will be doing.
It seems likely we will be slightly warmer than this last year and/or this year. In reference to satellite measure:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
I think would a bit surprised if a year bounced as high or higher than 1998.
Though not particularly meaningful. If held such level for a few year, it would more significant. But not alarming. If it bounce above the present chart for one year, that could be somewhat alarming- sooner this happens the more exciting.
Is this generally your view, or do you expecting something more exciting happening before 2015?
gbaikie – essentially what Hansen is arguing, which is confirmed on the natural variation side by Keenleyside et al, Smith et al, and Tsonis and Swanson’s climate-shift work, is that natural variation was aligned against the AGW signal in the 2000s. Add to that the deep trough in the solar cycle. Despite all of that, the earth continued to add energy.
Eventually natural variation will turn the other way, and 1998 will be left in the dust. In reality, it already is.
The planet did not add as much energy as Trenberth’s models indicated. The deficit, Hansen speculates, was caused by anthropogenic aerosols. This is why scientists like Hansen and Schwartz are pushing for the tools to gain a better understanding of them.
Tsonis and Swanson are arguing anthropogenic aerosols have not had much of an effect. If they are right, when natural variation starts working with the AGW signal, I think the GMT will do a whole bunch of catching up.
Are you saying that natural cooling episodes will generally act to increase the energy imbalance, but natural warming episodes will not generally act to reduce the energy imbalance?
“I think the GMT will do a whole bunch of catching up.”
Yeah. I got it.
Question how much by 2015?
The flattening of the temperature rise over the past decade is a tropospheric phenomenon related to increased natural and anthropogenic aerosols, the increased frequency of La Nina over El niño (cool phase of the PDO), and a less active sun. All of these have served to mask the tropospheric forcing from increased greenhouse gases. Importantly, the oceans have continued to accumulate energy over this same period as the above mentioned negative forcings in the troposphere do not significantly affect the reduction of ocean to atmosphere heat flux caused by increased greenhouse gases. When some or all of these negative forcings reverse, expect another round of rapid tropospheric warming with previous instrument records being easily shattered.
R Gates,
You note the flat tropospheric temperatures, but say this does not affect the reduction of ocean to atmosphere heat flux. How is that possible? You seem to be saying heat flow is unrelated to temperature difference.
Vassily, see my rather long post on this subject on this blog at:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/07/07/week-in-review-7612/#comment-216747
Essentially, understanding the difference between temperature of the air and the amount of downwelling LW is key. Air Temperature can be flat to declining while downwelling LW can increase because they are measuring different physical properties of different classes of molecules. ,You also need to understand how downwelling LW affects the thermal gradient across the ocean skin layer.
Anyway, read my rather long response to someone else who had this same excellent question.
Yes I see that comprehensive post, thanks.
The real question then becomes : how much does the increase in LW warm the ocean “skin layer” ?
“Yes I see that comprehensive post, thanks.
The real question then becomes : how much does the increase in LW warm the ocean “skin layer” ?”
And if indeed warmed skin layer, would not most of heat be converted in water vapor?
Bart,
You seem to be saying that averaging thermometer readings to come up with an area temperature gives an erroneous result. That is what they do now. Seems to me that using your cube idea would make a 1C anomaly at the poles less significant than a 1C anomaly at the equator. I like the way you think, write it up and get it published.
Bob Koss | July 8, 2012 at 3:32 am |
What this informs the way I think is that CO2 level is the easiest, most reliable figure to measure the disruption due human activity on the global climate and environment systems. The needless complexity of higher order derivatives, multivariate calculus, Chaos Theory and Game Theory (stuff that I spent decades studying and still have trouble with), while it fully supports the exact same conclusions as you get if you simply treat CO2 level as a problem based on its historical relationship to the 180-280 ppmv range of the past 800,000 years, is just more work than needs doing to make decisions.
It’s interesting science, there’s a need for it in some extremely narrow corridors of research and study, it does no harm, but it’s not what a general public or layman needs to have full understanding of the import of the issue. We’re 74% above the 230 ppmv median of CO2 level that has existed for the entire lifespan of our species, it is unnatural to be at this level, and it will lead to harms; a very few cause this by taking more than their share, and it takes very small changes to avert and reverse their excesses.
If you really want my thoughts.
Bart : “We’re 74% above the 230 ppmv median of CO2 level that has existed for the entire lifespan of our species,
it is unnatural to be at this level, and it will lead to harms (A) ;
a very few cause this by taking more than their share, and it takes very small changes to avert and reverse their excesses (B).
Both (A) and (B) are mere blind faith. Pretty much par for the climate “science” course though.
Vassily | July 8, 2012 at 11:19 pm |
Both (A) and (B) are inference drawn from clear and direct observation, in ice cores and fossil records, the functioning of Capitalism and the study of the behavior of Markets.
These are not opinions, excursions into fantasy, fictions, lies or myths. But I can understand you making that mistake, finding these statements as you do on Climate Etc in the comments section, where one’s expectations are bound to be low.
Thanks for the deft evasions Bart, and lowering the average quality of the comments section.
It nevertheless remains true that it is pure invention on your part that you KNOW that (A) the increased CO2 will lead to harm, and (B) reducing CO2 output will be pretty painless and affect only a few.
Vassily | July 9, 2012 at 1:13 am |
See, here you’re putting words into my mouth. And still throwing around accusations and smears.
I can KNOW (yes, that is the correct term) to a scientific certainty (I refer you once again to Isaac Newton’s Rule 4 from Principia if you are unclear as to what that means), that (A) harms will result from rising CO2 levels. We already have current harms attributable to a scientific certainty at a 3%-17% or more level of extreme weather events causing harm. We have Risk calculations that are — though we cannot attribute any single event purely to the level of CO2 — certain indicators of future harm and themselves as all Risks lead to costs of mitigation and avoidance by investors who seek to avoid them, already harm.
Perhaps I ought have explained this more completely earlier. That Risk itself is a financial harm. But I’d have thought it patently obvious. If you feel it was evasive not to tell you the obvious, I guess I owe you some sort of apology for your hurt feelings.
As for (B), I know the costs of reducing CO2 will certainly be less expensive than the vast sums calculated by Novaites and the shoot-from-the-lip-conomists who add up every possible penny that could be attributed, extrapolated or fantasized and lay it at the feet of climate, without bases in actual Economics. I know the Free Riders (you can google that term) who benefit from Rents (you can google that term under ‘Economics’) of fossil fuel industry subsidies and favors and infrastructure will be fewer than the many who shoulder the burden and pay the costs of this excess and wasteful arrangement we now have.
CO2 level is determined by the Carbon Cycle (including anthropogenic sources); that Carbon Cycle is treated currently as a Commons (you can google that term under ‘Tragedy’), while it is scarce’, ‘rivalrous’ and ‘excludable’ (look those terms up) and administratively practical to privatize (google that term), so those who benefit pay on the Market under the laws of Supply and Demand (google it).
I hate corresponding with people too lazy to do basic research before they sling unfounded accusations at me.
Ho hum, Bart, just more fancy words to try and dress up your blind faith as science – so good news, your Climatology PhD and IPCC membership is in the post.
Neither you nor anyone else KNOWS that the rising CO2 will cause significant harm that could cheaply avoided by just a few peolple. A rabid propagandist masquerading as a thinker, you are just assuming what you need to prove, to try and support your preference for heavy political interference (often disguised with the pretense of being “libertarian”)..
Vassily | July 10, 2012 at 1:46 am |
“Blind faith in Science.”
Individually, the words each mean something. When you put them together like that, not so much.
But making no sense hasn’t stopped you up to now, so this isn’t much of a surprise. You don’t like that people can really know things, because somehow that hurts your feelings? It’s so bad that people can reliably know things that it must, to your mind, be some sort of propaganda?
Propaganda for what? Politically, I’m a Market Capitalist with no party affiliations or leanings and a strong Minarchist tendency. That’s the least propagandable position in the game. It doesn’t need propaganda because it’s simply right, and it doesn’t get propaganda because there’s no profit in it, unlike Minarchy’s insane drug-addict cousin, Libertarianism.
You call observations and inference assumption, because you can’t tackle reason head on, and reframing the world to one you’re more comfortable with is your only recourse.
How’s that work in your life in general? Your speeding tickets, are they just assumed radar speed measures? Your grocery bill, how’s the cashier know it adds up?
That rabid propaganda from your proctologist, how’s that going? Your pants, did the guy who sold them to you have a PhD in fitting?
As predicted, Bart again trots out the blatant lie that he believes in minimal government, as a cover to justify his unfailing push for more and bigger government. (Along with numerous other assumptions he calls observations, another of his personal traits).
Vassily | July 10, 2012 at 2:49 am |
Whose sockpuppet is it this time?
And.. ‘as predicted’ (since I’ve fallen into the trap of responding to a sockpuppet) generally requires a prediction. For those etymology-impaired, that means something said before the thing happened.
Also, you appear to have confused anarchist or libertarian (no government, or too little government to get in the way of one’s personal tastes) with Market Capitalist minarchist — the least possible government to maintain a fair Market. Which is slightly more government than an anarchist wants, and on average less government than a libertarian will tolerate, but distributed differently; some libertarians have uneconomical tastes that they don’t mind saddling others with by force and deception.
However, sockpuppet, as we’ve observed everything about your posts appears designed to deceive, again not surprising.
The myopic lead the halt through the hall of cracked mirrors.
=====================
I mentioned some posts back that Bart is prone to disguising his totalitarian underpinnings, by feigning support for liberty (as well as feigning an air of authority about terms like “minarchist”, “market capitalist”). On cue he did this yet again, and now wants to split hairs saying I didn’t predict it. You just cannot get any straight talk from this megablogger.
Vassily | July 10, 2012 at 1:11 pm |
Ahhh. It’s a problem of one of these things is not like the other; why does this sound so familiar?
The claim: “I mentioned some posts back that Bart is prone to disguising his totalitarian underpinnings, by feigning support for liberty (as well as feigning an air of authority about terms like “minarchist”, “market capitalist”). On cue he did this yet again, and now wants to split hairs saying I didn’t predict it. You just cannot get any straight talk from this megablogger.” (Flatterer. Me, a megablogger? I wish.)
The “prestige”: “As predicted, Bart again trots out the blatant lie that he believes in minimal government, as a cover to justify his unfailing push for more and bigger government. (Along with numerous other assumptions he calls observations, another of his personal traits).”
The “prediction”: “A rabid propagandist masquerading as a thinker, you are just assuming what you need to prove, to try and support your preference for heavy political interference (often disguised with the pretense of being “libertarian”)..”
So, I don’t claim to be libertarian. A libertarian is a beast of a different stripe, and I’ve often enough disparaged their ilk here at Climate Etc. that it’s impossible to tar me with the brush of claiming to be one.
Vassily simply attaches whatever calumnies he hopes might stick to the proponents of ideas he rejects irrationally. He cannot differentiate a proven claim from an assumption, and wishes with all his heart that everyone who doesn’t fall into line with his thinking could be described as propagandists, feigned authoritarians (hello, remember me, the one who repeatedly invites people to check on what he says and validate from independent sources?), masqueraders, socialists, statists, anything that he hopes he isn’t, but let’s face it.. he’s using argument from authority, masquerading, pretending and feigning.
So much self-loathing in one person. It must be hard to be him.
“You understand of course that as T increases linearly, the energy required to create the same delta-T increases as a cube, yes?
So your claim that 1911-1942 represents greater warming than 1981-2012 ignores that 1981 is half a degree warmer than 1911, and so you are comparing two very different conditions in an entirely invalid way.”
It’s a good point in regard a question how warm earth could possible get.
Especially when talking about increasing watts per square meter.
So if 10 watts per square meter warms 1 degree at cooler temperature, another 10 watt added, warms less than 1 degree.
And/or if at noon one is getting 1000 watts per square meter from sunlight, if sunlight intensity increase by say 10 watt, so it was 1010 per square meter, it not going significantly increase the temperature.
Whereas if one has 100 watts per square meter, and add 10 watts it’s more significant in terms of increasing the temperature.
What is wrong with criticism, is the greenhouse theory doesn’t allow for this factor. It instead say adding xx watts per square meter increase temperature by x.x C
Another thing wrong it, is one should think in K rather than C.
And another reason why we should have accurate measurement average temperature of earth rather use difference in temperature. But if assume average temperature of earth is 14 C, 287 K, increase 1/2 degree is going to 287.5 K.
So for example ocean water temperature may be 26 C [299 K] at some latitude.
How much would would a doubling CO2 increase this 26 C water. The answer is very little, but giving some number would more meaningful.
Or instead doubling one said 800 ppm global average CO2 would be better. Or said doubling existing CO2 which is around 393 ppm. Or doubling pre industrial [280 ppm].
gbaikie | July 8, 2012 at 3:40 am |
Your point is irrelevant. Ten degrees warmer on a 100 degree scale isn’t 10% worse, it’s 10x worse.
The energy in the system, its rates of exchange and variability, are where the sensitivities to damage are; temperature is a crude measure but it’s what’s easily available to improvise, and commonly accessible to ideas people are used to thinking in terms of.
Were climatology an ancient science and taken as seriously as weather, we’d use different figures and measure different ways, instead of improvising units that lead to just such fallacious and silly arguments as you build on this haphazard arrangement.
“gbaikie | July 8, 2012 at 3:40 am |
Your point is irrelevant. Ten degrees warmer on a 100 degree scale isn’t 10% worse, it’s 10x worse.”
I didn’t say worse. I have no idea what 10x worse means.
gbaikie | July 8, 2012 at 11:39 pm |
I have no idea what 10x worse means.
That’s kinda the problem.
Fan @ 7th July,4.44pm:
Referring back to our interchange re inappropriateness of ‘denialist’ label, Machiavelli Thread 07/ 11.49am, and yr decision to restrict use to reactionary, polemic and demagogue ‘denialism’ still inappropriate fer reasons i cited. Well Fan, you can’t even stick to yr own self limitation. Tell me, how does yr Homer Simpson reference to the “D” label qualify? So emamoured are you, Fan who pretends to seek *more * discourse, with yr perjorative labelling, yer can’t even hold to yer word about restricted use, however limited that is. I’m awarding you no emoticons, Fan.
Actually Beth, the link is not to Homer Simpson, but to a funny-but-true SpongeBob Squarepants skit The Endless Summer.
SpongeBob’s skit is economically accurate (in the sense of Friedrich Hayek), and it physically accurate (in the sense of James Hansen), and it is culturally accurate (in the sense of David Good and Rafael Reuveny’s On the Collapse of Historical Civilizations (2009)).
In particular, Beth Cooper, SpongeBob’s skit embraces the sophisticated teaching of Good and Reuveny’s economic analysis, that climate-change denialism represents (in essence) the triumph of short-sightedness over foresight, and individual interests over common interests.
Thus SpongeBob’s teaches teaches children that climate-change denialism is not malign, but simply short-sighted and selfish. Which is pretty obvious, eh?
And so it is good that our children are learning from SpongeBob, not Homer! :) :) :)
The Skeptical Warmist (aka R. Gates)
warming faster at the end– warming accelerated at the end of the 20th century.
Not at all.
The 30-years global warming rate has dropped as follows:
1974 to 2005 => 0.193 deg C per decade
1981 to 2012 => 0.153 deg C per decade.
Here is the graph that shows this deceleration => http://bit.ly/NgvHih
Girma,
Scientists still do not realize that the natural state of water is ice and that energy is why ice turned to water.
Your ability to cherry pick continues. Why did you chose those time frames when we were simply talking about end of 20th century compared to the entire time frame from 1850 onward? Clearly the warming accelerated at the end of the 20th century, which would mean that 1975 to 2000 would be just the right timeframe to compare to the overall period of 1850 to 2000. Do that Girma, and then we’ll have a discussion.
Because climate is cyclic and after reaching its peak of 0.193 deg C per decade warming rate for the period 1974-2005, it has started to decelerate and has the latest lower value of 0.153 deg C per decade for the period 1981 to 2012 => http://bit.ly/NgvHih
Girma,
We were never talking about early 21st century, but late 20th. The original issue was comparing late 20th century warming to the rest of the period from 1850 to 2000.
What is this wierd posting? Is
Could it be the missing data that AGW scientists keep throwing out?
Could it be a cat on the computer key board?
Mine does this all the time…
Soberingly, Beth, that “◙” post was an (unsuccessful) denial-of-service attack on the Climate Etc. forum.
Fortunately, the attack was (partially) foiled by WordPress’ character-length filters. Were it not for those filters, the attack would have succeeded.
The attack on Climate Etc. was more direct than Anthony Watts’ public fantasy “Somebody should take [science writer] Chris Mooney’s blogging computer away from him” … but it was motivated by the same anti-free-speech ideology.
Restrict free speech? WUWT indeed?
Lawsuits, secret denunciations, abuse, threats, outing, and “enemy lists” are of course other classic tools for restricting discourse.
That is why, for so long as she hosts Climate Etc. as a free-thinking forum, Judith Curry should be prepared to withstand all these attacks.
Because some folks, and some ideologies, and some economic interests, and some political campaigns, are just plain against free-thinking, eh?
Of course, against these ideologies and interests and politicians, the very best offense is the simplest offense: THINK FREELY! :) :) :)
That’s why denial-of-service attacks on Climate Etc. are a *GOOD* sign: it signifies that forces standing against free speech are hurting.
So let’s continue with *MORE* discourse! :) :) :)
The Hamburgler did it. And the Koch bros paid him to do it.
Excellent post, “discord.”
All it needed was a link. :) :) :)
You are doing well, little “discord”-grasshopper! :) :) :)
Judith,
Do our current scientists know how to recreate our planet?
Do they know what our planet was like at creation?
These are very important questions in how our planet changed over the years and yet scientists fluff them off for abstract theories.
In order to even generate a model, these would have to be in consideration unless a certain outcome is being sought and created.
Then the field of science is man made and not seeking knowledge but seeking to generate careers and funding for strictly a dogma outcome.
Is it a wonder why scientists do NOT want to be questioned and their research scrutinized?
Is there a message hidden in this?
Yes.
It is an abstract thought process of an AGW scientist.
:-)
Looks like an attack to me.
It’s spam, pure and simple.
No I think it is a deliberate attack.
Happily the jamming has been removed, although now it looks like the nesting may not work. For those who missed it someone anonymously posted two long comments consisting entirely of many inches of black marks.
David Wojick, you are correct: Climate Etc. experienced a denial-of-service attack.
Which is denialism in its purist form, eh?
———————-
Method: The denialist posted thousands of unicode box-formatting characters “▉”. By design, it is infeasible to generate these special-purpose formatting characters accidentally; thus “the cat did it” is not a credible explanation.
Conclusion: The denial-of-service attack on Climate Etc. was deliberate in its intent, and (moderately) skillful in its methods.
———————-
denial of service? That was probably just a kid that do not have anything better to do, it’s full of this stuff all over the web(maybe not too much in scientific blogs).
Fan,
Were they not like the computer cards of the past with all those little punched holes?
That massive old high school computer sure was easy to bugger up and take days to fix…
It’s pretty easy to gum up the nesting on these threads. I’ve never noticed it on other WP blogs, but CE probably gets a lot more comments than your typical WP blog.
I think that the easiest way to screw it up is deleting comments. From what I understand, there’s a right way and a wrong way to delete comments.
Nesting test
Say, JW, do you think it might be space cadets trying to get in touch?
Beth,
I doubt it…The would have to talk baby talk in order for our scientists to understand them…and still they may think it was the whales trying to contact them… :-)
Beth wrote: Fan, Referring back to our interchange re inappropriateness of ‘denialist’ label, Machiavelli Thread 07/ 11.49am, and yr decision to restrict use to reactionary, polemic and demagogue ‘denialism’ still inappropriate fer reasons i cited. Well Fan, you can’t even stick to yr own self limitation. Tell me, how does yr Homer Simpson reference to the “D” label qualify? So emamoured are you, Fan who pretends to seek *more * discourse, with yr perjorative labelling, yer can’t even hold to yer word about restricted use, however limited that is. I’m awarding you no emoticons, Fan.”
I make the same general point upsteam a ways, Beth. The hypocrisy is pretty stunning. BYy the way, Ever notice how the most irritating warmists often have the most irritating names?
Ooops. Should read “upstream.”
Climate Etc. regulars like Girma and pokerguy and Beth Cooper and David L. Hagen and k scott denison and and manacker (and more!) are all making essentially the same point that was made by Dave Springer:
Thank your for your question, Dave Springer.
Yes Dave, you understand correctly that you are the denier. And the reason is simple. Our planet has four great thermal energy reservoirs:
• land,
• sea,
• air,
• ice
Physics assures us that Nature can (and does) slosh energy pretty freely from one account to another, but she cannot alter the total amount of energy in her accounts.
The radiation physics associated with CO2 ensures that Nature’s total energy-balance is inexorably increasing. That is what physical theory predicts, and that is what physical measurements see (per Hansen et al. “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications” (arXiv:1105.1140v2 [physics.ao-ph], 2011) for example).
That is why “the cherry-picking choice” — to focus upon any one energy account, out of the four accounts in-play — indeed is a form of denialism.
Specifically it is a form of reactionary denialism … for the essentially comedic ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ reasons that were posted in answer to Beth Cooper! :) :) :)
What is your next question,
SpongeBobDave Springer and Girma and pokerguy and Beth Cooper and David L. Hagen and k scott denison and manacker et al.? :) :) :)Silly you. Come on Gates, admit the region of the earth measured by HadCrut3 did cool slightly over the last 15 years!
JCH, don’t forget to check all FOUR of earth’s thermal reservoirs! :) :) :)
PS: sorry for leaving your name off the list! :) :) :)
“Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat”
This is a quite nonsensical statement.
Under what time-scale is he determining this statement? During a full 24 hour cycle at dawn the Earth begins to absorb heat, the temperature rises and photon efflux increases until about 1ish. Then, with the setting sun, influx falls and so the temperature falls. At dusk there is no solar influx, only atmospheric back-radiation, so the temperature falls further. All night, the Earth sends photons off into space.
Not all days are equal, the tilt of the Earth and non-circular orbit means that different locals have different solar influxes as different parts of the year.
Moreover, some solar energy is stored long term, either as biotic material or as ice on the poles. The glaciers are reservoirs of potential energy placed their by solar drive evaporation of brine.
Thank you, DocMartyn, for an excellent question:
DocMartyn, your question is answered fully in the 21 graphs that together comprise the concluding Figure 18 of Hansen et al. “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications” (arXiv:1105.1140v2 [physics.ao-ph], 2011).
Namely, climate forcings and their contributions to temperature change and planetary energy imbalance are considered at all time-scales from 1880-2010 are considered, with one-year resolution.
Hansen’s conclusions are in general are nuanced, long-term, and conditional, but (deliberately perhaps?) one particular high-visibility prediction is specific, unambiguous, and near-term:
What is your next (excellent) question, DocMartyn? :) :) :)
‘A fan of *MORE* discourse’ I have three questions
1) Why are you a first class wanker?
2) Why are there such huge swings in the Earths outgoing radiation?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_June_2012.png
Looking at the satellite measurement of heat radiated it is obvious that heat is capable of moving from non-radiative to radiative compartments.
The peak from 1997-1999 shows the phenomena very well indeed. Here heat has been transferred from a local where it was not radiating into space, into where it could.
Now the time scale of this swing, and the other swings is in the order of years. How do we not know, that in addition to these warm/cool multi-year spikes in the 1979-2012 record, there are not much longer term, oscillations of heat transfer from non-radiative/radiative locals, on much larger time scales?
3) Why is the bottom of the Mediterranean sea cooler that the surface Tmax, average and even the Tmin?
It addition to being feed by European rivers, the main source of water of the Mediterranean sea is the Atlantic ocean. The current from the Atlantic enters Mediterranean sea at the surface, and a counter current from the Mediterranean sea into the Atlantic ocean, drive by high density brine, flows from the depths.
Now, we know that the temperature of the Mediterranean sea is warmer than the Atlantic. We know that its depths are not cooled by polar melt water currents. Yet, the temperature at below about 100 meters in the Mediterranean sea is less than the surface. This means that the rate of heat flux from the bottom going upward has to be greater than the rate at which surface water radiates heat down; at a given temperature.
Why a shallow sea, with no cooling water inputs should have a thermal gradient is very puzzling.
Perhaps you would care to answer why it is the case; without smiles.
Thank you for your three questions, DocMartyn. Here are the three answers that you requested:
(1) “That’s what *she* said!” :)
(2) If Roy Spenser plotted a quadratic fit to his satellite data, it would show accelerating tropospheric warming, eh?
(3) “The solar heat absorbed by the [Mediterranean] sea during summer is redistributed to winter evaporation via heat storage by the sea. Thus the peak evaporation occurs in winter and is mainly driven by energy released from sea heat storage.” (Matsoukas et al., “Seasonal heat budget of the Mediterranean Sea”, 2004).
What are your next three questions, DocMartyn? :) :) :)
And this has got what to do with the question?
DocMartyn, the Gulf of Mexico is also much colder at the bottom than the annual cycle of the air above. I suspect that the cold water there is never mixed and is quite stagnant, and it shows that the molecular diffusion in water is very slow.
Jim D. That still does not answer the problem. It is quite clear that the downward/upward kinetics are unimportant, but the thermodynamics should drive the system to an average temperature in the bulk phase, with oscillations around the mean at the surface.
The Tmin/Tmax at the surface should be a wave form with an large amplitude, and this should be dampened as you drop in depth.
This doesn’t happen, we have an asymmetric temperature distribution. Why this should be I must confess I do not know.
Young “Discord” asks:
Little grasshopper, click the link that DocMartyn supplied and be enlightened! :) :) :)
I think that’s cubic (quadratics only have one minimax), but I’ll award that one to the original Fan, out of magnanimity. And for other reasons.
Magnanimity is a sufficient motivation, little grasshopper.
Think upon it, as a koan: Is there a better one? :) :) :)
Fan, since you are up on this thermidamics stuff, what is a barrier layer?
http://www.locean-ipsl.upmc.fr/~clement/mld.html
Something about salinity, density and such, kinda confusing. Folks keep telling me that you can’t use them thermidamical boundary layers, everything is just too mixed up for that so yous gotta use defuseonion in stead. Mighty complimumcated soundin’
BTw, Spencer is using a 4th order poly now it was a 3rd order before this little bump up.
DocMartyn, what I am saying is that it is highly stratified. That cold water could have been down there since the last ice age for all we know. It clearly doesn’t mix, otherwise it would be a annual average as you see with the land where heat conduction is much better.
Capt. dallas, my knowledge of oceanic transport processes is sufficient only to ensure my exceeding humility in the face of them.
Undoubtedly the tropospheric temperatures have in general flattened over the past decade or so, for quite obvious reasons. I put a fair amount of confidence in FR 2011 to identify this reasons for tropospheric temperature flattening, though their exclusion of anthropogenic aerosols for justifiable reasons is regrettable. Still, they’ve found 70 to 80% of the forcing even without the anthropogenic aerosol inclusion, which is pretty good. Their identification of the ongoing underlying positive forcing from greenhouse gas increases corresponds to other similar studies that try to isolate the individual negative and positive forcing agents.
Still, the fact that the far great heat reservoir of the ocean continued to gain heat over the past 10 years, with its far great thermal inertia and greater heat capacity when compared to the troposphere is far more interesting to me than the short-term fluctuations of the troposphere. I have a high-degree of confidence that once the natural fluctuations align with the positive forcing from greenhouse gas increases, tropospheric temperatures will soar and all previous instrument records will easily be shattered.
R. Gates – your comments lately have been exceptional. Just don’t go F. M. on me! The limit is 2,000 words/ 500 commas per sentence, and not a spec more!
In a period when the oceans are cooling there is no global warming during that period. Global warming alarmists must learn to live with that simple truth even if it means that they have been living a lie for years and just move on to their next lie like… global weirding–i.e., something wierd happen? That is caused by evil business, capitalism and evil Judeo-Christian morals, ethics and principles. In the liberal Utopia of the Left weather is always good so the climate is dependable, reliable and very comfortable for all, all the time.
How deep is your ocean? Mine goes down to the bottom.
It is as sign of a limitless vortex of swirling superstitious ignorance to believe there is a body of hot water down deep in the ocean just waiting to rise from the depths and destroy us all like a demonic Phoenix. How someone like Trenberth can be a denier of convection and retain a job in academia says more about our socity than science.
There’s also a little thing called the Thermocline, thanks to the hard, physical properties of water, which severely attenuates the flow of heat into the deep ocean.
The oceans are getting warmer, period.
Of course they’re getting warmer – by all of 0.15 degrees over the last forty years (15e+22J in the upper 700m) and a fraction of that below 700m
You are very wrong in this regard wagathon. Your inability to see natural fluctuations riding on top of a longer term forcing is your blindness. The fact that 2011 was the warmest La Nina year on record is very significant as it happened during a time that the sun is generally not that active. Your blindness to the significance of these facts indicates strongly your denier versus skeptic status.
But natural fluctuations and radiative forcings do not exist in isolation from each other, do they?
Regardless of radiative forcing, any temperature increase – whether natural fluctuation or otherwise – will tend to reduce the TOA radiative imbalance, and so reduce radiative forcing. A temperature decrease will tend to have the opposite effect.
Also, one part of the globe can warm, or cool, without having any effect on what another part of the globe is doing. The temperature will do what the temperature does, in sublime indifference to what the average TOA energy balance is doing – or not doing.
Peter317 discovers new physics:
Uhhh … there’s a principle called “conservation of energy” that implies the opposite, Peter317.
You’d be surprised how many climate scientists believe in it! :) :) :)
And even make scientific predictions from it! :) :) :)
Fan
You write
Yeah.
Like the prediction that if CO2 emissions continue unabated and CO2 levels continue to rise over the early decades of the 21st century (both of which did happen), the globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature would rise by 0.2 degC (which did NOT happen).
So much for “climate predictions”.
Max
Fan, go s***w yourself!
Peter137 and Fan
I havent been following this part of the thread so apologies if I’ve misinterpreted this, but surely Peter is rght, in as much there is no ‘global’ warming but rather patchy warming and some cooling.
I wrote this with a colleague a couple of years ago
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/04/in-search-of-cooling-trends/
BEST also confirmed that around one third of stations have been cooling for at least thirty years, so that makes it a genuine trend.
I know Mosh has his own views on this and its highly complex, as so much data has been messed with and so many stations physically moved or become surrounded by buildings and subject to uhi.
I suspect that changes in wind direction might be resposible as has happened in the UK where warm westerlies have often been replaced by colder easterlies, resulting in our decade long temperature down turn
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
tonyb
Uhhh … scarecrow? schoolfellow? scofflaw? seerpaw? sillyhow? slurbow? smew? snarleyyow? sneckdraw? spanghew? spleetnew?
Or is an unabridged dictionary required?
I’d like to buy a vowel, please Peter317! :) :) :)
Fan
I think Peter is merely suggesting that you need to carry out some urgent do it yourself repairs.
tonyb
Fanny, that’s three missing letters. Now assuming that at least one is a vowel, that’s at least 5x5x5 = 125 possibilities (all vowels), and as many as 5x21x21 (one vowel) = 2205 possibilities. No fair if you count Y as a vowel.
Trolls like fan and robert no longer exist for me. So my future lack of response to them should not be taken as tacit acceptance of anything they may say, but that I’m quite simply ignoring them.
“Discord”, the command-line tools
catandgrep, together with the unix-standard dictionary file/usr/share/dict/words, enabled a search for *EVERY* word beginning with “s” and ending in “w”.Of these “s***w” words (of which there are surprisingly many!) the great treasure is sea-captain Frederick Marryat’s on-line book Snarleyyow, or the Dog Fiend (1834).
Fans of Patrick O’Brian will rejoice at this wonderful British sea-faring novel of the 19th century.
What is your next (wonderful!) book recommendation, Peter317! :) :) :)
What could be more blind to reality than fearmongering global warming climatists who must deny that our world has been in a warming trend since the the last ice age?
Fan you write “The radiation physics associated with CO2 ensures that Nature’s total energy-balance is inexorably increasing.”
And then you write ” What is your next question,”
So, my next question is by how much is the total energy-balance increasing? And where is the empirical data that shows that this increase is not indistinguishable from zero?.. Since Girma’s graph shows clearly that total climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 IS indistinguishable from zero.
Jim Cripwell asks “By how much is the total energy-balance increasing?”
That is the key question, Jim Cripwell. Among climate scientists, the consensus answer is articulated by James Hansen as follows:
(1) Climate science’s most urgent need is for higher-quality data, extending over longer times, covering all four thermal reservoirs (earth, air, sea, and ice). In particular, the nations of the world must work together to launch a new generation of earth-observing satellites, that incorporates the lessons-learned from previous generations.
(2) Climate science also needs better theories, including most urgently, better understanding of aerosols and cloud-albedo forcings. Because better climate data+better climate theories helps us make better-informed decisions. Otherwise, not so much.
(2) What can climate science say with the data we’ve got? The summary of the analysis in Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications is that (a) there was a positive planetary energy imbalance during 200-2005 that (b) was driven by anthropogenic C02, such that we in the coming decade we can reasonably foresee (c) acceleration of the rate of sea level.
Thank you for your thoughtful question(s), Jim Cripwell.
What’s this thing you have for Hansen? It seems a little … err … unhealthy. Does his wife know?
Fan you ask me (among others)
Here it is:
PCC predicted a warming of the globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature of 0.2 degC per decade for the early decades of the 21st century (in both TAR and AR4) provided CO2 emissions continued unabated and CO2 concentrations continued to rise.
CO2 emissions DID continue unabated.
CO2 concentrations DID continue to rise.
MY QUESTION:
Why has the globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature not risen at all over the past 15 years (180 months)?
Got an answer for me, Fan?
Max
Manacker, I appreciate your well-phrase and polite question, and will respectfully answer it, both briefly and with reference to further analysis.
The short answer is that planet has four great thermal energy reservoirs:
• land,
• sea,
• air,
• ice
and the physics of radiative transport is such that this sum is rising inexorably, in physical consequence of the anthropogenic rise in heat-trapping atmospheric CO2.
Mother Nature sloshes energy pretty freely from one reservoir to another, and furthermore we measure each reservoir only incompletely, and moreover our instruments are error-prone (satellite measurements of the troposphere most especially). In consequence, secular increases in each reservoir are resolved above fluctuation, noise and error only over multi-decadal timescales.
For further discussion of this point, with many examples, see Paul Clark’s “Notes and Musings” page on his exemplary site WoodForTrees, which has been commended by skeptic and non-skeptic alike.
For in in-depth analysis from an energy-budget point-of-view, see the 2011 article by James Hansen and colleagues titled “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications” (arXiv:1105.1140v2 [physics.ao-ph]), which a Google search will readily find.
Thank you for this excellent question, Manacker! :) :) :)
Forgive me if I find your subjective and imprecise argument to be little different from handwaving.
Given your remarks about the inaccuracies of our measurements and about energy ‘sloshing around’, it seems unlikely that we can tell whether the real temperature has even risen at all in the last fifty years.
Or maybe you can put some verifiable numbers into the discussion that will reinforce your point and show that the errors are actually small enough to let us distinguish 0.7C in 50 years but large enough that we cannot be certain of 0.0C in 15.
Latimer, see for example, An observationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950 (Journal of Geophysical Research, 2009).
What are your next questions, Latimer and Manacker? :) :) :)
Latimer and Max. We are wasting our time. The latest reference given by fan is just more hand waving, with no substance behind it. We know there is no empirical data to support the hypothesis of CAGW. But we also know that the true believers in the Religion of the Church of CAGW, like fan, will NEVER admit this. They will just go on throwing red herrings all over the place. Pekka, and Steven Mosher are exactly the same.
And you think that the thermal storage capacity of land, sea, air and ice are all of the same order of magnitude? Let me give you a hint: it takes 144 btu to melt one lb of ice. It takes 1 btu to raise 1 lb of water 1 degree F.
You’re also missing the latent heat that it took to put the water vapor into the atmosphere, which is not insignificant. You need to look at the sensible heat of the dry atmosphere and the latent heat of evaporation of water (which is more like 1000 btu/lb) as separate reservoirs.
“Discord”, the scientific disciplines that take into account those energy-entropy mechanisms include thermodynamics. and statistical mechanics.
It is remarkable how many climate scientists know quite a lot about these difficult subjects! :) :) :)
That is why you must study them too, little grasshopper! :) :) :)
” the scientific disciplines that take into account those energy-entropy mechanisms include thermodynamics. and statistical mechanics.”
Yes they do. Oddly, those are the exact disciplines that are most questionable in climate science. :) Climate scientists seem to have forgotten there are upper bounds, limited by simple thermodynamics like specific heat capacity.
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o252/captdallas2/climate%20stuff/WabbitsFolly.png
If the oceans were warming unabated by CO2 amplification, why would the warmest parts of the oceans not be warming? Probably some silly thermodynamic limit like the specific heat capacity of air at sea level or some other not so technical non-sense :)
Fanny finally plays the windmillbeard card:
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~tashbook/spring2010/ise108/_Media/windmill_beard.jpeg
I have noticed, pokerguy, but I didn’t like to say…
Do you notice in Fan’s latest post, how she/he is trying to wriggle out of a previous position? Kind of like ‘move the goal posts,’ ‘ readjust yer frame- work,’ ‘ hide the decline,’ ‘ tweak the model, I’d say’ typical climate-ahem- *science* theory innoculation. ‘Global warming’ becomes ‘climate change’ …jest another sea change into something rich and strange.
I’m with you on free speech, Fan, there was a time at univesity where reading Karl Popper’s Open Society’ saved me from the Slough of Despond. I’m giving you 1 emoticon :-) You could ‘ve got 2 but you had a go at Anthony W.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SO5VO2ixWY
A little less with the dramatics?
Beth, if you mean the denial of service attack that was mounted this morning against Climate Etc., then please let me express my appreciation that you, and I too, and the overwhelming majority of Climate Etc. posters, utterly reject such attacks.
The best defense is a good offense: SPEAK FREELY!
Which deserves *FIVE* emoticons! :) :) :) :) :)
Tsk … u n i v e r s i t y
“I have noticed, pokerguy, but I didn’t like to say…”
Not sure why, but struck me as very funny Beth. Actually laughed out loud, which like snow to children, is an increasingly rare and exciting event in the life of this grumpy old skeptic..
And yes, I did notice the usual warmist wiggling and tiggling one often encounters with a warmist who finds himself/herself painted into a corner,
just didn’t like to say :-)
Laughter or The Slough, pokerguy, and getting immersed in the world of a well written novel as you well know.
This on The Mayor of Casterbridge.
Thomas Hardy
Undone by his past –
he once sold his wife and child.
Nobody’s perfect.
H/T Bader ‘One Hundred Great Books in Haiku.’
“he once sold his wife and child.” A package deal? That’s hard to do now a days :)
Hah! More laughter. My wife is downstairs with her Sunday crossword no doubt wondering if I’ve finally snapped my cap.
______
Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”
“Yes.”
“All like ours?”
“I don’t know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound – a few blighted.”
“Which do we live on – a splendid one or a blighted one?”
“A blighted one.”
― Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Maybe we need a Week In Review thread II, because this one’s buggered?
Something else that caught my eye this week: UEA, in response to a FOA request, released some of the obscene, homophobic, paranoid and sociopathic threats sent to Phil Jones. I highlighted some examples, and posed a challenge to more responsible “climate skeptics” here: http://theidiottracker.blogspot.com/2012/07/threats-against-climate-scientists-phil.html
Robert,
Did you condemn Gleick or not?
So UEA released some hate emails directed at data-hider Phil Jones.
But still no progress on backed-up FOI requests. And still no sign of any missing “context” emails, that puts Jones’ deliberate sabotaging of the science process in a better light.
P and CD: Funny how those jokes against females get a response isn’t it? :-(
My father only had daughters and in an all female household sometimes liked to tell jokes against women. He would always laugh at his own joke.. to which we would usually respond, disapprovingly,, ‘Yes, you would laugh at that wouldn’t you?’ Sometimes it was all we could to not laugh out loud, he was pretty amusing.
Interesting, because I didn’t think of it that way. Although, now that I cogitate on the matter, if he had only sold his child, it would have been as funny. ON the other hand, if he sold say, “all 6 of his children,” now I’m laughing again.
Sigh. *wouldn’t* have been as funny.
One year hence
North Atlantic ‘could oscillate’ with a constant energy input providing it gets a 64 year cycle trigger.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/NAO-SST-ea.htm
Hi Beth me love,
How’s that climate dog? Thought I would test out the new carbon tax on petrol. So I left Shibboleth – my blue horse – at home on the range in Rocky and drove the black Ford Falcon to Brisbane. It is a bit of a sham and a disgrace. Not the Falcon. I meant the tax. As we were already paying $0.38/L tax and this hasn’t increased – a change in the name of the tax don’t seem to matter much. The oil price is down somewhat and petrol is cheaper.
It seems unlikely at any rate that the energy mix in 2050 will be anything like today’s. I picture it as closed cycle gas cooled nuclear reactors – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Multiplier_Module – powering flying cities. Whatever it is will be cheap and abundant.
I was interested in your ‘conservation farming’. Building carbon levels in agricultural and grazing land soil is a great way to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. Increases food production – better water use – better environmentals – it just works on so many levels.
You’ve got a bit more cold and wet weather on the way courtesy of SAM the climate dog – http://www.bom.gov.au/products/national_radar_sat.loop.shtml – so take care on your Yarra adventures.
Best regards
Captain (Robbo) Kangaroo
:cool: :cool::cool: :cool: :cool:
Dr. Curry,
Bravo for this ” Lonnie could make a huge and lasting impact by archiving his ice core data.” You have ‘named a name’ and called for a corrective action on the part of another CliSci researcher.
A tiny step in the right direction….
Hi Diogenes (et al) :-)
Thx fer another great DVD, i’ve got a project in mind.
After two days sunshine, and freezing nights,yesterday the River Yarra flooding is subsiding. I loved its beauty and the daily drama, but if there’s more rain coming the ducks and I will be happy. Chief Hydrologist, I’m sending you this, finished it last night,
River Music.
Misty clouds disperse along the ridge
And on the mountain peaks snow becomes soft.
Water trickles from a granite ledge
In veins of liquid crystal through the rocks.
Then the plover calls upon the wind,
The coot hen answers in the valley.
In the foothills where the streams unite,
From beds of reeds along the river course,
Song birds by day and croaking frogs at night,
Celebrate the shining river’s source.
And the plover calls upon the wind,
The coot hen answers in the valley.
The living river flows across the plains,
In dark water silver eddies swirl.
A kingfisher dips its wing into the stream
Creating riffles of expanding circles.
Deep in the river, fish dart while overhead,
Lulled by the river’s purling, dragon flies hover.
And now the mighty river travels past
The crowded city and industrial towns
That pour their effluent and cast
Their rubbish on its living waters, down
To the murky port, where no plover cries,
And only the seagull mourns the river’s demise.
Beth.
This is not a news item, just an observation of recent discussions. AGW seems to have undergone a secret shift. GHGs trapping atmospheric heat and causing global warming is gone. Now we have Earth’s energy imbalance and ocean warming. It is a fundamentally different hypothesis but no one has noticed. A bit of a shell game. More later.
Climatists of global warming alarmism essentially have given up pretending that they can use science to make their case against Western industrial man; they’ve given up on reason. The climatism of the weather fearmongers has evolved to the point now where it has the credibility of earthquake prediction science. The official `science’ of the global warming alarmist community is simply to pray for catastrophe and then point. The only real `consensus’ that exists, now that Bush is gone, is to simply blame capitalism whatever Nature brings our way.
http://evilincandescentbulb.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/hot-world-syndrome-white-coat-hysteria/
Five little mental sloughs of despond, five logical fallacies that human minds are heir to. It’s a wonder we didn’t fall in a slough (eg #5) as soon as we climbed out of the trees, busy winning the food supply, the mate, the argument, -not problem solving the situation we found ourselves in, hmm .. what’s that moving in the shadows, what is it and what do I I need to do to get out of this? Getting the right information and learning to deal with it adequately, mattered.
So let’s not get bogged in our sloughs, let’s listern fer a moment to what Socrates, Popper and Hayek had to say about human thinking. I’ll try to channel them now…
Hello Socrates …Hello Beth, you’d like my take on the above? well, usually I like to use a dialectal approach but as we’re short of time, let me say that all I ‘know’ is that i ‘know’ nothing. However, all of us , even you Beth, if we wish to do so, may learn to free ourselves from some of our prejudices by critically examining our own thinking and seeking enlightenment. But never think yer’ve got it.
Thx Socrates, sounds like the scientific spirit to me … what do you say, Professor Popper?
Well, I say, we’re biased, no doubt about that, there’s no such thing as the innocent eye. We guess all the time, but that’s how we learn, trial and error. Yer see, through critical enquiry, conjecture and refutation, we sometimes solve problems, kinda lift ourselves up by our bootstraps.
I’d say creation of critical language is one of humanity’s greatest inventions. Can yer understand, Beth, that conjectures, couched as theories, belong to an objective world outside ourselves, like the contents of our libraries, and can have unexpected significance beyond those postulated by the person who created them? And can be criticized bounced off, stimulate new problems… Think about that and catch yer later …
Oh hello to you, Professor Hayek, would you mind giving us a brief run down on your all time classic about human freedom?
Glad to, Beth, freedom is an important issue alright. You may not be aware that trade, exchanging goods and ideas precedes farming in human history and has been a powerful force fer human prosperity, did yer know that?
(Well I … please go on…)
Open competition, within a societal legal framework, a not too intrusive rule of law, (see my ch 6,) not a single plan consciously directed by our leaders, -sometimes shamen and think they know everything but they don’t, -offers the best way of fostering individual effort and know how with multiplier, innovative benefits when this takes place. Look there’s no time to go into all this now but read my books fer the extended argument about winners and win/win.
Thanks professor and congratulations on yer Nobel Prize.
David Karoly just wrote some incredibly stupid things about Steve McIntyre in a book review of Mann’s new book.
“Unfortunately, the frightening aspects of this story are the details of the Climate Wars, of the repeated attacks on Mann’s research by climate change confusionists. Commentators with no scientific expertise, ranging from politicians such as Republican congressman Joe Barton from Texas, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, or Republican Senator James Inhofe from Oklahoma, to blog writers Stephen McIntyre and Marc Morano, have repeatedly promulgated misinformation and sought to launch formal investigations into Mann’s research, claiming professional misconduct or worse, even though it had been peer reviewed and confirmed by other scientists. They found a group of media reporters and commentators ready to repeat these claims without question and to amplify them. The blogosphere and some media outlets can be very effective echo chambers for communicating misinformation.”
I suspect this fool Karoly has made a very large mistake.
Wavelet decomposition of global total column ozone:
http://i45.tinypic.com/bfxn4.png