by Judith Curry
Is global warming slowing down? – David Appell
David Appell has written an extensive article on the pause over at YaleClimateMediaForum, entitled Whither global warming? Has global warming slowed down? The whole article is well worth a read, here I excerpt some quotes from scientists that were interviewed:
These increases are certainly less than the warming rates of the 1980s and first half of the 1990s of about 0.15 to 0.20 C (.27 and .36 F respectively) and per decade. The earlier period may have provided an unrealistic view of the global warming signal, says Kevin Trenberth, climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co.
“One of the things emerging from several lines is that the IPCC has not paid enough attention to natural variability, on several time scales,” he says, especially El Niños and La Niñas, the Pacific Ocean phenomena that are not yet captured by climate models, and the longer term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) which have cycle lengths of about 60 years.
From about 1975, when global warming resumed sharply, until the 1997-98 El Niño, the PDO was in its positive, warm phase, and heat did not penetrate as deeply into the ocean. The PDO has since changed to its negative, cooler phase.
“It was a time when natural variability and global warming were going in the same direction, so it was much easier to find global warming,” Trenberth says. “Now the PDO has gone in the other direction, so some counter-effects are masking some of the global warming manifestations right at the surface.”
Giving support to their finding is a forthcoming “reanalysis” by Magdalena Balmaseda and Erland Källén of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts in the U.K., and Trenberth. Their research, by combining several sources of data with climate models, finds a sharp increase in ocean heating over the past decade, beginning shortly after the 1997-98 El Niño. “In the last decade, about 30 percent of the warming has occurred below 700 m, contributing significantly to an acceleration of the warming trend.”
In fact, their reanalysis finds that the total of all oceans actually lost heat during the 1990s, at a rate of about -0.26 Watts per square meter of ocean surface area. By contrast, the ocean gained about 1.19 Watts per square meter in the first decade of the 21st century, most in the top 700 meters. That gain, Trenberth says, is associated “with changes in the winds and changes in the ocean currents that are associated with a particular PDO pattern that has dominated in the 2000s.”
So it’s not surprising that there was a significant warming of the surface during the 1990s, but not over the past decade. This recent, large increase in ocean heat content is the best sign that the Earth is still undergoing an energy imbalance caused by an enhanced greenhouse effect.
About 90 percent of this extra energy goes into the oceans. But meteorologist Roger Pielke Sr. of the University of Colorado in Boulder says he would like to understand why more heat is going into the deep ocean. “Until we understand how this fundamental shift in the climate system occurred,” says Pielke, “and if this change in vertical heat transfer really happened, and is not just due to the different areal coverage and data quality in the earlier years, we have a large gap in our understanding of the climate system.”
These large changes in ocean content reveal that the Earth’s surface is not a great place to look for a planetary energy imbalance. “This means this heat is not being sampled by the global average surface temperature trend,” he says. “Since that metric is being used as the icon to report to policymakers on climate change, it illustrates a defect in using the two-dimensional field of surface temperature to diagnose global warming.”
James Hansen, just retired from NASA, wrote recently:
The rapid growth of fossil fuel CO2 emissions in the past decade is mainly from increased coal use…mostly in China with little control of aerosol emissions. It is thus likely that there has been an increase in the negative (cooling) climate forcing by aerosols in the past decade, as suggested by regional aerosols measurements in the Far East, but until proper global aerosol monitoring is initiated, as discussed below, the aerosol portion of the amplified Faustian bargain remains largely unquantified.
However, a recent study by Daniel Murphy of the Earth System Research Laboratory at NOAA, in Boulder, Colorado, found surprisingly little net change in aerosol forcing over the past decade. As air pollution shifted from the northern latitudes of the U.S. and Europe towards the equator in China and India, competing effects largely cancelled one another out — there is more sunlight nearer the equator, but its effect on aerosols is undone by its steeper angle, which means both that it travels through a shorter path in the atmosphere (so has less opportunity to scatter off aerosol particles) and less of its scattering is upward.
Murphy actually found that in the past decade aerosol concentrations have increased the most in the Middle East at about 20 degrees North latitude, perhaps because of dust. Aerosol concentrations decreased around 40 degrees North and around 40 degrees South, with the latter probably brought about by winds that scatter sea salts.
He cautions that his result applies only to aerosol’s “direct effect” — its scattering of sunlight — and not to its many “indirect effects,” such as the function aerosols serve as condensation sites for cloud formation. (The effects are roughly comparable in magnitude.)
“The message is simple,” he says. “For the direct effect, it matters more how much total aerosols there are than where you put them around the Earth.”
“Our expectation has never been that each year would be inexorably warmer than the previous year,” saysBen Santer, a climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
It’s simply scientifically incorrect, he says, to attribute the divergence of climate model projections and observations to an overestimation of the climate sensitivity. Santer says he sees several explanations of why climate model projections of surface warming may be differing from actual observations in the past decade or so.
“It’s certainly the case that we got some of the forcings wrong,” he says of the factors that specify the influence of any particular component of the atmosphere. “It’s likely we underestimated the true volcanic aerosol forcing, and may have underestimated the cooling effect of stratospheric ozone depletion.”
The bottom line, Santer says, is “there are multiple, not mutually exclusive interpretations of modeled versus observed differences, and claiming that there is only one explanation is not scientifically accurate.”
“We study the signal. If others want to study the noise, let them.”
Nor is it clear that recent surface trends are particularly unusual. “The term ‘hiatus’ is premature,” says planetary climatologist Raymond Pierrehumbert of the University of Chicago. “Maybe with another 10 years of data you’d say that’s something that needs explanation here.”
Pierrehumbert notes that the increase in carbon dioxide’s radiative forcing over any one decade is about one-fourth of a Watt per meter-squared, so if climate sensitivity is 2 C, the expected warming is only about 0.13 C (forcing increase divided by sensitivity). That can easily be swamped by natural fluctuations of 0.2 to 0.3 C from an El Niño or La Niña, and fluctuations from longer ocean cycles.
And, he says, “There’s really nothing in this that changes our estimates of climate sensitivity.” Calculation of that all-important number from the 20th century record is not possible, because the aerosol forcing is not well known, nor are the data for ocean warming up to the task.
“Any estimate of sensitivity requires all of the record and not just the last 20 years of it,” Pierrehumbert says. “The smaller the piece of it you take, the less certainty you have in your result.”
Nonetheless, he agrees that earlier warming may have been deceiving.
“I think it’s true that some rather sloppy discussion of the rapid warming from the 20th century has given people unrealistic expectations about the future course of warming.”
All the same, the warming effect of carbon dioxide is far down his list of topics that need further examination.
“Why would anyone seriously question greenhouse gases?” he asks. “They absolutely have a radiative effect, and no serious scientist thinks climate sensitivity could be much lower than 2 degrees Celsius based on the balance of the evidence.”
JC comment: A nice job on this article by David Appell. Recall all the flack I took last year for talking about the ‘pause’? The money quote from this article is Pierrehumbert’s: “I think it’s true that some rather sloppy discussion of the rapid warming from the 20th century has given people unrealistic expectations about the future course of warming.” I wonder how long it will be before these scientists take seriously the possibility that sensitivity could be lower than 2C.
Pierrehumbert says ““Why would anyone seriously question greenhouse gases?” he asks. “They absolutely have a radiative effect, and no serious scientist thinks climate sensitivity could be much lower than 2 degrees Celsius based on the balance of the evidence.””
I wonder what “evidence” Pierrehumbert is talking about. There is no empirical evidence that adding CO2 to the atmosphere has anything other than a completely negligible effect on global temperatures.
Our hostess ponders “I wonder how long it will be before these scientists take seriously the possibility that sensitivity could be lower than 2C.”
They dare not consider any value of CS that is less than 2 C. If they do, then the whole house of cards that is CAGW will come crashing down, and all the funding our stupid governments are providing them, will dry up. Those `scientists`who have nailed their colors to the mast of the good ship CAGW, will go down with the ship when it finally founders.
YEP
The pause is causing a lot of consternation. How sensitive the climate is to CO2 doubling is uncertain but I’m to tell you it’s certain that the usual suspects clinging to the CAGW story are UBER-sensitive when “the pause” is discussed and factored into the observed GAT in the satellite era. Now suddenly troposphere data is, according to Trenberth, the noise while the far-less-studied average global ocean temperature becomes the only reliable signal.
Roger Pielke Sr. should get credit for that. He’s been saying for a long time “the signal is in the ocean, stupid”. I suppose that’s progress when the usual suspects in climate boffinry adopt the position of a skeptic climate scientist. :-)
I read Hansen’s papers and he explained this in the early 1980’s.
Link?
Consider recent NASA observations of Earth’s heat source [1,2]: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/multimedia/Solar-Events.html
[1] Peter Toth, “Is the Sun a pulsar?” Nature 270, 159-160 (1977):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5633/abs/270159a0.html
[2] Carl A Rouse, “Evidence for a small, high-Z, iron-like solar core,” Solar Physics 110, 211-235 (1987):
http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2FBF00206420.pdf
It is also surprising to see that the central IPCC estimate for sensitivity (3°) has actually been disregarded, to favor a new, lower figure (2°C). I have seen several recent studies hinting at figures below the IPCC central estimate, but didn’t know that core participants in the IPCC process have adopted that view.
I am have a problem with the term “greenhouse gases”. Since this articles main proposition is that some scientists (?) are admitting that they were hasty in declaring “the sky is falling”. In my opinion, it would be better to use the proper scientific names for the atmosphere and its components.
Pierrehumbert is one of the few in the team with brains. Thus in his 2011 paper, which is worth reading**, he doesn’t dwell on the Aarhenius mechanism which any professional with decent heat transfer knowledge immediately realises is bunkum. Instead he cleverly used the ‘CO2 bite’ in OLR plus slipping in the ludicrous claim that this accounts for a third of the GHE thus cleverly cementing in the public psyche the 134.5 W/m^2 created artificially within the models. However, he does this with quite clever weasel words.
The team is desperately defending the phoney heating caused by phoney boundary conditions. The claim that this is being put into the oceans because it doesn’t appear elsewhere is based on 0.9 W/m^2 [2009 data]. However, they are really using this as a way of dragging the attention of the public away from a much larger error – where does the 134.5 – 0.9 W/m^2 go?
My point, that it never existed in the first place, is now ignored rather than being furiously countered with claims that Kirchhoff’s Law of Radiation applies at ToA when it can’t!
**PhysTodayRT2011.pdf
PS you can easily explain how the ‘CO2 bite’ is bypassed from the lower atmosphere.
The CO2 ‘bite’ (and other spectrum bites) has got nothing to do with surface warming, of course. It is the radiative transmissivity signal of an atmosphere with IR-absorbing gases. The absorption of radiative heat from the surface by the so-called GHGs is minor to begin with (~26 W/m^2 ((390-40=) 350 – 324 W/m^2). It warms the troposphere slightly, but of course not the surface providing the heat in the first place. Illustrated simplistically by a planet/shell model, the (absorptive gas) shell takes half of the heat for itself, getting warm, and emits the other half out as radiative heat loss. So what we ‘see’ is the 26 W/m^2 go up from the surface but only half (13 W/m^2) emerging from the TOA. The radiative rate of heat loss to space has been reduced by the presence of an IR-absorbing troposphere, because some of the heat going out goes into making the troposphere warmer. That is the ‘bite’. This reduction could however NOT make the surface warmer.
So the bite does not tell us anything about the total OLR emitted from the TOA to space. This balances (in the longterm) perfectly with the net incoming from the Sun. There is no tropospheric holding back of anything. No inherent heat transfer delay (the only delay is in Earth system response time when the solar input changes). There is just the ‘constant’ budget balance.
So, then, what mechanism fills in the ‘bite’? Well, convection of course. The convectional fluxes (conductive/convective and latent heat transfer from ground level to the tropopause). The kinetic (thermal) energy produced by the absorption is eventually transported aloft by the convectional engine to be dumped to space as radiation.
Oh bear of little brain, I despair of thee! This is what you have been indoctrinated with but it’s scientific nonsense.
Basic radiative thermal equilibrium theory taught to all physicists and engineers shows that black body amplitude thermal emission from atmospheric ghgs to the Earth’s surface mutually annihilate on average with black body surface emission. I used to measure such stuff in metallurgical plants.and we developed ghg physics. If this were not true, we’d be a ball of tenuous gas in space.
The only real surface IR emission is ~23 W/m^2 absorbed mainly by water vapour side bands and the ~40 W/m^2 that goes to space. Of the rest of the ~160 W/m^2 average solar SW thermalised at the surface, ~17 W/m^2 leaves by convection and ~80 W/m^2 by evapo-transpiration. These are average figures but are reliable, amazingly good experimentation.
However ‘The Team’ purports that the Earth’s surface emits 396 W/m^2 real energy flux by adding imaginary 333 W/m^2 ‘back radiation’ to the 63 W/m^2 real IR emission. This is utter, complete, incredible scientific tripe, unknown outside Climate Alchemy [incorporating Meteorology from which this balderdash came].
It assumesthe signal output by pyrgeometers, the product of putting the measured ‘temperature’ of the atmosphere into the S-B equation, is real when it is the potential energy the temperature radiation field of the atmosphere would emit to the zero point energy of space, Go into the guts of pyrgeometers and incorporate that the atmosphere is semi transparent to IR and the temperature data are dodgy too.
The bottom line is that the climate models exaggerate ghg energy absorption by up to 6.85x, 134.5 W/m^2 is imaginary and in thermodynamics’ terms a Perpetual Motion Machine of the 2nd Kind.
Climate Alchemy is now desperately trying to keep the eye of the public on the 0.9 W/m^2 ‘missing heat’ to keep them from realising that 134.5 – 0.9 W/m^2 never existed and causes equally imaginary ‘positive feedback’.
I’ve seen through this clever scam. So have many more but to do so you have to have post-grad physics and very good practical heat transfer knowledge which is why these people have got away with this new version of Lysenkoism for so long……
AlecM (aka Spartacusisfree (aka mydogsgotnonose) ) says:
I also see through your scam, Sockpuppet.
As for the rest, you will have to provide a theory for why we have seen a 1.2C land warming over the past century.
Hehe, calm down AlecM. I’m completely with you on this one. The only reason I used the Trenberth numbers was so that the people actually buying into this nonsense (which I would think is most people here) wouldn’t go off the rails right away: “What!? Where the heck did you get the 26 figure from?! The ‘real’ figure is of course 390 W/m^2! It’s right there in the diagram! Are you blind?!” Certainly the only real flux is the 23 or 26 or whatever thereabouts W/m^2. The only one that is measured. The radiative HEAT going from surface to troposphere. All other figures are simply inferred through circular reasoning from this flux.
WEB,
As for the rest, you will have to provide a theory for why we have seen a 1.2C land warming over the past century.
Here’s mine – The Lord observed the bikini and saw that it was good. At least on those of his children meant to wear it.
web hub…several changes and a GUT.
land use change, urbanization, UHI induced temperature measurement error, deforestation and, yes, CO2 for a bit at the margins.
GUT – more humans = greater temperature on land (where the bulk of the humans live, not so much on the oceans)
CO2 contributes its wee jot but the control knob is rather well illustrated by this graph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World-Population-1800-2100.svg
1.8 billion in 1900, 6 billion in 2000. This is not rocket science.
AlecM, (above in response to Kristian?), at http://judithcurry.com/2013/05/07/more-on-the-pause/#comment-319550
Re: (“… bear of little brain …”.)
Sir: I did not write that comment. I do protest; perhaps too much. :-)
The Earth’s surface actually emits about 396wm-2.
This is both observed and follows from basic physics.
Take care.
As for the rest, you will have to provide a theory for why we have seen a 1.2C land warming over the past century.
So easy. Ice has retreated since the little ice age and land warms as ice retreats.
It is all over now or almost all over now. When the oceans get warm enough to open the Arctic, it does snow enough and does start getting ready to go the other way.
I must agree. That more CO2 instantly turbocharges plant metabolism and hence their transpiration of H2O, shunting LHV to the upper atmosphere and into space and water vapour into cloud formation and, as recently reported, their production of natural aerosols which also promote cloud formation and enhance their albedo is hardly rocket science and the first two effects are high school level knowledge. And then there is the sun and solar cycles etc etc etc.
What I do not get is how many allegedly intelligent scientists can actually believe that they can get away with peddling such utterly simplistic crap.
That said, I watch the antics of politicians and celebrities and understand that there are people out there of some nominal intelligence who are utterly addicted to the crack cocaine of publicity, accolades and free travel around the world.
There is copious evidence of CO2’s enhanced greenhouse effect:
“Increases in greenhouse forcing inferred from the outgoing longwave radiation spectra of the Earth in 1970 and 1997,” J.E. Harries et al, Nature 410, 355-357 (15 March 2001).
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html
“Comparison of spectrally resolved outgoing longwave data between 1970 and present,” J.A. Griggs et al, Proc SPIE 164, 5543 (2004). http://spiedigitallibrary.org/proceedings/resource/2/psisdg/5543/1/164_1
“Spectral signatures of climate change in the Earth’s infrared spectrum between 1970 and 2006,” Chen et al, (2007) http://www.eumetsat.int/Home/Main/Publications/Conference_and_Workshop_Proceedings/groups/cps/documents/document/pdf_conf_p50_s9_01_harries_v.pdf
I learned from reporting this article that, of all the factors that might be causing a flattening of surface temperatures, uncertainty about CO2 and other GHGs is very, very far down the list.
Shorter Pierrhumbert:
‘Curses..they’ve found us out! That’s another fine mess you’ve got us into, Mikey’
I like Ben Santer’s take:
“Santer says he sees several explanations of why climate model projections of surface warming may be differing from actual observations in the past decade or so.”
“It’s certainly the case that we got some of the forcings wrong,” he says of the factors that specify the influence of any particular component of the atmosphere. “It’s likely we underestimated the true volcanic aerosol forcing, and may have underestimated the cooling effect of stratospheric ozone depletion.”
In other words they only missed on forcings that would not invalidate their theory. Zero possibility they missed on overestimating positive feedback effects such as water vapor.
Yer gotta inn -occ-u-late the positive..
Beth
It is with great exceitement that I can report that probably the greatest scientific experiement of our age regarding the climate has now commenced.
Our tomato plants were put in yesterday and I shall give you updates on the progress of the four closely monitored and varied experiments-each plant is of a different variety and in a different locatiion on the giant rolling acres of our sea side estate. Can tomatoes grow in the new reality of temperatures in the UK whose anomaly has now reached that of the 1730’s, 1640’s and 1530’s?
Scientific note; The UK must be due for what we in the climate business scientifically call ‘any sort of decent summer for pity’s sake.’
Watch this space.
tonyb
tony b
Your tomato experiment has a fall-back option (just like the deep blue sea as a hiding place for all that missing heat when warming stopped).
Import them from Italy and pray for the MWP to return to England.
Max
TONY
This will be such an important study. Us serfs
so prey ter cold weather, pestilence n’ famine
do fear the drops in food production of ice ages –
lest we fergit – I beleeve the serf charcoal burners
are raisin’ funds fer this experiment in cold whether
food pro- duck – shun We will be in tuch,
Serf Under-ground.
Please note that these are all Team members or affiliates. Appell has not even made the effort to interview one single climate scientist who happens to holds skeptical views. Bias, I would say.
More interesting is that, “team members” or not, the interviewees all sound far less confident and more conservative regarding minimum sensitivity. Trenberth speculating that late 20th C warming might have been over emphasized and that natural mechanisms may have been underestimated is intriguing to say the least. This is a long step back from stating the “missing heat” is a travesty and the data had to be wrong. Plainly, merely because the label “theory” has been slapped on an hypothesis doesn’t make it more reliable.
Tetris: In fact, I reached out to several well-known contrarians — none of them responded to me, except for Judith and Roger Pielke Sr (and I don’t consider RP Sr a true contrarian).
Some scientists are quite willing to go on Fox News or write op-eds for the WSJ, but won’t answer questions from those who know a little about climate science….
More like:
“And we would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those meddling Canadians”.
Yes, it is good to see that people are trying to keep them accountable.
The overwhelming observational evidence in the paleological record is that ANY forcing is negated by internal system changes so as to constrain climate sensitivity within very narrow bounds.
The radiative characteristics of constituent molecules are clearly dealt with by the same highly effective negative system response(s).
CO2 might theoretically warm the system by 2C per doubling but other system components then change to negate it to as near zero as makes no difference.
My proposal is that the circulation of the atmosphere changes as necessary so as to alter the rate of energy throughput and in doing so ensures top of atmosphere radiative balance over time and negates the thermal effects of all forcing elements other than atmospheric mass, the strength of the gravitational field and top of atmosphere insolation.
+10
ask him how he measured this
It snows more when oceans are warm and wet and it snows less when oceans are cold and frozen. it does change to bound temperature in a narrow range. This does negate any and all other forcing that does try to violate the thermostat that is set by ice and water.
+1
The unique properties of water in all its phases controls the climate. Non-condensing greenhouses gases do little to nothing except in the absence of water in liquid and gas phases. Wherever and whenever it’s very dry then non-condensing greenhouse gases can play a major role.
Depends on what Springer means by “very dry” or “little or nothing”. Springer is a master rhetorician who depends on the ambiguity of the English language for every argument he makes. So if “very dry” means an absence of water and “little or nothing” means nothing, then this is wrong with respect to the well-regarded scientific view; and is best explained by the control knob paper of Lacis.
A. A. Lacis, G. A. Schmidt, D. Rind, and R. A. Ruedy, “Atmospheric CO2: principal control knob governing Earth’s temperature,” Science, vol. 330, no. 6002, pp. 356–359, 2010
CO2 will act as a catalyst to bring the atmosphere out of net ice-box conditions. The lowest thermodynamic state in this case for a condensing GHG such as water vapor is below freezing. A non-condensing gas such as CO2 has the long-term atmospheric persistence to lift it out of this stable state and into a meta-stable state, whereby fluctuations can set the warming into motion.
+33C baby.
I thought nobody believed the CO2 the knob hypothesis any more.
You could perhaps provide citations to studies that claim to refute the control knob hypothesis.
The thermostat effect can be overridden — by the changes in solar energy; and, we know it has been overridden in the past. The historical temperature record shows that. And, it happened without having been caused by the CO2 of us moderns.
Never happened
Earth temperature has been well bounded for ten thousand years and has not bee overridden by anything in ten thousand years.
Yes, nothing due to CO2.
True, true…
Pic–> http://evilincandescentbulb.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/real-hot-today-kobashi-40002.jpg
The real science does does not do 2C.
So, no ice ages then?
Or glaciations for the pedantics in the mist.
Ice ages happen after ice advances and that happens after warm oceans cause more snowfall. CO2 in the atmosphere does drop then because warm oceans hold much more CO2 than warm oceans. This is simple physics.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page44.html
Posted at the Yale forum, awaiting moderation:
“Mathematics teaches us that 15 years is simply too short a period from which to draw statistically valid conclusions.”
It’s a shame you weren’t there to point that out at Hansen’s 1988 Senate hearing.
“‘But that does not mean the problem is going away.’
The second half of that conclusion is certainly right. Even if climate sensitivity is somewhat less than the IPCC’s median value of about 3 degrees Celsius, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are increasing exponentially, so a smaller value merely buys an extra decade or two until the same amount of warming is reached.”
To what level did you study mathematics?
Re: “We study the signal. If others want to study the noise, let them.”
On the “mathematics”, only when we understand the “noise” and the other natural “signals” within it can we distinguish the anthropogenic “signal”.
Climatic Variability Over Time Scales Spanning Nine Orders of Magnitude: Connecting Milankovitch Cycles with Hurst–Kolmogorov Dynamics Yannis Markonis, Demetris Koutsoyiannis, Surveys in Geophysics March 2013, Volume 34, Issue 2, pp 181-207
The Hurst Kolmogorov standard deviation appears to be about twice as large as conventional analysis shows. Thus much of IPCC’s “signal” may actually be natural Hurst Kolmogorov dynamics (aka “noise”.)
Markonis, Y., and D. Koutsoyiannis, Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics in paleoclimate reconstructions, European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2010, Geophysical Research Abstracts, Vol. 12, Vienna, EGU2010-14816, European Geosciences Union, 2010.
See Presentation Fig. 10 p 6/7
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law (1994 p. 71).
Quoted by Yannis Markonis & Demetris Koutsoyiannis
Once again, I’m gratified to see that the science is settled. It makes paying for subsidised renewable energy all seem worthwhile.
my thoughts exactly.
Actually, if you compare transient models backed to around 1960, you get a sensitivity of about 1.6degC. Did that in 2002. We could all just settle on something in that range and then pester the public (or in my case, non-government donors) to fund us to do something useful.
Well, yes, but what is the fun in that? Since there is evidence of a longer term upswing from 1900 and before, I think shooting for 0.8 C would be entertaining :)
That is – not sure I can tell which is the bigger twit.
Dallas, it wouldn’t be difficult to shoot for 0.8 C or even less. If SSTs determine water vapor and OHT determines SSTs and CO2 does not affect OHT, it is possible to imagine a scenario where feedbacks from CO2 are negative and the contribution to warming from CO2 is very small.
Webster, Right, you will continue to ignore the impact of asymmetry and stay wedded to a theory even though the observations are diverging from the estimates.
You know, it is really not that difficult a problem. Down Welling Long Wave Radiant energy or the “average” Tmin of the atmosphere is estimated pretty accurately at 334.5 Wm-2. It is fairly stable because that value is determined by the effective energy of the black body source, the world’s oceans. Increasing DWLR by 3.7Wm-2 will increase the world’s oceans by 3.7 Wm-2 which would be ~ 0.8C of warming. At a lower temperature and higher altitude there would be more warming, but the “surface” is sea level and the energy source for the atmosphere is the oceans.
Since the atmosphere is a fast response, you can compare OHC with satellite data and “see” the how the system responds.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/05/ocean-heat-content-versus-stratospheric.html
Pretty neat actually. Then I am a data kinda guy.
Where’s BBD? He’s got to get a load of this. Cappy dick is starting to invert curves and do stuff like that again.
Someday he will find an acorn in the compost pile.
The key word is transient. Only land temperatures will approach the transient rate and those show about 3 C for doubling of CO2. The ocean temperatures are faced with sinking half the heat, so are showing much slower rise.
Actually the ocean is not directly warmed by greenhouse gases. The physical response of water to downwelling longwave infrared makes it impossible. All that happens is evaporation increases and the water cycle works faster at transporting energy away from the surface. Any net change in ocean heat content from greenhouse warming comes indirectly from the continents. Land is warmed by the greenhouse effect and this results in warmer rivers which eventually run off into the ocean and indirectly warm it by that mechanism. But it’s drastically less warming than there would be if it were physically possible for longwave infrared to alter the temperature of a liquid body of water.
You have made the assertion many, many, times. You have never to my knowledge stated why you believe this to be the case.
If true it is very important. So why do you think that the seas and oceans are capable of responding to changing radiative influx, bu altering their surface temperatures, during the course of a year, but not to very small changes in IR ?
There was a post at RC a while back purporting to explain how heat from downwelling IR could heat the ocean. AFAIK it reported research not reported in any peer-reviewed literature, but that may have changed (or my search might have been defective). I linked to it several months ago, but don’t have time to track it down again right now. Shouldn’t be hard if somebody’s interested.
Warming from decreased losses is not difficult – http://www.skepticalscience.com/How-Increasing-Carbon-Dioxide-Heats-The-Ocean.html
Losses will increase over time in a warmer ocean to compensate – but the time frame is not obvious.
The RealClimate post is here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/09/why-greenhouse-gases-heat-the-ocean/
They show the skin surface effect and the thermal gradient below it. There are alternate ways of explaining this behavior but the net effect is that excess heat is diffusing downward.
Webster, Cool! Real climate explains the ir skin effect in 2006.
Here is one where they explain the stratospheric cooling :)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/why-does-the-stratosphere-cool-when-the-troposphere-warms/
There is a couple of great ones on Antarctic cooling/warming/cooling/warming ……
There are no alternate ways of describing it. The oceans are heated by the sun and heat is transported in the ocean by turbulence and convection. The dweeb cannot admit that he is just plain wrong. Pathetic really.
Chief is upset that Tsonis has not been mentioned enough, and is lashing out at anyone within spitting distance.
Well we have one twit insisting that the ocean doesn’t warm and another twit insisting that heat flows from the atmosphere to the oceans. Not sure that I can tell the difference.
I have though quoted Tsonis elsewhere in this post – go find it and learn something.
Mid-infrared is absorbed by the first few microns of the ocean’s surface. Since warmer water is bouyant it will remain at the surface. Water is poor thermal conductor but even if it weren’t physical measurements disprove conduction downward as a possibility. You see the ocean has what’s called a “cool skin layer” which is to say a ~1 millimeter deep layer that is ~1C cooler than the water below it. Conduction goes from warmer to colder not colder to warmer so it’s physically impossible for heat to conduct downward from the cool skin layer. Ergo where does the energy from downwelling infrared end up? Latent heat of vaporization. There’s nowhere else it can go. Rock doesn’t vaporize at such low temperatures so its reaction is quite different from water. Rock doesn’t have a cool skin layer like the ocean does.
Once you take this into account all the observations make perfect sense. I’ll probably do a back of the envelope calculation in the near future to see if the reported number of Joules of increasing ocean heat content can be reasonably accounted for by warmer river runoff from the continents and sea ice. I suspect it’ll work out nicely Continental surfaces become warmer and thus river temperatures and runoff from glaciers becomes warmer too and eventually ends up in the ocean. This explains the so-called missing heat. There’s far less heat going into the ocean because it’s predominantly indirectly added from continental runoff rather than direct from GHG forcing.
Chief Kangaroo Skippy Ellison using skeptical science for an authoritative reference on science?
ROFLMAO
Webster and Chief Kangaroo,
Find peer reviewed literature demonstrating by experiment that overhead illumination with mid-infrared can warm (or slow the the rate of cooling) of a body of water.
You can shove Gedankenexperiment blog science from real climate, skeptical science, and other hand wavers up your arses. If it’s possible it can be experimentally demonstrated.
Good luck with that. I’ve searched long and hard and can find no experimental validation of it nor can I find any practical devices used in industry that take advantage of the mythical effect. I don’t believe it exists and will stick to my guns until proven wrong.
Handwaving from the other aisle:
http://www.climatescience.gov/workshop2005/posters/P-GC2.9_Singer.S.pdf
At least this doubt about the efficacy of ocean heating from downwelling longwave was presented in more formal setting than CAGW apologist blogs. I really can’t stress enough that Gedankenexperiment in notoriously biased CAGW blogs is NOT science. It’s laughable to use that as any kind of authoritative reference. WTF is the matter with you dipchits doing it?
That would be fine if it were not exactly the opposite of what happens.
The skin is not warmer, it’s cooler. IR does not warm it, it cools it. The skin emits more IR than it absorbs. With more GHG’s the difference is smaller. Therefore the skin cools less efficiently and a little larger part of the heat brought to the ocean by solar SW stays there. That leads to warming of the ocean.
Pekka Pirilä | May 9, 2013 at 7:31 am |
“The skin is not warmer, it’s cooler. IR does not warm it, it cools it.”
You should have stopped right there. The rest of what you write contradicts it.
“The skin emits more IR than it absorbs. With more GHG’s the difference is smaller.”
Yes but latent heat is larger. That’s the whole point.
“Therefore the skin cools less efficiently and a little larger part of the heat brought to the ocean by solar SW stays there. That leads to warming of the ocean.”
Why has this less efficient cooling not been demonstrated by experiment? I encourage you to demonstrate the effect in a laboratory or point me towards published results of such demonstration. I would also accept some practical application of the effect as refutation. What I will not accept is the just-so stories that are the only thing on offer so far.
The stories originated from an article written by Peter Minnett and published at RC, linked above. At the time it was indicated his research was going to result in journal publication. He has since published extensively. Most are behind pay walls.
new explanation for the “cartoon”
Springer,
You are looking at years and years of wise physics instruction that Pekka has bottled up and served to you.
His first-order explanation is a thing of beauty and you have been stoppered.
Parodoxical reasoning (as in the stuff you have picked up in your years of inhabiting the Intelligent Design wars) is no match for plain-spoken physics.
BTW, I can waste a lot of your time by asserting that 1+1=3 is true and then having you prove that is not the case. But I don’t, because I am interested in the science, and not on winning the equivalent of high-school debate tournaments.
@WebHubTelescope (@WHUT), David Springer, Pekka Pirilä… I read that post a few months ago, and what I got out of it doesn’t match any of the descriptions I see here.
First, the majority of overall downwelling radiation is short-wave, absorbed in the first few meters. This produces warming, which diffuses both upwards and downwards.
IR is absorbed in the first few microns, which affects the balance of energy into and out of the skin layer. That layer is cooler than the underlying water, but too thin for gravity fed convection to overturn it, given a difference of under 0.3ºK with the underlying (5cm) temp (fig 2). The fact that it’s cooler means there’s a net upwards heat flow, transferring some of the energy brought by short-wave upwards out of the sea.
Part of that heat loss is due to upwards IR, part to evaporation, part to conduction. The ratio would depend (my conclusion) on the temp and humidity of the overlying (1m) air, and the current wind conditions (which would affect forced convection at scales around 1 micron).
The actual experiment (which I couldn’t find reported in any peer-reviewed source) involved correlating the extent of downwelling IR with the temperature difference (fig 2). They weren’t using greenhouse effect, rather cloud cover, about 2 orders of magnitude greater. But in principle, it demonstrates that more IR means a lower temperature difference, i.e. gradient, which means less of the heat delivered by short-wave to the .05-10m depths is lost through the skin layer.
I’m highly skeptical that Minnett has is orders of magnitude right, it intuitively seems to me the effect of global GHG’s would be negligible relative to the heat flow needed for the “lost heat”. More importantly, there are sociological reasons for doubt: if the numbers were right, it would have been published and trumpeted.
For me, the more important potential effect is on evaporation, which in any circumstance of air temp, humidity, and wind conditions would be higher with higher skin temp. This without any significant differences in temperature beyond a few microns. Most evaluations of “feedback” from clouds and water vapor depend (AFAIK) on modeled differences in air and water temp on a scale of meters.
But this effect could take place absent any higher temp, which means increasing humidity at the surface and in the mixing layer (under 1 km). This in turn would often (usually?) lead to more clouds, which would both increase the downwelling IR and decrease the short-wave due to higher albedo. This means low clouds from increased evaporation from more GHG’s would produce a positive feedback at the skin, while producing a negative feedback on overall downwelling radiation.
According to Minnett:
This means positive feedback from clouds could produce an up to 2500% amplification of the effects of GHG’s increasing evaporation while decreasing overall downwelling radiation. The actual extent of the feedback would depend, of course, on local conditions.
If this hasn’t been taken account of in the models, it could easily render their results totally invalid.
AK, All you have to do is take Springer’s argument and use it to prove something that is obviously unphysical. I have mentioned it once before.
@WebHubTelescope (@whut)…
I’m not interested in “Springer’s argument“, I specifically stated my understanding of that post didn’t match his. OTOH, you haven’t addressed my argument, which is that if the numbers actually provided a mechanism for the “missing heat” to have arrived in the ocean, they would have been published and trumpeted.
In another subthread I commented on the limited value of averages in understanding quantitatively the atmosphere. The same applies to the ocean. It would be easy to describe the ocean if it would be the same everywhere, but it’s not.
Perhaps it still of some help to think what happens assuming that there’s no horizontal mixing beyond local turbulent mixing. In that case solar SW heats all levels down to considerable depth. The heating is strongest in top few meters but there’s some heating to depths of tens and even hundreds of meters. Under the assumption made all those levels warm continuously unless the heat is transferred up or down. In a semi-stationary situation almost all of that heat is transferred up to the surface and released from there as IR, latent heat of evaporation or sensible heat. A very small fraction would be transferred down making the situation semi-stationary rather than fully stationary.
The amount of heat transferred to atmosphere must be transferred off from the atmosphere, i.e. it must be radiated to space. With a stronger GHE the radiation to space is reduced (until temperatures have risen enough, i.e until warming has reached a new stationary state). As the atmosphere settles rapidly to it’s new state, we can conclude that the heat loss from the surface is determined by the OLR at the top of the atmosphere. We need not know the relative ratios of net IR at surface, evaporative losses and conduction to know the sum of these all.
This is the reason for the fact that the balance at OLR is the only one that finally matters. That’s the balance of the Earth as whole, what else do we need. Knowing the balance at surface would be equally good but determining that is much more difficult than determining the balance at TOA (which is certainly also difficult enough).
Thanks for further confirmation that a simple laboratory experiment under well controlled conditions has not been done demonstrating that varying 10um illumination on the surface of a vessel of water changes the rate at which cooling of said water occurs.
No direct slowdown of ocean cooling by increased 10um illumination from the atmopsphere explains everything we observe so I’m sticking with that story until it fails to explain something and/or it is demonstrated by laboratory experiment that it’s wrong. Gedankenexperiments on blogs don’t count as real experiments. It’s no more than handwaving. Sorry fellas.
@Pekka Pirilä…
I’m not talking about averages, I’m making intuitive suggestions regarding individual elements in a global scale integral of many variables.
No, with a stronger GHE, everything else being equal, the radiation to space is reduced… But everything else isn’t equal, and the details of how and where it’s not equal are precisely what I’m talking about.
And we don’t know what that is! From Stephens et al. (2012):
Now, I don’t claim to be an expert, but as I read this, and the remainder of the article, we don’t really know that there’s an energy imbalance at TOA, rather the assumption is built into the interpretation of the data, based on other (e.g. surface) observations and models. The instruments are much better with incremental changes:
But this condition could remain true even if the net flux during the “pause” were zero, couldn’t it? In fact, I’m highly suspicious that much more circularity has been built in to the paradigm than most of its practitioners realize. The problem is that people working within the paradigm generally don’t question its fundamental assumptions, and one of the fundamental assumptions of the paradigm is that increasing GHG’s must lead to an energy imbalance until the system “stabilizes”. But if that weren’t true, if in fact on a planetary scale small increases in GHG’s didn’t lead to an energy imbalance because the greenhouse effect is counteracted by negative feedbacks (from e.g. clouds), then the changes to TOA energy balance could be varying around a stable value of zero, which would be consistent with the observed data. Wouldn’t it?
Stephens et al. (2012) An update on Earth’s energy balance in light of the latest global observations by Graeme L. Stephens, Juilin Li, Martin Wild, Carol Anne Clayson, Norman Loeb, Seiji Kato, Tristan L’Ecuyer, Paul W. Stackhouse Jr, Matthew Lebsock, and Timothy Andrews Nature Geoscience published online: 23 Sept 2012 doi: 10.1038/NGEO1580
OHC continues to be positive. Each year energy is added to the oceans. My understanding is usually what Pekka is saying is exactly right. OHC data and the TOA data are in close agreement. There is no missing heat when that is the case as the data approximately balances. GISS took the position there is no missing heat, which just shows how looney Max is. They accepted OHC and the TOA are in approximate balance.
It’s when there is a divergence that the missing heat issue arises and has to be solved, and the only place to solve it is by finding out whether or not it is in the oceans. If it’s not there, then it was reflected back into outer space long before it reached the surface.
AK,
The conditions that make my description true are very much weaker than “everything else being equal”. They are so much weaker that they are virtually certain to be satisfied. The alternative is that there is no GHE that may change. I didn’t even make any claims on the origin of GHE, only that it made stronger by something.
You may perhaps argue on the existence of GHE, but if it exits, it does almost by definition have the properties required to make argument valid.
JCH, “OHC data and the TOA data are in close agreement.” Yes, that is where the MSU lower stratosphere data comes in handy. It basically mirrors changes in ocean heat uptake and is broken down into regions both land and oceans.
UAH though, has to be wrong in the opinion of some, since it indicates less CO2 impact and a more significant, “pause”.
The witless one complains about referencing scepticalscience?
In this rare case I agreed with the exposition rather than otherwise.
The sun heats the oceans – the oceans lose energy in IR, latent heat and conduction. If net IR up from the ocean decreases the rate of loss from the ocean decreases until the ocean warms up enough such that the losses again equilibriate. http://pmm.nasa.gov/education/videos/water-cycle-heating-ocean.
There is an inordinate confusion about the baby physics.
The Chief thinks that incoming IR will lead to a net cooling of the surface. If that was true, the converse would also have to be true — whereby IR leaving the surface will heat the surface.
Yet, anyone can see how obviously that is crazy talk.
Chief Hydrologist | May 9, 2013 at 6:22 pm |
“The witless one complains about referencing scepticalscience?”
No. The witless one made the reference as he practiced his passive aggressive style of insult hoping that it won’t get him spanked by the lady of the house again. LOL.
“In this rare case I agreed with the exposition rather than otherwise.”
In this case you couldn’t find a source other than blog science. Double LOL.
“The sun heats the oceans – the oceans lose energy in IR, latent heat and conduction. If net IR up from the ocean decreases the rate of loss from the ocean decreases until the ocean warms up enough such that the losses again equilibriate.”
Not necessarily. What caused the decline in IR energy loss can also accelerate latent loss for net change that amounts to greater cooling efficiency not lesser.
“There is an inordinate confusion about the baby physics.”
Yes, you are definitely confused and making fundamental mistakes buttressed by schoolyard insults to typical of the juvenile mind. Grow up.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | May 10, 2013 at 2:11 am |
“The Chief thinks that incoming IR will lead to a net cooling of the surface. If that was true, the converse would also have to be true — whereby IR leaving the surface will heat the surface.”
No, that’s not what the chief thinks and no one with a triple digit IQ and an ounce of honesty could have come to that conclusion. You’re either stupid or dishonest or both.
Springer, You think you can always come in here and reason your way out of anything using English. Unfortunately, doesn’t work that way. You and Chief have both claimed that heat will not be absorbed in the net with respect to incoming IR by the underlying water. This is impossible WRT thermodynamics and I can show this mathematically by applying the conservation of energy and the arrow of entropy. The last bit is the nail in the coffin as energy always wants to disperse and you are preventing it from dispersing with your assertion.
Your likely problem is that you are deeply frightened of math. I will let you stew over this one.
Webster, That average temperature/energy of the northern hemisphere oceans is 19.9C(418Wm-2) and the average temperature/energy of the southern hemisphere oceans is 16.9C (401 Wm-2). The average temperature of the NH land is 10.17C and SH land is 6.9 C using BEST for the 1951 to 1980 time period. Why don’t you draw us up a nice little heat flow chart showing how CO2 is going to warm the global oceans 3C degrees.
BTW, that 3C difference between the NH and SH seems to be a few millions years old.
Here is the state machine:
Leave out the CO2 and you don’t get 33C.
You can make the next connection.
Webster, “Here is the state machine:
{CO}_2 \rightarrow {33^{\circ} C}
Leave out the CO2 and you don’t get 33C.
Oh that’s right, you have already done that. Let’s see, since clouds reflect ~24% of the shortwave, CO2 will adjust those to maintain that 33C + your 3C right, even though clouds would have started forming around 15C from the top end of that 33C. and end up producing about 326 Wm-2 of reflection that magically allows you to use 33C as your choice of baseline. That nonlinear increase in cloud cover and the associated non-linear increase in latent heat loss doesn’t impact your calculation since your “surface” is fictitious to begin with.
Sorry, not fictitious, a theoretical construct based on ideal radiant isothermal “shells”. So you can ignore the “actual” temperature differential between hemispheres and land/ocean because your construct doesn’t include land and ocean or the possibility of hemispheric imbalance to begin with.
That’s about it right?
If we didn’t have excess non-condensing CO2 around, the climate would be an icebox. This is an energy minimum.
Since the CO2 is around, the transition is:
This is a meta-stable energy minimum, made very shallow by the highly sensitive feedback effects of the GHGs.
Webster, you are obviously wedded to theory not reality. CO2 can produce a portion of that 33C, only because the combined albedo of the surface and atmosphere is 30%. If the Earth had zero clouds and 30% albedo, the CO2 forcing would be different. CO2 is not an independent forcing. There is a water/water vapor greenhouse surrounded by a WMGHG greenhouse. You can’t ignore 70% of the surface and 80% of the atmospheric forcing.
Since the absolute surface temperature of the NH ocean is nearly 20 C degrees, 415Wm-2 equivalent, 3 C warmer and about 16 WM-2 more energetic than the SH oceans, it is not going to happen. Look at a psych chart, water vapor is a control variable.
You wanted a flowchart so I gave you a flowchart. If you want more than that, I suggest you read this post again:
Climate sensitivity and the 33C discrepancy
This applies CO2 as a catalyst to determine what the natural temperature excursions due to water vapor could be. The analysis describes a way to find temperature bounds within the context of an energy well and a mild positive feedback mechanism.
CD says”if the Earth had zero clouds and 30% albedo, the CO2 forcing would be different.’
The albedo is closer to 29% (ceres 28.6) eg Kim and Ramanathan.
Giss in all its model configuration uses a higher figure (although recently has reduced it from .316-.306 without any determination.)
Maks said, “The albedo is closer to 29% (ceres 28.6) eg Kim and Ramanathan.” Yeah, and it does fluctuate a bit. It is nice to know that they can almost model a surface floating around about 5000 meters above sea level. Now it they could start a model with an initial 5% albedo and have it settle into the 29% to 31%, I would be impressed. Who knows, they may even get the absolute surface temperature to with in a couple of degrees and “discover” that the Antarctic is effectively the stratosphere. .
The GCM fix albdeo ie they use it as a constant ( which requires explanation) As it is necessary to affirm albedo eg the SB equation it is a first order problem.
The problem is non trivial
Giss has a simple tool to evaluate the problem
http://icp.giss.nasa.gov/education/geebitt/minigeebitt_a3.xls
Anybody looking to replace the supposed risk of catastrophic climate change in view of the apparently lower “sensitivity” can look to Catastrophic regime shifts in ecosystems. AFAIK we not only don’t have the data to produce an estimate of the probability with increasing pCO2 and the ocean acidification it drives, we don’t even have the technology to gather that data.
Of course, that’s not to downplay the risk of catastrophic economic regime shifts due to artificially increased energy prices. Or perhaps I should say military-economic regime shifts.
Best answer, IMO: much more investment in R&D for non-fossil (“renewable”) energy. Bring the price down where it can compete with fossil fuels.
You may wish to revisit that point and discover the meaning of ‘base’ in the context of the pH scale. Just saying.
When a solution is made less “basic”, by any means, that’s “acidification”. Even solutions at pH 12-13 are acids, just not very strong ones.
Yeah drink one of those “not very strong acids” and tell us how close to neutral it was. Wait, that was a joke, don’t do that, ok? It might actually not be too healthy.
AK-46, there’s a reason chemists have these two different word, acidic and basic – there are actually two different kinds of ions, you know…
The pH scale is technically defined as the number of hydronium ions in an aqueous solution – http://chemed.chem.wisc.edu/chempaths/GenChem-Textbook/Ionic-Equilibria-in-Aqueous-Solutions-528.html
But the actual chemical forms are such things as carbonic acid or sodium hydroxide. Additional CO2 in the atmosphere increases the amount of carbonic acid in seawater which drives the reduction in calcite and aragonite supersaturation. This in turn increases the dissolution of solid calcium carbonate – which is in adequate supply almost everywhere.
Nonetheless, people are expecting undersaturation of calcium carbonate in oceans this century. Something that would change the species composition in the ocean and might drive large changes in ecological systems.
‘The uptake of anthropogenic CO2 by the global ocean induces fundamental changes in seawater chemistry that could have dramatic impacts on biological ecosystems in the upper ocean. Estimates based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) business-as-usual emission scenarios suggest that atmospheric CO2 levels
could approach 800 ppm near the end of the century. Corresponding biogeochemical models for the ocean indicate that surface water pH will drop from a pre-industrial value of about 8.2 to about 7.8 in the IPCC A2 scenario by the end of this century, increasing the ocean’s acidity by about 150% relative to the beginning of the industrial era. In contemporary ocean water, elevated CO2 will also cause substantial reductions in surface water carbonate ion concentrations, in terms of either absolute changes or fractional changes relative to pre-industrial levels. For most open-ocean surface waters, aragonite undersaturation occurs when carbonate ion concentrations drop below approximately 66 μmol kg-1. The model projections indicate that aragonite
undersaturation will start to occur by about 2020 in the Arctic Ocean and 2050 in the Southern Ocean. By 2050, all of the Arctic will be undersaturated with respect to aragonite, and by 2095, all of the Southern Ocean and parts of the North Pacific will be undersaturated. For calcite, undersaturation occurs when carbonate ion concentration
drops below 42 μmol kg-1. By 2095, most of the Arctic and some parts of the Bering and Chukchi seas will be undersaturated with respect to calcite. However, in most of the other ocean basins, the surface waters will still be saturated with respect to calcite, but at a level greatly reduced from the present.’ http://tos.org/oceanography/archive/22-4_feely.pdf
I don’t think this can possibly be right – the source of the supersatuation is eons of limestone and shell deposition and any deficit will simply be scavenged from these abundant sources.
Nonetheless – we should have a plan B – just in case I am wrong.
Hey DirkH,
The ion HSO4-, which one is it?
acid or base?
AK46 and I will conduct chemistry seminars if anyone is interested.
In most of the earth’s history atmospheric CO2 level was far higher than it is today and far higher than anthropogenic fossil fuel combustion can reasonably drive it before said fuels become economically unrecoverable.
Therefore the so-called acidification of the ocean is no more than a small, partial change towards its usual state where the earth has no polar ice caps and Antarctica is temperatue forest. The vast majority of the evolution of life happened when the earth was much warmer the global ocean less alkaline. Will ecosystems be upset? Certainly. But the point is that there are alternative ecosystems waiting in the wings for their turn at bat. Overall a warmer planet supports more life not less. Snow and ice are not friends of photosynthetic organisms which comprise the primary producers in the food chain. Wherego the primary producers go the rest of the food chain so what’s good for them is utlimately good for everything else. More CO2 is a good thing. If we weren’t already increasinging it in the atmosphere we’d need to invent a way to do it in order to increase the vitality of the food chain.
@Chief Hydrologist…
Carbonic acid is a factor, but sodium hydroxide isn’t. The latter dissociates completely. Sodium ions (Na+) are a factor, so are carbonate (C03-2) and, most importantly, bi-carbonate (HCO3-).
Aragonite supersaturation is usually referenced WRT ocean acidification, but while undersaturation is capable of resulting in the dissolving of existing shells, in the more general sense it’s not a “hard” barrier. Neither form will precipitate without catalytic help, and the lifeforms that use catalytic enzymes probably also use calcium pumps to help the process along.
Changing the concentration of carbonate ions changes the energy required for those pumps, which can change the competitive balance between different populations (of different or the same “species”), with changes to the overall balance.
The problem is moving it around. Most of the precipitated carbonates in the biosphere are lying on the bottom somewhere, with limited ability for transport when/if they dissolve. For that matter, as I’m sure you’re aware, a large part of the “carbonate pump” consists of precipitation (with or without catalytic help) in warmer upper water followed by re-dissolution in the cold lower-level water after the solid particles have drifted down. There simply isn’t enough interchange between levels to keep it mixed. And anyway, if cold undersaturated bottom water were warmed (and brought to the surface), it would normally become super-saturated due to lower saturation points in warmer water. (Of course, the foregoing is a simplistic cartoon. Any realistic discussion would require more space/time than a blog comment allows.)
Personally, I’m a lot more concerned about the direct effects of increased pCO2. As so many proponents of inaction are wont to repeat, “CO2 is plant food”. All plants (and algae, cyanobacteria, even anaerobic autotrophs), not just the ones we depend on. While known weeds appear to get less benefit from increased pCO2 than currently popular crop plants (no time to dig up refs, but I’ve seen them), we have no idea what low-density populations of what “species” might be hiding in some wild ecosystem, already pre-adapted to higher pCO2, ready to become a major pest.
@David Springer…
The problem is that the settling time for such upsets is measured in centuries (or millennia, or more). And our current economic-agricultural cycle is measured in years (if that). More life doesn’t necessarily mean higher crop yields, at least not until new crops and agricultural techniques can be developed and deployed.
In the long run, of course, it won’t be a problem. Already PV and CSP systems are outstripping the energy efficiency of bio-photosynthesizers, electrolysis of water is a very efficient (and already pretty cheap) way to convert it to bio-usable energy, and the necessary bio-tech to feed it directly into the Calvin cycle can be easily envisioned and won’t (AFAIK) require any special breakthroughs.
And, in the long run, the real issue of atmospheric pCO2 will be keeping all those “free riders” from taking so much out for conversion to fuel, food, and construction material that they draw down the levels to the point where it kicks off another ice age. Assuming there really is a “greenhouse sensitivity”. (Which IMO is likely but unproven.)
If I may add to David Springer’s comment.
The greatest biological impact of enhanced CO2 and water vapor is in the driest regions – a greening of brown and white. For example, during the Eemian interglacial, the Sahara disappeared, the desert southwest of US was wet and forests grew in west Texas and southern Greenland.
Greens ought to fanatically oppose CO2 reduction. Are there no true Greens? Only pseudo-Greens (“Greens”) ought favor EVs (lithium), CFLs (mercury) and asphyxiation of plants.
AK,
‘When CO2 from the atmosphere reacts with seawater, it immediately forms carbonic acid (H2CO3), which in itself is unstable. This further dissociates to form bicarbonate and carbonate ions. The bicarbonate and carbonate ions are responsible for the buffering capacity of seawater, i.e. seawater can resist drastic pH changes even after the addition of weak bases and acids. The carbonate ion can react with calcium ions (Ca), which are in excess in seawater, to form calcium carbonate (CaCO3), the material out of which the shells of mussels, the skeleton of corals and the exoskeleton of some microalgae is made of.
http://www.mbari.org/chemsensor/ca/calcium.html
The ‘pump’ is immaterial if there are lots of calcium sources in all of the places where shell is formed – and not just in the deep ocean. Does pH change – or is there more dissolution of calcium carbonate minerals? Do we get undersaturatuion of aragonite or more dissolution of limestone?
‘Calcium carbonate minerals, present on the deep ocean floor below what is called the saturation horizon, constantly dissolve and thereby increase the alkalinity of seawater, which offsets the decline in pH. But there is a problem: these minerals dissolve much more slowly than the current uptake of carbon dioxide by the oceans, and that leads to increased ocean acidity and lower pH. Furthermore, CO2 uptake occurs at the surface of the ocean, far from the deep ocean floor, so this critical zone experiences the most rapid increase in ocean acidification.’ http://spice.wa.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Researching-ocean-buffering.pdf
Above the saturation horizon – the minerals are formed biologically. These minerals are everywhere in the ocean and in huge abundance.
OK. This is another one of those really stupid arguments. Yawn.
AK | May 8, 2013 at 7:46 am |
“And, in the long run, the real issue of atmospheric pCO2 will be keeping all those “free riders” from taking so much out for conversion to fuel, food, and construction material that they draw down the levels to the point where it kicks off another ice age.”
Very much agree with this and it’s unusual to see it stated by someone other than myself. I usually put it thusly: Mark my words. Before the end of this century we will have laws limiting how much CO2 can be removed from the atmosphere rather than laws limiting how much may be added.
Good for you for recognizing that atmospheric CO2 is a handy source of carbon available everywhere and that most of the durable goods that humans desire can be built using carbon and carbon compounds.
blueice2hotsea | May 8, 2013 at 11:47 am |
“Greens ought to fanatically oppose CO2 reduction. Are there no true Greens? Only pseudo-Greens (“Greens”) ought favor EVs (lithium), CFLs (mercury) and asphyxiation of plants.”
Right on. I’m greener than any CAGW apologist.
These people want the status quo to continue. I recognize that the earth’s current atmosphere is starved of CO2 compared to most of the past 500 million years since life emerged from the ocean. CO2 is quite literally plant food.
Thanks for the heads up on Callendar. He was engineer not a scientist which handily explains why I would I independently reach the same conclusion. Engineers are empirical and practical. There’s far less room for contrary conclusions under those constraints. Climate science and climate policy seems to be skipping over the vital step of getting engineering to sign off on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Stewart_Callendar
I’ve looked at some of the key characters (from a historical perspective) and I wasn’t sure if you were referring to my article here
http://grumpydenier.wordpress.com/resources/more-about-co2/more-about-co2-page-iv/
No I was referring a comment you made upthread about Arrhenious Callendar coming to the same conclusion as me about the blessings bestowed CO2 and that if it weren’t rising we’d want to invent a way to make it rise because more is better at least up to some point far above what’s in the atmosphere now.
AK; bringing the price of renewable energy down to where it can compete is a wonderful idea; probably even better than installing and subsidizing renewable energy when it can’t compete.
(I have some great ideas there, for instance wind turbines without foundations; that would bring the CO2 emissions during the concrete production down just wonderfully. Can’t tell you how I would keep them erect; still gotta apply for the patent, you know)
But hey; you want to prevent regime shifts you can’t predict. Think of asteroid impacts. Do you already live in a bunker? If not, consider getting a used one, they’re cheap.
And get one of your namesakes with the -47 at the end.
David Springer says @ 7.34 am CO2 is quite literally plant
food . I’m with DS, Primo Levi and Chiefio on this.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/got-wood/
I thought there was only one “The Chief”?
I suggest you go round up the Chiefio imposter romper-stomper style. Your hybrid ocker/bogan/yobbo accent will scare him into submission.
AK, as the definition of acidify is “to make or become aid” and no one AFAIK is talking about the oceans becoming acid, your use of acidification is incorrect. The correct terminology is neutralization, but it doesn’t have the same ring to it in terms of scare factor.
+10
The correct term is “acidification” which means to lower the pH. While people who don’t understand chemistry might get scared about the oceans becoming “acid” (while cheerfully using vinegar on their salads), ocean acidification scares me, so I’m being perfectly honest in communicating my concern.
Um, AK, “acidification” is the noun form of “acidify”, both of which refer to “make or become acid”…
Check out Webster’s, FreeDictionary.com, etc.
Please, what you are referring to is a misuse of the word acidification. Correct word is neutralization.
When the temperature changes from -40C to -35C we have warming, when pH changes from 8.2 to 8.0 we have acidification.
In both cases we are looking at the direction of the change and using the natural name for that direction. Neutralization is not a natural name for a direction.
What would be the neutralization agent for a basic mixture of carbonates and bicarbonates?
Just asking.
If the answer is the same as adding carbon dioxide gas to the solution, what is the difference?
acidify For the record, dictionaries aren’t authorities, just books of observations.
Hmmm … even with high CO2 levels in the Cambrian, limestone was laid down and contains a multitude of shelled animals. Maybe people are over-reaching in their speculation about:
1. If the ocean will ACTUALLY go acidic.
2. Will shelled animals flourish or not if it does.
It sure looks like many of them did just fine. This is another one of those complex situations where warmist’s imaginations go wild.
“Not a lot is known about the global climate during the Cambrian period, but the unusually high atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (about 15 times those of the present day) imply that the average temperature may have exceeded 120 degrees Fahrenheit. ”
…
“The Cambrian period saw the worldwide spread of the earliest plankton, as well as trilobites, worms, tiny mollusks, and small, shelled protozoans”
http://dinosaurs.about.com/od/PaleozoicEra/a/Cambrian-Period.htm
“Almost every metazoan phylum with hard parts, and many that lack hard parts, made its first appearance in the Cambrian. ”
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/cambrian/cambrian.php
“Fossil monoplacophorans displayed at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. These fossils are from the Cambrian Period (570-500 million years ago) and were found in Missouri. ”
http://louisvillefossils.blogspot.com/2010/09/cambrian-monoplacophorans.html
So Pekka and AK, what do you call it when you use a base to counteract the effects of an acid? Basification or neutralization?
@jim2…
No, this is another one of those complex situations where denialbots draw unwarranted and self-serving conclusions from insufficient data. Given that nobody knows much about the Cambrian, the assumption that erosion rates for calcium and magnesium (silicates) were identical to today’s is completely unwarranted. Oh, you didn’t know that the relationship between calcium (and magnesium) and carbonates depends on the rate of supply (via erosion) as well as the rate of removal (via carbonate precipitation).
Maybe you ought to go bone up on the geological carbon cycle before you try to make arguments based on paleo information. Not that I’m saying I totally agree with all the conclusions drawn WRT it, but it’s pretty clear don’t understand the subject you’re pontificating about.
AK, please educate us. How much CO2 is required to change the pH of the ocean to below 7.0. Please show your work.
@k scott denison…
Alkalinization.
@k scott denison…
I’m not going to waste any more of my time on a denialbot.
AK, guess that means you either don’t know the answer, don’t know how to get to the answer, or know that at the current temperatures of the ocean there is no way that enough CO2 could be dissolved in the oceans to cause pH to be lower than 7.0.
So, how can something be acidifying if it will never be an acid?
AK – If there is anything we have a lot of, it’s insufficient data.
AK, here’s a link from a non-skeptical site that forecasts ocean pH will be -wait for it – 7.8 by the year 2100:
http://www.ocean-acidification.net/FAQacidity.html
After all, it’s dropped 0.1 since the beginning of the industrial revolution for cripes sake!!!!
So lets see. Based on this, to go from today’s pH of about 8.1 to 7.0 will require the oceans to absorb 11x more CO2 (1.1/0.1) than since the beginning of the industrial revolution.
How fast you figure that will happen?
Now, can we please use non-inflammatory words when speaking about the change of pH of the oceans?
Ocean acidification is what it is, and what everybody who discusses it intelligently calls is.
AK, btw in re: your “denialbot” comment, two things.
(I) smacks of ad hom.
(II) I firmly believe that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, all other things being equal, will cause warming. It’s the *all other things being equal* um, thing, that I don’t believe ever holds true.
Also, I like to think I’m wise enough to see that the torturing that the surface tempertaure data goes through to become the *global* temperature should be validated and verified before being believed.
On the other hand, it sounds as if you might be a good prospect for the bridge I’m trying to sell in NYC. Give me a call if you’re interested!
AK | May 8, 2013 at 10:51 pm |
Now, can we please use non-inflammatory words when speaking about the change of pH of the oceans?
Ocean acidification is what it is, and what everybody who discusses it intelligently calls is.
———-
Ah, now on to argumentum ad populum… you are on a roll!
k scott – correction: AK is on a SCIENTIFIC roll. Only warmists’ speculations are scientific, don’t you know.
AK | May 8, 2013 at 10:36 pm |
A dictionary is not an authority merely a collection of observations…
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lame
AK appears to be in denial about how words and phrases are chosen to frame debates. One can just as easily and with the same number of syllables say CO2 causes the ocean to become less alkaline. This is both true and imparts more information about the situation. Acidification is a direction for pH movement. Less alkaline is both a direction and a starting point. The latter phrase has a smaller fright component for the unwashed masses so chicken little alarmists like AK choose the former.
I don’t really care for calling AK a chicken little alarmist but he chose to lower the dialog to playground level by calling others denial-bots so if that’s his level I’m willing to stoop to it if that’s what gets through to him.
@David Springer…
To the contrary, I already discussed my choice of language:
I might not have framed it that way were I choosing the language for the discussion, but “ocean acidification” is the standard term for it, and this is a presumably technical blog. Nevertheless, “acidification” is actually the correct term:
From Wiki, and notice that, while the page on “ocean acidification” is listed when you ask Wiki for “ocean de-alkalinization”, it’s not even at the top. The primary danger of ocean acidification is the increase in H+ ion concentration, and while a 30% increase is pretty small potatoes compared to the 1000% increase involved in a change of one pH level, it’s enough to have a serious effect on many biological functions.
I called them denialbots, and now you David, because anybody who objects to my use of the common term is clearly pursuing a denialist agenda. Especially since my discussion wasn’t even really about ocean acidification, but ecological destabilization, primarily as a direct result of increasing pCO2, but also (incidentally) the ocean acidification it drives. I doubt anybody who is willing to consider the potential dangers of ocean acidification would object to the term. Only knee-jerk deniers.
If denialbots are really interested in changing the language, rather than just pursuing a knee-jerk denialist agenda in the blogosphere, they ought to start by getting Wiki to point their preferred term to the article on ocean acidification.
This isn’t a chemistry blog and I didn’t object to acidification I merely described how it helps frighten those who don’t understand it’s the term a chemist would normally and naturally use because they understand it carries no negative connotation in this context. I pointed out that when describing ocean acidification to non-chemists it would be more descriptive and less fright-inducing to say increasing CO2 makes the ocean less alkaline. Your objection to that reveals your bias as an alarmist bedwetter. There are ointments that can help alleviate the symptoms but I’m afraid the only cure for your ailment is to grow the f*ck up.
“This recent, large increase in ocean heat content is the best sign that the Earth is still undergoing an energy imbalance caused by an enhanced greenhouse effect.”
I think the term “ocean heat content” should be put into a box with “global average temperature,” and buried at sea near bin Laden. The term GAT is often used, but look closely at the graphs and they really purport to describe surface air temperatures, or sometimes combined land and sea surface temperatures. But given the inaccuracy and imprecision of measurements, and vast areas (including much of Antarctica and the deep ocean) that are not even measured, the figures are neither truly global, nor an accurate average.
Since the heat content of vast volumes of the oceans are not even measured, I don’t think anyone has a clue to what the ocean heat content of the Earth is now, let alone ten years ago, let alone 100 years ago or more. Yet somehow the consensus has gone from speculating that the “missing heat” is in the oceans, to claiming they have actually found it there. Nice trick.
Not to be skeptical, but how do you know there’s a pause if you don’t even really know the GAT?
Gary
Another nonsense is ‘global average sea level.’
Tonyb
Seconded.
Regarding claims that warming has supposedly only slowed…
If you go to the CRU website, and look for Professor Phil Jones, you will find this graph which also appears to show HADCRUT 4 temperatures plateauing and actually dropping
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
Graphs of HADCRUT temperature reconstructions on their webpage shows the same plateau and temperature decline, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere!
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/
I found this rather cool graph, which looks JUST LIKE the HADCRUT4 temperatures, but it is a NOAA global land/ocean air temperature reconstruction. Shows plateau and decline at the end, also!
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-land-ocean-mntp-anom/201101-201112.png
Regarding claims that ocean temperatures continue to rise…
Found a graph of NOAA’s Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature from 1880 to 2010. It appears flat since about 1995 through 2010 to me!
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ersst/
I went looking for 2013 Ocean Cooling Numbers. Graph of Microwave sea surface temperatures from 2002 to 2013 shows slight cooling
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/03/global-microwave-sea-surface-temperature-update-for-feb-2013-0-01-deg-c/
Chris Shaker
Chris,
Regarding claims that ocean temperatures continue to rise…
Found a graph of NOAA’s Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature from 1880 to 2010. It appears flat since about 1995 through 2010 to me!
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ersst/
They’re not just talking about sea surface temperatures.
I’d like to see the graph of ocean temperatures below 700 meters…
Chris
You care to point me at a good source of historical deep ocean temperature records? I don’t seem to see any here at RealClimate.org?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/
According to this article, there is a reason I can’t find such data?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/03/ocean-heat-content-0-to-2000-meters-why-arent-northern-hemisphere-oceans-warming-during-the-argo-era/
Chris Shaker
Also, we should be seeing the heat from radioactive decay and from the left over heat of formation rising up through the oceans as well?
Radioactive decay accounts for half of Earth’s heat
“Geophysicists believe that heat flows from Earth’s interior into space at a rate of about 44 × 1012 W (TW). What is not clear, however, is how much of this heat is primordial – left over from the formation of the Earth – and how much is generated by radioactive decay.”
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2011/jul/19/radioactive-decay-accounts-for-half-of-earths-heat
Radioactive decay is key ingredient behind Earth’s heat
“Nearly half of the Earth’s heat comes from the radioactive decay of materials inside, according to a large international research collaboration that includes a Kansas State University physicist.”…
“Previous research has shown that Earth’s total heat output is about 44 terawatts, or 44 trillion watts. The KamLAND researchers found roughly half of that — 29 terawatts — comes from radioactive decay of uranium, thorium and other materials, meaning that about 50 percent of the earth’s heat comes from geoneutrinos.
The researchers estimate that the other half of the earth’s heat comes from primordial sources left over when the earth formed and from other sources of heat. Earth’s heat is the cause behind plate movement, magnetic fields, volcanoes and seafloor spreading.”
http://phys.org/news/2011-08-radioactive-key-ingredient-earth.html#jCp
Chris,
See for example Balmasdea, Trenberth and Källén (2013)
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50382/abstract
But my point was that even if you dispute their findings you can’t contradict them by pointing to surface temperature records.
I don’t think they are making conclusions based on actual measurements in the ocean. I strongly suspect that they are making conclusions based on their computer models.
I’m a computer scientist. I’m not terribly impressed with claims made based on computer models of the climate.
If I am wrong, please point me at historical data for ocean temperatures below 700 meters, and preferably graphs of temperature at a given depth over time.
Thank you,
Chris Shaker
Also, we should be seeing the heat from radioactive decay and from the left over heat of formation rising up through the oceans as well?
Maybe, but you’d have to show the effect was significant enough to make a difference. I don’t pretend to know much about the subject myself but I’ve seen it discussed elsewhere and the opinion seemed to be that it was orders of magnitude too small.
The effect is both small and stable. As it is stable it would not make any difference on warming even if it were not as small as it is.
The Earth is perhaps about 0.1 C warmer due to geothermal energy than it would be without (the exact value depends on the feedbacks). Thus the effect is not totally negligible, but as I wrote already this effect is stable.
Chris,
They use data from ORAS4, which as far as I can see is produced using a combination of observed data and models. See below for more info.
http://godaetwiki.ab-hosting5.co.uk/pub/Main/RelevantDiagnostics/oras4_QJ_latest.pdf
Thank you Andrew
Chris
Concerning primordial heat vs. heat from radioactive decay, back before the era of plate tectonics made geology a much simpler science in some ways, a standard exercise in physical geology class was to take typical concentrations Uranium isotopes in granite, typical conductivity of granite and calculate the amount of heat generated in a given volume per unit time. This was one of the keys to geosynclinal theories of mountain building (orogeny). The short of it is that a typical granite is “hot” enough radiocatively to melt itself, in sufficient volume and at depth.
A better link for the HADCRUT4 temperature graphs showing declining temperatures, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/HadCRUT4.png
Chris Shaker
WHAT?
It’s simply scientifically incorrect, he says, to attribute the divergence of climate model projections and observations to an overestimation of the climate sensitivity.
HE HAS GOT TO BE KIDDING. WHAT ELSE WOULD EXPLAIN THIS?
The scientific proof of the pudding is in testing models against the consequent data. e.g. compare IPCC’s vs Scafetta’s models against the data.
When IPCC gets its climate sensitivity right, then the model mean might be closer than 2 sigma away from the subsequent temperature. They would then still have to show the ability to hindcast/forecast from one half the data to the other half for credibility.
Here is cet, the oldest instrumental record in the world and seen by many scientists as a reasonable proxy for northern hemisphere and global temperatures
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
It has been dropping sharply for a decade
Tonyb
Tony,
Why do we need to use the CET as a proxy for global temperatures over the last decade when we have actual measurements of global temperatures for the last decade?
Furthermore we can conclude from this discrepancy that CET is not a good proxy for wider area averages.
Andrew
There was no global record back to 1660 so this makes cet a useful guide to historic temperatures.
Tonyb
Pekka
Here is a study of CET and BEST global temperature to 1820. There is a pretty good match
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/14/little-ice-age-thermometers-historic-variations-in-temperatures-part-3-best-confirms-extended-period-of-warming/
Cet is a reasonable precursor and a reasonable but not perfect proxy.
Tonyb
Tony,
But we’re not discussing 1660, we’re discussing the last decade. We don’t need to use the CET as a proxy for that period.
Tony,
CET and measurements from nearby parts of Europe must have significant influence on the earliest part of BEST. Thus they are not independent enough for straightforward conclusions.
It’s certainly to be expected that any single measurement series correlates better with global temperatures for multidecadal averages than in short term, but even longer term averages may behave differently – or not. We just don’t know, how good proxy it is.
tony b
It appears to me that both Andrew and Pekka are missing your point.
– CET gives good correlation with BEST over the period of overlap.
– Ergo it seems reasonable that CET would also be a good proxy for BEST for the period where there is no BEST record.
This makes sense to me (if I understood it correctly).
Max
tony b
To my earlier comment:
Both BEST and CET are land only measurements, so they do not necessarily tell us much about land and sea average temperatures.
The “globally and annually averaged land and sea surface temperature anomaly” (HadCRUT 3 or 4) shows a slight cooling since the new millennium (January 2001).
The Hadley sea only surface temperature also shows slight cooling, whereas BEST shows slight warming over land only.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/to/trend/plot/best/from:2001/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2001/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2001/trend
Max
manacker:
If CET were independent of BEST, that would be true. The problem is CET is not. CET’s data, and data from neighboring areas, are used by BEST. They even had an higher effect on BEST’s early results than its later results.
Without accounting for the effects of their non-independence, any correlation between the two is meaningless.
“Without accounting for the effects of their non-independence, any correlation between the two is meaningless.”
Oops, there go all the bristlecone pine reconstructions that supposedly make for a “robust” understanding of paleo-climate,
andrew adams | May 7, 2013 at 5:55 pm | Reply
Tony,
Why do we need to use the CET as a proxy for global temperatures over the last decade when we have actual measurements of global temperatures for the last decade?
———-
I’ll bite, where can I find these measurements of “global temperature”? Last time I checked what we have is a very small sample of local temperatures that are then gridded, massaged, folded, spindles and mutilated into something many call “global average temperature”. It’s nonsense, of course, but that’s what they call it.
Tony, I guess folks dont know that the early BEST record contains the northeastern united states and more than CET
http://berkeleyearth.org/movies/
Brandon Shollenberger
Good point.
Thanks.
Max
k scott denison
You write:
I think our hostess has referred to the process you describe as “tortured”.
Max
k scott denison,
Since you obviously know what records I’m referring to I’m not sure I can give you a reply which will satisfy you.
Mosh
I think the reasonable correlation between BEST and CET is interesting. It gives us some idea of what was happening in (possibly) the wider world back to 1660.
Having read some more of Phil Jones’ work and that from other researchers I think my reconstruction to 1538 is pretty indicative as well. Previously I was surprised at the apparent warmth in the 1640’s and early 1500’s but now I’m confident it was correct.
tonyb
“If CET were independent of BEST, that would be true. The problem is CET is not. CET’s data, and data from neighboring areas, are used by BEST. They even had an higher effect on BEST’s early results than its later results.”
The effect on the early results is determined by the correlation in the later results.
Now of course one could rerun the data with CET taken out. what is your prediction?
andrew adams | May 8, 2013 at 3:35 am |
k scott denison,
Since you obviously know what records I’m referring to I’m not sure I can give you a reply which will satisfy you.
——–
It’s easy andrew: show me the records that are validated and verified to represent the “global temperature”. For that matter, show me the records that indicate that the temperature and trend of even a ver small, say 1%, area of the globe can be measured using one thermometer within that area.
The experiment I would run would be to saturate that area on a uniform grid with thermometers at very high spatial resolution. Record the temperatures and trends for a significant period of time. Plot all of the data to see if they all have the same trend over time.
Do that, and I’ll start to believe in what the *climate scientists* say is global temperature.
As Mosher has pointed out, in the BEST data ~30% of the stations show cooling while the others show warming. So who decided that we simply haven’t over sampled areas with positive trends and under sampled areas with negative trends?
Steven Mosher, you didn’t contradict anything I said, but you did provide an opportunity to point out BEST’s decision to use spatial correlation in one period as a constant over all time is unsupported. It is, in fact, known to be incorrect, and it even contradicts BEST’s own data. BEST has simply set a variable (in formula two of the appendix, as I recall) to zero with the wave of a hand. BEST has made no attempt to justify this decision, nor has it offered any indication as to how this decision affects BEST’s results.
As for predictions, the only one I’ll make is that you’ll fail to address this issue as you have for something like a year now.
(For the record, I did do as Zeke suggest and contacted Robert. I received no response.)
I wonder how long it will be before these scientists take seriously the possibility that sensitivity could be lower than 2C.
It will be soon after the money they get to say this alarmist stuff stops flowing.
AFAIK, it is well understood that CO2 emissions alone could only contribute a 1°C climate sensitivity. The remaining 1°-3°C that are hypothesized are due to positive feedbacks. It would now appear as if the modelers mistook natural variability for feedback as they calibrated their models to the increased warming between the mid 1970s and the late 1990s when all the natural cycles that we are aware of were causing additional warming.
Tom, you write “AFAIK, it is well understood that CO2 emissions alone could only contribute a 1°C climate sensitivity“
This is another of the myths propogated by the warmists. It is merely a hypothetical guess that doubling CO2, by itself, with no feedbacks, causes a rise in global temperatures of around 1C. This number can NEVER be measured, so it is purely hypothetical, and completely meaningless. Basically, it is just another part of the scientific garbage which is promulgated by the warmists
Jim Cripwell – I think your refutation of climate sensitivity to CO2 (ECS) goes a step too far. The value of ECS is a bit more than a hypothetical guess, because it is supported by laboratory experiment. It is indeed difficult to see how it could be measured in the real world, but scientists – the genuine variety – may one day work out a way of doing it. So the situation as I see it is not that climate sensitivity is completely meaningless, but that it cannot yet be used with any confidence. The lab results plus a bit of theory place it I think at around 1 in today’s conditions. To my mind it is reasonable to work theoretically with it at around that level but without confidence. There is probably an equally valid reason for working with it at around zero (the effect is ‘saturated’). The only statement that can be made about its value with any confidence is “we don’t know”. NB. I included the words “in today’s conditions” above, because I don’t think it has yet been established that ECS is a constant – it would seem likely that it is highly dependent on other conditions.
Mike,
You bet that ECS would not be a constant (with wide error bands) because the other influences would swing in and out of the system in a random fashion with varying impacts on ECS.
ECS would better be represented as a series of PDF’s across space and time.
Mike Jonas
Jim Cripwell’s statement should be modified as follows:
I think you’ll both agree to the modified statement.
Max
Max, you write “I think you’ll both agree to the modified statement.”
Sorry, Max. No sale. So far as I am concerned, the no-feedback climate sensitivity for a doubling of CO2 is a hypothetical, meaningless number. It has a place in physics if it is used for one purpose, and one purpose only. That purpose is to help design the experiment where the actual change in global temperature caused by adding CO2 to the atmosphere from current levels is measured. All other uses of this number are not legitimate in physics.
Judith,
The money quote from this article is Pierrehumbert’s: “I think it’s true that some rather sloppy discussion of the rapid warming from the 20th century has given people unrealistic expectations about the future course of warming.” I wonder how long it will be before these scientists take seriously the possibility that sensitivity could be lower than 2C.
The whole point of what many of the scientists quoted in the article are saying is that the global temperature levels we have seen in recent years do not demonstrate that climate sensitivity is significantly lower than previously estimated. The “money quote” from Pierrehumbert does not suggest that this is the case and indeed he points out immediately afterwards that “no serious scientist thinks climate sensitivity could be much lower than 2 degrees Celsius based on the balance of the evidence”.
Andrew Adams
You need to get up-to-date.
There have been several recent studies (some at least partly based on actual physical observations), which all point to a lower 2xCO2 ECS than previously predicted by the models cited by IPCC.
Recent studies on 2xCO2 ECS
Lewis (2013) 1.0C to 3.0C
Berntsen (2012) 1.2C to 2.9C
Lindzen (2011) 0.6C to 1.0C
Schmittner (2011) 1.4C to 2.8C
van Hateren (2012) 1.5C to 2.5C
Schlesinger (2012) 1.45C to 2.01C
Masters (2013)* 1.5C to 2.9C
* not yet published
The average range of these recent studies is 1.2°C to 2.4°C, with a mean value of 1.8°C, or about half of earlier model-based predictions cited by IPCC..
Max
PS It appears that Pierrehumbert also needs to get up-to-date with his “no serious scientist” quote (there are at least around a dozen of them who would disagree, i.e. the authors of the recent studies on ECS).
There are papers putting ECS at around 0.2 :-
January 15, 2013
A paper under review for Earth System Dynamics uses a novel technique based on satellite data and surface air temperatures to find that global warming due to increased CO2 is is much less than claimed by the IPCC. According to the author, the findings confirm those of Spencer & Braswell and Lindzen & Choi that a doubling of CO2 levels would only lead to an increase in top of the atmosphere temperature of 0.67°C, or global surface temperature of about 0.18°C, instead of the alleged 3°C claimed by IPCC computer models.
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=10954
NB. This paper is reported as only being “under review”, but the papers it refers to have been published.
Hmmm. You lump together different estimates based on different methodologies and calculate a “mean value.”
Does the IPCC do that?
Max,
The point I’m making is about what the scientists quoted in Appel’s piece are saying. Judith seems to be taking their comments as evidence for lower CS whereas what they are saying is that what has happened to global temperatures in recent years is perfectly consistent with our current best understanding of CS. You or Judith may think that CS is lower (I’m familiar with some but not all of your references so I will look them up) but that doesn’t follow from Appel’s piece.
Mike Jonas,
Much as I don’t want to get into an argument about climate sensitivity, I have to say that putting your faith in an unpublished paper which is contradicted not only by virtually every other study on the subject (apart from one which has not stood up to serious scrutiny) but also by everything we know about climate changes in the past seems to me to be a bit… optimistic.
Andrew Adams
That’s correct.
I was talking about the estimates of seven new studies on ECS, which are (at least partly) observation-based, which all indicate that 2xCO2 ECS is around half of the model predictions cited by IPCC in AR4 rather than “Appel’s piece”.
Max
The review process of the Börnbom paper referred to by Mike Jones was interrupt for the following reason:
http://www.earth-syst-dynam-discuss.net/4/C202/2013/esdd-4-C202-2013.pdf
Max,
Lindzen’s claims of very low sensitivity have repeatedly failed to survive serious scrutiny.
I’ve looked up some of the other references.
The only paper I can find for Berntsen is Aldrin et al (2012) to which he is a contributor. Yes, their results are slightly lower than the IPCC estimates, although they acknowlege that the results could be underestimated due to indirect aerosol effects which are not included. Also they get much higher figures if they include certain cloud effects. You can certainly argue that it supports CS being at the lower end of IPCC estimates but it doesn’t contradict them.
Schlesinger’s paper is not about climate sensitivity, it is about reducing CO2 emissions. It uses certain values of climate sensitivity for the purposes of estimating the global temperature trajectory but it doesn’t calculate them from first principles.
The values in van Hateren’s paper are for the transient climate response so are consistent with the existing mainstream position.
I was interested in the discussion but now wonder if the info being provided is being influenced by ‘motivated reasoning’. I see that Andrew Adams is apparently ideologically aligned with the Greens and LibDems. So can I trust his interpretations of the sources he refers to as being objective and unbiased?
From Andrew’s web site referring to the 2010 UK election:
Science does not have an ideology. I suggest that you listen to what Andrew Adams is telling you about the premises of those papers estimating a low sensitivity.
Above all, I would recommend that people like Manacker work out the analysis themselves using current observational data.
The problem I think is that the skeptics are serving as obedient lap dogs — in not being able to do the analysis themselves, they take the lazy way out and apply rhetorical debating tactics. Having gotten past the procrastination stage and I became motivated to do the analysis for myself, I find that it is not too hard to work it all the way through. Once one finds canonical ways of representing what are often sophisticated mathematical behaviors, the results are surprisingly straightforward.
Good luck!
Peter,
If you think my interpretation of those papers may be incorrect (and I don’t expect you to merely take my word for it) then all you need to do is read them.
As for motivated reasoning, well I reckon pretty much everyone here probably has strong views of one kind or another. If people habitually make blatantly wrong arguments, and they have strong and overt political views, then it can sometimes be interesting to consider if the latter is influencing the former. And there are arguments around climate change, its consequences and what action should (or should not) be taken where people’s values are actually relevant and will naturally inform their arguments.
But assuming that because people have strong political views their argument must necessarily be suspect makes any meaningful discussion very difficult. Of course we should all be wary of falling into the trap of motivated reasoning but it’s wrong to see it in every argument made by others.
Andrew Adams,
I agree with your words. But many people are excellent at writing words that do not truly and honestly reflect what motivates them to write those words.
Mine are open. I support economically rational policies. If I am to be persuaded we need to implement policies that will be economically damaging, there needs to be strong evidence the chosen policies will succeed in making the climate better.
I take a risk management approach. So I recognise there are future risk of climate change and almost certain economic damage by the policies that have been proposed to date.
Therefore, I argue it is entirely rational for everyone to seriously questions every aspect of the science that is relevant to defining policy. I strongly disagree with those people who want to try to stop debate and get on with implementing (bad) policies.
There is no point in me reading every scientific paper I am referred to. I am interested in the information that is suitable for policy analysis. The sort of information I want that which informs analyses like Nordhaus RICE and DICE http://nordhaus.econ.yale.edu/ and Richard Tol’s https://sites.google.com/site/climateconomics/
I particularly want to know the best estimate and uncertainty for these four inputs:
1, Climate sensitivity
2. Damage function (damages per degree of warming)
3. achievable decarbonisation rate of the global economy
4. probability that the chosen policy will succeed and survive until the job is done
The uncertainty on climate sensitivity is huge and has changed little in the past 25 years or so. And virtually no work has been done on items 2, 3 and 4.
I am interested in the latest information on our best estimate for ECS and the uncertainty, but not in reading each paper. (and yes, I have read the relevant section of draft AR5 WG1 and the Figure 12.1).
The Greens and Leftist parties like the LibDems have displayed little interest in the economic consequences of the policies they push, so I am very distrustful of anything they argue.
Peter,
In principle I don’t disagree with a lot of that. I certainly think that it’s important to ask the kind of questions you raise. The problem is we might not get as accurate answers as we would like for some time, so we are stuck with having to make decisions baased on the imperfect information we have.
Although the economic arguments are important I don’t think that the issue can be framed in purely those terms – there are questions around both how we judge the risks involved and what kind of action (if any) we should take and how costs are borne which involve value judgements and so it is inherently a moral and political issue as well as a scientific and economic one. But much as I make no apology for my liberal left leanings (I don’t really think of myself as a LibDem of Green although I have, or had, some sympathies in those directions) I don’t claim that any political ideology will have the answers by itself – I think this is genuinely an issue whose scale means means we have to look at solutions which cross political boundaries.
I certainly wouldn’t reject out of hand suggestions for policies to address climate change from anyone regardless of their political affiliations, and ISTM there are quite big differences of opinion on policy querstions even amongst people with quite similar outlooks.
“no serious scientist” == “no true Scotsman”
BZZZZZZZZZT! Logical fallacy.
Thanks for playing. Next contestant please.
Pushing a buzzer about what Pierrehumbert said does not provide a good answer to Andrew Adams’ point, which was:
> The whole point of what many of the scientists quoted in the article are saying is that the global temperature levels we have seen in recent years do not demonstrate that climate sensitivity is significantly lower than previously estimated. The “money quote” from Pierrehumbert does not suggest that this is the case [.]
Thanks for playing.
Willard, “> The whole point of what many of the scientists quoted in the article are saying is that the global temperature levels we have seen in recent years do not demonstrate that climate sensitivity is significantly lower than previously estimated. The “money quote” from Pierrehumbert does not suggest that this is the case [.]”
Well of course not, when the range is twice as large as is should be because of “averaging” two guesses, how could it be “significantly” lower?
Thanks to AR4 though, that could change. Originally the range was 1.5 to 4.5 following the Charney Compromise. AR4 slipped in a minor change in that range making it 2-4.5. Since that is supposed to be a “95% confidence level”, the 1.6 range would be “significantly” different than the AR4 estimated range.
Once sensitivity drops to 0.8C, then the real fun will begin. AR5 should also be amusing. Should someone’s dog eat their corrigenda, there is likely to be a bit more notice taken. :)
Yes it provides a wonderful answer to those with a keen intellect. I’m sorry it went over your head but you should be used to that by now.
Cap’n,
Before a but the AR4 may such and such and so and so, I’d like to hear a loud and clear yes on Andrew’s point:
> The whole point of what many of the scientists quoted in the article are saying is that the global temperature levels we have seen in recent years do not demonstrate that climate sensitivity is significantly lower than previously estimated.
If you’re to play yes, but games, at least say but loudly and clearly.
Thanks for playing.
PS: What you just did was an argument from fallacy, Big Dave.
Willard, “Before a but the AR4 may such and such and so and so, I’d like to hear a loud and clear yes on Andrew’s point:”
You will have to settle for a yes, BUT. Just because Andrew’s statement is correct, doesn’t mean it is meaningful. That is the delightfully part of playing statistical games.
That is like me saying the models are WRONG. You have to agree, then you might add a but.
Cap’n,
Thank you for that yes.
Now, please put this yes into some perspective:
> Recall all the flack I took last year for talking about the ‘pause’? The money quote from this article is Pierrehumbert’s: […] I wonder how long it will be before these scientists take seriously the possibility that sensitivity could be lower than 2C.
These one-liners are interesting to read in the light of such a yes, don’t you think?
As for what the future will be, you’re entitled to your opinion, which we no doubt will hear again in a near future.
Thanks!
w
What you just did, Willard, was babble.
Williard, Judith’s definition of Flak and yours can differ. In fact, I think your view on just about anything is highly different than most. You have advanced “hair splitting” to a fine art.
In Judith’s mind, she may also think she has taken “flak” for her Italian Flag, conversing with Steven McIntyre, consorting with Richard Muller and blogging. Her definition of “Flak” is hers.
Now should Ray Pierrehumbert take a little “flak” for his statement? Since he wrote the book on the atmospheric radiant effect, it would seem he should have been one of the first to mention and explain the “pause”. In fact, it should have been mentioned in AR4 since Ray is an expert on the GHE, if anyone was capable of recognizing the “skeptics” pause, he should have been the one.
[Response: Wayne, please note that this is Kyle’s article not mine, though I did encourage him to write it for us. I think the interesting question raised (though not definitively answered) by this line of work is the extent to which some of the pause in warming mid-century might have been more due to decadal ocean variability rather than aerosols than is commonly thought. If that is the case, then a pause or temporary reduction in warming rate could recur even if aerosols are unchanged. Learning how to detect and interpret such things is important, lest a temporary pause be confused with evidence for low climate sensitivity. –raypierre] … 2009
Emphasis mine.
What do our results have to do with Global Warming, i.e., the century-scale response to greenhouse gas emissions? VERY LITTLE, contrary to claims that others have made on our behalf. Nature (with hopefully some constructive input from humans) will decide the global warming question based upon climate sensitivity, net radiative forcing, and oceanic storage of heat, not on the type of multi-decadal time scale variability we are discussing here. … – Kyle Swanson, 2009
Big Dave,
Since you kindly asks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_fallacy
Your argument against Raypierre was exactly that,
BZZZT. You’re out.
Next Denizen, please.
Cap’n,
You’re right, Judith’s definition of Flak and mine can differ.
This is why I keep asking what flak she had in mind.
Until she answer that one, I’ll keep pushing one unanswered criticism after the other.
Running with talking points for victimization’s sake has to stop.
More Pierrehumbert from elsewhere:
Williad, “Until she answer that one, I’ll keep pushing one unanswered criticism after the other.”
That sounds like a fun game. I myself think that some of the misconceptions of AWG theory will require the complete and utter humiliation of some of the participants.
Since I like picking on Trenberth, perhaps I can pick a little more by explaining his heat was never missing? He just can’t add.
If he didn’t have an “irrational” fear of satellite data, he would have known that by now.
http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/05/ocean-heat-content-versus-stratospheric.html
“There’s really nothing in this that changes my estimate of climate sensitivity.” -Bad Andrew
Cap’n,
Here kind of comment can help identify a game:
> That was fun.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/05/07/more-on-the-pause/#comment-319772
What you call a game right now ain’t one.
Willie, Willie, Willie…
What I implied and what you inferred are two different things. Since it’s my implication I get to clarify it.
I inferred that anyone who would commit the no true Scotsman fallacy is an imbecile. I know you admire imbecilic wool gatherers, a professonal courtesy no doubt, but others might not and so I pointed out one signature of a deficient intellect in a subtle way that was, unsurprisingly, too subtle for similar deficient intellects to properly construe.
Thanks for playing. Better luck next time but I’m afraid you need more than luck. Maybe someone smart to proof read your babble before you publish it…
Big Dave,
Thank you for clarifying:
> I inferred that anyone who would commit the no true Scotsman fallacy is an imbecile.
So you’re using a fallacy argument to construct an ad hominem for the sake of dismissing Pierrehumbert’s claim.
Since even imbeciles may be right, your construction is illegitimate.
BZZZT. The point stands.
Thanks for playing,
w
After due consideration of your point “even imbeciles can be right” I concede the argument to you. Even you can be right.
But a betting man will still bet on the imbecile being wrong.
And the trite expression, which I use often, is even a blind squirrel finds an ocassional acorn. Write that down.
All guesswork. None of them have a clue about climate. Nature makes fools of hubristic zealots..
That the warnings from those in-the-know are overblown and the world can keep burning fossil fuels?
Actually, those not ‘in-the-know’ where really those in-the-know.
Serial sovereign defaults and further severe global economic recession seem unavoidable. In these conditions, the ongoing obsession over AGW is looking more and more like a mental disorder, not unlike the mass manias of the Middle Ages… [where] angry mobs may be only too willing to accord full credit to false prophets. (Walter Starck)
“…no serious scientist thinks…”
How many times in history do you suppose this stuffy phrase has been uttered in defense of some academic status quo, only to be subsequently overturned?
+10
Indeed, no serious captain would ever start a serious claim with ‘no serious scientist’.
In this one quote by Ben Santer, one can see both the ignorance and arrogance of the “consensus” bunch:
Duh!
Arrogance: “Hey guys, we know it all.”
Ignorance: The “noise” may turn out to BE the “signal”, stupid!
As Albert Einstein is quoted as saying:
Looks like we’ve got both at work here.
Max
Judith Curry
Thanks for this post. Good stuff.
You last sentence is spot on:
So do I.
Max
Manacker,
In the Earth sciences discipline, geologists have come up with the ranking system for prediction called 3P . The 3P’s stand for Proven, Probable, and Possible. Just ask someone like the great Steve McIntyre, what relying on the lowest certainty Possible means when you are making recommendations concerning natural resource availability to Wall Street. (yes, you may make a trip to the hoosgow if the authorities catch on)
Hope this helps how much you can depend on the “possibility that sensitivity could be lower than 2C.”. And stay out of trouble.
I have prepared a “feel good” chart for fans of the pause (see link). Please concentrate on the OLS line for 1998- 2013, and ignore the silly 1880-1997 period.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2013/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2013/trend
My mistake for not throwing out that silly 1880-1997 period to begin with. My new and improved “feel good” chart for pause fans is
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2013/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2013/trend/plot/none
Max_OK
Great charts, Okie.
I feel much better already.
Thanks.
Max_not from OK
Max_OK, here’s a better one
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2013/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:1920/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1980/trend
Shows that the cooling trends out number the warming trends 3:2 over since 1880. This is what makes me feel no need to panic.
k scott, the problem with showing that many years is some rude “take-the-longview” type is gonna call attention to the overall trend. Look at how that would mess up your chart.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2013/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:1920/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1940/to:1980/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2013/trend
I was purposely avoiding the long-view in my revised feel-good chart for pause fans. Many of those fans are getting up in their years and don’t have long left, so it’s best not to bring up the long-term.
Yes we have seen this before – and if you think that 0.06 degrees C/decade is something we will worry about – even if it is continued for the next 100 years – you are off your meds.
We have seen it 100 times.
‘To unmask the anthropogenic global warming trend imbedded in the climate data, multiple linear regression analysis is often employed to filter out short-term fluctuations caused by El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), volcano aerosols, and solar forcing. These fluctuations are unimportant as far as their impact on the deduced multidecadal anthropogenic trends is concerned: ENSO and volcano aerosols have very little multidecadal trend. Solar variations do have a secular trend, but it is very small and uncertain. What is important, but is left out of all multiple regression analysis of global warming so far, is a long-period oscillation called the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO). When the AMO index is included as a regressor (i.e., explanatory variable), the deduced multidecadal anthropogenic global warming trend is so impacted that previously deduced anthropogenic warming rates need to be substantially revised. The deduced net anthropogenic global warming trend has been remarkably steady and statistically significant for the past 100 yr.’ http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JAS-D-12-0208.1
Chief Hydrologists inadvertently revealed his age with the following remarks:
“… and if you think that 0.06 degrees C/decade is something we will worry about …”
“We have seen it 100 times.”
_______
Holy Cow, 10 x 100 puts Chief at 1,000 years of age! HA HA, he sure knows how to exaggerate. Actually, the “100 times” probably is just a typo
If Chief meant 10 times it would put him at 100 years of age. I can easily believe a hundred. He’s the fuddiest fuddy-duddy I can recall.
Note Chief said “we.” Maybe he will tell who “we” are.
We have seen the science 100 times at least. We includes the many scientists who have identified decadal variability.
‘The observed global-warming rate has been nonuniform, and the cause of each episode of slowing in the expected warming rate is the subject of intense debate. To explain this, nonrecurrent events have commonly been invoked for each episode separately. After reviewing evidence in both the latest global data (HadCRUT4) and the longest instrumental record, Central England Temperature, a revised picture is emerging that gives a consistent attribution for each multidecadal episode of warming and cooling in recent history, and suggests that the anthropogenic global warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century. A recurrent multidecadal oscillation is found to extend to the preindustrial era in the 353-y Central England Temperature and is likely an internal variability related to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), possibly caused by the thermohaline circulation variability. The perspective of a long record helps in quantifying the contribution from internal variability, especially one with a period so long that it is often confused with secular trends in shorter records. Solar contribution is found to be minimal for the second half of the 20th century and less than 10% for the first half. The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady since 1910 at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade, with superimposed AMO-related ups and downs that included the early 20th century warming, the cooling of the 1960s and 1970s, the accelerated warming of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent slowing of the warming rates. Quantitatively, the recurrent multidecadal internal variability, often underestimated in attribution studies, accounts for 40% of the observed recent 50-y warming trend.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/22/1212471110
So yes we have seen the 20th century trend 100 times or perhaps a 1000 – and it is perhaps 0.08 degrees C/decade.
And all you have in response is trivial, inane, adolescent and uninformed rubbish. Go back to mummy because you haven’t learned to be a real man let alone a real human being yet.
So, Chief, you don’t deny you are 100 years old. I hope I live that long.
You may not have much time left to let go off that silly decade notion. It is not an explanation for climate change, it’s simply observation. It’s like observing an old wind-up clock and attributing the movement of the hands to the passing of time rather than to what’s inside the clock, and then when the clock runs down, thinking time has stopped.
Wise up while you still have some times (hopefully years) left.
Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”
Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703
There is a big picture of quite a lot of the planet on the site. Are you really quite insane Max?
Chief, you are describing observations. You aren’t explaining the causes of what’s been observed. You are doing little better than saying warming is a warming influence and cooling is a cooling influence.
You say: According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”
Yes, and ?
Max_OK
You write to the Chief that you “hope to live to 100”.
That’s wishing for a lot.
In your shoes I’d just hope to live until I grow up and become an adult.
Max_CH
Well gee wiz, if we want long term trends….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/the-two-epochs-of-marcott/
In case you wanted something new in old.
CO2 Climate Sensitivity Vs. Reality
One of the Faithful–David Appell–interviews some High Priests–who intone that the science is settled, only “sloppy”–and Curry thinks it is a “nice job”. All involved are incompetents, chanting in ritual consensus. Climate science is doomed, unless someone, anyone, can (as I wrote at that last link) “explain, within the ‘consensus’ theory, why the Venus/Earth temperature ratio should be precisely (!) due only to the relative distances of the two planets from the Sun, and nothing else”. Explain it quantitatively, people, or admit your consensus theory is false.
ZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz………..
WTF? You woke me for that nonsense?
Venus is a red herring. You need to explain why the earth is much warmer than its own moon where both are the same distance from the sun. Good luck. Wake me up when and if you get to the point where you start discussing the effect of a global ocean.
Thanks for playing.
ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz………..
HDH: As I’ve pointed out on your blog many times, the Venus/Earth ratio is hardly exact, and the entire idea that pressure determines temperature violates conservation of energy.
I must confess to being confused by the role of “natural oscillations” as used on all sides of the climate debate. I have both an evidentiary confusion and a causality confusion.
On the evidentiary side, we have Urgent Mitigationists, who used to downplay the role of natural fluctuations (when measured surface temps were rising), now using them to explain the “pause”. We have some Militant Nonbelievers, who used to cite natural fluctuations as an alternative hypothesis to AGW (when temps were rising) now blaming the “pause” on lower climate sensitivity to CO2 than assumed in the simulators. It would be nice for everyone to get his story straight.
On the causal side, I don’t understand exactly what explanatory role natural fluctuations are supposed to play. As Mosher likes to say, if we don’t know what causes these fluctuations, they are observations of climate rather than explanations of climate.
I would go further to say that even if we knew the causes of these fluctuations, their impact on climate would not be clear.
As far as I can make out, there are three main routes by which natural oscillations could counteract or reinforce the greenhouse effect on measured temps: a) We could have a redistribution of heat within the earth system. b) We could have a change in the albedo of the earth system. c) We could have a change in the effective transparency of the atmosphere to upwellng infrared radiation. These routes could operate simultaneously and each could be subdivided into multiple mechanisms, but I find the classification useful in thinking about the problem.
Do we know very much about which route is most important in causing natural oscillations to affect measured average surface temps?
stevepostrel
You listed three natural routes, by which natural factors might “counteract or reinforce the greenhouse effect on measured temps”
Let me add one.
d) some other as yet unknown mechanism by which our planet’s climate is naturally forced, which could or could not occur via the routes listed in a) through c) above.
Max
Stevenpostrel said, ” a) We could have a redistribution of heat within the earth system. b) We could have a change in the albedo of the earth system. c) We could have a change in the effective transparency of the atmosphere to upwellng infrared radiation. These routes could operate simultaneously and each could be subdivided into multiple mechanisms, but I find the classification useful in thinking about the problem.
Yes, that is useful.
a) has not only be noted but roughly quantified in paleo. Brierly et al. 2010
http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/w4937/Readings/Brierley%20and%20Fedorov.2010.pdf estimates the change in meridional flux due to the Drake Passage opening/circulation changes to be ~3.2 C and the Zonal variations ~0.6 C. That agrees well with Toggweiler et al 2000
http://sam.ucsd.edu/sio219/toggweiler_bjornsson.pdf
b) Toggweiler describes as a shifting of the “thermal Equator” or ITCZ. This shift from southern hemisphere dominate to northern hemisphere dominate change the westerlies which drive the THC as described in papers linked in a)
c) is the more complex issue. That one might make someone a new science super star.
The Drake Passage paper, from its abstract, does not describe a redistribution of heat such that the overall surface temperature would change, but rather a shift in heat between the surfaces of the SH and NH. So that wouldn’t explain anything about the average measured surface temp.
A redistribution of heat affecting average surface temp would have to be into or out of the deep ocean, higher altitudes, or some hypothetical non-thermal process (biota growth, wind, or what have you).
On b) you could have various ice-and-snow feedbacks, cloud feedbacks, changes in biological ground cover, changes in the reflectivity of the ocean surface (whitecaps?), etc.
On c) the only things I can think of are possible cloud feedbacks, water vapor changes, or maybe changes in the number and frequency of sudden stratospheric warming events.
This is just a list. It would be interesting to know if there is any way to tell if any of these are linked to the natural oscillations in a way that could explain (part of) fluctuations in average measured surface temps.
Steven, a) and b) are a little more interesting. The Drake Passage opening allows more efficient mixing of the oceans at various depths. Without that mixing, the thermocline layers become higher, warmer and more uniform which causing warmer surface temperatures.
With the Drake Passage, the southern hemisphere deepest downwelling water temperature is nearly fixed at -1 to -2 C. In the Arctic, the temperature is warmer but more variable because of the sea ice extent and salinity are more variable. The two hemispheres have different “setpoints”. .This is the main reason for the AMO impact on climate.
The story gets better due to the Drake Passage bottleneck. Nielsen et al found various common time scales for temperature fluctuations related to precessional forcing. 150 years, one of the mixing times mention in the Toggweiler paper with was noted also in the Greenland melt studies, 400 years, .1070 and 1220 years, During a NH dominate regime, SH sea ice extent increases which tends to vary the average flow rate.
So more efficient mixing equals cooling atmospheric temperatures and warming deeper ocean temperature and the reverse of course. The time scale for ocean warming is ridiculously long, ~1700 years and appears to be roughly limited to the range of 2C and 4C currently, likely due to the difference in Arctic and Antarctic downwelling deep water temperatures. That possible limit and the hemispheric “seesaw” keeps global mean temperatures pretty stable but there is huge variation in the NH high latitude temperatures. Kinda like the AMO and PDO on millennial scale steroids.
BTW, that ~1700 years I determined from the Bintanja and Van de Wal Northern Hemisphere paleo reconstruction. That is a 5 million year reconstruction and the lag relationship between SST and deep ocean temperature is consistently in the 1700 year range. That is pretty close to the Bond event timing, but paleo can be off a few hundred years.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/contributions_by_author/bintanja2008/bintanja2008.txt
It is a shame there are so many issues with paleo dating and calibration.
You should add “change in convection” to the list of factors. In fact since convection is the primary cooling mechanism for the earth’s surface its absence from your list indicates a fundmental ignorance of the climate system on your part.
Charming as usual. Convection changes would be covered in my list for a), redistribution of heat to higher altitudes.
That’s a pretty broad definition of redistribution. Convection makes cooling more efficient by insensibly transporting energy to a higher altitude where there is less radiative restriction by the remaining atmosphere above it. It’s not like the energy is simply moved it’s moved and dissipated. But that’s a quibble and since I see in your other comments you clarified your meaning I will retract the criticism.
An example of one source of noise is volcanic eruptions. The number and timing of eruptions likely follows a Poisson process and the sizes are picked likely from a fat-tail distributions. That’s as close as you are going to get to prediction, so you deal with it.
Other sources of noise can be similarly characterized. The main point to consider when dealing with random walk type of noise is whether there is a reversion to the mean process.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ReversiontotheMean.html
The continual addition of CO2 to the atmosphere is not a reversion to the mean process, while all the noise sources such as tides, solar, coriolis, and chaotic fluctuations have a reversion to the mean.
Volcanoes are transient phenomena – they make an impact and are gone.
Other climate series are non-stationary and so do not have a mean to revert to. That’s the secret – aye dweeby?
Here’s an 11,00 year ENSO series.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ENSO11000.gif.html?sort=3&o=107
Chief makes an observation: “so do not have a mean to revert to”
Ha ha ha ha ha. Chief is a total buffoon and doesn’t even realize that the measure in the chart he links to has a BASELINE that it reverts to.
In comparison, what does the measure of this chart do?
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/mlo/programs/coop/scripps/img/img_scripps_co2_record.gif
It is not reverting to the mean, ha ha ha.
The not-so-secret secret is that there is a big gap in your knowledge concerning elementary time-series analysis.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | May 9, 2013 at 12:22 am | Reply
“An example of one source of noise is volcanic eruptions.”
Another example of noise is anonymous commenters who are just barely bright enough to not want to damage their reputations elsewhere by attaching a traceable real-life name to their written demonstrations of juvenality and scientific illiteracy.
Before applying Feynman’s rules, first observe.
If it warms, blame CO2. If it doesn’t warm, blame aerosols. This seems to be the belief system.
I am confident that Mother Nature will eventually prove that GHG warming is of no consequence compared with natural variability.
The real inconvenient truth is that the earth’s temperature has been falling for 3,000 years as revealed by the Greenland ice core data. Current temperature changes are but tiny blips in the overall cooling. The temperature has dropped some 3.75 degrees Fahrenheit since the Minoan Warm Period some 3,300 years ago. The ultimate irony will be that if the long term trend continues shivering future generations may look back and wonder why we saw warming when the next ice age was staring us in the face. (Meteorologist, Art Horn)
Wagathon
Global temperature has probably been cooling since the Holocene Climatic Optimum about 8,000 top 10,000 years ago.
I’d lay even odds that’s not true, David. Unlike past interglacials the Holocene didn’t spike at the very beginning like predecessors. It just suddenly stopped rising about 2-3C short of the average of past interglacials. So it didn’t get a warm spike at the beginning and has now 12ky later failed to get on a steady downtrend.
The best explanation I’ve seen is Herman Pope’s who lays out and offers empirical support for a hypothesis that melting of the Greenland glacier is what starts a downward slide out of interglacial warmth. Without the extra water (larger global ocean surface area to absorb sunlight) and warmth from a naked Greenland soaking up rays the northern ocean doesn’t warm enough to drive high snowfall rates required to begin rebuilding of continental glaciers. Thus we’re stuck in a never-ending interglacial getting neither warmer nor colder just oscillating slightly around a tightly constrained median. The reason for the odd interglacial is, according to Pope, the Younger Dryas which interrupted the melt, quenching its inertia, and thereby saved Greenland’s glacier. He believes the Younger Dryas was caused by the premature (compared to past interglacials) collapse of an ice dam holding back meltwaters around the NA Great Lakes. The flood of freshwater into the North Alantic halted glacial melt in Greenland and it didn’t resume for 12,000 years right up to now.
Sounds perfectly plausible to me. If there’s a tipping point it would probably be a point of no return for Greenland’s glacier but we’re talking a thousand years for that to melt off and then a 100,000-year descent back into ice age conditions.
I think civilization has more immediate and more important concerns to say the least.
Springer
See: First complete ice core record of last interglacial period shows the climate of Greenland to be significantly warmer than today
Furthermore, the glacial period was about 8 – 10 C colder than at present. Cold has far greater danger of catastrophic mass deaths than a few degrees of warming.
The Greenland glacier never melted during Eemian interglacial, though 8C warmer than present. Consequently, Pope’s hypothesis of melting fails on the data.
Norman Page shows cooling since the Holocene Optimum.
Hagen
Dunno where you got your info but it’s wrong. Ice at bedrock level in Greenland is only 130,000 years old (Eemian Interglacial) so the last interglacial melted it all.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1901157/scientists_finally_reach_greenland_ice_sheet_bedrock/
Certainly not global but high resolution C Dome ice core in Antarctica shows temperature constrained within a 1-2 degree range with no trend up or down since Holocene interglacial began.
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0134849d3d3f970c-pi
http://www.climatedata.info/Proxy/Proxy/icecores_files/BIGw07-temperature—vostok-and-gisp2.gif.gif
Greenland a bit noisier than Vostok but same story. No real trend in past 10,000 years.
Yet more evidence of Eemian melt:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6091/216
It’s a well known factoid that if the entire Greenland ice sheet melted it would raise sea level about 7 meters. The fact that Eemian sea level peaked 6-9 meters higher than Holocene means Greenland was, if not bare, close to it.
Thanks for playing. Think twice before contradicting me next time and save yourself some embarrassment.
Springer
Suggest “digging deeper.” Yes the NEEM project reported the Eemian temperatures. Yes they reached bedrock. Pope’s conclusion fails from the omitted middle. See:
Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core Nature 493, 489–494 (24 January 2013) doi:10.1038/nature11789
See Figure 4: Reconstruction of the temperature and elevation history. Note the record of warming at the beginning of the Eemian interglacial followed by cooling. The presence of records through the Eemian interglacial indicates that the ice goes back at least that far.
A glimpse into the Eemian, Centre for Ice and Climate
Note: Ice Core Drilling Project NEEM Depth approx 2550 m
400/2550 = ~16% melted
I read that to mean the full core has not yet been reported on.
Hagen feel free to explain where the water came from, if not largely from the Greenland ice sheet, to raise the Eemian ocean 6-9 meters higher than the modern ocean. Absent that I’m just going to blow off your response as that of a poor sport who can’t admit a fault.
Springer
This remains a lively subject of scientific debate. See:
Greenland May Contribute Less Than Antarctica to Sea Level Rise
Your sea level rise argument fails from the fallacy of a false dilemma or exhaustive hypothesis.
Rather than “blowing off”, may I recommend that you try the scientific method. I.e., show evidence to support your/Pope’s hypothesis, and show errors in the Greenland evidence that are overcome by the other data. We have not seriously addressed either set of data nor the full range of models and their errors and uncertainties.
You simply can’t rule out the possibility that the Antarctic sheets melted just enough for that amount of rise. It would be a coincidence, but not an extremely unlikely one.
NEEM Data will help us all understand this better.
Based on having ice core data this old, we now know that all the ice on Greenland did not melt in the warming that ocurred about 130k years ago. Other ice cores from Greenland do show that some parts of Greenland did lose all their ice.
If we look at this actual data and the results of the analysis of what it means, we all might better understand what really happened and what it means for our future.
Herman Alexander Pope
Well put. I look forward to your further evaluation of all the collective data in this challenge of discovering the interactions in climate.
May I suggest including the stochastic evidence for the Hurst-Kolmogorov dynamics in your developments. See RPielke:
New Paper “Climatic Variability Over Time Scales Spanning Nine Orders of Magnitude: Connecting Milankovitch Cycles With Hurst–Kolmogorov Dynamics” By Markonis And Koutsoyiannis
Well you at least acknowledged that Eemian sea level peaked 6-9 meters higher than today. This is important in and of itself aside from being a breakthrough for you to acknowledge contrary data. No matter whether the source of the higher sea level was mostly Greenland or mostly Antarctic ice it supports the hypothesis that the melt was more extensive in the Eemian. Furthermore, a point I’d already made in this thread which you also ignored, the higher sea level creates a greater surface area for the global ocean. The ocean being very low albedo compared to land, especially where it greatly diminishes snow cover because land freezes over easily while ocean does not, causes the earth to capture more energy from the sun than it would otherwise and, as well, the greater oceanic surface area and warmer world injects more moisture into the atmosphere which falls out and builds up on the continents.
You think your argument somehow diminisheds or even extinguishes Pope’s but that diminishment is a figment of your imagination. You diminish yourself and no one else.
Springer
How much was the change in surface albedo by reduction in land area/increase in sea area, compared to the change in solar drivers?
So you interview 5 scientists and you get 5 differing answers.
We seem to have the true consensus. We don’t really know.
And there likely won’t be an El Nino this year so we can’t rely on the ‘noise’ helping to restore the warming.
“says Kevin Trenberth, climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Co.
One of the things emerging from several lines is that the IPCC has not paid enough attention to natural variability, on several time scales,” he says, especially El Niños and La Niñas, the Pacific Ocean phenomena that are not yet captured by climate models, and the longer term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) which have cycle lengths of about 60 years.”
The above should be sufficient evidence to rhrow serious doubt on the IPCC climate reports. It shows that neither the IPCC nor the modellers understand climate well enough to shut down our fossil ruel industries.
The “invincibility of ignorance” was noted long ago by St.. Augustine. But the resourcefulness of leading “climate scientisits” in maintaining that invincibilty.is nothing short amazing. Despite the fact that there’s not a single first-rate physical oceanographer, thermodynamicist or system/signal analyst among them, they’re all sure that only the momentary difficulty of obtaining “climate signal” data from the deep oceans, clouds or far reaches of the atmosphere stands in the way of universal recognition of inexorable AGW.
OBSERVATION BASED ESTIMATE OF CLIMATE SENSITIVITY.
Increase in GMST from 1960 to 2010, dT = 0.4 deg C
CO2 concentration for 1960, C1 = 317 ppm
CO2 concentration for 2010, C2 = 390 ppm
Climate sensitivity, CS = ln(2)*dT/ln(C2/C1) = ln(2)*0.4/ln(390/317)
CS = ln(2)*0.4/0.207 = 0.693*0.4/0.207 = 1.34 deg C
The observation-based estimate of climate sensitivity is 1.34 deg C for doubling of CO2.
you calculated TCS
Aye.
The Princess Bride comes to mind
http://judithcurry.com/2013/05/07/more-on-the-pause/#comment-319474
Steven
That is 50 years.
How many more years do you need?
Web
Yeah. So does the “fairy godmother” (with her “magic wand”).
Gotta love those fairy tales.
Max
ECS (Equlibrium climate sensitivity) goes from equlibrium to equilibrium.
TCR (Transient climate response) goes from equlibrium to time of CO2 doubling.
The difference ist the additional warming commitment and takes 500 years and more.
There was no equilibrium in 1960
.
Looking at the TAR (“The Scientific Basis”), what Girma calculated is quite near to ECS, and about double TCR.
Girma: “Steven, that is 50 years.
How many more years do you need?”
Mosher wants you to add those o.6°C (mentioned by Max-CH), because he thinks nothing was in the pipeline in 1960. That would make the final result 1.94°C, at least according to Mosher/Manacker/IPCC.
ECS varies by geography. Where it’s frozen a lot of the time it can go up a long way until evaporation and negative feedback from clouds halts the rise. Where the surface temperature is already capped by cloud feedback not much happens.
The characteristic pattern predicted by the above and empirically observed as well is that CO2 warming of the surface happens in inverse proportion to how much evaporative cooling happens in the same place. Everything observed makes perfect sense in light of that.
The IPCC model is here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/345.htm
It assumes: +1% CO2 per year (that is 70 years doubling), TCR 2°, ECS 3.5°, thus add warming 1.5°
Girma used (the equivalent of) a piece of the curve between year 70 and year 140 to get (the eq of) 3.25° ECS.
Mosher thinks he got (the eq of) 2° instead (yr 0 to yr 70).
Mosher is wrong.
Steven what do you think the ‘lag’ will be in a Planet that rotates on its axis and orbits its star?
I have never seen a proof that there should be anything but an annual response.
Could you please explain to me this ‘lad’?
Girma,
start here
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/blog/isaac-held/2012/04/30/27-estimating-tcr-from-recent-warming/#more-3531
Steven Mosher (about Held):
which is the part you want us to read: The primary post by Isaac Held or the comment by Nic Lewis on why it is wrong?
Alexej Buergin
Looks like not only the 2xCO2 ECS is overestimated by a factor of 2x by IPCC, but also the exponential CO2 growth rate.
This has leveled off at around 0.5% per year (NOT 1% per year).
So, instead of doubling in 70 years it would increase by 40% in 70 years, and would double in 140 years.
Big difference.
And when you compound the two exaggerations, you get a super-exaggeration.
Max
DocMartyn | May 8, 2013 at 10:08 pm |
“Steven what do you think the ‘lag’ will be in a Planet that rotates on its axis and orbits its star?
I have never seen a proof that there should be anything but an annual response.
Could you please explain to me this ‘lad’?”
I have similar concerns. Maximum and minimum seasonal insolation is followed mere weeks later by maximum and minimum temperature respectively. The lag between insolation and temperature empirically appears to be weeks not years. I attribute the disparity in warming to rocks not being able to evaporate in response to downwelling infrared. One very simple rule (ocean temperature is not directly effected by greenhouse gases) explains all the observations. Occam’s Razor favors the simpler explanation. The set of alternative explanations can fill a municipal library and still comes up wanting.
Girma
Let’s play Mosh and Webby’s “hidden in the pipeline” game, and convert your 2xCO2 TCR value of 1.34C to ECS.
IPCC tells us in AR4 that there were 0.6C added warming “hidden in the pipeline” that we would eventually feel over the next 100 years even if all human GHG emissions stopped in 2000.
Let’s assume that 80% (or 0.48C) of this resulted from added GHG concentrations occurring after 1960.
So your estimate becomes 1.34C + 0.48C or 1.82C
This is almost exactly the same average figure obtained by all the new studies (1.8C+/-0.6C).
Voilà!
Max
It looks to me that CO2-concentration has gone up about 0.25% per year for the last 150 years.
If that is the only reason for the warming (as Girma assumes), the heat in the pipeline in 1960 would be the same as in 2010.
Manacker, Do you really trust the incompetent Girma? I suppose you would also trust him to do your taxes?
Why not trust instead what DocMartyn has done? He is clearly a smart cookie, working to find cures for various human illnesses, and using good scientific techniques (worthy of your hero Feynman, no doubt).
I think DocMartyn did a good job with this. If you add 1.15 degrees to his 1.2 degrees, we get 2.35 degrees of warming (Doc estimated this as 2.4), and then if we add the extra 0.6 degrees that Manacker demands that we add to the pipeline, we get 2.95 C for a doubling of CO2.
This is pretty close to the 3 C for doubling that I get, and that seems to be the mean value of all climate studies.
Manacker, I hope this clears things up for you, as you struggle to find credible people to listen to,
I agree with Web’s 3C below. Now that the heat is going into the deep oceans, this will manifest itself as a 0.1 C rise in the deep oceans in 1,000 years. We must act now!!
At about 280 ppm the pre industrial CO2 concentration was in equilibrium; so that seemed (to DocMartyn) a good starting point for calculations.
Unfortunately the temperature varied a lot, even though the CO2 did not. Do you choose the medieval warm period or the Little Ice Age?
It only proofs that CO2 was not the important driver some people think it is.
Seems to me the good Doc has sold himself the dummy.
Max
What we are concerned is what would be the warming for this century. For that the transient climate sensitivity apply.
For that, a more useful measure is the transient climate response (TCR), the temperature you reach after doubling CO₂ gradually over 70 years. Unlike the equilibrium response, the transient one can be observed directly; there is much less controversy about it. Most estimates put the TCR at about 1.5°C, with a range of 1-2°C. Isaac Held of America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently calculated his “personal best estimate” for the TCR: 1.4°C, reflecting the new estimates for aerosols and natural variability.
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions
Girma: The 70 years for doubling are just a result of the IPCC assuming a growth of CO2 concentration of 1% per year, which, of course, leads to a linear temperature vs time plot.
Web, I am happy with you quoting me, but when you throw in this ‘missing’ heat crap, could you make sure that people know that this is your invention and not anything I have either calculated or endorsed.
As I have stated, an update of the data, over a longer timescale gives 1.71 degrees for a doubling of CO2.
DocMartyn
please pardon me for blaming WebHubbi’s nonsense on you.
DocMartyn
… but when I see you writing [CO2]=280ppm 1940 I set a question mark.
Webby
No struggle on my part.
I’ve just gone through seven independent recent studies (most of which are at least partly observation-based), which conclude on average that the 2xCO2 ECS is around half of the model predictions cited in AR4 by IPCC.
These (not Girma’s estimate) lead me to believe that IPCC (and Hansen et al.) overestimated 2xCO2ECS by around 2X. [Hansen’s failed 1988 projection, which were based on the same exaggerated ECS estimate, show the same 2X exaggeration compared to the actual warming.]
So much for that.
Now to Girma.
He estimated 1.3C for 2xCO2 based on temperature trend from 1960 to today.
He was criticized (by Mosh and you, I believe) that this was only the “transient climate response” of 2xCO2, which did not include the warming still “hidden in the pipeline” waiting to reach “equilibrium”.
I added in the IPCC estimate of 0.6C “in the pipeline” (which was presumably estimated by IPCC using the higher ECS estimate of 3.2C), and assumed that 80% of this warming in the pipeline occurred after Girma’s 1960 cutoff point = 0.48C.
Adding this to Girma’s TCR I got around 1.8C (coincidentally around the same number as all those seven recent independent studies).
Hope this has cleared up your apparent confusion.
Max
DocMartyn
Thanks for clearing this up.
Max
Max.
Very clear.
There are multiple different ways of estimating climate sensitivity with different outcomes and uncertainties associated.
You choose one particular method, and disregard evidence from others.
You make no effort to acknowledge the uncertainties with the method you prefer.
Crystal. Clear.
Girma
I’m not going to get into a big argument with you on the “hidden in the pipeline” premise.
To me, the concept of our “climate” ever reaching “equilibrium” seems foreign to the way it actually works.
The idea that heat is “hidden in the pipeline” for decades or even a century seems a bit like voodoo science.
The logic used by Hansen et al. to arrive at this estimate is circular:
– My models tell me it should have warmed by X degrees since 1880
– The thermometers tell me it only warmed by X/2 degrees
– Therefore the difference = X/2 is still “hidden in the pipeline”
And, in addition, his arithmetic was sloppy.
And the whole concept is not supported by any empirical evidence.
But, having said all that, you will never get a true “believer’s” attention if you pooh-pooh the “hidden in the pipeline” concept – it has become something like the “holy grail”.
The good news is that IPCC has, in effect told us its impact: if all GHG emissions had stopped in 2000, IPCC estimates that 0.6C warming would still occur over the next century as the “hidden heat” comes out of the “pipeline”. IOW this is the amount of warming that must be added to any observed transient climate response to arrive at an estimate for ECS, which could be accepted by a true “believer”.
Max
VTG
You are mistaken when you write:
I have cited the seven recent studies on 2xCO2 ECS, which arrive, on average at a value of around 1.8C with ranges of +/- 0.6C, or around one-half the value predicted by the models cited by IPCC in AR4 WG1 Ch.8 (3.2C+/-0.7C).
If you look at these studies, you will see that, while several of them use actual observations as opposed to simply model simulations, they use different ways of estimating ECS. [So I do not “choose one particular method”, as you write].
The uncertainties are cited by the authors. I simply averaged their ranges. And there is no “method that I prefer”.
So you are wrong on all points.
Max
Max,
you do indeed, as usual, continue to ignore studies whose results you don’t like. Indeed entire methodologies.
Knutti & Hegerl
Enjoy the echo chamber
Hansen first discussed unrealized warming in a paper written in 1985:
Hansen, J., G. Russell, A. Lacis, I. Fung, D Rind, and P. Stone, 1985: Climate response times: Dependence on climate sensitivity and ocean mixing. Science, 229, 857-859, doi:10.1126/science.229.4716.857.
…The response times are particularly sensitive to (i) the amount that the climate response is amplified by feedbacks and (ii) the representation of ocean mixing. If equilibrium sensitivity is 3C or greater for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration, then most of the expected warming attributable to trace gases added to the atmosphere by man probably has not yet occurred. This yet to be realized warming… – James Hansen, 1985
The existence of unrealized warming complicates the CO2 and trace gas issue… – James Hansen, 1985
Scratch that, now he’s discussing it in 1983.
VTG
Seems to me like you are the one who is ignoring SEVEN new independent studies, all published since 2011 and all showing a 2xCO2 ECS of around half the previously estimated value, using different methods of analysis.
But you gleefully cherry pick one from 2008 that suits your taste.
This study concludes
– that “current models” arrive at a range of “2.1–4.4 °C”,
– “that uncertainties in forcing and response made it impossible to use observed global temperature changes during that period to constrain S more tightly than the range explored by climate models (1.5–4.5 °C at the time)” [this is exactly the point now contradicted by the more recent studies, which constrain ECS to the 1.2–2.4 °C range based on “observed global temperature changes”],
– that paleo-climate reconstructions show “the relationship between temperature over the past 420 million years supports sensitivities that are larger than 1.5 °C, but the upper tail is poorly constrained”, “most studies find a lower 5% limit between 1 and 2 °C” and “studies that use information
in a relatively complete manner generally find a most likely value between 2 and 3.5 °C and that there is no credible line of evidence that yields very high or very low climate sensitivity as a best estimate.”
From this the authors suggest that the range of 1.5–4.5 °C seems to be realistic, with the remainder of the paper discussing effects and impacts.
With the exception of the estimates based on “observed global temperature changes” (which has been superseded by the more recent studies I cited), I see nothing very exciting here: models suggest one range for ECS, paleo data another and now actual physical observations a third.
Max
Max
JCH
According to the quotation you cited, Hansen wrote (in 1985 or 1983):
That’s the circular logic, JCH (starting with the little BIG word, “IF”)..
Max
Your claim has been he dreamed up the pipeline recently, and your claim is wrong.
Manacker and others,
I carefully follow James Hansen’s recommendations for how to combine a Ocean Heat Content (OHC) Model and Proportional Warming (PW) in this sequence of analyses. Let me lay it out for you so that you can follow a linear narrative. Note that these are all based on observational data, used correctly, in contrast to the references you supply.
1. This is how to analyze log sensitivity of CO2 to warming:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/stochastic-analysis-of-log-sensitivity.html
2. This explains how to determine heat uptake by the oceans:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
3. This puts together the log sensitivity and OHC models into a PW model that explains SST, Land, and the combined global temperature anomaly:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/05/proportional-landsea-global-warming.html
I feel blessed to have the mathematical skills to synthesize from the research of Hansen and others; and fortunate to be able to present a concise representation of what his happening in a world where a 3C sensitivity to doubling of CO2 is taking place.
To be able to help out the citizens of other countries such as Switzerland and Australia, who come to this American blog out of desperation, is quite satisfying.
I truly hope this helps you out of your confusion Manacker and gives you a dose of reality. This is the least I can do.
Manacker: concerning TAR, The Scientific Basis
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/345.htm
You are perfectly right that +1% per year CO2 and 3.5° ECS is way off.
So lets us just look at it as a model where the numbers could and should be corrected (to about half), but the shape of the curves remains the same
.
It still shows that “the heat in the pipeline” does not make a difference. It is there at the beginning (look at year 70) and the end (look at year 140). The temperatur difference from 70 to 140 is more or less the same as from 170 to 240 or from 570 to 640.
So we do not have to add 0.6°C to Girma’s numbers, even though there is no E (from ECS) at the beginning or at the end.
Webby
Your superior mathematical skills only go to show that if you start with a bogus hypothesis and torture the data and mathematics long enough, you can end up with the answer you knew was right from the get-go.
Fuggidaboudit, Webby.
Hansen’s notion of a high 2xCO2 ECS is being shown to be incorrect by the more recent studies based on the data on the ground.
Read them (all seven of them).
Then take a deep breath, and read them again.
Then clear all the clutter from your mind, and read them once again.
You’ll feel better afterward.
Max
Alexej Buergin
You are correct.
The “missing heat” remains at large.
As a matter of fact, it is so well hidden that it cannot be found.
And, even if it really were there (as a 0.001C warming of the entire deep ocean) we will never see it again.
It defies all rules of logic that this heat is going to miraculously rise up out of “hiding” and fry us all.
So it will always remain “missing”.
Max
JCH
Nowhere have I said that Hansen dreamed up the “hidden in the pipeline” story recently, as you suggest.
It’s been his “ace in the hole” for some time (in case warming would be much less than his models predicted – as it turned out).
He formalized this postulation in a June 3, 2005 paper in Science co-authored by several others, entitled “Earth’s Energy Imbalance: Confirmation and Implications”.
It’s available on-line, if you are interested.
Max
The “missing heat” and the “heat in the pipeline” are basically two completely different things.
This is Hansen’s prediction from 1981 along with observational data based on log sensitivity of T to CO2 overlaid:
http://imageshack.us/a/img802/3918/hansen1981.gif
J. Hansen, D. Johnson, A. Lacis, S. Lebedeff, P. Lee, D. Rind, and G. Russell, “Climate impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide,” Science, 1981, V.2l3, pp. 957–966.
The overlay is equivalent to land-only data which doesn’t have a heat sink, The banded region is the range assumed for realistic heat content absorbed by the ocean. That also works well.
Hansen’s more recent high sensitivity of around 4C is likely too high based on observational data. He ascribes this discrepancy to aerosols compensating the higher value to a value that is around 3C for doubling of CO2 seen in observational data.
The bottomline is that if Hansen had stuck to his 3C number that he had from 1981, the observational data would still be on track.
Does everyone understand this?
Hi Judy – I agree he did a very good article. Here is my complete reply to him
Hi David
Here is my reply to your question
“What do you think of Trenberth’s recent paper on ocean warming (attached)?”
Balmaseda et al, Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis ofglobal ocean heat content, GRL
They obtain an ocean warming, for 2000-2009, of 1.19 W/m2.
Does that change any of your concerns about models overestimating net
radiative forcing, such as you wrote in Physics Today in 2007 (also
attached)?”
My Answer
1. The recognition that ocean heat content changes can be used to diagnose the global radiative imbalance in Watts per meter squared, that I discussed in my paper
Pielke Sr., R.A., 2003: Heat storage within the Earth system. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 84, 331-335. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/files/2009/10/r-247.pdf
is applied in the Balmaseda et al 2013 paper. This, as I reported in my Physics Today article, is the much more robust approach to assess global warming and cooling, than using the global annual average surface temperature trend.
The Balmaseda et al paper is a step forward in understanding the changes of heat content.
2. However, there are substantive, unanswered questions that their paper introduces.
(i) First, they report that
“In the last decade, about 30% of the warming has occurred below 700 m.”
This change in heat content is a marked difference from what they report for the earlier years as illustrated in their Figure 1. They can only speculate on how this could have occurred; i.e. they write [boldfaced highlight added]
“….that changes in the atmospheric circulation are instrumental for the penetration of the warming into the ocean, although the mechanisms at work are still to be established. One possibility suggested by Lee and McPhaden [2008], is related to the modified subduction pathways in response to changes in the subtropical gyres resulting from changes of the trade winds in the tropics (Figure S04), but whether as low frequency variability or a longer term trend remains an open question. The 2000–2006 warming trend is likely associated with the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) in both experiments (see BMW13).”
Until we understand how this fundamental shift in the climate system occurred (and if this change in vertical heat transfer really happened, and is not just due to the different areal coverage and data quality in the earlier years), however, we have a large gap in our understanding of the climate system.
(ii) Moreover, how could this heat be transferred to depths below 700m without being been seen in the upper 700m of the ocean? [and this is a question also on the transfer of heat to between 300m and 700m without being seen in the upper 300m].
This absence of observable heat transfer through the upper 300m of the ocean is an issue that must be resolved.
3. There are also major implications for their findings even if they are robust.
(i) First, they report on a rate of heating that reads
the latest decade being significantly higher (1.19 ± 0.11 W m-2).
While, this is larger than found in the past, it is still less than the best estimate of the global average radiative forcing reported in the IPCC 2007 report (1.6 ± 0.6 to 2.4 W m-2 total net anthropogenic plus 0.12 ± 0.06 to 0.30 W m-2 from solar irradiance changes).
Since their reported diagnosed radiative imbalance for the last decade is 1.19 ± 0.11 W m-2 – which includes both the radiative forcings and all of the feedbacks (including from water vapor), this indicates that either the IPCC best estimate of the total radiative forcings by the IPCC is in error, and/or the radiative feedbacks in the climate system are a net negative.
(ii) Another very significant conclusion of their study, if it is correct, is that when they report that
“about 30% of the warming has occurred below 700 m.”
[and from their Figure 1, the percentage below 300m since 2003 is clearly well above 50%!]
this means that this heat is not being sampled by the global average surface temperature trend.
Since that metric is being used as the icon to report to policymakers on climate change (i.e. paraphrasing from other sources “we need to remain below a +2C change”), it illustrates a defect in using the two dimensional field of surface temperature to diagnose global warming.
I discuss this in my post
Torpedoing Of The Use Of The Global Average Surface Temperature Trend As The Diagnostic For Global Warming. http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/torpedoing-of-the-use-of-the-global-average-surface-temperature-trend-as-the-diagnostic-for-global-warming/
(iii) Moreover, they write,
“La Niña events and negative PDO events could cause a hiatus in warming of the top 300 m while sequestering heat at deeper layers.”
If this is a real effect, than this is a muting of the radiative effect as this deep layer warming is unlikely to be reemitted back into the atmosphere in short time periods in large amounts (of Joules) as it would diffuse horizontally and vertically, at depth, in the ocean.
(iv) Also, the latest real world measurement of upper ocean heat content; [see the attachment in my e-mail from http://oceans.pmel.noaa.gov/%5D continues to show, little if any significant recent warming.
(v) Finally, with respect to the change in slope, this occurred when the ARGO network achieved world-wide coverage. This raises the suspicion that it is the date quality and coverage that remains more of an issue before 2003 than concluded in Balmaseda et al paper when they excluded the ARGO data.
Please let me know if you have any follow up questions. Thank you for the opportunity to comment.
Best Regards
Roger Sr.
(ii) Moreover, how could this heat be transferred to depths below 700m without being been seen in the upper 700m of the ocean?
Most certainly this, “is the issue that must be resolved.” There could be a Nobel to the scientist who can explain the Trenberthian effect.
Ooops… I mean, “is an issue…”
The surface is cooler because of upwelling and mixing. This is the essence of ENSO and PDO. The cool modes are cool because cold water upwells from the depths. It shows up regionally rather than as global averages.
Onward and upward to Stockholm.
Regionally? Better cancel your reservations. Upwelling and mixing what brings nutrient-rich cold water to the surface as waters shallow.
It shows up in regions of the earth known as the central and northern Pacific. You remain as incoherent as usual. Reservations? Waters shallow? Try talking English and in sentences – as it is your credibility is fading rapidly.
“Shallow” when used as a verb means to get less deep. Hopefully your Swedish is better is better than either your English or your science.
Cold water cannot stay on the top of warm water. Research into the dynamics of swirling vortices show that.
Nobody was looking for it in the upper 700 meters of the ocean. Josh Willis told Pielke that it might be possible to find it in the ARGO data, but that I have read nobody is doing that work.
Emphasis mine:
Hi Roger,
The way I would answer this is that we can probably diagnose the amount of warming between 700 and 2000 m in the Argo data for the past 5 to 7 years. Using the data to determine the cause of this, however, can be tricky. For example, if an isotherm at 1000 m is depressed in one region by 10 meters, is this caused by a simple downward advection of the isopycnal, or is it due to vertical or horizontal mixing with a nearby warm water mass?
Questions like this can be difficult to answer with the Argo data. Nevertheless, with some basic knowledge of the local oceanographic conditions and use of additional data, like salinity and horizontal advection, it might be possible to tease apart the causes of this temperature change. There are some efforts to do this for the abyssal warming signal published by Purkey & Johnson, by asking the question: how big of a reduction in bottom water formation would be needed to account for the observed warming of the abyssal waters? I’m not sure if that work is published yet, however.
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Josh
Thanks JCH for that quote.
Indeed some of the discrepancies are at the 10% error level. I recall that DocMartyn was making a big deal of a 10% error via comments on this blog, and he also commented to RealClimate, where I responded.
So the issue is the risk one of blowing your wad over a discrepancy that could be in the noise or could be a systemic measurement error. Or it could be explainable as a natural behavior as per Josh Willis .
Reading what i said, I need to change it. Nobody was looking for the heat passing through 0-700 meters in the ARGO data. Willis is speculating it could be teased out of the data.
That is shows up in the ARGO data 700 to 2000 meters is adequate proof for most, but without the work to prove it passed through, there is I guess a possibility it was always down there. I would think it a very slight possibility.
I doubt anybody is doing that work.
Odd indeed – shoaling is the term you are thinking. To shallow is a term never used in English. Don’t know about Swedish at all. You call what you do science aye?
shal·low
/ˈSHalō/
Adjective
Of little depth.
Noun
An area of the sea, a lake, or a river where the water is not very deep.
Verb
(of the sea, a lake, or a river) Become less deep over time or in a particular place.
Synonyms
adjective. superficial – shoal – perfunctory – skin-deep – cursory
noun. shoal – hurst – ford
verb. shoal
“Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
“If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies… It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.”
Albert Einstein
To shallow – meaning to make or become shallow – is a ridiculous usage.
Not even Einstein can purse out of a pig’s ear shallow man. As the creeks shallow out and their courses have shallowed to pools of memories of past vigor with deadly falls that have now shallowed like lazy fools, I called out the global warming alarmists to ‘shallow down dudes’ — as if they’d shallow up over their babbling long enough to learn any noun can be verbed, as too many adjectives (enough so that poets quickly shallow the pool of words that can’t) — but, perhaps thoughts traveling at Godspeed can reach minds without ears to shallow our relentless plummet into the abyss.
Web, not only did the ‘Real Climate Scientists’ block my contributions, you now push a answer to which I was not allowed to reply to.
It is a despicable intellectual ‘trick’ to pass of the major result of a published figures as a result of ‘noise’.
you know, and I know, that this
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/deepoceanJPEG_zpsc6585990.jpg
shows a great degree of heating at 300-700m than from 0-300m, even though the heat source is directed toward the 0-300m level.
This is Thermodynamically impossible. This was not a question of noise, it was a question of lies, which is why Gavin sanitized the thread.
Your conspiring with these charlatans speaks poorly of your character. .
AGW-believers have done more to shallow the pool of good will than anything skeptics could do.
The surface is cooler because of upwelling and mixing. This is the essence of ENSO and PDO. The cool modes are cool because cold water upwells from the depths. It shows up regionally rather than as global averages.
Water at the surface is cooler because of mixing with cold subsurface water. Overall the heat is there because oceans are expanding – and it is measured.
All the rest seems to empty and quite clumsy verbiage. On the verge of meaning but never quite getting there.
You have defined Trenberthian AGW: empty.
This rpielke guy is close to winning a cigar, but I thought I could clear things up a bit.
The heat uptake by the ocean is close to what one would predict by solving an uncertainty-quantified heat equation:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
The overall temperature increase is then explained by a proportional warming. This takes into account the excess heat sinking into the ocean and thus not contributing to a rise in measurable ocean surface temperatures. The land however heats up according to the thermal forcing, thus one finds a proportional warming model:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/05/proportional-landsea-global-warming.html
This is all conventional physics, which supports the current view but is simplified as a result of taking a macro view of the system.
I hope this helps your understanding, rpielke. This is nothing out of the ordinary from what Hansen was saying in the early 1980’s.
I’m not sure how this is relevant to pielke’s point. If the measured ocean warming amounts to 1.19 W/m2 and this is less than the IPCC estimated direct forcings, then one or both of these numbers must be wrong unless the net feedback is rather strongly negative. The data actually shows a deceleration of ocean warming in the last few years as greenhouse forcing has continued to grow, adding further to the puzzle. What’s your explanation for this problem?
The 1.19 W/m^2 doesn’t go into a significant temperature increase, but the 1 W/m^2 or so that doesn’t penetrate into the ocean does.
Think man, think. And if that doesn’t help, read Hansen’s papers from the early 1980’s.
Oh for God’s sake – the dweeb continues to rabbit on about fitting a curve to ocean heat data which then explains ocean heat – while losing all the variability. It is not only horrendously circular – but based a concept of heat diffusing from the atmosphere to the oceans with no consideration for TSI or albedo at all. Completely unphysical and so utterly unable to claim any insights into physical processes at all. Nonsense of the highest order and yet he continues to prattle and preen.
The real heat content is –
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/vonSchuckmannampLTroan2011-fig5PG_zpsee63b772.jpg.html?sort=3&o=17
It is fully accounted for by changes in TOA radiant flux.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=95
Chief, Can you at least try to be coherent?
Dweeb – coherency is not something you could recognise if you hit you over the head. The description of your fantasy physics is quite coherent to anyone with half a brain.
The data speaks for itself to anyone who has the least competence. That excuses you. That you continue to prattle and preen I find absurd and incredible but there it is.
Chief, You make even less sense than your Australian buddy Girma.
You make less sense than a gerbil – that’s what I am saying. Accept your oddness, the preening, the prattling and that your physics are fantasies and we will get along just fine.
You can start with the fantasy physics. Give up on diffusion of heat from the atmosphere to the oceans because it is just total dweebness.
Web
I’d agree with your observation that “this rpielke guy is close to winning a cigar”
Here are my “take homes”
(i) the stated rate of forcing including feedbacks is much lower than previous IPCC estimates (AR4)
(ii) the study states that “30% of the warming occurred below 700 m”, yet the data cited show that “well above 50%” has occurred below 700 m since 2003.
(iii) IF the heat really went into the deep ocean at the same time that there was no warming of the upper 300 m, then this heat is likely to remain there, “diffusing horizontally and vertically, at depth, in the ocean”. This is good news, since it means it is gone and will not likely ever come back out to haunt us at a later date as added surface warming.
(iv) observations show that the upper ocean is not warming significantly (see (ii) and (iii) above)
(v) data prior to ARGO, when the most rapid warming is believed to have occurred, is questionable.
Let’s give ‘im that cigar, Webby.
Max
I have a question. If Climate scientists are finding they have to resort to moving the missing heat to the deep ocean to justify their models’ predictions, why do they stop at the deep ocean? Why not simply move it to the centre of the Earth and get it over and done with in one go?
Peter Lang
You ask why modelers have not picked the center of the Earth for locating the “missing heat”.
How about outer space? (as in, “hasta la vista, baby!”)
Max
Manacker, You clearly do not have any intuition as to how diffusion of heat into the deep layers of the oceans works. That is understandable as real engineers and scientists usually like to derive the math for themselves to get that level of intuition (and that is how I learned things in school and on the job),
So, Manacker, if you would like to develop this intuition for yourself, I suggest that you work through my derivation that you will find on my blog:
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
Take a look at the graphs that I fit to, which are derived based on excess forcing.
Hope this helps with your limited knowledge of climate science, Manacker. It is never too late to try to improve your understanding.
Cheers.
Dweeby – you remain utterly clueless, preening and prattling. Diffusion to the deep ocean from the atmosphere? Give it up. The ocean is heated by the sun and is mixed turbulently and by convection. Diffusion has very little to do with it – and relabelling it ‘effective diffusion’ is just compounding the nonsense.
Chief, Hope this extended narrative that I wrote in another subthread helps you out:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/05/07/more-on-the-pause/#comment-319917
As this is an academic blog, you should be aware that educators are sensitive to students who have a tough time learning science. When students get flummoxed over some aspect of a scientific topic, it is not uncommon to see them lash out with misplaced anger.
Patience may be a virtue. Let’s see how this works.
BTW, I can be as condescending as the best of you.
More preening and prattling dweeb?
The sun heats the oceans – which heat the atmosphere – which lose energy to space. You simplistic mish mash of fantasy physics – which we have been through in great detail – is a black box. It has no physical reality – therefore does not yield insights into process as they occur in the real world. In the case of ocean heat content it takes data and very roughly fits a curve to it using fantasy physics – losing information in a hugely circular and misplaced argument. It is not merely pointless but ultimately very misleading if you believe the fantasy physics in a way that James Hansen did not back in the 1980’s. For Hansen it was a black box model – for you it is just utter delusion.
Chief can’t admit that the ocean is gaining temperature in exactly the way that is predicted by solving the heat equation for a thermal forcing function applied to the ocean surface.
Highly confused and agitated, he calls such scientific analysis “preening and prattling” and starts sounding like his Oz buddy Mr. “fantasy physics” Myrhh.
Thanks for your excellent comment, especially whether global mean surface temperature is a good metrics of global warming. May be as we average surface temperature all over the world, we should also average along the depth of the oceans to arrive at the true global mean temperature, instead of global mean Surface temperature.
> May be as we average surface temperature all over the world, we should also average along the depth of the oceans to arrive at the true global mean temperature, instead of global mean Surface temperature.
I do not usually think that the average surface temperature exists, but when I do, I think like no true Scotsman would.
The IPCC has total net radiative forcing of 2.28 W/m2 in 2012 (AR5 RCP 6.0 scenario).
On top of that, we are supposed to be seeing 1.7 W/m2 of feedback forcing according to the water vapor, cloud, lapse rate feedbacks etc per the 0.7C temperature increase we have experienced.
They should be able to explain where 4.0 W/m2 is going.
Argo floats are only measuring 0.46 W/m2 going into the 0-2000 metre ocean and 0.03 W/m2 is going into atmosphere, land, and ice-melt (Church 2011).
Climate models might have 0.83 W/m2 of additional OLR occuring right now (Church 2011).
They are not talking about the whole picture since much of it is missing
2.28 + 1.7 – 0.49 – 0.83 = 2.67 W/m2 not explained.
The feedback doesn’t add to the forcing in W/m2, it adds to the response in deg C.
One feedback does influence the forcing, the Planck feedback reduces the forcing. Therefore the expected remaining forcing is around 1 W/m^2.
The number to check is 3.6 W/m^2 which explains land warming nicely. If about half of this gets absorbed into the ocean depths, it explains ocean above surface as well.
Then you take proportion of land and sea, and it explains the overall global rise.
The OHC may be short by at most 0.2 W/m2 but not 2.67.
What kind of strawman is w.Illis setting up?
JimD, “The feedback doesn’t add to the forcing in W/m2, it adds to the response in deg C.”
Six of on half dozen of the other. C anomaly on the other hand has to be used cautiously for either feed back or forcing. It is better to stick with Wm-2 or Joules.
btw, that is Webster tends to lose touch with reality. The warming of the NH land is amplified both by absolute temperature, fewer Wm-2 required per degree which the the polar amplification and also the lower air density of the air at the average land altitude,. To compare apples with apples, the absolute temperature should be used and adjusted for altitude before being compared to forcing.
As it is Webster has ~15% of the global controlling the destiny of the remaining 85%. That is also the issue with “which surface”. Using the atmospheric boundary layer, ~5000 meters, produces different results than using the surface at sea level.
Cappy Dick wants to include polar amplification, yet he doesn’t want to see the effects of the increase in temperature.
Quantify the error bars, otherwise you have nothing. The anomalies were relative and not absolute so you have nothing there either.
Notice how I am adding to the knowledgebase while Cappy is subtracting, or at least trying to..
Webster said,
“Cappy Dick wants to include polar amplification, yet he doesn’t want to see the effects of the increase in temperature.”
I don’t particularly want anything but a better understanding of what is happening and less smoke blown up my butt.
Polar amplification works both ways Webster, through natural and anthropogenic “forcing”. In 1989/90 there was a step change in surface temperature in Scandinavia. If you look at the Tmin for Iceland and others in close proximity to the north Atlantic, there was a relatively flat temperature trend from ~1930 to ~1990.; In ~1990, according to the Iceland Tmin via BEST, the temperature broke past the 0C barrier. The warming North Atlantic temperatures were amplified by increased Arctic sea ice melt and the increase in water vapor that would be associated with increased snow/ice melt. That along with albedo change is most of the “Polar” amplification.
During that warming and snow/ice melt period, the magnitude of NH SSW events was reduced. A decade later, the SSW magnitude increased and the regional temperatures “paused” and in many areas started a decline. That is not a part of the expected polar amplification.
Interestingly, there is not a very good correlation between individual station warming and CO2 in that region. There is a much better correlation between north Atlantic temperatures, that nasty AMO, and NH land temperatures.
You keep saying that most of the energy is going into the oceans but to the land warming, but it looks like it is happening the other way around.
I think there is a paper fresh of the presses on this interesting situation that may be the subject of a future post :)
captd, the direct no-feedback response and the feedback are both in units of temperature. The forcing only goes back to zero when the equilibrium response is completed with a temperature rise.
Like the captain of the SS Minnow, you are hopelessly lost at sea.
There is a difference between the extensive physical measure known as heat and the intensive measure known as temperature. As Jim D helpfully pointed out, when a steady state is eventually reached, much more than 90% of the heat will have cumulatively gone into the ocean. However during the transient phase, we get to keep track of the temperature as a non-cumulative reference.
So, because of the way temperature is defined, the relatively small heat capacity of the land suggests that measure is sucking all the heat. A wrongly-intuited appearance can be deceiving.
I understand that physics is sometimes confusing. We are here to help.
Kevin Trenberth
…the Pacific Ocean phenomena that are not yet captured by climate models
Thanks Kevin. We skeptics now have been vindicated.
My prediction does a better job than the climate models.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/plot/gistemp/compress:12/offset:-0.08/detrend:0.04/plot/hadcrut4gl/compress:12/offset:-0.03/detrend:0.02/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:732/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/offset:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/offset:-0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.000001/offset:2/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.003/offset:-1.03/detrend:-0.22/from:1982/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:252/offset:0.015/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:732/offset:0.015/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.003/offset:-1.03/detrend:-0.22/from:1982
A lot of climate discussion participants get upset when I say this, but I’ve always maintained that Trenberth has a healthy & refreshing appreciation for nature, including natural climate variability.
Research Update:
I’ve cracked the code of the 107 to 108 year solar cycle. Here’s a raw graphical glimpse:
http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/5691/911k.gif
Details will have to wait until I have time (weeks to months). For now I suggest just noting well that the phase relations reversed during the last “pause” (~1945-1975). There’s quite a lot more to the story. The temporal framework follows some rather simple rules that conventional methods (including neural networks) would totally overlook.
More details in the weeks & months ahead.
This is obviously some sort of mind-control experiment gone awry.
Data:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/greenwch/sunspot_area.txt
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/greenwch/sunspot_area_north.txt
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/greenwch/sunspot_area_south.txt
The rules governing the phase reversals are simple and can be isolated in a single sitting.
Here’s a reminder about the relationship of ~11 year activity cycles & volatility cycles:
http://img201.imageshack.us/img201/4995/sunspotarea.png
The mainstream solar asymmetry literature ignores that very simple relationship and as a result runs off the rails in a mess of unresolved disputes. (This is as bad as the heavy-tailed vs. light-tailed probability modeling issues that catastrophically derailed economic forecasts despite clear warnings from folks with superior awareness.)
9 year heliographic North minus South solar asymmetry cycles are reported in the mainstream solar literature, but the simple rules governing the phase reversals on the 9 year framework have not yet been published.
For those who don’t see where this is going, another reminder: Jean Dickey’s 4.5 year LF (low frequency) ENSO cycle.
Policy vanguards — Caution:
Be soberly wary soliciting advice on multidecadal climate cycles from anyone who can’t isolate these patterns, especially if they can’t do it with the generous hints given.
___
As rare luxuries (time & resources) permit I will illustrate further in the weeks & months ahead.
http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/8272/sjev911.png
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/scd_sst_q.png
The concert of decadal solar heliographic N+S, |N-S|, & N-S (where N = north & S = south) is coherent with multidecadal timescale July & August ENSO and year-round North Pacific Index (NPI).
Krank as performance art. Combination of Ralph Steadman and Mondrian.
http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/2836/volcano911.png (volcanic indices in italics; Cy = Chandler wobble y phase; SOST = southern ocean surface temperature; ISW = integral of solar wind)
http://img267.imageshack.us/img267/8476/rrankcmz.png
Explains figure 2 changepoints:
Trenberth, K.E.; & Stepaniak, D.P. (2001). Indices of El Nino evolution.
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/staff/trenbert/trenberth.papers/i1520-0442-014-08-1697.pdf
All on 6.4-9-11 timing framework. I bet Jean Dickey of NASA JPL has known all along.
Maybe I’m being a nudnik, but “no serious scientist thinks climate sensitivity could be much lower than 2 degrees Celsius” is actually quite an admission. That means that loads of serious scientists think it might be somewhat lower. Which was what Judith Curry said might happen in the future, and exactly the kind of thing Annan and such were suggesting.
Isn’t a sensitivity slightly less than two degrees Celsius a whole lot better than the 3 degrees the IPCC thought was most likely? Obviously the author doesn’t want to say that anyone is changing his mind, but he is anyhow.
miker613
Your analysis of Pierrehumbert’s statement that “no serious scientist thinks climate sensitivity could be much lower than 2 degrees Celsius” is actually spot on, on closer inspection.
I’m afraid I took it much too literally up-thread, without taking a closer look at the carefully included “much lower” escape clause, as you have done.
Taking this into account, the statement is not at all contradictory to the results of the may recent studies, which show an average (at least partly observation-based) estimate for 2xCO2 ECS of 1.8C+/-0.6C.
This is not “much lower” than 2C (but around half of the previous model-derived estimate of 3.2C cited by IPCC in AR4.
Max
Alas, catastrophe lack.
====
It will go like this
‘“no serious scientist thinks climate sensitivity could be much lower than 2 degrees Celsius”
err, turns out that its 1.9
See, thats not much lower
err turns out that its 1.6
see, thats not much lower
err turns out its 1.5
see Ar4, we did not exclude this possibility.
You missed your calling Mosher; Presidential Speech Writer
Thank you Doc, and in closing I would l like to say that no serious scientist thinks climate sensitivity could be much higher than 2C.
No true commenter
Would ever consider
That the IPCC consists
Of only true scientists.
Willard
Is this the stuff you want re Judy’s comments abot taking flak over the pause?
http://judithcurry.com/2013/05/07/more-on-the-pause/#comment-319659
ytonyb
The PDO is important to understanding how the warmer water only seems to appear below 700 m and not in the upper level first. Enhanced upwelling of colder water in regions such as the east Pacific, and its faster westward spread in the PDO cold phase, cool the upper 700 m. This seems to cancel out any heating effect in that layer. Ocean dynamics cools that layer, and the cooling would have been clearer without the background general warming going on.
Recall all the flack I took last year for talking about the ‘pause’?
It appears I owe Dr. Curry an apology.
If the fairly balanced, nuanced, somewhate detailed, reasonably complete analyses by David Appell were exactly what Dr. Curry meant lately, then I sorely misjudged her points.
I was wrong to disagree with our host, if Dr. Curry meant what David Appell says so clearly in his conclusion, “Uncertainty from the statistics, from climate inertia, and from climate noise all show that 15 years is simply too short of a time period when making judgments about climate.. So the lesson of the mathematics is: 15 years is simply too short of a time interval from which to draw statistically valid conclusions, which are heavily influenced by “end point” effects. This is why most climate scientists prefer to draw their conclusions from 30 years’ worth of data or more.”
If Dr. Curry really means when she says a pause on a statistically significant period merely means a slowing of the climb in global surface temperatures (replaced by climb in ice and deep ocean temperatures, or restructuring of currents in air and water, or taken up by chemical changes, or otherwise rerouted in the atmospheric energy budget as the drive to overcome the GHE barrier to outgoing surface radiation climbs), or even that there is a slightly lower than one in six chance of an actual 30-year or longer cooling trend on GMT, as happens in about a third of all GCMs.. then I was wrong, and am glad to say so.
Bart,
I’m not sure but I think that 1988 to 1998 is less than 15 years. People in the CAGW camp or even the AGW camp seemed to be convinced from the very start and it only took a few years of data. While many on the other side were saying things like: we should pay more attention to the ocean cycles and clouds, that the heat could go into the ocean and cause long lags, and that there seem to be fairly obvious 60 year cycles and that even 30 years is not long enough. Now that there has been a flatter temperature rise (a pause), all of these things have been rediscovered by the “good guy”, is that how it works? And never mind that the “deniers” had some good points all along? Another 10-15 years and many questions will be answered. Just hope it does not turn out that we’ve wasted trillions of dollars for nothing. Luckily with the heat now going into the ocean and “the pause” we have plenty of time in case the data show large amounts of warming are inevitable.
Bill | May 8, 2013 at 9:21 am |
Uh.. where did the span 1988-1998 come from? I’m not sure I follow your premise.
While it’s true 1988 was the start of some groups organizing, it’s not the start of the available data. Arrhenius and Callendar were long dead by 1988, and their work long accepted on its mathematics and long uncontroversial on the experimental support of laboratory research by that year.
While it’s true 1998 was a year with a significant weather event, it’s less than 15 years ago so due to the end points David Appell refers to on the 30-year span he explains is preferred for analyses (and at one thirtieth such a sample, its influence is much diluted) and so not all that significant. The power of computers to simulate, and of climatologists to model, the global climate was in its infancy, and the number of climatologists worldwide was still tiny.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:11/mean:13/from:1974/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:11/mean:13/from:1974/plot/gistemp/from:1988/to:1998/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1974/to:1988/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1998/trend
Help me out. Why 1988-1998? Did I miss something in the Appell article?
While I don’t pretend to speak for any camp, I believe there are far more than just 3.
There are those who say all science is a hoax and all scientists are in effect nothing but corrupt mouthpieces of political or business interests. There are those who say the observations are riddled with such severe mistakes that the data cannot support any theory at all. There are those who entirely agree with the mechanisms and the data of some other camp, but interpret the implications the opposite way, or at a lower level of importance, or who deprecate or inflate the issues one way or another. There are many who seem to change their stance with the direction the wind blows. There is a multiplicity of voices.
..we should pay more attention to the ocean cycles and clouds, that the heat could go into the ocean and cause long lags,
I agree we ought may more attention to ocean cycles and clouds, but we ought not succumb to the “fingoist” approach of speculating on effects from oceans and clouds for explanations while the observations we do have satisfy that GHE is as true as any ocean circulation effect, as true as any cloud effect, and cumulative as CO2 levels rise.
We aren’t seeing a 43% increase in clouds globally since 1750. We aren’t seeing 70% more clouds than the average of the past 800,000 years. We know clouds essentially form an arc within the feedback pathways of CO2, and so while we must pay more attention to clouds, it is within the context of CO2 and GHE.
We have barely scratched the surface of ocean circulations, and that is a travesty. There have been voices in science telling us how crucial understanding these phenomena is for centuries; we’ve had the technology to closely, regularly, and in great detail measure and record hundreds of thousands more data than we do even today, for decades, and continue to fail to do more than a few samples here and there. All of our ocean circulation data except ARGO is, in essence, improvised from weather research and navigation and adapted to climatology. Which we see from UAH and RSS’s terrible climate-scale agreement is simply inadequate.
Which is reason to form silly and unfounded hypotheses.. why? 300 years ago Isaac Newton in great detail and at great length expounded on why throwing fake (fingoist) hypotheses around in such circumstances is wrong. It is superstition. It is an error. And it does not form valid counterargument to sound hypotheses like GHE and AGW.
..and that there seem to be fairly obvious 60 year cycles and that even 30 years is not long enough.
So while every human eye on the planet ‘sees’ an ‘obvious’ 60 year cycle in GMT data.. Oh, wait, someone says 62-ish years. Someone says 65 years. Maybe 70 years? 58 years? Well, they’re all close to 60, so isn’t that pretty good as an approximation?
NO! Cycles have a fixed period, synchronize to a fixed wavelength, on the same effect. If the wavelength shifts unpredictably, if the frequency drifts without synchronization, then there is NO CYCLE. All that two sorta-kinda similar wavelike seeming patterns means is that the data is not linear and not cyclic. It’s random. Because that’s how randomness freaking looks!
You need a minimum of three good full wavelengths that correspond to a suspected cycle.. and we have just over 180 years of data (or more, for land only, on BEST).. except that when you go back to that first ‘wavelength’ it doesn’t match the next two. Which proves they are RANDOM, not cyclic.
Now that there has been a flatter temperature rise (a pause), all of these things have been rediscovered by the “good guy”, is that how it works?
Now? You have to be aware of the “down the up escalator” presentation. There have been flatter temperatures (pauses), and even downturns, all during the highest temperature rise on record, for the past half century or more. And what’s more, we’ve seen such pauses (and longer!) on the GCM computer simulations. The “good guy” — the informed, evidence-based guy doing the science — was saying this all along. You’re being fed a line of straw man crap if someone’s telling you the ‘good guy’ was saying anything else.
And never mind that the “deniers” had some good points all along?
My nephew, when he was five years old, asked his mother to explain why “Pie Day” was funny. She did her best to explain about numbers that have their own names, and he made my jaw drop when he said, “Oh. Like the number ‘i’.” See, he meant the Roman numeral, but by happenstance sounded like he was talking about the square root of -1, and the Imaginary numbers.. He happened to have a good point. But he was a five year old child who meant something entirely different and only said the right thing by pure accident.
Another 10-15 years and many questions will be answered.
I’ve been paying attention to this for far more than 10-15 years, and it has not been my experience that good answers that satisfy all the conditions of logic and mathematics are absorbed and accepted on so short a span by those who do not want to hear them. Further, NO, it’s a false argument to suggest 10-15 more years of data will ‘settle’ trendology. Trendology is a probabilistic field, and unless 10-15 years include aliens or angels appearing in a flash of light and telepathically implanting knowledge of the invisible unicorns and fairy realms all around us.. the questions will remain.. and at the rate governments are cutting spending on data gathering and evidence collection on climate and other fundamental sciences, it’s like they’re being run by people who count on aliens or angels.
Just hope it does not turn out that we’ve wasted trillions of dollars for nothing.
Trillions of dollars. Cite. I want to see the line-by-line account books. The ledgers. The receipts. In no field of human endeavor can people attach claims of dollar amounts without this level of evidence.. you don’t get a free ride on the rules of accounting from me.
Luckily with the heat now going into the ocean and “the pause” we have plenty of time in case the data show large amounts of warming are inevitable.
What time do you imagine we have?
Warming isn’t the problem. Warming is a benign effect in and of itself. Melting, storming, blocking patterns, erosion, acidification, extreme shifts, droughts, floods, tipping points.. things that aren’t fingoistic hypotheticals but inevitable conclusions of the most parsimonious, simple, universal, accurate hypothesis we have by logic and mathematics.. things already being observed.. things that will continue for generations after the external forcing that prompts them end.. those are the problems. And that’s just in climate.
Economically, the systems of subsidies and Market distortions caused by the anti-capitalist “cheap energy” argument that has infested so much of the world, that leads to so much waste in carbon burning and propping up inefficient and outmoded obsolete industries.. that’s where you can actually see accounts books showing real trillions of dollars being blown.
> Where did the span 1988-1998 come from?
1998:
Looks like my apology was premature.
Oh well.
Dr. Curry gets credit for enduring David Rose, and us. For sticking to her guns to get a semi-retraction of sorts from Rose, and repeating her message until the MSM almost got part of it right.
She deserves credit for providing this forum — arguably the best online forum of its type — for miscreants and misfits from all sides of all tribes to come together and talk about this topic. It appears Dr. Curry’s frontier salon helped form the questions David Appell chose to frame and discuss, at least in part, and so Dr. Curry gets credit for helping move the subject foward, much further than her own views themselves.
Well done, Dr. Kudos, and please keep up the excellent example.
> Recall all the flack I took last year for talking about the ‘pause’?
No.
Links pretty please with some sugar on it.
why should we give you links when all you will do is find mistakes.
Like CRU who pointed Willis at the pile of GHCN and said some of our data is there, I will point to this web site and say.. her data is here.
now go read the entire blog.
‘why should we give you links when all you will do is find mistakes.’
Quibble, obfuscate and distract more likely.
haha. I find it humerous that the same people who defended CRUs refusal to turn over scientific data howl when you dont give them a link.
Good idea.
And then perhaps I should start a blog about my incapacity to reproduce Judy’s flak and compare Judy’s behavior with glorious companies and individuals.
And if in a few years people tell me that I had the links all along, I could point out that I still don’t know if Judy based her appeal to pity on these.
> Quibble, obfuscate and distract more likely.
Let’s hope Warwick Hugues does not overhear that!
No willard, in the end she would say the posts were lost, you can find them in the same bit bucket as the SkS posting of Dr. Loo’s survey..
Or perhaps Judge Judy would declare that’s I’m mad, so it’s OK, as Willard Tony said of Zeke.
No, she’d do better to claim that you were a conspiracy nut or taking money from big Solar, attacking the character last longer than just claiming you were having a bad day.
Then I could play the victim and rip off my shirt on every subsequent thread.
This is so tempting I could start to whine right here, right now.
No willard, you’d stop with the shirt ripping the minute one honest person on the other side said it was wrong to not give you link.
No, I’d use all the rhetorical tricks to remind of this incident. And I’d never link to it. WIthin years, this incident would reach mythical proportions. Everything I’d write that would mention Judge Judy would be peppered with my memory of it.
Only a commenter who’d make the effort to recall of the incident and describe my modus operandi could ever stop me. And even then, I could simply ignore him.
hmmm.
why should we give you links when all you will do is find mistakes.
“Mommy, mommy, they did it fiiiiiiirrrrsssttt!”
Never seen that before.
Joshua,
since you are on record condemning Phil Jones, you can have any links your request. But you must request them and prove you are an academic because I have confidentiality agreements which I’ve misplaced which preclude me from sharing links with anyone who is a non-joshua.
Willard, is in the pay of Big Solar, so he will have to request them via FOIA, and my plan is to deny them on grounds of national security.
It sure is hard to have a dialogue when folks won’t substantiate their claims. Of course willard is within his rights to suspend judgement about the claims made by Judith. Nobody would argue that he’s a denier when he cant do a simple check, now would they.
“Evidently Prof. Curry operated on the Bushian principle of the one about fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on you.”
This is by far my favorite part from Rose and Curry’s nonsense:
“Prof Curry said that stripping out these [exogeneous] phenomena made ‘no physical sense’. She added that natural phenomena and the CO2 greenhouse effect interact with each other, and cannot meaningfully be separated. It’s not just that the ‘cold mode’ has partly caused the plateau.
According to Prof Curry and others, the previous warm Pacific cycle and other natural factors, such as a high solar output, accounted for some of the warming seen before 1997…”
So according to Curry we can’t separate the influences of ENSO etc. from CO2 when they’re causing cooling, but when they’re causing warming, well then they can quite easily be separated!
Curry tries to play the role of the ‘open minded skeptic in the middle’, but that quote comes straight out of the book of Wattsian denial.
Remember when Curry criticized Richard Muller for saying that global warming hadn’t stopped? When she said there was a “pause”? When she insisted Muller had to have a “scientific basis” for his claim?
I asked her for her scientific basis for claiming a “pause.” She couldn’t even provide a faulty response — she had none at all.
As far as I am able to discern she shows absolutely no such understanding when she comments on climate change. Rather, it’s all fuzzy waffle and prevarication – the intellectual equivalent of putting a hand over one eye and closing the other until the pig looks like a princess.
The sad fact is that Judith Curry is no longer capable of rational thought or elementary logical analysis. She’s become so blinded by her “uncertainty monster” ideology and her desire to host a forum for some of the biggest nitwits on the internet (second perhaps to WUWT on climate-related matters) that she is incapable of actually dissecting a flawed argument, or thinking about the physical implications of her claims. And her ideology is biased only in one direction. Judith Curry is a fake skeptic and no longer a credible scientist. Rose using her as an authoritative figure is no different than PBS hosting Anthony Watts as a representative expert of “the other side.” Just silliness.
Well this is one of the most astonishing comments I’ve seen in awhile.
Pretty much everyone acknowledges the existence of a ‘pause’, from Kevin Trenberth, Susan Solomon, Hansen, etc. Even Muller wrote the same in his FAQ http://berkeleyearth.org/faq/
Separating out ENSO, PDO, etc from the record and inferring that the residual is forced is flawed if you think there is any merit to arguments by Tim Palmer, Tsonis, many others, who say forced warming is likely to be projecting onto the modes of natural internal variability.
As for a scientific basis of the pause, most people seem to think that that the lack of a statistically significant increase in temperature for the past 15+ years might be characterized as a pause.
Looks to me like I have dissected your flawed argument.
See also my previous thread on the pause
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/17/pause-waving-the-italian-flag/
Mosh
I would like to believe that someone has hijacked your name. What an unpleasant unscientific and uncharacteristic comment you apparently made at 2.42,
I am sorry that we don’t appear to live up to your high expectations
Tonyb
Tony, those are quotes from Eli, Chris Colose, Dana N…
Sorry, with multiple C&P I neglected to add quotes around everything
For what it is worth, using the trend calculator at SKS, using GISS for the period 1983 to 1998, carefully picking data source and time period, being a warmist pure and to the core, had it calculate trend and statistical significance.
What result did I get?
Not statistically significant!
So we can say that there also was a pause 1983 to 1998.
Mosher –
Indeed, you write much more concisely than the above.
Judith
‘Well this is one of the most astonishing comments I’ve seen in awhile.”
Ha, well its Eli, And tamino, and Chris Colose, and Dana.
I went dumpster diving over on tammmys
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/more-on-david-roses-nonsense/
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/more-on-david-roses-nonsense/#comment-72001
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/more-on-david-roses-nonsense/#comment-72016
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/more-on-david-roses-nonsense/#comment-72036
hey willard wanted links…
no doubt he joshua and FOMD will head over and be nannies on Tamino threads… na
Ah, the dittoheads, thanks for the links
Good to read that you have not gone cuckoo or worse – morphed into a hell-hound. Back on must read list.
Mosh
I said it was uncharacteristic of you. Glad I was right. Hope Judith realises the source of the quotes
Tonyb
> Willard, is in the pay of Big Solar,
Only a mind that is corrupted by nobility could see such scheme.
yes willard I was channelling nobelity, ala Mann
The magic word might very well be “attribution”:
http://judithcurry.com/category/attribution/
That was fun.
Andrew Adams does not have the knack to attract attention:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/more-on-david-roses-nonsense/#comment-71896
He might not be dittohead-worthy.
Willard,
Thanks for the mention. I will point out for the benefit of other readers that I did ultimately get a response here from Judith (partly thanks to your prompting)
Statements about AGW as simulated by climate models do not find such periods longer than 15 or so years (or 17 years). So ANY period of this length (whatever start/end dates) challenges these earlier statements.
Which I think only partly addresses my questions, but I guess I have no particular claim on Judith’s time and effort. But I’m not sure that her arguments on the subject in general in the course of those threads were really any more illuminating – they basically came down to “this proves the models are wrong”. What Appell’s piece does is present arguments from scientists which try to put recent temperature trends in context and understand whether we have evidence of underlying reasons behind them. There seems to me to be a big difference in those approaches to the issue. As I said at the time I certainly don’t dispute the existence of a “pause” per se and as Judith points out prominent figues on the “concerned” side don’t either. What Judith was criticised for was not “talking about the pause”, it was the substance of her arguments.
> Thanks for the mention. I will point out for the benefit of other readers that I did ultimately get a response here from Judith (partly thanks to your prompting)
For the benefit of other readers, here’s where the prompt occurred:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/16/pause-discussion-thread-part-ii/#comment-256664
In retrospect, we can see that NevenA’s point got acknowledged with the robust “pot meet kettle”.
For crickets’ sake, here was NevenA’s point:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/16/pause-discussion-thread-part-ii/#comment-255469
***
Now, compare Andrew Adams and NevenA’s points with Judge Judy’s rhetorical question:
> Recall all the flack I took last year for talking about the ‘pause’?
I must say that my recall gets better and better. I now recall having talked about running with talking points. Non nova, sed nove.
And there must be some other flak out there in all the links.
So much to do, so little time.
‘But I’m not sure that her arguments on the subject in general in the course of those threads were really any more illuminating – they basically came down to “this proves the models are wrong”.
Wrong., andrew.
her statement is this
“Statements about AGW as simulated by climate models do not find such periods longer than 15 or so years (or 17 years). So ANY period of this length (whatever start/end dates) challenges these earlier statements.
She isnt claiming that the models are wrong. They are wrong by construction. I say that as a former modeler. You must understand that models are never right. The issue is always how wrong are they and can we use them. They are always wrong and will forever be wrong. They will never match observations and their predictions will always and forever be wrong. The issue is how wrong and does it matter. The issue here is do they “accurately” represent past pauses and does the variability they show match natural variability. Answer? No. plain and simple no.
If you like I can point you to mounds and mounds of regional data and
you can compare for yourself.
Continuing, One thing that models get wrong is capturing cooling regimes and plateaus. Hell models cant even get absolute temperature correct.
Models cant even get the ice correct.
Wanna see how bad
https://49d81a7c-a-62cb3a1a-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/apcmip5/home/trnd/histrcp85-sep-enh.png?attachauth=ANoY7crT8zGlxFD6bswz24yGXL-KQ100sjY61sQLjruxFzq8d9V7ncg0UCr2eOW42IBDHkT94LiMSdmJitHSBD3zr47GaaO8JJdHLsELmlUGpqxl1MrfjAiCffGdDWezfQNtbXDBaHSDlNaUQY_xYIhHatcUoyPm2lbHyCVO6DMZMkwS7M3eji8qSf4XD6a3f9axWu9TnPFaQ82falx0JFdyrAJvaINn-x5qmxrYdXEF21F8LtDDhow%3D&attredirects=0
This doesnt mean that models are not useful in informing us that adding C02 at current rates is a horrible idea. Models are good enough to show us that adding C02 is a bad idea. they are not good enough to simulate decadle natural pauses or cooling periods
“The issue is that GWPF/Rose lie by omission to mislead.
What people are taking away from Rose’s disinformation is not: “Oh right, they should improve the models so that they incorporate the off-chance that all factors of natural variability are in negative mode (after a Super El Niño) and thus in the short-term suppress the long-term warming trend”. No, what people are taking away from it – and I’ve heard with my very own ears today listening to a local Dutch radio show interviewing people on the street – is: “There’s no global warming. Scientists are stupid and in it for the money, just like we are.”
That’s what Rose/GWPF are after, and you condone that.
############################
So lets see Neven believes that Judith Condones the random responses that people have to Rose’s nonsense.
Wow, mind reader neven, thats some tar baby action.
I suppose he condones deleting emails which lead inexorably to stealing documents from heartland.
mosher –
My comment was merely on the mommymommyistic nature of your argument, not the primary subject at hand.
As for the primary subject – my criticisms of Judith’s rhetoric are twofold:
My first criticism is that she fails to denounce the obviously bogus arguments from folks like Rose. I find the selectivity of her objections to tribalism to be counterproductive (at least relative to what might occur if she were even-handed).
My second criticism (slightly overlapping) is that I still don’t get how anyone can say both that they “don’t listen” to anyone who questions the basic physics of the GHE and also that they think that global warming has “paused.” If you accept the basic physics of the GHE, then you by definition accept that if you add more ACO2 to the atmosphere, globally warming cannot “pause.”
Now – is that giving Judith “flak?” I don’t think so. I think of it as criticizing her rhetoric – for it’s tendency towards fanning tribalism and because of what I perceived to be a (in effect counterproductive) lack of scientific accuracy.
If my criticisms are just “flak,” then we may as well call what Judith does giving people “flak” as well (not to compare my scientific analysis to hers).
> I suppose he condones deleting emails which lead inexorably to stealing documents from heartland.
Here we go again with the squirrels,
Which are, in general, quite obvious tells.
Perhaps to be expected when speaking
Of the talking points and running.
***
Here was another unanswered comment:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/16/pause-discussion-thread-part-ii/#comment-255515
Perhaps this can be dismissed as a p***ing match.
Or perhaps they, whoever that might be, started it.
Or perhaps it was flak?
Lots of theories.
Mosher writes some interesting points I’d like to examine and request that he expand upon.
Steve writes: “models are never right”-
My response- Steve’s comment is somewhat misleading. In fact models are occasionally right but that is not really the point Steve is making. Models generally perform within a stated margin of error for each characteristic they have been designed to simulate before they are ever used outside the modeler’s lab. Steve fails to mention those climates models are just about the only instance where models of unknown capabilities (and frequently demonstrated to be very inaccurate) are still used to make decisions. I ask why? Why aren’t the models that have performed poorly dropped from consideration?
Steve writes- “Models are good enough to show us that adding C02 is a bad idea.”
My response- I’d ask Steve to elaborate on what models have produced what results to validate this conclusion. If you have a model that can reasonably accurately forecast temperature, what other characteristics has that same model been able to reasonably accurately forecast that would lead you to believe a warmer world is necessarily worse for humanity overall over the long term?
Joshua
“My comment was merely on the mommymommyistic nature of your argument, not the primary subject at hand.”
Sadly, its not playing mommy they did it first.
its quite the opposite of that.
In mommy mommy it goes like this
Willard steals Candy
Mom does nothing
Joshua steals candy
Mom punishes him, and Joshua screams unfair. They did it first.
That is trying to excuse your bad behavior by pointing at somebody else bad behavior.
In this case, I am not screaming unfair.
This case goes like this.
Jones Steals Candy
Mom does nothing.
Moshpit says ‘ Hey mom, Jones stole candy”
Willard argues that stealing Candy is ok
Mom says, stealing Candy is ok
Moshpit steals candy, mom said it was ok.
Totally different.
“As for the primary subject – my criticisms of Judith’s rhetoric are twofold:
My first criticism is that she fails to denounce the obviously bogus arguments from folks like Rose. I find the selectivity of her objections to tribalism to be counterproductive (at least relative to what might occur if she were even-handed).
###############################
So, do you find your selectivism to be counter productive? You played the same game over and over again at keiths and rogers, failing in all cases to ever search for a ground of agreement before you set out on suggestions for improvement. you are non even handed with judith and not even handed with yourself.
#######################
My second criticism (slightly overlapping) is that I still don’t get how anyone can say both that they “don’t listen” to anyone who questions the basic physics of the GHE and also that they think that global warming has “paused.” If you accept the basic physics of the GHE, then you by definition accept that if you add more ACO2 to the atmosphere, globally warming cannot “pause.”
Wrong. physically wrong. C02 does warm the planet all other things being equal. we have added c02 and the temperature has not gone up. Comes the question, WHAT EXACTLY has not been held equal.
a) other external forcings ( like aerosols )
b) other internal forcings, the stuff Judith would like to see studied
Its pretty simple Joshua and it relates directly to the issue of attribution
and it relates directly to the area of study that has gotten short shrift in Judiths estimation.
So Judith does not want to listen to people ( skydragons ) who question RTE. people who say GHGs have no effect. The issue is how much effect GHGs have versus how much unforced variability there is. In judiths mind unforced variability has gotten the short stick and the short dollar. The pause, in her mind, is good evidence that C02 and other GHGs might not have caused as much of the warming as we have thought.
###############################
Now – is that giving Judith “flak?” I don’t think so. I think of it as criticizing her rhetoric – for it’s tendency towards fanning tribalism and because of what I perceived to be a (in effect counterproductive) lack of scientific accuracy.
You totally missed the point. For the past 4 years Judith has been arguing that PART of the warming we see has been caused by C02 and Part by changes in oceanic cycles. ( Say PDO) This lead her to criticize the attribution statements where “blame” was portioned out by the IPCC.. Now that we have a pause or slacking in the rate, you see some other folks backpeddling TOWARD Judiths position, A position for which she took flak. Suddenly its ok for Santer to say they got forcings wrong, but its NOT OK for Judith to have challenged models.
Suddenly its ok for other people to suggest that some of the warming might be due to PDO but it was lunacy for her to suggest it. and its lunacy for her to suggest that we might see a continuation of this..
I think she’s wrong, but no way in hell would I bet against her position.
Finally, I think it ridiculous for people like you and Willis and Willard to hold her to standards that you dont hold anybody else to. You and Willis and Willard participate in making her into Judge Judy. From my experience with Judith I can say that she doesn’t really appreciate being thrust into that role. I remember in Lisbon I really wanted her to tell certin people to shut up. And then it struck me.. why am I expecting her to be a Judge? Stop expecting her to be fair. She’s not. She’s a voice. You can engage her to understand her position better or you can poop on more threads. When you do poop on a thread expect other to pick up your droppings and throw it at you.
> Finally, I think it ridiculous for people like you and Willis and Willard to hold her to standards that you dont hold anybody else to.
Yet another untruth.
I’m asking for Judge Judy to substantiate her:
As if I only asked that kind of thing of Judge Judy.
***
So, what was that flak, and how does this flak relate to our actual discussion?
I’d even settle for a response that shows a vague interest in p**ing contests.
Interestingly, the only flak I recalled was about running with talking points.
Speaking of which, here’s an unanswered comment:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/16/pause-discussion-thread-part-ii/#comment-256877
Is that flak?
Willard
Here was another unanswered comment:
What part of the headline misrepresents the text?
#################################
huh. who ever made a cognet argument about the headline to begin with? There is really nothing to answer here. To her credit Judith moved beyond the headline and acknowledged rather eliptically that it wasnt the best, which is why one moves beyond it to the meat of the story
First sentence:
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago,
Then
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
Well, OK, maybe the headline writer is responsible for inventing the Met Office report. But the idea that the Met should make a “media fanfare” about a few months of extra data which don’t add anything to the story that was not in the long-published Hadcrut 3 data is ridiculous
###########
So we have Nick saying that something makes no sense and is ridiculous. Does every Chewbacca need a response. The point is rather simple. Had the new data resulted in an uptick we would expect the MET to say something as was their practice in the past.
Moshpits solution is simple. When you update data that people use you make a very bland factual announcement.
############################
Perhaps this can be dismissed as a p***ing match.
Or perhaps they, whoever that might be, started it.
Or perhaps it was flak?
Lots of theories.
Sure there are many ways to construe this. To Judith it was flak.
Some people see her refusal to pick Rose apart as Treason. Nutjobs like neven can call it anything they like. He runs a great blog, but tends
to get unhinged ( as with Spencer) thats ok. Given that there are lots of theories, given that Judith experienced flak, you have a choice. sort through the theories, document the theories, make up your own theory,
or shoot squirrels…
but she said she experienced flak. I just practice charity and look for an intrepretation where what she says is true and interesting.
I certainly see things that i would take as flak, I dont know that everyone would take them as flak. Maybe they just lacked etiquette and Judith is used to getting private emails about her mistakes.
Somebody should call FOMD cause many people were farting in church.
> I certainly see things that i would take as flak, I dont know that everyone would take them as flak
Then Moshpit’s whiteknighting, while amusing, lacks relevance.
So, what was the flak?
What was it about?
How does it relate to our actual story?
***
While we’re here, let us note this gem:
> So we have Nick saying that something makes no sense and is ridiculous. Does every Chewbacca need a response.
Chewbacca suffers from an identity crisis.
With more roars, he should be fine.
steven –
Aside from doubting the veracity of your characterization of willard did or didn’t say (I really don’t know, but it doesn’t sound like willard), I also disagree with your diagram.
Selective reasoning is never productive. Why would you think I would suggest otherwise?
You played the same game over and over again at keiths and rogers, failing in all cases to ever search for a ground of agreement before you set out on suggestions for improvement.
Well, I don’t think your statement is true. I believe I often seek grounds for agreement. But regardless, I have never expected my input to have impact one way or the other. I am a nothing (in this context if not others). I write blog comments. Judith has impact. She has a role to play. She writes blog posts. She writes papers on climate change. Why would you compare the impact of my selectivity with hers? It is a ridiculous comparison.
Well, ACO2 warms the planet whether other things are equal or not.
If I have a flame under a pot of water outside in the winter, and then I put a flame under it, does the flame warm the water even if the amount of heat it generates is not sufficient to prevent the water from freezing? Does it warm the water only if the ambient temperature is relatively warm, and then “pause” if there is a sudden cold blast of air, only to resume once that cold blast is over?
Now, the trend of increase in certain measures of global warming – specifically land surface temps – has moderated, or “paused” if you will, but if you accept the GHE, then how can you say that “global warming” has paused if we’re anthropogenically increasing the total volume of CO2 in the atmosphere? Is there something taking that ACO2 back out of the atmosphere? Is there some other mechanism that is removing energy from the system, or reducing the extent to which increased ACO2 affects the earth’s energy balance?
Now can other forcings other than ACO2 can affect certain land surface temperatures, and they can do so to the extent that they overwhelm the impact of ACO2 on land surface temperatures. And if certain climate scientists underestimated the impact on land surface temperatures of those other forcings relative to the impact of ACO2, then by all means their work should be corrected. But you can’t correct their work, IMO, by saying that “global warming has paused.” Such a statement, IMO, serves only a rhetorical purpose from within the framework of tribal battles.
I have no problem with that. My problem is with bogus rhetoric, such as that “global warming has paused,” or even worse, the “global warming has stopped” kind of rhetoric that Judith turns a blind eye to.
Yes, that is the issue. And saying that “global warming has paused,” IMO, skirts the issue.
That’s fine. It is a valid issue to raise, IMO.
Replace “the pause [in global warming]” with “the decrease in the trend of increasing land surface temperatures,” and I think what you describe is entirely reasonable skepticism (as opposed to “skepticism.”)
Legitimate “skepticism,” IMO.
I see two “positions” there. One is that the attribution was problematic. The other is that “global warming has paused.” I see one as valid skepticism and the other as unfortunate rhetoric.
IMO, not deserved in the one case and well-deserved in the other.
I am not responsible for what other people think is or is not OK.
I am in no position to bet either one way or the other here.
Interesting group. Me, Willis,and willard. Two smart and knowledgeable people and one non-technical person of very limited intelligence (I’ll let you figure out which is which!). Can you show where I have held Judith to a standard that I don’t use against others?
I believe that to be true – which is why I think she should think more deeply about the selectivity of her rhetoric and her advocacy.
Fair? I don’t think that fair is relevant here. Fair has nothing to do with it. This has to do with the validity of reasoning and analysis, and why smart and knowledgeable people drop the ball on occasion..
Again, you seem to be failing at trying to read my mind. I have no expectation for anything to happen in these threads any differently than how it takes place. The same patterns repeat here over and over and over and over. Thread after thread. Day after day. And it happens here and at other blog after blog after blog. Anyone who expects anything different than what repeats itself over and over and over so often is necessarily employing motivated reasoning.
This is a long thread and I hope that this goes to the correct position. Joshua’s post is rather long but I am in general agreement with his position on the logical inconsistency of certain commenters that arises when rhetoric takes over from reasoning. We are all fallible at times and Joshua seems to accept this as pertaining to him as well.
mosh
In Mann’s case:
“Nobelesse oblige”.
Max
Steven Mosher,
Thanks for your response and I apologise in advance for the long reply.
I don’t disagree at all with what you say about models – my objection isn’t that Judith was wrong because the models are “right”. I guess it is fair to characterise Judith’s argument not so much as “the models are wrong” but “the models are even more wrong than we thought”, but my question still remains – is this really true? Is the fact that you can, if you choose your start date carefully, plot a linear trend on a surface temperature graph which shows only a very small rising trend over the last 16 years or so really mean that there is an bigger issue with the models than the known difficulties that they have in predicting natural variability over relatively short timescales? And does this (in the context of Rose’s article) really mean that “global warming stopped 16 years ago”? My inclination is to be dubious on the first question, but it’s a question about statistics as much as about models and climate science, and I’m no statistician. But I’m pretty certain that the answer to the second question is “no”.
I don’t think Judith, either in reply to me or in her posts in general really addresses these questions in a meaningful way. Neither does she make any serious attempt that I can see to put the trends we can see from just looking at graphs into the context of what has actually been happening to our climate over the last [insert number] years. Merely saying it proves the models underestimate natural variability is just superficial, just as simply saying “well, you can’t expect the models to agree over such short periods” is not sufficient. Both are the basis for an argument but require more detailed analysis, which is something we should surely expect from someone in Judith’s position. And that’s what Appel tries to do in his piece – he says “there is something in recent temperature trends worth discussing, what can we really learn from this?”. In contrast Judith seems to me to be just saying “look, I was right all along”. Maybe that’s uncharitable but that’s really how it looks to me.
What’s more, articles like Rose’s simply muddy the waters for the general public, for whom this subject may be difficult to grasp as it is. And he is doing it in one of the biggest selling UK newspapers, so it’s hard to argue that it is not going to influence people’s views. One of the reasons Judith was criticised was because she gave his arguments far more credibility than they deserved. It is perfectly possible to argue both that both recent temperature trends do raise questions about climate models and that Rose made statements in his article which are simply not supported by the facts. And “yes but Climategate” doesn’t work here – Judith chose to write about Rose’s article, I don’t claim that she has a duty to debunk every piece of contrarian nonsense that appears in the media but she should certainly be wary of appearing to give credibility to misleading pieces. I don’t think that she as you put it “condones the random responses that people have to Rose’s nonsense” but it would have been nice if she had recognised that Rose’s piece was bound to generate such responses and criticise him for it.
Steven,
Just one more point. You say
Had the new data resulted in an uptick we would expect the MET to say something as was their practice in the past. Moshpits solution is simple. When you update data that people use you make a very bland factual announcement.
I agree that if the Met Office didn’t make an announcement when it put out the updated HadCRUT4 data then it should have done. It is after all something in which there is a certain amount of interest. But Rose was suggesting that the updated data revealed something about recent temperature trends which was hitherto unknown, which is patently untrue – the data revealed nothing which was not already understood from the existing HadCRUT3 data, in fact if anything the 16 year trend is more positive in HadCRUT4 than in HadCRUT3.
Joshua, “Global Warming” was the first or one of the first terms used to describe the CO2 impact on climate. That was changed to “Climate Change”. Why? Now “Climate Disruption” has been proposed as a new name for the former “Climate Change”. Why?
When someone points out the “pause” in “global Warming” it is just consistent with the science part of the issue. Politically, “Global Warming” has a different meaning or science would not have decided on “Climate Change/Disruption”.
Judith also caught some “Flak” when she posted that the current “surface” temperatures are falling outside of the 95% confidence levels of the model “ensemble” use to predict climate sensitivity. The “surface” temperatures are, that is an indication of an over estimate of climate “sensitivity” and that is consistent with the name changes warming to change to disruption.
So science seems to agree with a “pause” in “global warming”, since “science” changed the name to begin with. Ignoring the “pause”, reversion to mean, reduction in rate or regime shift in “global warming” is politics not science. Science has already agreed that “global warming” was not the best description.
When Tamino removes Volcanic aerosols, solar and ENSO, which he assumes to be neutral, he shows what he “thinks” would be the slope of “global warming” without natural variability. You might notice he didn’t remove AMO or include error bars on the graph. Willard seems to like that visual. Could that graph be considered “politically” or “tribally” motivated?
Wouldn’t it have made more sense for the “scientific” community to say, “Well, yes, there is a pause or reduction in the rate of warming globally. That is why we changed the name. There is a great deal of uncertainty involved in the science of “climate change/disruption”.
Have you ever considered that Rose might know how to push political hot buttons?
Cap’n –
Dagnabit.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/05/07/more-on-the-pause/#comment-320206
Peter Davies –
Thanks for the comment at 10:50 PM. I have noted that you are one of the few commenters here that is not ideologically fixed in orientation. I use such commenters as a touchstone for checking my own triballisitic predilections.
Wow. That may be one of the dumbest arguments I’ve ever seen on this site: Joshua claims if you believe in the greenhouse effect and humans keep raising CO2 levels, you cannot possibly say global warming has paused. Nevermind if the temperature increase has paused.
What if natural forcings decreased? Doesn’t matter. CO2 is rising; global warming can’t pause.
What if anthrogenic forcings (such as aerosols) counteracted CO2’s forcing? Doesn’t matter. CO2 is rising; global warming can’t pause.
What if non-CO2 anthropogenic greenhouse gas levels were to drop, causing net forcings to stay constant? Doesn’t matter. CO2 is rising; global warming can’t pause.
To really have fun, we can imagine a situation in which net forcings decreased even while CO2 levels increased – perhaps a sharp decline in methane emissions (with their short atmospheric lifespan, the impact would be felt quickly). Because the net forcings decreased, the planet begins cooling a bit. And while the temperatures are dropping, Joshua says, “Doesn’t matter. CO2 levels are rising; global warming can’t pause/stop/reverse.”
The best part? He criticizes Judith Curry for not sharing this belief!
willard,
“So, what was the flak?
What was it about?
How does it relate to our actual story?
***
The flak has been cited. the flak has been linked. the flak has been discussed. And, if you dont see the flak, then you dont see the flak.
I can point to the sky and say ‘willard, look at the blue sky” and you can
say ‘what blue sky?” and I can point again. So, the flak
A) the flak for not criticizing every detail of Rose
B) the flak for saying models are wrong
C) the flak for suggesting that natural cycles complicate attribution
D) the flak for suggesting that there was a pause.
E) the flak for having an opinion about the next few decades.
In the present case.
Santer does what judith did in B
Ray does what Judith did in C
Hansen does what Judith did in D
everybody gets to do E
The relation to the present story is simple, judith Sees scientists saying the same things she said a while back. She sees them saying things that she got flak for. It’s pretty simple. You would see this if you actually worked in the field. Lets see. So, the other day I was having a debate with a scientist and was remarking about how the models were getting certain values wrong. the response was characteristic. you know about surface temperature Mosher, how dare you speak about models. And then the modelling spoke up to confirm what I said. So, when Judith criticizes models, “how dare she”, when Santer does, well umm, well umm, of course he has standing to do this. So, Judith speaks up about the pause, and tamino mouths off, how dare she speak about statistics, and of course when Hansen says what she said, schmidts bulldog, becomes hansens lapdog. Now when, RomanM found an error in taminos stats,
RomanM, the professor of statistics was banned from taminos..
interesting in who gets to speak and how punishment is delivered if you cross the thin green line.
Joshua,
“Since you are on record condemning Phil Jones”, I must tell you that you are not alone:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/22836534127
If you can find back a quote where you are condemning Jones, I will gladly add your name to the list:
– Bart V
– J Bowers
– dhogaza
– Mapleleaf
– PDA
– Mike Mann
I’m sure I could add Andrew Adams
If you are interested by this Greenline test trickery, there is this category:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/tagged/BeingTested
Note that “being on record condemning Phil Jones” puts yourself into a set. Perhaps not a tribe. Perhaps a clan?
The lukewarm ontology gets murkier and murkier. The ontology is not what matters anyway. What matters is the bait and switch to escape a hard stance and a rhetorical rock.
Greg Laden calls him a moron:
This 10 days after James Hansen et al. were observed saying:
Of course, GL is (IMO) the archtypical marxbot, much worse than anyone here.
Andrew
‘Steven Mosher,
Thanks for your response and I apologise in advance for the long reply.
I don’t disagree at all with what you say about models – my objection isn’t that Judith was wrong because the models are “right”. I guess it is fair to characterise Judith’s argument not so much as “the models are wrong” but “the models are even more wrong than we thought”, but my question still remains – is this really true?
#############
It depends on who you mean by “we”
lets stick with you.
1. what do you think of models ability to predict see ice
2. what do you think of models ability to get absolute temperature
correct?
3. Local sea level rise correct
4. regional temperture correct for impact studies or adaptation studies?
5. precipitation correct or temperture correct? pick one, its common
for models to get one right and the other wrong.
6. hydrology
In general, the models are good at telling us what we know. We cannot
continue to dump c02. duh, arrenhius knew that. wee know that from the simplest EBM. we know that from paper and pencil.
Put another way, models are good to inform us on mitigation but
lousy on adaptation and since climate change is the pipeline,
they need to get better at the next 30 years, which is what Judith
has been arguing and in fact is what she is working on with her
hurricane business.
Now of course, its mean to criticize the work of others. but the planet is at stake and some people take this seriously. Its way more important than some hurt feelings. Its way more important than handing “ammunition” to skeptics.
andrew:
“Is the fact that you can, if you choose your start date carefully, plot a linear trend on a surface temperature graph which shows only a very small rising trend over the last 16 years or so really mean that there is an bigger issue with the models than the known difficulties that they have in predicting natural variability over relatively short timescales? ”
1. you are assuming it is natural variability ( whats that)
2. It could be, as Santer argues, getting forcing wrong.
3. it could be, as some of have argued since 2008, that sensitivity
is high. That is worth trillions.
In short, you have assumed the issue is “simply” missing natural variability and that this is benign. But, even there, if the kind of mechanism that Judith is interested in ( regime change) is in play
then the inability to capture short term variation may be important.
“And does this (in the context of Rose’s article) really mean that “global warming stopped 16 years ago”? My inclination is to be dubious on the first question, but it’s a question about statistics as much as about models and climate science, and I’m no statistician. But I’m pretty certain that the answer to the second question is “no”.”
The difficulty everyone has is coming up with a neutral way of describing the last 16 years. While I’m not entirely happy with “the global warming has stopped” it is one way to describe the graph. “the global warming”
is probably the part of the description that gets misused by all sides in this debate. Here’s another way to look at it, if the rate of warming up to 1997 was .2C per decade, and if the last 16years increased to .4C, we would say, “the global warming increased” nobody, would blather on cherry picking or short term data. If apple stock was going up and then hit a plateau, we would say, the growth stopped.. and yet we could also say that apple grew. The fact that we can describe the same data in seemingly contradictory ways in words is a good clue that you should not rely on words to describe this.
Moshpit has not cited the flak Judge Judy used for her ad misericordiam. His listing does not identify the flak. 0or instance, “E) the flak for having an opinion about the next few decades” does not identify the flak. In short, Moshpit only says “here is flak”, as if that alone sufficed to justify the relevance of Judy’s ad misericordiam.
Onto the links.
***
1. As we already seen above, the first link Moshpit offered contains only the word “nonsense”. To run away from flak by crying “flak” is a way to dodge the point behind the flak.
***
2. The second link is to Dana’s comment:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/more-on-david-roses-nonsense/#comment-72001
This is a comment on this:
> [S]tripping out these [exogeneous] phenomena made ‘no physical sense’. She added that natural phenomena and the CO2 greenhouse effect interact with each other, and cannot meaningfully be separated. It’s not just that the ‘cold mode’ has partly caused the plateau. According to Prof Curry and others, the previous warm Pacific cycle and other natural factors, such as a high solar output, accounted for some of the warming seen before 1997…
Dana’s point seems to be that suggesting (C) and (D) at the same time deserves due diligence.
***
3. Third link is a quote from Tamino’s Voice of God:
The flak was about Judy’s unresponsiveness. This flak is not about her claim of da paws itself, but about the justification of that claim. If Judge Judy stood up and laid out her justification for her scientific claim, made under the weight of her own authority, then Tamino would have to bite his tongue. Not that he would have: as I already said, Tamino is a blogger with an attitude [1].
[1] http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/12239577107
But to claim that this is an example of (C) is yet another untruth. The “Told Ya” stance makes sense only if it has been told so. We’re talking about scientific claims here, not sporting bets.
***
4. The last piece of evidence of flak is Chris Colose’s comment:
However harsh this may sound, this editorial comment has nothing to do with any of A-E. This would be akin to claim that this:
http://julesandjames.blogspot.ca/2013/03/anthropological-data-point.html?showComment=1364946569869
would have anything to do with a specific claim by Judge Judy.
In other words, to claim Colose’s comment illustrates A-E is yet another untruth.
***
We clearly see that to identify the object of the flak is not a trivial manner. Even Moshpit can’t do this, however hard he’s trying to white knight Judge Judy. His appearance of sincerity might improve were he to keep his name dropping relevant and truthful, for instance:
Let’s also end this up with this yet another untruth:
> Tony, those are quotes from Eli, Chris Colose, Dana N…
There wasn’t any quote from Eli there.
***
We conclude that Moshpit’s analysis is unsubstantiated.
‘I don’t think Judith, either in reply to me or in her posts in general really addresses these questions in a meaningful way. Neither does she make any serious attempt that I can see to put the trends we can see from just looking at graphs into the context of what has actually been happening to our climate over the last [insert number] years. Merely saying it proves the models underestimate natural variability is just superficial, just as simply saying “well, you can’t expect the models to agree over such short periods” is not sufficient. Both are the basis for an argument but require more detailed analysis, which is something we should surely expect from someone in Judith’s position. And that’s what Appel tries to do in his piece – he says “there is something in recent temperature trends worth discussing, what can we really learn from this?”. In contrast Judith seems to me to be just saying “look, I was right all along”. Maybe that’s uncharitable but that’s really how it looks to me.”
If that is how it looks to you, then I have two coments.
1. that is how it looks to you, and nothing of consequence follows from that.
2. Look again.
The history here is pretty clear. Judith was criticized for the following
A. Failure to great enough distance from Rose for some peoples taste.
B. Suggesting that oceanic cycles were under appreciated
C. saying the pause word.
D. criticzing models
E. Having an opinion about the next 30 years.
Now, she isnt saying “I was right” what she is pointing out is that various folks are saying the SAME THINGS she said, and nobody is reaming them. She crossed a thin green line. with A and E, because she did that her opinions on B,C and D were maligned. Now of course, other folks say
B C and D, but its ok. Why? because they didnt cross a thin green line.
Put another way.
If Judith says models have mistakes david Rose piece that means one thing
If Santer says it in a david Appell piece it has an entirely different meaning.
or so it seems.
Willard
“Moshpit has not cited the flak Judge Judy used for her ad misericordiam. His listing does not identify the flak. 0or instance, “E) the flak for having an opinion about the next few decades” does not identify the flak. In short, Moshpit only says “here is flak”, as if that alone sufficed to justify the relevance of Judy’s ad misericordiam.”
Yes I have identified it. Again, you dont se the flak that Judith sees. you dont see the flak that I see. I cant make you see it. And you have directions on how to find E, its kinda like having Yamal data and not really knowing it. look harder.
this is fun.
[Let’s hope this gets in its proper place. I also added the link to Judge Judy’s statement of interest.]
> Yes I have identified it.
To identify the flak, you need to quote it, link to it, describe its content, circumscribe its object, and explain its relevance to our topic at hand.
Moshpit offered four links. These lead to two op-eds at Tamino’s. These links do not suffice to substantiate his rational reconstruction of Judy’s ad misericordiam.
His ad hominem has no bite against the fact that he’d need to step up his game to offer his audience a credible white knight impersonation. He can try again, this time with more feeling. By chance Moshpit’s having fun.
***
Perhaps Moshpit could try to find some flak coming from somebody else than the Dittoheads, since:
> It doesn’t matter really; both sides engage in this kind of behavior, it is part and parcel of the media and politics. I am far more interested in the public statements of scientists […]
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/16/pause-discussion-thread-part-ii/#comment-256738
Having clearly identified flak from scientists would a lot more interesting, considering the interest emphasized and the fact that our current op-ed mainly copy-pastes public statement of scientists.
Not that I mind paying due diligence to what Dittoheads say in the meantime.
Willard, I have been through my share of audits and I have observed the following when a finding is/isn’t present:
1) the auditor will properly identify a finding and write it up.
2) the auditor will properly identify a finding and, if permitted, allow it to be fixed ‘on site’, resulting in no finding.
3) the auditor will properly identify a finding and not write it up because it is trivial.
4) the auditor will improperly identify a finding and write it up (i.e. make a finding where there is none).
5) the auditor will look at all the records, certs, and requirements and not see the finding right in front of him (because the auditor does not know enough about what he is auditing)
I have seen all of these, but never all from one single auditor. One of the biggest problems with the auditing process is auditor inconsistancy. Not that the auditor is inconsistent, but no two auditors are the same, that is to say each auditor has specific areas they like to drill into and let’s face it, some auditors are just better than others. Generally, auditors that consistently do 1 – 3 are good auditors. Auditors that consistently do 4 and 5 are not so good. Where we have a problem with auditors who do 4 and 5 too often is what kind of oversight do we have over the auditors? Well, a good auditing system has someone other than the auditor close out the finding. That someone has the authority to correct a situation like 4. Another feature of a good auditing system is the auditors are subjected to testing and findings trending by the auditing function. That corrects for situations like 5.
Your looking for examples of ‘flak’
Judy didn’t give you any
You want to make it a finding
Mosher provides examples of ‘flak’ in Judy’s defense.
Your not satisfied with Mosher’s examples and still want to make a finding
From my experience and IMO, this is beginning to look like situation 4.
What type of example would resolve your finding? Because I have to say the examples provided by Mosher are pretty good examples of ‘flak’ taken. At this point the auditor needs to establish that just because no links are given, that none exist. Seems like a pretty tall order for an auditor to make.
John,
There is an implicit argument in Judge Judy’s ad misericordiam.
This implicit argument might be strengthened by its handwaving.
This could be verified by looking at the flak Judge Judy had in mind.
I don’t dispute that there is flak. On the contrary, in fact.
There is so much flak that it would be easy to say ‘oh, no, that wasn’t what I had in mind’ were I to show my homework first.
I did my homework. What about Judge Judy?
Remember Yamal.
Willard,
It is not a ‘pity me’ argument. I have seen an auditor in these parts call examples like that an untruth. A ‘pity me’ argument would be… ‘I talked about a ‘pause’ and got flak for it…. it hurt my feelings… now other people are talking about a pause with no flak from anyone… woe is me’. While what we are looking at is… ‘I talked about a pause and I got flak for it…now it seems like everyone agrees there is a pause’.
So if it’s not a ‘pity me’ argument, then it still looks like situation 4 to me.
Ball in your court
John,
My identification of her argument as an ad misericordiam is independent from my request that Judge Judy substantiates her implicit argument.
In any case, here’s Walton:
My emphasis.
There’s something that Judge Judy accomplishes with this op-ed beyond “WTF?” or “Told Ya!”.
We do have to wonder if this implicit argument helps accomplishes that goal.
***
Out of curiosity, what relevance do you find in Colose’s comment regarding the specific issue of da paws?
Steven,
In short, you have assumed the issue is “simply” missing natural variability and that this is benign. But, even there, if the kind of mechanism that Judith is interested in ( regime change) is in play
then the inability to capture short term variation may be important.
I don’t think I’m making that assumption, but natural variability is the reason we need to consider longer timescales when comparing models with observations, which is what we are concerned with here, so if there is some divergence between the two over shorter timescales it would seem logical for it to be at least be the first line of enquiry. But as I said in my last comment you do need further analysis – natural variability, whether it is posited as an alternative explanation for observed warming or a reason for an apparent lack of it, still requires a physical mechanism and needs to be supported by evidence.
As it happens I think we do have evidence to suggest that what we have seen happen to the GAT in recent years can to a large extent be attributed to such variations (largely ENSO and the solar minimum), see the Foster and Rahmstorf paper for example. I don’t see any compelling evidence for a regime change. But Appell’s piece does raise some other possibilities and I wouldn’t suggest they should be dismissed.
Willard,
“Out of curiosity, what relevance do you find in Colose’s comment regarding the specific issue of da paws?”
It’s relevant as an example of flak taken. Judy was quoted as a climate expert by Rose in the Mail article about the pause. She commented that there is reason to say there is a pause based on new data revealed. Colose comments at Taminos that she is now a ‘fake skeptic’ and ‘no longer a credible scientist’ because of it. She ‘is incapable of disecting a flawed argument’ in his view. You don’t see that as a relevant example of taking flak?
Steven,
I don’t think Judith was saying quite the same things as other people and many of the criticisms made of her were fair. People saw inconsistencies in her comments about ocean currents, and lack of evidence to support her claims. I personally don’t see “the models say we shouldn’t see pauses of 16 years” as a serious critique or a meaningful attempt to actually understand what we are seeing. And yes, she should have distanced herself further from Rose and her failure to do so certainly exacerbated the level of criticism she received. And of course some of this has to be seen in the context of longer running disagreements she has with some of the people involved, it’s not just about one particular issue or blog post.
But frankly, she has created a certain position for herself which she seems to enjoy and it’s one which, whether one agrees with her or not, is bound to attract criticism and she is certainly not adverse to dishing it out herself (dismissing her critics as “dittoheads” or “IPCC idealogues” for example). So she is of course entitled to defend her views but complaining that it is somehow unfair that she receives such criticism is not going to get my sympathy.
Willard,
I’m sure I could add Andrew Adams
Well since you mention it, here is what I said over at Eli’s – I don’t mention Jones by name but I think it still counts.
“UK FoI states that a body which received a FoI request must not take into account the identity of the person making the request, and I think this is absolutely right, so however much we might distrust the motives of McIntyre, David Holland etc., they were entitled to have their requests handled without prejudice and if (which is a separate question) the information they requested was subject to FoI they should have been given it. Ultimately the same applies to FoI as to any other kind of freedom – if you believe in it you have to be prepared to defend it for people you don’t like.”
I’m sure I’ve said somewhere or other that Jones was an idiot for suggesting that people delete emails as well.
The success of the Foster & Rahmstorf explanation seems to be partly based on overfitting as the fit deteriorates rapidly as soon as the period was over that was used in the fit. I have been following what has happened since that time and my latest comparison with GISTEMP looks like this (I compare a trend picked from their paper with data adjusted according to their formula)
http://pirila.fi/energy/kuvat/FGext.png
I have not made comparison with other temperature time series, but the effect should be essentially the same in comparisons with them.
The data series that I use start in 2003. Therefore the period of moving averages I show starts in 2004. The sharp deviation from the Foster – Rahmstorf trend starts in autumn 2011 where the moving average starts to go down.
I dont’t think that this short period tells much about climate, but it tells that the Foster & Rahmstorf explanation has failed at the level it appeared to have significance based on their paper.
In this case overfitting results in overcompensation.
More specifically the issue is using data of relatively large short term variability in a short term analysis that extends to the end of the available data. The statistical analysis was not on a solid basis when it was published and in this case more or less the worst case came true immediately after the data cut-off.
They draw conclusions that had not statistically significant support, and they were not lucky enough to guess correctly.
John,
First, let me say that I liked your audit comment. It was a bit mischievous, but I don’t mind much. Since you’d like an audit, here goes.
Here’s how you describe Colose’s comment:
> Colose comments at Taminos that she is now a ‘fake skeptic’ and ‘no longer a credible scientist’ because of it. She ‘is incapable of disecting a flawed argument’ in his view.
I don’t think that this episode of ClimateBall is what helped Colose made his mind on this issue. So the emphasized expressions rest on a very litteral interpretation of what Colose said:
The uncertainty monster and his impression of Judy’s seem to rest on his own experience down here, both of which predate this kerfuffle. The only bit that matters for our case is where Colose accuses Judge Judy of disregarding “the physical implications of her claims”. He does raise concerns regarding Judge Judy’s authority, but no argument supports these concerns.
In fact, for the most part, Chris Colose is simply ranting. This comment contains nothing but flak. If the point was to prove that there exists flak, this would be relevant. But we all know that Judge Judy receives more than her share her flak daily since at least 2010. See for instance:
http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/2010/11/09/934/
For what I have in mind, this would be an interesting piece of flak to analyze. We can distill the choler it contains (“I see no evidence that Judith is thinking clearly with respect to her claims about the IPCC”) and find arguments in the full text. This is not the case with Colose’s rant emphasized by Moshpit.
***
To prove how silly was Moshpit’s exercise of proving that there exists flak, I already gave links of examples of flak, in this very blog alone, starting with this comment:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/05/07/more-on-the-pause/#comment-319662
I’ve even added the whole category of this website, i.e. attribution. These links contains discussions I already quoted in this very thread. For instance, there’s a non-exchange with Dana “Nuticelli” — :-) — not far from NevenA’s.
Moshpit simply threw squirrels around for yet another fool’s errand, built upon the untruth that I was denying that Judy was receiving flak.
***
In fact, the only bit that could be interesting to audit on Tamino’s post entitled More on David Rose’s nonsense would be the two links.
The second link to Tamino’s post entitled Temperature “analysis” by David Rose doesn’t smell so sweet, in which he argues that David Rose cherrypicked. This would be tough to contradict since David Rose admitted to have done so himself. If you search for “jud” in that page, you will find 4 hits. Some flak, but not much, and not of the kind that would help Moshpit drop any names.
The first link leads to this:
http://skepticalscience.com/rose-curry-double-down-denial.html
This is what I believe Judge Judy should have in mind (?) when she spake of flak. Would it have been so hard to mention and cite Nuticelli’s post? Auditors may have lots of theories about that.
***
Interestingly, that op-ed contains only a few quotes from Judge Judy. It should not be that hard to compare them with the quotes that are supposed to agree with them.
Here is a first, which seems to be what Chris Colose has in mind when he talks about physics:
A second, which seems to be ze da paws quote:
A third already appeared in a previous article by David Rose:
***
Incidentally, ze da paws quote does sound a lot like this other one:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/10/30/judith-curry-opens-mouth-inserts-foot/
Notice the year.
Is this what you had in mind in terms of audit?
Best,
w
Andrew,
Thank you for your testimony:
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/22836534127
You are not alone.
It gets better already.
Willard,
I appreciate your thoughtful reply. Engaging in thoughtful discussion produces much better reasoned responses. Much of the discussions we engage in come with predisposed ideas of what the conversation is about. This leads to a situation where interlocutors start to talk past one another as they are trying to prove a point… they don’t want to ‘lose’ the argument. I don’t see arguments as won or lost, they evolve. They only evolve if the participants are willing to adjust, compromise and acknowledge the counterarguments. Not everyone can do this. Perhaps not even many can, IMO.
When faced with a questionable finding in an audit, there are a number of strategies one can take to persuade the auditor to your position. The best strategy is to be honest with the auditor and acknowledge the appearance of weakness of your position. Ultimately I am trying to move the auditors position from 4 to 2 or 3 (if I think 1 is not warranted). The auditor wants to show he is in position 1. To move him to 2 or 3 requires working with the auditor. Some auditors are willing to work with the auditee to resolve the issue, some are not…. some need to be worked on over the span of the audit. If we can work to a compromise about what we are really after in the audit, more times than not the auditor will back away from the finding and let it go. This has been my experience (which is the movement from position 4 to 3).
There is a question about flak taken by Judy about the pause based upon the comment ‘recall all the flack I took last year for talking about the pause?’. The auditor is looking for evidence about the flak taken. Some evidence was supplied to the auditor by a third person. The auditor dismisses the third person evidence as not specific to the comment and acknowledges there is flak surrounding the subject of the audit. Each talks past the other a couple times. I question the auditor about what evidence he is looking for to close the finding. Auditor asks what I think about one of the pieces of evidence in this context. I bite knowing the auditor has a purpose to this question. Auditor explains his position based on my response.
1) Auditor acknowledges Judy takes flak in many areas including the pause.
2) I acknowledge third persons evidence is not rock solid specific to the pause.
The compromise:
Consider each instance of flak (disparaging blog comments etc) as data points. When do we see upticks in data points? The day before the Mail article came out, was there an uptick? Something has to trigger flak events. When Judy talked about the pause, we saw an uptick in data points. Whether the data points are old ones being rehashed or specific to the trigger, there are more after the trigger than before it. If talking about the pause is the trigger, there was more flak directed toward Judy after it than before it, no? Does this not support the claim Judy made?
How charitable of an auditor do we have today?
John,
Thanks for this. I don’t have much time this week-end, but let’s return to Judge Judy’s rhetorical question:
> Recall all the flack I took last year for talking about the ‘pause’?
We can agree that she took flak, but was this flak really for talking about the ‘pause’? This rhetorical question does seem to hint that Judge Judy received flak because she deemed to talk about the flak.
Not because of what she said exactly, nor because to whom she said it, but because she deemed to say it.
And what she said is not supposed to be unlike what Hansen, Trenberth, Pierrhumbert, or Santer said.
And yet we don’t have a link to what she said nor to the flak, so we have no means to verify what was the critical basis for this flak.
And yet all the flak we have comes from the Dittoheads, whereas Judy declared her interests, which excluded the Dittoheads, except perhaps to dismiss them or use them as flak throwers. How is the flak from the Dittoheads relevant to Judge Judy’s purpose?
***
Besides, you’ll notice that the first part of ze da paws quote has an interesting formulation:
> There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped.
Compare and contrast:
> There is no scientific basis for saying that God does not exist.
There is an interesting lichurchur on the use of double negations, which spans from psychology to logical intuitionnism.
***
Considering Judge Judy’s self-declared interests, auditors ought to wonder why we shan’t try to find flak from comparable authorities, and see the critical basis of that flak coming from comparable authorities.
Mocking Nutticelli and the Dittoheads might not be the best way to fight tribalism, even more so if there’s a lack of interest in p**ing matches.
Hope this helps,
w
Hi Willard
Is this the threead Judith is referring to regarding controversy over the pause? At its foot are links to further articles on the controversy
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/14/pause-discussion-thread/
tonyb
Only Judge Judy knows.
Here’s another one, which Al Lakos won:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/17/pause-waving-the-italian-flag/
It could also be this one:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/16/pause-discussion-thread-part-ii/
There is also this one, which dates back from a bit more than a year, but about which somebody, somewhere most probably gave some flak to Judge Judy:
http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/04/pause/
There is also this more recent one:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/01/16/hansen-on-the-standstill/
This other one is in the correct time frame:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/21/sunday-mail-again/
This one has more than 1,000 comments, too!
Another one in 2012 with more than 1,000 comments:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/02/07/trends-change-points-hypotheses/
wow, FOMD has much etiquette to teach, I wish him much pretty pony power
Time out to wave the transparent flag
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/08/ipcc_vs_holland_foi/
Speaking of transparency:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-29/billionaires-flee-havens-as-trillions-pursued-offshore.html
Not that it matters much to the auditing sciences.
“Not that it matters much to the auditing sciences.”
we will leave that fight to you. divide and conquer under the transparent flag
Even better, with mug shots:
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/super-richs-offshore-tax-avoidance-213052491.html
hey willard did you realize that fracking success in the US is due to transparency and open data?
One of the interesting differences between the US and China.
How interesting.
I’d rather stay with flakking right now.
More exactly, what was the flak about, again?
Here’s Heinrich the Norwegian Elkhound:
http://judithcurry.com/2012/10/17/pause-waving-the-italian-flag/#comment-257077
This was left unanswered.
Perhaps this was not what Judge Judy had in mind.
willard,
‘what was the flak about, again?”
I can post it for you, I can link to it for you, but I cannot understand it for you. No one can. If you you don’t see the flak, here is a hand. Put another way, if you don’t see the flak, if you deny that there is flak, then read harder. If you still don’t see the flak, then we can agree to disagree. Nothing much turns on the fact that you don’t see what Judith see’s, or that you don’t feel what she feels.
‘If you [Judge Judy] spent half as much time on this blog actually explaining climate science as you do defining and defending your personal affiliations and complaining about how everyone else is doing it wrong, people might learn something.”
This was left unanswered because there is no question.
If Judith spent half as much time explaining science as she does complaining about how everyone else is doing it wrong, she would spend no time explaining science because half of zero is zero.
Put another way. Calculate the amount of time she spends complaining about how everyone else is doing it wrong.
links please and your spreadsheet showing an estimate of time.
> This was left unanswered because there is no question.
Wrong answer.
My response “Wrong answer” should suffice to see how wrong is this answer. Sometimes, people do answer to criticism.
Flak does seem to be some kind of criticism. Such criticism could very well contain a request for justification. At the very least, it implicitly asks for an acknowledgement.
Appealing to pity does seem to provide some kind of answer to flak.
Again, what flak did Judy had in mind?
Hen this will be clarified, we should be able to see how this relates to Judy’s one-line op-ed.
“Again, what flak did Judy had in mind?”
you’ve been given a bunch of examples. If you dont see them as flak
then you dont see them as flak. let me repeat that. If you dont see them as flak, then you dont see them as flak. What can anyone say except,
Judith saw the criticism of her as flak. What she says is interesting, I try to find the truth in it. If I were her what would I see as flak? Trying to be charitable about her claim.
First and foremost the flak she received for suggesting that models are wrong. Second the flak she got for not criticizing Rose. Third the flak she got for suggesting the pause was real. 4th the cricticism she got for suggesting that natural cycles may play a role. 5th the flak she got for suggesting that we could see decades of the same going forward.
For suggesting models are wrong, now we have santer admitting that they may have gotten forcings wrong. She gets flak, but you wont see Chris Colose slamming Santer
The flak she got for not correcting all of Rose’s mistakes. valid flak in my mind, but flak nonetheless.
Third the flak for suggesting the pause was real. Now we have Hansen and others recognizing what she said. The pause is a great opportunity to learn more.
The criticism of her interest in cycles? man I hate her interest in cycle. But Now we have the climarati acknowledging PDO.
The flak she got for suggesting potential cooling ahead? absolutely on par with old Hansen suggestions that the next el nino was around the corner. every body gets to have an opinion.
> you’ve been given a bunch of examples
No, I’ve been given links. Do I have to construct the examples myself as to what was flak to Judge Judy? All we have so far is:
> Ah, the dittoheads, thanks for the links.
So, thanks for the links.
***
Now, what about examples taken from these links?
Here’s the first link:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/more-on-david-roses-nonsense/
What Chewbacca’s move (“the latest David Rose/Judith Curry nonsense”) the example of flak MoshPit wished to bring on the table?
If that is so, how is this supposed to be related to Judy’s ad misericordiam?
***
This “latest David Rose/Judith Curry nonsense” op-ed by “Dittohead” Tamino refers to this post:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/temperature-analysis-by-david-rose-doesnt-smell-so-sweet/
There is no mention of Judy in that blog post.
So, how’s this “latest David Rose/Judith Curry nonsense” about Judy at all?
It it audit. It it awe. Audit, audit. Audit awe.
==========================
Mosher
You are a strange one to criticize others for unsupportable positions.
sorry you are missing my sarcasm..
And then people wonder why Fan uses emoticons.
willard FOMD uses emoticons because he is kawaii
I don’t wonder about the emoticons.
Perhaps you should wonder about the pom-poms instead, timg
Kawaii: not caring is essential
No pom-poms willard.
That’s your weak attempt at characterisation.
Why you get annoyed at my enjoying the schooling Mosher does to folks here on a regular basis only you can explain. That you are among those schooled is your own doing.
You’re cheer leading, timg.
Pom poms you’re waving.
willard,
Know the difference between an observation and cheer leading?
Or are you punch drunk from the beating Mosher is laying on you?
timg,
One can make an observation for the sake of cheer leading: “you look pale”, “you’re sweating”, “you’re punch drunk”, etc. Please do distinguish the speech act from its function.
Fess it: that you oftentimes root for Moshpit makes it tough for you to keep these pom poms hidden from everyone to see.
The canonical term for what you’ve been doing is “Me Too”, btw.
gosh, some folks make observations to cheer and others make observations to boo.
pom poms are nice. they tell me that somebody has charity and has worked to see the truth in what i say.
so thank you timg56 for working hard to find some points of agreement, you have honor and integrity.
You have honor and integrity,
Says Big Dog to Me Too.
> I certainly see things that i would take as flak, I dont know that everyone would take them as flak
Then Moshpit’s whiteknighting, while amusing, lacks relevance.
So, what was the flak?
What was it about?
How does it relate to our actual story?
Willard: She took flak. You’re being dense. I have no idea why Mosher even bothers writing responses to you.
Scott Basinger,
Running away with the ad misericordiam has to stop.
Either Judge Judy sticks to science, or not.
Scott
‘Willard: She took flak. You’re being dense. I have no idea why Mosher even bothers writing responses to you.”
it’s amusing. I mean seriously.
Judith thinks she got flak.
Either She’s lying about her perception or that’s her perception.
lets be charitable as Willard often suggests and assume this is her honest perception. That perception is one we can understand or not.
Willard chooses to not understand it or pretends to not understand it, or
refuses to say whether he understands it or not., or looks to the left when its pointed out on the right. Me, i can understand it.
Now, understanding it requires no great mental feat, so I find Willards responses puzzling. But I like puzzles. Sometimes however puzzles cant be solved. shrugs. It would be nice if folks would just stick to the science,
but that term “the science” is very squishy and we all use that term as a weapon against folks who are talking about stuff we dont like.
now did Judith really take flak? willard says no. he’s entitled to his perception. Same as Judith is entitled to her perception. They both make sense in my world. Although there are always degrees.
Oh look. Yet another handbag fight over the irredeemably inane and off topic. In other words business as usual for Mosher and his weak but ever-present foil Wee Willie Winkie. Gag me with a spoon.
Making an explicit argument would show be even more amusing.
INTEGRITY ™ — Ad Misericordiam Handwave.
“Making an explicit argument would show be even more amusing.”
There you go with that word explicit. as you know not all arguments are deductive, nor are all arguments explicit. you’ve made that clear before why repeat yourself? you dont think she got flak. we get that. And that matters how? She thinks she got flak. lots of people can see the truth in that. it makes sense to them. it makes no sense to you? fine. If we can stipulate that the kinds of things said about Judith do not constitute flak, then I’m happy to live with whatever you want to call it and practice the same with your endorsement.
And willard
” the ad misericordiam has to stop.”
Whereever did you get the idea that Judith noting that she got flak was an appeal to emotion? There is no appeal that her argument is correct on this account. It’s more like
She says pause. colose says she is irrational
hansen says pause. crickets.
Judith says: hey? WTF
Judith says pause. tamino says shes no expert and wont answer
questions from a man known to abuse women who visit his blog.
Hansen says pause. the bulldog is silent. he only hits girls.
Judith says : hey WTF.
if anything its a misplaced appeal for fairness, which we know you are incapable of.
Yet another untruth:
> Not all arguments are deductive, nor are all arguments explicit. you’ve made that clear before […]?
That not all arguments are deductive is irrelevant to the fact that Judge Judy’s **main** argument in her op-ed is implicit. That not all arguments are explicit has nothing to do with the obligation to substantiate one’s claim. To imply a contradiction out of this lacks integrity.
***
Yet another untruth:
> you dont think she got flak. we get that.
This is false. Judge Judy gets flak day in, day out. What matters is the flak she’s using in her implicit argument.
If Judge Judy wishes to convey the idea that what she said to Leake, Rose, or anyone else about da paws is similar to what the scientists she quotes are saying, then we need to see that.
If Judge Judy wishes to convey the idea that she got undeserved flak about her claims about da paws from the Dittoheads, then show the flak too.
Judge Judy should do her homework.
> Whereever did you get the idea that Judith noting that she got flak was an appeal to emotion?
Because she mentions the flak without paying due diligence about the point of this flak. The Dittoheads sent Judy some flak. As auditors ought to say:
> Boo hoo
http://neverendingaudit.tumblr.com/post/522052748
Moshpit writes: “She says pause. colose says she is irrational
hansen says pause. crickets.
Judith says: hey? WTF
Judith says pause. tamino says shes no expert and wont answer
questions from a man known to abuse women who visit his blog.
Hansen says pause. the bulldog is silent. he only hits girls.
Judith says : hey WTF.”
This. Exactly.
Willard: Still being dense. It doesn’t matter what else is said, the point is she got flak for pointing out the Pause. Now it’s the elephant in the room that nobody can avoid, Team apologists have to address the issue. She took flak at the time for simply pointing out the Pause, not the rest of the implication.
In non-pathological fields of study, she would be considered prescient and her opinion would be sought after. In the bizzaro-world of climate science you get discussions like this one.
The natural willard is bizarrely represented in the climate flak/hack/hate/spate topsy turvey Big Top. Toto took his shoes and expects him to find his own damn way home.
==============
> It doesn’t matter what else is said, the point is she got flak for pointing out the Pause.
That remains to be shown.
> She took flak at the time for simply pointing out the Pause, not the rest of the implication.
Repeating the meme does not make it true.
***
It might be important to recall what people say, since “Hansen says pause” does not represent what is being quoted of him in our current op-ed:
If we merge the two emphasized expressions together, we get the negative climate forcing by the aerosol portion of the amplified Faustian bargain. Is this really an equivalent to “pause”?
Also notice what is being predicated: “remains largely unquantified”. Yes, but uncertainty. The point of Hansen’s quote is not to say that there is da paws, but that we are still looking for an explanation of it.
***
Seeking out to explain da paws does not seem to be at the same rhetorical level than:
> Nothing in the Met Office’s statement […] effectively refutes Mr Rose’s argument that there has been no increase in the global average surface temperature for the past 16 years.
Incidentally, this quote does not even claim there is a pause. Nor does it directly talks about the pause either: it talks about Mr. Rose’s argument. Judge Judy does not say “there’s a pause”, she says “Scientists have not refuted the claim that there is a pause”.
Double negatives and straight talk might not got well together.