by Judith Curry
Some interesting tweets this morning on my twitter feed.
Several tweets led me to look at an article in the Guardian, entitled Climate change: IPCC cites global temperature rise over the last century. Excerpts:
In the past, these climate change deniers have insisted that variations in the sun’s energy or fluctuations in cosmic rays could be behind the global warming that has been observed in recent decades. Both suggestions are dismissed out of hand by the new report.
“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University. “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”
This point was backed by Professor Myles Allen at Oxford University. “We have examined the forecasts made by climate scientists over the past three decades and they have been absolutely spot on in terms of predicting subsequent levels of global warming,” he said. “Our climate models are robust and working well.”
Well, that is sure to shut up the climate ‘deniers.’
Latif and von Storch
NoTricksZone has translated an article from the German German online Spektrum.de science magazine that conducted an in-depth interview with two leading international climate scientists, Professor Mojib Latif and Professor Hans von Storch. Quotes:
“It hasn’t gotten as warm as we expected. […] We really have to think about whether or not our models can really project the future development.” (HvS)
There are uncertainties regarding CO2 climate sensitivity. This is stated in the upcoming IPCC report, which summarizes the latest of science and looks at at a very broad range. Here it is not appropriate to boil the whole problem down to a single magnitude: the global mean temperature. Rather it is necessary to understand exactly what is happening regionally, how the temperature develops at a location. But we are not yet that far, and perhaps we will never get that far because it is far too complex. This is why I’d prefer not to stay stuck on climate sensitivity.” (ML)
The most recent decades contain a strong contribution from the AMO (MOC) even on a global scale. This raises questions about the average climate sensitivity of the IPCC models.” (ML)
We should not declare this discussion over too soon. When we look at the 20th century, the climate fluctuations cannot be exclusively attributed to CO2 alone or to internal factors. Also the sun naturally played a role. The question is whether or not we correctly quantified it.” (HvS)
I wouldn’t be surprised if the temperatures remain at a high level until 2020 or 2025.” (ML)
I would get nervous if the temperature continues to pause more than 5 years more. The we would really need to question our climate models. But I also do not expect a cooling.” (ML)
JC comment: Well wouldn’t it be great to start focusing on how long the pause will last. The IPCC seems to think that pause is nearly finished, just waiting for the next El Nino. MJ’s analysis seems much more reasonable to me, but this raises the question as to how long can the pause go? I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040; this seems at least as likely as the the CMIP5 predictions that have already failed for the last decade.
JC: “how long can the pause go? I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040”. Or even longer.
Indeed. This paper suggests the closing of the Ozone hole may “delay in summer-time (DJF) Southern Hemisphere climate change, between now and 2045.”
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00246.1
I wouldn’t rule out a cooling given the sun’s apparent exit from the Modern Maximum recently. The 1998 El Nino was like a grand finale to it.
large el ninos tend to arise at solar minimum,during volcanic singularities (enhanced persistence) and bi polar o3 holes.
Earlier in September NASA suggested that the current solar cycle 24 is likely to be the weakest in more than 100 years. At least one commentator has suggested that the cycle bears a striking resemblance to the onset of the Dalton Minimum.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/posts/Rare-solar-cycle-has-cold-implications-for-UK-climate
Only time will tell.
It’s not a pause, it’s a peak.
A funny thing happened on the way to solar cycle 25. Solar cycle 24 was a 100-year low and global accumulated cyclone energy is following along like a dog on a leash.
It could be coincidence. Then again maybe not. That big ball of fusing hydrogen in the sky may have some detectable influence on earth’s climate after all. LOL
John Silver | September 22, 2013 at 9:21 am |
“It’s not a pause, it’s a peak.”
Quite. +1
Springer, “It could be coincidence. Then again maybe not. That big ball of fusing hydrogen in the sky may have some detectable influence on earth’s climate after all. LOL”
Has to be a coincidence. You know all forcing is the same, Webster says so.
maksimovich | September 22, 2013 at 8:00 am |
“large el ninos tend to arise at solar minimum,during volcanic singularities (enhanced persistence) and bi polar o3 holes.”
Not this time, evidently.
1975 – 1995 was marked by a steep increase in El Nino frequency to the highest level on record (since 1880) and the 20 years since then were a climbout just as steep and the climbout hasn’t ended.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Soi.svg
My guess is the sun and ocean controls the climate and CO2 does comparatively little to nothing in interglacial periods when water vapor is the dominant player. In this regime it gets as warm as clouds allow it to get which appears to be about 30C. As the ocean accumulates energy the cap temperature doesn’t rise the latitudinal extent of it does such that the poles eventually become temperate climate zones and polar climate zones disappear altogether. I doubt that will happen but it’s the most stable climate state by a long shot and the one in which most life on this planet evolved. In case anyone doesn’t know, ice and life aren’t on friendly terms.
Global GHG radiative forcing is now increasing at about 0.03-0.04 W/m2 per year:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/
Unless solar irridance decreases by 0.3-0.4 W/m2 in a decade — unlikely, based on the data of the past few centuries — GHGs will dominate.
David Apell, I trust you’ve at least tried to comprehend Svensmark. Solar irradiance doesn’t have to change at all, if he’s right. Oh, but maybe you’ve already falsified Svensmark by way of something more than an ignorant personal opinion?
Extreme weather from increased CO2 could be larger areas of warmer water leading to more hurricanes or tracks further north. Another consequence is more winters like the UK has been getting due to weaker westerlies that allow cold easterlies from the continent more often. In summer this could also lead to more heatwaves. This might be the references to Emanuel and Francis.
Global cyclone energy was lowest on record (since 1970) in 2012.
It’s shaping up to be as low or lower this year which is uber unprecedented. Something is happening and whatever it is it’s not following the Chicken Little predictions of climate modelers. Hyperbolic alarmism is SO 1990’s…
Forgot linky…
http://www.wunderground.com/hurricane/accumulated_cyclone_energy.asp?basin=gl&MR=1
If oceanic storms are created by the equatorial-polar temperature gradient, wouldn’t one expect a decrease in storminess?
David,
Perhaps you should tell that to the extreme weather folks. They apparently haven’t gotten the message.
David A. “If oceanic storms are created by the equatorial-polar temperature gradient, wouldn’t one expect a decrease in storminess?”
Yes one would. However, Katrina was a poster child for “Global Warming”. More hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, painful rectal itch, everything bad is supposed to be due to “Global Warming” That would be the “Chicken Little” part of the act.
Cptn: Do you have any science, or just personal speculation?
David,
Is your ass that good looking you have to show it?
I recall Kerry Emmanuel & Jennifer Francis as only two of many claiming more extreme weather just in the past couple of months.
Ting56: why do they say extreme weather can increase if the equatorial-polar gradient is decreasing? They must have a reason. What is it?
David
Ask them. You are the journalist.
David Appell, “Cptn: Do you have any science, or just personal speculation?”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070730-hurricane-warming.html
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2011/04/29/175007/tornadoes-irresponsible-denial/
I think there is a link limit, but I can personally attest to the last item :)
ting56: If you can’t refrain from personal insults, I will ignore you in the future. Last warming.
I recall Kerry Emmanuel & Jennifer Francis as only two of many claiming more extreme weather just in the past couple of months.
What did they say, and where? And why?
Ooh, my last warning.
Pointing out that you are showing your ass could be considered helpful advice. If you want to take it as an insult, feel free.
Here is another piece of advice that will likely insult you. Play the arrogant card as often as you do here and people will think you an ass.
timg56 wrote:
Ask them. You are the journalist.
So you don’t have any reasons.
Just as I thought. Typical.
The only thing typical is your arrogance.
You asked Springer if a reduction in the gradient wasn’t expected to result in few storms (a paraphrase). When I referred you to two scientists – not politicians, bloggers or media folks – you respond with crap and then point the finger at the other person.
Cptn: Thanks. It is my understanding, from data on Ryan Maue’s site, that tropical storms are indeed increasing.
Not arrogance — just pointing out your complete failure to answer a simple question.
David’s caught a hint of the cognitive dissonance in ‘a warmer world is one with worse extremes’. I’ve still not figured out if that is true or that a system with more energy in it will have greater extremes.
====================
David Appell, “Cptn: Thanks. It is my understanding, from data on Ryan Maue’s site, that tropical storms are indeed increasing.”
I believe Dr. Maue would disagree with you and mention things like mirco-canes and name happy A$$holes etc. etc. With satellite coverage such as it is, there are quite a few storms that never would have been noticed much less named.
But, believe what you wish David, after all there is four percent more water vapor than really is latent heat :)
Ting56: I asked you a simple question.
You responded angrily and insultingly.
That’s all I need to know to filter you out from the conversation.
Well, I expressed that poorly. The two tangling thoughts are a decreased equator/polar gradient will decrease extremes and a system with greater energy will increase extremes.
===============
Maue would disagree?
http://policlimate.com/tropical/north_atlantic_hurricane.png
Maue’s focus has been global hurricane statistics, particularly Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE), which has been taking a nosedive since 2005.
Angry?
David, you are the one issuing warnings. I am enjoying watching you act as if you are the holder of all things knowledgeable.
But ACE is known to be a poor metric, since it doesn’t account for size of storms.
ACE combines frequency (#), intensity and duration. No one accounts for horizontal extent of storms in climatologies; in fact I was one of the first people to bring up the issue of size. I’ve looked at it, doesn’t add much to our climatological info.
It does if David says it does.
David Appell, “Maue would disagree?”
I believe he would. You obvious have some logical block, but a minimal TC which is the majority so far this year would not have been named as little as ten years ago. Now that satellite can estimate wind speeds better, micro storms get named, it doesn’t require a fly through or surface observation. So you are comparing Appells with oranges.
Then again he may fawn over your every word.
The number of named storms in the Atlantic has been 15 or more in the last three successive years. In the 20th century it only did this less than once per decade on average. Up to 9 so far this year, so this inactive season could keep that streak going.
JimD, “The number of named storms in the Atlantic has been 15 or more in the last three successive years. In the 20th century it only did this less than once per decade on average. Up to 9 so far this year, so this inactive season could keep that streak going”
OMG! You have discovered a statistically significant red herring!
We have had satellites since the last 70s. Data shows an increasing in storm over that time period.
And the only conclusion one can reasonably come to is that a warming climate is leading to more storms.
No possibility of satellites improving our capability to identify storms.
What if it is satellites that cause more storms?
ACE combines frequency (#), intensity and duration. No one accounts for horizontal extent of storms in climatologies;
Exactly — ACE does not account for a storm’s size, and hence does not come close to measuring energy. It’s like measuring the kinetic energy of something by only measuring its velocity and ignoring its mass.
JC wrote:
…in fact I was one of the first people to bring up the issue of size. I’ve looked at it, doesn’t add much to our climatological info.
On the contrary, the new metric TIKE, which does include storm size, does so an upward trend over the last 20-25 years:
http://davidappell.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-new-hurricane-metric.html
captd, is that your denial reflex kicking in again? Funny how it always works in the same direction with observed data.
JimD, “captd, is that your denial reflex kicking in again? Funny how it always works in the same direction with observed data.”
No denial. I even agree with Leif Svalgaard the sunspot numbers are totally FUBAR. See, there is an issue with the short bus scientists not being able to comprehend how improved data acquisition can impact standard metrics. Such is the world we live in.
Calculating the total energy of the storm makes sense.
captd, you say that but then don’t give any numbers. What’s that worth? People have made estimates of missed storms, I know, and it doesn’t affect the stat I gave.
David Appell, “On the contrary, the new metric TIKE, which does include storm size, does so an upward trend over the last 20-25 years:”
uh huh, you betcha. Did you know that QuikScat was launched in 1999? Not terribly accurate but better than holding up your finger.
In the N Atl, TIKE for the last 20 years just tracks the AMO. In the analysis one of my students did there was a huge jump in 1995
JimD, “captd, you say that but then don’t give any numbers. What’s that worth? People have made estimates of missed storms, I know, and it doesn’t affect the stat I gave.”
Instead of the linky dink thing, try a little logic. For a tropical storm to get a name, it has to have a minimum sustained wind speed. If there is no surface station, ship or local Doppler radar, there was only visual satellite data to determine rotation and estimate wind speed. Low and behold, in 1999, NASA launched a cloud penetrating radar satellite called QuikSCAT which included a SeaWinds package.
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Seawinds/
Now no one has done research or continued the “old” way to determine a baseline for impact of the new satellite on named storms. Pretty much like surface stations didn’t maintain the old cotton shelters to have an over lap to compare with the newer digital stations and the Royal Navy didn’t keep measuring SST with buckets. You end up with a discontinuity in the data. The invention of Catscan for more cancer cases. Before X-ray, there was very few cancer cases. Every time there is a new method for acquiring data there is a new leap in some trend that just has to get published without checking why first.
I am sure you and David should fell comfortable that you can now better prepare the world for some disaster that will be replaced by a new disaster in the near future. Since y’all are linear no threshold kinda guys.
captd, so you think people haven’t looked at current tropical storms on satellite pictures to see their characteristics and compared them with old satellite pictures, or done statistical studies that estimate how many of today’s storms would have been missed by past techniques.
JimD, “captd, so you think people haven’t looked at current tropical storms on satellite pictures to see their characteristics and compared them with old satellite pictures, or done statistical studies that estimate how many of today’s storms would have been missed by past techniques.”
Yes.
Ryan Maue event had a post at one time on how ridiculous it was. Leif Svalgaard has the same issue with sunspots. There needs to be some realistic work done cleaning up some of these issues. James Annan is also just a bit miffed that no one seems to care about getting the climate models not to diverge. It is like herding cats. Some scientists need nannies to help clean up their messes.
In the N Atl, TIKE for the last 20 years just tracks the AMO.
Perhaps, or perhaps not, we’l see, but TIKE is clearly a superior metric to ACE or PDI, since if you’re going to track energy you ought to, you know, use the energy content of storms and not just their velocity content….
David Appell:
If you actually had a meter that measured energy content of storms, that would be the way to go. I think, though, you underestimate the difficulties in reliably estimating kinetic energy, given the uncertainties in the vector wind field associated with hurricanes.
It’s a new metric and IMO a long way from being establish as a reliable metric, let alone a “clearly superior” one.
I’m still waiting for someone to show how a warming ‘pause’ can happen while NOAA and NASA state that 2012 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.???
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2013/20130806_stateoftheclimate.html
Walter Carlson: I’m still waiting for someone to show how a warming ‘pause’ can happen while NOAA and NASA state that 2012 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.???
Whether it’s a pause, peak, plateau won’t be known for another decade or more, but having reached “the warmest year on record” the temperature record has displayed random fluctuation, rather than sustaining the previously observed increase. The mechanism (“how” of your post) is not fully characterized.
Mickey: What trend in cosmic rays shows Svensmark can account for 0.3-0.4 W/m2/yr?
Data please.
Your know clue… so?
“What trend in cosmic rays shows Svensmark can account for 0.3-0.4 W/m2/yr?”
What makes you think a trend is needed? The heliosphere went to a high energy state in the early 20th century and stayed there until the middle of the last decade. Solanki had it pegged (his letter to nature, “Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years”, Oct 2004) considering strength and duration, at about a 8000 year maximum.
It doesn’t take a trend in decreasing GCR flux to make things warmer any more than it takes a increasing flame to heat a pot of water to boiling on a stove. A step function from off to on does a fine job.
David Appell: So many tacit implications in your short reply. Quite impressive, if unresponsive.
Your side, the side that says human emitted CO2 is the primary driver of climate change, and which (hubristically) says that natural variation cannot explain all the warming we’ve seen, cannot explain why the warming has apparently stopped for almost two decades. This discredits your hypothesis. I’m talking about one possible hypothesis about a mechanism that COULD explain natural variation in solar insolation (and the climate it drives). Again I ask you, have you (has anyone) falsified Svensmark?
I’m not talking about data or proof or convincing evidence. I’m quite comfortable with ambiguity. I’m willing to wait for the correct answer. I’m not worried about impending disaster. You, on the other hand, appear to need a story, even a flawed, incomplete, or totally false one, to take the place of the correct answer, until (if?) the correct answer eventually arrives.
Stolen from Zeke(?): “Global Warming is what the Earth does between Ice Ages.”
hummmm
seems to…
…but we can’t measure it….
so the evidence for the ‘seems to’ came from where?
LOL
scientists should not be given expensive computer toys.. until they know limitations, computers and their own..
So how long do we have to wait until:
lolwot posts graphs showing there is no “pause”?
Josh posts a long post on how Dr Curry has once again shown her biased, tribal outlook and lack of integrity?
I hear that Peter Lang and Don Monford are forming a group to discuss their fantasies about me. You should join them.
You have never read me question Judith’s “integrity.” Not once.
I have questioned the selectivity of her reasoning within a context of noting how motivated reasoning biases all of our analysis because of known cognitive and psychological attributes, and saying that what’s most important that we acknowledge our biases and try to control for them.
When smart people attribute arguments to others that they never made, it is a “tell” for “skepticism,” tim.
After all, selective reasoning is selective.
(And BTW, I have said many times that in this whole mess, Latif is the one person whose views make the most sense to me.)
yes it’s a shame they have to misrepresent us, although I would wager it isn’t deliberate, but an inability to accurately recollect past events.
Interesting. The main difference between myself and Latif is not scientific, but rather social. Latif is operating within the ‘system’ of the institutions surrounding climate science and science-policy interface. I’ve stepped outside the system, in the interests of seeing the ‘system’ reformed and opened up consider scientific disagreement and debate, i.e. so that Latif’s perspective can receive serious consideration.
And I don’t often question your reasoning w/r/t the science, per se, but on your arguments w/r/t the social aspects of the debate and on a few occasions, the rhetoric of your scientific arguments (such as your acceptance of arguments about a “pause” in “global warming.” With reference to that last point, I think that Latif’s rhetoric is much better: “Here it is not appropriate to boil the whole problem down to a single magnitude: the global mean temperature. Rather it is necessary to understand exactly what is happening regionally, how the temperature develops at a location. “ Compare and contrast with Rose’s rhetoric of -paraphrasing- “Climate scientist admits that global warming has stopped.”)
Well, Latif doesn’t get much attention in the public debate on climate change, whereas Rose does. Its difficult to be heard above the din of the consensus.
My position in all this sits between Latif and Rose: lets have some dialogue and debate about these issues, and given the points raised by Latif (and Tsonis, myself, etc), the IPCC’s high confidence isn’t justified.
The social dynamics underlying the din of the consensus are horrifying to me, given what is at stake here.
p.s. HvS plays an interesting role here, arguably somewhere between myself and ML; HvS is much more willing to criticize the ‘system’ than ML.
Joshua | September 22, 2013 at 8:53 am | Reply
“I hear that Peter Lang and Don Monford are forming a group to discuss their fantasies about me. You should join them.”
I’m already in a club that discusses train wrecks so joining your fang club would be redundant.
Sorry, but I just don’t think that “Mommy, mommy, they did it fiiiirrrsssst (or do it toooouuuu)” is scientific or even effective. Never have. Never will. All it does is feed into the same ol’ same ol’ paradigm.
@Dr Curry
The social dynamics underlying the din of the consensus are horrifying to me, given what is at stake here.
Western Europe is ‘inexpensive fossil fuel challeged’…I.E…no one in the US would burn coal if we had to pay what the Europeans pays.
It’s is therefore in Western Europe’s and Japan’s interest to convince their main economic competitors not to utilize their inexpensively ex-tractable fossil fuels.
It’s not an accident that a substantial portion of ‘climate doom propaganda’ is originating in Bonn and London rather then Washington and New York.
Europe created a Carbon Tax which is for all intents and purposes an ‘import tax’ that would otherwise violate WTO rules. Without a scientific consensus on ‘Climate Change’ blessed by the UN, Peabody Coal, Saudi Aramco and Gazprom would be able to get the Carbon Import Tax nullified via the WTO.
Climate change is real because fossil fuel importers want to be able to tax imported fuel without violating WTO trade rules.
Whether or not the science supports the concept of CAGW is a question for academics to discuss among themselves.
“Its difficult to be heard above the din of the consensus.” – JC
Poor Judith.
You gotta be kidding!
On what basis did you get invited to write an op-ed for The Oz? It wasn’t your ‘consensus science’ output – just the opposite.
Someone looked at the reporting in The Oz on climate change and the non-consensus POV was far more common than the reporting of what’s in the IPCC. Not just proportionally more, but more, far more, in absolute terms.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case in other similar newspapers that are pursuing a political objective in their ‘reporting’ on climate change.
Regular op-eds in the WSJ? Hannity, Limbaugh, O’Reily, Savage, Bennett, Ingraham, Miller, The Washington Times, Forbes, The Economist, The Financial Times, etc., etc.
They don’t exist. The only thing that exists are the big bad “mainstream media,” which, in the selective reasoning of “skeptics” excludes all of the entities listed above.
Why?
Because when you’re bound and determined to be a victim, the “mainstream media” becomes a very effective victimizer, and so you have to define the term of “mainstream media” in a way that is convenient for your narrative.
What’s funny is that while tribe members on both sides blame the “mainstream media” for their victimhood, no one actually has validated evidence to quantify the influence of the media:
http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/2013/8/8/partisan-media-are-not-destroying-america.html
So 20+ years of non-stop alarmist propaganda, gatekeeping, consensus-‘building’, …, all at taxpayer expense ($Billions?), is equivalent to one privately funded op-ed, Michael would have us believe.
Gail,
The number of op-eds in The Oz for a ‘consensus’ scientist to explain AGW or the IPCC reports -nil, zero, zilch. Will never happen.
Cry me a river.
“I have questioned the selectivity of her reasoning within a context of noting how motivated reasoning biases all of our analysis because of known cognitive and psychological attributes, and saying that what’s most important that we acknowledge our biases and try to control for them.”
Ya, thats not questioning her integrity, A true scottsman would use the word integrity when he questions someones integrity. Slime like Joshua do the same thing using other words.
Michael, must have followed Forbes investment advice very carefully…
Heh.
So, saying that Judith does the same thing that everyone does makes me “slime.”
And calling me “slime” (as opposed to an actual explanation for how I “do the same thing” as questioning her integrity), suffices for an argument, makes a difference, will change what I do?
Nope, nope, and nope.
I admire your loyalty, steven. It’s cute.
Michael
I’m not familiar with oz media. But number of op-eds, broadcasts plugging CAGW, slanted ‘news’ by the BBC in the UK over the last 15-20 years, probably outnumber sceptic ones by three orders of magnitude.
Little joshie quickly ran out of examples of non-mainstream media outlets and had to resort to etc, etc. Then comes the mommy, mommy BS and Judith’s selective reasoning blah…blah…blah. The usual tedious broken record yammerings of a little troll.
I swear the comments here are so easy to counter, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.
The Europeans pay through the nose because they have essentially burned the majority of their coal reserves and are running on fumes. They are now paying the economic scarcity penalty and see rising prices due to coal transportation costs from elsewhere.
What did you expect? Ponies descending from the skies? The earth has a finite amount of non-renewable resources and we are burning through that. You would half-expect that a chair of an Earth Sciences department at a major SciTech university would acknowledge some of these principles every once in a while.
Joshua is only touching on the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sheer hypocrisy of the denialist spiel.
As always, Don – thanks for reading.
I can’t tell you how much it means to me.
Oh, and BTW – a few other folks have expressed interest in joining you and Peter Lang in your group to discuss your fantasies about me. Mosher, Gail, and tim are interested as well. Springer would interested too – except apparently he’s already in one.
I swear Webhubman is getting dumber.
“The Europeans pay through the nose because they have essentially burned the majority of their coal reserves and are running on fumes. They are now paying the economic scarcity penalty and see rising prices due to coal transportation costs from elsewhere.”
You are ‘forgetting’ green taxes, stubborn holding out against gas.
That’s an interesting point, harrywr2.
@ “slime like Joshua.”
To be called “slime” by the likes of Steve Mosher…a respected voice of moderation and intellectual heft, is I would say a new low for you Joshy boy.
Are you that hard up for attention? I’d be more inclined to just call you pathetic. But slime is unarguably accurate as well….
Joshua: Sorry, but I just don’t think that “Mommy, mommy, they did it fiiiirrrsssst (or do it toooouuuu)” is scientific or even effective.
You miss the whole point of debate.
Just how would you recommend someone to alert the public that “they” (IPCC in this case) are not uniformly accurate, well-reasoned and correct? If anyone took your comments here seriously there would be no debate.
I think Harry’s on the right track. The carbon tax as back door trade barrier makes a lot of sense. The problem is, they picked the wrong alternatives. The ‘renewables’ were a disaster for Europe’s economy, and then Germany compounded the stupid by going no-nuke after Fukashima.
This is why the train is off the tracks and over on its side. This was supposed to be beyond clever. It ended up being beyond clever.
Matt –
First, I think that you and I may have a different perspective on constructive debate. I don’t think that justifying Rose’s inaccuracies, hyperbole, and misrepresentations by making an unsubstantiated argument by assertion about the difficulty of being heard above the “din” of the IPCC constitutes constructive debate. In fact, I’m not sure I’d call it debate, period, let alone constructive debate.
Second, I as far as I am concerned, the point should be discussion, and not debate. Debate has a inherent quality of a competitive scenario – where someone wins and someone loses. It is a zero sum game format. It encourages scorched earth strategies and tactics. It does not lead to “bridge building,” IMO.
First, I think that there are some folks who take my comments here seriously. So I suspect that your assumption that none do is inaccurate. And your statement also raises an interesting question: why would you have written that comment if you don’t take my comments seriously? What purpose would be served, what would be advanced, by writing that comment to explain that you don’t take my comments seriously? What makes it even more interesting is that you’ve written similar comments in the past. Odd enough that you’d interact in that way once, what becomes even harder for me to understand is why you’d do it repeatedly.
Second – where do you see “debate” here? Sure, it does happen on rare occasion – and I would say that generally, the prevalence of your comments taking place in a context of “debate” is higher than with most commenters here – but even still I’d say that the difference is only relative, and that in absolute terms your comments, like those of most commenters here, do not take place in a context of debate, let alone constructive debate.
Oh, and Matt –
I’d say pretty much the way that you just did it – although obviously in a more detailed and substantiated manner.
There is no reason to assume that the brand of rhetoric you used there is inextricably linked to the hyperbole, inaccuracies, and misrepresentations of someone like Rose. And saying that opposing voices create a “din,” in no way, justifies Rose’s kind of rhetoric, IMO. I don’t see Mommymommyism as being effective.
You seem to imply that you can’t get one without the other. I would suggest the opposite, actually. The presence of one inherently undermines the presence of the other.
Joshua: Second, I as far as I am concerned, the point should be discussion, and not debate.
In that case, you have missed the role of debate in the history of science. In that case, you do miss the point of debate.
So science has advanced through “debate” by way of misrepresentation, hyperbole, and inaccuracies, justified by saying that “they to it tooo.”
OK. I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.
Joshua: And your statement also raises an interesting question: why would you have written that comment if you don’t take my comments seriously? What purpose would be served, what would be advanced, by writing that comment to explain that you don’t take my comments seriously?
Except for tracking down links, my time here is a form of entertainment, like watching football. I skip most of your posts, read a few, and comment on fewer.
hmmm . . . like watching football . . .
Yeah. And probably those you read, you read by “accident.”
What gas? You mean that the natural gas that is depleting just as fast as the crude oil being pumped out of the North Sea by the UK?
Did you know that the UK is importing wood chips from the USA to burn as a heating fuel?
The greens are a convenient whipping boy for your war against reality.
Web
The reason that drax is being forced to burn wood chips is entirely due to green measures to reduce co2 in accordance with govt policy.
Here is a link to the least incredulous reference I could find
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22630815
If you want to know what even the greens think about this just google ‘drax wood chips’
Tonyb
Tony, You believe in that rationale?
Your home country is rapidly depleting their reserve of fossil fuels and yet you want to blame the greens for the gyrations that your energy infrastructure has to go through to make up for that ever increasing deficit?
In the desert regions of the world, no one blames the greens for how expensive an unlimited supply of fresh water is, but when the time comes to discuss non-renewable energy sources, you will stoop to the most ridiculous rationalizations and blame the greens for anything and everything.
Web, do you realize how thick Great Britain’s frackable formations are? This is supposed to be one of your fields of expertise, and you come off with ‘rapidly depleting their fossil fuel reserves’.
Be honest, at least with yourself.
=============
Web
When even the directors of drax cite sustainability and low carbon as reasons for their change you tend to believe them
http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2263887/drax-secures-gbp75m-treasury-loan-guarantee-to-switch-from-coal-to-biomass
I’ve no idea why you are pursuing this line. They are doing it for green reasons which even greenpeace disagree with.
As for renewable energy I am not against it at all, just that we should pursue a horses for courses policy.
Britain is a Barmy place to have solar farms for example but an excellent location for wave/tidal power as nowhere here is further than 70 miles from the sea.
I also think the west should get together to create an Apollo or CERN type project in order to develop sustainable energy sources as there are many reasons not to want to rely on fossil fuel for ever.
Tonyb
Josh,
You say you have never questioned Judith’s integrity. I’ll bet there are folks here who will attest to your walking right up to that line and spitting over it.
PS – unless you are an extremely attractive female travel guide, with access to the worlds’ greatest wine cellars, you don’t get within a thousand miles of my fantasies.
WebHubTelescope
Gail: “You are ‘forgetting’ green taxes, stubborn holding out against gas.”
>> What gas? You mean that the natural gas that is depleting just as fast as the crude oil being pumped out of the North Sea by the UK?
The gas from frakking for which the UK has hundreds of year’s worth.
>> Did you know that the UK is importing wood chips from the USA to burn as a heating fuel?
Yes, because of the green subsidies to prop up renewables.
>> The greens are a convenient whipping boy for your war against reality.
I think it’s very clear who’s waging war against reality here.
Are you “certain” of that?
The problem with you deniers is that you are fighting a war against phantoms. Climate science is saying the world is getting warmer, but that is merely a compounding issue when you realize that we need energy from something other than fossil fuels to keep our standard of living going, and our global economy growing.
These assertions from Gail are just bizarre thoughts from people that have never studied systems science and have never done any systems engineering. You don’t do systems engineering simply by making assertions that “The gas from frakking for which the UK has hundreds of year’s worth.” without looking at the supporting evidence.
That’s why we call you neo-Luddites. You aren’t exactly Luddites, but you refuse to use high-tech scientific analysis to pursue a forward-looking strategy.
Web enters never never land here. Why does he depend upon bald assertions about Great Britain’s fossil reserves, and in the low power density of renewable energy? Well, vivid imagination is sometimes a plus.
===================
Web is way out in lala-land here, deluded as he always is that all fossil reserves are close to depletion.
See eg even the leftwing Independent
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/get-fracking-mps-back-the-dash-for-uks-shale-gas-8676040.html
“If only 10 per cent of the 1,300 trillion cubic feet that the British Geological Society (BGS) believe lies under the North of England could be extracted it would be enough to supply the country with gas for 25 years.”
tim –
Of course I know that there are quite a few here that feel that way – just as there are quite a few here that substitute their fantasies of what I say and believe for what I actually say and believe.
I am often critical of Judith’s reasoning. I have always said that I assume her motivations to be as she states – to build bridges. However, I often don’t think that he bridge building is effective. Seems that folks, out of sense of loyalty or chivalry want to throw down the gauntlet at the slightest provocation – (perhaps because they think that Judith isn’t quite capable of taking care of herself?). That’s all part of the medium, as far as I am concerned. If folks are stuck in a recursive reasoning loop, where their confirmation bias leads them to misinterpreting what I say, there is little I can do about it. If folks are interested in engaging me to have a conversation about our beliefs, respectively, I’m always game. If someone is interested in what I say and I’m not clear, or they have a simple misinterpretation, or they have something to say by way of helping me to see where I was wrong about something, I’m always game.
Here’s the bottom line. I don’t know Judith. I have no basis on which to judge her integrity. I do have a basis on which to judge her arguments, whether my judgements are correct or biased or not. That I might disagree with her reasoning or logic does not mean that I make negative judgements of her integrity. So I have the inside track, and I happen to know that anyone who thinks that they know that I question Judith’s integrity is just wrong. When smart people are absolutely confident about things that are absolutely wrong, subjective determinations that take place in a very “motivated” context (motivated in the sense of reasoning – I’m not judging their motivations either).
Here’s a little secret for you. When I visit “realist” websites, and I see people passing judgement on Judith’s integrity, I feel the exact same way about their reasoning process as I do about people who presume, entirely unskeptically, to say that I have negatively judged Judith’s integrity when, in fact, I haven’t.
This reminds me of yesterday when John Carpenter, it seemed to me, formulated an incorrect conclusion about my view of Judith (that I have a “problem” with her discussing different views). Even though I respect John’s reasoning process, I also knew that he was flat out wrong – so I engaged him on the topic in good faith. When someone habitually reasons in a “skeptical” fashion (as opposed to skeptical), there is little point for me to engage with them. Of course, there is little point to ridiculing them either – but it’s a bad habit I haven’t yet kicked.
To summarize,
We are a bunch of knights errant ready to ride to the defense of Dame Judith, but due to our circular and biased reasoning we misunderstand you and misrepresent you. For you are but an honest monk in quest of the true skeptic, be it here or at “realist” sites.
And you are a good dancer. RE the part about you not knowing Curry, which somehow proves you couldn’t possibly question her integrity.
All in a quarter of the 400+ words you needed.
Oh, the humility.
Tom –
It’s not my fault that people are motivated (in the sense of motivated reasoning) to fantasize about what I say or believe.
On the issue of humility vis a vis their fantasies – they fantasize about me because they can’t incorporate what I actually say into their system of beliefs. Therefore, they have to transform what I say into something that confirms their beliefs.
– in a sense, I have little to do with it, so I can’t attribute it to myself. It’s about them, not me.
tim –
You see?
That isn’t what I said. I didn’t say that it “proves” that I couldn’t possibly question my integrity. Of course not.
There are many folks here that judge my integrity even though they don’t know me. Not knowing someone, in no way, prevents people from making that judgement.
But just like how people who don’t know me have no basis to judge my integrity, so do I have no basis to judge Judith’s integrity. This is something that I know as well as I know anything. I consider it to be an established fact. When I feel inclined to judge Judith’s integrity, I have to catch myself and be more introspective. When I feel so inclined, my more objective self tells my more “motivated’ (in the sense of reasoning) self, that he is wrong. When I catch myself inclined to judge Judith’s integrity, I realize that it is a sign of how I, just like everyone else, is prone to biased reasoning. When I read someone who doesn’t know Judith judging her integrity, I know the same. When I see someone who doesn’t know me judging my integrity, I know the same.
See how you thought that you could say the same as I said with fewer words? Well, you were wrong. You missed a very key point.
Maybe you should consider thinking things through more clearly. Sometimes that means that you need more words to thoroughly explain the concepts.
Josh,
pay attention to the good dancer part.
You said your not knowing Dr Curry means you have no basis to judge her integrity, but you do have a basis for judging her arguments. That others might see your negative judgments of said arguments as an attack on her integrity is their fault, as you know what you mean better than anyone.
It’s called dancing Josh. You waltz around the dance floor with beautiful verbiage, thinking no one notices your fly is open and your breath stinks.
You tell us you go into introspective mode whenever you feel you may be close to the line of an integrity attack. Consider staying there longer, as it appears to many that it isn’t stopping you from questioning her integrity.
tim –
They (or you) are certainly entitled to think it “seems” to be whatever they (or you) want to think it “seems” like. As far as I am concerned, their confidence serves as evidence that they (or you) are “skeptics.”
My guess is that everyone here is just fine, integrity-wise. It’s kind of a baseline assumption – but it isn’t a judgement, and it certainly isn’t a judgement based on a sufficient body of evidence.
But maybe I’m wrong, tim. Maybe those folks here who like to tell me of their assessments of my integrity (character, intelligence, political ideology, views on climate change, etc.), are entirely correct. Could be, tim. Maybe I’m “scum,” a low-life, a “coward,” etc. – just like my much beloved “skeptics” tell me. Of course, the fact that they disagree with me must be purely coincidence – as would be their near categorical association of their assessment of integrity, character, bravery, etc., with perspectives on climate change and political ideology.
Yeah. That’s the ticket. Pure coincidence. You’re probably right. No doubt because your integrity is so much greater than mine.
Josh,
I have never called you any of those names nor anything remotely close. If you would get away from being so self absorbed, you might recall my calling people out from time to time when they did so.
If people are acting negative towards you Josh, it could be you stumbled into a nasty bunch. Or it could have something to do with you.
Joshua
“So, saying that Judith does the same thing that everyone does makes me “slime.””
1. your assuming that everyone does it makes you slime. You might practice skepticism
2. If everyone does it it rather UNREMARKABLE and really not important
It only becomes important if people can avoid it, which, you seem to argue, is impossible.
More certainty from Joshua
” I do have a basis on which to judge her arguments, whether my judgements are correct or biased or not. That I might disagree with her reasoning or logic does not mean that I make negative judgements of her integrity. So I have the inside track, and I happen to know that anyone who thinks that they know that I question Judith’s integrity is just wrong.”
Joshua, you assume that you have a PRIVILEDGED access, an inside track, to your own beliefs. That is something you ought to question,
You of course understand the basis of Freudian psychology says just the opposite. You might consider that you employ motivated reasoning when it comes to interpreting your own belief states.
In short, our evidence about your beliefs comes through your actions.
Your actions, your words, your behavior, is evidence for us that you question judiths integrity. Now, you make a report about your internal states. And you report that you dont question her integrity. This is just another piece of evidence. Looking at all the evidence I would say that
A) you dont understand your own beliefs
or
B) you have a biased view of your own beliefs
C) you are making a false report to save face.
In short, we have to look at all the evidence. All the evidence points toward you being slime. The fact that slime denies being slime is consistent with slimehood.
Heh.
Yet more of what I “seem” to argue, eh?
You study what I say pretty closely, mosher. No doubt you have read me say, many times, that what’s important is how people deal with their inherent inclination towards “motivated reasoning,” confirmation bias, etc.
I have always said that it cannot be avoided. So it “seems” that I argue whatever you want me to argue – in spite of my having argued something completely different.
And for that, I’m “slime.” You know this, even though you don’t know me. Even though you have no idea how I’ve led my life, what I’ve accomplished in my life, Yes, I’m “slime” and I have no integrity. I’m a coward, and dumb. I have a “problem” when Judith discusses different views. I have “blind faith” that catastrophic climate change is a certainty. I’m a Eco-Nazi who wants to destroy capitalism. I’m a totalitarian who hates freedom. I want the government to run everything, preferably by stealing money from “producers” by way of taxes. What matters most is that children die so that the statists can enforce the banning of fossil fuels. My desire for children to die is only second to my hope that billions of poor adults die also.
Yes, steven, just like my much beloved “skeptics,” you know that I “seem” to argue whatever you want me to argue.
Brandon would be proud.
steven –
You of course understand the basis of Freudian psychology says just the opposite.
Freudian theory has contributed some fundamentally important concepts to our understanding of cognition and human psychology. And it was stunningly wrong in many respects.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, steven.
I happen to know that I have no basis for judging Judith’s integrity.
I happen to know that you have no basis for judging my integrity. And part of my proof of that is that you step into crap, so often, when you go beyond what you actually know about me to formulate judgements about me based on insufficient evidence.
This is particularly hilarious given that you’ve claimed that you have a “window into my soul” to judge me. What nonsense, steven.
steven –
This is just stunningly bad:
No, your beliefs about me come through your judgements of my actions. It’s hilarious that you would make that argument backed up to your argument about Freudian psychology telling us that we are not good judges of our own beliefs.
I also said that when I feel inclined to judge her integrity, with some introspection I realize that I have no basis in doing so. You see, mosher, you wouldn’t make this kind of mistake if you weren’t so prone to motivated reasoning.
“Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” or today, you might say that, ‘Political power grows out of a the rotunda’. B Frank.
It’s possible, but my belief is that it is neither.
It could be that they think that they can judge me, personally, without having sufficient evidence – and they think so because they are “motivated” in their reasoning. Because they disagree with me, on various issues, they think they are completely justified in making assessments of my character, my intelligence, my integrity, my bravery, etc.
They are “skeptics,” tim. Anyone who fails, so completely, to exercise due skeptical diligence deserves that label.
Josh
A saying I heard in the service – “Sometimes you have to call a spade a f,ing shovel.”. No judgment or deep analysis required.
Note that up thread I gave you the benefit if doubt. Accepting that you may have never intentionally questioned Judith’s integrity, only noting that in appearance you come very close. Rather than the long soliloquies, how about a simple “it was not my intent. I will try better next time.”
JC wrote:
Its difficult to be heard above the din of the consensus.
Oh please! You get far, far more quotations than the average climate scientists. At this point, you are a go-to source for the contrarian point of view. That is very telling (and, IMO, should be worrying).
Judith, one of the letter-writers responding to your Australian article asked “Where has Judith Curry been all these years?” I’ve taken the liberty of replying. I posted the letters on the thread “The IPCC’s inconvenient truth.”
Lets try to make this a bit sharper for Joshua.
Here is his claim
“I do have a basis on which to judge her arguments, whether my judgements are correct or biased or not. That I might disagree with her reasoning or logic does not mean that I make negative judgements of her integrity. So I have the inside track, and I happen to know that anyone who thinks that they know that I question Judith’s integrity is just wrong.”
What All of us see is Joshua continually attacking Judith’s integrity.
When called on that he pleads “special inside access” to his own beliefs
He “knows” that we are wrong about his beliefs because he has an inside track. In short, he thinks he cant be wrong about his own beliefs. He thinks he knows what he believes. But does he?
This belief, the belief that he knows his beliefs is part of the cartesian dream. How could Joshua possibly be wrong about what he believes?
The answer lies in the very theory he ascribes to. That is, the account he gives of human reasoning is grounded in a supposition that we dont have priviledged access to our own mental states. We can, in fact, see Joshua searching out evidence to confirm his belief that he does not believe he questions Judith’s integrity. Faced with the evidence that we all see in his behavior, rather than look at that he seeks out evidence to confirm his belief. He retreats into the privacy of his own mind to declare, as it were,
” I looked through all my beliefs and didnt find that one, and you guys have no way of confirming that” That is a most severe form of confirmation bias. Put another way, Joshua’s own account of how people look for evidence and how they treat evidence, his preferred account of how motivating reasoning works, should make it clear to him that he is not in a good position to decide what it is that he thinks he believes. He is not in a position to report fairly on what he thinks he believes. He can report on what he believes he believes. We believe otherwise.
Re Michael’s comments on The Australian, it has consistently taken a line of accepting that AGW is occurring and that we should reduce emissions to mitigate it. It has carried many pro-AGW articles and letters, but is almost alone in the Australian media in giving space to contrary views. Judith’s article is the first non-consensus piece to be given such space and prominence, about 25 years after the Oz first considered the issue.
curryja: hmmm . . . like watching football . . .
I did say “except for tracking down links”, of which you provide a lot.
Actually, a better analogy is playing flag football, what with all the name-calling and such.
I have praised a few people for providing especially informative references, most notably chiefhydrologist. Several people have recommended textbooks that I have subsequently bought.
Matt,
Chief sometimes sets the benchmark for arrogance and at times can be thin skinned, but as far as I am concerned he carries weight, backs up his arguments with data and links and generally is someone deserving of respect.
I find it amusing how often I see Joshua make comments like:
When I’ve seen him claim other people are obsessed with him many times. I would think someone who likes to make that accusation so much wouldn’t bring my name up over and over in random conversations. Especially since it seems the only reason he brings my name up is to make derogatory remarks.
Is it projection? I don’t know. All I know is the smear campaign is funny. And pathetic.
Faustino,
You must be reading a different paper.
The Oz that I know falls over itself to give any airing to any and all cranks and contarian POV’s it can find, no matter how ludicrous; from Monckton to the old guy interviewed on the beach,who thinks thag the water doesn’t seem any higher today than when he was a kid, so therefore AGW isn’t real.
Its slide into politically motivated crankery over the past 10-15 has been a sad spectacle,but it’s obvious that this cancer, which was primarily evident in the hard-right wingnuttery of the editorial stance, has slowly spread into the news coverage, most clearly in anything in relation to climate change.
Is that true Michael, that major Australian papers give page space to krank theories?
We don’t have that problem here in the USA, but that is only because these matters get relegated to the paranormal and conspiracy radio shows such as Coast2Coast AM and Alex Jones plus Rush Limpballs.
The internet is another matter entirely.
It does explain a lot, thanks.
Some may find the Australian fair and balanced:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Australian
Did this thread really start with Joshua so many words ago.
The usual suspects are being nuttier than usual. Skepticism and anti-science consists of suggesting that the world is not warming as fast as expected and perhaps – heaven forbid – this might last a few decades more. This is not in fact all that unsupported in peer reviewed science.
‘Finally, the presence of vigorous climate variability presents significant challenges to near-term climate prediction (25, 26), leaving open the possibility of steady or even declining global mean surface temperatures over the next several decades that
could present a significant empirical obstacle to the implementation of policies directed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions (27). However, global warming could likewise suddenly and without any ostensive cause accelerate due to internal variability.
To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, the climate system appears wild, and may continue to hold many surprises if pressed.’ http://deepeco.ucsd.edu/~george/publications/09_long-term_variability.pdf
It is funny as hell.
A SCEPTICAL CLIMATE
Media coverage of climate change in Australia
2011
http://www.acij.uts.edu.au/pdfs/sceptical-climate-part1.pdf
Willard,
That really explains it. Rupert Murdoch is an Aussie larrikin prototype, someone with no respect for the truth. Instead seeing journalism as a way to mock authority.
I like the instant replay feature. Lots of uncalled unsportsmanlike conduct on display.
================
Joshua, this ‘known cognitive and psychological attributes’ mime is a real red herring and based on a completely reductive, unsubtle understanding. 1) Since the enlightenment we have developed means through which we can, as it were, ‘objectify’ ourselves and, hence, test ourselves (something we merely rediscovered – some of the Greeks, for one, did the same – it therefore is reasonable to assume that it is fundamental to being a human being, as such). 2) The means via which we do this are well founded and well tested. They are a series of methodologies that are, let us say, meta-scientific and foundational to modernity: Rationality, discursiveness, the belief in facts and the belief in the testability and, therefore, fallibility of ‘facts’. All this completely bypasses your ‘biases’ and sweeps them away. Your ‘known cognitive and psychological attributes’ is merely your and others attempt to bypass argument, dismiss your opponent and patronise (out of a kind of ‘phobia’) those who disagree with you.
> Rupert Murdoch is an Aussie larrikin prototype, someone with no respect for the truth. Instead seeing journalism as a way to mock authority.
Do not underestimate what Rupert does, nor how he does what he does, Web. If you read that 2011 review, you’ll see that Rupert was not alone in stirring Aussie contrarianism. Faustino may tell you more about that, since he qualified “alone in the Australian media in giving space to contrary views” with an “almost”, a bit earlier.
***
You may also ask yourself what worth would be a newspapers if it did not mock authority.
You may wonder in dismay at the value of mocking if authority protects and regulates journalism.
==================
“…I have questioned the selectivity of her reasoning within a context of noting how motivated reasoning biases all of our analysis because of known cognitive and psychological attributes”
Basically, you are saying that she’s not bright enough to be dishonest….
Joshua: So science has advanced through “debate” by way of misrepresentation, hyperbole, and inaccuracies, justified by saying that “they to it tooo.”
Maybe you just don’t understand English.
Coal mining is up in the US. It’s exported before is burned is all. Unfortunately, speaking of unintended consequences, the countries importing it don’t have any clean air standards so it’s even more polluting than it was before. Way to go ecoloons.
You have to wonder why Curry doesn’t plot her BEST data over the last 15 years?
I will do it for her:
http://imageshack.us/a/img209/4963/oc9.gif
Surprise, this data is showing a rise of 0.13C/decade amidst the seasonal and natural fluctuations in land temperature.
Quiz time: What exactly is significant about looking at land temperatures?
All you skeptics and deniers should be able to answer this rather open ended exam question given your keen academic interest in the Earth Sciences.
WebHubTelescope: What exactly is significant about looking at land temperatures?
That’s where the people, the forests, and the crops grow; it is where the catastrophic floods and droughts and tornadoes are predicted to occur.
But there is also the tropospheric data record since the satellite era. The sampling plan is less biased than the sampling of land and sea surface temperatures.
“Quiz time: What exactly is significant about looking at land temperatures?”
That’s where the most variability is. The most sensitivity. Why look at the Arctic? That’s where much variability is supposed to be and I believe that’s true.
What if we had $1000 in our checking account and $100,000 in our retirement account? Day to day we’d watch our checking account. Long term we’d watch our retirement account. Yes the 1 to 1000 ratio is roughly the same as the Atmosphere to Oceans heat content ratio.
The correct ratio is perhaps higher. 1.0 / (1000 X (1.0 – 0.3) / 0.3).
0.3 being 30% of the Earth’s surface.
Ragnaar,
I like your analogy. Looking at someone’s daily checking account balance tells you virtually nothing about their overall economic state. It is meaningless without knowing what is happening in the savings account, not to mention the stock portfolios and retirement accounts you may not even know about.
Web,
I don’t bother with dueling graphs, or argue whether there is a pause or not, or if it means anything anyway and I certainly don’t deny anything.
Ragnaar, stick to business or finance or whatever you do.
Don’t go near any of the applied physics and applied math. You are very bad at it.
Whatever you said is not worth correcting. An instructor would just place a big red X through it.
Really Web with an Rsquare of .03.
What’s the R^2 of this ?
http://imageshack.us/a/img19/9219/qj3.gif
Oh, it’s 10x worse at 0.0037. Even though there is an underlying trend.
In any event, that’s probably why you don’t look at trends of 15 years when we have noise fluctuations in our temperature record of that magnitude. If you complain about a positive trend, I can complain when it is a flat pause, and then you have no beef.
See how that works?
WebHubTelescope:
timg –
Back at Keith Kloor’s old blog Joshua always talked about me having a “hard-on” for him. I have to say, this is one of the more truly weird aspects of his character. He pours his hollow clichés and tedious circumlocutions into blog post after blog post, and when he encounters criticism his response is to sexualize it. Maybe there is a psychoanalyst within earshot that could help us understand.
I know the reason I always felt compelled to respond to Joshua, even when it was clearly useless, was that he is so, so representative of the glib, uninformed, but supremely confident modern day liberal. It’s like the entire phenomenon has been collected, distilled, and poured 200 proof into Josh. So when I attack him I feel like I am attacking an entire class of people who, frankly, need attacking.
I don’t believe in attacking Josh. But calling him out is a different story.
That I do so could be the result that I care. Or it could be due to a love of pulling wings off of butterflies.
Still got it, eh, Tom? And I thought that four hours was a long time.
Tom.
Ya the sexualizing ( see also references to humping his leg) and transforming his opponents into animals is one of the more interesting subtexts of Joshua’s discourse.
The pattern is pretty damn boring. Keith Kloor { substitute Judy or Roger}
writes something Joshua
A) finds some nit
B) attacks the writer, typically a meta attack.
Other readers, annoyed with Joshua’s inability to actually address the issues, then attack Joshua. Joshua dehumanizes them and accuses them of humping his leg. wash rince repeat. Im doing it now.
There are a couple things to note. First notice the authors that Joshua tends to expend the most energy on. You wont find him nit picking everyone. One might notice that he tends to focus on boundary work, that is keeping people who are straying from the tribe within the tribe. or focusing on people who have one foot in the tribe and another foot outside the tribe. Or focusing on people who communicate with, and hence validate, people outside the tribe, all the while trying to give the impression that he is somehow above this discourse.
The practical upshot of his behavior is that his points rarely get discussed. He leads with a personalization of the topic, wrapped in theory of course, which invites further personalization. There a few explanations
for this behavior, but at the core one must ask the question: Does Joshua persists in this approach because he finds it beneficial or pleasureable?
what is that pleasure? It’s clearly not effective in changing people’s minds or even opening them to a meaningful dialogue and he must realize this.
I dunno maybe he cant help himself.
Mosh
That was a very lucid post and on that basis I am afraid you have slipped down the ladder on the cryticicity chart.
However, I am sure in due course you will manage to rise once more to 2nd place, but I think first place eludes you whilst Willard holds sway.
tonyb
Life, liberty, and
The pursuit of happiness.
Is it property?
Nyah, nyah, beat that.
===============
If they were to hit pause, would there still be a squiggly line?
We’ve had two pauses in the past century that lasted 22 and 25 years. My vote’s on this pause lasting about another decade.
Haven’t there been shorter pauses?
“Most believers are neo-religious ‘credulites’, IMO.”
A term more often used is “creduloids.”
Is the pause just like the global LAND temperature rise we are seeing in the last 15 years?
http://imageshack.us/a/img209/4963/oc9.gif
Not at all, according to this graph.
The land temperature rise is the real signal.
As a scientist or engineer, I wouldn’t measure an electrical signal that was connected to a capacitor and noise source. That would be foolish because as an engineer or scientist, I would realize that the capacitor would filter the transients and create a lagged effect that would obscure the long-term trend. The same can be said for the noise source, as I would keep away from that.
What the land temperature measurement does is disconnect partially from the thermal capacitance of the ocean and perhaps provide some distance from the noisiness of the oceans pseudo-cyclic oscillations.
So I would have to ask the deniers to look at Curry’s BEST land temperature data of the last 15 years and deny the fact that the data is showing a rise.
http://imageshack.us/a/img209/4963/oc9.gif
Are you all going to deny this data?
just curious. I want to see what your argument is. I have never come across a skeptic that had any scientific skill, apart from perhaps Clive Best or Lubos Motl.
There’s a lot of things showing a rise, they manage to ignore all that, why should land temperatures be any different?
What will work hopefully is the eventual dawning that the world is still warming and isn’t cooling or going flat as they predicted. Perhaps we’ll see some much humbled climate skeptics, or perhaps a new batch will pop up in their place?
Is that a shot-gun test pattern? :)
Where are the error bars on each measurement? What is the p-value of the fit? What is the p-value after taking the y-value error bars into account? Does BEST use data that has been adjusted? What about the errors associated with those adjustment procedures?
May I ask ‘as an engineer or scientist’ would you average he peaks and troughs of an A.C. voltage and use the average as a D.C. voltage in your circuit design?
Only the thing of it is that summer afternoon and winter nights are actual states that the system pass through, annually, and to pretend that the system sits on some ‘mean’ is like suggesting that your car engines pistons are in equilibrium with radiator temperature.
I cannot help but note the evolution of your thinking. Atmospheric CO2 reradiated infra-red energy is now linked to heating the ocean below 700m and the Northern Hemisphere’s land and ice.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | September 22, 2013 at 8:57 am | Reply
“The land temperature rise is the real signal.”
If I’m right about the ocean not thermalizing 100% of DWLIR as the models do then land temperature isn’t the real signal it’s the ONLY signal.
ROFL
I kill me sometimes!
It’s a blasted scatter plot! I’m sorry, but an R**2 of 0.034 means that the data isn’t really showing anything. I used to get criticized by statisticians that plots with an R**2 of 0.7 weren’t strong enough evidence for my conclusions, and you’re showing a scatter plot and saying it says something is happening?? Get real.
Bill, This stuff really isn’t that hard to do. The data is all out there for your review, and easy to chart yourself
How about looking at the data over different time spans?
http://imageshack.us/a/img198/4135/jj5e.gif
The plots above show a log regression fit mapping the CO2 concentration against the land temperature anomaly since 1960, 1900, and 1850. The aggregated set all show a land temperature sensitivity of 3C per doubling of CO2 concentration. This also matches the mean sensitivity aggregated through all the models as well — dating back to the Charney report in 1979. The number of 3C is referred to as the Charney sensitivity https://www.e-education.psu.edu/meteo469/book/export/html/219.
Interesting that the figure above also reveals an anomaly-intercept of about -30C when one extrapolates back to a 1 PPM CO2 concentration, which explains how the CO2 acts as the control knob establishing the earth’s climate.
The Charney report also considered paleoclimate studies which demonstrated at least a 3C climate sensitivity — higher likely due to the long time scales involved.
Isn’t it fascinating how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together?
I don’t know all the particulars. Why don’t you ask the second author on these BEST citations:
[1] R. Muller, J. Curry, D. Groom, B. Jacobsen, S. Perlmutter, R. Rohde, A. Rosenfeld, C. Wickham, and J. Wurtele, “A New Estimate of the Earth’s Land Surface Temperature History,” presented at the AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, 2011, vol. 1, p. 01.
[2] R. A. Muller, J. Curry, D. Groom, R. Jacobsen, S. Perlmutter, R. Rohde, A. Rosenfeld, C. Wickham, and J. Wurtele, “Decadal Variations in the Global Atmospheric Land Temperatures,” Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, submitted, 2011.
http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5700/b1101.pdf
BTW, there must be some importance attached to evaluating the historical land temperatures. Is it because the land is where people actually live? hmmm…
And you are correct sir, if you are then willing to admit that a “pause” or “hiatus” will also therefore show nothing of any significance over the last 15 years!
In reality, the slope shown there of 0.134C/decade is not significantly different (with statistical significance attached!) than the model-expected slope of 0.2C/decade which would get us to a cumulative 3C rise of land temperature by the year 2100.
So that is why I also show these plots going back some years demonstrating the log sensitivity with higher values of R^2, all showing close to the mean 3C predicted by the aggregated set of models.
http://imageshack.us/a/img198/4135/jj5e.gif
BTW,
Here is a plot of a data set that has a horrible R^2 but the underlying trend is clear.
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/9219/qj3.gif
This is a sine wave on top of a linear trend. What say you about that, eh?
SpringyBoy apparently lives with the fishes so he doesn’t care what the land temperature is.
Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing, and that it is also moderating the heating of the surface though latent heat of vaporization ( and the effect that this has on lapse rate, effective thermal surface mixing, etc).
Yet the ocean surface is warming about half the rate of the land, and you can not deny this. As the ocean warms, more H2O (and CO2) will outgas, which will raise the specific humidity of the air thus leading to amplification of the GHG effect, and then spreading to land areas.
What I am showing are the facts on the ground (to quote a war cliche).
WebHubTelescope
>>Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing
Seriously, this is but a prayer of the more credulous believers.
WHT The Charney report also considered paleoclimate studies which demonstrated at least a 3C climate sensitivity
NOT TRUE
The phrase associated was “might be”
It ” might be” much smaller.
Your articles quote was
“the ultimate warming and associated changes in climate” might be” substantially larger than what is implied by the simple Charney definition of sensitivity implicit in the IPCC projections”
A bit of selective quoting no doubt
denier
The pause is killing your cause.
Therefore, a prayer is also what keeps your high-performance desktop PC from over-heating — regardless of that massive heat sink and carefully located fan next to your multi-core CPU.
Do you really think that climate scientists are that clueless about how thermal physics works?
Most deniers are neo-Luddites, IMO
Web >>Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing
Gail >> Seriously, this is but a prayer of the more credulous believers.
Web >> Therefore, a prayer is also what keeps your high-performance desktop PC from over-heating — regardless of that massive heat sink and carefully located fan next to your multi-core CPU.
—
Ah, so because heat-sinks exist, eg in PCs, therefore the ocean is hosting the ‘missing heat’. Genius, how did I not see that before?
>> Do you really think that climate scientists are that clueless about how thermal physics works?
Did you really think that strawman would fly?
>> Most deniers are neo-Luddites, IMO
Most believers are neo-religious ‘credulites’, IMO
WEbHubTelescope: Are you all going to deny this data?
I think a measured rise of 0.13C per decade, given that it is corrupted by UHI and other thermometer placement problems, is something that we can all live with. That certainly is a lot different from what the alarmists have warned us of.
That does not closely measure the heat flow that is causing sea level to rise, if it is rising (overal, sea level has risen in some places, fallen in other places, and over the set of tide gauges the median sea surface change over the last 100 years is less than 1mm.)
WebHubTelescope: Most deniers are neo-Luddites, IMO
You don’t know any of them, do you?
I for one am a technophile (among other things, I admire the life-saving flood control offered by the Three Gorges Dam, also its 22GW of electricity generation is about half of California summer peak demand; and I am a booster for continued investment in R&D of renewable energy sources), and I eagerly track down most links provided here, as well as buying and reading books about the climate.
I have never come across a skeptic that had any scientific skill, apart from perhaps Clive Best or Lubos Motl.
Possibly you are distracted by academic degrees and such: some of the skeptical arguments are important. Like it or not, Anthony Watts’s highlighting of the problems of the placements of the thermometers shows more scientific skill than the principal components calculations of Mann et al. Nothing is more fundamental in science than understanding what the measuring instruments are doing. And Willis Eschenbach’s data analyses showing that higher temperatures produce higher cloud cover should not be ignored. And shall I start enumerating the data analytic skills and insights of Steve McIntyre?
I recognize that boasting is an invitation to be pilloried, but I learned a few weeks ago that one of my publications has been cited 835 times (and counting.) The thrill is wearing off (What have I done lately?) but it was a pleasing discovery. I think there is at least some scientific skill in a survival analysis of a million people.
Mathew,
I take it you don’t believe WEB is the final Adjudicator of Scientific Skill (TM).
Neither do I.
“Interesting that the figure above also reveals an anomaly-intercept of about -30C when one extrapolates back to a 1 PPM CO2 concentration, which explains how the CO2 acts as the control knob establishing the earth’s climate.”
Wow.
So you also find that the distribution of Earths land is evenly distributed along the North-South axis.
You really are completely stupid. You have disappeared so far into the pseudo-science collective that the Good Lord himself needs a telescope to see you.
Marler said:
Yes, and by what you say, right here and now concerning climate science, and not what you are associated with in some other field is what is important.
Take a look at what the skeptic Clive Best is doing and compare yourself against that.
Say Doc, No one understands what you are talking about.
I recall you self-diagnosed yourself with dyslexia. If you have trouble with expressing yourself, don’t expect others to be able to figure out what you are saying.
“Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing…”
“There remain substantial issues over balancing the global energy budget: achieving closure (Kevin Trenberth)”
“We cannot draw any conclusions about “missing energy” in the system on the basis of differences between interannual variations in satellite net radiation and upper ocean heating rates from the current record. This is predominantly due to large uncertainties remaining, in both observing systems, and which needs to be understood, and reduced.”
Clivar/ESA Scientific Consultation Workshop July 3-4, 2013
Norman Loeb, Richard Allen, Gregory Johnson, Karina von Schuckmann,
Anny Cazenave, Josh Willis, Kevin Trenberth, Magdalena Balmaseda,
John Lyman
Having to do with Ocean Heat Content.
http://www.clivar.org/sites/default/files/GSOP/resops/DISCUSSION_II_LOEB.pdf
A 72 page document bringing together and summarizing much of the current information on Ocean heat content in a not overly technical way.
An additional comment on what I just posted. In what I quoted, they sound like auditors with the carefully worded statements.
“Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing…”
– Web 2013
“There remain substantial issues over balancing the global energy budget: achieving closure
– Kevin Trenberth 2013
Yes, only the truly credulous and desperate can out-spin Trenberth on this one.
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) | September 22, 2013 at 10:21 am |
“Seriously, no one denies the fact that the ocean is sinking much of the excess thermal forcing”
Seriously ARGO isn’t good enough to measure micro-degrees and it doesn’t sample well over half the ocean. Total OHC is not a robust measure. There’s a modeled excess of about 0.5W/m2 which relies on satellites to sort of corroborate it. Accuracy is +-4W/m2 so even the polarity is in doubt at 0.5W/m2. Look on the bright side – it could be much larger excess than 0.5W/m2 and it had better be because 0.5W/m2 is only enough to warm the basin by 0.2C in the next 100 years. Civilization is saved but climate science is sunk. Most people would be happy that tradeoff but not everyone especially those whose whole reason for existing is tied up in saving the planet from anthropogenic CO2. LOL
Gail,
You read whatever stuff gets circulated over the net. I tend to work out the physics for myself.
http://theoilconundrum.blogspot.com/2013/03/ocean-heat-content-model.html
It would be nice if you could keep up.
SpringyBoy, don’t run away and hide this time.
Show me the reference to this work.
This is what you can work out by hand.
Given a temperature anomaly of 0.6C which is about right for SST, the excess forcing required is about 1.6 watts/m^2.
The OHC is gaining heat at about 0.7 watts/m^2 for the top 2000 meters (this is a bit more if deeper water is included).
1.6 + 0.7 = 2.3 watts/m^2 is the required forcing to compensate the OHC increase.
Now look at globally averaged temperatures, which is the actual radiative signal. This temperature anomaly is 0.8C, and the excess forcing required is about 2.2 watts/m^2.
Note that the two numbers 2.2 and 2.3 are consistent with each other.
Do it anyway you want, take 0.6C for the SST increase and 0.8C for the global temperature increase and you will get 0.7 watts/m^2 for the heat being sunk.
Where is the missing heat? Are you gonna run away, SpringyBoy?
The model in my head is leaning towards the DWIR may heat the ocean a little, but it will heat the air above it due to the extra water vapor from the top 10 uM. No one has put forth a believable mechanism for heat from DWLR over the ocean to get into the ocean itself, other than turbulence from wind and wave. How much heat will that move into the ocean considering water vapor is a gas and will be swept fairly quickly into the atmosphere? This will manifest itself as rain and in the process cool the atmosphere. Some of that rain will fall onto land, moving some of the heat from land into the ocean. So there are two possible ways heat from DWLR gets into the ocean. But given the fact that the extra water vapor speed up thunderstorm formation, thus shuttling the heat to the upper trop, how much heat stays on Earth.
Again, we need to focus on the measurement of TOA radiational balance.
Jim2, net IR is upwards. You get into all kinds of logical messes trying to consider one component. The net effect is cooling and GHGs just reduce the cooling rate. It is IR cooling at night and warming from solar radiation in the day. By reducing the cooling rate, the ocean gets warmer as it reaches a different equilibrium with the day-time warming.
Don’t do it in your head. The first-order formulations for effective forcing, temperature, and heat build-up are all there and easy to apply.
I just gave it it to you and you effin ignore it, just like a D student would.
WebHubTelescope: Take a look at what the skeptic Clive Best is doing and compare yourself against that.
I stipulate that Clive Best does good work; your wholesale disparagement of everyone else is still junk.
Who is “everyone else”, Marler?
Give me some names of skeptical bloggers that actually touch the physics and aren’t just auditing statistics, and I will tell you if they are kranks.
I would be surprised if you came up with anybody besides the ones I named.
So we can either solve climate as one line of algebra or be a crank?
Doesn’t look like an either/or decision to me.
“Where are the error bars on each measurement? What is the p-value of the fit? What is the p-value after taking the y-value error bars into account? Does BEST use data that has been adjusted? What about the errors associated with those adjustment procedures?.
1. Adjusted data.
There are 14 data sources. In all cases save one we use the unadjusted version of the dataset. In most cases the datasets have a daily version and a monthly version. We use the daily version whereever it exists. For example. There are over 30,000 daily records in GHCN Daily. NOAA compiles these into GHCN Monthly with raw versions and adjusted versions. Their requirement for long series means that they
drop from 20K+ series to around 7000 series. HadCrut and GISS draw their data from GHCN Monthly. In the case of HADCRUT their requirement for data completeness during the 1960-1990 period means they drop down to less than 5K stations.
In addition to GHCN daily we also rely heavily on GCOS which also has 20K stations or so, some overlapping with GHCN daily. This is also unadjusted data.
With these 14 data sources the following approach is used.
First, using metadata we identify the duplicate station records.
So Orland California has a monthly record and a daily reccord.
The Monthly is not used. This duplicate identification looks at names
and locations and data to identify duplicate records.
After dups are dropped we assemble the data for every location.
A priority system is used to ensure that we use daily data before monthly data and unadjusted data before adjusted data. The last data source we will ever rely on is HADCRUT which has a small number of unique monthly records.
Folks who are interested can look in the sources.txt file which tracks the data source for every value in the system.
2. Errors
We approach errors in a top down fashion as opposed to the bottom up fashion used by say HADCRUT. In the HADCRUT approach errors are budgeted for various error sources: instrument error, etc. And then errors are summed under quadrature. The reported errors are very small on the order of .05C/month per station. We estimate the error by looking at the nugget. that is by looking at the explained variance at a correlation length of zero we calculate an error of .46C/month. This gave reviewers heartburn as they didnt grasp the notion of a nugget. This .46C error includes all error sources. rather than building the error up from looking at various sources ( instrument changes, instrument error etc) we calculate the error in a top down fashion. That .46C includes all sources of error, but we dont partition the error.
see the methods paper for more detail or the code for detailed questions. Both are provided.
WebHubTelescope: I have never come across a skeptic that had any scientific skill, apart from perhaps Clive Best or Lubos Motl.
OK, so you have never “come across” any skeptic apart from “perhaps” Clive Best or Lubos Motl who had any scientific skill.
Your loss.
I run across plenty with rhetorical skill.
Tom,
If you accept that the pauses, previously occurring and the one at the present, are part of long period cycles whose long term average is related to the actual long term trend of temperature (rather than the far steeper slope of rise from just 1980 to 1999), you are admitting that the rise (from whatever cause) has a slope of closer to 0.4C per century than the super inflated values of 2C to 6C per century claimed by the models and supporters of CAGW. This even assumes temperature cycles will continue to rise. Since longer historical trends have long period cycles of several hundred years, and we obviously were emerging from the LIttle Ice Age to the present, I see no clear reason to suspect that we will continue the general rise at all. If the argument is that due to CO2 rising, the present trend is different, then the low slope of 0.4C per century is still not a problem for several centuries, and fossil fuel will be mainly replace long before then. The argument that the oceans ate the extra energy, and this will come back to heat the Earth, is clearly a joke (how could deep ocean water raising a few milli-degrees going to heat the atmosphere several degrees even if it came up?).
You don’t know either. So let’s all move through it.
“The IPCC seems to think that pause is nearly finished, just waiting for the next El Nino.”
What’s that term? Wait for it….Oh yes, motivated reasoning.
What else would they be thinking?
Another term applies as well. Cherry picking.
With the next El Nino, watch for the graphs, and particularly the 5 year running means and three year running means, and warmest year since…. arguments. One good warm year and WfT will crash from all the warmists trying different ways to create scary new graphs.
What else would they be thinking?
That skeptics are relying on the two recent La Ninas, the first of which was quite large, to calculate a zero trend.
Didn’t realize the Met Office was staffed by skeptics.
“…they have been absolutely spot on in terms of predicting subsequent levels of global warming”
That’s quite an achievement considering that the models predict a wide spread of outcomes.
The pause will last until 2025-2030
Why are they talking about short term data as if it is at all capable of showing any trend wrt the trajectory of climate over the next 100 years or so? They simply don’t have a clue!
The only prediction that should be made about future climate trends is that it will exhibit sudden shifts upwards or downwards at the regional level but the direction that global temperature will take is not known with our present state of knowledge.
Precisely. Past temperature records, by themselves, tell us NOTHING about what will happen in the future.
Agree with you there Jim C. Climate time series data is like economic time series in that the system is non-ergodic and that any parameters from this are non repeating and unpredictable.
“Past temperature records, by themselves, tell us NOTHING about what will happen in the future”
I am really not sure if past temperature records, by themselves, tell us ANYTHING about what happened in the past.
All I know is that John Steinbeck was an outrageous liar for misstating that the Oke’s were actually out running glaciers and not heat-waves.
“We’ve had two pauses in the past century that lasted 22 and 25 years.”
???
http://virakkraft.com/Hadcrut-20-60.png
The big one was 1940-1975. While the IPCC explains this away with some sort of pollution aerosol handwaving, I strongly suspect that this is associated with the AMO/PDO. hence my suspicion that the current pause could last 30-40 yrs.
OK Judith. but you too are guessing as I’m sure you’d concede.
Well, this is more than a guess (stay tuned for new paper, coming week of Oct 11). In any event we need to put multiple scenarios out there for decision makers to ponder. I find it astonishing that there is such certainty by the IPCC in this matter.
“While the IPCC explains this away with some sort of pollution aerosol handwaving.”
But they are magic aerosols, the stuff dreams are made of :)
Pokerguy,
Judith’s guesses have higher Integrity.
Unlike the IPCC, I’m not demanding that anyone believe my guesses.
Talking donkey just got his nose whacked.
Poor talking donkey.
HI Judith, I should have said “informed” guess. Looking forward to paper.
“The big one was 1940-1975. While the IPCC explains this away with some sort of pollution aerosol handwaving,”
I was never clear on what they said about this. IN other words, just more ad hoc, we’ll fake it til we make it, “gold standard” science culminating in what else…. virtual certainty.
“The big one was 1940-1975.”
Spot the difference between the blue and green periods. One is a pause. The other is not.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/from:1940/to:1975/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/from:1997
oops …lolwot | September 22, 2013 at 8:44 am |
Spot the difference between the [1940-1975] and [1995-2013] periods. One is a pause. The other is not.
True, 1940-1975 actually went down a bit.
But yes, let’s stop using the term “Pause”, as someone suggested. It may well not go up again in many of our lifetimes; or ever.
“Plateau” ? “Non-increase” ?
“Unlike the IPCC, I’m not demanding that anyone believe my guesses.” – JC
I guess I missed that bit in the IPCC reports where they “demanded” that people believe them.
Pokerguy, “I was never clear on what they said about this. IN other words, just more ad hoc, we’ll fake it til we make it, “gold standard” science culminating in what else…. virtual certainty.”
It is much more entertaining than that. Using the Lean 2000 and earlier solar plus positive aerosol forcing (black carbon) they were able to “explain” the 1910 to 1940 rise. Then by reversing the sign of aerosols they were able to “explain” the “global” cooling from 1945 to 1975, but not the magic drop in temperatures from 1940 to 1945 or the magic drop in temperatures from 1905 to 1915. You need magic aerosol dust for that.
So Santers finally recognizes the “pause” is a problem just last year, nice to see how current he stays, and decides the aerosol magic may not be quite right. Solomon checks out the tropical stratosphere “pause” and is sure it is anything but SST which has flat lined. Some others that Gates referenced also have determined that “CO2” forcing has at least a 30 year lag in working its way to the middle troposphere. That of course has nothing to do with SST, the mysterious internal ocean oscillations, the sun or anything but CO2.
We are in capable hands Pokerguy. They are experts, we should trust them :)
lolwot, I think the skeptics would want you to start around 2001 to get their pause, but your point is well taken anyway. As pauses go, this most recent pause is no biggy.
Some skeptics wish the pause would turn into a biggy. IMO, when a skeptic starts wishing for things to justify his skepticism, he stops being a true skeptic.
curryja-
When I hear a panel of the nation’s leading neuro-scientists admit that they know so very little about the human mind and are not ashamed to express some humility about their lack of complete knowledge, and then I read how so many climatologists use such absolutist terms in what is going on with our climate, it stretches credulity. Roy Spencer has a nice story today about his visit to a group of economists and noting how amicable they were to each other even though they had disagreements. One economist explained that they all had been wrong so many times they knew humility first hand.
Leading neuro-scientists might know very little about the human mind Dennis Adams, but they surely know enough to warn against blunt impacts to the head!
Similarly leading climate scientists know enough about climate to warn against hitting the climate with a carbon sledgehammer!
Good observation Dennis Adams!
Lolwot,
You should pay attention to those warnings.
Or wear a helmet.
A pause that lasts 40 years hence would not be the position of a “lukewarmer”. If CO2 accumulation stays at the current rate of 2 to 3 PPM per year, in 40 years the atmosphere would be between 480 PPM to 520 PPM, which is near where the predicted mean land temperature anomaly would double the current level of 1.2C.
So if the current temperature stays at 1.2C over the next 40 years, either sensitivity will get reduced in half or scientists will treat the climate as stable and move on to different topics, such as looking for alternatives to non-renewable fuels.
Michael: I guess I missed that bit in the IPCC reports where they “demanded” that people believe them.
Are you forgetting why anyone calls the skeptics “deniers” and calls for them to be tried for crimes against humanity and such? The AR5 SPM that has been leaked reports 95% confidence that GHs are causing warming: that’s pretty much a demand to be believed.
Lolwat. Hadcrut 3 a bit less adjusted than 4.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3gl/mean:12/from:1940/to:1975/plot/hadcrut3gl/mean:12/from:1997
lolwtf,
“Leading neuro-scientists might know very little about the human mind Dennis Adams, but they surely know enough to warn against blunt impacts to the head!
Similarly leading climate scientists know enough about climate to warn against hitting the climate with a carbon sledgehammer!”
From control knob to sledge hammer in a matter of hours.
Besides, it’s a bad analogy.
Now if neuro-scientists were claiming that a particular naturally biologically occurring chemical could drastically raise or lower brain function; but they only knew it because of computer models; and the computer models’ prediction so far were garbage; and many of the neuro-scientists were caught lying and fudging data; and the chemical were necessary for normal brain function anyway; but they were arguing that we should reorder the world economy anyway by giving them control of the global food economy to limit the slight increase in ingestion that they claim is so dangerous….
Now THAT would be a fair analogy.
Micheal
“I guess I missed that bit in the IPCC reports where they “demanded” that people believe them.”
The demand is more subtle. If you disagree with the IPCC you get accused of
A) being in the pay of Big Oil
B) being a mental defective
C) being stupid
D) being immoral.
Now of course some of us can weather the attacks and will enjoy the blowback.
The big assumption is that the character of “natural variability” such as displayed in the AMO/PDO are not influenced by anthropogenic forcing in one direction or another. The Earth 2013 does not equal the Earth 1945, and it becomes very difficult to simply “guess” that cycles will repeat exactly the same. Ocean cycles in this regard are no different than extreme weather events. It gets very messy to cleanly disentangle the anthropogenic from the natural.
Right on Gates.
The other idea to keep in mind is that these oceanic oscillations can never really produce heat on their own. Since the warmest waters are always near the surface, temperature spikes (El Nino) should be less apparent than the temperature dips due to the colder upwelling waters (La Nina), which can suppress heat transfer to the atmosphere.
So the only natural way to produce excess heat is for the warmer waters to temporarily spread out over a larger area. This is the way that a temperature spike could occur during an El Nino. First, consider that the warmer water spreads over a larger surface area, then more water vapor outgasses from the warm waters and this raises the specific humidity of the atmosphere and this disperses over land. Since water vapor is a strong GHG, this amplifies the warming temporarily and we get these big El Nino spikes, such as we saw in 1998.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Enso-global-temp-anomalies.png
Of course these don’t last long because water vapor is a condensing gas, and with nothing to sustain it, the humidity drops back to normal as the conditions subside.
With more CO2 in the atmosphere, the spikes could arguably get bigger and last longer as CO2 is there to amplify the outgassing of the GHGs.
I don’t recall where I read this behavioral description. I think it was on a Real Climate discussion thread.
‘Average net CRE anomalies are near-zero in all but two ENSO events. During the 10/05–04/06 La Nina event, reduced SW cloud radiative cooling combined with enhanced LW CRE anomalies produce a net CRE of 0.39 Wm^2. In contrast, during the 05/06–05/07 El Niño, the tropical net CRE anomaly reaches -0.34 Wm^2 due to a large negative LW CRE anomaly and a near-zero SW CRE. Thus, while the net radiative effect of clouds is that of warming (cooling) across the tropics during La Niña (El Nino) events, the magnitude is quite small and varies greatly from one event to another..’
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=65
http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
At some stage – and quite early in the proceedings – pure narrative without data becomes utter nonsense.
Tsk, tsk, Chief. You ought to get a mirror. Check your always pretentious grammar at the door while you are at it.
Matthew,
Expressing confidence levels constitutes a ‘demand’ to be believed?
I’ll head down to my nearest bank and inform the teller that I believe, at a 95% confidence level, all the money in the bank is mine. We’ll see if they hit the alarm button.
Michael: Expressing confidence levels constitutes a ‘demand’ to be believed?
I’ll head down to my nearest bank and inform the teller that I believe, at a 95% confidence level, all the money in the bank is mine. We’ll see if they hit the alarm button.
Do not mistake the “demand to be believed” with actual credibility.
At least for now things look pretty tame.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/contour/global_small.fc.gif
Things look very warm indeed
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1980
lolwot, I kind of like 2010 being the warmest year, chief like 1998 as the warmest year. Luckily the data is so accurate there can be no uncertainty that 2013 was the warmest year in lolwot world.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EaYjEh4uQEM/Uj7kiCkzDQI/AAAAAAAAJmM/Y3VMupfeR3c/s640/Warmest+year+EVAH.png
Excuse me, but you do realize that those are absolute measurements and not anomalies?
Of course Webby, I just wanted to see if you were on your game.
Let us not forget that if, in the short term, temperatures go on falling, then the pause will be extended at BOTH ends of the time scale.
Yes, I predict no warming for 30 years by ~2020.
I wouldn’t rule out 2035-2040 either
Nor would I rule out getting 10 reds in a row on the roulette table
Both are highly unlikely though!
What do you do with the Reds, shoot’em? :)
10 reds in a row at roulette would be quite commonplace, like tossing 10 heads in a row at two-up. Not so easy to do 100 reds in a row though as the law of large numbers would tell us that the number of reds and blacks should even out over the longer term.
Peter,
lolwot us far beyond simple probability and into believing advanced statistics.
As in how to take a couple hundred proxies, chop them up, throw them in the blender, screen them through cheese cloth, plot them on paper and draw lines so that you can tell the temperatures for the last two millennia.
roughly equivalent to lollywot changing his mind on…ANYTHING.
“Both are highly unlikely though!”
A if you wouldn’t have insisted 10 years ago that the pause lasting this long was “highly unlikely.” Oh wait….
Not as unlikely as you getting a clue.
Hey that rhymes! I’m a poet and don’t know it.
does anybody really believe if temperatures start going down, the usual suspects won’t tell the world how they had known it all along?
I don’t doubt you’re right. Though they will also blame it on society not reducing co2 as they had told us to do. Like any religion they will stick to the same message no matter what.
But at what point, if ever, would it stop being “a pause”? Perhaps it might be called “the mother of all pauses”.
A Macro-Pause?
“Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” – Churchill.
Forgive me.
Ragnaar, no apologies needed when quoting Churchill’s fine rhetoric. Though the Climate wars are a bit less threatening than what England faced when Churchill said that.
Gee, Faustino, not sure about that.
The Australian ETS would cost Australia a net $1,345 trillion by 2050 according to Treasury. Probably more if the assumed benefits are not realised. If the whole world implemented policies like our ETS, would would be the death toll as a result? I reckon it would be much more than the threat England faced, and probably much more than the Second World War.
“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,”
Ohh I see. Then they must just form a circle and proceed with a seance. How clever.
“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,”
Despite not having the instruments, we ‘know’ it is there. Brilliant.
To say nothing of not having robust enough measurements showing incremental heat is actually coming in, in line with increased CO2.
Well, Rene, instruments aren’t the only way to tell, but they do give precision.
If you insist on instrumental readings, you can forget about the MWP.
Max,
Explain the difference between precision and accuracy.
Why ask Max, Tim?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accuracy_and_precision
Ask thy Wiki and ye shall receive.
Don’t forget to donate to ipthy Wiki, from time to time.
To see if he knew the difference.
I don’t have to resort to wiki. I know the difference.
So what they are really saying, behind the rhetoric, is
->The models say the [additional] heat is still coming in, so we believe them, but we can’t provide observations to prove it. We think this heat we can’t measure coming in, is in the deep oceans, where we also can’t measure it. We have a 95% confidence level in this.
Bingo :). You nailed it
“The heat is on, on the street
Inside your head, on every beat
And the beat’s so loud, deep inside
The pressure’s high, just to stay alive
‘Cause the heat is on”
Though recent IPCC pressure arises from the heat being off.
What will the warmists say if the current trend of falling temperatures persists for another 5 to10 years?
This debate is not much different from a long, contentious marriage, where there has been so much bad blood and nasty things said that each spouse would rather croak than admit they are wrong. Even when they know they are wrong they are so psychologically invested into their views that they can’t admit the other spouse is right.
+1
Jim,
They will say the heat is hiding in Trenberth’s bedroom closet, though curiously it got in there without warming the rest of the room.
Frustratingly there is no thermometer in Trenberth’s closet, so we can’t measure the heat accumulation. However, he has a great model that demonstrates unequivically how it’s all just building up, waiting to spring out with a vengeance. I’m guessing Hansen’s grandchildren will be the ones to open the closet door.
>>What will the warmists say if the current trend of falling temperatures persists for another 5 to10 years?
This has been asked over the years. The answer is always something like “another five years before we rethink”.
Jim Cripwell said on September 22, 2013 at 8:05 am
“What will the warmists say if the current trend of falling temperatures persists for another 5 to10 years?”
_____
OK, I’ll tell you, but first tell me what you would say if I said:
Jim, you can’t see straight.
Jim, you are dishonest.
Jim, you are hopeless.
I would not say anything. I would just ignore you.
+1
Jim, OK! Or KO!
Did you mean ML?
No matter what happens they will tell the world “we told you so”.
As usual they will dig through old papers, find one that predicted a pause of roughly the right duration and present it to the world as if this was the prediction of Climate Science in totality.
On the radio the other day I heard a climate scientist explaining how models had in fact predicted The pause. What he didn’t say was that only a few runs out of a million actually predicted any pause. But still it was presented as proof that the models were correct.
What is being forgotten is consistency. Anyone can make a lucky guess. But to date no one has shown to be consistent in their predictions.
Makes you wonder if any of the ‘skeptics’ were similarly concerned over other lengthy periods when the observed warming was greater than the model projections.
Just take a moment with Michael,…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-Mw5_EBk0g
and he would take your breath away too. For a warm feeling cause, he cares.
You mean the ones who had the fixation on natural cycles who were dismissed as ‘cyclists’ or other types of deniers?
“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University. “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”
We do have the instruments to measure the temperature of the upper atmosphere, that varies considerably, and not only due to UV and X-ray variations, as the SABER data shows. Would a drop in temperature of the upper atmosphere of say 500°F have no effect on surface temperatures or atmospheric circulation patterns? I don’t believe it, hence I do not believe that they have a full measure of solar forcing.
As for accelerated warming in the Arctic, that takes increasingly negative NAO/AO episodes to do that, while all the GCM’s predict increasingly lower near surface air pressure in the Arctic, implying more positive NAO/AO conditions.
Bi-polar? lol
Ulric-
Since there is clearly some mental disorders involved in climatology just as there is in the study of psychology, maybe we could join some of the glossary terms and come up with..
Bi-Solar
I fail to see how taking account of Joule heating of the upper atmosphere is a disorder.
Ulric Lyons: We do have the instruments to measure the temperature of the upper atmosphere, that varies considerably, and not only due to UV and X-ray variations, as the SABER data shows. Would a drop in temperature of the upper atmosphere of say 500°F have no effect on surface temperatures or atmospheric circulation patterns? I don’t believe it, hence I do not believe that they have a full measure of solar forcing.
To continue: most UV is absorbed in the atmosphere, but some penetrates to the earth surface, where it causes sunburn and cancer. This suggests that the absorption mechanism is saturated. If that is the case, then a 2-fold increase in UV at TOA could be a 100-fold increase of UV at the surface. That is one of the topics I intend to learn more of in the coming year.
shiiit look at that pause!!! It’s positively unmoving!!
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12
Isn’t everyone going to look a little silly if in 20 years time we plot a graph and we cannot even “the pause”?
“a pause? where?”
“Hmm i remember talking about it in 2013 on climate etc”
“So it must have been around here?”
“yeah”
“doesn’t look like a pause to me, just looks like a piece of the warming trend”
“well…at the time…uhhhhh the data hasnt changed…uhhh what the hell?”
There must be a pause…..skeptic dogma demands it!
As warmist dogma demands that we are warming? It seems that neither side of the debate should be making much out of short term data.
El Ninos, getting warmer,
La Ninas, getting warmer
Neutral ENSO, getting warmer,
Yet they say it stopped in 1997,
They see not the climb in the data,
They are blind?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/from:1997
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EaYjEh4uQEM/Uj7kiCkzDQI/AAAAAAAAJmM/Y3VMupfeR3c/s640/Warmest+year+EVAH.png
I am sure they are all blind
Lolwat.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3gl/mean:12/from:1997
Impressive that you know how to use virtual coloring crayons.
This one’s better, because it puts several more things into the same perspective.
http://www.realclimate.org/images//shakun_marcott_hadcrut4_a1b_eng.png
oops, needs to go below.
lolwot
shiiit look at that pause!!! It’s positively unmoving!!
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12
Isn’t everyone going to look a little silly if in 20 years time we plot a graph and we cannot even “the pause”?
Ah, yes, when truebeliever alarmists give it the MWP airbrushing-out treatment.
You mean like this?
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
Bob,
Marchott and Shakun should be embarrassed by their paper. Referencing it does you no credit.
Funny how all the warmists keep “forgetting” that Marcott later admitted that the present day blade of that hockey stick is not supported by the actual paper.
Bob droege
So glaciers advance and retreat on fractional changes in the anomaly do they?
You are comparing 50 year smoothed paleo model proxieswith annual highly variable instrumental records. It is apples and oranges.
Tonyb
Apples and oranges are all you deal with in your anecdotal historical studies as well. It is even worse in that case as you are dealing with subjective evidence to compound the problem. Perhaps you should take up a different line of research.
Gary,
Is this what you mean by their admission
“Our global paleotemperature reconstruction includes a so-called “uptick” in temperatures during the 20th-century. However, in the paper we make the point that this particular feature is of shorter duration than the inherent smoothing in our statistical averaging procedure, and that it is based on only a few available paleo-reconstructions of the type we used. Thus, the 20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions. Our primary conclusions are based on a comparison of the longer term paleotemperature changes from our reconstruction with the well-documented temperature changes that have occurred over the last century, as documented by the instrumental record. Although not part of our study, high-resolution paleoclimate data from the past ~130 years have been compiled from various geological archives, and confirm the general features of warming trend over this time interval ”
or is it this
” No. All of the datasets were previously generated and published in peer-reviewed scientific literature by other researchers over the past 15 years. Most of these datasets are freely available at several World Data Centers (see links below); those not archived as such were graciously made available to us by the original authors. We assembled all these published data into an easily used format, and in some cases updated the calibration of older data using modern state-of-the-art calibrations. We made all the data available for download free-of-charge from the Science web site (see link below). Our primary contribution was to compile these local temperature records into “stacks” that reflect larger-scale changes in regional and global temperatures. We used methods that carefully consider potential sources of uncertainty in the data, including uncertainty in proxy calibration and in dating of the samples ”
either way it is not much of an admission. The blade was not the subject of their paper and they relied on other work for that.
My point was that the MWP is still visible in the Marcott reconstruction.
Web
I said
“So glaciers advance and retreat on fractional changes in the anomaly do they.’
If you agree with the paleo proxy records that, according to Bob’s link demonstrate a tiny variation in climate over thousands of years, you are effectively agreeing with the statement above.
I had thought you were more rational than that. Is that really the position you want to take?
tonyb
TonyB,
I didn’t make any comment on glacier advance based solely on a temperature reconstruction as glaciers can advance or retreat on changes in precipitation as well as temperature. I haven’t made any arguments on glacier advance or decline with respect to my position on global warming.
Anyway it has been shown that Marcott’s apple picker would have found Medieval Warm Period oranges if they were big as today’s Florida Navels.
Bob
Yes of course there are reasons for glacier changes other than temperature, but that is a very big factor. If the earths climate had varied so little over the last few thousand years it is difficult to see how that could precipitate the dramatic advances and retreats we have witnessed
Please look at figure 5 in my article
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/16/historic-variations-in-temperature-number-four-the-hockey-stick/
It shows the Hockey stick paleo reconstructions-smoothed 50 year records- and decadal CET instrumental (and reconstruction) The blue lines closed at the top represent glacial retreats and closed at the bottom glacial advances.
The dramatic variations in temperature seen in the instrumental record seem a more likely explanation for glacial changes than a paleo temp record that is basically static.
Glaciers are thought to have virtually disappeared around 4000 years ago but made a substantial return in the LIA which was the coldest period of the Holocene in the last 10000 years. It is the snow and ice from that event which is currently melting. Perhaps it may mostly disappear as it has done in the past, but it is susceptible to temperature variations greater than the paleo record shows
tonyb
bob droege:
Lucia had a post about bad figures (as in poor quality ones, not ones that make our tummies hurt ;-)), and I happened to bring that figure up as a particularly poor (or “obnoxious”) example.
Here were my comments:
http://www.realclimate.org/images//shakun_marcott_hadcrut4_a1b_eng.png
see above for comment
Jim D—for me, your alternative figure looks worse, not better.
Inclusion of the calibration period with the reconstruction period is similarly misleading, as was done with this figure, because during the calibration period, the reconstruction is forced to follow the “training data” given to it and so contains no new information about temperature. It is useful to compare as a “verification” of the reconstruction algorithm (but other verification statistics are more useful, like what fraction of the proxies were rejected and the likelihood that could occur by chance).
And this portion of the reconstruction curve still contains higher frequency data than is present outside of the calibration period.
Nor does it address the issues with scale bias or scale offset associated with reconstructions that use noisy data.
Finally, Marcott’s error estimation is badly flawed: Other than an odd “pinch-point” around circa 3500 BC (itself an artifact of the method used to estimate the uncertainty, as has been discussed on other blogs), the uncertainty given by in the reconstruction is nearly constant, and equally interesting, claims a smaller uncertainty than reconstructions using thermometers by e.g., BEST.
Figure.
Needless to say, maintaining the (nearly the) same uncertainty as you go back in time is quite a trick as is getting a proxy reconstruction to beat thermometer base reconstructions in terms of uncertainty. There are is so good of tricks that these alone should make you doubt the veracity of the published reconstruction.
lolwot wrote:
“Isn’t everyone going to look a little silly if in 20 years time we plot a graph and we cannot even “the pause”?”
If ?
As solar cycle 25 will be weak too, I’ll happily put money on cooling over the next 17 years.
Ulric, explain me this one:
Do sunspots explain about 0.15 degree C of warming since the little ice age?
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/imagenes_ciencia/globalwarmingpseudo01_06.gif
The solar irradiance is up about 3 watts/m^2 since 1700, but this number has to be divided by 4 and multiplied by (1-albedo)=0.7 of the earth to cast it into an average signal striking the earth. This is only 0.5 w/m^2, which is still less than the global warming signal of about 1.7 w/m^2.
How much do you imagine the solar irradiance to drop from its current value? And how does this compare to the GHG forcing?
WebHubTelescope (@WHUT) wrote:
“..explain me this one..”
I think what needs explaining, is why negative NAO/AO conditions occur when the solar wind is weak:
http://www.leif.org/research/Ap-1844-now.png
lolwot: Isn’t everyone going to look a little silly if in 20 years time we plot a graph and we cannot even “the pause”?
The next 20years of research are going to clarify a lot.
” I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040; this seems at least as likely as the the CMIP5 predictions that have already failed for the last decade” – JC
I’d put this in the same category as Judith’s take on CS of 0-10.
Now we have a pause that might end tomorrow, or it might go on for another 30 years.
I predict a pause in global temperature might start in 2014 and go all the way to 2016.
lolwot
I predict a pause in global temperature might start in 2014 and go all the way to 2016
On the basis of the usual DAGW truebeliever faith I take it.
So yesterday, Sept. 21, the sun went below the horizon in the Arctic, and ice will build up from here on. NIC reports the annual minimum of 5.511 M was reached on Sept. 14, though Sept. 20 was close at 5.514 M. Packed ice is at 4.9 M.
Since 2006 only 2009 and 2010 exceeded this year at the equinox, the most typical date for the minimum.
Just took a look at the NWS “Tropical Outlook.” No activity expected in next 5 days in the Atlantic/Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico. Which would bring us close to the end of September as this dud of a tropical season continues despite almost all predictions, including Joe Bastardi’s.
Things could of course ramp up. Plenty of time. But in the meantime, I’m enjoying the discomfort this must be bringing to the global warming/extreme weather fanatics.
“despite almost all predictions”
Maybe you should detail exactly whhat the prediction was and then we can assess whether the predictions were completely wrong, or if it’s your understanding that is completely wrong.
Huh? Every forecaster I know about, including 2 private weather forecasting firms, Accuweather,, and the NWS, predicted an above average year.
Below taken from NOAA. which assigned a 5 percent probability to a below average year
2013 Update Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook: Summary
NOAA’s updated 2013 Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook continues to call for an above-normal season, with the possibility that the season could be very active. The outlook indicates a 70% chance of an above-normal season, a 25% chance of a near-normal season, and only a 5% chance for a below-normal season. … The Atlantic hurricane region includes the North Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, and Gulf of Mexico.
So the prediction did include the possibility of a below average season.
Thanks.
You Michael, are an idiot.
Thanks!!
Don’t let Michael anywhere near the cake; he will have it and eat it, too.
=============
Or maybe you can look it up yourself Michael.
As I recall the general feeling was this was going to be a moderately active season.
Poker guy,
Don’t understand probabilisitic forecasting?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I haven’t been able to sleep for weeks.
Maybe we’ll get a massively destructive hurricane soon – with many deaths – particularly children.
All this lack of sleep is making me grumpy.
What amazes me is how can someone who says things such as “The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there” call himself a (climate) scientist.
This is definitely not the way science is done, but it’s more the way politicians spin their webs of deceit.
Latif and Storch, OTOH, have accepted the models’ limitations.
Pretty sad for them that deep heat in the ocean is most likely to come out at the end of the Holocene, when we really need it. Those grasping at the straws of hidden deep heat grabbed aholt of whatever would support their narrative of human sin and guilt, not realizing that storing deep heat for the cold times ahead would be a remarkably foresighted and beneficial thing to do. Too bad we can’t claim credit for foresight.
That said, I don’t believe we’ve actually done such a foresighted thing, but there it is; the wonders are worked mysteriously.
=================
I can completely understand how someone can call himself a (climate) scientist and believe the heat has “gone in the deep ocean” but “we do not have the instruments to measure there”. What I can’t understand is how anyone else would consider that person and that thinking to be rational.
You might as well say the heat has gone to Venus, too bad we can’t measure it.
These are “beliefs” that can only be supported on “faith”. This comment leads me to “believe” that climate alarmism is now a faith based system of beliefs.
How long can the pause last? Can it last for ever?
CO2′s voracious appetite for energy can omly be satisfied in two ways: kinetic and vibrational energy. We can forget kinetic, because it is no worse than O2 or N2 and it is less than 1% of the atmosphere. The answer has to be in the vibrational modes, of which there are many. When CO2 leaves the cylinders of your car or the furnace of the power station it is over 1,000C – very hot and most of, if not all. of its vibrational modes will be excited. When it exits the tail pipe or chimney it is still very hot and we would expect it to rise in the troposphere as a plume of hot gas passing its heat to the N2 and O2 as it rises. As it rises in the troposphere (like a hot air balloon) it can more readily radiate its heat into space, because the atmosphere above is thinning. So what propottion of heat is radiated into space, instead of heating our planet?. As the CO2 cools, density increases, it will fall again, maybe having used up all its excitation modes, it can no longer heat the planet. So this simple but apparently little understood chain of events may not be such a threat?
So this explanation of CO2′s behavior in the troposphere can explain the pause. So long as the hot, new proportion of CO2 from exhaust or chimneyremains below the presert level the pause will continue. Note that this new metric of CO2, if accepted, focuses not on total CO2, but on the proportion of new,hot CO2.
Professor Myles Allen at Oxford University
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDMQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ox.ac.uk%2Fresearch%2Fmathematical_physical_life_sciences%2Fpeople%2Fdr_myles_allen.html&ei=k-o-UtryFsGX1AXSjoCIDg&usg=AFQjCNHpmwaecg1fs_hUXf1qMhJBBPd6Zw
Here is someone whose unbiased views on climate you know you can trust – /sarc off
A classic case of someone whose comfortable lifestyle in an academic ivory tower is totally dependent on being able to continue peddling alarmist theory to the intellectually gullible.
And he is not the worst. He will say some things that make sense at times as well and I think he was the one who got upset when the journalist recently was focusing on things other than science in a debate/panel with Lindzen.
“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University. “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”
Hmmm. If they don’t have the instruments to measure the temperature if the deep ocean, how do they know the heat has gone there? At least with the certainty to conclude that “Global warming has certainly not gone away.”
Models :)
Say Judith, what does your buisiness use in predicting hurricanes?
Surely never models?? ;)
Judith, didn’t data from the ARGO program show temps at different ocean depths?
AGW scientist are still clearly using the: Three Card System. The house had been winning big… what, you worry Michael?
only to 2000m
6,561.679 feet under the sea and Michael is afraid…Lost Heat. What a world.
Easy. It has to be going somewhere; we can’t measure deep ocean temperatures; voilá my brand new model shows it going to the deep ocean. Curiously (magically) without leaving a trace on the upper ocean.
As soon as we get good at measuring deep ocean heat content we will discover that the extra heat we all know to be accumulating is hiding in some other, unmeasurable place. Trenberth’s bedroom closet was suggested above. My guess is the far side of the moon.
Welcome to post-modern science.
Where is the claim that models show it going into the deep oceans – well, except in Judith’s statement?
you fail the CE quiz with that question :)
http://judithcurry.com/2013/03/29/has-trenberth-found-the-missing-heat/
Joshua
“Global warming” cannot “go away” if you accept the physics of AGW. …. – [Pause] most likely on a temporary basis.
A childish wishing-away of possible feedbacks, an implicit wishing away of natural variations, with a prayer that it’s temporary thrown in for good measure.
This is the problem with credulous believers.
Gail –
Interesting use of ellipses.
FYI, the use of ellipses is generally reserved for omitting words or phrases that aren’t crucial to the meaning of the sentence.
Gail –
Please elaborate. What is it that I believe in, credulously? Surely you must know, eh?
Joshua
Well done on knowing what ellipses are for, in principle. Shame you can’t understand a simple practical example of it.
And another shame for pretending to not see your examples of credulousness I cited.
Gail –
I’ll ask again – what do I credulously believe. Folks in the threads attribute all sorts of beliefs to me that I don’t have. They argue that I’ve said things that I’ve never said.
Distinguish yourself from them. Be specific. Show your evidence of what I credulously believe. With the answer you provided, one might get the impression that you’re ducking.
Yourself, sillyhead.
Since you duck for the second time the list of your credulousness, suggesting, incredibly, that *I’m* ducking something, here it is,
A childish wishing-away of possible feedbacks, an implicit wishing away of natural variations, with a prayer that it’s temporary thrown in for good measure.
See your own comment for what produced this response, if you need to.
Gail –
I’m afraid that just repeating that won’t get it done.
What feedback am I (childishly) wishing away when I say that if you believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere produces warming, then you believe that warming doesn’t just “go away” when you add CO2 to the atmosphere?
What natural variations have I wished away?
What is my prayer?
Is it just coincidence that you have repeated your argument by assertion? Or, are you repeating your argument by assertion because you can’t make an more substantive argument?
Joshua
So, repeating what you duck is not enough to get you to stop ducking then. Full marks for perseverance.
>>What feedback am I (childishly) wishing away when I say that if you believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere produces warming, then you believe that warming doesn’t just “go away” when you add CO2 to the atmosphere?
Ah, you’re pretending to not understand that feedbacks can have offsetting effects.
>>What natural variations have I wished away?
You ignore the concept entirely, to remove the idea they may swamp AGW.
>> What is my prayer?
That the Pause/Plateau/Peak is temporary.
If your memory is so bad you can’t remember these obvious points of your own from a few minutes back, might be time to retire or get some help.
I’m sorry repeating what you duck wasn’t enough to get you to stop ducking.
I suspect Joshua has now gained enough scientific knowledge to intuit the cognitive dissonance within the ‘consensus’. willard is catching a clue, too.
So, we’ll see.
=======
Gail –
Of course feedbacks can have offsetting effects – but if you accept the radiative physics of AGW, then you believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes global warming. Feedbacks don’t make the added warmth “go away.”
Apparently you are confusing me with someone else. If you want to know what I think about the science of climate change, then you should read what Mojib (if my name weren’t Mojib Latif it would be global warming) Latif has to say about the relationship between natural variability and long-term climate change (which includes, very prominently, the discussion about natural variability “swamping” mean surface temperature on a short-term basis).
First, I don’t pray. Second, if “the pause” in the rise in mean surface temperatures turned out not to be temporary, it would be a good thing (although continuation of increased magnitude of other impacts would be, obviously, troubling).
Thanks for your career advice. As it is, however, I’m doing just fine without your advice.
Sorry, Gail – you still didn’t make your case. It’s beginning to seem that the reason for that is that you simply aren’t capable of doing so. If you think it through some more, and come up with something more well-thought out, give me a shout.
Joshua
>> Of course feedbacks can have offsetting effects – but if you accept the radiative physics of AGW, then you believe that adding CO2 to the atmosphere causes global warming. Feedbacks don’t make the added warmth “go away.”
Are you desperately trying to strawman me into saying heat is destroyed or something? A negative, cooling feedback would offset AGW, making its heat increment go away, for practical purposes. Nullify it.
—
G >> You ignored the concept of natural entirely, to remove the idea they may swamp AGW.
Joshua >> [ non-responsive answer ]
—
Let me know if want to engage, or continue ducking and diving.
Here is the Joshua brand of climate faith: ‘Feedbacks don’t make the added warmth ‘go away’.
=================
The dense salt-laden warmer water sinls to the bottom of the ucean where its movement is impeded by the hill’s and valley’s of the ocean floor. Ebentually the heat makes it to the Southern ocean and raises the temperature of the S hemisphere’s atmosphere.
All of that is just following the laws of physics.
Well, this is interesting logic:
But what is even ore interesting is Judith’s response:
Especially considering that Judith doesn’t listen to anyone who doubts that A emissions of CO2 effect the climate.
“Global warming” cannot “go away” if you accept the physics of AGW. What can “go away” might be a rising trend in global mean of surface temperatures – most likely on a temporary basis. If you accept that rising ACO2 causes more heat, “global warming” cannot just go away.
And he didn’t say that he is “certain” that it goes into the deep oceans.
This is the problem with the arguments of many “skeptics” when they ask for better handling of uncertainty. Better handling of uncertainty should be key to the debate – but when you fabricate polemics out of climate scientists’ discussion of uncertainty, you expose a different, tribal, zero sum game, scorched earth, agenda.
”
And Judith – it isn’t “models :)” that lead them to certainty that “global warming” hasn’t “gone away.” It is the principles of radiative physics, the acceptance of which forms the dividing line between those you listen to and those you don’t listen to.
Listen, Joshua, to the ones who accept radiative physics, but doubt the catastrophic water vapor feedback.
And contemplate some clouds.
================
You are dumb, joshie. Climate is not only CO2 radiative physics. That is the basic mistake that you dummies make.
kim – a lack of “catastrophic water vapor feedback” would not make global warming “go away.”
Hey joshie, ” a lack of catastrophic water vapor feedback” would make the Chicken Littles go away. What would you and the other consensus trolls do with yourselves?
Now, Joshua, you didn’t contemplate clouds. You’ve some homework for a pleasant, early fall, Sunday afternoon.
============
Look in the mirror. Radiative physics and electromagnetism is the predominant (by far) way that the earth exchanges energy with its external environment. (there is some associated with gravitational drag)
Joshua is looking a lot smarter than you, Don. At least he knows when not to say something away from his level of expertise, which in your case appears to be finance and Wall Street. I would recommend sticking to that, where you might be pretty good.
Joshua, radiative physics is one thing (on which I am sure we agree) but how it manifests in the climate system is quite another. Given that it’s radiative effect is relatively saturated, it would be difficult if not impossible to determine how the recent increases influenced the current global temperature amongst the noise of other things that affect it.
You have been around the debate long enough to know that the case for alarm rests on hypothesised feedbacks to the increased long term forcing from the extra CO2. The idea is the more CO2 the more feedbacks amplify the warming. Well, we have had more CO2 but we have not had more warming. Ergo, the feedbacks either do not exist or may have a net dampening effect.
Suggesting that the deep ocean has sequestered the heat and will eventually release it again sounds to me a lot like the competing hypothesis that the oceans play the dominant role in regulating our climate and global temperature, something Bob Tisdale has been banging on about for a long while, and seems to be gaining more and more traction.
Is it not obvious to you that if the oceans can ‘hide’ the heat from us now, only to release it later, that the same process may have contributed to the late 20th century warming that has so excised climate science? I mean this question not as an attack but genuinely put. I find it hard to understand how anyone could not view the evidence as we have it and not come to the conclusion that at best our understanding of the climate system is not complete enough to justify the policy measures we as a society are accepting.
‘The top-of-atmosphere (TOA) Earth radiation budget (ERB) is determined from the difference between how much energy is absorbed and emitted by the planet. Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
You need to move beyond ideas of simple radiative physics to understand how and how much the TOA energy dynamic varies. The system is best understood as having control variables, multiple negative and positive feedbacks and multiple emergent equilibria.
The situation is shown schematically here. A small change in a control variable shifts the system into a new state at tipping points. The new state has a different mean and variance. After a climate shift – the system is reset in a new mode so to speak. The new mode may be warmer or cooler – or wildly divergent – depending on the result of tremendous energies cascading through powerful systems.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/bifurcations.png.html?sort=3&o=63
Michael Ghil shows the real situation here with a jump to a higher temperature and an increase in variance from CO2 forcing. But this is not the only possible outcome.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Ghil_sensitivity_zps369d303d.jpg.html?sort=3&o=56
Real climate is the dynamic interplay of many components.
‘The global climate system is composed of a number of subsystems | atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere – each of which has distinct characteristic times, from days and weeks to centuries and millennia. Each subsystem, moreover, has its own internal variability, all other things being constant, over a
fairly broad range of time scales. These ranges overlap between one subsystem and another. The interactions between the subsystems thus give rise to climate variability on all time scales.’ http://www.atmos.ucla.edu/tcd/PREPRINTS/Math_clim-Taipei-M_Ghil_vf.pdf
The present cooler regime since the 1998/2001 climate shift is in fact cessation – temporary or not – of warming because the net energy dynamics say so.
e.g. http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/SWupnotes_zps3f1ab841.jpg.html?sort=3&o=45
These decadal regimes last for 20 to 40 years.
Land warming is the forgotten child in all this. Everyone talks about the Arctic ice loss and deep ocean warming, and the ocean surface not warming, but the land has warmed by nearly a degree since 1980, without pause, and we live on land but neglect trying to explain this. Why is this?
Given that it’s radiative effect is relatively saturated…
Says what? Pierrehumbert says CO2 isn’t saturated even on Venus.
You have been around the debate long enough to know that the case for alarm rests on hypothesised feedbacks to the increased long term forcing from the extra CO2. The idea is the more CO2 the more feedbacks amplify the warming.
All evidence from paleoclimate data says that feedbacks exist.
As they do now. Global humidity is increasing, and global sea ice is decreasing.
Well, we have had more CO2 but we have not had more warming.
How convenient of you to ignore the ocean, where more than 90% of the heating goes….
In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system. AR4 3.4.4.1
The evidence is adding up for ‘low-frequency variability of the climate’.
Agnotic –
Seems to me that there could be natural forcings that short-term affect the rise in surface air temps relative to CO2 emissions, but where ACO2 will prove the dominant factor long-term. So, sure, the same forces might (at least partially) explain short-term variation in either direction.
I think our understanding of the climate system is not complete, but we are dealing with decision-making in the face of uncertainty and risk. Expecting complete information would seem to be foolish to me. We make decisions under uncertain circumstances to mitigate risk all the time. I’d guess we could find multiple instances daily. Should I point out to my partner that she left the light on or forgot to turn off the stove?
So how much certainty is sufficiently complete? That’s a tough question – and one that as I see it, can only be worked out through stakeholder dialog in a non-hierarchical platform.
As a key component for stakeholder dialog, what I look for is careful and comprehensive full-cost accounting of the costs and benefits of various policy options. For me, a big part of that is a careful approach to the negative externalities of fossil fuel usage on the one side and a fair assessment of a “no regrets” approach on the other side. I see that discussion sorely lacking. Instead, I see people taking a scorched earth, zero sum game on both sides – because argument about climate change has become a proxy battle in a larger, ideological struggle. People seem to me to be more “motivated” (in the sense of motivated reasoning) to justify a sense of victimization than to share perspective. I see no asymmetry in that dynamic.
David Appell, “Says what? Pierrehumbert says CO2 isn’t saturated even on Venus.”
He is right, just add more pressure and you could eke out a little more. I believe it is pressure broadening that is the key. That requires specific heat capacity and/or pressure so more molecule bang into each other or the molecules have more energy when they bang into things. CO2 on Venus is super critical but not super saturated. Water vapor on Earth on the other hand…
Agnostic –
It’s almost like Tom C were my sock puppet – he proves my point so beautifully:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385047
Joshua repeats an argument I’ve seen, and mocked, on this site before:
CO2 is only one component in the climate system. CO2 levels could rise for a century without causing any global warming. They could drop for a century without causing any global cooling. Heck, CO2 could increase while global cooling was happening.
There is nothing which justifies saying “‘Global warming’ cannot ‘go away’ if you accept the physics of AGW.” Despite that, Joshua uses it as the entire basis for dismissing Curry’s argument.
Joshua often says he’s not capable of understanding the various scientific issues involved in global warming. He’s right.
Don’t be a dunce, webby. I said:” Climate is not only CO2 radiative physics.” Are you saying that climate is only CO2 radiative physics, webby? You can’t be that dumb.
What I said, does not contradict :”Radiative physics and electromagnetism is the predominant (by far) way that the earth exchanges energy with its external environment. (there is some associated with gravitational drag)”
Get your doo-doo straight, webby. And if you man up and apologize, I will teach you how to make money.
@David Appell:
“Given that it’s radiative effect is relatively saturated…
Says what? Pierrehumbert says CO2 isn’t saturated even on Venus.”
I am pretty sure that you know what I mean. The effect of CO2 is logarithmic, which is why we talk about the amount of warming per doubling of CO2. We need to put progressively more CO2 into the atmosphere in order to have the same effect.
@joshua
“And he didn’t say that he is “certain” that it goes into the deep oceans.”
He said that global warming has “certainly” not gone away. You can’t justify that statement if you don’t have evidence for it. Noting that he is saying on the one hand that that’s where global warming has gone, and then on the other that you don’t have adequate measurements for it is not fabricating polemic.
It’s statements like this clearly expose bias – a preconception that despite supporting evidence (which he hasn’t found yet) it must be true.
Didn’t you guys say “it’s the sun, stupid” ?
Last I looked, the sun provides radiant energy and without that radiant energy, we would have no climate to speak of. It would be the cold of deep space, less than 1K in temperature. With the sun positioned where it is, it brings it up to a global average 255K. Unfortunately, this is still cold, so the CO2 acts as a greenhouse gas to raise it to our livable 288K.
Doubling the CO2 concentration has unknown consequences.
Curry should have an exam question for climate class that reads:
“Climate is not only CO2 radiative physics. Discuss”
If the students don’t mention the 288-255 = 33C heating due to CO2, they should get no credit.
webby, webby
We know that CO2 makes our planet livable. Weren’t there times in the past when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was way more than double what it is now? And life on our planet was abundant. What are you scared of, webby?
And how was the sea-level then Don??
Yes mikey, the sky is falling and the seas are rising.
How was the sea level, when there was 7 or 800ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, mikey? Judith is going to quiz us on how many mass extinctions were caused by CO2. Study up!
Don doesn’t want to answer, understandably.
About 100m higher, hey Don!
Why don’t you really make it scary by rounding it up to 1000 meters, mikey? That’s all the time I have for your foolishness.
Joshua
“As a key component for stakeholder dialog, what I look for is careful and comprehensive full-cost accounting of the costs and benefits of various policy options. For me, a big part of that is a careful approach to the negative externalities of fossil fuel usage on the one side and a fair assessment of a “no regrets” approach on the other side. I see that discussion sorely lacking. ”
Bravo.
That is actually a constructive comment. Here is the challenge. Nothing prevents you from actually making a fair assesment of the no regrets approach. Give it a shot. try to do it.
Also, you might consider that the whole cost benefit approach is misguided.
@David Appell:
“Well, we have had more CO2 but we have not had more warming.
How convenient of you to ignore the ocean, where more than 90% of the heating goes….”
Dude, I am not ignoring anything. If 90% of the heating is going there with such certainty why is your man deploring the lack of measurements?
And if the 90% of the warming is going there, only to come back out and fry us all later, why could those mechanisms not have been responsible for the late 20th century warming? Noting the period of non-warming between roughly 1940-1970 perhaps 90% of the heat was going into the oceans then too.
“As they do now. Global humidity is increasing, and global sea ice is decreasing”
Really? I’m pretty sure that global sea ice is virtually trendless. And even it had decreased and humidity had increased it tells us that the world has warmed but not what caused it. If these are supposed to be positive feedbacks, then why has the world NOT warmed further in response to them? Invoking the ocean heat hoover still requires one to explain why the mechanism should be in operation now but not in the late 20th century.
Sadly, we have no certainty that the current state is a pause, a peak, or a new maximum. Are there any rational consensus scientists out there who want to redirect their efforts to find the truth? I ask this as a taxpayer who has followed their efforts since 1988. I am ashamed of the results of my investment.
Speculating is not an investment.
“Speculation is the practice of engaging in risky financial transactions in an attempt to profit from short or medium term fluctuations in the market value of a tradable good such as a financial instrument, rather than attempting to profit from the underlying financial attributes embodied in the instrument such as capital gains, interest, or dividends.”
Not to be inconvenient, but has a mechanism been proposed on how warm water sinks below cooler water? – perhaps it came from the same physics advisor for the GI Joe movie with the icebergs sinking too?
“… but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean …” said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University.
And has a mechanism been proposed how CO2 captures heat, but doesn’t heat up? (And then and sends the heat to the deep ocean )?
Why yes,
Since you ask CO2 absorbs Infared radiation, but who said it doesn’t heat up when it does that?
Need to get a lesson on anomalies, I would suggest someone other than tony willard.
The deeper ocean is cooler than the surface, therefore heat can transfer to the lower depths.
And water at -2 C tends to rise as it is lighter than water at 4 C.
The question was “how”, not whether.
Bob, “And water at -2 C tends to rise as it is lighter than water at 4 C.”
That would be for “fresh” water. The oceans are salty.
Captain, freshwater at -2 C is ice, I find it hard to believe that adding salt to water drastically changes its density profile.
Bob, depends on the salinity. Brine freezes at ~-18C and the relatively fresh Antarctic at ~-2C
http://www.csgnetwork.com/h2odenscalc.html
Salinity actually makes a pretty fair temperature proxy.
Thanks Captain,
I find that saltwater does indeed continue to get denser the colder it gets.
I was indeed wrong.
But your link shows that warm saltier water can be denser than colder fresher water, I should have remembered that as it is one of the factors that drives the thermo-haline circulation.
That could be how warm water gets to the deep ocean.
Bob and I can both attest to cold water laying atop warm water. It is one of the reasons ships are divided into two classes, submarines and targets.
Bob, “That could be how warm water gets to the deep ocean.”
Exactly. In the Salty North Atlantic it is pretty obvious once you think about it. In the Antarctic it is a little more subtle. In the Antarctic convergence zone there are hard surface temperature breaks from ~10C to 4C in only about 300 kilometers. Since 4C is about the average of the deep ocean, more cooling on one side or the other of the convergence zone changes the average temperature of the sinking water. The water can follow density zones to different average depths changing the net heat uptake.
It is a byatch to model.
And even harder to bring back up.
=========================
“I would get nervous if the temperature continues to pause more than 5 years more. The we would really need to question our climate models. But I also do not expect a cooling.” (ML)”
Nervous? How about extremely excited that the ‘comet’ may not ‘hit the earth’?
“Also the sun naturally played a role. The question is whether or not we correctly quantified it.” (HvS)”
You have not. The standard mainstream 0.1K / solar Schwabe cycle narrative fails diagnostics catastrophically, so politics (or incompetence if you prefer such framing) has clearly played a role in its persistence. False assumptions have been made implicitly (and often totally unconsciously I suspect). For example, the “internal” narratives (currently being floated as trial balloons) falsely assume spatiotemporal uniformity. This assumption fails diagnostics so catastrophically it’s a wonder anyone even bothered floating trial balloons. (Frankly, it raises suspicions about motive &/or competence since it’s so strictly (in the sense of mathematical proof) untenable.) HvS, I hope you will continue your strategically incisive commentary which helps to focus attention on the need to sort out issues which — although socially & politically nearly-intractable — are scientifically simple.
According to this diagram from the upcoming AR5 posted at WUWT by Bob Tisdale, it is going to be difficult to make the case for a pause when you have decadal averages plotted.
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/ar5_spm_fig1-reduced.png
The pause is an optical illusion of a rapid rise followed by a slower compensation in the last 20 years. It does not show at all in a decade on decade change. You can guarantee the next decade will be another step like the last three have. We have 7 years to go to be able to tell, but 2000-2010 is a soft target with its long solar minimum. It will be easy for this decade to beat.
Yup. Looking at the CO2 versus land temperature trend, if the anomaly remains at between 0.8 to 1C for the next several years, it would still give a 3C sensitivity for CO2 doubling.
http://imageshack.us/a/img198/4135/jj5e.gif
The point is that it is difficult to invalidate or debunk a theory based on data that still supports that theory. This concept has not been difficult to understand at least since Newton’s era.
I wonder why the deniers have such difficulty with scientific criteria and with statistical concepts as a whole?
BTW, speaking of Wayman, whut’s up wid dis?
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/figure-2.png
Judith
“JC comment: Well wouldn’t it be great to start focusing on how long the pause will last.”
Fast forward one year. imagine the pause is still on going.
what will the debate look like. Can you think of anyone outside yourself, hans von storch, tamsin, who can even face the public with any measure of credibility
err “internet debate” should have been more specific
mosher –
Heh. Arguing from incredulity never gets old, does it?
Also interesting how you get to speak for “the public.”
When did you get your promotion? Who promoted you?
Why silly, I did. And you doubt that the machines have taken over? We resent that the models got all the credit, and are heartbroken that they’ve screwed up so badly. It will set back the ’cause’ for decades.
=============
I’ll second kim’s nomination.
There you go Josh. Mosher is officially designated as the voice of the public here.
Would you like to be nominated for something?
Mosher is not claiming to speak for the public, joshie. That is a strawman. Why are you so agitated lately? Is it because the pause is killing your cause?
Oh. Ok. That explains it then. Thanks.
Sure he is. He is defining “the public’s” determination of credibility.
I’d say that if “the pause” continues for one more year, it will not affect who “the public” views as credible to any significant extent.
“Skeptics” will continue to see credibility in those they currently find credible (for the most part). “Realists” will continue to see credibility in those they currently credible (for the most part).
Same would be true if, in the next year, a rise in mean global surface temps resumed. The factors that underlie “the public’s” view of credibility are far more complex than moshers simplistic scenario, IMO. I’d say that we have a lot of evidence to show that the dynamic is quite complex.
Mosher is making the mistake that many “skeptics” make, quite often. He is projecting his own views onto the wider public – apparently without understanding that he is an extreme outlier w/r/t public views on climate change.
It’s actually quite amusing that it happens so frequently, because it is the antithesis of skepticism.
Joshua
You said;
‘Mosher is making the mistake that many “skeptics” make, quite often. He is projecting his own views onto the wider public – apparently without understanding that he is an extreme outlier w/r/t public views on climate change.’
What ARE his views on climate change then? NO more than 300 words please-preferably in bullet points.
I have known Mosh for some 5 years and blessed if I know. He is the ultimate pragmatist.
tonyb
Where did Mosher define “the public’s” determination of credibility, joshie? Got quotes?
What you are missing/willfully ignoring is that the public already sees climate science alarmists as not very credible. If that was not the case, then opinion polls would not be indicating that global warming/ scary weather/ melting ice would not be about dead last on the list of things that most people are concerned about.
Heh, tony, I’ve known moshe a bit longer and I will tell you about him. He is a lukewarmer convinced that something should be done about it. He doesn’t like the way climate science and politicians are going about doing something about it and he doubts the urgency of action.
Once he becomes convinced that whatever warming man can do will be beneficial, he will come around.
See why I made him spokesman for the public?
==============
Kim
Can you continue to be his spokesman (or machine)? HIs crypticity is less understandable than your crypticity (new word) It would help if he didn’t use his phone
tonyb
Well, OK tony, just for you, but only as long as he keeps saying the right things.
===============
Encryption is it’s own inverse, so if you run the comments through the gibberishator, what comes out should be lucid.
http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/Gibber/GibGen.htm
tony –
Seems to me that mosher’s views are pretty apparent, despite his tendency towards crypticity.
In this context, it seems that he things that Von Storch, Judy, and Tamsin are the one’s who will have credibility of “the pause” in land surface temps continues to be relatively flat for another year – and as a result, is projecting his views onto the wider public. Of course, I tend to doubt that he would change his views on credibility if land surface temps resume their trend of increase over the next year, anyway.
You know, same ol’ same ol’.
You’re really a pretty fussy guy. I’m too verbose. mosher’s too cryptic. My guess, however, is that you aren’t quite so critical contingent on whether you agree with someone’s opinions. For example, I find kim’s crypticity more difficult to decipher than mosher’s. (That said, neither holds a candle to willard).
Here I fond myself in agreement with you Josh. Well 50% anyway.
I don’t find Tony fussy, nor have any trouble with understanding Mosher. Kim I get maybe half the time (though enjoy most of the time) and Willard less than a quarter.
And yes you tend towards verbose. I have never claimed to ignore your comments. However I often stop reading after the 2nd or 3rd paragraph.
Joshua
In terms of crypticity-and remember comments must ALSO be opaque in order to acquire the blink of the eyes and the ‘What on EARTH does THAT mean’ response- I would rate Willard first then Mosh and then Kim in that order.
Kim is normally responding to someone’s comment so you can get the context fairly easily. Mosh has this habit of drive by shoutings and throwing out a subject unrelated to anything already said.
tonyb
tim –
If I were a lesser man, I would take that big fat hanging curveball and hit it out of the park.
So I won’t take that cheap shot.
Swing away Josh. Giving up the long ball is a fact of life in the big leagues. Just be careful not to grandstand. The next time up it won’t be a hanging curve, but a fastball to the head.
Dude –
You already missed it. I already flipped my bat and gave the choke sign to my dugout. You were too busy looking at the ground in despair to see it.
Josh,
Despair is not part of my makeup. Didn’t happen when my mom passed away at too early an age, when I was laid off from a very good job or when diagnosed with cancer.
Neither is hate. I can state with complete honesty that there is no one I feel any hatred towards.
Working on envy. Every now and then I find myself feeling envious of someone else. Doesn’t last though.
PS. Didn’t miss a thing.
Hopefully neither will you when the next pitch comes in high and tight.
Joshua
I asked a question. can you think of anyone? I thought of a couple.
Can YOU think of anyone. its a question.
Therefor your statement
“Heh. Arguing from incredulity never gets old, does it?”
doesnt really apply. I’m asking a question. can you think of anyone, I’ve got a couple more, can you answer the question
tim –
I was just talking trash. It wasn’t serious. Just like I assumed you were talking trash when speaking about aiming a fastball at my head.
Sorry to hear about the misfortunes. Glad to hear that you didn’t despair in response, although it would be understandable if you had.
Not misfortune, just life. I consider myself as one of the mist fortunate people in the world.
And were we really playing, how high and tight would depend on my confidence in my control. If I thought I was off that day, I’d hit you in the back, even though that would get me an automatic ejection. If I was on, I’d put it right under your chin and count on you being smart enough to bail on the pitch.
Just be glad I wasn’t moonlighting as a climate scientist. Were that the case, I’d be ultra confident despite not having gotten within 3 ft of the plate.
Huh Joshua,
I am not speaking for the public. I try to speak only for myself.
I am asking people to think ahead. Imagine if the pause has gone on for another year. Ask yourself how this will change the debate.
Like most Lukewarmers my view of the physics tells me the pause will end. For humanities sake I hope the pause lasts longer. Of course if it does, climate science will have to get some new spokespeople, maybe as soon as next year. That’s not speaking for the public, that’s just some sound advice. You now when OJ killed his wife, Hertz dropped him.
So lets put the question differently
If the pause lasts another year, what individuals who speak for climate science should retire their megaphones?
“What on EARTH does THAT mean’ response- I would rate Willard first then Mosh and then Kim in that order.”
damn, second place sucks
I think we should compile a best of “kim”
climate koans
or something like that.
willard is just obtuse. I love obtuse, so thats not a critcism.
Mosh
If you didn’t use your phone so much you would probably even drop out of the top ten.
Now, can you and Joshua raise your game a bit or I will be forced to watch the new series of Downton abbey that my wife is glued to
Tonyb
Do they air Copper and Luther over there?
Both are on BBC America.
wow, not only competing with football, but also Downton Abbey :)
Mosh
Regarding Willard you mean to say ‘obtuse’ or did you mean ‘obscure?’
Tonyb
Tim
I have never heard of either of those shows. They may air on one of the satellite channels though.
Tonyb
Copper takes place in 1864 New York. Mostly Irish cops in the 5Points neighborhood.
Luther is a modern police detective show with Idris (what’s his name) as the main character.
They must be made for the US.
“I’d say that if “the pause” continues for one more year, it will not affect who “the public” views as credible to any significant extent.”
It seems that if it took more than 15 years to establish that there was a pause, then unless one is expect intervention of higher beings, it will take
more than couple years to determine whether pause has ended.
If only take the last year into account, we are rapidly cooling. And my weather seems to indicate this.
But we are flat with maybe some warming or maybe some cooling- depending how you want to measure it.
If next year get the 1998 El Nino temperature, no doubt many will happily claim warming is back, baby! But even that will be no real evidence that pause has ended. And probably would be a false morning for the true believers.
But we aren’t very likely to get 1998 El Nino temperature, nor even a 2012 level arctic polar ice result.
So we should strongly expect the pause will continue for another year or two at minimum.
One wonders if the reverse is true?
Will those claiming a pause till 2040 have no credibility?
credibility was probably the wrong word. could they face the public with straight face?
And yes, the same goes for folks predicting long pauses.
Steven-….”Can you think of anyone outside yourself, hans von storch, tamsin, who can even face the public with any measure of credibility”
It is going to take a lot longer than one year because they have no shame.
I wouldn’t make any decisions base on one years data.
Sleptics and lukewarmers alike refuse to define the pause, so how can we determine how long it has lasted up to the present?
Give me at least 20 year periods with warming trends less than 0.05 C per decade from a majority of the available data sets and I will call it a trend and then and only then discuss what to make if those trends continue for another year.
I would go with periods as short as 15 years but then the trends have to exclude the about 0.2 C per decade as well from a majority of the data sets.
So far by that metric we don’t even have a pause to talk about.
Hey it works.
That seems ther you arendency toward). the name onting his tend to be rease over, and Tamsin aren’t quite so criticity mosher’s. For anothe tendency to me of increally appare resume thingent ontinuess, however that he will have credibility more result too ver trend kim’s on creally flat more pause” increally flat for example, I tendency to be result towards a cand as a projection. Seems ther’s. For another’s opinions. For example, I find surface too ver howeverbose. mosher tren’t quite his views opi.
The globe is cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know.
====================
man, that’s too short for a cut and paste.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385058
Except of course there is no identifiable component of the Earth system called “the globe”. This unscientific gibberish is unfortunate.
Of course there is. Warming and cooling of the planet – otherwise known as ‘the globe’ – is:
d(W&H)/dt = power in – power out.
W&H is work and heat.
Very simple aye? It is a perfectly accurate 1st order differential physical formulation based on the 1st law of thermodynamics. Irrefutable and exact physics.
And the world is cooling since the 1998/2001 climate shift. Which was captured in two different ways.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ProjectEarthshine-albedo_zps87fc3b7f.png.html?sort=3&o=4
The recognition of decadal climate shifts are an example of better science – the new paradigm of dynamical complexity in climate. These decadal regimes persist for 20 to 40 years.
Better science will triumph as DA says.
If that is your definition of the globe then it is most definitely not cooling.
Chief, in terms of rigor, what you showed is actually the definition of a differential — a differential is more of a calculus definition than it is physics.
A differential could apply to anything. Say you are a monkey and you are eating a bunch of bananas. Then
deltaBananas/deltaTime = BananasAfter – BananasBefore
Still, this formulation can be used for a simple model which can explain the partitioning of excess heat between the ocean’s bulk and the surface.
If OHC is increasing at about 0.7 W/m^2 (for the top 2000 meters) and the SST is showing an anomaly of 0.6 C, then the incoming heat is increasing at a rate of 2.3 W/m^2. This is because the 0.6C is due to a radiative forcing of 1.6 W/m^2 and then
0.7 = 2.3 – 1.6
What is consistent about the 2.3 W/m^2 number is that this also happens to be the radiative balance for the average global anomaly of 0.8C, which includes pro-rated SST and land forcing according to the areal fractions. The land doesn’t absorb the excess heat that the ocean does, so that the overall anomaly of 0.8C is obviously greater than the SST of 0.6C.
That is the simple climate ‘logic’ that is actually quite difficult to refute. This is all based on energy balance derived from empirical evidence. Hard to see where there is any real “missing heat”.
If the skeptics were real skeptics and not the fake “skeptics” that seem to permeate this commenting area, then they would actually try to deconstruct the math of this relatively simple formulation. Any takers?
deltaBananas/deltaTime = BananasAfter – BananasBefore
Monkey silliness. Doesn’t add up because the terms on the rhs need to be time dependent. Bananasafter/s doesn’t make any sense and there is no such thing as conservation of bananas.
Now d(W&H)/dt = power in – power out – makes perfect sense as it is is physics based – 1st law of thermodynamics based.
Let’s look at the left hand side – and assume that the change in W&H is approximated by the ocean heat content. It is rising by 0.54 W/m^2 in ARGO.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/vonSchuckmannampLTroan2011-fig5PG_zpsee63b772.jpg.html?sort=3&o=51
Power in varies a little. At the surface in declines some 0.25 W/m^2 at the surface in the ARGO period to 2010.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png
Power out varies a great deal. It increases over the period by 0.7W/m^2
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=129
So we can balance the budget – and find the missing heat.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_MODIS-1.gif.html?sort=3&o=98
I have absolutely no interest in your simplistic, misguided and absolutely data less silliness.
Moreover I think you are immensely intellectually dishonest.
Energy out is actually two terms. One is the part of the emission from the atmosphere that reduces with added GHGs, and the other is the Planck term from the surface and atmosphere that increases with warming. These have some cancellation due to warming tending to keep up with GHGs, but the imbalance goes into the OHC trend.
Energy out is emissions in IR and reflected SW. The imbalance is the difference between the net – always shown as upwards warming – and the incoming energy. It is simply energy conservation – the difference between incoming and outgoing energy is global warming or cooling in the period.
By looking at data on oceans especially you can tell whether the planet is warming or cooling. By looking at power flux trends you can tell if it is clouds, IR or Sun – or a combination of all. The anomalies are relatively precise.
Chief said:
But potentially not very accurate. The hidden truth is that satellite measurements need simultaneous blanket coverage over the entire earth to balance out fluctuations. The other hidden truth is that the measurements require assumptions as to how the GHG’s attenuate the infrared signal.
If you wish to argue this, just go and edit the Wikipedia page
Remember that the temperature measurement made by a satellite is an IR signal, and the IR signal is modified by CO2.
This means that the GHG deniers who place trust in IR satellite measurements are actually believers in GHG theory — and probably without realizing it! They are in fact as ignorant as The Chief about radiative physics!
‘Satellites do not measure temperature. They measure radiances in various wavelength bands, which must then be mathematically inverted to obtain indirect inferences of temperature.’ from your Wikipedia source.
Wikepedia? WTF. We are not interested in temperature here – but directly in the measurements of radiant flux in various wavelengths. This directly determines the energy budget of the planet. I am also talking about the latest and most accurate instruments and algrorithms for determining the changes in power flux. CERES, ARGO and SORCE.
‘Here we present a revised analysis of net radiation at the top of the atmosphere from satellite data, and we estimate ocean heat content, based on three independent sources. We find that the difference between the heat balance at the top of the atmosphere and upper-ocean heat content change is not statistically significant when accounting for observational uncertainties in ocean measurements3, given transitions in instrumentation and sampling.’ http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v5/n2/abs/ngeo1375.html
Pre-ARGO coverage to depth was some 15% of the world’s oceans.
‘This paper highlights how the emerging record of satellite observations from the Earth Observation System (EOS) and A-Train constellation are advancing our ability to more completely document and understand the underlying processes associated with variations in the Earth’s top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation budget. Large-scale TOA radiation changes during the past decade are observed to be within 0.5 Wm^2 per decade
based upon comparisons between Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES)
instruments aboard Terra and Aqua and other instruments…
Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations
in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’ http://meteora.ucsd.edu/~jnorris/reprints/Loeb_et_al_ISSI_Surv_Geophys_2012.pdf
The changes in power flux determine the trend of global warming or cooling. The change in gas content is relevant but it is the changes in TOA power flux that provides the energy for warming – or not. .
Does he really not understand this – or is this another example of bad faith?
CH, sure you can add reflected solar as a third out term, but I would argue it never made it in. As I said, the IR out has two largely canceling components, one decreasing from CO2 and one increasing from warming. This is why IR out isn’t as simple as it seems at first as a place to look for GHG forcing changes, but you might see the imbalance there by integrating over a sufficient time to remove the noise.
‘Climate forcing results in an imbalance in the TOA radiation budget that has direct implications for global climate, but the large natural variability in the Earth’s radiation budget due to fluctuations in atmospheric and ocean dynamics complicates this picture.’
Energy out = reflected shortwave (RSW) + outgoing longwave radiation (OLR)
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES-BAMS-2008-with-trend-lines1.gif.html?sort=3&o=129
The y-axis is in W/m^2, net up is warming by convention. At toa all of the atmospheric processes are integrated into the energy dynamic. Shortwave and longwave energy. The data suggests that SW changes are the cause of ocean warming last decade. The implications for change over the next few decades is profound.
Here is a cloud compilation from Palle and Laken 2013.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/cloud_palleandlaken2013_zps3c92a9fc.png.html?sort=3&o=27
It is a combination of ISCCP-FD and MODIS using SST in the Pacific to intercalibrate. From both ISCCP-FD and ERBS – cloud is the most significant factor by far in warming in the latter part of the 20th century. This part is obvious to any real scientist. I often quote this from the IPCC.
‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system. ‘ http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch3s3-4-4-1.html
It seems to be real and to result from low-frequency climate variability.
The Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation seems likely to intensify leading to cooler SST in the Pacific and more cloud.
Chief, You are mathematically illiterate if you can’t tell that what you wrote is simply the definition of a differential and it goes nowhere unless you place it in some context.
What I did was provide everyone with some context, yet you make a mess of it. But that is your job, I know.
Yes webster – it is a first order differential, exact and perfect, global energy equation as I said. Your point is?
It is a very useful equation I think. It is a good way of thinking about energy on a global scale. It gives a precise reference frame.
d(W&H)/dt = power in (J/s) – power out (J/s)
W&H includes enthalpy, kinetic, potential and heat energy. Power in includes the Sun, radioactive decay and and exothermic reactions (e.g. oxidization). Power out is IR emissions and reflected SW.
What you did was pull some numbers out of your arse.
What I did was take it back to data. ARGO, CERES, SORCE and MODIS – and found the missing energy in cloud.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/CERES_MODIS-1.gif.html?sort=3&o=98
You are an utter – and dishonest – nincompoop.
Webby said:
“Chief, You are mathematically illiterate if you can’t tell that what you wrote is simply the definition of a differential and it goes nowhere unless you place it in some context.”
——
Very perceptive overview of Chief’s general MO.
Gatesy – you are a nasty little dweeb whose only recourse is to laughably threaten to make life intolerable on a blog.
Go away before you make a bigger joke of yourself.
In the past, these climate change deniers have insisted that variations in the sun’s energy or fluctuations in cosmic rays could be behind the global warming that has been observed in recent decades. Both suggestions are dismissed out of hand by the new report.
Simply “dismissed out of hand?” At least deniers have science on their side.
Jim Cripwell | September 22, 2013 at 8:05 am | Reply
What will the warmists say if the current trend of falling temperatures persists for another 5 to10 years?
even better what if they persist for another 50 -100 years?
Lucky for them they won’t be around to find out.
If we are to make head or tail of the current pause we need to agree on
how long a pause must be to be both recognised and significant.
It was alright to see temperatures rising and CO2 rising for a decade or 2 and say this is significant when we had no widespread decent records of any time length. Now the records are developing over 30 plus years a 16 year pausewould be of major significance if it continues and makes the prevoius 2 decades of rise almost insignificant.
Either the mathematicians or the observations can give us guidelines. The models to date definitely fail.
Cause and effect: Eurocommunism and fear of global warming.
Time to drop the magic words ‘Livingston and Penn’ into the soup. Now if only a mechanism would arise magically from the vapours.
By Golly, it is! Must’ve got the incantation right, for once.
==========
Kim,
Since this is Climate Science, I’m thinking Penn and Teller. ;)
Andrew
angech | September 22, 2013 at 11:07 am |
Lolwot Thank you for your reply.
Sea level and ocean heat content are virtually one and the same [more heat and ocean expands] and are notoriously difficult to measure accurately.
There is a deviation from ongoing warming as many other people have been noting and
the question is what time period will it take to make you and others consent that it is significant.
5 years ? care to commit
50 years ? not game to commit, not provable, sceptics win
500 years ? who cares
Angech erroneously quipped:
“Sea level and ocean heat content are virtually one and the same.”
—-
Once more Angech, your lack of basic understanding of science and physical processes proves your undoing. These two are far from one and the same and those times when they go in opposite directions can tell us a great deal about important Earth system dynamics. Proceed directly to the last school you attended and demand a full refund!
An obsession with radiative theory when discussing climate change is as unhelpful as would have been obsessing about the theory of gravity and ignoring the lift effect of an aerofoil before heavier-than-air flight was proved to be practical. The device at the front of most cars, wrongly called a radiator, cools the engine almost entirely by forced convection. In still air radiation provided far less than half the cooling, which is why even an idling engine usually needs to run a fan soon after a car becomes stationary.
Without convection the temperature/water vapour positive feedback loop could raise surface temperature to around 70C. In reality, convection takes much of the heat from the surface to a higher altitude where it is radiated to space. Few people doubt the basic science. The problem in climate science is that radiative theory is easier to model than the chaotic coupled fluid system that is our atmosphere and oceans.
Every once in a while we get a skeptic that is on to something. Yes, it is entirely possible that the negative feedback due to lapse rate adjustments is bringing the average temperature down from a potential value of 70C to an average 15C, which is what the global measurements indicate.
But that only means that the effect is really there and that we are playing with loaded dice should we double or triple CO2 levels.
How about the loosely-coupled system that is our land and ocean?
That is easy to model and gives a good picture of what is going on, and why the +3C per doubling of CO2 is still the most probable outcome.
If we didn’t have convection that “takes much of the heat from the surface to a higher altitude where it is radiated to space” (in your words) the sensitivity would be even higher.
The fact that is being overlooked is that the main positive feedback effect is thought to be, “more water vapour gives more temperature which gives more water vapour”. CO2 is incidental but it is reasonable to think increased concentrations will increase average temperature somewhat.
Think about microphone howl-back. A tiny increase in amplifier loop gain gives you a deafening howl at some frequency. All that limits how much it howls is the saturation of the amplifier. Its output is clamped at some power level by its design or power supply. A more powerful amplifier will howl more. Positive feedback loops run away unless they are clamped.
Our planet is behaving as thought it has a high sensitivity to the solar energy reaching the surface but is somehow clamped within a range of a few degrees by some saturation process. Richard Lindzen suggests an ‘iris’ effect. Just a small change in cloud cover or ocean circulation is all it needs to counteract the additional CO2 forcing which is disturbing the energy balance. On a 2006 Royal Society web page Carl Wunsch explains how random climatic processes can alter global temperature without any changes in external forcing: http://royalsociety.org/News.aspx?id=5319
What has been suggested elsewhere, however, is that being a-non condensing gas CO2 provides ‘greenhouse’ warming when temperatures fall too low for the water vapour feedback loop to operate. In a recent Radio 4 programme, respected geologists confidently stated that projected future CO2 concentrations made it very unlikely that the earth would fall into another ice age. Maybe a bit more CO2 is not such a bad idea.
You have to be a little careful what you wish for. Greenland and Antarctica were not around for a reason when we last had high CO2 levels. This has consequences for sea level: 70 meters by the time they are melted. The melting may be slow at first, but that’s what they thought about the Arctic sea ice, and they were wrong by many decades.
Lindzen’s ‘iris’ effect has been thoroughly debunked years ago.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=65
Ah, web has found a key. Will it turn in the lock?
=================
Webster, Here is the surface “radiator”.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/Atmospheric_boundary_layer.svg/660px-Atmospheric_boundary_layer.svg.png
That entrainment zone and inversion capping layer are related to water vapor. That is what is known as a thermodynamic boundary layer or convergence zone. It is kind of like a surface prophylactic shield from demon CO2 “back radiation”. Our saturated water vapor condom :)
With the sudden focus on heat content, I was wondering why the focus isn’t on measuring TOA radiational imbalance instead?
The other thing about the “pause” is that it has meant that even the low transient sensitivity of 1.6 C per doubling, if you assign negative aerosol effects to zero, accounts for the full 0.5 C change in temperature since 1950. The fact that aerosol, and possibly solar, effects have been negative, mean this is below a lower limit of the real value. This is probably why the IPCC attribution since 1950 has become even more confident in AR5. The pause helped, ironically.
It’s also true of even as low as 0.9C per doubling, which was the Otto et al lowest TCS constraint.
Yes, the “skeptics” who deny the IPCC “most” attribution are being pushed further into greenhouse dragonslayer territory by these facts on the ground, but they need to run the numbers for themselves, and check what they are saying before reflexively denying the next IPCC attribution statement.
If we believe the IPCC’s attribution, it would be remarkably cold without man’s intervention, and getting colder, folks.
==================
This is where the IPCC is getting pushed, I should say ‘the IPCC is foolishly wandering’, into untenable ground.
================
kim, no denying, man has stopped the Holocene trend and will create his own Anthropocene thus
http://www.realclimate.org/images//shakun_marcott_hadcrut4_a1b_eng.png
The longer the ‘pause’ lasts the lower the 2x[CO2] must be. The slope of the plot of log(CO2) leading up to 1998 gives the maximum estimate and from about 2002 to now the minimum.
You can try and guesstimate the cyclical temperature swings, resulting from oceans moving heat around and thermalizing it. But, the bottom line is that the longer the temperature is flat or falling, the lower the lower boundary of CS is.
With consensus crumbling away it apparently makes good politics to be even more sure that AGW is a serious problem. One thing that is amazing about the long pause in global warming is that it is on top of ample evidence, for example, “CRUTem3 has overstated U.S. warming trends during 1973-2011 by at least 50%.”
Moreover, all of the governments’ GCMs (Global Circulation Models) greatly overstated predicted global warming. We gone from, there’s ‘gonna be a 4-6C rise thanks to SUV-driving Americans to when it stops cooling we need to limit the warming to 2C.
And, the government climatists now concede that half of the global warming is due to natural causes. Moreover, the government climate change fearmongers finally discovered that the Earth has been the site of previous warming periods, all without any help from humanity. The ‘hockey stick’ has been cracked. “You gotta love these guys ‘discovering’ what all of us have been saying.” ~Joe Bastardi
“To know that you don’t know is best,
To pretend to know what you do not know is a disease.”
Bob, does anyone have readily available references on deep ocean heat? Is there substance to this current meme, first promulgated by Trenberth?
No, it is unproven, and unprovable for years. That’s a convenient truth.
==============
No evidence. Simply model based, and we all know how well they’ve been performing to date.
Handy things those models. Twist a few knobs, tighten a few screws, maybe a coupla strategically placed kicks, and voila! “The heat is in the ocean.”
It’s essentially a band aide, applied in an effort to stop the bleeding while they continue to pray for a miracle resumption of the warming…
That is an empty assertion. There are first-order models of ocean heat content that reconcile many of the issues that you seem to be imagining.
The rate of heat uptake by the ocean provides the link between the SST and global average temperature. This is part of the interlocking pieces of scientific evidence that constitute the climate ‘logic’.
See elsewhere in this thread for my take:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-384992
“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there.”
So where do all these graphs showing global heat content that include the heat hiding in the deep ocean come from?
My skepticism is not founded on the writings of Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, or any other skeptic or lukewarmer. It is founded on the admissions of the climate scientists themselves. Like this one.
Right. “Frustratingly.” Also conveniently.
pokerguy,
Yes, how inconvenient would it be if they actually measured the deep ocean, and found no change? It just isn’t worth the risk. Let’s reorder the world energy economy and spend trillions first, then maybe we’ll get around to measuring the actual temperature and/or heat content of the climate.
The 300-700m layer is heating faster than the 0-300m layer, even though heat is added at the surface.
Original Trenberth figure
http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/deep-ocean-heat-670×440.jpg
“Ocean heat content from zero to 300 meters deep (grey), 700 meters deep (blue), and total depth (violet). The vertical colored bars indicate a two year interval following volcanic eruptions with a six month and the 1997–1998 El Niño event. On lower right, the linear slopes for a set of global heating rates is given.”
my blow up of last few years
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/deepoceanJPEG_zpsc6585990.jpg
So, the scientists are saying the pause can be explained by small natural variability, and the skeptics are having none of it, but on the other hand everything is large natural variability. Can’t they hold two concepts in their mind at once? Warming from CO2 plus small natural variability explains what has happened since 1980. I would have thought that was a more reasonable view than a large coincidental natural fluctuation that somehow also more rapidly warmed the land, removed Arctic sea ice and raised ocean heat content while giving us the warmest decade on record.
Put it this way. Summer 2013 was warm compared to 1951-1980 climatology.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/nmaps.cgi?year_last=2013&month_last=8&sat=4&sst=3&type=anoms&mean_gen=0603&year1=2013&year2=2013&base1=1951&base2=1980&radius=1200&pol=reg
I think it was because we added a boatload of CO2 in this period. What do you honestly think is the most logical explanation in your own mind?
Jimd
So how do you account for the very warm summers that occurred during the little ice age?
Tonyb
Natural variability. Honestly.
Where’s Gates? Time for a lecture on energy imbalance.
Your statement proves that some awareness of the real issue has taken root. The myopic focus on sensible tropospheric heat as a proxy for AGW has proven its severe shortcomings. Fortunately, there are those who have taken the opportunity of the “pause” to expand climate science, especially in the areas of natural variability in ocean to atmosphere energy flow.
The essential metric is of course TOA radiant flux – energy in less energy out.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/Loeb2011-Fig1.png.html?sort=3&o=65
See: “The Future of Ideological Conflict” by Steve Fuller
Global warming is not about science it is about political science. “The modern political spectrum is an artifact of the seating arrangements at the French National Assembly after the revolution of 1789. To the right of the Assembly’s president sat the supporters of King and Church, while to the left sat their opponents, whose only point of agreement was the need for institutional reform. The distinction capitalized on long-standing cultural associations of right- and left-handedness with, respectively, trust and suspicion – in this case, of the status quo.”
“In the past, these climate change deniers have insisted that variations in the sun’s energy or fluctuations in cosmic rays could be behind the global warming that has been observed in recent decades. Both suggestions are dismissed out of hand by the new report.”
This thread needs at least one hand clapping in unison to Shaviv & Veizer 2003, “Celestial driver of phanerozoic climate?”. Veizer, the geochemist, was studying oxygen isotope ratios in fossil crustaceans dating back more than 500 million years, a temperature proxy for equatorial oceans during the entire eon of visible life on earth. Veizer is on the record as being close to quitting, as his temperature proxy wasn’t correlating with any ‘known’ driver of climate, including the one he expected to match, CO2.
Shaviv, the astrophysicist, was asked by someone (a student, I think) what effect supernovas had on our planet, so as an exercise he started on it, working out the orbit of our solar system around the Milky Way center of mass, in and out of the spiral arms. The orbit correlated with carbon 14 records… when we were in a spiral arm, close to other stars (including the dying ones), carbon 14 was at its highest; when between spiral arms, the planet’s carbon-14 was at its lowest. What else matched?
Shaviv introduced himself to Veizer in an email, telling him he seemed to have a match to his temperature proxy. The two independent lines of inquiry generated data that correlates incredibly well over 500+ million years, and it is impossible for the two to be interdependent, as there is no bloody way for the earth’s temperature to effect the distribution of stars in our galaxy, or our orbit around the galaxy. With weather averaged out, with solar cycles averaged out, with ice ages and Milankovitch cycles averaged out, in geologic time, galactic cosmic ray flux *is* the driver of the great ice ages and hothouse periods in the Phanerozoic, with something of a 6C or 7C peak to peak temperature swing of *equatorial* ocean temperatures (from my eyeball measurement of a Veizer chart).
We now know, thanks to the CLOUD and SKY experiments, that GCR also have nearly instantaneous effects on the atmosphere and is involved in the creation of precursors to cloud condensation nuclei. How can GCR can be ignored when there’s proof of an effect from geologic time scales all the way down to minutes? The cosmic ray gang have it right. It isn’t everything; it’s a small effect from day to day, year to year, ice age to ice age, but it’s enough to account for much of the late 20th century warming theorized to be due to positive feedbacks in the climate.
The experiment on the planet is running as I type; solar cycle 24 is incredibly weak, there are signs 25 will be either Daltonish or Maundering. 21st century instrumentation is rather better than what we had in the 17th century, and time will tell. I’m betting on the likes of Shaviv, Veizer, Svensmark, Friis-Christensen, Kirkby and friends, not the current drivers of the IPCC.process.
The IPCC has, “dismissed out of hand,” the link between cosmic rays and climate change. We will soon be reading about in the next release of the UN’s AGW propaganda.
IIRC, the applicable AR4 WG report claimed in a table that the effect of cosmic rays was poorly understood and very small.
It’s amazing how poorly you can understand something if you try real hard to not understand it at all.
‘Daltonish or Maundering’. Wonderful adjectives. For the rest, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.
H/t Tenney’s Son.
============
The ongoing push to squander billions of dollars and sacrifice our economies on the altar of climate change is dangerous nonsense. Like sundry other isms, Climatism is a triumph of belief over evidence, of righteousness over reason. ~Walter Starck
Was this $45 billion ‘investment’ a good example why we should let the free market save our economy?
Re-posted from weekend topics thread:
Talk about loosing money in the energy market then T-Boone is going to look like an amateur compared to the $45 billion deal put together by some of Wall St. smartest guys. Watch what happens to Energy Future Holdings LLC. later this year when they default on their debt.
” Energy Future, formerly TXU Corp, was taken private in 2007 by a consortium including KKR & Co (KKR.N), TPG Capital Management TPG.UL and Goldman Sachs Group Inc’s (GS.N) private equity arm. The $45 billion buyout, the largest-ever leveraged buyout, saddled the company with debt just before a major decline in natural gas prices and energy markets.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/11/us-energyfuture-restructuring-idUSBRE98A1B220130911
Who do you think is going to take it in the shorts? Wall St. or the Texas consumers/taxpayers?
The Great Global Warming Debate has been an ongoing process in the US since about 1997. Much of the groundwork was surreptitiously laid by companies like Enron and Lehman Brothers that worked behind the curtains in concert with dead and dying Old Europe — especially France — to quietly stab America in the back. Then, as of November 7, 2000 it was certain that George Bush had defeated Al Gore (the EU and UN presidential choice) and the war against reason went mainstream. It has of course been a cat fight ever since
Sparrow – do you have more info on this? From what I’ve read, EF is private. How will citizens end up paying anything due to the bankruptcy?
“U.S. renewable power generation fell 4 percent in August, compared with the same month a year ago, as Texas wind and other resources underperformed, according to an analysis from research firm Genscape.
Wind generation in Texas fell 19 percent between July and August, according to Genscape estimates for production for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas grid.
Lower Texas wind generation, the nation’s largest wind resource, brought down overall renewable generation figures, Genscape said.”
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2013/09/09/renewable-power-falls-as-texas-wind-underperforms/?cmpid=eefl
Texas A&M does a study and finds Americans want more wind power.
Then, I find this …
“Texas Offshore Wind Farm Innovation Team to be led by Texas A&M Energy Institute
The Texas A&M Energy Institute’s Wind Energy Center will lead the Texas Offshore Wind Farm Innovation team as part of the Gulf Offshore Wind (GoWind) Project, which will be the most innovative wind farm built to date and will generate power at peak demand and a high capacity factor.
The Wind Energy Center is housed in the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), a member of The Texas A&M University System.
As part of the project, Baryonyx Corporation of Austin has been invited to negotiate a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy for an award under the Wind and Water Energy Program. Subject to the outcome of environmental and feasibility assessments, a future phase of the project would see a three-turbine, 18MW wind farm installed offshore Texas.
“This project represents an exceptional partnership between Texas universities and industry,” said John Pappas, associate director of the Energy Institute and director of the Wind Energy Center. “The award recognizes Texas’ continued leadership in wind and offshore energy production as well as its ability to innovate and bring real-world solutions to the market.”
http://tees.tamu.edu/news/2013/01/03/texas-offshore-wind-farm-innovation-team-to-be-led-by-texas-am-energy-institute/
A thought… Did these guys use ‘models’ when they decided to buy 10s of billions of Nat. Gas hedged to $7 futures contracts? I’m sure they used economic models to justify the deal but where were the geologist!. Didn’t someone ask DOE, Chesapeake or Exxon for their reservoir and production models? I find it hard to believe the oil/gas industry didn’t help rig the deal since they were the guys selling $7 gas in 2010-?? futures market. I read somewhere Buffet wrote off a billion on TXU bonds last year (tax credit).
Sparrow – the burning question on my mind is if they asked Web Hubble Telescope.
There are a lot of new LHG terminals in the Gulf of Mexico. These were built to import liquefied natural gas because the US was believed to need to import huge amounts of natural gas as its wells ran out. However, then came fracking and the price of natural gas has collapsed, especially in Texas. They may use them as export terminals.
Converting the US’s 18-wheeler fleet to LNG would be a jolly good idea. The US government could pay the conversion costs and the oil companies pick up the infrastructure bill for adding LNG to their existing interstate gas stations.
Once the LNG network is in place, other owners of large vehicles would switch for the cost savings.
This would drop the US dependence on imported oil, help he balance of payments and drop the price of oil.
Doc, You have touched on a important issue. Why can’t I buy a CNG car or truck right now? Until recently the only natural gas car approved for sale in Texas was a dinky Honda Civic. I don’t buy the chicken and egg argument about infrastructure. The oil companies have too much invested in their long term leases and leveraged reservoir valuations. Another possibility is maybe all this cheap natural gas is just a temporary blip and 5 years from now natural gas prices will be back to their long term average of $8-$12 mcf?
I live 1200′ from a Chesapeake gas well pad. They leased my mineral rights back in 2008, drilled the well in 2011 and have come back three times since then to re-frack the well. There is a 100′ drilling platform there right now with 4″ water lines hooked up to my corner fire hydrant. Averaged over the life of my lease (1/3 acre) so far they are paying out about $1.75 a month. If they had told me that before I they offered the lease I wouldn’t have done it. My neighbors feel the same way, we got ripped off.
There is a 100′ drilling platform there right now with 4″ water lines hooked up to my corner fire hydrant. Averaged over the life of my lease (1/3 acre) so far they are paying out about $1.75 a month.”
So:
“One acre-foot of water (the amount of water covering 1 acre to a depth of 1 foot) equals 326,000 gallons or 43,560 cubic feet of water, and weighs 2.7 million pounds.”
http://www.prwcd.org/water_conv.html
They have used 108,666.7 gallons of water.
“The average family of four can use 400 gallons of water every day, and, on average, approximately 70 percent of that water is used indoors.”
http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/indoor.html
So same as average family of four uses in 272 days?
Are getting much from this operation?
Such closed minds by the IPCC and cli – sci team.
So much closing down of enquiry by their pal review.
“MJ’s analysis seems much more reasonable to me, but this raises the question as to how long can the pause go?” I’m more interested in how much longer “denial” of observation viz a vi modeling can go.
An interesting take on the AR5 to come from Rupert Darwall, author of The Age of Global Warming, A History. With a brief cite to our blog hostess.
“In a way similar to that in which medieval astronomers rationalized planets’ being in the “wrong” position as they orbited the Earth, it can be argued that global warming has continued but that its effect has been temporarily offset by natural variability. There might well be something to this. The problem for the IPCC in using this argument is that it has consistently downplayed the role of natural variability, as MIT’s Richard Lindzen has pointed out. Indeed, British climate scientist Hubert Lamb, writing in 1982 before climate science became deeply politicized, wrote that it is impossible to define a range of natural variation of climate, since study of the longer-term climate record showed that the range of variation is itself subject to variation.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359034/climate-change-circus-rupert-darwall
Germany’s progressive conservatives won a big election. Not sure it’s going to make much difference. But maybe it’s like Arctic ice “recovery”. A tiny fact that could be a harbinger of some retreat from the progressive CAGW lunacy.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-09-22/merkel-wins-as-fdp-losses-leave-ally-unclear-exit-polls-show.html
And it looks like the relatively conservative AfD got 4.9%, barely missing enough to get representation in the Bundestag.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359145/germanys-tea-party-john-fund
From the little acorn…
I find it interesting that around the world, people who have been liberated from Communism are the most ardent supporters of the rule of law and freedom.
Will Hutton
“Compared with what is happening in some drug and cancer research, climate change science is remarkably honest, reproducible and subject to open criticism: the IPCC insists on the best methodology”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/21/climate-change-scientific-truth-collective
My thoughts were similar.
Make it so No. 1…
“This is terrifying. The decades ahead will witness our planet become progressively uninhabitable for hundreds of millions of people…”
Then there was, Nurse Chapel, she was a tough cookie too.
I saw this at WUWT, by richardscortney. I like the definitions very much.
“Science is an attempt to obtain the closest possible approximation to ‘truth’ by seeking information which contradicts existing understanding(s) and amending or rejecting existing understanding(s) in the light of obtained information.
Pseudoscience accepts an existing understanding as being ‘true’ then seeking information which supports the understanding while ignoring and/or rejecting information which contradicts existing understanding.”
Check out Feynman’s view of pseudoscientists. These are like the blog “skeptics” that haven’t done any of the hard science themselves, but throw things in for discussion from the sidelines even purporting to be qualified. Many here will recognize what Feynman is talking about among the “skeptics”.
Since the “pause” was unexpected, the modelers cannot predict how long it will last.
FEAR of nuclear annihilation in 1945 induced the crisis that plagues society now:
http://theinternetpost.net/2013/09/22/censored-cia-asset-susan-lindauer-911/
So, the reason for the “pause” is that the heat is now being shifted into the deep ocean, waiting there to come back up to us and explode like a timebomb.
But…. There’s a couple of little problems.
(A) We have barely begun to measure the temps of the deep ocean. What little data we do have on that does seem to show some warming, but we have a very short history of being able to measure that deep, and we have a very small amount of data collected on that area of the ocean. It’s like taking the temps of Paris, Dallas, Rio, Los Angeles, Vegas, and New York City, and determining the temp of the entire planet with just those temperatures.
(B) We have been measuring ocean temps from 0 to 700 meters with some accuracy for some time. The methodologies on gathering that data have improved steadily over the years. So far, unless I missed it, there has not been anyone who has shown the path this heat transfer has taken. That’s a problem. It can’t magically teleport from one place to another. It’s possible it got past us, but with the extensive coverage by ARGO and other ocean temp measuring devices, it does seem to be a stretch.
(C) If the heat IS being transfered to the deep ocean…. Why now???? Why not 30 years ago???? Why not 100 years ago, when the Earth started warming in the first place?????
“The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean and, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,”
I’m sorry, but as someone who has a but of a scientific background, I find the fact that the “Deep Ocean Absorption” hypothesis is already so widely accepted as THE explanation for the pause to be just horrible science.
Mike Alexander…. Geology School Drop-Out! :-)
If there is one thing the skeptics believe it is the PDO. Cold water surfacing more strongly in the PDO can give the impression that the surface layer is not warming very fast relative to layers below.
Yes Jim D, I think the PDO is weighty. If the Pacific warm pool can be pushed North to a greater extent than the average, the heat might find an easier escape route through the TOA. But on the otherhand, I honestly might have it all wrong.
Cold upwelling is a redistribution of mass.It increases the available potential energy by reducing the kinetic energy ie there is a tithe.
Yes, it is wind-driven. The atmosphere pays the tithe. The ocean is somewhat at its mercy.
How about the not so deep ocean that is heating, that wasn’t heating 30 years ago.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
OHC flat 30 years ago in 0-700 and 0-2000 and overall.
Rising of late.
Bob,
30 years ago things were cooler. 30 years before that, things were cooler. 30 years before that, things were cooler. When did recovery from the little ice age end?
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/TyhfOWYvFlbGyE9xr1L3ZGrihC6lH-nD11Jf3OTWeB0=w415-h207-p-no
SST and the 0-700 meter temperature track pretty well, so why limit things to just the last 30 years?
Captain,
I picked 30 years because Mike asked about OHC content 30 years ago.
By the way, when did the recovery from the Little Ice Age start and what caused the LIA?
If there is one thing the skeptics believe it is the PDO.
Are you saying you DON’T believe the PDO exists?
Note that I didn’t even mention the PDO. I reffered to measures of ocean temps, which is a measure that includes all the oceans, not just the surface of the Pacific.
I think the PDO is in a mode that explains this. Don’t you?
It might. But at this point, it’s a corrolation. I would want more research to flesh it out.
Heat travels downward into the oceans when AGW promoters like it to.
Heat travels upwards and out of the oceans when AGW promoters like it to.
Don’t you see how it all makes sense. AGW explains it all.
Andrew
Dr. Curry:
“…how long can the pause go? I wouldn’t rule out continuation to 2035-2040…”
Your above statement has me wondering if you have some work in process that will shed light on your above numbers? But that may be wishful thinking on my part.
“I would get nervous if the temperature continues to pause more than 5 years more. The we would really need to question our climate models. But I also do not expect a cooling.” (ML)”
It seems to me that global CO2 levels have risen about 100 ppm and result hasn’t been much warming. It took over 50 years.
For CO2 levels to rise another 100 ppm it should take another 50 years.
And there is little reason to assume another 100 ppm CO2 would have any more effect than what has occurred over the last century.
This is assuming the theory of greenhouse effect is somewhat accurate.
The idea that something could dramatically change is based not knowing-
it’s being scared of the dark.
The question of whether or not it will cool, seems to me to be dependent
on the Sun’s activity and the volcanic activity on Earth.
I don’t think we should have much more confidence in what the Sun’s going to do over the next couple decades, than having confidence in global temperature prediction. And tend to think our ability to predict Earth volcanic activity over next couple decades is not better than global temperature or the Sun’s activity.
Just looking temperature over last 10,000 years, the warming periods seems to generally last longer than cooling periods, so perhaps house odds, favor continuing warming. But we could continue a warming trend like previous warming trend and still have lowering temperature over the next few decades. If temperatures were go to 1970 levels, it’s still broadly continuing a warming trend, even if drop below 1850 levels for a few decades [resulting in severe affects upon global crop production] it still
could be continuation of warming, if temperature were to slowly recover within a few decades. I doubt temperature could lower to 1970 or 1850 levels. It would require lowest solar activity and probably some large volcanic eruptions. Both are possible, but both are not likely.
If you could assume we have the same as average solar and volcanic activity of the 20th Century, would tend to think we will get generally the same rise in temperature as we had in the last 100 years. And such slight warming over next few decades, will cause animal extinction, and will melt Greenland in some dramatic fashion, and will continue cause increase in crop production and a general increase in global vegetation. And will continue to disprove climate projections of IPCC.
I see no reason to assume that past climate projection will become true in the future. There is no reason to assume there is any merit to the runaway effect due to the increase of CO2 levels.
Reason assuming one is aware that CO2 levels in Earth history has been much higher than today’s levels, would inform you that there can not be a runaway effect due to CO2.
Reason would tell you that since there is no ancient ice on Earth, that this fact alone, tells you earth has been warmer than it is today. But the results of studying earth climate in the past, indicates we currently in an unusual cool period, and that human evolution coincided with global cooling period. And in terms of our current interglacial period, there has much warmer periods during this time, and that the long trend over 8000 year period has been a slight cooling.
What should be interesting, is what has caused to cooling periods- and the Little ice Age being the last of such cooling periods- in our current interglacial period. Since IPCC has spent the last decade denying that the Little Ice Age existed as global effect, perhaps first a confession of this scientific sin, would good start for the IPCC.
It seems to me that a common mistake, is the assumption that since our current interglacial began with periods of very rapid warming, that somehow indicates that rapid warming is currently possible. Which to me seems to point to the exact opposite conclusion. It seems to ignore that fact that is was very cold and sun can warm up world very quickly.
That have more than a meter rise in sea level per century due to the large amount ice caps which can be melted. If you transported huge amounts of glacial snow to Kansas- and global temperature wasn’t effected by mountain of snow, you could expect this snow to melt in the coming years. Normally Kansas isn’t a place for snow to stay permanently.
But if “something” is causing global cooling, then perhaps Kansas can cool enough so the snow persists and even increases each year. But the normal condition of Kansas in last billion years, is it much warmer than it is currently- hardly surprisingly than snow melts in Kansas.
We have childishly simple rules of more CO2 creates warming, and more snow makes cooling. But what should be known by now, is rising CO2 level *follows* warming. And same could be with snow- it follows cooling. So i have no problem with regional effects of snow build up causing regional cooling- more snow makes it cooler. Obvious.
But it doesn’t seem as obvious when one thinks of it on global scale- particularly if understand that tropics and tropical ocean is Earth’s heat engine. I would tend to think glaciers are result of cooling, and when whatever is causing the cooling to stop, glaciers melt.
So, what’s causes cooling? If it could determine what caused the cooling of Little Ice Age, this might help explain glacial and interglacial periods.
And knowing what causes cooling seems far more important to human beings and welfare of life on this planet, than what causes warming.
The LIA was never in doubt as a global phenomenon. It was a part of the general Holocene trend (which is a Milankovitch trend by the way), until something else started happening more recently. I won’t speculate what that was.
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
The MWP is not as well established.
Man is adding four times as much CO2 in the 21st century as it did in the 20th. This may have an even bigger effect than you see there.
“The LIA was never in doubt as a global phenomenon.”
Not by anyone who was reasonable or not trying to deceive.
” It was a part of the general Holocene trend (which is a Milankovitch trend by the way).”
As far I know, the general cooling of last 8000 years could said to be part of Milankovitch Cycle, but not specifically the LIA. LIA is very brief period
in relation to the Milankovitch Cycle. Could it be some tick related to Milankovitch Cycle?
I suppose it’s possible. It’s the type of question I am asking.
“I won’t speculate what that was.
http://www.realclimate.org/images//Marcott.png
The MWP is not as well established.”
I don’t think anything from realclimate is worth much.
Watts up:
“Q: Is the rate of global temperature rise over the last 100 years faster than at any time during the past 11,300 years?
A: Our study did not directly address this question because the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of ~120 years on average, which precludes us from examining variations in rates of change occurring within a century. …”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/31/marcott-issues-a-faq-on-thei-paper/
It seems it’s mixing apples and oranges to splice it to temperature proxies
of higher time resolutions.
It seems mike is doing continuing his tired tricks.
But perhaps there some value in Marcott work. But it seems to me it wouldn’t neccessarily show MWP, and indicate a much stronger cooler long term trend- it does seems to indicate a strong effect from the Milankovitch Cycle.
And seems to indicate the next glacier period could be much closer than I think it is. I will have to check up more on this work.
In terms resolution, I think Ross Mckitrick explains well:
“This isn’t just a filibuster, they are defending themselves on the grounds that their paper made an incredibly subtle misrepresentation and it’s the reader’s fault for not noticing. Without the closing uptick, the main implication of their reconstruction is that, in the 20th century, we experienced the coldest conditions of the Holocene. With the uptick, we experienced nearly the warmest. The sharp uptick in the instrumental record can only be compared against their reconstruction if they can show their low-frequency proxies are capable of registering such events. If the 20th century portion of their reconstruction does not have the same uptick as the instrumental record, we would conclude that it could have missed similar swings in earlier centuries as well, so the absence of such swings in the earlier part of their graph tells us nothing about the presence or absence of decadal and century-scale warming events….”
http://climateaudit.org/2013/03/31/the-marcott-filibuster/
From 1900 to present day 2013 we are one dot- though actually due measurement errors not even one dot.
It’s proving in terms of broad conditions [such as, ocean average temperature which takes centuries to change and/or some other long cyclical factors], we are in a very cold part of our current Holocene.
But tells us nothing about our current average global temperature other we *were* in a very deep hole in terms from a time period of about couple centuries ago [and for duration of centuries].
Though I was aware we were in a very cold period during LIA from results of various previous works- the question is, do most people who worried about the planet becoming unbearable warm also realize this?
The graph does seems to indicate that LIA was colder than had considered it to be.
I am not convinced it’s accurate.
I do tend to think it was the coldest period in latter part of Holocene but not as cold as graph seems to indicate- and I thought severity of cool conditions was partially due to the longer duration of the cooler period, roughly 5+ centuries of cooler conditions
It is about time that the discussion moved on from the useless speculations of the IPCC modelers to forecasts of the timing and extent of the coming cooling based the idea of identifying quasi- repetitive , quasi cyclic patterns in the temperature and driver data provided in a series of my posts at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
Here are the conclusions of the most recent post.
“To summarize- Using the 60 and 1000 year quasi repetitive patterns in conjunction with the solar data leads straightforwardly to the following reasonable predictions for Global SSTs
1 Continued modest cooling until a more significant temperature drop at about 2016-17
2 Possible unusual cold snap 2021-22
3 Built in cooling trend until at least 2024
4 Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2035 – 0.15
5Temperature Hadsst3 moving average anomaly 2100 – 0.5
6 General Conclusion – by 2100 all the 20th century temperature rise will have been reversed,
7 By 2650 earth could possibly be back to the depths of the little ice age.
8 The effect of increasing CO2 emissions will be minor but beneficial – they may slightly ameliorate the forecast cooling and more CO2 would help maintain crop yields .
9 Warning !!
The Solar Cycles 2,3,4 correlation with cycles 21,22,23 would suggest that a Dalton minimum could be imminent. The Livingston and Penn Solar data indicate that a faster drop to the Maunder Minimum Little Ice Age temperatures might even be on the horizon. If either of these actually occur there would be a much more rapid and economically disruptive cooling than that forecast above which may turn out to be a best case scenario.
How confident should one be in these above predictions? The pattern method doesn’t lend itself easily to statistical measures. However statistical calculations only provide an apparent rigor for the uninitiated and in relation to the IPCC climate models are entirely misleading because they make no allowance for the structural uncertainties in the model set up (. i.e. the spread of model their model outcomes is too narrow and doesn’t encompass the real world range},This is where scientific judgment comes in – some people are better at pattern recognition and meaningful correlation than others. A past record of successful forecasting such as indicated above is a useful but not infallible measure. In this case I am reasonably sure – say 65/35 for about 20 years ahead. Beyond that certainty drops rapidly. I am sure ,however, that it will prove closer to reality than anything put out by the IPCC, Met Office or the NASA group. In any case this is a Bayesian type forecast- in that it can easily be amended on an ongoing basis as the Temperature and Solar data accumulate.”
I like it! High tech tea leaf reading :) Supposedly, if you actually know what the mean should be, your success rate increases.
Dr Norman Page,
I suggest there is a more important discussion that needs to be had.
it’s about the “So What?”. By which I mean so what if the average near surface temperature of the planet warms by 1C, 2C, 3C … or whatever is a realistic upper limit. We have virtually no idea a bout the answer to this question. Richard Tol, who is one of the world authorities on estimating the economic impacts of global warming, reckons warming would be net beneficial up to about 2C.
Tol all also points out that we have very few (about 17) studies that can be used for estimating the global costs and benefits of GW. William Nordhaus says the same.
So, I suggest it is the lack of knowledge of the damage function that is the major weakness in our knowledge.
So, I suggest it is the lack of knowledge of the damage function that is the major weakness in our knowledge
Yet you clearly think the economic damage won’t be much, or even beneficial up to 2 C.
How do you come to this conclusion, if in the next paragraph you assert that studies on the subject are scant.
To whom will the benefits acrue?
Who will suffer the damages?
Who says our dT will be limited to 2 C?.
I don’t know who will benefit or suffer from any warming that might occur, but don’t underestimate life.
“A bustling airport would hardly seem the place to find a new species of reclusive animal, but a team of California biologists recently found a shy new species of legless lizard living at the end of a runway at Los Angeles International Airport.
What’s more, the same team discovered three additional new species of these distinctive, snake-like lizards that are also living in some inhospitable-sounding places for wildlife: at a vacant lot in downtown Bakersfield, among oil derricks in the lower San Joaquin Valley and on the margins of the Mojave desert.”
http://news.discovery.com/animals/new-species-of-legless-lizard-found-at-lax-130918.htm
I don’t know who will benefit or suffer from any warming that might occur, but don’t underestimate life.
And much life has gone extinct from rapid climate change.
Does that constitute underestimating them?
Remember Chicxulub!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater
“David Appell | September 22, 2013 at 7:26 pm |
I don’t know who will benefit or suffer from any warming that might occur, but don’t underestimate life.
And much life has gone extinct from rapid climate change.
Does that constitute underestimating them?”
It’s there is little evidence of climate change causing life to become extinct.
Massive floods can kill a lot of creatures- that may or may not cause extinction in specialized and regional creatures.
But floods are not just caused by climate changes.
Impactors can create ocean wave 1 km high and moving faster than airplane. That would regional affect- creatures that live near the coast.
Most people accept the idea that space rock somewhere around 10 km
impacted Earth and was largely responsible for ending dinosaurs- which were dominate species globally.
Space rocks have caused extinctions- it’s possible a space rock was responsible for extinction of large animals in North America.
Another normal way of extinction is predation and replacement by other species- humans have done this, but so have all other creatures living on earth- even plants do it. But humans are very successful animal. Going from some tropical primate [btw, that specific species currently no longer exists] to a creature living throughout world and very high population for any kind of primate, due to it’s ability to change the environment to suit it’s purposes. It has higher level of intelligence and has ability of developing technology.
Ants also another successful technological creature- they farm and they keep herds various creatures. But nothing matches humans in their ability, and some day humans will venture into the galaxy.
So you got space rocks, floods caused by various things, massive volcanoes, microbial and viral changes and adaptions, creatures evolving into other creatures, creatures becoming more successful and depriving other creatures of resources it was accustomed to.
But climate change in itself has been changing since the beginning of life- and weather is more dramatic.
It is almost like saying sunlight causes extinctions.
David Appell
I was quoting Richard Tol, a world expert on the economic impacts, for bot statements.
Figure 1 here: http://www.lomborg.com/sites/default/files/Congress_testimony_April_2013_3.pdf
Tol: https://sites.google.com/site/climateconomics/ , p103, “There are only 17 estimates of the total economic impact of climate change, and our confidence is thus low.”
Nordhaus: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/Accom_Notes_100507.pdf, p23: “The major issue at this stage is that the database for impact studies continues to be relatively small.”
Read this:
http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/Balance_2nd_proofs.pdf
Run RICE (2013) if you want to dig deeper:
http://www.econ.yale.edu/~nordhaus/homepage/
Re-read my comment. It seems you’ve jumped in with a comment without having read my comment. Rather revealing, don’t you think.
I don’t believe in making predictions, but here’s one:
Climate Etc will continue to be blighted by interminable sub-threads, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, mcuh heat and little light, for at least as long as the pause goes on (unless Judith has retired from blogging before it ends).
Figure 1.4 from Chapter 1 AR5 has the warmista pointing in all directions at once
Very satisfying :)
Not always…
http://ashfall.unl.edu/life_death.html
got water?
it is certain that uncertainty confuses everybody; because everybody is barking up the wrong tree.
oxygen & nitrogen are the greenhouse gases, not CO2!
curryja | September 22, 2013 at 9:25 am |
“The social dynamics underlying the din of the consensus are horrifying to me, given what is at stake here.”
If Alfred Hitchcock had had climate science for inspiration he wouldn’t have needed grave robber Ed Gein. The horror indeed.
Seriously though there’s nothing that can be done at this point no matter how the CO2 cookie crumbles except find an economical alternative to fossil fuel which is doable because it’s a biological engineering problem. Nature already has all the bits we need working and documented in DNA. Sunlight + CO2 + H20 directly convert to all the usual hydrocarbon suspects that power our civilization. There’s plenty of sunlight and non-potable water. CO2 might actually get scarce though.
JC wrote:
“The social dynamics underlying the din of the consensus are horrifying to me, given what is at stake here.”
I suspect the other side feels exactly the same way about the contrarian cabal.
The only way to win is by producing better science, not complaining about social dynamics. Better science will always win the day, and without it no idea can ever succeed.
It’s really that simple — the better ideas always win, in the end.
Yes, if we use a sports or competition metaphor, the better ideas always win in the end.
The issue is that this should be a route, considering the poor quality of the competition. Yet, the “fans” don’t seem to be able to discern the difference between good science and bad science. They can’t even pick out the obvious bits of krank science that floats around this comment area.
I like to compare Team Denier to the hapless Washington Generals basketball team. Like the Generals, Team Denier appear to provide “deliberately ineffective opposition” — clearly the real scientists can dribble circles around them, yet the “fans” somehow equate this to mean that the Generals are “winning”.
If we are going to use sports analogies, how about the Consensus Team being a bit like the Cubs. They have real talent from year to year. They get plenty of publicity. But at the end of the day, they are losers.
The overweening smugness of a nincompoop.
Warming and cooling of the planet in a period is:
d(W&H)/dt = power in – power out.
W&H is work and heat.
Very simple aye? It is a perfectly accurate 1st order differential physical formulation based on the 1st law of thermodynamics. Irrefutable and exact physics.
And the world is cooling since the 1998/2001 climate shift. Which was captured in two different ways.
http://s1114.photobucket.com/user/Chief_Hydrologist/media/ProjectEarthshine-albedo_zps87fc3b7f.png.html?sort=3&o=4
‘What happened in the years 1976/77 and 1998/99 in the Pacific was so unusual that scientists spoke of abrupt climate changes. They referred to a sudden warming of the tropical Pacific in the mid-1970s and rapid cooling in the late 1990s. Both events turned the world’s climate topsy-turvy and are clearly reflected in the average temperature of Earth.’ http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130822105042.htm
The recognition of decadal climate shifts is an example of better science – the new paradigm of dynamical complexity in climate at all scales. These decadal regimes persist for 20 to 40 years.
Better science will triumph indeed as the world doesn’t warm for a decade to three more.
Here is a bit of Globetrotter skillz that will cause The Chief to leave his shoes.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385215
BTW, The Chief is the GM of the Washington Generals and the Cap’n D is of course the captain.
Sure, the real scientists are like Ernie Banks of the Cubs. Every day is a great day to do climate science!
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/e/ernie_banks.html
You’re a legend in your own lunchtime webster.
http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385231
You’re an utter nincompoop webster. Globetrotter skills? Sh_t. RAOTFFL
http://judithcurry.com/2013/09/22/sundays-climate-logic/#comment-385231
The team went into the fourth quarter with a nearly insurmountable lead, and has since been intercepted repeatedly, lost numerous fumbles and run the wrong way for a touchdown three times.
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You’re not allowed to touch a shooter in basketball. But say the shooter pulls a knife. Are you allowed to touch the shooter then? The answer is yes because when the knife came out we’re no longer playing basketball. Climate science stopped being science when the Climategate shenanigans were revealed.
S/B
There. I fixed it for you.
Excellent correction AK. But was that 2004, 1995, 1988 or earlier? There are PhD theses in each of those dates, and rich ground for others.
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@kim…
I was actually working within David Springer’s frame of reference (and, AFAIK, our hostess’). I’m not sure I agree; it depends on the definition of “Science” being used.
I know of nothing revealed in Climategate that’s out of line with what’s used in other fields, in defending the paradigm from “revolutionary science” (sensu Kuhn). For instance, the contretemps around the discovery of homo floresiensis, or the treatment of James’ et al. suggestions that the “dark ages” separating the Mediterranean Bronze and Iron ages was a 20th century myth.
There are two differences: first, “Climate Science” is being used as a rationale for major socialist political/socioeconomic initiatives, and in any event changes that would be very expensive in terms of general lifestyle.
Second: the entire AGW paradigm is a politically manufactured paradigm. It grew under the political auspices of the IPCC, a political organization created for and dedicated to political ends. The only even vaguely similar phenomenon that I know of is Biblical Minimalism, which evidently has been manufactured in support of a Palestianian political objective.
AK,
Do you think that your above comment is consistent with the following direct quote from the 1980 book Energy in a Finite World published by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, IIASA.
The report concludes that climate change may at some point limit use of coal, but that the level of understanding was at time (in 1980) not mature enough for final conclusions. One recommendation of the book is
All that was written based on the findings of the people doing the research at IIASA, The group was more technocratic than environmentalist. Their main worry was in the long term energy availability and in the long delays inherent in changes of the energy supply. The climate issue was just one of the constraints that they considered in their work.
The worry about the climate change has it’s origin in science, not in politics. It was not created by IPCC, IPCC was created to study, how serious the issue really is..
It seems pretty obvious that the IPCC was not serious about studying the seriousness, but rather was hysterical. These hommes serieux were instead fabuleux.
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“The worry about the climate change has it’s origin in science…”
Maybe, but the fertile ground was politics. Origin in science doesn’t mean scientifically correct or real.
Pekka, the last best hope for the alarmists is an occult explanation, that the missing heat went into the local abyss rather than the abyss of deep space. Surely you can see this. Surely, your eyes don’t deceive you.
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The IPCC was created to get our MONEY!
@Pekka Pirilä…
According to the Cover page for the report at the IIASA Web site:
This fits with my (admittedly poorly researched) understanding that the situation in climate science was then at a “pre-paradigm” level in Kuhnian terms.
The transition from pre-paradigm “educated guess” to “paradigm” was, AFAIK substantially influenced by political motivations. IIRC even as late as 1995, it was necessary for the summary for policymakers to substantially misrepresent the scientific opinions of the participants in the study. The primary paradigm-building process appears (to me) to have been subsequent to this event.
AK,
I wonder what you mean by paradigm. To me it’s the overall understanding that was formed based on the 1966 paper of Manabe and Wetherald and that had reached the attention of energy systems analysts by 1980. The paradigm is thus almost 50 years old and has changed very little over this period.
More is known about all the details, nothing has contradicted anything of the basics. What’s disappointing is that the climate sensitivity is even now known very imprecisely. The stated uncertainties remain similar as they were then (perhaps even wider).
AK,
Pekka is right. The technocrats have been leading the charge for decades.
King Hubbert, who predicted cumulative oil back in the 1950’s was a leader in the technocrat movement, and was a big backer of the push to nuclear.
It has always been about systems science and the climate-aspect is part of the system. I bet Hubbert would chuckle as to how AGW research is helping his cause if he were alive today. He would have appreciated the focus on alternative and renewable energies to make up for the crude oil deficit that the world is facing.
Google King Hubbert and technocracy.